text stringlengths 1 39.7k | label int64 0 0 | original_task stringclasses 8 values | original_label stringclasses 35 values |
|---|---|---|---|
With his new series, "Mr. Iglesias," arriving three months after the contentious cancellation of "One Day at a Time," the comedian Gabriel Iglesias will inevitably be seen as picking up the cause of Latino representation on Netflix. That's a lot of pressure for someone who's really just trying to remake "Welcome Back, Kotter." Like Gabriel Kaplan's Gabe Kotter, Iglesias's Gabe Iglesias is a dedicated public school teacher assigned to a class of comic underachievers. The Brooklyn high school in "Kotter" was based on Kaplan's alma mater, New Utrecht High; the Long Beach, Calif., school in "Mr. Iglesias" is based on Iglesias's alma mater, Woodrow Wilson. The students are diverse (Italian and Jewish having counted as such for "Kotter" in the late 1970s). Both Gabes are dogged by a humorless administrator who targets their students. Mr. Iglesias even has his own Horshack, an excitable boy named Mikey Gutierrez (Fabrizio Guido), who at one point throws in an "Ooh, ooh" when asking a question. And despite the radical changes you would expect after 40 years in language, sexual frankness and political and cultural demonstrativeness "Mr. Iglesias," whose 10 episodes hit Netflix on Friday, is every bit the conventional multicamera sitcom that "Kotter" was. Take away the dating app jokes, and the humor is, if anything, blander and more predictable, the jokes more obvious, the reaction shots more ubiquitous. The show glides along on the self effacing charm of its star (who uses his stand up moniker, Gabriel "Fluffy" Iglesias, in the credits), but it doesn't seem to be in a hurry to get anywhere. Read more about Netflix's cancellation of "One Day at a Time." Series like this operate off a set of assumptions, held in place to minimize or eliminate the possibility of surprising the audience. In "Mr. Iglesias," the orthodoxy is up to date, as demonstrated by the summary of American history delivered by a showboating teacher's pet: "Wiped out the indigenous people, oppressed the blacks, did some good stuff around World War II and now the sun is setting on our empire." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Today, Mars is a cold, dry world , home to dust devils and robotic explorers. But many scientists suspect it was once waterlogged. A new study, published last month in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, suggests that a 75 mile wide impact scar in the Martian northern lowlands is to the red planet what the Chicxulub crater is to Earth: the mark of a meteor that generated a mega tsunami when the planet was relatively young. If accurate, the finding adds evidence to the hypothesis that Mars once had an ocean, and would have implications for our search for life there. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. Whether Mars was ever warm and wet enough to retain a long lived liquid water ocean has long been debated by planetary scientists. Several climate models have indicated that it was probably too cold. But other researchers point to ancient river deltas and other geological evidence of a northern ocean some 3.7 billion years ago. Additional evidence includes hints of mangled, buried coastlines visible from orbit; these suggest that mega tsunamis with skyscraper high waves inundated parts of Mars's northern shores around three billion years ago. On a world believed to have lacked Earthlike plate tectonics, any tsunamis were probably triggered by a meteor slamming into a huge body of water. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
This article is part of Frank Bruni's newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it every Wednesday. After his big victories yesterday in Michigan and several other states, Joe Biden is the emphatic favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination. It's difficult to see how Bernie Sanders catches up. So it's not too soon to imagine what Biden's general election campaign would ideally look like. It's not too soon for advice. What follows is hardly a comprehensive road map. It's just a few scattered driving tips. Biden needs to give his choice of a running mate very, very careful thought. That's of course true for any presidential nominee, but it's doubly true in his case, for two reasons. First, he's 77 now, would be 78 on the day of his inauguration and sometimes shows his wear. Many voters may care more than they typically would about the vice president being someone ready to step up and take charge if need be. Second, Biden will be making the case that Donald Trump was an untested and thus irresponsible decision by voters, a bet that didn't pay off, and that argument intensifies the imperative that Biden's running mate not be someone who's any kind of gamble. Biden's message is competence, experience and normalcy. The Democratic vice presidential nominee must reflect that. If that nominee is a woman, a person of color or both, all the better. That demonstrates a respect for diversity that underscores President Trump's utter lack of it, and it could increase voter turnout in helpful ways. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
A roundup of motoring news from the web: This year's Detroit auto show reported its highest attendance in more than 10 years. A total of 803,451 people visited the 2014 show a significant one for General Motors, which took both the North American car and truck of the year awards. Attendance has not been that high since 838,066 people came to the show in 2003. (Jalopnik) In its efforts to get people used to the idea that its new F 150 pickup trucks will be built with aluminum bodies, Ford told its dealers Sunday that the new trucks will actually be cheaper and easier to repair than the outgoing model. Ford said that the aluminum bodies are set up in a modular design as opposed to the welded design of the old steel trucks that simplifies repairs by making them less time consuming. (Reuters) In other F 150 related news, Ford says that the new 2.7 liter V6 the automaker introduced with the new pickup has a unique two piece engine block. Most engines are either all aluminum or all cast iron, but Ford's new engine has an upper part housing the cylinder bores made from compacted graphite iron and a lower half made from aluminum. The unusual construction allowed Ford to make the engine very small; it is only 18 inches long from front to back. (Automotive News, subscription required) BMW says that its all electric i3 will arrive in American showrooms in May, priced similarly to the 3 Series. Ludwig Willisch, who heads BMW North America, said that the United States would be the company's largest market for the i Series electric cars, adding that demand for the i3 will most likely outstrip supply in the first year of production. (Bloomberg) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Alden Global Capital seemed in position this week to take control of Tribune Publishing, a move that would have enabled the New York hedge fund to merge the parent company of The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun with MediaNews Group, an Alden owned newspaper chain, to create a new media giant. Instead, after negotiations this week, Alden settled, for now, on something less ambitious: a Tribune Publishing board seat for one of its founders, Randall D. Smith, a onetime Bear Stearns partner who runs Alden with Heath Freeman. As part of the deal that gives the investment firm more say in the company, Alden and Tribune Publishing extended a so called standstill agreement, struck last year, that could prevent Alden from pursuing ownership of the Tribune chain for up to another year. Alden's designs on Tribune Publishing, a publicly traded company that owns nearly a dozen prominent metro dailies across the country, became clear in November, when it revealed that it had taken a 32 percent stake in the chain. That news led to an outcry from Tribune Publishing reporters, many of whom have denounced the hedge fund's habit of slashing newsroom costs at its MediaNews Group papers. At the close of this week's negotiations, Alden agreed not to continue its pursuit until after the Tribune Publishing's next annual shareholder meeting, which is scheduled to take place no later than June 15, 2021, according to a public filing Thursday. The standstill agreement would no longer apply if some other entity acquired as much as 30 percent of Tribune Publishing or made an offer to buy the company, according to a public filing. If that were to happen, Alden would be free to pursue a deal for Tribune Publishing. "Tribune Publishing will continue to focus on our long term strategy to drive digital growth and invest in high quality content while reducing legacy costs," Philip G. Franklin, the chairman of Tribune's board and not an Alden member, said in a statement. Mr. Smith is the third executive from Alden or affiliated companies to join the Tribune Publishing board, which grew to seven seats, from six. The other Alden representatives are Dana Goldsmith Needleman and Christopher Minnetian. Few newspapers have been immune to cost cuts since readers started getting their news from digital devices rather than printed pages. In that time, Alden has been aggressive in laying off newsroom employees in an effort to wring profits out of MediaNews Group, which operates roughly 200 publications. Two years ago, journalists at The Denver Post, a MediaNews Group paper, blasted Alden in a special opinion section. "If Alden isn't willing to do good journalism here, it should sell The Post to owners who will," The Post's editorial board wrote in the lead editorial. Journalists at Tribune Publishing papers believed they saw fresh evidence of Alden's cut to the bone style when the company offered buyouts in January. Then, in February, there was turnover: Terry Jimenez, the Tribune Publishing chief financial officer, replaced Timothy P. Knight as the company's chief executive. 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. Weeks later, Mr. Jimenez announced a change in leadership at The Chicago Tribune: Bruce Dold, the publisher and editor in chief, was replaced by Colin McMahon, who had been Tribune Publishing's chief content officer. Mr. Dold, a winner of a Pulitzer Prize, had worked at the paper for 42 years. The coronavirus pandemic has hit the newspaper industry with a new challenge, now that struggling or shuttered businesses have reduced how much they spend on advertising. In response, Tribune Publishing imposed cuts, including three weeks of furloughs for some employees and permanent pay cuts for others. After Alden became a significant part of the company at the end of last year, the NewsGuild union teamed with several Baltimore area benefactors to push for local ownership of The Sun. Matthew D. Gallagher, the chief executive of the Goldseker Foundation in Baltimore, said his group had been "in contact" with Tribune Publishing, but he declined to comment further. Journalists have also sought new ownership for other Tribune Publishing papers. Among those making the rounds were a pair of Chicago Tribune investigative reporters, who lobbied wealthy Chicagoans in an effort to keep Alden from taking control. Those pushing for Tribune Publishing to sell its papers to local owners have found an ally in Mason Slaine, an investor who bought a roughly 7 percent stake of the company this spring. "The newspapers should really be owned by the local communities," Mr. Slaine, a former chief executive of Thomson Financial, said in an interview last month. Mr. Slaine, who lives in Boca Raton, Fla., added that he had some interest in buying The Sun Sentinel of South Florida, a Tribune Publishing paper. In 2018, Dr. Patrick Soon Shiong, a billionaire medical entrepreneur, bought The Los Angeles Times, The San Diego Union Tribune and other California papers from Tribune Publishing, then known as Tronc, for 500 million. Dr. Soon Shiong is the second largest shareholder in Tribune Publishing, with about a quarter of its shares. Wall Street ownership of newspapers has become common, and Alden helped drive that trend since the Great Recession, when it started grabbing stakes in distressed media companies. Last year, in a deal financed by the private equity firm Apollo Global Management, the newspaper chain Gannett was acquired by the parent company of GateHouse Media to form a giant that publishes more than 250 dailies. The resulting company, called Gannett, is controlled by another private equity fund, Fortress Investment Group, which is owned by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank. McClatchy, another chain, is likely to emerge from the bankruptcy it declared this year into the hands of its largest bondholder, the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management. Alden itself recently disclosed a significant stake in the newspaper chain Lee Enterprises. Tribune Publishing fell into bankruptcy a decade ago, shortly after it was bought by the Chicago billionaire Sam Zell. In 2016, the private equity firm Merrick Ventures became the largest shareholder in the company. Its chairman, Michael W. Ferro Jr., oversaw extensive job cuts before stepping down in 2018, after two women accused him of unwanted sexual advances. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The kiss between Bella Hadid and Miquela Sousa, part of a Calvin Klein commercial last month, struck many viewers as unrealistic, even offensive. Ms. Hadid, a supermodel, identifies as heterosexual, and the ad sparked complaints that Calvin Klein was deceiving customers with a sham lesbian encounter. The fashion company apologized for "queerbaiting" after the 30 second spot appeared online. But Ms. Hadid, at least, is human. Everything about Ms. Sousa, better known as Lil Miquela, is manufactured: the straight cut bangs, the Brazilian Spanish heritage, the bevy of beautiful friends. Lil Miquela, who has 1.6 million Instagram followers, is a computer generated character. Introduced in 2016 by a Los Angeles company backed by Silicon Valley money, she belongs to a growing cadre of social media marketers known as virtual influencers. Each month, more than 80,000 people stream Lil Miquela's songs on Spotify. She has worked with the Italian fashion label Prada, given interviews from Coachella and flaunted a tattoo designed by an artist who inked Miley Cyrus. Until last year, when her creators orchestrated a publicity stunt to reveal her provenance, many of her fans assumed she was a flesh and blood 19 year old. But Lil Miquela is made of pixels, and she was designed to attract follows and likes. Her success has raised a question for companies hoping to connect with consumers who increasingly spend their leisure time online: Why hire a celebrity, a supermodel or even a social media influencer to market your product when you can create the ideal brand ambassador from scratch? That's what the fashion label Balmain did last year when it commissioned the British artist Cameron James Wilson to design a "diverse mix" of digital models, including a white woman, a black woman and an Asian woman. Other companies have followed Balmain's lead. Fable Studio, which bills itself as "the virtual beings company," created Lucy, a cartoonish character able to read and respond to viewers' reactions in real time. The company says it makes digital creations "with whom you can build a two way emotional relationship." Xinhua, the Chinese government's media outlet, introduced a virtual news anchor last year, saying it "can work 24 hours a day." Coca Cola and Louis Vuitton have used video game characters in their ads. Soul Machines, a company founded by the Oscar winning digital animator Mark Sagar, produced computer generated teachers that respond to human students. Last month, YouPorn got in on the trend with Jedy Vales, an avatar who promotes the site and interacts with its users. Edward Saatchi, who started Fable, predicted that virtual beings would someday supplant digital home assistants and computer operating systems from companies like Amazon and Google. "Eventually, it will be clear that the line between a Miquela and an Alexa is actually very slim," he said. Virtual influencers come with an advantage for the companies that use them: They are less regulated than their human counterparts. And the people controlling them aren't required to disclose their presence. Many of the characters advance stereotypes and impossible body image standards. Shudu, a "digital fabrication" that Mr. Wilson modeled on the Princess of South Africa Barbie, was called "a white man's digital projection of real life black womanhood" by The New Yorker. The Federal Trade Commission acknowledged in a statement that it "hasn't yet specifically addressed the use of virtual influencers" but said companies using the characters for advertising should ensure that "any claims communicated about the product are truthful, not misleading and substantiated." KFC worked with Generic Versatility to develop the virtual version of Colonel Sanders, here promoting Dr Pepper. In a way, virtual influencers are not so far removed from their real life predecessors. It's no secret that the humans who promote brands on social media often project a version of daily life that is shinier and happier than the real thing. But when a brand ambassador's very existence is questionable especially in an environment studded with deceptive deepfakes, bots and fraud what happens to the old virtue of truth in advertising? 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. Bryan Gold, the chief executive of Paid, which connects influencers to companies, said virtual influencers could lead companies into "a dangerous area," adding, "How can consumers trust the message being put out there?" But the concerns faced by human influencers maintaining a camera ready appearance and dealing with online trolls while keeping sponsors happy do not apply to beings who never have an off day. "That's why brands like working with avatars they don't have to do 100 takes," said Alexis Ohanian, a co founder of Reddit and the self described grandfather of the virtual influencer Qai Qai. "Social media, to date, has largely been the domain of real humans being fake," Mr. Ohanian added. "But avatars are a future of storytelling." KFC recently introduced a new Colonel Sanders on social media. He has a dusting of stubble on his jaw, tattooed abs, a silver coif worthy of a teen idol and bulging biceps beneath a perpetually unbuttoned white jacket. The reimagined fried chicken kingpin another virtual being was designed to spoof the vast ecosystem of influencers, which includes nanoinfluencers, kidfluencers and petfluencers. His creators consulted an inspiration board plastered with photos of human Instagram celebrities to generate the mash up that became the new Colonel. "It was our opportunity to poke a little fun at the advertising world that we're a part of," said Steve Kelly, KFC's digital and media director. "But the love around virtual influencers is very real." The rising presence of uncannily realistic computer generated beings in ads can be off putting, however, in a realm where a manipulated video can make Nancy Pelosi appear to be slurring her words and the Mona Lisa can be "trained" to speak. "It's an interesting and dangerous time, seeing the potency of A.I. and its ability to fake anything," Mr. Ohanian said. Lil Miquela operated for two years before it was revealed that she was the product of a secretive company, Brud. Its California business registration lists an address in Silver Lake blocked by thick vegetation, but workers, who must sign nondisclosure agreements, said the company actually operates out of downtown Los Angeles. Brud's public relations firm, Huxley, declined multiple interview requests. On a public Google Doc that functions as the company's website, Brud bills itself as "a transmedia studio that creates digital character driven story worlds" and says Lil Miquela is "as real as Rihanna." Its "head of compassion," in Brud speak, is Trevor McFedries, whom Lil Miquela has referred to in several posts as a father figure. Before co founding Brud, Mr. McFedries was known as Yung Skeeter, a D.J., producer, director and musician who has worked with Katy Perry, Steve Aoki, Bad Robot Productions and Spotify. He has helped raise millions of dollars in financing from heavyweights like Spark Capital, Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund, according to TechCrunch. Last summer, Lil Miquela's Instagram account appeared to be hacked by a woman named Bermuda, a Trump supporter who accused Lil Miquela of "running from the truth." A wild narrative emerged on social media: Lil Miquela was a robot built to serve a "literal genius" named Daniel Cain before Brud reprogrammed her. "My identity was a choice Brud made in order to sell me to brands, to appear 'woke,'" she wrote in one post. The character vowed never to forgive Brud. A few months later, she forgave. The online drama was as engineered as Lil Miquela herself, part of a "story line written by Brud," according to Huxley. It echoed "S1m0ne," a 2002 film starring Al Pacino as a film director who replaces an uncooperative actress with a digital ingenue. While virtual influencers are becoming more common, fans have engaged less with them than with the average fashion tastemaker online, according to data from Captiv8, which connects companies to social media influencers. "An avatar is basically a mannequin in a shop window," said Nick Cooke, a co founder of the Goat Agency, a marketing firm. "A genuine influencer can offer peer to peer recommendations." There may be hope for the humans yet. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
There's a moment near the end of Angie Thomas's debut novel, "The Hate U Give," when fiction and reality collide. The narrator a 16 year old girl named Starr, who is in mourning and shock after a police officer shoots her friend recalls the names of African American victims of racial profiling in recent years, shot in many cases by officers: "Oscar. Aiyana. Trayvon. Rekia. Michael. Eric. Tamir. John. Ezell. Sandra. Freddie. Alton. Philando." Ms. Thomas wrote the novel, which became an instant best seller, partly as a response to those deaths. "The Hate U Give" is one of several recent and pending young adult novels that grapple with racial profiling and the emotional, social and political aftershocks that communities endure in the wake of police violence. Below are six books for young readers that address police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement. Jason Reynolds still vividly recalls when his mother gave him "the talk" about how to behave around police officers. "That talk has saved my life many a time," Mr. Reynolds said. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. In 2014, after an officer shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Mr. Reynolds and the author Brendan Kiely decided to team up to write "All American Boys," a young adult novel. In it, a quiet and artistic teenager is shopping for chips at a bodega when a police officer mistakes him for a shoplifter and assaults him. Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Kiely assumed no one would publish the book, and planned to put it online for free if they couldn't sell it. "When Black Lives Matter started, it was polarizing," Mr. Reynolds said. "Does any publishing company want to bring forth static around something so fresh?" In fact, "All American Boys," which came out in 2015, became a commercial hit, selling more than 120,000 copies. Jay Coles was 18 when he started writing his debut novel, "Tyler Johnson Was Here," about a boy whose twin brother is a victim of police brutality. While the characters were fictional, Mr. Coles said he had been motivated to write the novel after Trayvon Martin, 17, was killed in Florida. "I put myself in a deep depression while writing it," he said. A few months ago, Mr. Coles, who grew up in Indianapolis and is now a senior in college, sold the book to Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, which will publish it next spring. "I want people to leave with the understanding that it's O.K. to be angry and loud when it comes to seeking justice," he said. In Nic Stone's debut novel, "Dear Martin," Justyce, a smart, ambitious black high school scholarship student at an elite prep school, gets caught up in a heated exchange between his best friend and an off duty police officer, who shoots at them. In the frenzied media coverage that follows, Justyce is stunned to find himself described as a gang member. His story is interspersed with letters he writes to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., lamenting how little race relations have improved since the civil rights movement. Crown Books for Young Readers will publish the novel this fall. Ms. Stone, 31, who lives in Atlanta and has two young sons, said she had written the book after a string of high profile shootings of unarmed African American teenagers left her feeling gutted. "When it comes to the heavier issues, fiction gives you this bubble, where you can grapple with things without somebody in your face," she said. 'I Am Alfonso Jones,' Written by Tony Medina and Illustrated by John Jennings and Stacey Robinson In this forthcoming young adult graphic novel written by Tony Medina, a poet and prolific children's books author, a teenager named Alfonso Jones is killed by an off duty police officer, then watches from the afterlife as his family struggles to bring the shooter to justice. The story will be illustrated by John Jennings, who illustrated the graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler's "Kindred," and Stacey Robinson, who works with Mr. Jennings as part of the collaborative team "Black Kirby." It will be published this fall by Tu Books, an imprint of Lee Low Books. Jewell Parker Rhodes, an award winning children's book author, has never shied away from emotionally challenging subjects. Her previous novels have addressed national tragedies like Hurricane Katrina and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Her next novel, "Ghost Boys," which Little, Brown Books for Young Readers will publish next spring, is a surreal tale that tackles recent police shootings and the country's long history of racially motivated crimes. The narrative unfolds from the point of view of a ghost a young black boy who is shot by a white police officer and observes what happens after his death. In the afterlife, the boy meets the ghosts of other black boys, including the spirit of Emmett Till. Because of the book's violent premise and its proximity to real events, the novel is being recommended for slightly older middle grade readers, ages 10 and up. "Children and teens are reading and hearing about this in the news all the time, and fiction gives them an entry point to understanding it better and helping them to empathize with all sides," said Alvina Ling, the vice president and editor in chief of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. 'How It Went Down,' by Kekla Magoon The young adult novel "How It Went Down," which was written by Kekla Magoon and came out in 2014, explores the aftermath of a shooting from multiple perspectives. After a white man shoots Tariq Johnson, a 16 year old African American boy, witnesses offer conflicting accounts of what happened whether Tariq was armed, and what precipitated the violence. In a review, School Library Journal said the book "raises such difficult, thorny issues and doesn't try to offer any easy answers." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
In any normal year, "Making Friends" would be an unremarkable programming choice, especially over the holidays, when so many people feel alienated from their families. But in this overwhelmingly disastrous year, it's a perplexing piece for a company to stream. Filmed live in an empty theater at the Pico Playhouse in Los Angeles, this is the kind of show that needs the affirmation and community of an audience in the room, laughing and commiserating a crowd like those that the director, Drew Droege, had for his hit solo show, the uproarious and emotionally piercing "Bright Colors and Bold Patterns." "Making Friends" is nowhere near as focused and clear as that meticulously constructed piece. Still, it's hard not to wonder how much more effectively DeTrinis's monologue might have found its form with the instant feedback and buoying energy of humans in those vacant playhouse seats, which he addresses sometimes quite accusingly as if they were filled. Splenetic and spectatorless, albeit beautifully lit by Donny Jackson, DeTrinis comes across as self obsessed. That's not least because "Making Friends," which he wrote, is as willfully oblivious of current events as if it had been pulled from a time capsule, not filmed under the protocols of a Covid 19 compliance officer. Publicity materials suggest that the show is in tune with the moment because we are all so furious right now. But it is tone deaf to rant, as DeTrinis does, about long lines at a Manhattan restaurant, now part of a gravely wounded industry, or the arrogance of New York bartenders, many of whom are lately unemployed. It is bizarre to carp about being 30 some years old and not working on Broadway, when (perhaps you've heard) no one is working on Broadway. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Tech jobs are coming to New York City in droves. All the big tech companies even Amazon, which abandoned plans for a headquarters style campus a year ago are expanding in the city. But many local workers could miss out because they are not receiving the training they need for well paid careers in tech, according to a new study by the Center for an Urban Future, a nonprofit research group. The study echoes one of the concerns of opponents of a deal that would have cleared the way for a new Amazon office park in the city that tech wealth and good jobs would bypass current New Yorkers. And those natives would be left struggling with the downside: the higher housing prices and living costs in neighborhoods gentrified by newcomers. Closing the opportunity gap in New York's tech economy, the study concludes, will require more initiatives that truly prepare workers for careers that can be ladders to the middle class. Per Scholas, a nonprofit founded in 1995 and based in the South Bronx, is an example of how this can be done, according to the study. The nonprofit offers free technology training in courses that run from 15 to 19 weeks. In recent years, it has expanded beyond training for technology support jobs to add courses in cybersecurity, cloud computing, software engineering and data engineering. Ninety percent of its students are members of minority groups, 60 percent have no more than a high school degree, and half receive some form of public assistance. Per Scholas students at a center in the Bronx are mainly in their 20s and early 30s. Their work experience has typically been in retailing and restaurants, where the pay is low and hours are inconsistent. "I was underemployed in dead end jobs with no advancement possibilities," said Francisca Hernandez, a 29 year old Per Scholas trainee, who never made more than 12,000 a year. Her prospects should be far brighter after she completes the Per Scholas cybersecurity course in a few weeks. In New York, Per Scholas graduates are now making 18 to 30 an hour, 37,000 to 62,000 a year, with some earning 40 an hour or about 82,000 a year in jobs as software engineers and data specialists, the organization said. But Per Scholas appears to be an exception. More than 370 adult tech training programs are offered across the city by nonprofit organizations, for profit boot camps and continuing education courses at schools. Yet fewer than 19 percent of them equip graduates for midlevel and advanced skill jobs, ranging from programmer to data scientist, the study concluded. The lengthy report, which also examined grade school and high school programs, is intended to serve as a guide to public and private efforts to bring the benefits of the tech economy to minority groups, women and more neighborhoods beyond affluent parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn. "The goal is to see more clearly what is being done, what needs to be done and what is succeeding," said Julie Samuels, executive director of Tech:NYC, a nonprofit industry group, which commissioned and co published the study. Most training initiatives, the researchers found, focus on simpler skills like digital literacy, basic computing concepts and preparation for entry level jobs such as technology support technician and help desk associate. "It's striking how few in depth, career ready programs there are," said Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the Center for an Urban Future. Four big tech companies Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple already employ thousands in the city and are adding office space to accommodate thousands more. In all, the companies are expected to have roughly 20,000 workers in New York by 2022. The growing need for tech workers is forcing employers to look beyond traditional recruiting pipelines, like elite universities, to new sources of talent, including local people without college degrees. With offices in 12 cities, Per Scholas is one of the largest tech training programs. Its enrollment has tripled since 2015, to more than 2,000 projected for this year. In New York, the nonprofit will train about 750 people this year double the number in 2015 at a smaller office in Brooklyn and its main center in the Bronx. There, Per Scholas occupies the second floor of nondescript concrete building, just down the street from a U Haul depot. Independent evaluations of Per Scholas's success have helped it attract more foundation and government funding to expand in recent years, but it could reach more people, said Plinio Ayala, its chief executive. Per Scholas accepts 30 percent of its applicants. With added resources, Mr. Ayala estimates, the nonprofit could increase that rate to 50 percent and maintain its income improving performance. "There are proven models now," he said. "The issue is how to scale." A key Per Scholas strategy has been forging close ties with companies. For example, in a partnership with Cognizant, the technology services company pays for training tailored to its needs and gets to hire the graduates. Since the partnership began in 2017, the company has trained more than 760 Per Scholas graduates in New York and Dallas. Some Per Scholas alumni are working at tech companies like Google and Amazon. But far more are employed at places like Barclays, Bloomberg, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the local operations of the Japanese electronics maker Ricoh. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Two years ago, when Lee Silber wanted to downsize from a house in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, she found a five room co op right in the neighborhood, made an offer and went into contract. There was just one little problem with the new apartment. Actually, there was one big problem with the apartment: a wall unit the size of a woodshed in the guest room. "It was a hideous piece of furniture, the ugliest thing I've ever seen," said Rachel Weingarten, Ms. Silber's daughter. "It was dark wood, so it killed any light, and so overwhelming it took up a third of the room." In every conversation with the seller, either Ms. Silber, a semiretired fashion designer, or one of her three children sought reassurance. "You're taking the wall unit with you, right?" they would ask. Yes, the seller would promise, he was taking the wall unit. Absolutely, positively? Absolutely, positively. Of course, you know where this is headed. The seller went. The behemoth wall unit did not. There it stood, like a hulking bully, on the final walk through, and "when we called the guy, he just played dumb," Ms. Weingarten said. "My mother wanted to be out of her old house and in her new space, so everything went ahead as planned. But she had to pay quite a bit to have it disassembled and removed." Real estate closings are hobbled, sometimes even derailed, by a seller's last minute adjustment of terms. What the buyer had believed was included in the transaction the Viking stove, the Sub Zero refrigerator, the sconces in the living room, the fresco in the dining room, the brass carpet rods on the staircase isn't part of the deal after all. But perhaps more vexing are the things sellers forget to take with them or quite deliberately leave behind furniture that's too much of a hassle to take apart, too unwieldy and costly to clear from the premises. True, years ago, they managed to get that monster sofa into the apartment, but now they can't think how to get it out. Maybe that marble topped dining table is too big for the new, tighter quarters the sellers are moving to across town. Or maybe they just plain don't like it anymore. Usually, buyers know ahead of time that they'll be getting more than they bargained for or paid for. "If there are items that are required to be removed before the closing, the contract should provide for that in detail," said Eva Talel, the head of the co op and condominium practice at the law firm Stroock Stroock Lavan. On the walk through and it should be a thorough walk through "If things are not gone, and if we're talking about things that will cost a great deal of money or take a lot of effort to remove, money should be escrowed at the closing," Ms. Talel continued. But sometimes, as in the case of Ms. Silber and the wall unit, buyers are blindsided. Very occasionally, the orphaned item, however unexpected, is accepted with pleasure. "It seems to me that sellers always leave something, and buyers are usually appalled," said Gerard Splendore, an associate broker in the Brooklyn Heights office of Halstead Property. "They don't see it as a windfall. They don't want somebody else's stuff." Such stuff includes air conditioners, because they're too much trouble to take out of the window, and shower curtains, just because. "Sellers will leave one cuff link, one earring, a belt on a top shelf," said Mr. Splendore, who has happened upon false teeth left in a dishwasher, keys, keys, many keys, awards, diplomas, a wedding band and photos of family members back in the old country. "I'll send notes and ask if the sellers want the pictures, and often I don't get a response," he said. "Clearly they aren't important to them, or maybe they just didn't like that side of the family." As for that errant wedding band, it was appraised and bought by a jeweler for 35; Mr. Splendore sent the seller a check. During one rather unsettling walk through, he found several large rusty knives wrapped in a towel. "They were enough to make me curious," he said, "but not suspicious." Everybody involved was suspicious about a safe in the basement of a Lower Manhattan townhouse, an estate sale. "The deceased owner had had some underworld connections and his family didn't want to open the safe because of what they might find," said Craig L. Price, a partner at the law firm Belkin Burden Wenig Goldman who was representing the bank in the transaction. "The issue came up at the closing when the purchasers asked if the safe had been removed," Mr. Price said. It had not. "Then the purchasers asked if the safe had been opened." Again, no. To avoid having the deal scrapped, the brokers arranged for the safe to be removed, and the sellers told them they could keep the contents as a thank you for their trouble. The good news: There was nothing in there to take to the police. The bad news: There was nothing in there to take to the bank. "Just some old meaningless documents," Mr. Price said. Sometimes, sellers will leave a particular item because it came with the place for example, a chest of drawers that was in the attic when they themselves took occupancy. "They happily used the bureau, but now the new owners don't want it," Mr. Splendore said. "And there's a last minute drama about how to get rid of it. I'm a problem solver: I open the window and toss it out." Deborah Goldzweig, a sales agent at Engel Volkers, represented the wealthy international buyer of a pied a terre at Museum Tower on West 53rd Street a few years ago. The seller was an art collector who, as a condition of the sale, insisted that some of her treasures stay put. There was no way of knowing if the seller was charging extra because of the art, Ms. Goldzweig said, "but the price was 'take it or leave it.' " She said her client, who declined to be interviewed, initially balked. He didn't share the owner's taste and was put off by a particular piece, a hyper realistic resin sculpture of a woman in a bathing suit. "But he really wanted the apartment, so he finally relented," said Ms. Goldzweig, who after the closing, was tasked with making the statue disappear. She called Sotheby's, which agreed to include it in an upcoming auction. The piece went for between 10,000 and 15,000, she said, "so my client made money." Fortunately, many sellers want to leave nothing behind but good will. "I've had clients who've put together elaborate books of menus from local restaurants," Mr. Price said. "Some have left a box of chocolates or champagne and strawberries in the refrigerator." None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. A few have left more lavish tokens. Earlier this year, Hon Sing Kevin Tsun, a sales agent at Citi Habitats, represented a young couple buying a one bedroom co op on Central Park South. His clients fell in love with a large ornate antique mirror in the foyer and asked that it be included in the purchase price, "but the seller didn't want to do it," Mr. Tsun said. "Then my clients offered to buy the mirror, but the seller didn't like the price." Lo and behold, there it was at the walk through: The seller had left the mirror behind as a gift. Four years ago, Jack and Mary Cleland, a couple who live in Corning, N.Y., bought a pied a terre at Trump Plaza on East 61st Street. The sellers offered to leave a glass coffee table and a dove gray sectional, charging a nominal sum for the two pieces, "and they just sort of threw in the baby grand because they didn't want to take it," said Ms. Cleland, 62, a homemaker. "For us it wasn't a burden because the piano looked nice, our son plays it and we wanted to move right in." This may be the gift that keeps on giving. When it comes time to move, "we'll probably leave the piano," Ms. Cleland said. Moving is a stressful time. In the midst of the chaos, it's perfectly reasonable that a seller might neglect to empty the medicine cabinet or check the far corners of a closet, might forget, well, who knows what. A dozen years ago, Kiono Thomas, a saleswoman at Engel Volkers, was representing the seller of a large co op at the Westbury on the Upper East Side. "I went to the apartment several times a week, and whenever I was there I would see a turtle in a bowl on the island in the kitchen," Ms. Thomas said. It was the same sort of turtle she herself had had as a child, with a plastic bowl and a green plastic palm tree. "I'd turn on the lights and say, 'Hi, little turtle,' and the turtle would pop its head up and seem to smile." Eventually, the co op sold. Ms. Thomas showed up for the walk through to make sure everything was going according to plan, and to say goodbye to her client, who was moving to London the next day. The apartment was broom clean and all packed up except for the turtle in its little bowl. "I said, 'What are you going to do with the turtle? You can't leave it,' " Ms. Thomas recalled. Her client told her that she should take the turtle. "I was, like, 'O.K.,' I was worried for the turtle. I don't know what my client would have done with it otherwise. Throw it in Central Park? Flush it down the toilet? People do, you know." Ms. Thomas named the little reptile Lucy and took her home to her penthouse in Tudor City, an apartment that overlooked the United Nations and yes, Turtle Bay. "I still have her. She's now 12 years old and huge," said Ms. Thomas, who has since moved with Lucy, and her custom tank, to Park Avenue. About 20 years ago, Ellen Saland, an associate broker at Halstead Property, represented the buyer of a co op with a large terrace on the West Side, and happened to be at the apartment one day when the seller came by. "She said she'd be taking a particular potted juniper tree because her father's ashes were in it," Ms. Saland said. "Some weeks later, we did the walk through and we noticed that plant was still there, and she said she'd come and get it after the closing." Two decades or so later, the buyer of the co op, Bobbi Queen, a retired journalist, is still waiting. "I thought it was all sort of strange," she said. "It was a little weird to have someone with whom I had no connection sort of existing out there." Ms. Queen, who's had considerable work done on the terrace in the intervening years, doesn't know if the remains remain. "Some of the trees have died," she said, "so I have no idea if the ashes are still here. But believe me, I'm not sentimental about it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
A charging station at a Walgreen's in California. Retailers have in the past forged partnerships with car companies and others to build more stations. Since hitting the mass market about five years ago, electric vehicles have failed to take off, largely, experts say, because a robust network of public charging stations has not been built. Car companies, retail chains and members of an infant charger industry have announced partnership after partnership to build the stations, but their number still falls well short of what is needed to nudge millions of drivers into making the switch, analysts say. But now, if major electric utilities have their way, that could change. In several regions, utilities big companies experienced in financing, building and managing power infrastructure as well as selling electricity are getting into the vehicle charging business. In Kansas City, Mo., for example, the main utility is building a network with more than 1,000 charging stations for the metropolitan area. And in California, Pacific Gas and Electric recently became the last of California's three big utilities to file a proposal with regulators that would allow it to install 25,000 public chargers costing 654 million in a state that has about 6,300 public chargers, at about 2,000 stations. In all, three major utilities envision building as many as 60,000 chargers in California in the coming years. Nationwide, there are about 9,000 public stations, with about 22,900 chargers, according to the Energy Department. The electric vehicle industry has a long way to go to catch up to the availability of gas. In 2012, there were about 114,000 gas stations in the United States, according to the Census Bureau. "We're looking to really remove barriers to E.V. adoption, to really build to scale where all business models can work," said James Ellis, director of electrification and electric vehicles at the utility. Although California leads the nation in electric vehicle sales, with about 40 percent of the market, it is under pressure to meet aggressive goals that would require 100,000 chargers that are faster than traditional home outlets enough to support one million vehicles by 2020. Beyond California, automakers face strict federal mandates to improve fuel efficiency and reduce carbon emissions. By 2025, their fleets must average at least 54.5 miles a gallon, more than double the current average of about 25 miles a gallon. To reach that goal, analysts say, automakers have little choice but to expand the consumer market for vehicles that require a plug in charge beyond the 120,000 sold last year. Over all, automakers sold about 16.5 million vehicles in the United States in 2014. But developing that electric market has proved difficult, with charging companies struggling to figure out how to make money and even going bankrupt, despite generous federal support and, in some states, prohibitions on utilities entering the market for fear of stifling competition. California regulators had enacted one such ban but overturned it at the end of last year. Mindful of what Dan Bowermaster, manager of electric transportation at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit utility organization, called the speed bumps of developing the network, regulators and the industry were beginning to turn to the electric companies. Some private companies, like Ecotality, went out of business even after receiving generous taxpayer support and had difficulty maintaining the stations. "Everyone has different opinions about whether or not the utility model is the right one, but it is regulated and every stakeholder can get involved," he said. "What the utilities can do is, they have scale, so they can drive costs down." For the utilities, whose revenue is being squeezed by slowing growth in electric demand and, especially in states like California, the explosion in residential solar power, the charging business represents a potential boon. Utilities could benefit not only from increased electricity sales but also by investing in building the underlying infrastructure, on which they earn a set return recovered through customer rates. In addition to that, executives said, passenger cars sucking up power at public stations during the day could absorb excess electricity flowing from the solar farms that are increasingly coming online. "There's a significant opportunity to actually operate the grid more efficiently by managing electric vehicle charging," said Jim Avery, senior vice president for power supply at San Diego Gas and Electric, whose proposal would install equipment that allows customers to manage their charging based on price, convenience or other factors through their smartphones. Electric vehicle industry executives say they welcome the utilities into the market as powerful and important partners in building the charging network. Still, the utilities' push has met resistance, from competing companies and ratepayers themselves. Some executives at charging companies said that the utilities should not use ratepayer money to compete directly with them, but should limit their role to building, owning and maintaining the electrical infrastructure, rather than the stations themselves, and in setting standards. Pasquale Romano, chief executive of ChargePoint, developer of the nation's largest charging station network, praised a proposal from Southern California Edison that the company helped influence, but cautioned that Pacific Gas and Electric which plans to own the chargers but use contractors to develop and operate them could end up stifling competition and innovation. "Just like we have to add lanes to roads as population increases in areas and build subways, we need to make sure we can deliver enough energy to parking lots everywhere to be able to take advantage of new technology that allows us to drive on electrons," he said. The private sector has already shown a willingness to begin investing in charging stations, he said, and if the utilities simply took on the cost of the electric infrastructure it would accelerate that process. But Mark Toney, executive director of the Utility Reform Network, which advocates for ratepayers in California, questioned whether it was fair to burden the majority of California ratepayers with building the network at all. "I have a lot of skepticism that E.V.s are even going to be successful I just don't know," he said, adding that Toyota appeared to be betting on hydrogen vehicles over electric ones. "They're not a fringe player. So that makes me wonder, 'Is this the technology that at the end of the day takes off?' " | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
In New York, a checkerboard of blocks, circles are hard to come by. Even so, Frederick Douglass Circle, at the northwest corner of Central Park, has long suffered from inattention. From the late 19th to the mid 20th century, elevated trains clattered across 100 foot tall tracks there. And in recent years, the intersection's barren islands were often relegated to unofficial parking lots. But a new 12 story, 48 unit condominium called Circa Central Park, rising on the northeast edge of the circle, should help give its namesake new stature. "The building is the conclusion of the story of trying to make the circle whole," said Anne Simmons, the secretary of the Friends of Frederick Douglass Circle, an advocacy group that has worked for decades to improve the place where West 110th Street, Central Park West and Frederick Douglass Boulevard all meet, on the edge of Harlem. Ms. Simmons, a retired public school art teacher, does worry that the starting prices of around 1 million for the market rate units may be a bit steep. Still, she prefers Circa Central Park to the gas station that preceded it on the site. "For the neighborhood," she said, "this is a beginning." Developed by Artimus Construction, a prolific local builder, Circa, at 285 West 110th Street, has an unusual shape. Its facade bends with the circle, giving it a concave look that defies Manhattan's grid. The roofline, designed by FXFowle Architects, is not squared off but sloped, courtesy of a rising series of terraces. The effect resembles a half pyramid. The windows that face a woodsy section of Central Park are tall, though they don't quite run from floor to ceiling. Privacy minded residents don't want to be completely exposed to the street, said Dan Kaplan, a senior partner at FXFowle, which also designed the Greenwich Lane condo complex on the site of the former St. Vincent's Hospital campus in Greenwich Village. Buildings in general have better curb appeal if not every object is bared to the world, Mr. Kaplan said. "The backs of furniture and trash cans are not so nice to look at," he added. But too much transparency won't be an issue on the West 111th Street side. On those walls, Circa will be clad in a gray brick, to mesh with its prewar neighbors. Circa's units will range from one bedrooms starting at 647 square feet to five bedrooms starting at 3,348 square feet. There are also three penthouses. Kitchens will feature Caesarstone quartz counters, while master baths will have white marble tile floors. Thirteen of the apartments have private balconies or terraces, and there will be 3,000 square feet of shared outdoor areas, said Shlomi Reuveni, the managing director of Town New Development, which is handling sales. Circa is also making available to its residents a fleet of remote controlled model boats that can be sailed on the Harlem Meer, the Central Park lake nearby. Skateboards and bicycles, covered by common charges, will also be offered for borrowing. "Central Park is an extension of your amenities," Mr. Reuveni said. Of Circa's 48 units, 38 will be sold at market rates ranging from 1,500 a square foot to 3,000 a square foot, or starting at about 1 million for a one bedroom, Mr. Reuveni said. Though marketing has not yet begun in earnest, he said a few contracts were already out in late November. The remaining 10 units, which are reserved as affordable housing, will be sold at below market prices through a lottery. The market prices at Circa may seem high. At Towers on the Park, a nearby condominium, sales prices average 1,000 a square foot, according to Bob Pollock, the owner of the Uptown Homes Real Estate Company in Harlem, who frequently sells in the complex. Admittedly, a new condo with luxury finishes like Circa commands a premium over such an older building. Designed by Bond Ryder James and completed in 1988, Tower on the Park, with 599 units, was built with private and public funds and had income restrictions to target middle class buyers. But those rules expired several years ago, Mr. Pollock said. If the value of Circa's site is any indication, it's clear that the area's fortunes are sharply changing. According to court documents, the owners of the gas station paid the city 375,000 in 1996 for rights to the land, which had had a gas station on it at least since the 1960s. In 2014, after a drawn out court battle over the city's rights to the property, which once was part of an urban renewal area, the Economic Development Corporation ended up paying 10 million for the site, according to city records. That same month, Artimus closed on the property for 25.5 million. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Your life has not always gone smoothly but the Juilliard period, with the instructor you call Gloria, stands out as a painful low. How did you recover? To this day, I talk to my peers about that experience and they're like, "No, she likes you, she cares about you." I think I was looking for a certain kind of permission, and I had to give myself the authority. Art is a disruption, you're declaring war in a certain way, you're telling everybody else, "This is my point of view." In the acknowledgments you thank the actress Marian Seldes "for teaching me what it means to be an artist." What is that? I wrote "Elective Affinities" for her and she did it at Juilliard. I was asked to leave the program and I sort of had a breakdown. I was blocked, I was very depressed, I just felt so lost. One day the phone rang ... I feel like I'm going to cry pause . It was her. She said, "I just want you to know that I will always be part of your circle and you will always be part of mine." He tears up, composes himself. She was something for me to latch on to in terms of the idea of the integrity of an artist. She was so gracious and generous to me, and I try to do that for younger artists, to make myself available to them. You write about your "essential worthlessness as a person." But it feels as if sometimes that feeling blocks you and sometimes it fuels you. I had this feeling of displacement from when I was a young kid, and also from being gay in a very homophobic, Republican culture in the 1980s. People think, "Oh, homophobia, whatever," but it was a very, very intense thing. But then I also felt this endogenous, strangely insistent feeling that I did have worth. I didn't know if I was delusional or megalomaniacal, I didn't understand why I felt my voice had any value. That alterity set in motion a series of experiences that gave my life meaning and gave me an advantage that I think is incredibly precious and hard won. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The awards administrators debated combining the 2019 20 and 2020 21 seasons for one televised ceremony next year, but decided against that over concern that it would not be fair to shows that opened in 2019. "Though unprecedented events cut the 2019 2020 Broadway season short, it was a year full of extraordinary work that deserves to be recognized," Charlotte St. Martin, the Broadway League president, and Heather Hitchens, the American Theater Wing president, said in a joint statement. "We are thrilled not only to have found a way to properly celebrate our artists' incredible achievements this season, but also to be able to uplift the entire theater community and show the world what makes our Broadway family so special at this difficult time. The show must go on, no matter what and it will." Tony administrators and rule makers will meet next week to discuss what to do about categories like original score, and leading actor in a musical in which there are few eligible competitors, because awards officials want to be sure they are recognizing merit. Based on both precedent and the awards rules, options could include: allow the nominators to choose fewer nominees, or even eliminate categories; and/or require that a certain percentage of voters support a nominee, even in a non contested category, for them to win an award. The award administrators are hoping to be able to stream a ceremony in late October, but the date remains uncertain, as do many other specifics: What site will it stream on? Will there be a socially distanced in person ceremony, or will it all be remote? Will there be a host? Will there be performances? Will there be noncompetitive honors for individuals or shows? And how will the ceremony be financed, given that most of the traditional revenue sources (ticket sales, sponsorship and licensing fees) are gone? Other entertainment industry awards shows have also been grappling with the impact of the pandemic. Both the Emmy Awards and the Country Music Awards are scheduled to take place in September, and Tony officials will watch to see how those shows are handled. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said in June that it would extend the eligibility window for next year's Oscars, and delay that ceremony, to April from February. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The psychiatric illnesses seem very different schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, major depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Yet they share several genetic glitches that can nudge the brain along a path to mental illness, researchers report. Which disease, if any, develops is thought to depend on other genetic or environmental factors. Their study, published online Wednesday in the Lancet, was based on an examination of genetic data from more than 60,000 people worldwide. Its authors say it is the largest genetic study yet of psychiatric disorders. The findings strengthen an emerging view of mental illness that aims to make diagnoses based on the genetic aberrations underlying diseases instead of on the disease symptoms. Two of the aberrations discovered in the new study were in genes used in a major signaling system in the brain, giving clues to processes that might go awry and suggestions of how to treat the diseases. "What we identified here is probably just the tip of an iceberg," said Dr. Jordan Smoller, lead author of the paper and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. "As these studies grow we expect to find additional genes that might overlap." The new study does not mean that the genetics of psychiatric disorders are simple. Researchers say there seem to be hundreds of genes involved and the gene variations discovered in the new study confer only a small risk of psychiatric disease. Steven McCarroll, director of genetics for the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T., said it was significant that the researchers had found common genetic factors that pointed to a specific signaling system. "It is very important that these were not just random hits on the dartboard of the genome," said Dr. McCarroll, who was not involved in the new study. The work began in 2007 when a large group of researchers began investigating genetic data generated by studies in 19 countries and including 33,332 people with psychiatric illnesses and 27,888 people free of the illnesses for comparison. The researchers studied scans of people's DNA, looking for variations in any of several million places along the long stretch of genetic material containing three billion DNA letters. The question: Did people with psychiatric illnesses tend to have a distinctive DNA pattern in any of those locations? Researchers had already seen some clues of overlapping genetic effects in identical twins. One twin might have schizophrenia while the other had bipolar disorder. About six years ago, around the time the new study began, researchers had examined the genes of a few rare families in which psychiatric disorders seemed especially prevalent. They found a few unusual disruptions of chromosomes that were linked to psychiatric illnesses. But what surprised them was that while one person with the aberration might get one disorder, a relative with the same mutation got a different one. Jonathan Sebat, chief of the Beyster Center for Molecular Genomics of Neuropsychiatric Diseases at the University of California, San Diego, and one of the discoverers of this effect, said that work on these rare genetic aberrations had opened his eyes. "Two different diagnoses can have the same genetic risk factor," he said. In fact, the new paper reports, distinguishing psychiatric diseases by their symptoms has long been difficult. Autism, for example, was once called childhood schizophrenia. It was not until the 1970s that autism was distinguished as a separate disorder. But Dr. Sebat, who did not work on the new study, said that until now it was not clear whether the rare families he and others had studied were an exception or whether they were pointing to a rule about multiple disorders arising from a single genetic glitch. "No one had systematically looked at the common variations," in DNA, he said. "We didn't know if this was particularly true for rare mutations or if it would be true for all genetic risk." The new study, he said, "shows all genetic risk is of this nature." The new study found four DNA regions that conferred a small risk of psychiatric disorders. For two of them, it is not clear what genes are involved or what they do, Dr. Smoller said. The other two, though, involve genes that are part of calcium channels, which are used when neurons send signals in the brain. "The calcium channel findings suggest that perhaps and this is a big if treatments to affect calcium channel functioning might have effects across a range of disorders," Dr. Smoller said. There are drugs on the market that block calcium channels they are used to treat high blood pressure and researchers had already postulated that they might be useful for bipolar disorder even before the current findings. One investigator, Dr. Roy Perlis of Massachusetts General Hospital, just completed a small study of a calcium channel blocker in 10 people with bipolar disorder and is about to expand it to a large randomized clinical trial. He also wants to study the drug in people with schizophrenia, in light of the new findings. He cautions, though, that people should not rush out to take a calcium channel blocker on their own. "We need to be sure it is safe and we need to be sure it works," Dr. Perlis said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
PARIS "No questions?" Stephane Lissner, the general director of the Paris Opera, asked the 200 or so journalists assembled on Wednesday morning for the announcement of the Opera's 2016 17 season. There was the briefest pause. "Well, thank you," he said, leaving the podium immediately with the music director Philippe Jordan and the director of dance, Benjamin Millepied. If Mr. Lissner had not specified that remarks be limited to those about the new season, there would certainly have been a flurry of questions for Mr. Millepied, who announced last Thursday that he would leave his job at the end of the current season. The news reverberated around the dance world and made the front pages of France's major daily newspapers, Le Monde and Le Figaro. Although Mr. Millepied said he was leaving to focus on his choreography, avid speculation continued about his real motivation. In an interview in his office at the Palais Garnier the day before the news conference, the French born but American trained Mr. Millepied said he had come to realize he was not the right man for the job. "I knew it was going to be complicated and I tried really hard," he said. "To face the cultural and economic issues of our time, we need new kinds of organizations, and I've realized that it's too hard to turn this one into what I think is most relevant for ballet today. It's two and a half years that I've worked on this, and I know it's a short time, but it is long enough to realize this is not something I want to do." He added, "They need someone better suited to run this company." At the time of his resignation he said he wanted to return to Los Angeles with his wife, the actress Natalie Portman, and focus on his own choreography and a small ensemble he founded in 2012. Mr. Millepied is to leave the company on July 15, and will be succeeded by Aurelie Dupont, 43, a former Paris Opera Ballet etoile. Mr. Millepied, 38, has brought a glamorous profile and international attention to the Paris Opera Ballet. After he began his directorship in November 2014, he moved quickly to bring about change. He secured William Forsythe as its associate choreographer, commissioned new ballets, established a digital platform for new work, bolstered the Opera's social media presence and put a new emphasis on fund raising, with his season opening gala raising over a million euros. His second season, detailed at the conference, brings an enviable group of contemporary dance makers, as well as high profile artists like Tino Sehgal, Olafur Eliasson and Philippe Parreno to the Ballet's program. Critics of Mr. Millepied have portrayed him as having given up too quickly, abandoning a company that he had promised to remake as a 21st century troupe. Others have suggested that his departure is a sign that the Paris Opera Ballet like France itself is so resistant to change that it defeats anyone trying to bring it about. Another view holds that Mr. Millepied did not sufficiently respect the Opera's traditions and culture and had suffered a well deserved fall. Mr. Millepied also drew criticism for what was seen as neglect of the French repertory. Laura Cappelle, a Paris based dance critic for The Financial Times said, "He came in and judged the existing repertory of the company based on American standards about classical choreography." Ms. Cappelle added: "He may be right in an absolute sense, but it felt like he was imposing a view. The French neo Classical tradition is much more theatrical and less based on musicality than the American tradition. To us, that doesn't mean it's substandard, just different. There was a real sense of disappointment that he didn't take people's attachment to these works into account." Some dancers thought Mr. Millepied was too blunt, Ms. Cappelle said, especially when he asked for changes from "people who have been working in certain ways for 20 or 30 years." Among other issues, Mr. Millepied has spoken openly about the need for the company and its school to be more racially diverse. "I agree with him that diversity should have a place without discussion, but I disagree that there is any prejudice about it within the company," Mr. Lissner said in an interview last week. Raphaelle Delaunay, a mixed race dancer who went to the Paris Opera Ballet School and danced with the company from 1992 to 1997, said that Mr. Millepied was right to raise the issue. "I have never wanted to add to the polemic about the lack of diversity in our institutions," she wrote in an email, saying that she had been obliged to whiten her skin in certain roles, laughed at for having frizzy hair and been told she was paranoid when she objected. "I'm abandoning that stance today to do justice to the reforms led by Millepied." She added: "Bravo! Of course it's polemical; a polemic that many think is useless because the Opera has 'welcomed' diversity." But to cite the few dancers who are of Vietnamese, Moroccan, Algerian or other ethnic heritage, she added, "is a bit like saying 'I have a black friend' against an accusation of racism." Mr. Millepied has also run into trouble over his remarks about the quality of the company's dancing in the classics. In the documentary "Releve," broadcast in December on the French television channel Canal Plus, he said he did not want the corps de ballet to serve as wallpaper, but to dance as individuals; a comment that was widely circulated as an example of rudeness to the dancers. He also remarked in the documentary that the Paris Opera Ballet is not the best classical company in the world as is commonly stated in the press here. "When I arrived, there was too much of that attitude," he said on Tuesday, "and my goal was to see first rate performances. I am not against people being together and in line, as I keep reading. But we are not the Rockettes." He added: "In every company there is a group of upset dancers, but that's not the majority," he said. "I did not have a bad reaction at the time." Mr. Millepied isn't the first Paris Opera Ballet director to run into trouble quickly. Roland Petit's tenure lasted less than six months. John Taras and Claude Bessy made it a year; Violette Verdy and Rosella Hightower three years; Rudolf Nureyev a stormy six years. Ariane Dollfus, a journalist who has written a biography of Nureyev, said Millepied wanted similar changes to the rules as Nureyev. "These dancers are protected and cocooned since they are children, and Millepied and Nureyev are people who have taken care of themselves. A Paris Opera dancer can't grasp the idea of being a self starter." Mr. Millepied said he hoped to continue to have a close relationship with the company. "There is a beautiful tradition of ballet here, with charm and musicality and elegance," he said. "I really wanted to bring back the great tradition of French ballet." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
He was the captain of the basketball team at Regis High, an elite Jesuit school in Manhattan. "He was a little on the short side for the N.B.A., but he was talented," President Trump said of Fauci at a news conference in early April. "I like all sports," Fauci said recently, "but I'm really much, much more of a baseball fan." After college, medical school and hospital work, Fauci carried his Yankees fandom to Washington. He didn't care much for the Senators, an expansion team that left Washington to become the Texas Rangers for the 1972 season. He tried becoming a Baltimore Orioles fan, he said, but "that's tough when you live 40 minutes away." But when the Montreal Expos moved to Washington to become the Nationals in 2005, Fauci was hooked. "It kind of triggered in me that kind of fierce affection for a team that I hadn't had since I used to idolize all the Yankees," he said. "I just fell in love with the Nats. I don't consider that I'm being disloyal to the Yankees. I consider it as sort of a replacement for my boyhood love for baseball, which I still have." It shows. On Tuesday, Fauci was interviewed by the Nationals' longtime mainstay, first baseman Ryan Zimmerman, for the team's website. They talked about potential scenarios in which Major League Baseball could resume play after stopping spring training in mid March. Zimmerman offered him tickets. Fauci giddily said he had been a fan of Zimmerman's since he was drafted by the Nationals out of the University of Virginia in 2005. In a subsequent interview with the The New York Times, Fauci painted a cautious picture about when baseball could return. Although he said sports could provide a distraction for the public, he conceded that the needed testing wasn't available yet and warned against a premature reopening of the country. "There are certain parts of the country in the Mountain region and in the Midwest and in some of the places where there is very little infection and they're developing the capability of responding I think they're getting back to some form of more normality," he said. "That's much, much different than putting somebody in Madison Square Garden to play a Big East game." Despite his hectic schedule, Fauci has still found some time for his other passion, running, to boost his mental and physical health. Before the pandemic, his daily routine consisted of eating yogurt for lunch and going on a seven mile run on the Bethesda Trolley Trail near his office at the National Institutes of Health. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
NEW DELHI Many of India's airlines are rife with safety violations, according to an unreleased report by the industry's top regulator here. Most of the airlines in India including Air India Express, GoAir, IndiGo, Jet Airways, Kingfisher and SpiceJet were named in the report, which was dated Dec. 27. The report was given to The New York Times on Monday by an airline executive, who asked to remain anonymous because the report was not public and he feared repercussions. The report noted that the regulatory agency, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, had been prompted to examine the airlines amid a "background of severe financial stress being faced by almost all" of the carriers. It was signed by Lalit Gupta, head of the aircraft engineering branch of the directorate, and E. K. Bharat Bhushan, the regulatory agency's top official. Neither official returned a call for comment on Monday. The report found fault with almost every one of India's airlines, although the regulator said it had yet to examine Air India's international operations. The concerns included a shortage of pilots at Air India Express, the state carrier's budget airline; a shortage of engines and a spate of pilot departures at Kingfisher Airlines; a two year delay in auditing international operations at Jet Airways; a lack of instructors for the Boeing 737 aircraft at SpiceJet; and incomplete investigations of incidents at IndiGo. The Indian airline industry is nearing a crisis after rapid growth, analysts say. In the last seven years, according to the Center for Asia Pacific Aviation, passenger numbers have tripled, to more than 150 million last year. About 14 billion has been invested in aircraft and more than 25 billion in the whole industry in that time, but the growth in pilots, flight trainers, regulatory safety experts and maintenance engineers has not kept pace with demand, according to analysts and regulators themselves. Stiff competition in the industry has recently driven down revenue to the point where several airlines are nearing bankruptcy, raising more safety concerns. "The airline sector is broadly at a brink of financial disaster," said Kapil Kaul, the South Asia chief executive at the Center for Asia Pacific Aviation. "Most of them don't have a business case to exist, and fund raising options have dried up." The Indian airline industry has lost 5 billion to 6 billion in the last five years and this year was expected to lose an additional 2 billion, he said. While in other parts of the world, some airlines may have consolidated or shut, in India they remained in business in part because they are financed by entrepreneurs who have a personal stake in trying to make the business work, Mr. Kaul said. "The airlines which are surviving are beyond business," he said. The report did not discuss direct dangers to passengers. Mr. Kaul said that if the regulator had thought passengers were at risk, it would have grounded airlines. IndiGo, one of the few Indian airlines that is not losing money, disputed the regulator's report, saying, among other things, that the airline had removed engines early to comply with a directive from the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States about one engine model, and that all employees were "strongly encouraged" to report any safety issues. A spokeswoman for GoAir said that the airline had met with the regulator on Jan. 6 about the report and that the regulator had "fully accepted" GoAir's response. "GoAir has always been committed to guarantee high safety standards and will continue to invest all the resources necessary to keep our standards at the highest level," she said. Jet Airways said, "All points raised by the report have been clarified and accepted by the safety department of D.G.C.A. Guest safety is of paramount importance at Jet Airways and JetLite," a Jet subsidiary. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
The new coronavirus has infected nearly 90,000 people, and more than 3,000 have died. But relatively few children appear to have developed severe symptoms so far, according to available data. "Disease in children appears to be relatively rare and mild," with those under 19 years making up only 2.4 percent of the total cases, according to a report published Feb. 28 by the World Health Organization. So why aren't more children getting sick? "My strong, educated guess is that younger people are getting infected, but they get the relatively milder disease," Dr. Malik Peiris, chief of virology at the University of Hong Kong, said last month. Dr. Peiris has developed a diagnostic test for the new coronavirus. The numbers so far support that theory: According to the W.H.O., only 2.5 percent of those under 19 have developed severe disease and only 0.2 percent had critical disease. There have been no deaths recorded in children under 9. Scientists may not be seeing more infected children because "we don't have data on the milder cases," Dr. Peiris said. Without more information, it is also unclear whether children can transmit the disease to others. The W.H.O. report said that its team sent to China, the epicenter of the outbreak, "could not recall episodes in which transmission occurred from a child to an adult." Still, children who are detected as infected must be shedding some virus or they wouldn't be detected, noted Dr. Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. But whether their infectiousness is high is as yet unknown. "It's a very high priority to do studies to find it out," he said. One way to find out, he said, is to look at outbreaks such as the one at the church in South Korea. "If there were children among those people," he said, "that would be a goldmine of data." In one such published case study of a family, a 10 year old traveled to Wuhan, China, with his family. Upon returning to Shenzhen, the other infected family members, ranging in age from 36 to 66, developed fever, sore throat, diarrhea and pneumonia. The child, too, had signs of viral pneumonia in the lungs, doctors found but no outward symptoms. Some scientists suspect that this is typical of coronavirus infection in children. "It's certainly true that children can be either asymptomatically infected or have very mild infection," Dr. Raina MacIntyre said last month. Dr. MacIntyre is an epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, who has been studying the spread of the new coronavirus. In many ways, this pattern parallels that seen during outbreaks of SARS and MERS, also coronaviruses. The MERS epidemics in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and in South Korea in 2015 together claimed more than 800 lives. Most children who were infected never developed symptoms. No children died during the SARS epidemic in 2003, and the majority of the 800 deaths in the outbreak were in people over age 45, with men more at risk. Among the more than 8,000 cases of SARS, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were able to identify 135 infected children in published reports. Children under age 12 were much less likely to be admitted to a hospital or to need oxygen or other treatment, the researchers found. Children over age 12 had symptoms much like those of adults. "We don't fully understand the reason for this age related increase of severity," Dr. Peiris said. "But we see that now and with SARS, you could see that much more clearly." It's not unusual for viruses to trigger only mild infections in children and much more severe illnesses in adults. Chickenpox, for example, can be largely inconsequential in children, yet catastrophic in adults. Influenza is unusual in that it has evolved with humans over thousands of years and infects millions worldwide each year. Still, even though thousands of young children end up in the hospital each year with influenza, just a small percentage of them die, said Dr. Krys Johnson, an epidemiologist at Temple University in Philadelphia. This trend is generally true of respiratory illnesses because children tend to eat well, and to get plenty of exercise and rest none of which may be true of adults. "The younger, most healthy segment of the population are able to fight it off," she said. Adults may also be more susceptible because they are more likely to have other diseases, such as diabetes, high blood pressure or heart disease, that weaken their ability to stave off infections. The body's innate immunity, which is critical for fighting viruses, also deteriorates with age, and particularly after middle age. "Something happens at age 50," Dr. MacIntyre said. "It declines, and it declines exponentially, which is why for most infections we see the highest incidence in the elderly." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The genre busting, glitter dusting performance artist Taylor Mac and his musical director, Matt Ray, have been named winners of the 2017 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History, for their 24 hour work, "A 24 Decade History of Popular Music." The piece, billed as a "radical fairy realness ritual," is a decade by decade walk through American history from 1776 to 2016, told through the songs of the time, reinterpreted through a radical queer lens. It was performed in its entirety last fall at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, first in three hour segments and then in a continuous 24 hour marathon, complete with shared audience meals, group dance breaks and, mercifully, a sleeping loft for weaklings (like this reporter). The prize jury called it "a vast, immersive, subversive, audacious and outrageous experience," that uses a variety of techniques to "explode our country's history" and show, in Mr. Mac's words, how "in America the oppressor is forgiven but the outsider is vilified." (Wesley Morris, reviewing the marathon performance in The New York Times, called it simply "one of the great experiences of my life.") | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
BERLIN The term "regietheater," a German theatrical philosophy that gives a play's director godlike powers, can send a chill down an Anglo American theatergoer's back. But while many directors here stick to the classics, often in productions so radical that they end up seeming like entirely different plays, a crop of brand new works by playwright directors is lighting up stages in Berlin and Frankfurt at the beginning of the theater season. Call it auteur theater. The staged creations of Rene Pollesch, one of Germany's most innovative directors, often don't look like theater at all. With no characters, no plot, no conventional dramatic arc, his high energy performances feature his regular acting collaborators reciting text that can swerve from philosophy to pop. He often defies contemporary expectations of theater by resurrecting archaic ones, like the Greek chorus. And yet the result is fun, accessible and engaging: Many of Mr. Pollesch's works have become cult classics. They are a far cry from the deconstructive behemoths of Frank Castorf, the former director of Berlin's Volksbuhne theater, who invited Mr. Pollesch to stage many productions there during Mr. Castorf's 25 year reign. And, unlike that legendary or notorious impresario's monumental performances, an evening with Mr. Pollesch usually clocks in at 90 minutes or less. "Cry Baby" is Mr. Pollesch's first work in Berlin since a failed changing of the guard at the Volksbuhne, and it takes place at another storied playhouse: the Deutsches Theater. In an 18th century boudoir that becomes a stage within a stage thanks to Barbara Steiner's set, the actress Sophie Rois (another Volksbuhne exile) and her three co stars discuss the motivations and desires of actors, the expectations of the theatergoing audience and individuality versus groupthink. The setting lends the play the breezy feel of French Boulevard theater, although the hallmarks of that genre love, adultery, crime seem to have played out before the play's beginning, when Ms. Rois shuffles onstage and plops onto the bed. The rapid fire dialogue is peppered with quotations, ranging from the German playwright Heinrich von Kleist to the Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel, and the talk careens free associatively from Brechtian aesthetics to German pop music. There's also a gaggle of pajama clad girls, reciting their dialogue in unison like a Greek chorus, who at one stage crawl into Ms. Rois's bed. Bernd Moss, a lanky, expressive actor in the Deutsches Theater's ensemble, is Ms. Rois's chief interlocutor, heckling or at least provoking her as an onstage spectator, and swashbuckling his way around the stage with her in a long fencing duel. Mr. Pollesch divides the text and action into discrete scenes with his eclectic soundtrack of Roy Orbison and flamenco guitar. As for Ms. Rois, she is charismatic and captivating as she switches between theatrical registers, embracing a spectrum from classic declamation to guttural whining reminiscent of Gollum in "Lord of the Rings." Mr. Pollesch's plays are so intimately connected with his productions that it would make little sense to present them in new stagings and with different casts, and "Cry Baby" is no exception. This is usually the case with Yael Ronen, too, who often devises her plays with actors from Berlin's Maxim Gorki Theater, where she is the in house director. Ms. Ronen is known for combustible evenings during which actors exhume their personal traumas, emotional scars and fears, largely through monologues. Her new work at the Gorki, "A Walk on the Dark Side," however, is both a thrilling production as well as a fine new dramatic work. Writing credit is given to both Ms. Ronen and the ensemble, and while I can imagine that the actors contributed their ideas, a play this carefully plotted does not feel like a group effort. Ms. Ronen uses a dysfunctional family reunion in the countryside around Berlin as a comic allegory for the struggle between dark matter and dark energy, the forces said by physicists to make up most of the universe. Immanuel and Mathias, two estranged brothers and rival astrophysicists, meet in a secluded hotel at the insistence of Immanuel's wife. The simmering tension between the brothers is heightened by two other unexpected guests: Mathias's unstable girlfriend, fresh out of a mental hospital, and a mysterious half brother, who turns up uninvited and seems to know every last incriminating detail about the family members he hasn't seen in decades. As the revenant sibling David, the Israeli actor Jeff Wilbusch is charmingly, frighteningly ambiguous. Ms. Ronen makes him the most interesting character in the play, the embodiment of chaos and the unexplainable: in other words, the complete opposite of the two scientists, who despite their contrasting temperaments both put their faith in reason. Magda, the suicidal girlfriend played with feverish intensity by Lea Draeger, has much more of an affinity for David, although her character is somewhat crudely drawn as a hysterical bundle of self destructiveness and sex. In his latest, which he wrote and directs, four candidates apply to be part of the first colony on Mars and must undergo a bewildering and strenuous screening process. Among the hopefuls are a wealthy man and the grown daughter he wants to shield from a world gone wrong, and a daredevil alpha male who drags his loser brother along with him like a ball and chain. They convene in a secluded bunker to be drilled by Yannik (the preternaturally composed Torsten Flassig), who will decide who gets to go to the red planet. The 100 minute play comes with generous doses of absurd humor and pathos, as Mayenburg brings together a "Hunger Games" style kill or be killed plot with the sensibility of Existentialist theater. More than Mr. Pollesch or Ms. Ronen, Mr. Mayenburg is renowned in Germany and abroad first and foremost as a playwright. (Two of his plays, "The Ugly One" and "Fireface" have appeared on New York stages in recent years.) In Frankfurt, Mr. Mayenburg's chamber production is a well measured match for what is essentially a classic character driven, dialogue fueled drama, despite frequently inventive video projections that recall video games and virtual reality. It is a fundamentally different approach to the theater than Mr. Pollesch's, one that insists on the ability of new work to stand apart from its production. But by assuming the director's role as well, Mr. Mayenburg has found a way to have it both ways: He can assert a level of artistic control similar to Mr. Pollesch, while keeping the door open for future productions by others down the road. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
A rhino desk by Francois Xavier Lalanne sold for EUR5.4 million with fees at a Sotheby's auction on Wednesday. It among the works in the personal collection of the French artist and his partner, Claude Lalanne. A Sotheby's sale featuring the personal collection of the sculptors Francois Xavier Lalanne and Claude Lalanne rakes in 53 million. PARIS "Two million!" screamed a voice from the crush of Sotheby's staff members taking instructions from telephone bidders. The opening offer for the "Rhinocretaire," a welded metal writing desk in the shape of a rhinoceros dated 1991, was almost three times the low estimate of 700,000 euros, or about 775,000 and the auctioneer hadn't even started the bidding. The desk eventually sold to another telephone client for EUR5.4 million with fees. The French sculptors known collectively as " Les Lalanne " the husband and wife team of Francois Xavier Lalanne , who died in 2008, and Claude Lalanne are among the few names capable of creating serious excitement in the niche world of design auctions. They certainly did so Wednesday night, when Sotheby's raised EUR48 million from a sellout session of 41 lots, the first in a two day auction of works from the Lalannes' personal collection. The low estimate for the entire sale of more than 270 lots was EUR15.9 million. Most of the pieces at Sotheby's had been made by the Lalannes in their farmyard studios at Ury, south of Paris, where the couple had lived and worked since 1967. Ms. Lalanne died in April at the age of 93, survived by four daughters. Estates in France valued at more than EUR1.8 million incur inheritance tax of 45 percent, so the death of a successful French artist is often followed by studio sales. Blurring the boundaries between art and design, the Lalannes' playfully surreal bronze creations have had a cult following since the 1960s. Gunter Sachs and Yves Saint Laurent were among the Lalannes' early patrons, while more recent collectors have included Peter Marino in the United States, Francois Pinault and Bernard Arnault. "As always with this kind of sale, what seems expensive will turn out to look cheap, and the cheap will look expensive," said Ben Brown, a dealer with galleries in London and Hong Kong who has exhibited Les Lalanne since 2007. Mr. Brown, seated in the front row of the salesroom, gave the second highest bid for "Rhinocretaire," the most expensive lot in the auction. "It was the bargain of the sale," he said. "It was a masterpiece." The eight foot desk was a unique item by Mr. Lalanne, but most works included in Sotheby's auction were editioned pieces, typically made by Les Lalanne in series of eight. The Lalannes met in Paris in 1952 and began working together shortly after, though they would not marry until 1967. They worked in parallel, rarely collaborating, each having a distinctive vision. For Mr. Lalanne, formative friendships with the artists Constantin Brancusi and Salvador Dali, together with a brief spell as an attendant in the Egyptian and Assyrian departments of the Louvre, inspired animal sculptures that combined form and function in whimsical ways. Sotheby's sale also included an example of his "Gorille de Surete I," a five foot high gilded bronze gorilla with a safe concealed in its chest. Made in 2006 and from an edition of eight, it sold for EUR1.9 million, almost four times its high estimate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Giving Up the Battle for Peak Sunset Our columnist, Sebastian Modak, is visiting each destination on our 52 Places to Go in 2019 list. Before Zadar, he was at a once in generation party in Vevey, Switzerland. Every evening in the second half of July, the city of Zadar on Croatia's Dalmatian Coast undergoes a transformation. Just as the church bells signal 8 p.m., the narrow streets of Old Town get so packed it can be hard to move. Like ants to honey, throngs of tourists congregate and move as a unit to the waterfront to take in or rather to photograph the city's greatest attraction: sunset. The best spot for viewing it is right above the Sea Organ, a sound art installation made up of pipes sitting under the concrete boardwalk that react to the swell of the tides. The repetitive sighing of the giant, hidden musical instrument would be beautiful meditative even if the view wasn't a sea of selfie sticks silhouetted against the setting sun and the notes weren't drowned out by the chatter of thousands. Wherever they are, the Old Town was far more pleasant when the punishing noon sun made it hard to be outside. Some of the labyrinthine alleyways were empty, as I wove my way through the oldest continuously inhabited city in Croatia. I was able to pick up on details like the mismatched flagstones, signaling the time period in which they were set or replaced. I stumbled upon smoky hole in the wall "konobas," or taverns, where real life locals dug into fresh fish without a tourist in sight. I was able to climb the bell tower of St. Anastasia's Cathedral, dating from the 12th century, for bird's eye views of the Roman Forum and the sparkling Adriatic Sea, and marvel at the high flying dome of the 9th century St. Donatus Church without having to wait in long lines. It was worth the sweat and the sun induced headache But to really escape the crowds, I had to make a concerted effort to think outside the guidebook. It took me a few days and a healthy dose of luck to do so. My first encounter with Zadar beyond the crowds started at one of the aforementioned konobas a small, wood paneled spot called Konoba Tovar where, in the dead zone between lunch and dinner, I was able to find a seat at one of the outside tables. My plan was to nurse a cold beer while I stared into my phone and figured out what to do next. It wasn't long before a Croatian man sipping on a glass of rose at the next table engage d me in the kind of small talk conversation common in bars across the world. Eventually, he invited me to his table. We shared a plate of fresh sardines doused in olive oil and traded travel stories. When we got to the last sardine on the plate, he ripped it in half, and offered me the head in between drenched fingertips. We ordered another round of drinks and a bowl of mussels. He showed me photos of his daughter on his phone. We barhopped across the Old Town, skipping the tourist traps selling mediocre pizza and risotto in favor of dives lit up in neon lights where I only heard Croatian spoken. He introduced me to the "PT," or pelinkovac and tonic, a concoction anchored by a local wormwood spirit that tastes disconcertingly like vomit. The night ended close to three in the morning, at a bar miles away from the Old Town. A huddle of locals in the corner sang along to Croatian pop music from the 1980s. Somewhere along the way, I had changed out of my T shirt and into a Croatian soccer jersey bearing the number 10, which is worn by local Zadar hero Luka Modric. Mr. Matanovic had stopped at a store along the way to buy it for me. He had also given me two of his paintings to mail back home. None Though Zadar has an airport, it can be easier to fly into Split. Reliable bus service connects Croatia's major cities and top attractions, but renting a car gives you the freedom to go where the tour buses don't. None You could come away from Zadar thinking the food is limited to mediocre takes on Italian classics: most of the spots catering to tourists don't appear to be trying very hard. But head to one of the local konobas for seafood to experience another side to the cuisine. (Your best bet is pointing at something on another table that looks good.) There are also some seriously good pasta and pizza spots, including 4 Kantuna, where the quality of the food is at odds with the relatively low prices. Just make sure to reserve a table in advance: it's popular for a reason. None If I wasn't limited by the logistical nightmare that is a trip to 52 places in 52 weeks, I would have come to Zadar at another time. In July it's packed with vacationing European families. But if you're not limited to when the children are out of school, word has it that shoulder season either in May June or September October is the time to go, when the sun's still shining but the crowds are notably thinner. My adventures in dodging vacationing families continued a couple of days later, when I connected with Joe Orovic, a Croatian American journalist (and New York Times contributor), who lives just off the mainland on the tiny island of Iz, along with 300 odd other people. In the second half of July, the only way to escape the crowds in Zadar, Mr. Orovic, told me, was to leave it. "If you had come even a week ago, you would have asked me if anyone lives in Zadar," he said. The solution during high season, he told me, was to get a boat and explore some of the more than 1,000 islands that sit off the mainland like crumbs fallen off a bread loaf. So that's what I did. I made my way to the ferry port. From there, a slow but beautiful ride took me to Dugi Otok literally, "Long Island" where I met Mr. Orovic and the boat he had borrowed from a neighbor. Beside the occasional sailboat, flags from across Europe decorating their masts, we had the Adriatic and all the mostly uninhabited islands to ourselves. And there's far more than empty beaches and bright blue water to enjoy. There's history, in the form of the tunnels drilled into the islands that once hid Yugoslav submarines and naval ships during the Cold War. There's also the wreck of the Michelle, an Italian cargo ship that most suspect was sunk by its owners in a case of insurance fraud and that's in shallow enough water to explore without scuba gear. We ended the day on Mr. Orovic's home island, a speck encircled by isolated coves. On our way in, we bumped into his wife, Tina Rokov, who was taking underwater photos and cleaning up some of the plastic that had washed ashore. Their dog, an elderly mutt, watched from the safety of her boat. Afterward, we sat at the dockside cafe, drinking cold beers and watching people somersault off the jetty into the refreshing sea. When traveling, a little effort, a little risk taking and some luck can go a long way in separating yourself from the herd. This was most clear on my last full day in the country. Hearing so much about Croatia's natural beauty, I was in search of some time in the great outdoors. There were the obvious choices, national parks like Plitvice and Krka, where electric blue pools are framed by giant waterfalls, but I was afraid of the crowds I would encounter there after seeing the travel agencies on every corner in Zadar advertising day trips. On a tip from Mr. Orovic, I went in search of the Zrmanja River Canyon, about 30 miles inland from Zadar. I ended up in Obrovac, a small town along the river where I was too late to join any of the scheduled boat rides up the canyon. "This is nice, but where can I really see the canyon?," I asked the tour operator in charge of boat trips. He pulled out a map and gave a series of complicated directions. I followed them the best I could, driving up winding roads whose edges ended in steep drops down cliffs. I turned left at a "no left turn" sign and followed a dirt road until I thought my rental car had taken too much of a beating. Then I walked. From there, using Google Maps as a rough guide I followed the river until I came to a park near the town of Muskovci, the grass leading right up to the water's edge. Children from families who had set up tents along the river swung from a rope, doing back flips into the cold lake. A set of small waterfalls set a steady soundtrack. It was among the best swims I've ever had. Of course, tourism isn't only or even primarily about the tourists. Crowds like the ones I saw in Zadar can change a place and its people. Mr. Orovic, who sees the bonanza that happens on the mainland every summer, was worried about what it means for the future of young Croatians. "You have this whole generation of people whose muscles are atrophying to do anything else besides work in tourism for a couple of months a year," he said. "And with that it's harder to find what's authentic, because to find authenticity you have to go to a place that doesn't care that you're there as a tourist." Those places are getting harder and harder to find in Dalmatia, but they are still there. There's a dilemma that faces all of us who write about travel: by writing about something, can you ruin it? Aren't the things that are "off the beaten path" better if they are kept that way? I grapple with it constantly, but, while some of the onus is on the travel industry and tourism boards, taking the initiative as a traveler to cover ground less trodden can also go a long way in saving a place from itself. The world is big; there's so much to see and so much to do. Why then should we all see and do the same things? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Late Thursday night, I appeared on TV. On Friday morning, I woke up to a text message from a friend. "People on Twitter are pathetic," she wrote. "How are you?" On MSNBC's "The 11th Hour With Brian Williams" the night before, we mentioned a tweet, written by someone else, about the enormous amount of money Michael Bloomberg had spent on his failed presidential run, about 500 million. Here's what I said: "Somebody tweeted recently that actually with the money he spent, he could have given every American a million dollars." The math, as a few people have pointed out, was wrong. Overnight, I had become an online sensation, and not in a good way. The video had gone viral, first shared by the right wing, and then by seemingly everyone else, too. Some people seemed surprised I couldn't fact check arithmetic on live TV. Let me assure you that my high school math teachers were not among those people. Given my history with math, I thought the flub was pretty funny, too. I tried to laugh it off. "Buying a calculator," I wrote on Twitter on Friday. "Brb." In a normal time, that would have been the end of it. But the country has lost its mind, so instead, it was only the beginning. Across social media, right wing trolls celebrated. And some journalists did, too. Most of them were men who are prolific on Twitter. (Going out and doing actual reporting? That's harder.) The next time they make a mistake, I hope people are nicer to them than they were to me. "How did this end up on TV?" one of them helpfully wrote, sharing the video. Unfortunately, quite a few Americans can tell you what it's like to be the target of a Twitter mob over a gaffe. My great sin was trivial, harmless, silly. What's it like when people are trying to cancel you for a math mistake? Weird, and maddening and painful. Of course, in my case it wasn't really about math, as anyone who read through my mentions on Twitter or saw my inbox would know. "You're a great example of why we need to end Affirmative Action," someone named Jim B. wrote me in an email this weekend. "Get a job scrubbing floors. It's the only thing you're good for." On Twitter, it was about the same. "Keep thinking that your important. Lol ... your a nobody ... you fill a seat ... only because your Black. that's the only reason. cause if was based on education or merit, you would be working at Walmart ... sometimes the truth hurts ... your a lowlife." "Is that you using that black girl magic I heard about. You so silly, can't believe you have a job there. LOL" These are just a few examples of many. I am a black woman who writes for The New York Times and appears on national TV. And if you're black in America, no matter who you are, what you accomplish or how hard you work, there will always be people to remind you that you are black, that you are "just a nigger." A colleague at The Times, an African American woman, wrote to me on Friday afternoon, "They resent that you exist." It didn't help that I write for a newspaper where my colleagues are assiduously working to hold a rogue president accountable every day. We are living in a world where there is no grace for the smallest, most inconsequential mistake. In an instant, I became a target of those who are furious with the media for being too liberal, or not liberal enough, a totem for the grievances of millions of people who seem to be hurting. No doubt, some people piled on because they just wanted the "likes" and brushed aside the inconvenient fact that I was a human being. Several days into the experience, which is hell, I ran into an acquaintance on the street who informed me that the video clip had been shared on "Last Week Tonight With John Oliver." I began to wonder how others in the same position had managed to carry on. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for Monica Lewinsky. I even had sympathy for the woman who was fired back in 2013 after tweeting a horrible joke about how she was on her way to Africa and hoped she didn't get AIDS. When something like this happens, it's true that you know who your friends are. Friends and colleagues went into hand to hand combat defending me on Twitter. Others sent flowers. I heard from old friends and new ones, elected officials and former teachers, sources and fellow journalists, readers and ex boyfriends. On Saturday, I received a gift from some high school friends. "This is a 'We're sorry you're getting dragged on Twitter' plant," the note read. "We love you tons and are always here." I write a lot about the underdog, which tends to make some people feel threatened, or simply uncomfortable. When I appeared on that TV program last week, I had been working for many days interviewing black voters in the South who were determined to defeat Donald Trump, whom they see as the nightmare embodiment of the old hatreds many of them fought to overcome. Many of those Americans had survived far worse under the racial terror of Jim Crow than anything I can imagine. I thought about the black man I met at the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., who had been beaten bloody by the police there half a century ago. I thought about the older black woman who approached me in a Selma coffee shop to tell me she was proud of me. I thought about my father, who grew up enduring the daily indignities of segregated South Carolina and Detroit. I am here because of them. And there is nothing the haters can do about it. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
TROY, N.Y. Natasha Barrett's introduction to classical music was not unduly peculiar. She can still recall her father's collection of vintage vinyl, her love for Debussy albums. She also remembers wanting to be a composer from an early age. But she didn't live long in the past. As synthesizers became more common through the 1980s, a teenage Ms. Barrett began playing them. She also experimented with multitrack recordings. "I just thought this was fun, because I could make funny sounds," she said before a concert of her works last week at Empac, the experimental media and performing arts center here at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "I didn't think of this as being music. And I hadn't really heard any contemporary music at this stage." "And it was presented in a way that was very musical," she added. "It allowed you to understand this and embrace it as an artistic subject, and not just as a technological subject." Thanks in part to that early training, Ms. Barrett is now one of the leading composers in the emerging field of 3D audio: using high density loudspeaker arrays (think movie theater surround sound on steroids) and cutting edge recording and mixing procedures to create works full of ingenuity and drama. The technology behind some of her methods might be a challenge to picture, but the sonic results contain easy pleasures as with the range of timbres and steady build of intensity in "Sagittarius A " for violin, multichannel electroacoustic sound and live electronics. A few of Ms. Barrett's electronic pieces without live performers, including one recorded from inside a balloon, were presented at Empac's first spatial audio seminar in 2017. At last week's edition of the seminar, there was a concert of her so called ambisonic pieces on Friday. The night before, she screened "Pockets of Space," a short 3D film made with the digital artists Marc Downie and Paul Kaiser. As the often abstract visuals of "Pockets of Space" transform from febrile, subatomic squiggles to more recognizable depictions of a tree, so, too, does Ms. Barrett's score evolve with initial, dry tendrils of percussive sound steadily giving way to more resonant passages, suggestive of prepared piano. Originally commissioned by Ircam, the French electronic music institute, "Pockets of Space" also exists in a virtual reality version. After strapping on Oculus goggles and headphones, a viewer can choose where to gaze inside the digital environment. At one point, during my second trip through the VR edition, I tilted my head to allow an approaching cloud of red dots to pass over my face. As I did, a slow rolling pattern of Ms. Barrett's tones sounding like a great many packing bubbles being popped in sensuous slow motion seemed to approach and wash over my head, too. This synchronization of perspective, across audio and visuals, was made possible by the fact that both elements of the film were being rendered anew by a computer in real time, based on the tilt of the goggles on my head. "I'm really concerned with the idea of tangibility," Ms. Barrett said during our conversation, shortly after I removed the goggles. "Sound is invisible, but we can do things that make you want to reach out and touch it." One of her tools is binaural recording, which uses multiple microphones inside a dummy head that is designed to be generically reflective of human auditory processes. It places the listener, Ms. Barrett said, "more 'into' the space of the sound," instead of being merely sandwiched between left and right channels. Given differences between actual heads, a binaural recording won't sound the same or produce the same spatial effects for different listeners. And it pales in comparison to hearing the spatial separation of high order ambisonics, like at Empac. But they give a feel for the sense of immersion those speaker arrays can offer. In a dramatic, windswept section of a piece like "Involuntary Expression," Ms. Barrett's binaural version for headphones sounded, to my ears, as though it kept pulling my head between minute gradations of sonic balance; the stereo edition, by comparison, sounded like a series of more discrete, back and forth handoffs between the halves of my headphones. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
A Night of (Mostly) Not Drinking With a 'Drynuary' Expert Other than some exceptions here and there, John Ore has not had an alcoholic drink during the month of January in 10 years. This is part of an annual seltzer soaked exercise in temperance that he calls Drynuary. Mr. Ore, 46, is a longtime subscriber to the idea that a January without booze can lead to better sleep, better dreams and a weight loss of roughly 10 pounds. But on a recent evening in December, he could be found sitting under a ceiling of red and gold Christmas ornaments at the Brass Monkey, a bar in the meatpacking district, drinking a pint of Lagunitas. After all, it wasn't Drynuary just yet. Over a couple of pints of beer and, later, a seltzer based drink Mr. Ore was preparing to hit the reset button after a grueling holiday season filled with gluttony and family related stress. Maybe you know the feeling. For those who are thinking of taking the month off from drinking, he has some pointers. For years, Mr. Ore, a senior vice president for product at the news website Business Insider, has peppered the internet with essays about Drynuary in Slate, The Awl and Deadspin indeed, he's the top Google result for the term. "The one thing I've not gotten my head around is the reaction of people I don't even know," he said of Drynuary's detractors, of whom there have been many, from those who think it trivializes the problem of binge drinking to those who just think it's stupid. Drynuary is the "Love Actually" of lifestyle choices: Most people don't care either way, but the same handful return year after year to tell you how bad or how good a programming choice you're making. "Last year, someone tweeted at me and was like, 'Hey, Drynuary guy, I get what you're doing but you're kind of a smug ," he said, ending the sentence with a four letter expletive. Mr. Ore, a father of two, emphasizes that Drynuary is not a cult or a movement: "I'm not recruiting." During the month of January, Mr. Ore is a Canada Dry kind of guy. He enjoys mixing fruit with his seltzer. At the Brass Monkey, he swaps his Lagunitas for seltzer with a splash of cranberry and lime. "It's like a virgin Cape Cod or something," he said after taking a sip of the slightly syrupy drink. He thinks of an alternative name for this mocktail: the Drynuary Sadness. For those new to Drynuary, Mr. Ore says that ordering a seltzer drink at a bar or a party can be a provocation, mostly because others may be compelled to try to undo any progress with peer pressure. "If people get salty about it, it says more about them than it does about you," he said. "Say, 'This is why I do it, and this is what I'm getting out of it.'" After leaving the Brass Monkey, Mr. Ore sits down to a dinner of sliders and a cheese board at Tanner Smith's in Midtown. Here, he drinks a cocktail called the Hudson Duster rye, lemon juice, amaretto and contemplates the cadence of the average Drynuary. "The first week, you're overenergized," he said. "I'm having lucid dreams more often." The second week, his clothes fit better, but after that, it's all uphill. By the fourth week, he said, "I'm sick of whatever it is that used to be interesting about this." Tonight, dinner comes with a nonalcoholic round of tonic waters and lemon. "You get a little bit of the interestingness of a cocktail," he said, regarding the drink. "I could see cranberry in this, too. Nothing too fancy." As other observers of Drynuary have noted, completing a month without drinking is an achievement, especially in a city where socializing without alcohol can be tricky and social calendars are defined by happy hours and bottomless brunches. "If you can get this done," Mr. Ore said, "there is this sense of accomplishment." On one or two occasions, Mr. Ore and his wife, Jennifer Jerutis, have ended the month a little early or started a few days late because of vacations including "flying to Puerto Rico with a 4 month old" or because of hard to get dinner reservations. One year, he just didn't feel like drinking seltzer water with his steak at Peter Luger. This year, he says he may have to make contingency plans for the second half of the month. "I was thinking I'd maybe do something different," he said, "like have a beer on Inauguration Day." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Pure dance no longer holds the allure it once did for Bill T. Jones. So what's this award winning choreographer to do? For one thing, he has removed the word "dance" from his company's name. "We're a contemporary performance ensemble," he said on a recent afternoon. His ensemble, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, and his approach braiding storytelling and movement into a theatrical collage will be on display in his ambitious "Analogy Trilogy," which is to be shown in two marathon performances (with a dinner break) at the N.Y.U.'s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts on Sept. 22 and 23. The trilogy is capped by the New York premiere of "Ambros: The Emigrant." The piece was inspired by a section of W.G. Sebald's novel "The Emigrants," in which the narrator tells the story of Ambros Adelwarth, his great uncle, who becomes the traveling companion of a wealthy American. The three parts all created in collaboration with the company's associate artistic director, Janet Wong explore similar ideas: What is the effect of trauma? What role does memory play in it? And how can narrative and movement work together to bring a person, or character, to life? "Am I arguing that collage, assemblage, can be just as moving as Shakespeare, just as important and vital to us?" Mr. Jones asked. (The answer would be yes.) While it may no longer be at the forefront, the dance element is still demanding, Jenna Riegel, a company member, said. "The difficulty is in the concentration to be able to recover your breath in a heartbeat and to sound composed and to speak again with thoughtfulness and not like a robot," she said. In his office at New York Live Arts, where he is the artistic director, Mr. Jones spoke about the trilogy and about how running Live Arts has affected him as an artist. But he frequently and jovially changed the subject to ask his own questions "Do you think a middle career artist should have a signature?" or to tell stories, like the time he was in ballet class and accidentally kicked Martine van Hamel, the American Ballet Theater principal dancer, at the barre. "It was a wonderful moment," he said with a giggle. "But I felt so stupid." Here are edited excerpts from our conversation. How did you become interested in oral history? I think Sebald was reminding me of something when he has his young narrator looking for his uncle. The uncle is long gone, but there are people who knew the uncle, and he is interviewing them. Suddenly this novelist device is something that in our world we call oral history. I thought: You're not an anthropologist. You don't have a study grant from Columbia. But you do have access to people. Was doing these oral histories a way to be autobiographical that isn't so obvious? I've done autobiography but I have aged the ankle, the back, maybe the brain, the emotional state. It's another way to be personally involved in it. Why did you starting interviewing Dora? I was thinking there was something about her accent, something about her talking about the war that reminds me of Sebald. I wanted to put Sebald and Dora together, but I realized it was too much, so I put Sebald aside and focused on Dora and Lance. He was different. He never makes a distinction between Michael Jackson and George Balanchine. I don't think he knows who Balanchine is it's all dancing. We were trying to rebuild our relationship, honestly. No more gossiping. Tell me your life. What did you want to learn from Lance? I thought that my nephew was an example of somebody who should have been saved. He was at the San Francisco Ballet School and all the good liberals including his liberal gay uncle were so glad. But he had his own ideas, so I think I was a little angry about how it had failed. So you returned to the Sebald? Yes. Addressing himself You after all, have always taken refuge in a work of art and now you've weighed it out into the Holocaust, you've weighed into whatever the question is around an at risk person who is no longer young. Now you're going back to art. Did you envision showing the entire trilogy at once? Envision, no. From being an African American counterculture person, life is about putting it together and seeing what happens. That is still the way I think about art. It's also something about this institution New York Live Arts . This is an incubator. When I came here, I wanted to know: What is the voice of the place? We want to be producing the conversation for a general public. The conversation happens in the art world, but how but how can that conversation be retrofitted? And that's a question isn't it? Every time the curtain goes up on another season, hallelujah. I remember saying to the former Live Arts artistic director Carla Peterson, "We should only do the really outstanding things," and she said, "There's only a couple of masterpieces at one time." It was amazing to hear. I said, "What are you doing for the rest of the time?" She said, "You're just letting people grow." How does that make you feel? Being the person I am, I want to win. I come from potato pickers. The thing that's still an artist in this person who is trying to become an administrator is that I've got to listen deeply to my preoccupations and my heart. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
THERE is no questioning the sales success of the Chrysler 300 that swaggered into the full size sedan market in 2004 like a mob underboss; some 650,000 were sold in the 2005 10 model years. The 300 was instrumental in keeping Chrysler in business through its dark days of drift, bankruptcy and reorganization. But the car's polarizing gangster chic styling finally had to go; sales had plunged in the last couple of years. So for 2011, there is a restyled and refreshed version, and the stakes may be even higher. The new 300 must not only perform strongly once again in North America as Chrysler's flagship, but also in Europe. With Chrysler being integrated into the Fiat Group of Italy, the 300 will get a new nose and assume an alternate identity as the Lancia Thema. This dual role dictated a design that was less distinctively a Chrysler. The goal was to make the car look more upscale, and that target seems to have been achieved. Chrysler is presenting the new 300 as an evolution of the last model's broad shouldered, slab sided, somewhat menacing design in the 2005 film "A History of Violence," the bad guys' 300 is itself practically a malevolent character. But in many ways the 2011 model is the spiritual opposite of its predecessor. The bold, boxy lines have given way to a refined, soft shouldered look; the extremely high beltline seems less pronounced and the turretlike cabin has been lightened up with larger windows. "We wanted to make it less of a caricature," said Ralph Gilles, the company's senior vice president for product design (as well as chief executive for the Dodge brand). Mr. Gilles was instrumental in the designs of both the outgoing and incoming 300s. But what now? What if the high character look was the best thing the 300 had going for it? The macho style of the outgoing model inspired a constellation of aftermarket grilles, lights, interior trim and wheel and tire treatments. But the customizers who helped to drive sales of the last car may find the new 300's styling harder to fiddle with or, perhaps, to improve upon. The new 300 appears to be changed more significantly than perhaps it really has been. It still rides on an evolution of the Chrysler LX platform, which was influenced by the chassis of a previous generation Mercedes Benz E Class. A legacy of the short lived DaimlerChrysler union, the LX incorporates not only an E Class type double wishbone front suspension, but also a version of an S Class five link rear suspension. The upshot of all this? The 300's high class underwear gives it composed, confident road manners, more like a Mercedes than a Chevy. But over all, the 300 is still struggling to break out of the middle of the pack of so called affordable full size cars, a group that includes the Charger as well as the Buick LaCrosse, Chevrolet Impala, Ford Taurus, Hyundai Azera and Toyota Avalon. (Of these, only the Charger and 300 are still based on rear wheel drive architecture.) Still, with this revamping the 300 and Charger have become significantly more competitive in refinement, features and standard powertrain. The old 300's demerits included its rental car caliber interior, its outdated telematics and its uncompetitive base level powertrain. The interior, dumbed down in the rampant cost cutting that preceded Chrysler's bankruptcy, was put out with the trash. Engineers restuffed the cabin with extra insulation and sound damping material. Thicker carpets were installed, along with plusher and more supportive seats (though the driver's bottom cushion is still a smidgen too short for my taste). Surfaces are softer. The gauges are bathed in soothing blue light. The 8.4 inch touch screen display is so big that even the myopic Mr. Magoo could see it clearly. But the 300 offers a mixed bag of features, some of whose value is questionable like a slide show function for your digital photos. If you don't also opt for the navigation system (supplied by Garmin), the large display can seem like overkill merely to control cabin functions. And I found the screen distractingly bright at night despite its auto dimming feature. The system also includes Bluetooth connectivity for a variety of voice commands (redundant controls on the steering wheel and dashboard handle most of the same functions). Slots are provided for a USB cable, an SD card reader and a single DVD (though video playback works only when the transmission is in Park). A dealer installed Uconnect Web feature can turn the vehicle into a mobile hot spot for high speed online connectivity (though additional charges may apply). A premium audio system, made by Alpine, is also an option. My favorite creature comfort, besides the nicer seats, was the huge double pane sunroof, a 1,295 option. It was so well positioned that the cabin had an open, airy feel almost like a convertible even when the glass was closed. Other test car amenities included seat and steering wheel warmers, heated and cooled cup holders, adaptive cruise control, rain sensing wipers, blind spot warning lights and a back up camera. Based on its own crash tests, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety rates the 300 a Top Safety Pick. Caught in a sudden spring snowstorm, the traction and stability controls provided enough grip to pull the big rear wheel drive sedan shod with all season tires safely through the slippery stuff. But in such conditions I would have preferred the competence of the 300C with all wheel drive. Under the hood, engineers replaced the outdated and generally unloved base engines (V 6s of either 2.7 or 3.5 liters) with a new 3.6 liter Pentastar V 6, which Ward's AutoWorld recently ranked among the world's 10 best engines. The 292 horsepower motor provides considerably more power and torque and it uses much less fuel than the previous engines; the Environmental Protection Agency rates it at 18 miles per gallon in the city, 27 on the highway. The venerable 5.7 liter Hemi again provides V 8 power, and half of the cylinders shut down at cruising speeds to save fuel. The Hemi is now rated at 363 horsepower and 16/25 m.p.g. (15/23 m.p.g. with all wheel drive). Oddly, in my tests of V 6 and V 8 models, each returned a highway average of 23 m.p.g. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Now, with American hospitals facing a grave shortage of the vital devices, the Big Three automakers, small engineering firms, software designers and medical equipment manufacturers are rushing to figure out ways to produce more of them. But President Trump has so far declined to use powers that public health experts say could make a real difference in getting more ventilators to places that need them the most right now. What is really needed, a number of public health experts and former government officials say, is for Washington to take control of the nation's existing ventilator supply. Because peak coronavirus infections will hit cities and regions at different times in the coming months, a centralized federal effort could send unused machines to hospitals that need them most. "This is a national crisis," said Frank Kendall, who served as under secretary of defense for acquisition and logistics in the Obama administration. "In a time of scarcity, you can't leave it up to companies and governors to manage it themselves." Mr. Kendall said that only the federal government had the authority to take over the allocation of ventilators, both from manufacturers who are in the business of selling devices to the highest bidder, and state leaders unlikely to voluntarily let go of machines they fear they might need in the future. "As the states become more desperate, someone has to referee the situation," he said. "The marketplace isn't set up to do that." The United States currently has between 160,000 and 200,000 ventilators, but as many as one million patients could need to use one of the machines over the course of the outbreak, according to the Society of Critical Care Medicine. In New York, the epicenter of the outbreak in the U.S., hospitals are already on the verge of running out, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said this week. But military experts say Mr. Trump could also tap the logistical prowess of the Pentagon and the legion of defense contractors primed to quickly solve complex challenges. The federal government could address problems in the global supply chain that are depriving ventilator companies of the components they need to increase production. Other, quicker options are being explored around the country, including stepping up production of the type of resuscitators used by paramedics and repurposing simpler ventilators used by plastic surgeons and elective surgery centers. G.M. said this week that it would partner with the ventilator company Ventec Life Systems to produce up to 200,000 machines. Ford said it would help 3M and GE Healthcare increase production of respiratory machines they already make. And Medtronic, one of the world's largest medical device makers, is in talks with Tesla and other car companies, including General Motors and Ford. "This is not a business model problem," said Vafa Jamali, a senior vice president at Medtronic. "This is a society problem." But the fruits of these partnerships will not arrive in time to save the thousands of patients who will need the machines in the coming weeks. Ventec's timetable for increasing production fivefold, for example, is three months. Touring a vast convention hall that was to be turned into a makeshift hospital, Mr. Cuomo said on Tuesday that the state needed 30,000 ventilators in the coming weeks not months to cope with skyrocketing infections. "I don't need ventilators in six months," he said. "And I don't need ventilators in five months, four months or three months." After he spoke, Vice President Pence said the federal government would send 4,000 more to New York. Besides the slow timetable, experts on medical devices questioned the wisdom of bringing in an unrelated industry like the automakers to manufacture a sophisticated medical device. "It's not like making a sedan or S.U.V.," said Dr. Hugh Cassiere, a pulmonologist who sits on a Food and Drug Administration panel for anesthesia and respiratory devices. "Sounds good as a sound bite, but the practicalities may be very difficult," added Dr. Cassiere, who is helping oversee care for more than 40 severely ill coronavirus patients on ventilators at North Shore University Hospital on Long Island. Experts in the field say there are other ways to rapidly boost the ventilator supply for overwhelmed hospitals. Most ventilators are sophisticated machines that keep critically ill people alive by delivering oxygen into the lungs through a tube inserted in the windpipe. Full feature machines can cost as much as 50,000, but doctors say even basic models that cost less than 2,000 can sustain a patient in acute respiratory distress. The most grievously ill may need to remain on the machines for weeks until they can breathe on their own. There are tens of thousands of no frills resuscitators used by paramedics and the military. Plastic surgeons and outpatient surgery centers also have ventilators in their offices. With elective procedures indefinitely on hold in much of the country, those machines are now sitting idle. "I think it will be faster to throw a couple ventilators on a truck and drive them to a hospital than wait for new ones to arrive," said Dr. Adam Rubinstein, a plastic surgeon in Miami who has been compiling a list of doctors willing to loan out their ventilators in a pinch. "So far, no one has said no." In recent days, mechanical engineers and software designers across the country have been crowdsourcing plans for simple ventilators that could be made with 3 D printers and components readily available at hardware stores. Hospitals have been pulling old machines out of storage and requisitioning ventilators that anesthesiologists use during surgery. Larry Kronick, the president of PMT Partners, a Florida company that sells a simple breathing machine already used by the military and ambulance crews, said he had 1,000 of his Oxylator respirators ready to go, but buyers have been scarce. "I can make 1,000 more, but I need money to buy materials," he said. Eric Honroth, the North America president for Getinge, a Swedish company that makes 10,000 ventilators annually, said he would welcome government intervention to solve supply chain bottlenecks for components, but that production would be better left to companies with expertise in the field. "These are complex machines that require complicated technology to keep patients alive," he said. "I would have some trepidation and reticence about someone else trying to manufacture what we do. It's not like we're manufacturing masks." Then there is the issue of who will run the new devices. Dr. Mahshid Abir, an emergency physician at University of Michigan, said most ventilators require specialized training to operate. With so many health care workers falling ill, there is an additional staffing challenge: patients tethered to breathing machines need to be monitored 24 hours a day. The New England Journal of Medicine estimates that there are only enough respiratory therapists to care for 100,000 patients at one time. "You can't just put someone on it and press start and you're done with it," Dr. Abir said. "There's a lot of adjustments that need to be made, depending on how sick a patient is. Even if we got an indefinite number of ventilators, we don't have an unlimited number of people to operate them." The two companies are trying to work out a deal in which G.M. would essentially serve as a contract manufacturer, according to a person familiar with the discussions who was not authorized to discuss them. While the companies are working as quickly as possible, it could take four or more weeks for production to start, the person said But Dr. James DuCanto, an anesthesiologist in Milwaukee, says relying too heavily on car companies to produce ventilators would be irresponsible. Facing a surge of desperately sick patients, many hospitals have been dusting off triage plans for rationing ventilators that require doctors to make excruciating decisions about which patients would get them if there aren't enough. Dr. DuCanto often uses the portable Oxylator breathing machine for patients who need short term breathing assistance and he said they could provide a much faster solution. The machines, which cost 2,000, could be pivotal in sustaining scores of coronavirus patients in a crisis, he said. The only thing they need to function is an oxygen tank. The devices are so simple, he said, that machine shops across the country could be enlisted to produce the components. "It would be easy peasy to make them," he said. "During a national crisis, there's no need to reinvent the wheel." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
LONDON When interest rates soared last week on Irish government bonds, it served as a grim warning to other indebted nations of how difficult and even politically ruinous it could be to roll back decades of public sector largess. An Irish bond market already in free fall plunged further after Ireland announced on Thursday that it planned to nearly double its package of spending cuts and tax increases to try to rein in its huge deficit. Investors took it not as a sign of resolve but rather of Ireland's desperation and uncertainty about the true extent of its problems. The yield on Ireland's 10 year bond climbed to 7.6 percent on Friday, expanding the gap with the 2.5 percent interest rate on comparable bonds issued by Germany, which is emerging most strongly from the European debt crisis. Borrowing costs in Spain, Portugal and Greece also spiked upward again, as investor concern re emerged that those countries would be hard pressed to bring their deficits under control and avoid defaulting on their bonds. Even as global stock markets rallied last week, those bond market jitters were a forceful reminder of how wary investors remained after Europe's debt crisis last spring, despite the commitment of a combined 750 billion euros ( 1.05 trillion) in bailout funds by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. "The scale of the deficits are just so big," said Philip R. Lane, a professor of international economics at Trinity College in Dublin. "The issues are political as much as they are economic." Prime Minister Brian Cowen's increasingly shaky political standing in Ireland may be threatened by the new deficit reduction measures, which will cut to the heart of the Irish welfare system, including health care. In Greece, regional elections on Sunday were viewed as a test for the Socialist Party led by Prime Minister George Papandreou, whose government's austerity measures have been wildly unpopular. In a televised address, Mr. Papandreou claimed victory in the elections and viewed the results as support of his economic policies. International concerns about the high budget deficit in the United States, and Washington's seeming willingness to print money rather than tackle tough debt cutting measures, help partly explain the recent anti American criticism from countries as diverse as Brazil, China and Germany. Countering those critics may be one of the biggest tasks for President Obama in Seoul, South Korea, this week at the Group of 20 meeting of the leaders of the world's biggest economies. Within Europe, though, the more immediate concerns involve Ireland. Its debt woes have stoked fear that it might even need to follow Greece and request a bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Such a move could do lasting damage to Ireland's credit standing. For the moment, at least, that outcome seems improbable. Unlike Greece earlier this year, Ireland has enough cash on hand to allow it to finance government operations through June 2011. And it has, at least temporarily, withdrawn from the bond market instead of paying the new, higher interest rates, which Irish officials say do not adequately reflect the country's true economic condition. To a degree, Irish officials are correct. Market experts concur that the ever widening gap between the interest rates Germany pays on its debt and those of Ireland and other vulnerable euro zone economies is partly a reflection of technical factors, like the tiny number of bonds actually being traded. Low trading volumes mean that every time even a single spooked investor decides to sell an Irish or Greek bond, it can be a market moving event, causing the price to plummet and the yield to rise. Still, there is no denying that the recent run up in interest rates highlights a real concern throughout Europe: that the first round of spending cuts and economic changes put forward by countries that also include France and Britain may not be enough to bring deficits down to the target levels of 3 percent of gross domestic product by 2014. In this respect, Ireland, where the deficit is currently 32 percent of its G.D.P., is exhibit A. A year ago, as cascading mortgage defaults brought down the biggest Irish banks, Ireland became the first major developed nation to impose an austerity program. The country was hailed worldwide as an exemplar of probity and national consensus. But as the full extent of the banking and real estate bust became evident, it was clear that the government of Prime Minister Cowen, which has been in power since the onset of the crisis more than two years ago, had underestimated the cost of fiscal recovery. Now the possibility that he will be forced from office or compelled to call a new election grows by the day. Last week, the Irish government conceded that it had previously miscalculated the scale of its debt challenge. It announced that the task would require an additional 15 billion euros in savings over four years, bringing the total sum of tax increases and spending cuts to about 30 percent of Ireland's total economic output. And Ireland's need for cuts and taxes is hardly unique. Whether in Spain, France or Italy, European nations remain saddled with heavy welfare obligations ones that inevitably must be curtailed to meet ambitious deficit targets, even as their tax revenue is constrained by low economic growth. And political pressures are building in Britain, where the government at least has a thin electoral mandate to cut the deficit, and where politically sensitive components of the welfare state, like health care and pensions, so far have largely been spared. Last week, subway workers, firefighters and BBC journalists went on strike over proposed public sector cutbacks. The British chancellor, George Osborne, perhaps the keenest deficit hawk among policy makers in the developed nations, was taken to task last week by lawmakers. They accused him of exaggerating the extent of the country's fiscal problems to justify broad cuts in middle class benefits like universal payments to parents with children. "How many children will be forced to leave their homes?" demanded one furious member of Parliament. "Will the numbers of homeless increase or decrease under your government? Will there be a reduction in special needs education for children in our schools?" The chancellor replied that he had no choice. Unless the root causes of the British deficit were addressed, he said, the country's credit rating would be jeopardized. In a report last week, the International Monetary Fund largely reinforced that view, arguing that the increasing debt ratios among advanced nations needed to be addressed. It highlighted the extent to which the debt ratios of all developed nations had exploded since the onset of the financial crisis. The leader is Ireland, whose debt level has almost doubled, to nearly 100 percent of G.D.P. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
This article is part of a series on resilience in troubled times what we can learn about it from history and personal experiences. Here's the thing about sled dogs: They never know how far they're going to run. As a musher the human driver of a dog sled team this is one of my main challenges. There are many ways in which my dogs know more than I do. They know if a storm is coming, or if a moose crossed the trail days before. They know how ice shifts under their paws. They know if we're being followed and by what kind of animal. They know their own power that they're stronger than me, much stronger, and if they turn or stop when I ask them to, it's because they're choosing to listen and trust me. Running together is a gift they give me every day. But each time my dogs hit the trail, they run hard they give it everything they've got. That's fine if we're going 10 miles, or 30, distances they can cover easily in a few hours. We can leave after dinner and be home by midnight, silver snow on a full moon night. But what if we're going a hundred miles, or a thousand? Asking sled dogs to pace themselves, to slow it down, is like asking a retriever to only fetch one ball out of three: It goes against their every instinct. That's how I feel now, midpandemic: that we humans are falling into uncertainty, stretching ourselves thin, and we have no idea how far it is to the finish line. The difference, of course, is that sled dogs want to run, and people do not want to live through a public health crisis. But there's a parallel in the unknown distance, the unseen ending. And oddly enough, mushing has prepared me for this. I used to be a dedicated planner. I knew what I'd do every day, weeks in advance. Having a plan made me feel confident and safe. And then I got into long distance dog sledding, and I discovered that the only thing worse than not having a plan was the stress of having one and constantly breaking it. Working with dogs in the wilderness means negotiating countless shifting variables: snow and wind, wild animals, open water, broken equipment, each dog's needs and changing mood. I learned that plans, when I made them, were nothing but a sketch; the only thing I needed to count on was that the dogs and I would make decisions along the way. So how do you throw yourself into the unknown and better yet, feel OK about it? How do you settle into an endurance challenge with no idea when it will end? One of the most surprising things about distance mushing is the need to front load rest. You're four hours into a four day race and the dogs are charging down the trail, leaning into their momentum, barely getting started and then, despite their enthusiasm, it's time to stop. Make straw beds in the snow, take off your dogs' bootees, build a fire, heat up some meat stew (for the team, but hey, you can have some too) and rest for a few hours. The dogs might not even sit down; they're howling, antsy to keep going. It doesn't matter. You rest. Four hours later, you rest again. And you keep doing that, no matter how much your dogs want to keep going. In fact, if you're diligent from the start, they'll actually need less rest at the end of a trip when their muscles are stronger and their metabolisms have switched from burning glycogen to fat than at the beginning. It's far easier to prevent fatigue than to recover from it later. But resting early, anticipating your dogs' needs, does something even more important than that: It builds trust. A sled dog learns that by the time she's hungry, her musher has already prepared a meal; by the time she's tired, she has a warm bed. If she's cold, you have a coat or blanket for her; if she's thirsty, you have water. And it's this security, this trust, that lets her pour herself into the journey, give the trail everything she has without worrying about what comes next. You can't make a sled dog run 100 miles. But if she knows you've got her back, she'll run because she wants to, because she burns to, and she'll bring you along for the ride. What this means for people, for us, is that we can't just plan to take care of ourselves later. We shouldn't expect to catch up on sleep when we really crash, or to reach out to loved ones after we're struck by loneliness. We should ask for support before we need it. We should support others before they ask. Because if you don't know how far you're going, you need to act like you're going forever. Planning for forever is essentially impossible, which can actually be freeing: It brings you back into the present. How long will this pandemic last? Right now, that's irrelevant; what matters is eating a nourishing meal, telling someone you love them, walking your dog, getting enough sleep. What matters is that, to the degree you can, you make your own life sustainable every day. Sled dogs can run farther, in a shorter time, than almost any other animal. But they only think as far ahead as they can see, hear and smell. They catch the scent of a deer; they see a curve in the trail. It is, in its way, that simple. If the team meets an unexpected challenge, if they come to a steep mountain or take shelter in a storm, they're better off for their restraint. Because they're healthy, content; they have what they need, and they have each other. There's no stronger way to meet the unknown. Blair Braverman is the author of "Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Livable but in need of a significant renovation to bring it up to 21st century speed, the property is divided into two living areas: The first floor has a 21 by 58 foot garage and an in laws' apartment, which has a 19 by 24 foot living room, a rear bedroom, a bathroom, and an 8 by 11 foot kitchen that was originally a box stall. The main living area, on the second floor, is configured as eight rooms, most of them enhanced by crown moldings and parquet floors that date to 1939. The residence, a rental for the last 15 years, has skylights in all three bathrooms and a fireplace in the 23 by 15 foot living room, which faces south on East 73rd Street. A 15 by 10 foot dining room with an antique crystal chandelier opens into the kitchen, which the Weisers, who left the carriage house and moved to New Mexico in 1993, renovated for tenants several years ago. The two most spacious bedrooms are at the back of the house and overlook the neighboring gardens. The master is 12 by 18 feet, with an en suite bath and a walk in closet. The crystal chandelier in the master is another antique, Mrs. Weiser said. The two story 25 foot wide carriage house, built from yellow Roman brick and limestone along with its identical twin next door at 167 East 73rd, was designed by George L. Amoroux in 1903 04 and was owned by Henry Harper Benedict, the president of the Remington Typewriter Company. Mr. Benedict, a great uncle of Mrs. Weiser's, lived in a limestone mansion at 5 East 75th Street and required two carriage houses to stable his herd of horses, shelter his coachmen, and store his carriages, as well as hay and grain. He sold the 167 East 73rd Street carriage house in 1909 it has since been transformed into the headquarters for the Vilcek Foundation but retained 165 East 73rd for automobiles after horses and carriages went out of vogue. In 1929, he transferred ownership to his wife, Katherine Geddes Benedict (Mrs. Weiser's great aunt), and 10 years later the Benedicts sold it for 15,000 to Robert L. Graham Jr., a lawyer, after he married one of their nieces, Mary. The Grahams were Mrs. Weiser's parents, and she grew up in a modest family residence on the second floor, which had been transformed from a servant's apartment and hayloft. Her father used the downstairs as an office and hobbyist's workplace, and over the decades he assembled his soldier collection there; Mrs. Weiser recalls helping him paint and arrange them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom. Early on Monday, the police in Hong Kong arrested Jimmy Lai, founder of the popular tabloid Apple Daily, on charges of collusion with a foreign country, one of the vaguely defined crimes under the anti sedition law adopted this spring by Beijing. It was the latest and clearest signal that China intends to make full use of that sweeping new legislation to stifle free expression and undermine Hong Kong's pro democracy movement. Mr. Lai, an ardent critic of the Chinese Communist Party who had used his wealth to finance pro democracy activities, knew it was coming. In an Op Ed in The Times in May, shortly before the government in Beijing announced its intention to pass the law, he wrote: "I have feared that one day the Chinese Communist Party would grow tired not only of Hong Kong's free press but also of its free people. That day has come." It has been a sad sight for all who had watched hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong's people bravely take to the streets in the months before the coronavirus pandemic, in addition to several other protests in years past, to protect the modest freedoms they were promised when Britain turned its former colony over to China in 1997. Beijing started trying to undermine the "one country, two systems" principle from the get go, but the campaign to quash the opposition has escalated sharply under the unyielding, authoritarian rule of President Xi Jinping. Since the new law took effect at 11 p.m. on June 30, just before the anniversary of the city's handover from British rule, students have been arrested for social media posts; warrants have been issued for pro democracy activists abroad; a dozen pro democracy politicians have been disqualified from running in legislative elections; and the elections themselves were postponed for a year. The Times announced last month that it was moving part of its Hong Kong operations to Seoul, South Korea. Mr. Lai's arrest was the most significant and aggressive action yet under the law. He was seized at his home in the early morning and later led handcuffed through the newsroom of Apple Daily while nearly 200 police officers rifled through desks and amassed bales of documents to take away all duly recorded by the paper's infuriated staff. The police also arrested Mr. Lai's two sons and four executives of his company, Next Digital. What will happen next to the 71 year old tycoon, a native of mainland China who made his fortune in apparel, is hard to predict. The anti sedition law is overarching both in the definition of crimes and in its scope, with penalties as severe as life in prison for crimes such as secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces. It applies to Hong Kong residents and nonresidents alike, as well as Hong Kongers living abroad. And it allows for certain cases to be tried behind closed doors in mainland China, where courts are obedient to the ruling party. In the early years of Hong Kong's semiautonomous status, the prevailing presumption was that China would not dare to crack down too aggressively for fear of risking the link to Western finance that the bustling enclave provided. But as China has grown in economic might, the financial role of Hong Kong has decreased, and Mr. Xi has evidently concluded that he can withstand whatever outrage or sanctions China's behavior provokes in the West. Hong Kong has been only one front on which he has flexed his muscles; the others include expansive claims to the South China Sea, repression of Uighurs in the Xinjiang region and a readiness to wage a tariff war with the Trump administration. The introduction of the national security law for Hong Kong prompted the Trump administration to terminate the special status Hong Kong had enjoyed as a semiautonomous region, to impose visa restrictions on those in Beijing responsible for the crackdown, and to end exports of military equipment and dual use technology through Hong Kong. On Friday, after pro democracy candidates were disqualified from running for the legislative council, the Trump administration went further and ordered sanctions against 11 Hong Kong officials, including Carrie Lam, the chief executive, effectively lumping them together with Communist officials on the mainland. China promptly retaliated on Monday by sanctioning 11 Americans, including Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. The United States also joined with Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand in a sharp statement charging that disqualifying candidates and postponing elections "undermined the democratic process that has been fundamental to Hong Kong's stability and prosperity." It is dubious that such sanctions and statements can have much effect, given that the officials sanctioned are not likely to travel in one or the other direction due to the pandemic and probably have few assets that the other side can freeze. Given Mr. Xi's mind set and China's growing economic and military might, it is hard to imagine what actions the United States or its allies could do to help the brave people of Hong Kong. To them, "two systems" always meant more than a bit of say in local governance: It meant they could continue to enjoy free speech and impartial courts, and freedom from fear of official oppression. "Two systems," to the pro democracy forces, meant a free one in Hong Kong and an unfree one on the mainland. All that has long been in peril, no more so than now, and it is terribly sad to see people who had done so much to protect their freedoms fall further challenged again by a system that regards freedom as sedition, free speech as subversion and meeting with foreigners as collusion. For now there is not much more the world can do. Yet Mr. Xi is deluded if he thinks that turning the rule of law into a rule by law will erase the longing for elemental freedoms that is second nature to Hong Kong. It is incumbent on the United States and its allies, and on all people who cherish freedom, to make abundantly clear to Beijing at every chance that in Hong Kong, as in Xinjiang and the South China Sea, Mr. Xi's misguided aggression is turning his nation from a rising star into a pariah. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Imagine you have a high risk of heart disease. Maybe you even have had a heart attack or a stroke. Since then you have done everything you can to stay healthy: you exercise, track your blood pressure, take a statin. With the publication of a new study last week, you may well be wondering if there's one more measure you should try. In a multimillion dollar trial, a new kind of cholesterol lowering drug significantly reduced heart attacks and strokes among patients like you. Should you run out and get a prescription? Well, not so fast. In 2015, the Food and Drug Administration approved a new class of drugs for the reduction of LDL cholesterol, the type associated with heart disease and stroke. The medications, called PCSK9 inhibitors, are administered by injection and can reduce LDL levels by a whopping 60 mg/dl on average. The introduction of PCSK9 inhibitors led some experts to believe that we might be able to virtually eliminate heart disease. But they've been slow to catch on. Each prescription costs 14,000 per year, despite the fact that these drugs had yet to be evaluated in a big study that tested whether they could actually reduce risk. It may seem obvious that lowering LDL cholesterol would inevitably reduce the risk of heart disease. But drugs can be unpredictable. They tend to have many effects. A drug that ameliorates one risk factor might have other effects that offset the benefit. On Friday, investigators reported the results of a highly anticipated trial of a PCSK9 inhibitor called evolocumab (brand name Repatha). This medication reduced LDL levels to an almost unfathomable 30 mg/dl from about 90 mg/dl on average, which is typically considered low. Over about two years of study, the researchers found that the new drug, when added to statin therapy, further reduced the risk of heart attack or stroke by about 15 percent. For about every 70 people treated with the drug, one person benefited in this way. This is not far off the size of the benefit that statins provide. So the drug works, which is good news for patients. And no safety concerns emerged. But the applause from heart experts has been muted, because expectations were so much higher. Their hope had been that drastically low LDL cholesterol levels would make it difficult or even impossible to have a heart attack. For people with a high risk of heart attack or stroke, there is now evidence that evolocumab may help you dodge the bullet. It is not a panacea, and you need to decide whether the odds sound good: You may be the lucky one among about 70 people who take the drug. The benefit is likely to be greatest among those with the most risk, including people with very high LDL levels despite treatment. Still, the cost is sky high. Not all insurance companies will consider this drug a reasonable value, and some experts already think that the price should come down, given the size of the benefit. On the positive side, there was some indication that the benefit was increasing over time, but that is highly speculative at this point. Another reason to hesitate: The study's short time frame means that there wasn't much time in which to detect safety problems. If you are cautious about the safety of medications, you may want to wait and see what happens as more people start using it. Besides, there is a much less expensive alternative to evolocumab. Ezetimibe (Zetia) is another medication that can be added to statins to further reduce cholesterol. One study has indicated that it can reduce risk when added to statin therapy, though not quite as much as evolocumab did. For people with a low risk of heart disease, there is probably little to gain from taking a PCSK9 inhibitor. Many, many of these kinds of patients would have to be treated for someone to benefit. And there are no trials yet in this population. What about people who have trouble with statins? First, it turns out that some of the perceived problems with statins are not related to statins at all; you may need help from your doctor to determine what's really causing your symptoms. And some people tolerate one statin better than another. If statins are really not for you, ezetimibe is an option. If you still want to further lower risk, then you might add evolocumab, despite its expense, to ezetimibe. This can be a particularly important option for people at high risk because of very high LDL levels. There are not yet studies of outcomes in patients who use these medications because they cannot take statins. But it is a reasonable guess that the benefit will be similar to that reported in the newly released study about a 15 percent reduction in heart attacks or strokes. If there is a silver lining, it's that the tried and true remedies are highly effective at reducing the threat for those at great risk of heart attack and stroke. Despite the newest drugs, a combination of heart healthy behavior, blood pressure control and statin therapy remains the gold standard. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
To Get Back on Its Feet, Italian Bank Gives Up Five Centuries of Control SIENA, Italy The long, tortured saga of Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the scandal plagued Italian lender that is the world's oldest bank, may be coming to an end, but Italy's broader banking troubles are far from over. Shareholders of Monte dei Paschi di Siena are expected to agree on Thursday under duress to lift ownership restrictions on the bank, ending five centuries of cozy local control and political patronage. That might attract new capital, some from overseas, to help Italy's third largest bank work its way through financial problems. Earlier this year the bank received a 4.1 billion euro ( 5.4 billion) bailout. But the same insular ownership structure that shielded Monte dei Paschi, even while it fell ever deeper into debt, still persists at dozens of other lenders in Italy. Economists say this tradition may be prolonging the recession that has made Italy a threat to euro zone stability, by insulating the financial institutions from the rigorous restructuring they need if they are to resume the main role of banks: lending to businesses. At a special shareholder meeting on Thursday, Monte dei Paschi, under new management since last year, is expected to abolish a rule that has limited the voting rights of outside investors. Eventually, that and other changes could wrench control away from the bank's largest shareholder, the Monte dei Paschi Foundation, which has long dominated the bank and used its profits to act as Siena's shadow government, helping to finance everything from ambulance service to the local professional soccer team. Profits from the bank even helped finance the Palio, the bareback horse race in the town square that is the city's trademark event and main tourist draw. As long as Monte dei Paschi was profitable, the system served almost everyone. Politicians used it to dispense patronage and jobs and sometimes landed lucrative management posts themselves. The foundation used bank profits to help finance hospitals, church restorations, low cost housing and local museums. "Monte dei Paschi is extreme," said Lucrezia Reichlin, a professor of economics at the London Business School who is on the board of directors of UniCredit, Italy's largest bank. "In Siena there is no one who did not benefit from this crazy bubble." Monte dei Paschi is just one example of the pervasive influence that Italy's powerful foundations, or fondazioni, exert over the banking system as dominant shareholders in publicly traded companies like the country's two biggest banks, UniCredit and Intesa Sanpaolo. The foundations' influence may have made it more difficult for Italian banks to raise new capital, analysts said. Not many investors, particularly wealthy foreign ones, are willing to buy shares in a company in which they have no influence. "All the banks need capital," said Stefano Micossi, an economist who is director general of Assonime, an association of publicly traded Italian companies in Rome. "This structure makes it difficult to raise capital." One reason Italy has been stuck in recession since the end of 2011 is that small Italian businesses have not been able to get credit they need to invest in modernization and expansion and to create new jobs. The credit squeeze has grown worse this year. Lending has fallen more than 5 percent during the first quarter of 2013 compared with a year earlier, according to the country's central bank, the Bank of Italy. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. The problems at Monte dei Paschi have led to a wider debate about fondazioni influence in the Italian banking system. In a speech to a bankers' group last week, Ignazio Visco, the governor of the Bank of Italy, said that the foundations had in some cases become too involved in bank decision making. He called on them to let in new investors. Approval of governance changes at Monte dei Paschi is virtually certain after the foundation said on Monday it would vote in favor of lifting a rule that prevented any one investor except the foundation itself from exercising votes worth more than 4 percent of the total. The foundation's stake in Monte dei Paschi has already sunk to 33.5 percent, from more than 50 percent two years ago, and it is likely to sell more shares to cover its own debts, pushing its stake as low as 10 percent. The changes in Monte dei Paschi governance are designed to make shares in the bank more attractive to investors, and pave the way for the bank to sell 1 billion euros in new shares by the end of 2014. The bank is also responding to pressure from the Bank of Italy and the European Commission, whose approval is needed for the bank to receive state aid. The shareholder meeting on Thursday will also make other changes, like term limits for directors, that are likely to weaken the foundation's influence on the bank's board. Even if the changes are a done deal, Thursday's shareholder meeting is likely to be loud. Past meetings have drawn hundreds of angry citizens, political leaders and former bank employees whose severance pay has been partly converted into devalued bank shares. "We are breaking a century old bond here," said Eugenio Neri, a heart surgeon and leader of a civic movement that placed a close second in Siena's mayoral elections a month ago. "The function of the bank and of the foundation is crucial for this region. We need to restore the bank ourselves and kick politics out of it. That is what we need." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Esa Pekka Salonen will lead a concert version of Strauss's "Elektra." Franz Welser Most will conduct the Cleveland Orchestra in Mozart and Morton Feldman. Louis Langree and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra will give the first New York performance of Christopher Rouse's Symphony No. 6, which they premiered last year, shortly after its composer's death. A slew of visiting orchestras and the Rouse symphony which Joshua Barone described in The New York Times as a "haunting and profound farewell" are among the highlights of next season's Great Performers series at Lincoln Center. The 2020 21 series, which was announced on Thursday, will also feature a variety of smaller ensembles, chamber music concerts and more intimate recitals. There will be several free concerts in the center's David Rubenstein Atrium, including the pianist Francesco Tristano playing Bach's "Goldberg" Variations alongside projections of a digital city being drawn in real time. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Live lobsters are put onto a scale at the Key Largo Fisheries in Key Largo, Fla. Florida Lobster Got a Break on China Tariffs. Then Came Coronavirus. MARATHON, Fla. Like other commercial fishermen along the east and west coasts, Ethan Wallace had been waiting 18 months for China the world's largest importer of live lobster to lift its crushing retaliatory tariffs on American seafood that had whittled down his profits. This week, that moment came: Beijing started allowing Chinese businesses to apply for tariff exemptions. But for Mr. Wallace, it no longer mattered. Tariffs or not, no one in China is buying. The coronavirus outbreak meant the Lunar New Year banquets and wedding parties that feature a fresh lobster on every plate, a symbol of good fortune, were canceled. In several cities, restaurants are shuttered and public indoor gatherings are prohibited. And even if they weren't, many of the planes that ferry live lobsters aren't flying to China. "Boom! Coronavirus," said Mr. Wallace, 28, after he had steered Piece of the Pie, his 43 foot Torres boat, into the Keys Fisheries marina in Marathon. Although the season continues through the end of March, he and his crew that day took home more lobster traps than pounds of lobster from the Gulf of Mexico. "Normally I would still be out there fishing for the next 15 days or so," he said as two mates unloaded wooden traps laced with brown garlands of seaweed that hung like tinsel. Even though the catch trails off near the end of the season, the premium price that buyers are willing to pay for live lobsters that can be shipped to China 11 to 12 a pound when the year started was worth the effort. In January, when the Chinese government closed the live seafood market in Wuhan, the price of lobster in Florida fell overnight by as much as 5 a pound. Because they will now have to be sold for frozen use, the lobsters aren't worth as much. All around the wharf, spilling over into the parking lot, on the grass and even, in some spots, along the Overseas Highway that traverses the Florida Keys, lobster traps are stacked. The makeshift skyline of slatted wooden low rises and high rises is one emblem of how far and fast the coronavirus outbreak is reverberating throughout the global economy. Production and distribution chains, travel plans and social gatherings have been disrupted in Asia, Europe and North America. The effects are rippling out to the supply of Apple phones and demand for hotel rooms and lobsters. "The effect of the coronavirus has been a shake up across the entire lobster supply chain in the U.S. and Canada," said Annie Tselikis, executive director the Lobster Dealers' Association in Maine, where four out of five American lobsters are caught. Now is a slow time for fishing and sales in the state, she said, so the damage has been limited. Compared with those in Maine, the annual landings from the Florida Keys are tiny, about six million pounds. But half of the catch goes to China, the largest single customer. Over the past decade, China's demand for live lobster a sign of wealth and status among the country's rapidly growing middle class has transformed Florida's lobster industry. The clawless spiny Caribbean lobsters caught off its coast tend to be more prized in China than Maine's pincered ones. 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. Known as dragon shrimp, they could be shipped out of Miami and arrive alive in China 40 hours later. As prices headed past 20 a pound in 2014, more and more fishing boats, processors and buyers redirected their operations to sell to Asia. Lobster is now the most valuable seafood product harvested in the state. D D Seafood, which handles more than one million pounds of lobster a year, has a facility five minutes from Miami International Airport to speed shipments. "The virus has knocked out 100 percent of our live business to China," said Dennis Dopico, the vice president. When the market shut, he got stuck with about 5,000 pounds in the tanks instead of the 15,000 carried on an average day. "We just got lucky," he said. For Florida's fishing industry, the health scare is the latest in a series of unfortunate events. In 2017, Hurricane Irma ripped through the region, wrecking lobster traps and boats and reducing the commercial fishing harvests, said Gary Graves, manager of Keys Fisheries, one of the state's largest seafood processors and distributors. In 2018, a trade feud with the United States prompted China to impose an additional 25 percent tariff on American lobster imports payback for tariffs that the Trump administration had slapped on Chinese goods. Last summer, just after lobster season started, another wave of tariffs from the White House prompted the Chinese to retaliate by further raising import duties on American seafood. Exports of live lobster to China plunged 42 percent from 2018 to 2019, from 148 million to less than 86 million, according to the Maine International Trade Center. Maine was hit the hardest by the punitive tariffs. Buyers could easily pivot north to Canada, whose waters breed the same species of clawed lobster. He had hoped to make up some lost ground during new year celebrations in China, when pumped up demand raised prices. "You hope for a good pull right at the end of the season," he said. "Then the market crashed." Mr. Piton lives down the block from Key Largo Fisheries. Last week, a lone lobster boat, Hanna Katherine, arrived with something to sell. Stepping off the deck, John Greco said he had already taken out about a third of his 2,600 traps, but figured he could earn some extra money since most everyone else had given up for the season. "It sucks that the price dropped," he said, as a couple of lobsters scrambled out of the bright blue crates that had been hoisted onto the dock. "But if you don't go out, you don't make anything." Mr. Greco, 34, and his brother have been trapping lobsters since high school. That morning they had motored out at 5:30, pulling up and emptying about 250 traps throughout the day. Inside the fishery, a half dozen cutters in white rubber boots and thick gloves wielded long fillet knives, quickly dissevering tubs of yellowtail. Heads went in one plastic lined cardboard box; skeletons that could be used for chum in another. Nearby, a purple tub was crowded with bonito, often used as bait. "It has a scent to it that fish just adore," said Rick Hill, a co owner of Key Largo Fisheries. The lobsters were weighed in batches, and then dumped into a stainless steel vat filled with ice and freshwater, a quick way to kill them. Some would probably end up in one of the fishery's enormous warehouse freezers, which are set at 20 and 30 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The final tally: 365 pounds of lobster, worth just over 2,500. "I'm not complaining," Mr. Greco said, but noted that if the Chinese market hadn't collapsed, he would have earned at least another 1,000 for the day's labor. For the U.S. commercial fishing industry, the tariff exemption is a huge relief, but because of the virus, it is still unclear how long it will take to revive trade with China. In Marathon, the season is winding down, but it reopens in August. "Next year's right around the corner for us," Mr. Wallace said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
In the midst of the pandemic, diamonds (at least newly mined ones) may have lost their luster. But in the studio of his New York apartment, John Hatleberg is betting it will soon be back. For months, he has been at work hunched over a gem faceting machine, where he is cutting and polishing a synthetic material that will be used to make an exact replica of the Hope Diamond as it existed in the 17th century. Perhaps no diamond has as much glamour as this luminous blue 45.52 carat stone, encircled by 16 white diamonds and set on display in the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (temporarily closed, but its treasure twinkles 24 7 online). Heavy in mystique as well as weight, it is replete with a history of a royal owner, theft and family curses and has long been the most popular object at the Smithsonian, where about four million visitors a year used to come gape at it. But the current Hope diamond is only the latest version of the stone. The diamond, first bought from a mine in India, was recut as the "French Blue" after King Louis XIV acquired it. Stolen during the French Revolution, it resurfaced in 1812 in London and was recut into its current style and named for its owner, Henry Philip Hope. Having completed replicas of the original stone and the Hope itself, Mr. Hatleberg has been laboring since the winter to finish the "French Blue." He strives to assure that his replicas have the exact same angles and color as their inspiration, a process that involved seven trips to Azotic LLC., a laboratory for gems and crystals in Rochester, Minn. There, experts coated and recoated the replica using a thick level of precious metals to match the lush blue of the Hope. Mr. Hatleberg is not working for some wealthy private client who wants a knockoff for travel. Instead his three replicas will appear next to the Hope at the Smithsonian. When? The art of replicating diamonds is a delicate one, and perhaps no one has worked directly with so many named stones as Mr. Hatleberg, 63, who made a replica of the 31.06 carat Wittelsbach Graff diamond for Laurence Graff, the billionaire diamond dealer, and the 273.85 carat Centenary diamond that was discovered in 1986 by DeBeers, the giant diamond company. So perfect was his copy of the Centenary that when a group of DeBeers executives were invited to compare the two, "some could not immediately tell the difference," said Rory More O'Ferrall, the manager of marketing liaison at the time. For the Okavango Diamond Company, Mr. Hatleberg recently completed a copy of the Okavango Blue, a 20.46 carat fancy deep blue diamond found in 2018 in Botswana. "We wanted a replica because we need to hold on the legacy of the stone for future generations." said Marcus ter Haar, the managing director of the Okavango Diamond Company, which is selling the original, in a telephone interview. A perfect replica is an art form that, for Mr. Hatleberg, can require months and even years of work. Though the Smithsonian has seen many replicas of the diamond, "we have had the luxury of looking at people doing that kind of work, but John is an artist with a sense of detail and perfection," said Jeffrey Post, the curator of the U.S. National Gem and Mineral Collection at the Smithsonian who hired him. "When John hands me a stone, I know he has thought about and analyzed it, and he would not hand it to me unless he thought it was perfect." For the Hope Diamond, "the difficulty was matching the color," Mr. Post said. "It is an interesting shade, not like other shades of blue. We wanted exact replicas." For the museum, the goal was "not to sell but to help tell the story of the history of diamond. Visitors see the sizes and shapes in a powerful way to give the history of the cutting of the stone. You cannot simply show a picture of a three dimensional object." Years ago, some diamonds were bought by socialites and movie stars who relished showing them off to friends and the press. The American heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean, the Hope's last private owner, often wore it in public or occasionally put it around the neck of her dog or wore it when she gardened. Richard Burton made headlines in 1969 when he bought a 68 carat diamond for Elizabeth Taylor, naming it the Taylor Burton diamond. Just after the actor bought it, Cartier, the seller, put it on display in New York where 6,000 people a day lined up to gape. But in recent years "movie stars generally don't buy them, they borrow them," said Henry Barguirdjian, a former chief executive of Graff USA and managing partner of Arcot, a gem investment firm, in an interview shortly before he died in October. And he added, "In America there are people who love to buy precious stones, but they are usually business people and completely anonymous. In Asia they buy the way Americans used to buy: for status symbols." In 2015, Joseph Lau, a businessman in Hong Kong, set a record of 48.4 million buying a 12.03 carat diamond at Sotheby's called "Blue Moon of Josephine" for his 7 year old daughter just after buying a 16.08 carat pink diamond, "Sweet Josephine," for 28.5 million from Christie's. The Hope, often cited as a metaphor for ne plus ultra, is unusual in that it has been on view for over 60 years. (To be sure, both the French and British crown jewels, on public display, include extraordinary diamonds: among them those cut from the 3,106 carat Cullinan, found in South Africa in 1905, and the 105.6 carat Koh i Noor, found in India.) After its disappearance in 1792 and reappearance in London it was sold and resold until it ended up with Ms. McLean when her husband, a publishing scion, bought it in 1911. Wealthy, yes, but ill fated. Her eldest son died in a car accident and her daughter from a drug overdose. At her death, Harry Winston bought her entire jewelry collection and in 1958 gave the Hope to the museum. In reproducing it for the public, Mr. Post sought a sense of what the diamond had looked like in each of its three iterations. Mr. Hatleberg's interest in such work started in childhood: His mother was a documentary photographer for the Smithsonian's gem collection. Growing up in Bethesda, Md., he recalled, "We all studied geology in school back then. People brought in crystals, agates and everything. I was nuts about gems, so my mother found a center for retirees at a community recreation center where there was a course in gem cutting. I loved it." After getting a graduate degree in sculpture at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Mr. Hatleberg supported himself doing faux finishes and other types of artisan works. He first had access to the Hope diamond in 1988 when he made a mold of it that he used for chocolate copies that were, for a while, sold in the Smithsonian gift shop. Then in 2007, "I learned about a new method to color match my diamond replicas," he said. "Before that it was difficult to color match fancy colored diamonds." That connection was extremely valuable since colored stones are generally the most prized. "'Colorless' material gives you much less to worry about," said John King, a former laboratory chief quality officer at the Gemological Institute of America. "The richer colors are more valuable. But when you begin to color it and you are not satisfied with the original color, it is a much bigger problem." The process can be nerve racking, "We do multi iterations," said the president of Azotic, Steve Starcke. "It can be a little too purple or a little too blue in our initial samples. John would say, 'Can you push it a little more in this direction?'" Constructing how the Hope diamond looked in its earlier lives was a sleuthing adventure. The original Tavernier stone was reimagined from drawings of the period. The second was a mystery until 2009 when Francois Farges of the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris uncovered a long lost lead cast of the stone. Barbara Barrett, the U.S. Secretary of the Air Force who served as a Smithsonian board member, supported the project with her husband, Craig, Mr. Post said. Mr. Hatleberg is far from the only person creating copies. Many are made using colored cubic zirconia. Scott Sucher, who specializes in replicas of famous diamonds, generally relies on photographs and line drawings to create his works, though there have been some exceptions. For the Koh i Noor, the Natural History Museum in London lent him a plaster model of the historical version of the diamond. He then had it laser scanned in Antwerp, Belgium, and used that data as a guide for cutting. For a Discovery Channel program, Mr. Sucher had access to the original and created a replica using colored zirconia. As part of the arrangement, the Discovery Channel gave it to the museum although it is not on display. In a telephone interview, Mr. Sucher said copies of his work are in numerous museums. Of course, many of those are now closed. Meanwhile, the progress of Mr. Hatleberg, who only makes molds from the original stone and finds cutting almost as daunting as getting the color right, has been slowed by travel restrictions. When he made his 1992 replica of the Centenary, "I went back and forth to London every two months for over a year," he recalled. "It was extremely difficult because of the design of the facets. The whole top of the diamond was cut with angles that are less than 15 degrees. That meant the differential in the angles was tiny and hard to control." To get an idea of how difficult the original cutting was, DeBeers set up a special underground room in Johannesburg for a team led by Gabi Tolkowsky, the renowned diamond cutter, so as to preclude any technical factor that might interfere with the cutting. "Vibration is problematic, and the city is given to tremors, in part because of the gold mining that has taken place there," Mr. More O'Ferrall said. For most people, the isolation of the pandemic may have made work difficult. But aside from not being able to travel, or deliver the finished "French Blue," for Mr. Hatleberg this may be the ultimate quarantine project. Even after making copies of dozens of major stones, the work has not lost its appeal. From the first, he said, he found the gems: "rare, valuable and beautiful. They completely intrigued me." A diamond is forever, in other words and lockdown is only temporary. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Sydney Ember, who covers politics for The New York Times, reporting from Lancaster, Calif. Her travels and dependence on Google Maps put a strain on her cellphone's battery. How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Sydney Ember, a politics reporter for The Times, discussed the tech she's using. You now cover politics after writing about media for years. What tech do you use to follow politics, and what tech do you take with you on the campaign trail? Covering politics is totally different from covering the media. I no longer get to talk to other journalists all the time. But on the upside, I've gotten to leave my media bubble. And I get to travel a lot more. There are some really good websites that I'm always checking to see information about elections that are coming up, and how analysts are weighting certain districts. I read The Cook Political Report to see which way House districts are leaning. I also really like a website that looks as if it's straight out of the late 1990s: The Green Papers. It is really easy to navigate and has extremely comprehensive information on every race across the country. When I'm out on the trail reporting, I'm actually pretty low tech. I use a backpack so I can keep my hands free. I carry around a lot of reporting notebooks and pens. I have a small Olympus recorder that I got years ago. It has a USB that connects to my computer, but it's so old that my computer can no longer play the recordings I transfer over. It seems to have something to do with the format of the recordings, but it's still something of a mystery to me even after copious Googling. I also record a lot of videos on my phone so I can remember what the atmosphere was like at a campaign event, for example, or how candidates looked interacting with voters. Drives on the trail can get long. I recently drove from Kansas City to Wichita, Kan., and back, then went on to St. Louis, a journey of roughly 700 miles over three days. Most cars these days seem to have a USB port, so I make sure to plug in my phone as soon as I start driving. I rely on the Google Maps app for directions and would never be able to find my way to the right place without it. That's all to say I spend a majority of my time on the road thinking about how to make sure my phone stays charged. I have a pink Mophie external battery in case the situation gets dire. How has tech changed the way politicians are campaigning for the midterms? Politicians are using technology much more to speak directly to the people. They are increasingly streaming rallies and conversations online. At campaign events, there always seems to be someone Facebook Living speeches. Representative Beto O'Rourke, a Democrat running against Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, is streaming his campaign live on Facebook. A number of politicians, like Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a Democrat, have started podcasts. And more politicians, particularly the group of insurgent progressives taking on the establishment this year, are not afraid to express themselves on social media in more personal ways. The goal of this direct to voter messaging seems twofold: They can more easily shape their narratives and appear more human while also bypassing difficult questions from the media. While candidates are definitely still buying television ads, there also seems to be an emphasis on digital ads this year. Some candidates, particularly first time Democratic candidates like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez in New York, are using online videos to share biographical information and personal details that are inspiring voters who often feel underrepresented in Washington. The Los Angeles Times had a good article this summer about how these videos, some of which have gone viral, are reshaping campaigns. What's the deal with those pesky robo texts? If you haven't received any of these robo texts yet, count yourself lucky. As my colleague Kevin Roose wrote in a recent article, both political parties are sending out text messages, often personalized, using mass texting apps that allow them to send hundreds of texts a day without breaking anti spam laws. If you, like me, don't enjoy when your phone buzzes with unsolicited text messages, there are a few things you can try. Per a handy guide The Times published, you can forward the text message to SPAM (7726). On iPhones, you can also report some text messages as spam by clicking on the Report Junk link that shows up under texts from unknown numbers. You could also try just texting back the word STOP. If anything, it might make you feel better. Does switching beats change how you use technology to report? When I covered the media, I spent every waking hour on Twitter. (That's at least how my husband felt.) If media news broke, I wanted to make sure I didn't miss it. Now, I try not to spend all day looking at Twitter it seems less necessary and check in only every few hours. This sometimes feels more like an aspiration. But I'm trying. I actually feel it's easier to get people to talk on the politics beat than it was when I covered the media. Believe it or not, it's hard trying to get other journalists to say things on the record! On both beats, though, I find that picking up the phone and calling people is often the best way to get them talking. You've covered the rise and fall of many print media empires in the digital age. For the ones that are succeeding, what do you think they are doing well? Companies that are doing well have figured out a good pay wall to make up for losses in digital advertising and print subscriptions. The cost has to be low enough that readers can justify it, but high enough that it helps support the journalism the companies want to offer. In the end, though, the companies that are succeeding are consistently producing great, unique stories that can't be found anywhere else. Readers will pay for good journalism. Outside your work, what tech product do you use a ton? As unoriginal as it sounds, I really love my Apple Watch. I'm a big runner, and I originally got it because I wanted to use it as a running watch. But I've found other reasons to love it. In a weird way, it gives me some freedom from my phone. Before I had it, I'd pick up my phone for every email, text or alert, then get sucked into the vortex of social media. I could lose hours this way. Now, because I can look at my watch to see what's going on, I can leave my phone alone, sometimes even in another room, knowing I still won't miss anything important. I also really like that I can read and send text messages from it. When I'm stuck on long drives on the trail, I can glance at my wrist to see a text, then respond simply by saying something out loud. It doesn't transcribe perfectly, but it works when I can't look at my phone. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The Yankees ended their pandemic shortened season with a 5 0 loss to the Miami Marlins in the Bronx, but the result wasn't nearly as meaningful as three other matters that were resolved on Sunday. Most important, the Yankees found out where they were flying on Sunday night for the first round of the playoffs: Cleveland. The other two issues involved personal accolades for Yankees stalwarts that carried the team through its many seesaws this year: Infielder D.J. LeMahieu won the American League batting title with a major league leading .364 average, becoming the first person to claim undisputed batting titles in both leagues. And first baseman Luke Voit won the home run title, finishing with a major league best 22. "The goal is to keep it going in the playoffs," Voit said. To that point, Voit and the Yankees (33 27) learned on Sunday evening that they would be facing the fourth seeded Indians (35 25) in the best of three playoff round added for this unique season. Game 1 on Tuesday will be a matchup of two of the best pitchers in baseball: The Yankees' Gerrit Cole (2.84 earned run average) and Cleveland's Shane Bieber, the presumptive A.L. Cy Young Award winner who led the majors in wins (eight), E.R.A. (1.63) and strikeouts (122). None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. By dropping six of their final eight regular season games, the Yankees lost their chance to host the first round at Yankee Stadium, where they were 22 9 this season. The Yankees did avoid dropping to the A.L.'s eighth seed, which would have pitted them against the top seeded Tampa Bay Rays, when the Toronto Blue Jays lost their regular season finale to the Baltimore Orioles. Instead, the Blue Jays will get that honor, while the Yankees secured the fifth seed. Because this year's regular season schedule featured only regional play, the Yankees and the Indians, an A.L. Central team, did not play each other as they usually would have. The last time the two teams faced off in October was in a 2017 A.L. division series, when the Yankees prevailed, 5 2, in a winner take all Game 5. So much has changed with both teams since then: Yankees Manager Aaron Boone was an ESPN broadcaster; Gio Urshela, now a Yankees standout, was on Cleveland's roster as a light hitting, defensive minded third baseman; Cole was a Pittsburgh Pirate and LeMahieu was with the Colorado Rockies. "I'm honestly not really concerned who we're playing or where we're going," LeMahieu said after Sunday's game. "I have a lot of confidence in us. If we're playing the way we should be, it shouldn't matter who we're playing." The Yankees, though, haven't played the way they should of late. This season, they looked like a juggernaut in some stretches but like a car with a few flat tires in others. In the final week, they looked more like the latter, with sound defense and trademark power largely absent. "We have the best team in the league still," the normally soft spoken LeMahieu, 32, said. "We're definitely the most talented. I don't know why it was so up and down. I'll chalk it up to 2020, and I know in the playoffs we're going to be extremely focused and ready to go." The Yankees will need LeMahieu to be just that against the Indians, who finished the season with the best E.R.A. (3.29) in the A.L. Last year, he hit .325 during the Yankees' playoff run, which ended two wins away from the World Series. During his two seasons with the Yankees, LeMahieu has been perhaps their most irreplaceable player because of his defense, versatility and hitting. On Sunday, he became the first Yankee to win a batting title since Bernie Williams in 1998. LeMahieu won the National League batting title with the Rockies by hitting .348 in 2016. There is some debate over whether LeMahieu is the first or second to claim batting titles in each league. The Elias Sports Bureau, the official statistician of Major League Baseball, credits Ed Delahanty as the 1899 National League batting champion for his .410 average with the Philadelphia Phillies and the American League winner in 1902 for his .376 mark with the Washington Senators. But some researchers consider Nap Lajoie as the 1902 winner with a .378 average because of a different standard at the time regarding at bats needed to qualify for the award. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
SO far, the closest encounter that Kevin Spacey has had with the Baltimore Orioles was during the second season of the Netflix series "House of Cards," when his character, Frank Underwood, worried about throwing out the first pitch at an Orioles game. Mr. Underwood, the vice president of the United States, feared embarrassing himself in front of tens of thousands of fans. From his throwing motion in the episode, his fear was well founded: Frank Underwood can't throw a baseball much better than an 8 year old. Mr. Spacey insisted in a recent interview that this was merely acting, not a reflection on his own ability. "What people don't understand is I can throw a baseball, but I didn't want it to look like Frank Underwood could throw a baseball," Mr. Spacey said. "Politicians can never throw out a baseball." Later this month, Mr. Spacey will have a different encounter with the Orioles. He will be teaming up for a fund raising gala with Cal Ripken Jr., the Hall of Fame shortstop who in his 21 seasons with the Orioles broke Lou Gehrig's record for most consecutive games played. The plan is for the Kevin Spacey Foundation, which aims to helps at risk children through theater and film, and the Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation, which aims to do the same through sports, to share the proceeds and expand their reach. The combination of two widely revered figures from two arenas may seem a perfect matchup for any event. But philanthropic advisers said the two foundations would be better off worrying about the gala ending up a meaningful success. "Rarely do people come together for fund raising," said Judy Levine, executive director of Cause Effective, an organization that helps nonprofit groups in New York City raise money and govern themselves better. "I've never heard a group on the other end of it say, 'Wow, that was a good idea. I'm going to do it again.' " Steve Salem, executive director of the Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation, says, "It's very competitive to raise money, so how do you separate yourself from some of the other organizations? Who can say, come have dinner with Cal and Kevin Spacey?" As for the foundation goals, Mr. Salem added: "We're trying to partner with people who care about these kids. The Kevin Spacey Foundation does exactly what we do, except that they use the arts." What the two foundations are trying to do with a fancy gala has relevance beyond their own event. The outcome of their effort has resonance with people wealthy enough to start their own 501(c)3 charitable organization and, more broadly, with people who serve on nonprofit boards and the many more people who attend galas and give their money and time to a cause. With the fall fund raising season about to begin, every gala is looking to distinguish itself by raising more money as well as expanding its donor base. A joint appearance by a sporting legend and acting great seems to be one way to do that. But philanthropic advisers, steeped in the fickle ways and short memories of donors, say there isn't a great track record of foundations working together. One reason is a belief that each foundation has its own niche or approach to a problem. "The idea behind philanthropy is you'll have multiple approaches to dealing with problems," said Leslie Lenkowsky, professor of philanthropy at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. "It makes collaboration, even if it's rational, more difficult." There is a history of collaboration among foundations that make grants to organizations in support of a specific cause. Mr. Lenkowsky pointed to work in the early 20th century by the Carnegie, Rockefeller and Rosenwald foundations to improve education in the South. He said grant making foundations were more likely to team up to give money to a certain cause, not least of all because it was easier to share credit for giving money than to share responsibility for operating a program. Private foundations are a little different. While the emphasis on legacy is no less important it may be even more important for private foundations they also don't have the same resources as public charities. Collaborating on a shared issue could be beneficial to private foundations, if they find a way to do so without conflicting with each other's mission. Ronna Brown, president of Philanthropy New York, an organization that connects people, institutions and resources, said 15 foundations recently came together to do research on public school education. They provided this information on the state of education in New York City to Mayor Bill de Blasio. "The 15 had very different philosophies about public education," she said. "We were looking at what is successful and what needs improvement." For Mr. Ripken and Mr. Spacey, the common bonds are children and the city of Baltimore, where "House of Cards" is filmed. "A lot of people just focus on what they're doing," Mr. Ripken said. "You can accomplish a whole a lot more if you have a partnering view. If the goal is to help kids, we can do that effectively by partnering." "That might be different from a lot of foundations," he added. "They want to keep their funding and success and contacts to themselves. We don't believe in that." Mr. Ripken's foundation is considerably larger than Mr. Spacey's, with an annual budget of about 24 million compared with about 1 million. Steve Winter, the executive director of the Kevin Spacey Foundation, said the Ripken Foundation had already helped it locate a school in Baltimore for one of its programs. Jenny Santi, a philanthropy adviser and author of "The Giving Way to Happiness: Stories and Science Behind the Life Changing Power of Giving," said one big impediment to foundations working together isn't finding a shared mission there are many foundations that do similar work but managing egos. "If you think of the scale of issues, they're huge and intractable," she said. "Collaboration in principle is very important and integral to the work of foundations." But, she said, most people who set up foundations, either private or public, want some sort of recognition for the work they do, or at least a measurement of their legacy. Otherwise, they could give anonymously. Ms. Santi says that ideological collaboration works the best. One way to achieve this is to hold an event that brings together diverse foundations to learn how each one operates its programs or manages its operations. These are events, she said, that "lay the groundwork for the pursuit of ideas." Collaboration gets more difficult when sharing insight into the actual workings of a foundation the strategic, programmatic and financial operation Ms. Santi says. One way programmatic sharing has worked is when wealthy people like Bill Gates work with famous people like the rock star Bono to accomplish a goal. And that could very well work with what Mr. Spacey and Mr. Ripken are doing. "The reasons for not collaborating are many," Ms. Santi said. "Collaboration takes more work. In the long run, it can be smoother. In the short run, it can be a hassle." At this point, the Spacey and Ripken foundations plan to split the money raised. But Ms. Levine says the real benefit from a gala will not be the money raised but the connection to donors who will have spent an evening hearing only about the foundations' mission. "One of the key things is the event needs to leave donors focused on your cause so they really want to know more," she said. "You want to avoid an event that leaves attendees with an unclear or mixed message. You don't want them to go home and say, 'That was a great event, it had something to do with kids.' " If this collaboration between an athlete and an actor works, it will be due in no small part to the willingness of the foundations and their famous founders to set aside their egos. Both men seem to be approaching the joint gala with a sense of humor. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Charline von Heyl's "Slow Tramp," from 2012, in the exhibition "Snake Eyes" at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington.Credit...Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times These Paintings Have a Digital Life. (You Can Also Go See Them Now.) Update: This survey, which had been scheduled to close Jan. 27, has been extended through April 21. Because of the government shutdown, the exhibition was closed for most of the month of January. WASHINGTON A very strong exhibition of contemporary painting is up right now in the nation's capital, but I can't tell you to go see it. Not because Charline von Heyl, the German born New Yorker with a fearless approach to composition and style, doesn't deserve your attention. I can't recommend it because Ms. von Heyl's paintings are at the Hirshhorn Museum, which along with nearly 20 other Smithsonian institutions has been closed since the new year, a casualty of the government shutdown. "Charline von Heyl: Snake Eyes" opened in November, and I caught it just after Christmas, during the first days of the shutdown, when the stifled Smithsonian was relying on savings to keep the doors open through the holidays. Chances to see it are narrowing: The Hirshhorn is the only American stop for this show, which opened in Hamburg last year, and the museum has no plans to extend its run past the Jan. 27 closing date. So I've been thinking about what it means not to be able to see Ms. von Heyl's paintings in person. I've been re examining her art on my phone and on my bookshelf; I've watched walk throughs of the show on YouTube and scrolled thousands of images visitors have posted to Instagram. What's clear is that, unlike the other major exhibitions you also cannot see in Washington because of the shutdown the luscious chiaroscuro prints at the National Gallery of Art or the dynamic paintings of Bill Traylor at the American Art Museum the "Snake Eyes" paintings bleed out of the gallery, into digital space. Looking at a painting and looking at a digital image are hardly two discrete experiences anymore, especially for younger audiences. Being denied the chance to see Ms. von Heyl's paintings in person can, if nothing else, clarify the bifocal strategies art like this demands of us and the ways painting can bridge the gallery and the screen. Cunning, witty, dandyish at times, proudly kitsch at others, Ms. von Heyl's paintings scamper over any distinction between "pure" abstract and figurative painting. They make use of graphical motifs such as stripes, grids, zigzags and squiggles, and luxuriate in a palette of warm colors: a muffled lavender, a lemon chiffon yellow and a cherry blossom pink that all, at times, get mucked up with gray. Winding S curves, jagged star bursts, and stammering dots and dashes weave among more identifiable forms, from wine bottles to a woman's face. And almost all of her recent paintings allow different kinds of mark making hard and soft, crisp and hazy to intermesh in ways that trick, and thrill, visitors' screen conditioned eyes. In "Dunesday" (2016), for instance, an impetuous curve divides the canvas between hard edge, black and white zigzags at the top, and an inky, gashed field of saffron yellow at the bottom. Four outlines of bowling pins, and a fifth more like a toilet plunger, frame hot colored patterns that interrupt the saffron half. Yet despite the work's complex composition, all these elements seem to occupy the same flat plane. The same holds true in "Mana Hatta" (2018) , which blends rings, squiggles, polka dots and outlined bunny rabbits into what appears to be a figure in profile. The compositional elements bristle against one another, and still they somehow settle into a pancake flat harmony. These are far from the methods of Cubist collages, which made a virtue of their elements' disjunction, or of New York School abstraction, which emphasized the gestural production of painterly marks. Instead Ms. von Heyl layers, blurs, masks and copies, soldering together parts into a single, solid image whose genesis is never quite clear. As Mark Godfrey and Andrianna Campbell have written, these painterly techniques are familiar from Photoshop, InDesign and other desktop publishing applications, whose users stack and transform layers to produce a document or a JPG. That's what makes "Dunesday" and "Mana Hatta" so bewitching in the gallery: the back and forth between the means of composition and the resultant image, between the three dimensional object on the wall and the two dimensional impression it gives. They're conversant with digital imagery, but they insist on the value of the handmade. (Unlike Albert Oehlen, a key influence for Ms. von Heyl, she does not use computers to make her paintings.) And their layers resolve into images that would flummox earlier generations of abstract painters, but that we, as offspring of the screen, can dive into. Her paintings are therefore relatively easy to photograph, and this week I have been looking at both printed and digital images of her work, curious as to what disappears and what survives. Most of the visual tricks she employs get blurred, as when she uses masking tape to produce seemingly impossible tangles of lines. Scale drops out, too. Ms. von Heyl's paintings are usually between six and seven feet tall, and in person they fill your eyes and badger your body. Even a pinch to zoom gesture on your phone's touch screen can't capture that physical experience. Yet online images of Ms. von Heyl's layered, digitally informed paintings aren't fated to be mere shades of the "real thing." The paintings on Instagram have their own lives, parallel to their lives in the gallery. Like Tomma Abts, who also works in intuitive, unplanned ways, Ms. von Heyl makes paintings whose graphic cohesiveness is something of a deception and that effect is heightened on a phone's OLED display, which turns the image into something close to an icon. In the gallery, the pleasure of her paintings comes over time, as you look closely, unwind their parts, discover their inner workings. The pleasure online comes as the analog painting gets translated into something new, and disrupts our naive expectations of accurate transmission. A similar kind of second, digital appearance arises from the paintings of Laura Owens and Keltie Ferris, whose mark making is more visibly pastiched, like browser windows on your overloaded desktop. Other digitally conversant painters prefer to jam up the logic of camera phones; these include Cheyney Thompson, R.H. Quaytman and especially Jacqueline Humphries, whose glitchy, iridescent canvases, some featuring stenciled emoticons, turn woozy and reflective when photographed. None of this is to say that social media offers a substitute experience to seeing these paintings in person. Nor is it to say that surfaces do not matter. It is to say that, for many ambitious artists today, abstract painting springs from the ubiquity of digital imagery as well as from the history of art. These artists acknowledge that we look with compound eyes and accept that a predigital painterly Eden will not come again. The art historian David Joselit once called contemporary painting "a broadcast medium." Now everyone with a phone is both transmitter and receiver. We toggle between object looking and screen looking at every moment, and the camera app conditions our memories even when our phones stay in our pockets. Paintings like Ms. von Heyl's are especially valuable today, much more than your latest VR flimflam, for the way they solidify the immaterial flows of the image stream, and reveal to us how utterly our screens have changed our eyes and brains. It's good to remember that an old medium can do new things, though I hardly think we needed a governmental crisis to impart the lesson. Through April 21 at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington; 202 633 1000, hirshhorn.si.edu. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Writing about the choreographer Beth Gill, critics have often described her work as "meticulous." Every choice the placement of an arm, the manner of taking off a sweater seems exactingly considered. That might be why, so often, her dances unfurl with a sense of inevitability; she has tuned in to what has to happen next. Her latest, "Pitkin Grove," which had its premiere as part of the Joyce Theater's "NY Quadrille" series on Thursday, is no exception. But in recent years, Ms. Gill has applied her discerning eye to increasingly dark, chaotic, psychologically tangled worlds. Drifting away from the bright austerity of her Bessie Award winning "Electric Midwife" (2011), she has arrived at dances populated by shadows of characters and stories, at once more human and more surreal. While her focus on form persists, precise as ever, she has carved out more space for feeling to creep in, or blast through. In the riveting "Pitkin Grove," despair rips at the seams. With her set and costume designer Baille Younkman, Ms. Gill has blanketed the signature "Quadrille" stage a platform in the center of the theater that allows for viewing from four sides with squares of artificial turf. Beneath the green expanse lie mysterious bulky mounds, their consistencies revealed as the dancer Kevin Boateng, roaming alone onstage, cautiously touches, steps and reclines on them. One is squishy, another solid. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
XI'AN, China For years, many of China's best and brightest left for the United States, where high tech industry was more cutting edge. But Mark R. Pinto is moving in the opposite direction. Mr. Pinto is the first chief technology officer of a major American tech company to move to China. The company, Applied Materials, is one of Silicon Valley's most prominent firms. It supplied equipment used to perfect the first computer chips. Today, it is the world's biggest supplier of the equipment used to make semiconductors, solar panels and flat panel displays. In addition to moving Mr. Pinto and his family to Beijing in January, Applied Materials, whose headquarters are in Santa Clara, Calif., has just built its newest and largest research labs here. Last week, it even held its annual shareholders' meeting in Xi'an. It is hardly alone. Companies and their engineers are being drawn here more and more as China develops a high tech economy that increasingly competes directly with the United States. A few American companies are even making deals with Chinese companies to license Chinese technology. The Chinese market is surging for electricity, cars and much more, and companies are concluding that their researchers need to be close to factories and consumers alike. Applied Materials set up its latest solar research labs here after estimating that China would be producing two thirds of the world's solar panels by the end of this year. "We're obviously not giving up on the U.S.," Mr. Pinto said. "China needs more electricity. It's as simple as that." China has become the world's largest auto market, and General Motors has a large and growing auto research center in Shanghai. The country is also the biggest market for desktop computers and has the most Internet users. Intel has opened research labs in Beijing for semiconductors and server networks. Not just drawn by China's markets, Western companies are also attracted to China's huge reservoirs of cheap, highly skilled engineers and the subsidies offered by many Chinese cities and regions, particularly for green energy companies. Now, Mr. Pinto said, researchers from the United States and Europe have to be ready to move to China if they want to do cutting edge work on solar manufacturing because the new Applied Materials complex here is the only research center that can fit an entire solar panel assembly line. "If you really want to have an impact on this field, this is just such a tremendous laboratory," he said. Xi'an a city about 600 miles southwest of Beijing known for the discovery nearby of 2,200 year old terra cotta warriors has 47 universities and other institutions of higher learning, churning out engineers with master's degrees who can be hired for 730 a month. On the other side of Xi'an from Applied Materials sits Thermal Power Research Institute, China's world leading laboratory on cleaner coal. The company has just licensed its latest design to Future Fuels in the United States. Future Fuels will ship the equipment to Pennsylvania and have Chinese engineers teach American workers how to assemble and operate it. Small clean energy companies are headed to China, too. NatCore Technology of Red Bank, N.J., recently discovered a way to make solar panels much thinner, reducing the energy and toxic materials required to manufacture them. American companies did not even come look at the technology, so NatCore reached a deal with a consortium of Chinese companies to finish developing its invention and mass produce it in Changsha, China. "These other countries China, Taiwan, Brazil were all over us," said Chuck Provini, the company's chief executive. President Obama has often spoken about creating clean energy jobs in the United States. But China has shown the political will to do so, said Mr. Pinto, 49, who is also Applied Materials' executive vice president for solar systems and flat panel displays. Locally, the Xi'an city government sold a 75 year land lease to Applied Materials at a deep discount and is reimbursing the company for roughly a quarter of the lab complex's operating costs for five years, said Gang Zou, the site's general manager. The two labs, the first of their kind anywhere in the world, are each bigger than two American football fields. Applied Materials continues to develop the electronic guts of its complex machines at laboratories in the United States and Europe. But putting all the machines together and figuring out processes to make them work in unison will be done in Xi'an. The two labs, one on top of the other, will become operational once they are fully outfitted late this year. Applied Materials has built a 360 employee operation here in Xi'an after announcing an 18 month program last year to reduce employment by 10 to 12 percent, or 1,300 to 1,500 jobs, including layoffs in the United States and Europe. Mr. Pinto said that the company was readjusting its work force as manufacturing shifted to Asia, but that the Xi'an facility involved a new approach to researching the design of an entire assembly line and was not replacing laboratories elsewhere. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
TAIPEI, Taiwan Populism was supposed to be the winning formula. With the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (D.P.P.) steadily campaigning on growing anxiety over threats to Taiwan's national identity, the Kuomintang, a party that favors close ties to China, risked being consigned to playing permanent opposition. Populism seemed to offer it a way out. It was populist promises, after all, that had helped Han Kuo yu, of the Kuomintang, triumph in local elections in late 2018. Yet the same playbook failed him and his party miserably in the general elections this weekend. Not only was Mr. Han unable to woo new voters; he couldn't even hold on to many traditional Kuomintang sympathizers. President Tsai Ing wen was re elected with 57.1 percent of the popular vote; the D.P.P. won 61 of the 113 seats in the national Legislature. The D.P.P.'s victory is partly the result, as many analysts had predicted, of its successful efforts to drag the election back onto the conventional battleground of sovereignty and identity. Ms. Tsai invoked often the protests in Hong Kong to remind voters of the threat that China poses. Yet the D.P.P. election stands for more than a rejection of the Kuomintang's cozying up to China; it was also a repudiation of Mr. Han's populist discourse. Mr. Han's stump speeches were full of such themes. He claimed to know the people and represent them against a craven elite. Taiwan had once burst with vitality and prosperity, he said, but now it was stagnating because the Tsai administration had put its interests above those of the population. At a rally in early December, Mr. Han denounced "a small cabal" at the helm of the D.P.P. "They feast and feast," he railed. "The factions divide the spoils among themselves." "These people," he added, "eat the flesh and drink the blood of Taiwanese people. Now, after three and a half years, all of Taiwan is sick." Mr. Han spoke relentlessly about his connection with the real people, the "shumin." He claimed that the "shumin" lead bitter existences, that all they want is to have "good daily lives" and that this could be ensured by entertaining close relations to China the quickest way to create jobs, markets and other economic opportunities. When Mr. Han ran for mayor in the southern city of Kaohsiung in 2018, the D.P.P. attacked him as unfamiliar with policy and claimed that his proposals for creating jobs were unrealistic. But those technocratic arguments fell flat against Mr. Han's grand commitment to stand with the people. And Taiwan's sovereignty seemed a distant worry from the usual concerns of voters in local elections. Mr. Han's shocking victory then, and in a city traditionally hostile to the Kuomintang, jolted the D.P.P. leadership. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Here's Johnny Carson's Personal Papers, and How You Can See Them None Johnny Carson hosted "The Tonight Show" for 30 years. Two museums plan to create and expand on exhibitions celebrating his life. It's been nearly 30 years since Johnny Carson stepped off the stage of "The Tonight Show" for the last time and bid farewell to a singularly innovative television career. Now, two museums are preparing to keep his legacy alive and make his work available to future generations. On Friday which would have been Carson's 95th birthday the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, N.Y., and the Elkhorn Valley Museum in Norfolk, Neb., will announce plans to preserve a trove of Carson's personal materials and to create and expand on exhibitions celebrating his life. From 1962 to 1992, Carson hosted "The Tonight Show" on NBC, where he established himself as a pioneer of late night television, helping to create countless influential comedy segments and provide rising stars with national exposure. He died in 2005 at the age of 79. Over the years Carson created many memorable characters on "The Tonight Show," including Art Fern. During that time, Carson amassed a collection of papers, as well as awards, videos, clothing, costumes and other artifacts. Jeff Sotzing, who is president of the Carson Entertainment Group, said that the host gave some of these items to the Elkhorn Valley Museum, near the Nebraska city where Carson grew up. "When Johnny left NBC, he received a letter asking if he had anything he wanted to donate," said Sotzing, who is Carson's nephew and a former "Tonight Show" producer. "He said to me, as he was sitting in front of all of his Emmys, his Presidential Medal of Freedom and signed autographs and pictures from other celebrities, 'Just give 'em all of this give 'em everything,'" Sotzing recalled. After Carson's death, his widow gave Sotzing other materials, he said, including documents and notes on Carson's comedy routines. One set of pages contained his comments on a 1973 "Tonight Show" monologue. "He was provided with a number of jokes, and he then circled the ones that he liked best, underlined the words that he wanted on cue cards and created the order," Sotzing said. "You can see his whole process of how it was put together. It's an art form." He added: "There's lots of papers that we haven't sorted through yet." Monologue jokes from May 18, 1973, handwritten by Carson. Among Carson's papers: A list of jokes for Jack Benny. The National Comedy Center, which has provided a home for the possessions and archives of other comedians, said that it will lead the conservation and digital preservation of this collection. It will also share artifacts and digital assets with the Elkhorn Valley Museum. Additionally, the National Comedy Center will create a new multimedia exhibition honoring Carson's tenure at "The Tonight Show," called "30 Years of Late Night Television, 30 Years Later." This exhibition, planned to open in 2022, will spotlight many items from the Carson collection (including some of his personally annotated "Tonight Show" monologues) and characters like Carnac the Magnificent, Art Fern and Floyd R. Turbo, as well as the breakthrough performances of other comedians who got their starts on his program. "We need to ensure that the story of Johnny Carson is told in a way that's commensurate with his impact on our culture," said Journey Gunderson, the executive director of the National Comedy Center. "He was a great example of the role that comedy plays in our lives, as something that is cathartic, soothing and keeps us sane on a day to day basis." The Elkhorn Valley Museum is planning to expand its Johnny Carson Gallery, adding new items and interactive displays that trace the story of the host's life and career. The updated gallery is expected to open by early next year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
A 1956 painting by Jacob Lawrence that was believed to be missing for 60 years, from the "Struggle" series, depicts an uprising of American farmers in Massachusetts. It will go on public view Thursday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan Museum's celebrated exhibition "Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle" has drawn many visitors, but recently one of them had a revelation: She suspected that one of five panels missing from the artist's original series of 30 re examining the nation's early history had been hanging in her neighbors' Upper West Side apartment for decades. She returned home and encouraged them to contact the museum. The neighbors had purchased the small painting by the renowned Black artist for a very modest sum at a friend's Christmas charity art auction in 1960, to benefit a music school. They are an elderly couple and asked the Met and The New York Times that they not be identified to protect their privacy. They are not art collectors; they had only become aware that their painting of confrontation between soldiers and farmers in Revolutionary War times might possibly be part of a larger series when they read stories about the Lawrence exhibition premiering earlier this year at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., and the curators' efforts to locate the lost works. Last week, the couple finally contacted an art adviser to help them navigate the Met, one of the country's largest museums. On Wednesday, their painting Lawrence's Panel 16 from his series "Struggle: From the History of the American People" was hung at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reunited with the rest of the known works for the remaining two weeks of the exhibition, through Nov. 1. On view starting Thursday, it will travel on loan to venues in Birmingham, Seattle and Washington, D.C., through next fall. "The painting has been hanging in my living room for 60 years untouched," one of the painting's owners said, adding that she bought it with her husband when she was 27. She said the pair had initially put off contacting the Peabody Essex Museum early in the year because they were traveling to Florida. A child of immigrants, the owner said she grew up in the South Bronx and studied Latin and art appreciation her daughter and granddaughter are both artists. She said she has always loved Lawrence's work and is happy to share it. "Last week a friend of mine went to the show and said, 'There's a blank spot on the wall and I believe that's where your painting belongs,' " she continued. "I felt I owed it both to the artist and the Met to allow them to show the painting." The Met's director, Max Hollein, said in a statement, "It is rare to make a discovery of this significance in modern art, and it is thrilling that a local visitor is responsible." Randall Griffey, the co curator of the Met's presentation (with Sylvia Yount), said in an interview Tuesday that he learned of the panel's existence just last week, when he was copied on a long email chain. "Given that this body of work was now just across the park from the owners, at the Met, that's what tipped the balance for them to figure out a way to reach out," Mr. Griffey said. Any curator would be suspicious at the outset of the work's authenticity, Mr. Griffey said, but the images he was sent were immediately compelling. The work was signed and dated 1956, the year Lawrence completed the series. The subject, Shays' Rebellion, also lined up historically to the missing Panel 16 in the cycle, for which no photograph exists only the title given it by Lawrence from a letter by George Washington referencing the lead up to the rebellion in Massachusetts: "There are combustibles in every State, which a spark might set fire to. Washington, 26 December 1786." "It's a group of blue coats new American officials in an obvious confrontation with hardscrabble farmers, which is what the Shays' Rebellion is about," said Mr. Griffey, adding that the angular, Cubist composition and palette with earthen skin tones are the hallmarks of the series. The Met's modern paintings conservator, Isabelle Duvernois, who has worked intimately with Lawrence's works in the exhibition, paid a visit to the couple's apartment to give her own appraisal and guarantee that the painting was in condition for exhibition and travel. It was. "If it had lived with smokers for the last 60 years, we wouldn't have been able to show it without cleaning," Mr. Griffey said. Drawing out missing works is what the exhibition's organizing curators Austen Barron Bailly, formerly at the Peabody Essex and now chief curator of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., and Elizabeth Hutton Turner, a professor at the University of Virginia had hoped would happen as they worked to reconstitute the dispersed series through many years of research. It is the only one of Lawrence's 10 series not preserved intact in public collections, which is partly why "Struggle" has been little known until now. In the late 1950s, the artist's dealer, Charles Alan, showed "Struggle" twice at his gallery and approached multiple museums about acquisition with no takers. It was the era of the McCarthy hearings, and Ms. Bailly, the curator, suggested that the incendiary politics of the time "played a role in the reception of this project." The series then was sold to a private collector, William Meyers, without any restrictions on keeping the panels together, which he soon began reselling piecemeal. "Early indications suggest that the first owner of the series may have offered Panel 16 to the art auction," where the current owners purchased it in 1960, Mr. Griffey said. He added that details of the provenance still need to be firmly nailed down. (According to experts, a work of art purchased at a charity auction without provenance to back it up can be a problem for acquisition or resale.) In 2000, at the publication of Lawrence's catalog raisonne, six panels from "Struggle" were still unaccounted for. Then in 2017, in the midst of exhibition research, Panel 19, titled "Tensions on the High Seas" (1956), resurfaced. It sold at Swann Auction Galleries in 2018 for 413,000 (quadruple its high estimate of 100,000) to Harvey Ross, who now owns half the series and is the largest lender to the Met exhibition. The auction high for a work by Lawrence is just over 6.1 million in 2018, for a 1947 painting, "The Businessmen." "Any new and important Jacob Lawrence that surfaces would be a candidate for selling in the seven figures," said Eric Widing, deputy chairman, Americas, at Christie's New York. Barbara Haskell, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art who often shows Lawrence's work, said the discovery of the missing panel is "really something to be celebrated," adding that it was "very exciting to begin to pull this whole landmark series together and see it as Lawrence wanted it to be seen." But the whereabouts of four works remain unknown. Could lightning strike again? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
There are some things money can't buy: for example, intimacy. Few people, rich or poor, really like to disclose their financial standing to the world which means a photographer interested in wealth and poverty needs a special gift for seduction. Whether depicting privation, as in Gordon Parks's indelible essay of a struggling Harlem family, or privilege, as in the high society portraits of Tina Barney, the most powerful images of American money rely on trust. They are mutual exchanges between lenser and lensed, although there is always a third element in the frame: the economy itself. Few photographers have reckoned with money as consistently as Lauren Greenfield, a photojournalist and director of documentaries like the housing bubble fable "The Queen of Versailles." Her subjects are socialites and cosmetic surgery patients, fashion obsessed preteens and bankrupted property flippers, child beauty queens and aging strippers. And she, too, has a gift for winning her subjects' trust, whether at a Beverly Hills high school or on a Beijing polo field. Yet where older photographers like Ms. Barney depict wealth with a certain chill, Ms. Greenfield prefers heat bold color and strong moral objection. Her exhibition "Generation Wealth," on view at the International Center of Photography on the Bowery, is a bitter, reproving tour of her 25 years exploring American and global materialism, and it's accompanied by a glistening cinder block of a publication, filled with over 500 pages of diamonds, collagen and Birkin bags. (The show initially appeared at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles; a related film is due out soon.) In a documentary about her work screened here, Ms. Greenfield wonders how America lost its "Protestant ethic" and "frugality," and she describes her photography as a "morality tale." And as a consequence "Generation Wealth" is not a show that fixates on the behaviors of the 1 percent. Ms. Greenfield is interested in money and status across the economic spectrum, and turns her camera wherever she finds a hunger for lucre and fame which, in America, is almost everywhere. She saw it first in her hometown Los Angeles in the 1990s, where she shot her early series "Fast Forward." A boy celebrating his bar mitzvah grinds on the dance floor with a half dressed go go dancer. A teenager in Calabasas sits poolside with a bandage over her face, recovering from a nose job; her coevals in South Central head to a prom in a limousine they paid for with years of savings. (Among her subjects: a 12 year old Kim Kardashian, pouting at a dance in a Bel Air middle school.) Ms. Greenfield often interviews her subjects, and long quotations alongside her glossy prints sometimes offer sociological ballast, but more often leave you aghast. "I consider myself a princess," says a sales worker in a Disney shop. Or this, from a school bus driver who travels to Brazil for a butt lift: "It was time to focus on me." Only occasionally, as in later photographs of busted housing investors, do these portraits and interviews cohere into archetypes of an economic order. More often, they come across as delusional individuals, whose shallow desires for money, youth and fame mean that their unhappiness is their own fault. Many of Ms. Greenfield's photos are meant to repel not only for what she depicts, but how. In the plastic surgery images, as well as in related photographs of beauty queens, child stars and Hollywood celebrities, she relies on bright, harsh lighting that makes skin appear waxy. She often shoots from a high angle, capturing her subjects in unattractive foreshortening. A shallow depth of field, too, flattens the McMansions and infinity pools into stage sets. Many other photographers employ these flattening techniques: the deadpan British photographer Martin Parr, say, or the Dutch portraitist Rineke Dijkstra. Unlike them, Ms. Greenfield invests these formal devices with clear moral judgment; her subjects appear to have no souls. For a photographer so gifted at winning the trust of her subjects, Ms. Greenfield rarely uses that confidence to illuminate their lives, preferring easy satire if not outright mockery. (Jackie Siegel, the surprisingly sympathetic wife in "The Queen of Versailles," appears at her worst here in one photograph, an augmented breast popping out of her shirt while her child munches on Cheetos.) No doubt Ms. Greenfield intends that the implants and logos stand for something beyond the subjects, to a larger economic disorder. But the result is too often something uglier: unflattering images that do nothing more than mock personal profligacy, as if all would be fine if everyone just had good taste and bought only the handbags they could afford. In some cases, especially when concentrating on women and girls, Ms. Greenfield seems to accept that society shapes us in ways that make bad behavior forgivable, or at least understandable. A disturbing photograph of a 4 year old girl thrusting her buttocks out, printed at large scale, indicts the beauty and entertainment industries more than the child herself. Western expats and South Asian laborers in Dubai delineate the emirate's boom and bust. Photos of Atlanta strippers picking up singles on their hands and knees prickle with shame that these women have few other economic opportunities. But more frequently she condescends, not only through formal techniques but through incuriosity. When Ms. Greenfield turns to China, she shoots newly wealthy entrepreneurs building monster mansions a White House replica in Hangzhou, a bedroom draped in Versace fabrics. There seems to be no systematic thinking in these images, but only personal distaste; a related film invites us to snigger at the Chinese finishing school where newly wealthy Asians learn to pronounce "Hermes" and "Ferragamo." These are dismissive, stereotypical images, and there are about 1.3 billion other people whose relationship to Chinese economic growth might be a bit different. Perhaps it's natural that she puts so much emphasis on surfaces. Artists are not economists, after all, and there is a value to her insistent gaze on the most unrefined forms of wealth and consumerism. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Back in January, at Stanford University, where I teach and practice psychiatry, I showed my students a slide of an oak tree from the edge of campus. At first the photo seemed out of place. The course, "PSYC82: The Literature of Psychosis," is about the portrayal of psychosis in memoir and fiction, art and film; the lecture that day was a survey of psychiatric history. But there is growing evidence linking green space to mental well being, and I have become increasingly concerned for my students, who, studies show, are experiencing depression and anxiety at record rates. I wanted them to get outside. The winter had been mild, a new round of rains had just passed through, and the woods were beautiful. In the three years I have taught this course, this was the first time I thought to show such photos. But as the quarter progressed, I found myself returning to images I had collected over weekend walks. Photos of bay laurels from the Stanford hills, of turkey tail fungi fanning over mossy logs, of gleaming slime molds and iridescent ferns. They served, at first, as a respite from some of the dense and difficult narratives we were reading, as well as from the darkening mood and news from the world outside our classroom. But as time went on, the students found connections between these images of nature and the stories in our class: the birds that call to Septimus Smith in "Mrs. Dalloway," the "happy hollow of a tree" that shelters Edgar as Tom in "King Lear," even the flight into the Californian foothills in the science fiction classic "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." And they pointed out the importance of nature for the confined narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," or the current reality of hundreds of thousands of people with severe mental illness locked up in penal institutions far away from any green. As the narrator of Georg Buchner's 1839 novella "Lenz" declares, "If I couldn't get out on to a mountain occasionally and see the landscape all around, then come back home and walk through the garden and look inside through the window I'd go mad! mad!" 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. We were reading Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" when the first case of Covid 19 was reported in Washington State, Philip K. Dick's "Ubik" when the first case of community transmission was reported in California. On March 2, with nine cases reported in Santa Clara County, I began to record lectures on "King Lear," so students could watch from their dorm rooms. We had made it to Edgar's soliloquy when face to face classes were canceled. Onto Zoom we went; I gave my final lecture in the silence of my living room. Class, it seemed, was over. Students began to leave, first on their own, then on the university's order. There remained only the matter of the exams. Almost immediately people began to whisper of the possibility that winter finals would be canceled. I hesitated. However trivial a final may seem in the context of world events, canceling one means far more than canceling a test. A final exam is more than just part of the key struggle to retain some kind of normality in the face of chaos. A final represents an opportunity to synthesize knowledge, to bring together readings and concepts from across the term. If one believes in the significance of one's material, then this synthesis is a critical moment of a course. And so first I made the examination optional, then open book; the date of the exam was postponed twice. It was hard not to feel that I was negotiating with the growing epidemic. And then, as student after student emailed, describing challenges returning home, I realized it was time to admit defeat. As I wrote my letter to my students explaining the cancellation, I paused. It's a large class, and during the week's upheaval, I wondered where they had gone: the students who came laughing into class together, or sat quietly in back; who shared stories of their own struggles with mental illness; who turned in recorded songs for their assignments; who introduced me to books I had never read. So instead of ending class altogether, I gave them one last assignment: Go outside and take a photo of the natural world we had talked about so often, and share it with others in the class. That night, after the Zoom meetings, the spring course prep, the planning updates from the hospital and the brief moments stolen outside, I logged on to our course website. So chaotic have the days become that I had almost forgotten the new assignment. But as the sun set outside my window, I saw the screen of the computer light up with photos from across the world. There was a waterfall from the hills of Georgia; a pasture in Venus, Texas; budding magnolias in New Jersey. A student in Nome, Alaska, posted a bare cottonwood covered with snow. An Australian student shared a gum tree blooming after the wildfires there. There were sunrises in California and roadside mushrooms. Snow filled woods and fruiting lemons. A standoff between a dog and lizard on a bright green lawn. A southern stingray from the Gulf of Mexico. Fritillaries, songbirds. A Carolina swamp. And the same sky in Ohio and Delaware as out the window of my room. Of course, access to green space is one of the many inequalities increasingly exposed by this epidemic, and it is possible, in my students' photos, to see that some, whether because of geography or illness or some other reason, could not go far. In Northern California, we are fortunate to be in the midst of one of the most beautiful springs in recent memory. The streets are quiet, and the air so clear that you can see the mountaintop observatories across the bay. Many people do not have this recourse; later this summer, if the foretold fires come, we may not either. Over the next few days, the photos continued to flow in, nearly 100, from the Central Valley, Hawaii and Indonesia. There were familiar campus ginkgoes, cedars in Brooklyn, polypore mushrooms climbing a tree in Utah. The assignment was called because on the spur of the moment I couldn't think of anything else "The World Around Us." And that was what the students had built. The deadline was Friday; as I write this, the most recent photo to arrive was of a Muscovy duck swimming in Pastoral Pond Park, Montgomery County, Texas. At the end of the day, this is more than an exercise in finding connection during a time of struggle. As many have noted, the causes and effects of this virus are intimately related to the health of the natural world. Zoonotic diseases like Covid 19 may be linked to increasing deforestation and the sale of wild animals. Lungs and hearts damaged by atmospheric pollution are more susceptible to severe illness. And the woods and outdoor spaces are providing respite for the millions of people who can no longer go to school or work. It is worth remembering, as this story unfolds, that we are being sustained not only by the neighbors who bring groceries, and the teachers who learn how to manage a classroom of rowdy kindergartners on Zoom, and the doctors and nurses and hospital staff who are risking their lives for a country that can't, or won't, supply them with enough protective equipment, but also by the oaks and fritillaries, the gardens and copses of cottonwoods that are so critical to both our physical and mental well being. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Credit...Stacy Sodolak for The New York Times When you escape your life at 45, as in a Thelma and Louise level escape, you go to the desert. My best friends of 25 years joined me. We were all leaving behind something. Beth and Miriam were leaving their young children behind. Sara had just recovered from breast cancer; her mastectomy was fresh, just under a year. I was taking a break from kids, my husband and my 80 pound incessantly barking dog. We picked Marfa, the artist hub in the middle of the West Texas desert as the destination of our road trip last winter. We had been traveling together for 15 years. The quirky art community was part of the reason we landed on Marfa. We wanted to fade into the weirdness of the town, with our identities washing away into the artist Donald Judd's concrete blocks, the dry landscape and the big sky. We knew it would be the kind of place you might forget to call your family. (Indeed, it was.) If we were lucky, we'd get some much needed refueling, maybe a chance to scream in the middle of the road, or, like Thelma and Louise, innocently flirt with a Brad Pitt type of cowboy. And even though GPS would never allow any of us to get lost, we longed for that feeling of disappearing. Just temporarily. We wanted to separate from the reality of our lives. Leave behind not just the kids and the responsibilities, but the newspaper headlines and cable news. Was that even possible? In our all American S.U.V., I gave it my best Bruce Springsteen Thunder Road I'm pulling out of here to win moment and we tore out of El Paso onto 10 East doing 80 miles per hour through the vast Chihuahuan Desert, passing through long stretches of flat landscape with puffs of sage brush for the three hour drive ahead of us. Past the border patrol checkpoint, past an abandoned truck stop, with a great old (nonworking) Art Deco style neon sign that simply read "Truck Stop," a 1960s relic; when Interstate 10 bypassed Sierra Blanca and it became something of a ghost town. That's when it sunk in. We were really, finally nowhere. Nightfall came quickly and the bluish Chinati Mountains disappeared in the darkness as we turned onto U.S. 90, a two lane road leading into Marfa. A refurbished neon sign glowed in the pitch dark night; it read, vertically, in pink, "Stardust," then underneath in blue, "Motel." Except there was no motel. Not a soul in sight. And when you've been driving for two plus hours down a dark desert highway, it gets creepy. Sara and I had fallen under the spell of the hypnotic yellow lines down the center of the road. Awful country music streamed from the radio, coming in and out of frequency. That's when I saw it. A beam of light in the shape of an orb hopped across the road and just as quickly disappeared. I grabbed onto the wheel and screamed and then Sara screamed, "What is it? What! What?" "I think we're seeing our first U.F.O." I was half kidding, half serious. We were in West Texas. Roswell, N. M., where ominous U.F.O. stories have been churned out for decades, was only four hours from here. Plus Marfa had its own weird phenomenon called the Marfa Lights. Yellowish orbs had been spotted flashing through this desert since the late 1800s. (There's even a Mystery Lights Viewing Area, a truly unusual roadside center where people gather nightly.) I didn't pull over because when you think you see a U.F.O. in the desert and there's no one around, you don't pull over. I have enough nostalgic alien movies under my belt to know this. However, I slowed down the car and there they were again orbs the size of grapefruits, miles away. My heart pounded because it was only the beginning of our journey and we had already descended into a Steven Spielberg extraterrestrial movie. But as we drove closer, we realized they weren't free floating orbs at all. They were just truck lights dipping in and out of the sightline. And there you have it: My first desert mirage. During our four day road trip, our home base was El Cosmico, a quirky hotel and campground on 21 acres, filled with vintage trailers (Beth and I stayed in a 24 foot, 1950s Branstrator with a turquoise painted top), Sioux style teepees and yurts. Sara and Miriam holed up in a bright pink 1953 Vagabond trailer. Marfa is an eccentric and remarkable mix of artists and cowboys. Their seemingly comfortable coexistence is most likely owed to the vision of the artist Donald Judd. Judd, who died in 1994, is the magnet of art pilgrimages to Marfa. In 1971, a successful minimalist artist, he moved to Marfa with his children to escape the New York art scene, turning abandoned offices of the United States Army Quartermaster Corps into his home and personal work space. La Mansana de Chinati, informally known as The Block, which is part of the Judd Foundation, is a space so large it took up an entire city block and encompassed two airplane hangars. So in the morning, we took a guided tour at The Block. Everything at The Block was symmetrical. The metal and glass doors. The endless bookshelves. The stack of woodcut yellow and blue plexiglass installations, all isolated rectangular blocks, hung vertically on the wall. The concrete raised pool. The plum trees in a line, one after another. Symmetrical, except, one could argue, for the old, yet working, grain mill across the street, with its machinery churning and grinding all afternoon. The mill was loud. Leave it to my friend Miriam to look beyond the art. "You move all the way to the desert," she said, "and you built an art compound across the street from a grain mill?" Fair point. But it wasn't the clamor of the mill that bothered me. It was the nine foot tall adobe brick wall. I was sick of walls. And eight foot fences. And border delineations. I lived in a tight suburban New Jersey enclave with one neighbor's driveway only 10 feet from my house. When you leave Marfa, it's a deep dive into the rural framework of Texas. Back to the grasses and the yucca. The uninterrupted sky. A whole lot of space to fill. And what a sky it was! It had been so fickle, now finally we saw glimmers of bright blue patches above the long dark ribbon of a road ahead. Look at that road! With nothing on it! "This would be a good time to stand in the middle of the road," Beth said. And she was the family therapist. The reasonable one! It was a spur of the moment suggestion. No reasoning behind it. We might be getting older, but in Texas, in the desert, you can still pull over, jump in the middle of the road and not a soul will know about it. We hopped out of the car and screamed our heads off, drunk with all of the space. And it was exhilarating! When my kids were little, I told them not to run into the street about 100 times. (Maybe more?) Here we were, four women in our mid 40s. It went against all of our instincts as responsible adults, and we let those instincts go into the wind that night. The sun was quickly dropping into the desert so, after our "I'm the queen of the road" stunt, we got back in the S.U.V. and I revved up to 80 again. In my path were two large black crows, snacking on roadkill. I slowed down a bit so they'd have time to ascend, but one got caught by the wind and it swooped down with a sharp force. My car plunged into it, everyone screamed and the bird propelled into my windshield. I did what any sane person would do when something large is coming at you: I ducked, yet my hands remained steady on the wheel. For whatever reason maybe it was the desolate road, maybe it was how fast I was driving, or my desert head space but my instinct was to simply duck, not to swerve. I'm a good driver. I can take a highway or a city street. But this was not a normal reflex. I'm telling you, I didn't move that wheel. I'm going to chalk it up to adrenaline. Something raced inside of me that said "Get your head down. Now." The manic energy leading up to that moment flattened out. Music turned down. Everyone still. But that black bird was not my albatross. I wouldn't let it be, I told myself (and it wasn't, but all of that driving will play tricks on you), and so we sailed along the road, quieter, through the low tawny grass, past the sprawling ranches along U.S. 90 to a spot we'd all been talking about visiting: The Prada Marfa. Then there it was, a shining beacon of consumerism, nestled into the landscape, this landmark, Prada Marfa, a fake Prada store, a symbol of wealth and prosperity. Right in the middle of the desert, about 37 miles northwest of Marfa. It's a small building that looks like a stand alone storefront with wide windows. A few purses and shoes on display, donated by Miuccia Prada. Absolutely nothing else but miles and miles of empty ranchland on each side of it. This building is a lone rider, is as if someone had airlifted it into the desert. Or an apocalyptic relic, the only sign left of modern commercialism. The Berlin based artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset built the cultural landmark in 2005 with the help of the Marfa art collective, Ballroom Marfa. In 2014, Beyonce did a split jump in front of the structure, posting it to her Instagram and sealing the Prada Marfa's cultural fate forever. And in the light, that was when we spotted him: a tall, handsome cowboy giving a small art tour. Every Thelma and Louise road trip story like ours needed a Brad Pitt moment and we found ours at The Chinati Foundation. His name was Chris Cole and truly, he looked like Richard Prince's iconic Marlboro Man with his unmussed brown corduroy jacket, his tall cowboy build, his long hair and his 10 gallon hat. We overheard him talking about ranch water and because there's nothing wrong with flirting, we asked what it was. Turns out ranch water was a simple mix of tequila, lime juice and soda water. "Nothing special, but fun to say," he said. "Thanks for coming all the way to Marfa." And he seemed like he meant it. Chris the Cowboy or as we deemed him later that night, the "Hottie from Chinati," as we gulped down our ranch waters at the Hotel Saint George bar where we stopped in for a drink after dinner had walked away into the sunset. Our last night in the trailer, the four of us cozied up under colorful serapes, reading animal spirit cards. We were wistful about leaving Marfa and leaving each other. It would probably be another year until the four of us set out on another adventure. Before we left town on that bright Sunday morning, we stopped again at Marfa Burrito. Ramona and Lucy invited us to the back, in the kitchen, where we hugged them and thanked them for feeding us for our entire trip. "That's what we do, feed people and make them feel good," Lucy said. They certainly did. Hayley Krischer is a freelance writer living in New Jersey. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Tucked into an unlikely intersection of central Prague set partially under a highway, between a bus terminal and train station exists a new frontier of Prague's steadily diversifying culinary scene. Manifesto Market, which opened in early June, has brought back life to a long derelict space in the city center, even though it's just a few minutes walk from tourist landmarks like Cafe Imperial and the Powder Tower. Some of Prague's more eclectic food vendors inhabit this cashless , open air village of 27 attractively arranged converted shipping containers, offering a fine tuned collection of global cuisines. Everything is served with a side of culture, including daily concerts, free (and English friendly) film screenings, and arts workshops. Technically a pop up, Manifesto will eventually relocate or extend its two year lease on this site, which awaits a future development designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. "I love this site because nothing else was here. It was awful, a no go zone," said Manifesto's organizer, Martin Barry, a New Yorker turned expat and founder of reSITE, a nonprofit aimed at improving the urban environment. "The first idea was to change this, to get people to come to a place they normally wouldn't. The second thing was to do it with food and culture." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The pharmacy chains Walgreens, Rite Aid and CVS have moved to stop selling the heartburn medicine Zantac and its generic versions after the Food and Drug Administration warned this month that it had detected low levels of a cancer causing chemical in samples of the drug. A Walgreens spokesman said in a statement on Monday that the company had pulled the drug from its shelves "while the FDA continues its review of the products." A Rite Aid spokesman said the company was "in the process of removing Zantac and generic versions sold under the Rite Aid name from its shelves." Walgreens and CVS, which announced its move on Saturday, both noted that the drug, which is known as ranitidine, has not been recalled. The companies said customers who had bought the products could return them for a refund. The F.D.A. has said it is investigating the source of the contamination as well as the risk to patients, recommending that they talk to their doctors and that those who take over the counter versions consider switching to a different medication. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Moviegoers entering the AMC Empire 25 multiplex near Times Square next week might hear some unexpected sounds blasting from one of its theaters: the wail of a saxophone, a screech of feedback, a rapid fire footwork beat. Those snippets will be coming from Interference AV a free, three day experimental music and video art festival, Feb. 19 21, which will feature the Sun Ra Arkestra, JLin and Lightning Bolt, and bring a subversive, D.I.Y. spirit to the multiplex. On the fourth floor lobby of the country's busiest movie theater, audiences filing out of "Black Panther" will pass by tables of a zine fair; the staid, checkered carpeting might be filled with dancers grooving to a D.J. Across from the concession stand hawking 44 ounce Cokes, a rival cart will serve craft beer from Heartland Brewery. And inside the cavernous Theater 13 which last week showed "Maze Runner: The Death Cure" musicians will thrash away below the big screen, their faces alight with glitchy original video art projected above. "We've created this alternate kind of wacko movie theater experience," said Lani Combier Kapel, who organized the event for Clocktower Productions, a nonprofit that puts on live events around New York. Clocktower partnered with Times Square Arts, which has sought to infuse the area dominated by towering bank and soda ads with progressive pop up art installations; the two organizations created a similar but smaller event at the same theater in 2016, entitled "Primal Screams." AMC, the country's largest movie theater chain, is not actively involved in the organization of the event it simply rented out the space. (The Times Square Alliance says the festival cost a little less than 80,000 to put on.) But the festival fits right into a movie theater landscape increasingly filled with wonky one off events and experiential tweaks to yank viewers away from their Netflix accounts. AMC has been particularly ambitious as it fights slumping stocks and a challenge from a merger of two competitors. It has invested 20 million in virtual reality, and is sharpening its menu and gaining dozens of liquor licenses. (The company declined to comment for this article.) And one strategy that has paid off is the combination of film and live music. The Wordless Music Orchestra, for example, performs scores at screenings around the country; it will next play two nights of "Phantom Thread" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, both of which have sold out. Orchestras like the New York Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra rely on screenings of classics like "An American in Paris" and "The Lord of the Rings" to fill their houses every season, while boutique theaters like Nitehawk Cinema bring in musicians to complement their bespoke cocktails. "It's an opportunity to really test the audience and their understanding of what's going on," Alanna Heiss, the founder of Clocktower, said of the lineup. The Sun Ra Arkestra, the fabled free jazz ensemble, embraces volcanic bursts and entropic rambling; the electronic musician JLin creates skittish footwork beats that favor only the bravest and most experienced dancers. And the Rhode Island based noise rock band Lightning Bolt is famed for concerts that often occur in tiny, clandestine spaces, where a crush of jittery bodies surround the band on all sides. Brian Chippendale, its drummer, plans to lean into the strange contrast between this performance space and his scrappier ventures: He and the bass guitarist Brian Gibson will devise an improvised and likely more sedate set to match the mood from those seated in the plush red seats. "I think the scene will most definitely be off in some way; I don't mind that," Mr. Chippendale said. The band is prepared to find its own source of energy rather than depend on a rowdy crowd, he added. "We're just this little band that drove over in our rickety van, and we're battling it out in the belly of the beast. I could conjure up some 'Moby Dick' scenario to get energized." He also plans to draw inspiration from the video projections, which will be created by the artists Peter Burr and Sabrina Ratte from the Undervolt Co. arts collective. Using digital and analog equipment, they will take turns mixing videos on the fly to match the music's mood; Ms. Ratte's work is often characterized by serene, colorful undulations, while Mr. Burr opts for twitchy, near seizure inducing patterns. "I've always wanted my work to be scalable: You can rock out a basement, but can also rock out the MoMA or a multiplex in Times Square," Mr. Burr said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The scene is a familiar one in Paris: an expansive, brightly lit dining room and servers decked head to toe in black and white, darting between tables with a balancing act of dishes in one hand and carafes of wine in another. Diners sit elbow to elbow in rows of ruby red leather banquettes or wooden bistro chairs, chatting over generous portions of beef bourguignon and escargots dressed in parsley butter. This genre of old timey Parisian restaurant is a lot less visible today than it once was, displaced in part by the bistronomy movement of the last several years. But if the local media frenzy and blocklong lines at Bouillon Pigalle are any indication, there has been a glaring unmet hunger for such nostalgic comforts. A precursor to the Parisian bistro boom of the mid 19th century, the original Bouillon was a restaurant serving hearty, simple and, most important, inexpensive dishes that could be consumed quickly for a predominantly working class clientele. It began with Pierre Louis Duval, a butcher who needed a place to serve les bas morceaux, the least preferred cuts from the front of the cow, which he couldn't sell. He cooked them in different ways, including in their broth, or bouillon hence the name. Its popularity inspired hundreds of similar restaurants and a fan base that extended into society's upper echelon. By the belle epoque era, however, tastes veered upscale and bouillons faded or transformed entirely, their charming interiors left untouched while their menus became decidedly upscale. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
A beautifully proportioned apartment that commands nearly the entire 15th floor at the hyperexclusive 778 Park Avenue, an important pearl in the elegant prewar necklace of Upper East Side residences designed by Rosario Candela, is being offered for private sale by the family of its late owner, the ABC maestro Roone Arledge. The head of ABC Sports for 25 years, Mr. Arledge expanded his hands on fief in 1977 to include the network's news division. "Wide World of Sports," "Nightline" and "20/20" were among his varied creations, as was Howard Cosell. The 29 million asking price includes the gracious 10 room simplex distinguished by its French moldings, 11 foot ceilings, three marble fireplaces, three terraces and four exposures, the westerly one providing glimpses of Central Park but not Mr. Arledge's imposing collection of Emmy Awards. He received his 37th and last, for lifetime achievement, in 2002, a few months before his death at age 71. Simultaneously intimate and grand, the apartment, No. 15, encompasses 4,500 square feet and is reached by a private elevator landing that opens onto an impressive 30 foot long gallery with its original wood herringbone and marquetry floor and mahogany doors with classic P. E. Guerin hardware. All of the principal rooms face Park Avenue and, like the rest of the residence, bear the neo Classical imprimatur of David Easton, the decorator commissioned by the Arledges to refurbish the interior 16 years ago, before they moved in. (They had looked at 35 apartments over two years before deciding on this one, seduced by its special address and fantastic light.) There is one decorative carry over from the apartment's previous owners, the horseman Albert C. Bostwick Jr., whose grandfather was a founder of Standard Oil and a partner of John D. Rockefeller, and his wife, Eleanor. In the dining room where the recessed windows face north and east, the chandelier is vintage crystal and the fireplace is carved marble the Arledges retained the hand painted bird and floral chinoiserie wallpaper made by the historic firm Gracie, for its wow factor. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
On March 6, 1857, The New York Times described the commencement exercises at New York Medical College. The first prize for the best thesis went to Nehemiah Nickerson "for his thesis on Infantile Paralysis." It was the first time the newspaper mentioned what would come to be known as polio. The Times said little else about infantile paralysis or poliomyelitis until Aug. 4, 1899, when an article with the headline "Puzzling Child Disease" appeared on Page 3. By Aug. 7, polio was front page news. The disease was "spreading with remarkable rapidity," with more cases in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and nearby towns. Then, apart from a brief mention in December 1900, infantile paralysis disappeared from The Times until the summer of 1907, when another outbreak prompted several reports. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The brokerage firm Charles Schwab said on Monday that it would enter the online investment advice market early next year and would offer its advisory services to those customers without charge. In the last few years, companies like Wealthfront, Betterment and FutureAdvisor have made a big splash building software that puts customers in a collection of low cost exchange traded funds. For a fee of roughly 0.15 to 0.5 percent each year on the assets, the companies help people assess their risk tolerance, put them in an appropriate mix of these index fundlike investments and rebalance back to the original allocation as the markets move. They also can help with optimizing sales to save money on taxes. Schwab's free offering will be called Schwab Intelligent Portfolios. Customers will need to invest a minimum of 5,000 and won't get help with tax sale maneuvers unless they have at least 50,000 invested. In a conference call with analysts, the company emphasized the availability of round the clock live help from licensed investment professionals, something start ups have trouble offering. When a service is free, consumers' first instinct might be to look over their shoulders and check their wallets. In this offering, Schwab will make some money if its own exchange traded funds are part of the investment portfolio and if other firms' funds are as well, if those funds share revenue with the company. Schwab said it will have a team of people using a variety of selection criteria to decide which firms' funds get into a customer's portfolio and will not disqualify any funds simply because they don't share revenue with Schwab. "We will make the criteria transparent and public, and people will be able to draw their own judgment," Walter W. Bettinger II, Schwab's chief executive, said in an interview. The company will be acting as a fiduciary in this service, which means it is legally obligated to act in customers' best interest. "I would be skeptical," said Jon Stein, founder and chief executive of Betterment. "I've never seen it happen before where a firm that has a vested interest in providing you with one product doesn't somehow try to steer you towards that product." Betterment said it does use some Schwab exchange traded funds in its own portfolios when helping people engage in tax optimization, but those funds are never Betterment's first choice. Mr. Bettinger said that his company's service would be more sophisticated than those of the start ups, adding classes of assets that might help improve performance. "The development and design is being done by a much more experienced group that already manages, on a discretionary basis, tens of billions of dollars," he said. Wealthfront and Betterment have investment committees staffed with Ph.D.s and experts on investing like the Princeton economist Burton Malkiel, the chief investment officer at Wealthfront. So customer choice may come down to price more than brainpower. Branding may matter, too. Schwab, once the upstart that lowered stock trading fees, is now the establishment firm with expensive storefronts trying to play catch up. Mr. Bettinger, however, said he saw the free services as consistent with the company's roots under its founder, Charles R. Schwab, as a price slashing discount brokerage firm. "There will be a lot of comment and speculation and probably a lot of obfuscation and falseness put out, too," he said. "What we're doing here is no different than what Schwab was doing 40 years ago, when Chuck charged 70 for stock trades when everyone else was charging 400." Betterment said it had no plans to lower its management fees from its current range of 0.15 to 0.35 percent annually, pointing to the value that features like its new tax impact preview tool provided. Wealthfront and FutureAdvisor also said they had no plans to lower fees. Mr. Stein of Betterment said he welcomed Schwab and all of the attention its marketing dollars would bring to the online investments field. "I see this as further validation of concepts that we started working on five years ago," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
"The art world should be understood as a complex ecology with many microclimates and some macro ones," said the curator Okwui Enwezor, who died in March. He could have been describing the geography of New York City galleries. In the 1970s, the climates were macro and few (the Upper East Side, SoHo). In the 1980s, they were joined by the East Village; in the 1990s, by Chelsea; and in the 2000s, by the Lower East Side and Brooklyn. And there are spillovers everywhere. Today, it can be hard to tag a gallery by district, as I learned when visiting a handful that straddle either side of Canal Street, a cross island axis that runs from SoHo to Chinatown, without claiming full allegiance to either. This small storefront gallery, in Chinatown, is a distance from Canal Street, but well worth a walk for the local debut of the artist LaKela Brown. The look of her mostly white plaster reliefs is austere. The subject, ornamental bling associated with 1990s hip hop, is the opposite: door knocker earrings, rope neck chains and gold teeth . All are artifacts of the pop culture Ms. Brown grew up with in Detroit, her home city. Although the show's title, "Surface Possessions," hints at a critical remove from that culture, the work itself, exquisitely done, feels like an honoring gesture. Lining the gallery walls, the reliefs might have been lifted from an ancient royal tomb. Through June 16 at 56 Henry Street; 518 966 2622, 56henry.nyc. For 25 years, the nonprofit apexart has been inviting curators from across the globe to produce thematic group shows in its small space. Many of the curators have been artists, as is the case with Porpentine Charity Heartscape, the digital game designer who assembled the current show, "Dire Jank." Keeping her checklist short, she has surrounded her own work with that of just three fellow gamers, all but one transgender. The exception, an artist who calls himself Thecatamites (Stephen Murphy), takes a sardonic look at old school games in a click heavy conquest narrative that goes nowhere, very slowly. Tabitha Nikolai, self described as a "trashgender gutter elf" from Salt Lake City, offers a tour through a luxury mansion that houses a Borgesian library, a sexology institute, and opens up onto vistas of cosmic space. Devi McCallion, the rock star of the bunch, delivers a despairing, pulsating plea for environmental awareness in a music video. As for Ms. Heartscape's work, centered on the risks of queerness, it's startlingly soul baring. Where most conventional games are about predation and its thrills, hers are about the evils of predation. I should mention that in the gallery I found the interactive pieces glitch prone. (Maybe they're meant to be? After all, jank is gaming talk for, among things, low quality.) But when I reran the show on my laptop everything worked like a charm. Through May 18 at 291 Church Street; 212 431 5270, apexart.org. Alexander and Bonin is one of a handful of galleries that recently jumped Chelsea for TriBeCa. (Bortolami, Andrew Kreps and Kaufmann Repetto are others; more are on the way.) With the move, the gallery has gained airy duplex quarters, and filled them ambitiously. On the main floor there's a large, intriguing photography show called "Exposures," which uses little seen work by some house artists to tease the line between documentary and creative nonfiction. Downstairs is the first of what will be five two artist shows selected by the Lisbon based curator Luiza Teixeira de Freitas. For the initial offering she's paired cast glass sculptures of everyday objects by Belen Uriel with a very funny seven minute film by the young American born artist Gabriel Abrantes about the imagined origins of Brancusi's phallic 1916 sculpture "Princess X." (Mr. Abrantes's zany feature length "Diamantino," a collaboration with Daniel Schmidt, was a hit at Cannes last year.) Through April 27 at 47 Walker Street; 212 367 7474, alexanderandbonin.com. You get a foretaste of Chinatown in TriBeCa with the exhibition "Ming Fay: Beyond Nature" at Sapar Contemporary. Mr. Fay, who was born in Shanghai in 1943 and came to the United States in 1961, specializes in super realist sculptures of vegetal forms fruit, nuts, seedpods modeled on what he finds in Chinatown's street markets. What he adds is scale: everything in his botanical universe measures in feet, not inches sweet peppers the size of satellites, maple seeds as big as drones. He magnifies other forms too: seashells, bird skulls (and shrinks a few in the case of some unexceptional bronze human figures). The show, organized by Alexandra Chang, looks like a glimpse into a wonderland in which Mr. Fay seems to say, nature really is. Through June 1 at 9 North Moore Street; saparcontemporary.com. In her second solo show at Bridget Donahue, Jessi Reaves complicates the kind of work that made her a standout in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Her medium is assemblage; her material is recycled furniture; her method is to puzzle that furniture together, intact or cut up, into sculptures. The joining is ingenious; the look bulky but agile. What's most distinctive, though, is the complex mood the work generates. There's nostalgia built into the domestic middlebrow furniture Ms. Reaves chooses; violence implied in the way she strips it of practical use; and something like solicitude in the way she gives trashed things a funky new purpose. Through May 12 at 99 Bowery, second floor; 646 896 1368, bridgetdonahue.nyc. In his 2001 7 photographic series "Things Fall Apart," Sasha Bezzubov chronicled the effects of natural disasters hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunami on landscapes in Asia and the United States. The series that followed, titled "Albedo Zone" and now on view at Front Room, refers to a scientific theory about climate change that has triggered such disasters . Ideally, the theory says, the earth's surface reflects, rather than absorbs, sunlight, with ice being a protective reflector and water, an absorber. At present, global melting, caused by human carelessness, has thrown the balance dangerously off, a reality Mr. Bezzubov documents in black and white images of water and ice shot in Alaska. From a distance, the large format photographs look abstract. Once you know the story behind them, they take on a very specific urgency. Through May 5 at 48 Hester Street; 718 782 2556, frontroomles.com. Even smaller than 56 Henry, this storefront is packed to the ceiling with another cultural homage, this one to an excellent big group show. It's organized by the artist Rachel Mason, whose parents until recently ran two adult bookshops in Los Angeles. Both were called "Circus of Books" and both served, since the pre Stonewall 1960s, as unofficial social centers for the local gay community. The show evokes that community with work by nearly 60 artists, most gay, some well known (Ron Athey, Kathe Burkhart, Vaginal Davis, Tom of Finland), others (Chivas Clem, Scott Hug, Jimmy Wright) on and off the radar. Stacks of vintage porn magazines add a sex shop vibe, but it's the art, installed salon style, that holds the eye and kicks off still important communal conversations in art and social history. Through May 6 at 127 Henry Street; 917 593 4086, fierman.nyc. Some other exhibitions to visit while you're in the area: Alan Sturm (through May 26) at Situations Gallery, 127 Henry Street, situations.us; Diamond Stingly (May 4 June 16) at Queer Thoughts, 373 Broadway, queerthoughts.com; Azza El Siddique (through June 2) at Helena Anrather, 28 Elizabeth Street, helenaanrather.com; Wendy Red Star (April 28 June 2) at Sargent's Daughters, 179 East Broadway, sargentsdaughters.com; Katarzyna Kozyra (through June 1) at Postmasters Gallery, 54 Franklin Street, postmastersart.com. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
"And look, I get that as a leader you don't want people to panic, but you also want to inform the people so they can be safe. You know, if a plane is crashing, a pilot will tell you to remain calm, but they'll also tell you to fasten your seatbelts and brace for impact. If Trump was a pilot, he'd be like, 'Attention all passengers, everything is fine. Seatbelts are for snowflakes, and if you want to stretch your legs, now's the perfect time. Bye bye.'" TREVOR NOAH "You didn't want to create a panic? So what did you want, for people to very calmly be dying in the streets?" TREVOR NOAH "Well, good job with that. This country's never been more chill. A lot of people aren't even moving." SETH MEYERS "America's as cool as a cucumber right now. Sure, we're stealing toilet paper every time we go into a Starbucks, and Trader Joe's looks like the last scene of 'Apocalypse Now,' but other than that, it's all good, baby." SETH MEYERS "Well, thank God. Thank God none of us panicked. You know, I might have freaked out and stayed inside for six months." JAMES CORDEN "Yeah, it's a catastrophic story for Trump that threatens to end his presidency, or as he calls it, 'Wednesday.'" JIMMY FALLON | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
At a towering 42 stories, the InterContinental Presidente has long been a Mexico City beacon. A renovation, completed in late 2015, with updates this spring and summer to some of its signature restaurants, adds a new burnish to this destination, just as Mexico City itself is becoming a must go spot, especially for the international jet set. (The city's first Ritz Carlton is scheduled to open in 2019, which makes the timing of the InterContinental's redo either smart or lucky.) Situated in Polanco, an upscale enclave, the hotel is a five minute walk from a lively stretch of international restaurants and designer shops, popular with locals and expats alike, and bordered by pleasant greenways. Better still, it's adjacent to Bosque de Chapultepec, the sprawling Central Park of the city, home to attractions like the National Museum of Anthropology, pre Columbian ruins and Chapultepec Castle. A metro stop is also a five to 10 minute walk away; buses run frequently along the neighboring Paseo de la Reforma, a main thoroughfare, and cabs are plentiful. The view, the view, the view. Our 25th floor "Classic room," the lowest tier available, offered a sweeping vista of the sprawling city, extending all the way to on a clear day the mountain ranges that ring the metropolis. Watching the sunset over the colorful rooftops was mesmerizing and tranquil, offsetting the bustling streets below. (Park view rooms are also available, and blackout blinds are standard.) Otherwise, the gray and dark wood room was plushly functional, with a king size bed, a desk, a small L shape sofa under the picture window and ample storage space, including a useful if utilitarian coat tree. A single, bland black and white photo, of a hand painting a plate, hung on the wall; the decor could have used more local flourish. (Viva Mexico, but not with this look.) A Melita coffee maker, a 42 inch television and a somewhat outdated iPod dock were among the tech touches. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Nick Denton, left, founder of Gawker Media, and Albert J. Daulerio, a former editor in chief of Gawker, listening to testimony on Wednesday during a trial over a sex tape involving Hulk Hogan. ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. A palpable sense of shock rippled through a courtroom here Wednesday morning when the former editor in chief of Gawker.com was shown in a videotaped deposition suggesting that almost anything goes when it comes to the newsworthiness of celebrities' sex videos. The former editor, Albert J. Daulerio, a defendant in an invasion of privacy lawsuit brought by the retired wrestler Hulk Hogan, was asked by the plaintiff's lawyer where he drew the line when it came to posting videos of people having sex. "Can you imagine a situation where a celebrity sex tape would not be newsworthy?" asked the lawyer, Douglas E. Mirell. Gawker said later in a statement that Mr. Daulerio was being flippant. Still, the exchange highlighted the way that Gawker's culture of reporting on some of the most intimate aspects of the lives of celebrities and prominent newsmakers was being put on trial. Albert J. Daulerio, former editor of Gawker, set broad limits for newsworthiness. Nick Denton, founder of Gawker, said he believed that the tape was worth posting. Mr. Daulerio's testimony took place during depositions taken last year in advance of the trial, which began on Monday, in the suit by the retired wrestler, known in the proceedings by his legal name, Terry G. Bollea, against Gawker Media; its founder, Nick Denton; Mr. Daulerio; and others. Mr. Bollea is seeking 100 million in damages, saying that amounts to the harm he suffered after Gawker posted in 2012 a secretly recorded video showing him having sex with a friend's wife. The case is prompting significant questions about how far First Amendment rights stretch in an era when the unregulated Internet is ripe for abuse by anyone with a computer. In addition, testimony this week by Mr. Daulerio and other current and former members of Gawker's staff has raised a curtain on the culture of the website and others like it that traffic in salacious fare in an effort to gain readers. In such a culture, he went on, it was "pretty standard operating procedure" to seize upon and publish photographs and videos of celebrities in compromising or intimate situations, regardless of whether the celebrity might object or be embarrassed. Mr. Daulerio conceded that no such consideration guided Gawker's publication of lewd images of the former Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre or of photographs of a topless Duchess of Cambridge. The former wrestler Hulk Hogan is suing Gawker Media over a sex tape it published. "She's a public figure, and those pictures were published elsewhere," Mr. Daulerio said, referring to the duchess, the former Kate Middleton. He acknowledged that there had been no discussion in the Gawker newsroom at the time whether the publication of the pictures constituted an invasion of her privacy. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Similar thinking, Mr. Daulerio said, dictated the site's handling of the video of Hulk Hogan, which he noted had been provided anonymously to him in the mail and for which no money had changed hands. "I was very enthusiastic about writing about it," Mr. Daulerio said. He explained that he had "enjoyed watching the video" and was eager to attach his commentary to it on the site. "I found it very amusing," he said. "I thought it was newsworthy, and it was something that was worth publishing." In response to a question from Mr. Mirell, the defendant said that neither he nor anyone else at Gawker had made any attempt to contact Mr. Bollea to ask him whether he was in fact the man in the grainy video, and how he felt about Gawker's intention of publishing it. A moment later, after an objection from a lawyer for Gawker, Mr. Mirell persisted. "So it's fair to say that whether he suffered emotional distress or not, that played no part in your decision whether or what to publish," he said. Videotaped testimony by his boss, Mr. Denton, was also shown to the jury, later in the day, even though the two men were sitting behind their lawyers in the courtroom. The plaintiffs' use of taped depositions at this early stage of the trial seemed intended to stave off cross examinations by the defense, which might reduce the impact of their words on the videos. Both defendants, however, are on their own legal team's list of witnesses, to be called to the stand when it is the defense's turn to present evidence at the trial. Under questioning in the deposition, recorded in October 2013, Mr. Denton said that contrary to Mr. Daulerio's feelings, he had not been "very excited" by news that Gawker had received a video showing Hulk Hogan having sex with a woman on a four poster bed. "We all have sex," Mr. Denton said, noting that he preferred stories that had "some kind of meaning." Nevertheless, Mr. Denton did not impede the video's publication, although he advised his editor "not to put up the whole tape." A video editor cut it to 1 minute 41 seconds, from roughly 30 minutes. Asked whether he or his staff had looked into the tape's provenance, Mr. Denton demurred. "We can't always determine the circumstances in which a film was made," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
LAGOS, Nigeria There is an axiom of my elders: The earthworm says it used to own a lot of gold jewelry, but now that it burrows the earth and covers itself in mud, no one believes it. As a Nigerian, I'm reminded of that whenever I encounter some of the exquisite objects looted from Benin City, in southern Nigeria, in Western museums. I always feel a strong urge to tell others around me that these works belong to my country, but I know they would doubt me because a revered Western institution claims them as its own. These artworks, recognized as masterpieces but sometimes dismissed as primitive, ethnographic or animist, have inspired my art over the years, even in my few encounters with them. If returned to where they belong, these artworks would have a great impact on the future of Nigerian contemporary art. In 2017, when I was preparing for a solo exhibition in London, I visited the British Museum for the first time to see the famed works known as the Benin Bronzes which, despite the name, are not all bronzes and other artifacts that were looted during a devastating lash of desecration in 1897. That year, British troops sacked Benin City, which was then the capital of the Kingdom of Benin, and ousted the ruler, Oba Ovonramwen. An untold number of artworks were seized from the oba's palace. Some of these artworks ended up in other countries, but many are now housed at the British Museum and other British institutions. In recent years, it has become clear that some of the soldiers involved in the expedition carried out to punish the kingdom for an earlier encounter that ended in British deaths also kept objects for themselves, leaving a gaping hole in Nigeria's art history. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Shane Gillis was dropped from the "Saturday Night Live" cast on Monday, just a few days after he had been named to it, because of offensive remarks that came to light. Shane Gillis, a comedian named last week to the "Saturday Night Live" cast before videos surfaced in which he used slurs and offensive language, will not be joining the show, the program announced on Monday. "After talking with Shane Gillis, we have decided that he will not be joining 'S.N.L.,'" a spokesperson for the show said in a statement on behalf of Lorne Michaels, the show's creator and longtime executive producer. "We want 'S.N.L.' to have a variety of voices and points of view within the show, and we hired Shane on the strength of his talent as a comedian and his impressive audition for 'S.N.L.,'" the statement continued. " The language he used is offensive, hurtful and unacceptable. We are sorry that we did not see these clips earlier, and that our vetting process was not up to our standard." Gillis, 31, came under fire just a few hours after he and two new cast members one of them Bowen Yang, the show's first Chinese American were named for the coming season. A journalist unearthed a video of a podcast in which Gillis used a slur in referring to Chinese people and mocked a caricature accent of a Chinese person speaking English. In another podcast recording, Gillis used homophobic slurs to describe Judd Apatow, the comedy filmmaker and producer, and the comedian Chris Gethard. In a Twitter post that night, he called himself "a comedian who pushes boundaries" and said that in comedy, "you're going to find a lot of bad misses." He also issued something of a nonapology apology: "I'm happy to apologize to anyone who's actually offended by anything I've said." On Friday, Vice News uncovered another podcast in which Gillis used the slur, this time prefaced by the word "Jew," in referring to the Democratic presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Senator Bernie Sanders. Later in the podcast, which was broadcast this past May, he acknowledged the toxicity of his language, describing himself and others he was bantering with as "fat ugly idiots promoting hate." After "S.N.L." announced his departure, Gillis said in a statement posted to his Twitter account that he respected the show's decision and understood that his presence there "would be too much of a distraction." While "Saturday Night Live" frequently makes changes to its cast from year to year, and has sometimes dropped multiple performers from its roster in efforts to revitalize itself creatively, it does not often cut cast members before the end of a season, let alone before their names are even announced once in the opening credits. Gillis, a native of Mechanicsburg, Pa., has been a rising star in comedy, performing in major clubs in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Two clubs in Philadelphia, however, said they had stopped working with him because of jokes that were, as one of the clubs put it, "racist, misogynistic, xenophobic and homophobic." "Saturday Night Live" acknowledged in its statement on Monday that its vetting of new talent had fallen short in this instance, but the program did not explain what, if any, measures it had taken to survey Gillis's past professional history or online footprint before he was hired. The controversy surrounding Gillis reflects an ongoing debate in comedy over whether performers should be punished for offensive language in their acts and on social media. Andrew Yang himself, while condemning the remarks, said he did not believe Gillis should be fired, and offered to "sit down and talk" with him. (On Monday, Yang said on Twitter: "Shane Gillis reached out. Looks like we will be sitting down together soon.") | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
On Sunday, the day of the Italian referendum that resulted in the announced resignation of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, Michelle Obama wore an Italian dress to the Kennedy Center Honors, a.k.a. "Washington's cultural event of the year." Specifically, she wore a Gucci dress. Coincidence? It's possible. But consider this: It was the first time she had worn a non American designer to the event in the eight years she had attended. Such a choice is not casual, especially on an evening watched by millions, not just because of the paparazzi photos that come out of appearances by such names as the honorees Al Pacino, the Eagles and James Taylor, but because it is broadcast on television later in the year. (The 2015 awards were viewed by 7.5 million people; the 2014 ones, 9.25 million.) And because her choices throughout the two terms of her husband's administration have been watched with increasing intensity ("Michelle Obama stuns in XX" is the typical headline post Honors ceremony), and this is her last ceremony as first lady. And because this is only the second time she has worn Gucci, the first being in September on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," when she wore a vintage map print dress. And though the first lady has largely broken out of the Made in America box, she has done so primarily by using clothes to convey cross border diplomatic messages. For example, at the administration's last state dinner, held in October for yes Mr. Renzi, she wore Versace. He wore Armani. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
CALDWELL, N.J. Political reporters were calling, crediting them with helping to bring down Republican legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Rachel Maddow made them the stars of a segment on her show, chronicling how they had grown into a "legitimate political movement" that pushed their congressman, the chairman of the influential Appropriations Committee, to come out against the bill hours before his party's leadership decided to pull it without a vote. So now, members of the group calling itself NJ 11th for Change gathered in an upstairs party room of a tavern here to celebrate. As waitresses pushed through the crowd to distribute beers, Debra Caplan, one of the group's founders, stood on a table and raised a glass. "We did something big; we didn't think it could be done," she said. "Here's to the future of us doing the impossible." Someone cried out from the crowd: "Debra! What are we going to win next?" That is the critical question facing hundreds of similar groups across the country as they seek to create a lasting political force that could return majorities in the House, and even the Senate, to Democrats. While much of the attention and finger pointing from President Trump has focused on the role of conservatives in opposing the health bill, small liberal activist groups like the NJ 11th were also crucial in killing the repeal, by pressuring moderates back home in their districts. This could be the Scott Brown moment for the young movement that has risen up to oppose the agenda of Mr. Trump and the Republican led Congress, providing the taste of power that Tea Party groups got in 2010 when they helped elect Mr. Brown, a Massachusetts Republican, to a Senate seat that had been held for decades by a Democrat. That victory propelled a wave of conservative victories in the midterm elections later that year. But for liberal groups, the swift success in health care removes a visceral, unifying issue. And with the midterms much farther off than they were after Mr. Brown's victory in a special election 20 months away, not 10 many resistance group leaders worry about sustaining their momentum into 2018. "The nightmare scenario is two years from now it's, 'Hey, remember when we all did activism?'" said Ezra Levin, a co founder of Indivisible, a group that wrote a guide to resisting the Trump agenda and is helping to nurture resistance groups. "There is always a fear that there's a ton of energy now, but these are not professional organizers. They are doing this in their free time nights, weekends, sick days," he said. "This is tough work to do." While the Tea Party united largely around one goal for seven years abolishing the health law it derisively called Obamacare members of the new resistance have a host of next priorities: pushing an investigation of ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, getting Mr. Trump to release his tax returns, and reversing his executive orders to restrict immigration and loosen environmental protections. "People care about these issues, but it's not as direct as 'I'm not sure I'll be able to go to my doctor,' or 'I'm not sure this procedure I was going to have next month I'll still be able to have,'" said Vanessa Williamson, a co author, with Theda Skocpol, of "The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism." "When the costs are not so immediate," she said, "it's hard to mobilize people." Many of the groups started out organizing demonstrations at town hall style meetings during the February congressional recess. These encounters produced arresting video of angry constituents facing down their elected representatives. But for the Easter recess, which starts this week, there is less focus on town halls. Instead, many groups have already moved on to developing strategies for the 2018 elections. Groups like this one in New Jersey are forming political action committees and raising money. Others, just as the Tea Party groups did, are beginning to train their members on how to go door to door and use data to get out the vote. In some districts where Republicans won their seats narrowly, several Democrats are already lined up to run. To be as effective as the Tea Party, Ms. Williamson said, resistance groups will have to focus on politics and policies within their own states as well. While the Tea Party got a lot of attention for the energy it brought to congressional elections, it was also effective on the state level, particularly as a force blocking Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Guy Potucek, who works for a military contractor and organized an Indivisible group in Virginia's 10th District, represented by Barbara Comstock, said his group had held a training session to help members get involved in the Virginia elections this year. "I don't want them jumping all the way to 2018," he said. Ms. Comstock was among the Republicans who announced late in the game that she would not support the party's health bill. "It energized us even more," Mr. Potucek said. "It felt like, 'That was easy.'" He has been sending out "action alerts" to the 3,500 members of the group's email list, asking them to post on social media and write and call their representatives on a different talking point each week. This week, it was pushing legislators to expand Medicaid. (On Wednesday, the state's legislature voted against expansion.) He is also asking members to write letters to the editors of local papers about Ms. Comstock's voting record. "The more we can over time show how her voting record is tied to Donald Trump, we can make it easier for the eventual Democrat running against her," Mr. Potucek said. As many as 10 candidates are considering running against Ms. Comstock, he said; one has declared, and shown up to meetings to seek support, and four others have reached out. In California's 49th District, where Representative Darrell E. Issa, a Republican, won re election by less than 1 percent of the vote in November, leaders of a dozen resistance groups have organized a training session for early next month to write scripts that members can use when talking to neighbors about the importance of the midterms. They are creating databases of voters that the new activists can use to host pizza parties or coffees, and to track door to door visits as they canvass for the midterms, in which two Democrats, including the one who lost narrowly in November, have already signaled an intention to run. Their first rally after Republicans pulled their health care bill was smaller, drawing only about 150. But new faces turned out, including Ted Noble, a 73 year old Vietnam veteran from Wayne, who said he was concerned about Mr. Trump's budget. "We got to take care of people who need help," Mr. Noble said. He teared up as the group began to gather for the walk to Mr. Frelinghuysen's office. "I think it's phenomenal what you're doing," he told an organizer. Last week, the group organized a bus trip to Washington. The evening before, it got another small victory: Mr. Frelinghuysen, at long last, had agreed to a meeting. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Cree Bautista's application for next year's freshman class at New York University isn't due until Jan. 1, but Cree, an incoming high school senior from Pflugerville, Tex., was not taking any chances. Just after 12:01 a.m. on Aug. 1 when this year's version of the Common Application, the passport to N.Y.U. and more than 400 other institutions, was first posted on the Web Cree sat down at the computer in his parents' bedroom and began filling out the form. The room was dark, because they were sleeping. After listing his extracurricular activities (including cross country and show choir), tallying his Advanced Placement courses (seven) and putting a final polish on his essay, he pushed the "send" button. It was about 3:30 a.m. Never mind that he had never visited New York, let alone New York University. This, he said, was his "dream school," and he was determined "to be the first to apply." As it turned out, Cree, 17, was the first applicant for the class of 2015, not just at N.Y.U. but to any institution that accepts the Common App, including those of the Ivy League. By Tuesday he had plenty of company: Nearly 1,000 applications had been filed by students to colleges Harvard, Miami of Ohio and Vanderbilt, among many others a nearly fourfold increase over the comparable period last year. But as more students each year seek to get the earliest possible jump on the nerve racking process of applying to college, as if they were securing tickets to a soon to be sold out rock concert, the deans of admission at N.Y.U. and elsewhere are sounding a cautionary note. They say that there is no reason to apply five months in advance, let alone two, and that they are far more inclined to put a premium on thoughtfulness and contemplation than speed. Asked when a member of his staff might first see Cree's application, Shawn Abbott, assistant vice president for undergraduate admissions at N.Y.U., said it would probably not be until mid October at the earliest. "We won't even download it until months from now," Mr. Abbott said. "It's not a horse race." While Cree is applying to N.Y.U. in the regular decision round, several deans said Mr. Abbott's plea for deliberation and patience was also good advice for those applying to selective colleges through their early application programs. For example, the deadline for students to file early action applications to the University of Michigan which is accepting the Common Application for the first time this year is Nov. 1. Asked if filing well in advance of that deadline would give an applicant a leg up, Ted Spencer, the longtime executive director of undergraduate admissions at Michigan, said no. "As long as you pay attention to the deadline, you're going to be in good shape," Mr. Spencer said. Rob Killion, executive director of the Common Application, said he was particularly unnerved by the flood of early submissions through the organization's Web site because he feared that students were rushing their essays. (This year's Common Application was actually posted several weeks later than last year's not as a prod to get applicants to file later, but instead to allow high schools extra time to send final documents before the new year begins.) Cree said he felt he was as ready as he would ever be. He said the essay that he submitted in answer to the application's array of broad questions including "Discuss some issue of personal, local, national or international concern and its importance to you" was actually drawn from a paper he worked on last semester in his junior year English class. Titled "It's Not a Phase," his essay begins: "I grew up in the same neighborhood, in the same house, in the same bedroom, for 10 years. Throughout that decade, I grew into the person I am today, changing who I thought I was just about every five seconds. As I came to terms with what was on the inside, my parents came to realize that no matter what, I was still their son." Cree, who hopes to study music at N.Y.U., will not have his application considered until his teachers have submitted their recommendations, his school has sent along his grades and the College Board has sent an official record of his SAT scores. But Mr. Abbott of N.Y.U. who spoke only in general about early filers, and not Cree in particular said he hoped that other students would wait to file their applications until they have actually begun their senior years, and can let the colleges know how things are going so far, whether in class or out. Cree, whose parents are both teachers and who hopes to also apply to three Texas colleges that have not yet posted their applications, said he was just glad to have this one done and out of the way. After essentially pulling an all nighter, he was calm and fell immediately asleep. "I was exhausted," he said. "I just kind of collapsed." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, teammates on the Mercedes Benz Formula One team, finished one two in the Malaysian Grand Prix Sunday, continuing the marque's dominance in the early stages of the battle for the 2014 Formula One title. Hamilton, the pole position starter, led from green light to checkered flag, at which point he was more than 17 seconds ahead of his teammate. Rosberg, who won the season opening round in Australia this month, now has a sizable lead in driving championship points. Third place went to Sebastian Vettel, the defending series champion, who was driving for Red Bull. He was more than seven seconds behind Rosberg. Vettel's teammate, Daniel Ricciardo, had fourth place well in hand until he lost a wheel after his final pit stop. Instead, Fernando Alonso, from the Ferrari team, picked up the position; Nico Hulkenberg took fifth for Force India. The next stop on the circuit will be in Bahrain on April 6. Kurt Busch gave his new team, Haas Automation, its maiden victory Sunday in the 500 lap Nascar Sprint Cup race at Martinsville Speedway in Virginia. Tony Stewart's business partner, Gene Haas, decided to form a separate offshoot from the three car Stewart Haas operation for 2014 and hired Busch in a somewhat unexpected move. The team has been competitive from the start and has generally given the Stewart Haas entries a run for their money. Stewart, who is still rounding into form after missing the end of last season with a severely broken leg, finished 17th Sunday. Busch took the lead with 11 laps to go and then held off Jimmie Johnson, who has won at Martinsville many times, by two car lengths. Dale Earnhardt Jr. was third, followed by Joey Logano and Marcos Ambrose. Busch, ending a personal 83 race winless streak, survived a bit of door banging earlier in the race with Brad Keselowski, after a mix up in the pits caused tempers to flare. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Ms. Meyers, 53, is a partner at the law firm Fried Frank, specializing in land use. She represents several large developers, including the Related Companies, Forest City Ratner and the Rudin Management Company. Before joining Fried Frank in 2003, Ms. Meyers served as general counsel for the New York City Planning Department. Q. Tell me a little about what a land use lawyer does. A. I represent developers in a few different ways: they either are looking at or buying properties. They're assessing the development potential of properties, and so we help them in trying to figure out what they're acquiring or what they have, what additional development opportunities they have and how they might create a better asset out of the properties that they have. I work a lot in actually undertaking land use changes and approvals for projects. Q. You were a practicing architect. Why did you not stay in that field? A. I love architecture, and I like every architect who I work with. What I was interested in was much more how a building fits within its context, how it contributes to the infrastructure of the city. I'm a little less interested in the details of the building itself. Q. How many projects are you working on? A. When I do the list, I end up with 15 to 18 to 22, depending on the day. There certainly was a slowdown after the financial crisis, but we've been progressively busier and busier. We represented them on the original designation. What they are acquiring or will be acquiring at that time were two very large properties, some of which hadn't been zoned yet. They were planning on doing about eight million square feet, primarily residential development, on a site that was zoned for a quarter of that and only for manufacturing and commercial uses. We created an entire section of the zoning resolution that would allow for the property to be rezoned and to be developed. Q. How about Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn? A. It was actually a state project that wasn't subject to zoning, but because it wasn't subject to zoning we actually had to create a different design framework so effectively creating design guidelines for the overall build out of the project, and continuing to work with them on the implementation of the project. It's another one of those projects that's going to last forever. They're working on the first residential building, and that's actually under construction. They're doing it as a modular building, so they're potentially transforming the way that buildings are built in the city. Q. Did that cause complications? A. From a lawyer's standpoint, I was pretty happy that we developed a framework that was flexible enough to go from traditional development to modular development without having to change the basic design structure. Q. There have been complications in other projects, like the mixed use redevelopment at St. Vincent's hospital in the West Village. A. This is a project with the Rudin family, and we represented them through the land use process. It was a very specific and detailed approval. We needed a series of special permits and rezoning for the area. That was a project in a landmark district. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
An unmanned rocket carrying equipment and supplies for the International Space Station reached orbit on Saturday morning, but an audacious attempt to land the rocket's first stage on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean was unsuccessful. With a brilliant burst of flames, the Falcon 9 rocket, built and operated by Space Exploration Technologies, better known as SpaceX, roared into the predawn sky from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. "Orbit is nominal," George Diller, the launch commentator, said on NASA Television about 15 minutes later. "Nothing is amiss." It was the fifth mission under a 1.6 billion contract with NASA. The cargo capsule on top of the rocket, with more than 5,000 pounds of payload, is to arrive at the space station on Monday. But Elon Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX, wrote on Twitter that the attempt to land the first stage on a platform in the ocean, in the hope that it could be used again, failed. "Close, but no cigar this time," Mr. Musk wrote. After the first stage separated, its engines fired again to turn it around and bring it into a controlled descent. SpaceX had tried similar maneuvers on three earlier flights and twice had slowed the 14 story tall rocket stage to hover over the ocean before it toppled over and broke apart. This time, SpaceX placed a platform in the ocean. The company also added "grid fins" to the side of the rocket to steer it precisely to the 300 foot by 170 foot platform, about 200 miles east of Jacksonville, Fla. Mr. Musk had guessed that the chance of success on the first try would be 50 50 at best. SpaceX staff members observed the landing attempt from a safe distance away on a second ship. In the early morning darkness, SpaceX did not get a good video recording of the landing attempt, Mr. Musk said. "Will piece it together from telemetry and ... actual pieces," Mr. Musk wrote. If recovering the first stages of rockets like the Falcon 9 proves viable, the cost of future launches could be greatly reduced. The cargo capsule is scheduled to arrive at the space station on Monday around 6 a.m. The station's robotic arm will then grab onto the capsule and swing it to a docking port. The launch had been scheduled for Dec. 19, but was postponed to Jan. 6 after a test firing of the rocket engines was cut short. The Jan. 6 attempt was called off with less than 90 seconds left in the countdown because of a problem with the steering mechanism on the second stage. The cargo includes the Cloud Aerosol Transport System, an instrument that is to measure the distribution of clouds, dust, smoke and other particles in the atmosphere. The information will aid computer models of the planet's changing climate. The capsule is also carrying passengers flatworms and fruit flies. The two species are well studied organisms on Earth, and scientists are hoping to understand how the biological processes change in the absence of gravity. Also aboard are student experiments to replace those that were destroyed when a cargo rocket built by the Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., exploded in October. NASA hired SpaceX and Orbital to ferry supplies to the space station, part of an effort to reduce costs and spur the private space industry. Until Orbital can resume flights it plans to launch the next two missions using a competitor's rocket, the Atlas 5, from the United Launch Alliance NASA will have to rely on SpaceX. The Russians continue to launch Progress cargo ships to the space station. After a month at the space station, the SpaceX capsule will return to Earth, parachuting to the Pacific Ocean with experiments, equipment and trash. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
In the middling family drama "Team Marco," 11 year old Marco (Owen Vaccaro) lives with his mother, Anna (Anastasia Ganias), in Staten Island. His father, Richie (Louis Cancelmi), left them, going west to chase the technological gold rush. Richie talks only about tech and coding, and he encourages Marco's obsession with video games. Marco in turn rejects offers of friendship, hates the outdoors and is as absent from his own social life as his father is from Marco's life. Everything changes when Marco's grandfather moves in. Nonno (Anthony Patellis) is an old timer who springs out of bed with the sunrise to play bocce matches with friends. At first, Marco sniffs at Nonno's lust for living. But eventually, as Nonno introduces the boy to sunshine and rainbow cookies and games that can be enjoyed without a console, Marco's disdain melts away. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Take the first step into "Unseen Oceans," the new exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, and you are bound to be tickled and enticed by the appearance of sand and surf beneath your feet. It's only video projected onto the floor, a simple enough technique, but I was sorely tempted to take off my shoes and wiggle my toes in the illusory foam. If I were to bring little ones to the exhibition, I'd keep an eye on their footwear. Promise them that if they keep walking there will be real sand that they can touch with their hands. The exhibition is, of course, about hidden ocean wonders, but it features more than the usual suspects of blue whales and frighteningly enlarged microscopic plankton. The technology that allows scientists to uncover what the museum is showing its visitors is emphasized as well. That researcher, Kelly J. Benoit Bird, is featured in one of the "Meet the Scientist" nooks. One of the smaller wonders is presented in a vastly enlarged model along with its horrific and compelling life story. The creature is Phronima, a miniature carnivore ranging from half an inch to almost two inches long. When it is time to reproduce, a female Phronima bores into the body of a salp, a gelatinous translucent sea animal, and hollows it out into a barrel shape that it inhabits with its young. It drifts along, drawing food from seawater, overseeing its brood until they are ready to leave the nest, or barrel, or salp remnant. The female looks enough like the monster in the "Alien" movies that people have speculated that this scrap of zooplankton inspired its design. For those who prefer beauty to horror, vast blue whales circle a wall screen in full size video animations. And if you like weird and appealing, the Mola mola, or ocean sunfish, makes a similar appearance. Yet, as this show proves, there is always more to discover. Anyone who loves the water knows the thrill of breaking the surface to enter a different world. And snorkeling or scuba diving reveals all sorts of life that reacts to you with near indifference. If you dive at night, for instance, and shine a light on a reef, there are stunning displays of fluorescence. And if you go to great depths you find even more. Scientists like John Sparks, who curated the exhibition, are now finding that these phenomena are even more common than originally thought. One section focuses on fluorescence, found so far in more than 200 species of fish. Even sea turtles display it. Here, there are live animals showing off their colors eels, scorpion fish, pipefish, green patterned chain catsharks and red seahorses. Older children can sit in a model submersible, or play a kind of video game in which they drive the submarine around the ocean floor. And younger ones can actually reshape that floor in a sandbox lit to make some of the sand seem beneath the ocean surface. You can raise islands or destroy them. Some of the technical leaps that allow investigation of the oceans are high tech, like the submersibles, spheres with large acrylic windows in which you can dive thousands of feet deep. Advances in sonar and lasers allow scientists to better map the ocean floor, the details of which are largely unknown and unexplored. Parts of the ocean are so remote it is hard to imagine them. The Pacific's Mariana Trench, the deepest part of any ocean, is in the hadal zone (for Hades, the underworld). The deepest part of the trench, seven miles down, is called the Challenger Deep. Only three humans have visited it, fewer than have been to the Moon. The ocean that is glimpsed in this show is largely still to be explored, but, as the exhibit notes at the end, it is threatened in many ways by climate change and other environmental insults. The ocean is becoming more acidic, which threatens some plankton. Warmer seas and acidity are implicated in killing the algae that live with corals, creating bleached, dead reefs. Overfishing threatens many species. All the more reason to learn as much as possible about the oceans now. Although I am usually partial to biological wonders, my favorite part of this exhibit was the technology under development, such as the soft fingerlike grippers that researchers are developing so scientists in a submersible or remotely operating one can take hold of objects and living things without damaging them. This particular project is a joint effort of Harvard and the City University of New York. The group that does this work is called the Squishy Finger/Soft Robotics for Delicate Deep sea Marine Biological Interactions team. The title itself is an unseen wonder. My favorite story of technological innovation in the exhibition involves attaching tags to sea creatures to track their movements. Attaching such tags always presents challenges, like how to get them to stick and not interfere with water flow as a whale swims. But what about tagging a jellyfish? Researchers tried quite a few different ways to stick a tag on amorphous, fragile jelly. The solution was an inexpensive glue that veterinarians use to help small cuts on animals heal. According to the show, the battery for such a tag is "now the size of a piece of Trident gum." Of course, I have to say that I really liked sitting in the model submersible and playing the submersible video game too. It's a good thing my children are older now. It would be bad enough to have my kids be the ones to tell me to put my shoes on. How embarrassing if a museum official had to order me to give the kids a turn. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Scientists reported on Wednesday that they had discovered evidence of an extinct branch of humans whose ancestors split from our own a million years ago. The evidence of these humans was not a fossil. Instead, the researchers found pieces of their DNA in the genomes of living people from West Africa. Arun Durvasula and Sriram Sankararaman, two geneticists at the University of California, Los Angeles, described this so called ghost archaic population in the journal Science Advances. Their discovery may shed light on human genetic diversity in Africa, which has been hard to chart until now because the fossil record is sparse. The new study builds on a decade of research into ancient DNA extracted from human fossils. In 2010, a team of researchers published the first genome of a Neanderthal. Later, they found DNA from fossils in a Siberian cave called Denisova. That genetic material belonged to a second lineage of humans, called Denisovans, who proved to be closely related to Neanderthals. The ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans split from our shared ancestor about 600,000 years ago, quite likely in Africa. They expanded into Eurasia, where the Neanderthals moved west while the Denisovans moved east. By roughly 40,000 years ago, both populations became extinct. As that occurred, modern humans evolved in Africa. They later expanded into Eurasia, where they interbred with both Neanderthals and Denisovans. Today, all living humans carry some Neanderthal DNA. In addition, Aboriginal Australians as well as people in New Guinea and neighboring regions carry Denisovan DNA. For the new study, Mr. Durvasula and Dr. Sankararaman carried out a large scale comparison of genetic diversity in living humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans. The researchers tracked how new variants of genes arose in each branch of humans. For the most part, the data fit the current thinking about human evolution. But in a few populations in West Africa, such as the Yoruba of Nigeria and the Mende of Sierra Leone, some of the DNA contained variants not found in other living humans, or even in Neanderthals or Denisovans. "What it told us was that this was not a simple story," Dr. Sankararaman said. A few percent of the DNA in the living West Africans seemed to have arisen in a distant branch of humans that were not Homo sapiens, or other species in our genus known from their genes. Mr. Durvasula and Dr. Sankararaman's model suggests that this ghost archaic population split as long as a million years ago from the lineage that led to modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans. They estimated that the ancestors of West Africans and the ghost archaic population interbred roughly 50,000 years ago intriguingly, around the time that modern humans in Eurasia also interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans. The scientists could not say what species of human the ghost archaic population belonged to. The fossil record in Africa offers only a few hints. A million years ago, Africa was home to a species known as Homo erectus. The oldest fossils of Homo sapiens date back 300,000 years, in Morocco. But researchers have also found a remarkable range of other fossils from our genus in Africa during that period of time. One of the most intriguing is a human skull dating back just 11,200 years ago at a site in Nigeria called Iwo Eleru. The first researchers who studied the remains linked them to living West Africans. But in 2011, a team of scientists took a more careful look at the Iwo Eleru skull and concluded it was an intermediate form between modern humans and Homo erectus. Mr. Durvasula and Dr. Sankararaman speculate that fossils like Iwo Eleru might belong to the archaic ghost population. "It is indeed possible," said Isabelle Crevecoeur, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Bordeaux in France. But she cautioned that scientists still needed to learn a lot about the physical and genetic diversity of Africans before jumping to such a drastic conclusion. "I would favor a conservative approach," she said. The best test of the new study would ultimately be to get DNA out of a fossil, like the one at Iwo Eleru, and find a match to the segments identified by the scientists. Scientists have yet to succeed at that effort, because DNA quickly degrades in the tropics. But scientists have recently managed to get DNA from modern human remains in Africa dating back thousands of years, so there's reason for hope. "That's the gold standard," Dr. Sankararaman said. "I can't wait for that to happen." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Wall Street likes gridlock. That claim has been made for decades. When Washington is so thoroughly absorbed in political posturing and sniping that it can't manage to interfere with Wall Street, the stock market is free to get on with the real business of America: making money. That's the logic, anyway. It makes some sense, but there's a problem with it: Strictly speaking, the numbers don't support it not if you use an institutional definition of Washington gridlock. By this definition, gridlock is a political alignment in which the president belongs to one party while the other major party controls at least one house of Congress. We've been living with that kind of gridlock for almost four years, and we have two more years of it ahead. "We've had gridlock, and as a result of the midterm elections, we will still have gridlock," said Howard Rosenthal, a political scientist at New York University. President Obama, a Democrat, has shared power with Republicans since they took control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections. And for the next two years, because of the midterms this month, Republicans will control the Senate as well. But certain fundamentals persist, Professor Rosenthal said: "It will still be an extremely polarized Congress and it will still be unlikely that very much important legislation will be enacted in Washington." What has gridlock actually meant for the stock market? Stocks have been on a tear since the 2010 midterms, but if you go back further in history, it's hard to demonstrate much of a connection between institutional gridlock and stock performance. At my request, Paul Hickey, a founder of the Bespoke Investment Group, looked at the Dow Jones industrial average through every term of Congress since the start of the 20th century, using the institutional definition of divided power. Over all, he found that during gridlocked years since 1901, the Dow gained just 4.06 percent, annualized. That compares with an average of 6.27 percent for all years and 7.88 percent for years without gridlock defined as years when either the Democrats or the Republicans controlled the White House and all of Congress. In short, based on those numbers, gridlock has been a hindrance for the stock market. Yet plenty of very astute people often assert the opposite. For example, Edward Yardeni, an independent economist and strategist who writes a trenchant newsletter for clients, wrote on Nov. 10, after the midterms: "Gridlock has been bullish for stocks in the past, and should remain so." I called him about that statement, and he readily acknowledged that it wasn't based on statistics. "It's not something you can prove with numbers," he said. "I think it's been true in certain circumstances, and is likely to remain true now." In his commentary, he was careful to differentiate between two types of institutional gridlock: benign inaction resulting from the checks and balances embodied in the Constitution, and self induced crisis, which unsettles the stock market. Gridlock will be good for the market in the next two years, he said, "as long as it doesn't lead to another debt ceiling crisis and a government shutdown." In a similar vein, Ethan Harris, co head of global economics research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said that while we would still face gridlock in January, "in some respects we're in a much better spot than we were, say, two years ago, in the sense that we don't face the same superdramatic deadlines on the calendar." In contrast to the situation in late 2012, the country is not facing a dreaded "fiscal cliff," with the threat of major contractions in government spending and of rising tax rates all coming in a very short period. Mr. Harris said: "The good thing is that I don't see that kind of brinkmanship occurring in the next two years, because it was very unpopular when it happened before and some of those battles are over now. The bad thing is that it's hard to see anything very positive coming out of Washington." Ed Clissold, the United States market strategist at the Ned Davis Research Group, pointed out that budget cuts and tax increases negotiated in Congress in past years resulted in a major fiscal contraction. "That's over now," he said. "With any luck, the fiscal winds now will be helping the economy and the stock market for the next few years. In that sense, the prospect of gridlock now is good news." In fact, periods of extreme conflict in Washington over the last several years were associated with brief stretches of high market volatility. But stalemate has been the dominant mood and the stock market has prospered. During the years of institutional gridlock since January 2011, the market has had an annualized return of 11.22 percent. That institutional alignment with a Democratic president, a Democratic Senate and a Republican House, has occurred only that one time since 1901, Mr. Hickey said, and it has produced the best annualized return of any political alignment in the entire period. When you slice and dice the numbers so finely, differentiating between gridlock under Democratic and Republican presidents, the case for gridlock becomes more interesting. With gridlock, market returns have been great when a Democratic president has served along with at least one Republican controlled house in Congress. But they have been mediocre, at best, when a Republican has been president under gridlock. For example, in periods like the one to begin in January those with a Democratic president and Republican control of both houses the market has gained 10.32 percent, annualized. That's been the second best political alignment, as far as stock market returns go. For all combinations of gridlock under a Democratic president, the annualized gain was 10.58 percent. Under a Republican president with gridlock, it was only 1.37 percent. Why? It could be coincidence. But Mr. Hickey surmised that "the market likes a Democratic C.E.O. and a Republican C.F.O." The idea is that in general, the market has prospered under Democratic presidents, but prefers that their spending be curtailed by Republicans in Congress. Keith T. Poole, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia, who, like Professor Rosenthal, is an expert on political polarization, said people on Wall Street might have personal reasons for liking gridlock. Rising political polarization in Congress correlates closely with rising income inequality in America, he said. "We're now approaching levels of inequality we haven't seen since the Gilded Age," he said. This has been accompanied by disproportionately high earnings on Wall Street, he observed. With a highly polarized, Republican dominated Congress likely to be bickering with a Democratic president in his last two years in office, he said, major tax and regulatory legislation to restore a more equitable balance is unlikely. "Wall Street is getting very rich," he said. "And with gridlock, that trend is likely to continue. It's no wonder that Wall Street likes gridlock." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
LOS ANGELES After a brutal six months marked by creative retrenchments and two failed merger attempts, DreamWorks Animation on Thursday reported a first quarter loss of 54.8 million. The boutique studio, based in Glendale, Calif., reported a per share loss of 64 cents for the quarter, which ended on March 31. In the same period a year earlier, it had a loss of 42.9 million, or 51 cents a share. Analysts expected a loss in the most recent quarter of roughly 45 cents. DreamWorks Animation was hurt by a hefty restructuring charge; increased costs at AwesomenessTV, a YouTube based entertainment business aimed at teenage girls; and continuing fallout from "The Penguins of Madagascar," which flopped late last year. The bulk of revenue came from premium television reruns of "How to Train Your Dragon 2," which was released last summer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
BRINGING vintage cars to the parks, estates and golf course fairways where they can flaunt their beauty and compete for honors in the summer's many concours d'elegance events is a well rehearsed process. But as museums have assembled more exhibitions that showcase the artistry and historical significance of automobiles, the task of putting vehicles into public spaces often in the center of a busy city has become infinitely more complex. Cars, especially prewar classics, can be huge. And while museums are accustomed to dealing with large artworks, the vehicles present challenges on another scale entirely. Placing 16 cars inside the Portland Art Museum for the "Allure of the Automobile" exhibition, which opens this weekend, has been the job of Donald Urquhart, director of collections management for the museum. "These cars present problems, not the least of which is getting into the building," he said. "Our doors aren't as big as some of these cars." Mr. Urquhart is the man responsible for the logistics of maneuvering the rare, important and valuable cars into the museum's galleries for the exhibition. Displaying cars as art took a big step forward in popularity in 1951 with the "Eight Automobiles" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. More recently, cars from the collection of the clothing designer Ralph Lauren were displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2005 and at the Louvre in Paris this spring. The "Allure of the Automobile" opened at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in 2010. With a few changes, the same exhibition has come to Portland. It was not easy to persuade the owners to lend their cars to a museum at all let alone twice. When Brian Ferriso, executive director of the Portland Art Museum, approached the High Museum about bringing the show across the country, he was told that getting the cars had been difficult. But because Mr. Ferriso was approaching the exhibition as a study in industrial design, most of the lenders agreed to a second stint. "I think they look at these objects as works of art rather than merely technological wonders," he said of the owners. "Car museums contextualize the automobiles to the degree that they're very much in the pantheon of auto history. Now we're putting these in the history of 20th century industrial design." The lenders also see the cars as art to be driven. "Working with lenders is different than borrowing a painting or sculpture from somebody," Mr. Urquhart said. "The lenders have different relationships with cars they drive. One lender said, 'I can see this as art in an art museum for 90 days, but as soon as you give it back, I'm driving that car.' " One car that appeared in Atlanta was withdrawn, the Dodge Firearrow III concept car. The guest curator, Ken Gross, formerly director of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, was able to procure a 1954 Plymouth Explorer design study, sister to the Firearrow, from the Petersen in time for the show's setup days last week. Mr. Urquhart said he welcomed the challenge of bringing in the cars. "In every exhibition, you start with an e mail picture," he said. "Then you walk around carrying this 6 inch scale model. When I saw the Sting Ray the first time, I knew it was a 15 foot car, but it looked like it was 30 feet long." Mr. Urquhart and his team at the museum created scale models of the three galleries that would house the cars for the summer and a digital fly through for a sense of the space. Model cars and scale photos pasted to foam backing were placed in the architectural model to visualize the exhibition, arrange it thematically and to make sure the cars would fit in the galleries. Let's follow the 1961 Ferrari 250 GT racecar, a class winner at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, into the museum as an example. When it arrived last Monday morning, it was driven onto a lift at the rear of the semi truck it shared with five other cars in the show. The lift was lowered to street level, where a section of parking spaces had been rented from the city by the museum for the nine delivery trucks that would be dropping off the show's cars for two days. Webb Farrer, who has been ushering rare and priceless cars to exhibitions for 30 years, hopped in, started the engine and drove the car up two plywood ramps, over the sidewalk, past the museum cafe, through the sculpture garden and to the entrance, where the doors and jamb had been removed. The silver Ferrari was pushed into the building, past the ticket counter and through the interior doors to the first gallery, where it would be positioned just behind the '61 Aston Martin DB4GT Zagato. Here, the wheels were raised onto special rolling dollies so it could be moved as if it were on skates to line up with blue tape on the platform in front of it. The dollies were removed and the car was pushed slowly onto the platform. Mr. Farrer cited the two biggest, heaviest cars in the show a 1937 Hispano Suiza and a 1933 Pierce Arrow as the hardest to maneuver into place. The Hispano Suiza had to be slid onto its platform sideways because there wasn't room to line it up and roll it on. The Hispano Suiza was so wide it nearly scraped a metal artwork in the sculpture garden. The blue gloved guide who was near the right fender had part of his hand pinched between car and art, luckily with little injury to himself and none to either object. Once the cars were in place, the museum had a new aspect of curation to consider: car maintenance. The batteries, gasoline and oil must be tended to, and the museum had to be respectful of the city's fire code. And there are the little things to remember, like which car has a small, slow leak in the tire that will need to be reinflated all summer. Some of the cars leak fluids when left to sit for months. Each car also comes with its own care and feeding instructions, per the lender's preferences. "When you rent a car, it comes with a photograph, and you mark the checks and the dents," Mr. Urquhart said. "These come with four page condition reports and photographs and instructions on handling and instructions on maintenance. One lender will say, 'just knock the dust off with a towel,' and the other will send a box of towels with a page of instructions on exactly how to dust." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
The children are played by adult dancers: Little Marie Stahlbaum wears a white bow in her hair and a pink party skirt, and her littler brother Fritz is played by a woman. So we're watching characterizations removed from close realism and yet how vivid, how detailed, it is. Marie and her godfather Drosselmeyer wheel in two huge wrapped boxes; just look at the impetuousness with which Fritz rips off the paper to reveal the dancing dolls inside. The guests are as excited as the children to know what the boxes contain. When the boxes open, dancing dolls emerge: a Barbie doll and a male robot, who start to dance 40 seconds into the video. The Barbie doll has a swaggering dance in which four of her particularly high kicks each perfectly hits a pizzicato note in the music one of the clues to just how tightly connected to the music the rest of the production will be. Above all, though, this doll dance is an ensemble: Watch how everyone onstage reacts differently, some joining in and imitating the dolls, others immediately switching their attention elsewhere. Everyone here has a life. As the party scene shows, the Stahlbaums are a stereotypical American example of the nuclear family, and Mr. Morris sweetly lampoons their mixture of social anxiety and genial affection. The story that follows will blow their world apart and yet it reaffirms their virtues. Mrs. Stahlbaum, laden with la di da airs and graces, needs a drink before her party guests arrive, and yet she truly loves her children. In one of the work's strangest but most touching inventions, she leads the Act II Waltz of the Flowers, a nicely daft fertility ritual that celebrates the happy ending. "The Hard Nut" a comedy that never loses its cartoon quality turns out also to be a love story, and when Marie and the Nutcracker find love with each other, they aren't alone: The music for the Sugar Plum adagio becomes an adagio for the whole world, with characters from every part of the narrative returning. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Back in March, when isolation and homebound boredom were novelties, many Americans fashioned themselves into folksy sourdough bakers. Come June, making bread loaves, cookies and cakes took on new urgency, as professionals banded together to raise funds for organizations that support and defend Black lives. All the while, many artists and amateur bakers had been creating confections at home, not out of practicality or as part of a campaign, but for art's sake. Their cakes, which draw on the absurdist Jell O mold tradition of 1950s homemakers and revel in gross out palettes, reflect ideas about gender, power and respectability. "This practice of feminist baking has a long history in galleries and museums, such as with Martha Rosler's film 'Semiotics of the Kitchen,' which was a way of tending to women's everyday creativity as a form of art making," said Kyla Wazana Tompkins, a gender studies professor at Pomona College who has written about the intersection of food and aesthetics. "I see these new cakes as a continuation of anarchist femme baking," a tradition that skirts the "violent form of perfection," as she put it, in favor of something "aesthetically promiscuous." "During a time where we can't really celebrate birthdays in the same way or go to galleries, the cake sculptures are a nice way to still be able to share," she said. (Many art spaces have since reopened, though with limited capacity.) Unlike the meme in which a pristine pickle or onion is revealed to be a cake, these versions are intentionally imperfect, with their crinkly sometimes crude piped icing and psychedelic color palettes. They're ephemeral, edible art made from scratch and often include a hodgepodge of botanical ingredients or whatever's in the fridge. For instance, Cake For Every Creature recently shared a cake made using black sesame seeds, cornflowers, and white nectarine slices; Cakes4Sport combined a chocolate sumac cocoa cake, finished with orange curd and Aleppo pepper. One could imagine fantastical preppers or a kooky woodland creature might partake of these delightful desserts (the term "goblincore" has been thrown around, and the style has been described by its proponents as a slimier, less refined take on cottagecore). Many of the cakes and their decorative elements, such as Becka Heikkila's sentient, beady eyed fondant characters, take on a folkloric life of their own online. Hyun Jung Jun, a candle maker and artist in Chicago, said that each of her cakes, which she posts as dreamcaketestkitchen, has become "its own landscape" (a recent one featured a sprouting purslane branch) and a way to romanticize escaping to the natural world during a time of profound destruction and loss. "The mini trees have a meaning of growth and taking care of each other in a time like this," she said. "But the larger message I'm seeing in this movement is that people try so hard to be perfect on Instagram. It's nice that these cakes are unpretentious and a rejection of that." This particular style of maximalist ornamentation has inspired several spinoff fan accounts, including hoe cakes . Sara Sarmiento, an illustrator in Miami, created the account last year when she was unemployed. "Now that people are spending more time at home, I've noticed a big increase in submissions," she said. "It's a style of baking that I can see myself more in than others," they said. "In the queer and trans community there's so much history of feeling left out of the narrative. Part of the appeal with these cakes is valuing those offbeat combinations of colors and flavors that not everyone will 'get.'" This style of cake making, they said, "is chaotic but also sensual and beautiful it feels especially relevant to this moment." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The trial of Sutter Health, a sprawling system of 24 hospitals and 5,500 doctors is beginning on Thursday, over accusations that the major hospital group used its dominance in Northern California to stifle competition and force patients to pay higher medical bills. Sutter, the nonprofit hospital group in Sacramento, with operating revenues of 13 billion, has long been viewed as the classic example of a hospital system that got way too big. Its network of hospitals and services enabled it to essentially corner much of the market, corralling insurers and patients so that they couldn't go elsewhere for less expensive or better treatment, according to a lawsuit filed by Xavier Becerra, the California state attorney general. In bringing the case, Mr. Becerra cited research showing people in Northern California paid thousands of dollars more for certain hospital procedures than those in the southern part of the state. While hospital care for a heart attack cost around 25,000 in San Francisco, it was closer to 15,000 in parts of Los Angeles. A doctor's visit for a common cold cost 205 in San Francisco, compared to as low as 122 in Los Angeles. Sutter is hardly the only mega system i n the country. Nearly three quarters of metropolitan areas were considered highly concentrated hospital markets in 2016, according to a recent analysis by the Health Care Cost Institute, a nonprofit group. "Sutter was the first and they figured out how to make this model work," said Glenn Melnick, a health economist at the University of Southern California who consulted with the lawsuit plaintiffs early on. "Other systems have copied the Sutter model," he said. In particular, more doctors' practices are being subsumed by these hospital networks. Looking at national data, the researchers found that nearly half of all primary care doctors and 45 percent of specialists worked for practices owned by a hospital or hospital group in 2018. The trend is mirrored in California. In 2010, about a quarter of physicians, both specialists and primary care doctors, worked in groups owned by hospitals, according to the researchers, who were funded by the California Health Care Foundation, a nonprofit group. By 2018, 52 percent of specialists and 42 percent of primary care doctors were employed by practices owned by a hospital or hospital group. The researchers point to that "market concentration" as a critical factor spurring "the fast growth of prices in California." They describe the gap in health care costs between the northern and southern parts of California, which lead to higher insurance prices paid by employers and individuals. "You see it in the premiums, " said Anthony Wright, the executive director of Health Access, a California consumer group . The researchers found that a midlevel individual policy cost about 3,000 more a year in Sacramento than in Los Angeles in 2019. Frustrated by the increasing clout of systems like Sutter, the lawsuits, including a complaint filed by employers and labor unions, represent a new way for regulators and businesses to try to rein in big hospital groups. Jaime King, a law professor at U.C. Hastings College of the Law, described the approach as "a landmark case." Rather than trying to block a merger over antitrust concerns, the Sutter trial is an attempt to attack the practices of a powerful hospital system. Sutter contends that major insurers are behind the latest efforts to target its system. "The largest health insurance companies in the nation openly and actively support this lawsuit," it said in a statement. They "want to maximize profits by pushing patients into insurance plans that limit their choices and result in surprise billing," it said. The hospital group also disputes the Petris Center's analysis, cited by the California attorney general, showing higher prices in Northern California resulting from big systems, saying it was flawed and based on incomplete data. It went on to describe the researchers as "pro insurer." Pointing to research Petris has done about how increased concentration among insurers leads to higher premiums, the center's director says there is no evidence of any bias in the work. In California, big systems are driving up prices, according to the Petris Center researchers, who examined prices for hospital stays and doctors' visits from 2012 to 2016. In many cases, the care in California was much more expensive than elsewhere in the country. The average price for a normal birth was 9,751, compared with the national average of 7,295, adjusting for wage differences, according to the analysi s . The gap between prices in Northern California and the rest of the state remained high, averaging 24 percent for a normal delivery, after adjusting for wage differences within the state. Unlike big hospital mergers, which come under scrutiny by state and federal officials, physician groups tend to be quietly absorbed. "Most of it is under the radar, and it doesn't get picked up by the regulators," said Richard Scheffler, the director of the Petris Center and one of the study's authors. "It's adding more power to a concentrated market," he said. Big systems view control of physicians' groups as key to determining where patients go for medical care, particularly for lucrative procedures or tests. "One of the biggest drivers in cost and quality is who the doctors work for," said Dr. Zeyad Baker, the chief executive of ProHEALTH Care, a physician group in New York and New Jersey that is owned by Optum, a unit of UnitedHealth Group, the giant health insurer. Optum has become one of the nation's largest employers of physicians. Doctors who work for the big hospital systems are closely monitored, Dr. Baker said. "They are being checked on where they are sending their patients," he said. When a large system owns so many hospitals and physician practices in an area, private insurers have typically not pushed back. "Too many health plans conceded to the idea that if someone had market power, you pay them a lot," said Dr. Farzad Mostashari, a former Obama administration official who is now the chief executive of Aledade, a company that helps independent physicians compete. "You concede and concede and concede." The prices now being paid by employers and insurers are often two to three times what Medicare pays for the same care, especially in areas where a large system controls many of the hospitals and doctors. "The horse has left the barn," said Erin Fuse Brown, who teaches health care law at Georgia State University. "You can't rely on merger review to protect competition. That's not possible. Competition has already been lost." Regulators don't have many options, said Leemore Dafny, a former federal official with the Federal Trade Commission and a business professor at Harvard University. Mammoth systems could be broken up, but she acknowledged "it would be a battle." While the F.T.C., which oversees hospital mergers, cannot pursue anti competitive behavior in nonprofit groups after they have already combined, state attorneys general and the Justice Department are starting to study whether lawsuits like the ones against Sutter might change the pattern of consolidation and result long term in lower prices. "Banning these practices would be a step in the right direction," Ms. Dafny said. A similar case, brought by the Justice Department and the North Carolina attorney general, resulted in a settlement with Atrium Health, the state's largest hospital group, over the practice of insisting that insurers not steer customers to less expensive hospitals. Atrium agreed to discontinue that practice. "We can't allow Atrium to use its size and market dominance to the detriment of health care consumers," said Josh Stein, the North Carolina attorney general, in a statement at the time. Atrium did not acknowledge any wrongdoing and did not pay a financial penalty. In the case of Sutter, the system is accused of employing numerous tactics to protect its dominance and could be liable for more than 2 billion under state law because the injured parties could collect treble damages. If Sutter is forced to change how it negotiates with insurers, "it could have a chilling effect on these practices nationwide," said Ms. Dafny. She cautioned that these lawsuits may not be able to fully address the leverage enjoyed by a powerful hospital group, even if it is forced to change its contracts with insurers. A big organization "would still have a lot of market power," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Credit...Stefano Ukmar for The New York Times On a recent Saturday, 25 members of the Philadelphia Church of Universal Brotherhood, an African American Seventh day Adventist congregation, gathered in the ornate lobby of a 95 year old former movie palace in Brooklyn for their weekly Sabbath service. Surrounded by columns and a gold painted plaster frieze of griffins and vases, the attendees sang exuberant, hip swaying hymns, accompanied by drums, a synthesizer, tambourines and even a cowbell. The fellowship was palpable, and the voices so strong that the force of their collective music seemed to belie the congregation's meager numbers. But when the collection baskets were handed around, the limited number of hands to pitch in for badly needed building repairs was manifest. "The lack of funds has really kept us back, because we're not rich," said D. Liendra Jeffries, the church's octogenarian senior pastor. "We're trying to negotiate a deal so we can do something with the building." The building in question, the church's home since 1975, is the former Loew's Kameo on Eastern Parkway near Nostrand Avenue in Crown Heights, a 1,400 seat theater with a snazzy, Egyptian inflected Art Deco facade of vibrant, multicolored terra cotta. Pieces of that facade and other masonry have fallen off the building in the past few years, prompting the church to erect a sidewalk shed to protect pedestrians. And in a peculiar example of life imitating art, real plants are growing out of a decorative band of terra cotta leaves on the structure's cornice. Whether the building, which the church consecrated as the Philadelphian Sabbath Cathedral, will survive at all is very much up in the air. The church has been besieged by developers and builders, according to F.E. Roy Jeffries II, the institution's leader and son of its senior pastor. Church leadership is now weighing whether to repair the building or tear it down and build something larger, such as a six story apartment house. "We might do a land lease that includes the air space," said Pastor Jeffries, a dapper 69 year old with a salt and pepper beard. "But we're not going to sell." In any scenario, he insisted, the church would continue its ministry at that location. Wiseman's Cameo facade was an exotic film world fantasy with an Egyptian flavor, probably influenced by Howard Carter's discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, which had set off a wave of Egyptomania in the design world. Running along the top was a terra cotta band of stylized Art Deco women's faces, suggestive of theatrical masks or muses, each one sporting a smart Cleopatra hairdo. From their eyes shot angular beams of green light evocative of film projections. The Cameo opened on Feb. 9, 1924, with the melodrama "The Lullaby," starring silent film beauty Jane Novak. In June, the cinema began showing movies under the open sky in a 1,500 seat roof garden. The theater was one of two along with the Rolland, a neo Moorish style Yiddish stage venue at St. John's Place that Wiseman designed on Eastern Parkway. The two have had similar histories. Both were built in the 1920s for owners who themselves lived on Eastern Parkway. Both have vividly colorful, terra cotta Wiseman facades. And both were repurposed for religious use, when churches scrambled into the theatrical shells like hermit crabs and made themselves right at home. Since the 1950s, the former Rolland Theatre has been the Holy House of Prayer for All People. By the 1950s the Kameo had grown tatty, but its showy interior still held substantial allure. "It had a skyline of minarets and fake Moorish stuff," recalled Mark Jacobson, who used to watch movies like "Creature From the Black Lagoon" there with his granduncle Gus, a projectionist at the theater. "And the artifice was set in front of the fake sky in a way that gave you the sense that there was a vast city surrounding you set against the twilight of this other world that probably never existed." Mr. Jacobson also got a look behind the theater's artifice. "I would climb up this little catwalk, and the booth would open up and my uncle would be up there reading The Daily News with a half eaten chicken sandwich lying around," he said. "It kind of shot the fantasy." When the church purchased the property from Loew's in 1975, the theater was a mess. "We were in love with that building, oh man, because we bought it with our hard earned money," said Liendra Jeffries, the senior pastor. The church paid 110,000 in cash, she said, because racially discriminatory redlining by banks made obtaining a loan impossible. Cleaning the building was grueling. "Loew's had guard dogs they let run free in here, and they defecated," said Pastor Jeffries. "We had to wear boots and overalls and masks and use bleach to clean the whole sanctuary." The church reupholstered the seats, whitewashed the plum colored tapestries in the recessed wall arches and as the senior pastor said "we hired a Greek painter who painted over all the naked ladies in the ceiling and turned them into angels." Today, the sky blue and gold auditorium is in decent shape, although the ceiling has collapsed in an upstairs stairwell landing, another area has mold, and the building needs repointing. High above the auditorium, the projection booth serves as a breathtakingly untouched time capsule. A rusted cabinet for film reels remains in place, one door marked "Sat Nite." A vintage spotlight points out a square hole in the wall. And a midcentury Norge icebox bears a message in Magic Marker: "This Refrigerator Is the Personal Property of Men in Booth." Even if the church does not raze the former cinema, the Art Deco faces may be stripped from its facade. "If we can change them into angels or replace them with figures that are spiritual, we might go that route," said Pastor Jeffries. Art Deco is worth big bucks, he has been told, and movie industry people have offered to buy that row of terra cotta visages. "Anytime we're ready to get rid of it," he said, "they've left their cards." 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 |
My partner, Solomon, and I still argue about Gina Prince Bythewood's 2000 romance, "Love Basketball." The movie tells the story of Monica (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy (Omar Epps), which begins with Monica's family moving in next door to Quincy's when they are both 11, follows them as their friendship turns to courtship right before they graduate high school and start playing basketball at U.S.C. Once in college, they juggle off court drama (Quincy learns that his pro athlete father has impregnated a woman outside his marriage), and on court demands (Monica fights to earn her spot as the starting point guard). These pressures come to a head when Quincy asks Monica to stay up late to help him process his parents' marital crisis, and Monica, worried about her place on the team, returns to her dorm to make curfew. Dejected, Quincy ultimately decides to leave Monica and college and go pro. Monica, meanwhile, ends up playing basketball in Spain. Years later, they meet again in Los Angeles, and after she loses a pickup game to him, she wins his heart and a starting spot on the Sparks. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as black directors turned to black romances in "Love Jones," "The Best Man," "Brown Sugar" and other films, "Love Basketball" stood out even more for featuring black characters whose ambition (Monica) and craving for domestic bliss (Quincy) challenged traditional gender norms. At the heart of the disagreement between Monica and Quincy and for that matter, Solomon and me was our generation's gender wars gone buppie: Could Monica really win the boy next door, play ball and have it all? A new crop of heterosexual black love stories including "The Photograph," "Premature" and the series "Cherish the Day" by black filmmakers answers that question with a definitive yes. Though they pay homage to Prince Bythewood's vision with African American female leads as complex, cosmopolitan and curious as Monica, the central conflict of these new stories is whether their characters can work through personal trauma, break free of the "strong black woman" stereotype, and be vulnerable enough to love themselves and their partners. In line with a larger recognition of black women's multidimensionality in American culture and politics, never once do their male partners make them feel bad for dreaming big: their ambition is their appeal. "I think the benefit of having the two characters Christina and Mae is that you can show them going through different things," Meghie said in an interview. "For Christina, her driving force is figuring out how she was going to be successful careerwise. For Mae, her mom's success and her dad help her to achieve that. Now, she needs to look at what is missing in her life and what issues that she's not confronting emotionally within herself. Hers is a more philosophical journey." Growing up, Meghie was obsessed with films like "Love Jones" (like Christina, the main character in that 1997 drama was a photographer) and "Love Basketball." Later, those films became blueprints for her own screenwriting. "I grew up playing basketball so Monica was a character that I very much saw myself in as an athlete and tomboy who really didn't know how to date or how to have a boyfriend or how to tell a guy you like them," Meghie reflected. "And that last scene when she's like, 'I'll play you for your heart.' It makes me cry still because it is a moment where you realize you can't just be this strong girl. He's going to walk away if you don't show him that you love him." Directed by Rashaad Ernesto Green, who co wrote it with his star, Zora Howard, the film is the result of what the two saw as a lack of black love stories today, especially those that center on the experiences of young black women. "One of the things that really drove us to write this story was the very simple fact that we grew up watching love stories in the 1990s with people of color, black people and brown people, in them," Green said. "In the current landscape, because of what has transpired in this country politically, there has been an overabundance of films that deal with black trauma, victimization, pain and suffering. We wanted to offer a film that dealt with the other side of that narrative, present a story that we felt was universal, and invite people into our lives and our love in a way that we hope is also effective." Fortunately, this trend is not just limited to the big screen. Each episode of Ava DuVernay's latest series, "Cherish the Day" (which premiered Feb. 11 on OWN), follows a single day of a young couple's romance over five years. Revolving around the relationship between Evan (Alano Miller), a Stanford educated, Tesla driving tech engineer, and Gently (Xosha Roquemore), a bohemian, globe trotting caregiver from South Los Angeles, it appears at first to be a story about opposites attracting. But, as the show's format intentionally accelerates the timeline, we quickly learn that Gently's carefreeness is not a drawback to Evan but rather an inspiration for his entrepreneurship and an indicator of her hard earned freedom in life and love. In turn, Gently is now front and center, unlike past characters whose whimsical natures would have them sidelined as comic relief (think Freddie from "A Different World" or Lynn from "Girlfriends"). Evan "fits into what we usually see in our iterations of black love," Roquemore said. "He's fiscally successful and highly educated those stories in which black people have to be perfect." Unlike Evan, whose parents have been married for 40 years, Gently is raised by a family friend who takes her in after her father's gang related death and her substance abusing mother abandons her. "Instead of Gently being hardened by her background, it makes her more eclectic or freer or makes her want to travel the world," Roquemore said. "She's trying to channel that pain into something else, which I think is just a little more realistic." Noting that few Hollywood writers depict black women as both vulnerable and aspirational, Roquemore touched on how cliched so many stories are still: "Because I live my life as a black woman that is multifaceted, Gently is so very familiar to me. When people are like, 'Whoa, what is this? I've never met anyone like this!' No, they've just never seen it on TV." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
What is an astrophysicist to do during a pandemic, except maybe daydream about having a private black hole? Although it is probably wishful thinking, some astronomers contend that a black hole may be lurking in the outer reaches of our solar system. All summer, they have been arguing over how to find it, if indeed it is there, and what to do about it, proposing plans that are only halfway out of this world. The speculation began back in 2016 when Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin, astronomers at the California Institute of Technology, proposed that the weird motions of a few ice balls billions of miles beyond Pluto could be evidence of a previously unknown and unsuspected object way, way out there in the dark. According to their calculations, that object would be roughly 10 times as massive as Earth and would occupy an egg shaped orbit that brought it as near as 20 billion miles from the sun several times the distance from the sun to Pluto and took it as far as 100 billion miles away every 10,000 to 20,000 years. "What we don't know is where it is in its orbit, which is too bad," Dr. Brown told the Times at the time. Dr. Brown called this hypothetical object Planet Nine, which is rich in irony. Not long ago, Pluto was considered the ninth planet, but Dr. Brown's discoveries of other denizens in the Kuiper belt, the realm of frozen, orbiting dirt balls that Pluto inhabits, played a major role in demoting Pluto to a dwarf planet 15 years ago. Needless to say, nobody has yet seen this thing through a telescope. Last year, another pair of astronomers Jakub Scholtz of Durham University in Britain and James Unwin of the University of Illinois at Chicago suggested that Planet Nine might actually be a black hole. But not just any kind of black hole. Black holes are the gravitational terrors predicted by Albert Einstein's equations, objects so dense that not even light can escape from them one way passages to doom. Astronomers know that such entities exist. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory and the Virgo observatory have heard black holes the gravitational shells of collapsed dead stars banging together out in the dark cosmos. Some cosmologists have speculated that black holes could account for 25 percent of the mass of the universe and could constitute the famous and elusive "dark matter" that determines the gravitational structure of what we see in the sky. But you don't need a star to die to make a black hole. In 1971, Stephen Hawking, drawing on an idea earlier suggested in 1966 by the Russian physicists Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich and Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov, theorized that intense pressures during the Big Bang could have collapsed matter directly into black holes. Those primordial black holes could be of any size and could be anywhere. A black hole as massive as Earth would be about the size of a Ping Pong ball and would be exceptionally hard to see. No such primordial black holes have been detected yet. But neither has their existence been ruled out. Dr. Scholtz and Dr. Unwin pointed out that an experiment called OGLE, for Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, based at the University of Warsaw in Poland, had detected the presence of a half dozen dark objects in the direction of the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Their gravitational fields had acted as lenses, briefly amplifying the light from distant stars that they drifted in front of. Those objects could be free floating planets, the authors said, with masses ranging from half to about 20 times that of Earth. But they could as easily be primordial black holes floating around the galaxy, the astronomers proposed. If that were the case, the putative Planet Nine could well be a black hole, too, in a distant orbit around the sun. That would make Planet Nine the nearest black hole to Earth by many light years, so close that humans could contemplate sending a robot probe there, much as New Horizons has passed Pluto and the dumbbell iceberg now known as Arrokoth four billion miles from here. But first we must find Planet Nine. Earlier this year, Edward Witten, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, chimed in; Dr. Witten is the rare physicist who has won the prestigious Fields Medal in mathematics and is known, among other things, for his work on string theory, the controversial "theory of everything." Dr. Witten suggested borrowing a trick from Breakthrough Starshot, the proposal by Russian philanthropist Yuri Milner and Dr. Hawking to send thousands of laser propelled microscopic probes to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri. Dr. Witten suggested sending hundreds of similarly small probes outward in all directions to explore the solar system. By keeping track of incoming signals from the probes, scientists on Earth would be able to tell if and when each one sped up or slowed down as it encountered the gravitational field of Planet Nine or anything else out there. Key to this plan would be the ability of the probes to keep pinging Earth precisely every hundred thousandth of a second. In May, astronomers Scott Lawrence and Zeeve Rogoszinski of the University of Maryland suggested instead monitoring the trajectories of the probes with high resolution radio telescopes, which would obviate the need for high precision clocks on the probes. In May, Avi Loeb, chair of the astronomy department at Harvard and leader of a scientific advisory board for the Breakthrough Starshot enterprise, poured cold water on that daydream. In their own posting, he and Thiem Hoang of the Korea University of Science and Technology argued that the effects of friction and electromagnetic forces in the interstellar medium the dilute electrified gas that wafts among the planets and stars would swamp the signal from any gravitational effects from Planet Nine. But Dr. Loeb has rarely met a sci fi sounding theory or project that didn't intrigue him. He is well known in astronomical circles for arguing that astronomers should take seriously the possibility that Oumuamua, the cometlike object that breezed through the solar system from interstellar space in 2017, was actually an alien space probe. So in July Dr. Loeb was back, with a student, Amir Siraj, and a new idea for finding the Planet Nine black hole. If a black hole were out there, they argued, it would occasionally rip apart small comets, causing bright flares that could soon be spotted by the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, previously known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, now under construction in Chile. The observatory's mission, starting in 2021, is to make a movie of the universe, producing a panorama of the entire southern night sky every few days and revealing anything that has changed or moved. Such flares should occur a few times a year, they noted. "Our calculations show that the flares will be bright enough for the Vera Rubin Observatory to rule out or confirm Planet Nine as a black hole within one year of monitoring the sky with its L.S.S.T. survey," Dr. Loeb wrote in an email. If the theory pans out, it's not crazy to think that humans could contemplate sending a probe to study our local black hole. What would it learn there? A top priority for many astrophysicists and gravity experts would be to test a prediction made by Dr. Hawking 46 years ago, that black holes, despite their name, should radiate energy in the form of heat. Almost every astrophysicist believes that the prediction which is inscribed on Dr. Hawking's tombstone in Westminster Abbey, near the graves of Newton and Darwin will be confirmed, but it has yet to be. The effect would be beyond minuscule for the giant black holes like those that LIGO and Virgo have been recording, and thus impossible to discern. But smaller black holes are hotter, and they grow hotter still as they shrink and finally explode. A black hole of about six times Earth's mass would have a temperature of about 0.04 of a degree Kelvin, according to Dr. Witten. That is colder than outer space, which is about 3 degrees Kelvin, and much too cool to measure from Earth. "It would be a challenge to measure it from up close," Dr. Witten noted. "But it is not out of the question that it could be done by century's end." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
With its Mission style facades and showy tropical foliage, Santa Barbara could be a commercial for the California good life. It can be easy to underestimate the struggles of a place so seemingly flawless. But Santa Barbara has had a tough few years. From the devastating wildfires in 2017 and 2018 to the flooding and mudslides that followed, the county has experienced more than its share of trauma. Yet if it weren't for the charred chaparral faintly visible on the surrounding hillsides, the average visitor might never know. This is, after all, a place that's good at reinventing itself. That spirit is on display at the new Hotel Californian, which sits on the site of a grand beach resort that was destroyed just weeks after opening by the 1925 earthquake that defined modern Santa Barbara's architecture and character. Smack in the center of Southern California's spectacular coastline, the county is surprisingly rural. In its multigenerational ranches and farms, its remarkably undeveloped public beaches, and the expansive Los Padres National Forest, Santa Barbara County offers glimpses of California before it got crowded. Start your visit in the city of Santa Barbara with a cone at Rori's, a decadent ice creamery in the Santa Barbara Public Market, which serves organic ice cream in flavors like Black Pepper Pistachio, Root Beer Float or vegan (coconut milk based) Tropical Wild Berry. Cones start at 5.50, so take advantage of the kid's happy hour (3 to 5 p.m. daily, when cones are two for the price of one). Then, drive up past the historic Old Mission Santa Barbara, a striking colonial structure representing a tragic history, to the 78 acre Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, established in 1926 and devoted to pre Columbian native species. Shake off your travels with a walk along the garden's meandering pathways, alive with the sound of bird calls and chirping insects. Find a shady spot beneath a coast live oak or coastal redwood and appreciate the plant life species like the Russian River Coyote mint and the Canyon Prince giant wild rye that thrived in the area's temperate climate before the arrival of the Europeans. Head downtown and explore the city's paseos, plazas and parks, including Alameda and Alice Keck Park Memorial Garden, twin parks and gardens that, combined, include a koi pond, exotic trees like Canary Island date palms and Hong Kong orchids, and Kid's World, a community constructed wooden play structure that overflows with shrieking children. On State Street, Santa Barbara's main drag, stop for Aperitif Hour ( 10 Sunshine Spritzes, made with Aperol alternatives like Cocchi Rosa and Cappelletti aperitif wines) at Satellite, an outer space themed restaurant and wine bar with a menu designed by the chef Emma West of the beloved, now shuttered, Julienne Restaurant. Satellite serves sexy, distinctly California dishes like Rad Toast ( 7), the Yoga Pants Salad ( 16), and Smoked Shrooms ( 16) in a casual, bar like setting with a mod decor of avocado colored bench seats, framed newspaper clippings of the moon landing, and film reels of early rocket launches and moon walks projected on the wall. While the food is meat free and the wines lean "natural," Satellite doesn't take itself too seriously. Then, snag a bike at downtown's Bikes to Go rental station ( 10 per hour, 35 per day) in the open air Paseo Nuevo mall, and cruise downhill to the pier for the ultimate pre dinner show: a Pacific Coast sunset. The 10 table, largely unadorned dining room at Yoichi's is deceptively modest. It feels like stepping into the home of an extraordinarily gracious host. It makes sense, then, that this kaiseki style restaurant, which specializes in multicourse meals, is a mom and pop establishment. Opened in 2015, the restaurant, named for its chef and co owner Yoichi Kawabata, serves a seven course, 125 prix fixe menu that builds on itself from the zensai (appetizers) to owan (soups), the mukouzuke (chef's choice sashimi) to the yakimono (grilled dish) and mushimono (steamed and simmered dish). Small plates arrive one after the next, featuring complex dishes with clean flavors, including the Jell O like water shield and briny snails, pickled plum in bonito broth and egg custard soup with rockfish. By the time you're sipping a complimentary glass of yuzu sake at the end of your meal, the cumulative effect of the experience feels more like a brilliantly executed concept album than mere nourishment. Drive north along a stretch of Highway 101 that includes two of California's most stunning state park beaches, Refugio and Gaviota. For a mellow morning paddle along this spectacular, white sand and palm tree adorned coastline, schedule a kayak tour ( 119 per person, lunch included) at least a week in advance is recommended with Santa Barbara Adventure Company. After a quick beginners friendly tutorial, float over forests of kelp while learning about Pacific marine ecology and watching for seals, dolphins and brown pelicans. Or, if you're up for an arduous but rewarding hike, take the Gaviota Hot Springs Trespass Trail ( 2 parking fee), which climbs over 1,000 feet through wildflowers and blooming agave plants for a dazzling view. Or, skip the hike and head for the "hot springs" lukewarm, crystal clear, sulphuric smelling and shaded by a single palm. Cut inland across a landscape of giant boulders, chaparral and ranchland until you reach Buellton, a town that was, until recently, most famous for a nearly century old road food institution, Pea Soup Andersen's restaurant. In the last two decades, the Santa Ynez Valley's wine growing reputation has begun drawing not only wine enthusiasts, but the restaurants to feed them. For a lunch of oysters topped with fresh uni ( 8), white shrimp with pancetta, chile and garlic ( 13), beef tongue pastrami Reuben ( 16), smoked pheasant with basil and citrus ( 14), and exotic wood fired pizzas (think skirt steak, tomatillo and queso fresco, 15), stop into Industrial Eats, which is named for its location in an industrial park surrounded by breweries, wineries and distilleries. Pence Vineyards and Winery, on Route 246, is a working cattle ranch that grows Burgundian varietals, mostly pinots and Chardonnays, on a creatively landscaped vineyard with a pond, trails and an appointment only tasting room. If you're not a drinker, or traveling with children, head instead to Solvang's Ostrichland ( 5 admission), where you can buy a pan of bird feed ( 1) for the farm's 100 or so ostriches and emus. The gift shop sells the bird's oversize eggs. Then, hop over to Los Olivos, an impossibly cute town that overflows with tourists on weekends, and stop into Story of Soil, a tasting room manned by the husband of the winemaker, Jessica Gasca, who focuses on single vineyard, single varietal wines, including a standout Gamay, that have a cult following. Drive down Route 154 from Los Olivos, past Cachuma Lake, to Cold Spring Tavern. This former creekside stagecoach stop at the top of the San Marcos Pass has been a staple of California road trip culture since 1865, before the automobile was invented. A wooden shack draped in ivy and filled with Old Western charm and tchotchkes, from taxidermy to wagon wheel chandeliers, serves the region's famed tri tip grilled over red oak and has live music in its backyard, where picnic tables offer extra seating. Or, for a more cosmopolitan dining experience in the city of Santa Barbara, sit beneath the strung lights on Loquita's side patio, where quintessentially Spanish dishes like pan con tomate (pan de cristal a ciabatta like Spanish bread with grated tomato, garlic and herbs, 9) and pulpo (Spanish style octopus with black garlic aioli, lemon vinaigrette, potato puree and pickled red onion, 22) mix with the gauzy atmosphere in ways both intoxicating and magical. The restaurant, which is one of the restaurateur Sherry Villanueva's many hits (including popular local spots like Helena Avenue Bakery, The Lark and Tyger Tyger) also offers a drink list heavy on Spanish wines, sherries, vermouths and gin and tonics. Don't miss the Loquita Martini with an El Bulli olive ( 15). Built in 1930, on the site of the once grand Arlington Hotel, the Arlington Theater in the city of Santa Barbara was built in the era's characteristic Mission Revival style. A former movie theater that still sometimes hosts films and festivals, the 2,000 seat Arlington features a Robert Morton pipe organ that rises onto the stage during musical performances. While the Arlington's interior is painted to create the illusion of a Spanish night, its stage flanked with illustrated villas and stars overhead, the Santa Barbara Bowl sits on a hillside dotted with Southern California mansions. A venue with an ocean view, the Bowl was funded by the Works Project Administration and carved into a former quarry in the 1930s. Designed to accommodate the Arabian horses that are a staple of the annual Fiesta celebration, the venue now hosts a mix of big name acts from the Raconteurs to Lionel Richie and other performances and events, like the Santa Barbara Mariachi Festival, from spring into the fall. For affordable, family friendly accommodations near the beach, look for Airbnb rentals in the Mesa neighborhoods East, West and Alta which have gorgeous views, attractive historic homes, and are close to the Douglas Family Preserve and Hendry's Beach, and not far from downtown. Prices for an entire cottage or guesthouse start in the mid 100s. 52 PLACES AND MUCH, MUCH MORE Follow our 52 Places traveler, Sebastian Modak, on Instagram as he travels the world, and discover more Travel coverage by following us on Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: Each week you'll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to photos from all over the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Working with Amnesty International, the London based research agency Forensic Architecture used photographs and videos primarily from social media to create a 3D model reconstructing one of the heaviest days of bombardment in the 2014 Israel Gaza war. Instead of creating a house or skyscraper, the group scours for evidence of lies, crimes and human rights violations combining the spatial and engineering skills of architects, the data gathering prowess of librarians, the doggedness of investigative journalists and the storytelling finesse of screenwriters. Its reports have annoyed Germany's Christian Democratic Union party, frustrated Bashar al Assad, Syria's president, provoked an attack from Vladimir V. Putin's Russia Today news service, and infuriated officials in Israel. Mr. Weizman has an especially long history of run ins there. Born in Haifa, educated at the Architectural Association in London, he was just starting out as an architect in Tel Aviv when he began to study the legacy of town planning in the occupied territories. What he saw suggested to him architecture's complicity in human rights violations. In 2002, with a colleague, Rafi Segal, he was hired to organize a show of new Israeli architecture. Mr. Weizman and Mr. Segal presented settlements in the occupied territories. Appalled, the Israel Association of United Architects canceled the exhibition and withdrew the catalog. The incident brought Mr. Weizman attention. His timing could hardly seem better, with technology rapidly democratizing the instruments of forensic research and the purview of young architects widening. He begins his recent book, "Forensic Architecture," recalling the libel trial in London of the Holocaust denier and historian David Irving, nearly two decades ago. Mr. Irving's shameful case relied on a tidbit of architectural evidence: he made much of fuzzy satellite imagery showing a demolished crematory at Auschwitz. Survivors had said they recalled poison cyanide gas canisters dropped through a hole in the crematory's roof, but Mr. Irving said there was no hole in the satellite photos. "No hole, no Holocaust," became the deniers' catchphrase. Mr. Irving lost his trial. But Mr. Weizman cites the case as a cautionary tale. The tools of forensic analysis can easily be perverted. Wielded especially by governments and other powers in defense of violence and crime, they need to be challenged by equally sophisticated means. Architecture and forensics may be disparate disciplines but brought together they could produce a new, "different mode of practice," Mr. Weizman realized. They could help reverse "the forensic gaze" back onto state agencies "that usually monopolize it." Adopting a phrase coined by the photographer Allan Sekula, Mr. Weizman terms the practice "counter forensics." I stopped by the group's office in southeast London the other day. A dozen or so researchers were staring into computer screens, Nick Masterton among them. He was tinkering with a timeline and 3D computer model of the Grenfell Tower fire that killed 71 people in London last year. Mr. Masterton and the rest of the Grenfell team have spent the last several months knitting together thousands of open source photographs, videos and reams of metadata related to the fire. Mr. Masterton told me he's using some of the techniques he learned in architecture school when so called parametric design was the rage. Forensic Architecture relies on computer programs and digital animation software that model exotic building shapes to reconstitute bombed out ruins, identify debris patterns from drone strikes and document tragedies like the fire. And of course Mr. Masterton scours the Web for images. It has become a cliche that smartphones and social media today flood the world with pictures that change public debates around power, policing, violence and race. For Mr. Weizman, the "image flotsam," as he calls it, can be as confounding as it can be useful and it needs to be assembled. It requires "construction and composition thus, architecture," in his words. The resulting "architectural image complex" functions like a lens, letting people "see the scene of a crime as a set of relations between images in time and space." Christina Varvia is now Forensic Architecture's research coordinator. "What we do is in the tradition of 'paper architecture,'" she told me, when I asked how her work relates to what she did as an architect. "Except we expect results. As architects, we're also trained to bring different people together to produce a design. But instead, we synthesize evidence." Since 2011, when Mr. Weizman founded the agency, its work has expanded beyond Israel and the Palestinian territories to Mexico, Guatemala, Afghanistan and Europe. Its investigation into whether a German undercover agent lied about witnessing the murder of a man of Turkish descent at an internet cafe is one of the most intriguing and mysterious cases at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. One of the most heartbreaking involves Saydnaya, the infamous prison outside Damascus. Since the start of Syria's civil war, thousands have disappeared inside that country's detention centers. At Saydnaya, prisoners are kept in darkness, tortured and beaten if they speak. No outsiders are allowed access. There are no recent photographs of the inside. "When a state commits a crime," Mr. Weizman explained, "it cordons off an area, which is the privilege of the state. That site becomes a work of architecture, defined by the cordon. A prison by definition is architecture. You can try to break through the state cordon via leaks, media images, satellite photographs. And when they're not available, memory is a way around the cordon. In any case, the cordoned area is our 'building site.'" At Umm al Hiran, the Bedouin village that was raided, the building site became the dusty hill where the car struck the police officer. The supposed terrorist in that case was a farmer named Yaqub Musa Abu al Qi'an. The Israeli policeman he ran over was named Erez Levi. Collaborating with ActiveStills, an Israeli based photographic collective, Forensic Architecture used photogrammetry and collected, time stamped and synchronized every available image and video of the raid, producing a corresponding soundtrack. The soundtrack, when played alongside the thermal imaging videos, revealed the pops of three gunshots where heat flashes emerged from a policeman's weapon that had been overlooked in the silent helicopter footage. The weapon was fired at Mr. Abu al Qi'an's car just before it accelerated down a hill and into Mr. Levi. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Jill Valentine has been the head guardian for the dozens of children who have appeared in "School of Rock." Among her duties: distributing pain relievers, running science flashcards, confiscating contraband. Jill Valentine is pretty sure the kids have a nickname for her: Fun Killer. For nearly four years, Ms. Valentine has been the head guardian of "School of Rock," which played its last performance on Sunday at the Winter Garden Theater. Guardians care for child actors during rehearsals and before and after performances, making sure they're fed, watered and rested. Ms. Valentine distributes children's pain relievers, she runs science flashcards, she confiscates contraband. She doesn't have children of her own "I have two cats and a boyfriend, that's enough!" she said but 63 have come into and out of her care since she joined "School of Rock" for pre Broadway rehearsals in 2015. Thirteen children, age about 8 to 13, star in every performance, with four more waiting backstage. Thirty six alumni joined them for Sunday's show closing jam session. Before the Saturday evening performance, Ms. Valentine met me at the show's rehearsal space, now mostly denuded and bubble wrapped. She talked about the responsibilities of the job, the hectic schedule and why there are no children showmances. Her feelings about the show's ending were bittersweet, but not so bittersweet that she hadn't booked a 5 a.m. Miami bound flight for Monday. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. What exactly is a guardian? It's the responsible person for the child actor. We are responsible for their safety, health, well being from the time that they walk into the stage door until the time they walk out. I will be in two hours before the curtain goes up. Then we pick up the kids about an hour and 15 minutes before curtain. There are 17 of them. It's a lot. They'll go upstairs, drop their stuff, do a physical and vocal warm up in our green room and then we are off to the races hair calls, costumes, mic check, all that stuff. Once the kids go downstairs for the show, we don't have any breaks. They're onstage all the time and we're backstage. They go upstairs for intermission quick snack, water break, bathroom break, game of cards. And then right back downstairs again until the end of the show. Their tastes are not what you would think of as kid tastes. They like poke bowls. They're into Maison Kayser. They don't eat kid food. They're like very short adults. But if there's a birthday and we have birthday cake, everyone is in. What do you do to bond with them? If you ask them real questions about what their life is like and then follow up, they know that you care. We spend 40 hours a week together; that's an incredible amount of time. They really do become like family. How do you reassure the parents? When we start rehearsal, I do a parent orientation. I have an eight page packet that I send out. Like, so your child's in a Broadway show, here's what you need to know, a step by step guide. They have my cellphone number. I get texts, I get phone calls, I get emails. What emergencies have you handled? We've certainly had bloody noses, we've stood offstage with trash cans. We say, if you think you're going to be sick, please walk off the stage, we will be there with a trash can for you. I have to ask the kids, do you need to stop? Can you finish the show? It has to be the actors' choice. Do you handle a lot of stage fright? There's usually a little bit of nervousness for the first or even the second show. We try really hard to encourage parents to maybe hold off on inviting everyone you've ever met to see your child perform for like a week. Do you have ways of celebrating when someone leaves the show? We do. We call it graduation. The audience gets to cheer and afterward we do a graduation ceremony, everybody sings "Pomp and Circumstance." They get a little mortar board, they sign the back of the set, they get a little diploma. Yeah, they are. And sometimes it's really hard to watch them go. It's also pretty great. We have a lot of alumni come back. They can come in and go to warm up and sit with the other kids. They're all coming back tomorrow! So many of them! It's going to be nuts. Check out our Culture Calendar here. So Fun Killer, how do you kill the fun? If we're having a tough day I'm one who comes in and is like: "What are you, crazy? We're doing a show. You cannot throw a football backstage. You just can't." I've definitely taken away a basketball, a skateboard. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Which is how I ended up here, conducting research for my latest thriller while mostly hoping I wouldn't vomit. I've always been drawn to suspense novels that inform as well as entertain, so called plausible fiction, in which the crime may be the author's fabrication but the investigators use as much real world procedure as possible apart from, say, the standard six month wait for DNA test results. Unlike many other thriller writers, however, I have no expertise as a former lawyer, crime beat reporter or doctor to draw on. I wrote my first book at 17 and hit the best seller list at 28. I know fiction, but the plausible part requires due diligence. Hence my cold call to the Body Farm, where the first thing I learned is that the facility doesn't offer tours. If it did, Lee Jantz, the associate director, told me, the staff would never get any work done. The facility does assist with research, however, and I had some questions. How do you calculate time of death from skeletal remains? Could fire be used to obscure or prevent the identification of a body? Is there a plausible scenario in which one person's bones could legitimately be mistaken for another's? In suspense novels, it's vital to get such details right. No one wants to read about a dumb expert. Yet everyone loves a clever villain who's one step ahead of his pursuers. I'd never viewed a body outside the sanitized world of a funeral home. Now, I was about to see hundreds: corpses in various poses on the ground, skeletons dangling from trees, body parts protruding from the earth. What's it like to walk among the dead? The first order of business was not to stray off the path. This is a scientific facility, and you mustn't contaminate the site. The second thing I learned was to breathe through my mouth. Even on a cool day in October, the smell ... well, this was death: organic and 100 percent genuine. Gradually, I came to understand that the Body Farm is more than a macabre outdoor lab; it's hallowed ground. Most bodies that come to the facility are volunteers, who register before their demise. However, a volunteer's family can't very well ship their loved one's remains via the post office. Instead, a funeral home assists in transport. (If you die within 100 miles of Knoxville, the Body Farm will pick up your corpse free of charge.) Upon receipt, the staff unboxes the body and prepares it for research. This is serious work, handled with the utmost respect. One afternoon, Jantz told me, she personally oversaw the arrival of an elderly woman. Tucked inside the box next to the corpse was a collection of travel size soaps, along with a note. Our mother always insisted on traveling with soap, the note read. We used to tease her that hotels provided such basic needs, but she always said, "You never know." So for this, our mother's final journey, we wanted to make sure she'd have everything she needed. By the end of my visit, I knew the difference between official cremation and "redneck" cremation. The first involves a crematory burning at 1,400 to 1,800 degrees. The second involves a trash barrel and gasoline. Neither method can fool a well trained forensic anthropologist, who can reach into a box of burned bones most of which look like rock size pieces of off white coral and identify the sex, age and/or occupation of the human being to whom they once belonged. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Kehlmann is a master of economical, devastating description. During the calamitous Battle of Zusmarshausen, one man is suddenly "lying in two places: one part to the right of his horse, the other to the left, and the one on the right was still moving." Equally chilling are his descriptions of a society in which old kindnesses are forgotten under pressure, where truth matters less than the ability to terrify people into confession, where lies scribbled in Latin become history. In such a world, only acting feels honest, only magic feels real: "It was not the theater that was false, no, everything else was pretense, disguise and frippery, everything that was not theater was false." Art need not be brilliant to be vital. "Tyll" revels in the efforts of second rate artists doing their best with small talent: a bard whose "poor singing would not be so bad if he could at least play the lute," a monotonous old woman who can remember long stories without forgetting a line, a count who fills out his memoir with descriptions from other books. Through them, Kehlmann irreverently imagines the birth of modern German literature, as a series of would be poets struggle to draw beauty out of "a language that sounded like someone struggling not to choke, like a cow having a coughing fit, like a man with beer coming out his nose." Tyll Ulenspiegel is the genius among them. A juggler, ventriloquist and court fool, he is above all a figure of lightness. When villagers watch him leap on a rope above them, they feel, for a breath, "as if a human body had no weight and life were not sad and hard." In this exquisitely crafted novel, Kehlmann moves just as nimbly through the grimmest of human experiences. The result is a spellbinding memorial to the nameless souls lost in Europe's vicious past, whose whispers are best heard in fables. "All this is true," says one of Kehlmann's storytellers, "even what has been made up is true." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
When I was asked to go to China to be a judge on "Star of Outlook English Talent Competition," I assumed I'd be joining a nerdy little program, like those on the nascent PBS a half century ago. Something like "The Letter People," with 26 anthropomorphic characters representing the alphabet, or "Science Demonstrations," with a wild haired scientist who declared, "Physics is my business." Nope. "Star of Outlook" says some seven million contestants, from kindergarten to college age, took part in this edition of the program and that it has had about 100 million participants since it began two decades ago. It's a bit like "America's Got Talent," but it's more than entertainment. It's a chance for young Chinese people to speak out on important issues and it's a recognition of the importance of the English speaking world. At least, for now. I and five other American, British and Canadian judges spent a week of 12 hour days last year in Beijing evaluating 50 finalists, who gave carefully rehearsed three minute TED like talks, then answered questions from us. Some tried to stand out by wearing costumes (robot, karate master and empress among them). We were looking for compelling personal stories while also considering their knowledge of English, their pronunciation, the subject matter and logic of their talk, and we adjusted for their age. As if being on national TV were not pressure enough, they faced a studio audience made up solely of their families (usually, just their mothers). After many one against one elimination rounds, we named a winner: a 10 year old girl from Guangdong Province who spoke with nearly perfect English. She talked about protecting abandoned dogs, and suggested virtual reality glasses to help humans see the world through a dog's eyes. It struck me that these young men and women demonstrated why China is fast emerging as an economic, technological and even a cultural superpower and America's chief rival. Yes, in a world that relies more on English, it's less important for Americans to learn Chinese. And, yes, there are Chinese speaking competitions in the West. But not on this scale. An American without Chinese roots who is fluent in Chinese is rare; the number of American students learning Chinese, while growing quickly, is still in the hundreds of thousands. By contrast, as many Chinese have studied English as there are Americans. How many can speak it well is another question, and this contest encourages kids to improve. Indeed, this competition is also a way for parents to overcome what many perceive as a stifling education system. It encourages young Chinese to be creative and to use what they learn, said the host, Yinqi Zhao, also known as Frank, who conceived the show. I had expected to hear pablum topics, and there were some, like a talk about what children can learn from their parents. But in fact many contestants addressed issues delicate enough that I wondered whether censors for the increasingly authoritarian government would allow them when the show aired in November. From what I could tell, little was removed. The kids talked about schools that emphasize rote memorization over creativity. Pressure from overbearing parents. Poverty. The heedless consumption of plastic that ends up in the ocean. And the consequences of China's one child policy. Several of the contestants even talked about depression. "Seven years ago I attempted suicide," began one 24 year old from an impoverished village southwest of Beijing. She described studying from morning until late at night in response to the onerously high expectations of Chinese parents and society. She spoke of redemption through "self salvation" and "reaching out." No one mentioned President Xi Jinping. Or the Hong Kong protests. Or oppression of the Uighurs in the west. Indeed, given the controls on the media in China, I'm not sure how much the contestants knew about these topics. That not even the oldest contestants mentioned these subjects left me wondering, maybe naively: For all their progress in English, will the Chinese truly succeed without a more informed public? Speaking like an American does not mean thinking like an American. Almost no fathers came to watch their kids, most who were under 15. When an 11 year old son of English teachers from Ningbo, a city south of Shanghai, won his round, his mother wept with joy. She said the boy's father wasn't there because he couldn't get time off from work. Most American bosses, I said, would insist an employee take time off if his child reached a national championship. The mothers said China is different. About two thirds of the 50 finalists were young women. Their lack of confidence struck me. Asked about becoming a heart surgeon, one teenager said the job was too difficult for women. Others played down their own skills. And I noticed the influence of money. The polished British accents of many contestants told me they likely had tutors. Some of the children have studied or traveled abroad; one had visited 22 countries. But not everyone got to the finals with money. The 11 year old boy's mother told me she and her husband didn't earn enough to hire tutors. She said that even without tutors, the competitions four in her city, then one in the provincial capital and then the nationals against the top 10 in his age group had cost about 1,500. She told of one parent who had spent 75 to have her daughter's hair braided for the finals. The 10 year old winner talked of a father who worked so hard he wasn't happy and of her stressed out 15 year old brother. You must be true to yourself and do what you love, she said, then you will have a soul. "Without a soul," she added, "your entire person is controlled by someone else." I thought this a most important message for everyone, not just the Chinese. I teach at Stanford and was proud to hear a half dozen of the contestants, one only 11 years old, say it was their dream university. Only a few years ago, our country would have not just welcomed such students, it would have hoped they would stay, to lift the country and the world. If only these connections could be strengthened. Today's most intractable global problems require cross cultural cooperation. These formidable children would be better as our partners than our opponents. Glenn Kramon, a former assistant managing editor at The New York Times, is a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
A new mixed use building is on the market for 33 million at 324 326 Grand Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side. A mixed use, seven story elevator building completed in 2017, with a black and gold facade covered by ornate lettering created by the Los Angeles street artist Cryptik, is available on the Lower East Side. Quarters, owned by the Berlin based co living operator Medici Living Group, holds a master lease for the residential portion until 2027. The 27,500 square foot building has 16 market rate apartments 14 three bedrooms with two baths, a five bedroom penthouse with two baths and a ground floor apartment with a large backyard that is being used as a common lounge and recreational area. The Atelier, a 3,000 square foot speakeasy bar with a lease until 2038, occupies the lower level, which has its own entrance and an elevator for handicapped access. A Japanese pop up gallery leases an 1,800 square foot ground floor space, and a recently completed 2,000 square foot space is vacant. An overseas financial services company has bought this 8,000 square foot four story city landmark for its offices. The townhouse has a fifth story setback, a windowed basement and an elevator. The building is adjacent to Central Synagogue and has been home to DLT Entertainment, a production company. The neo Tudor like townhouse, with a brick facade and limestone colored terra cotta trim above a marble base, was built in 1881, and was remodeled with a new facade and front extension in 1909. Its interior, to be restored, features original moldings, mantels, floors and oversized windows. Development or transfer of its 17,000 square feet in air rights would be subject to landmark approval. 232 East 78th Street (between Second and Third Avenues) Ashanty Chocolate, with a production and distribution facility in Long Island City, has signed a five year lease to open its first retail shop in a 400 square foot ground floor space, formerly a shoe store, in this Upper East Side seven story elevator building. The shop, which has a two month rent concession to renovate the space, is owned by Constantine Abanda, who grew up in Cameroon, and uses natural ingredients from an upstate farm. Its lineup of chocolates wrapped in kente cloth includes dark chocolate with wild blueberries and milk chocolate with coconut shreds. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Near the still center of "The Blue Fox," a sleek little enchantment by the Icelandic writer , a naturalist pauses to watch the sunrise while puffing, unexpectedly, at a pipe filled with "opium moistened tobacco." I can't speak firsthand to the effects of that particular brand of pick me up, but I imagine them as very much like those from inhaling any of the four short novels has published in English since 2013. For the duration of the dose, the given world stands out with heightened clarity, to senses softly dilated, while at the edges trippy flickerings like "the oldest tomcat in northern Europe" brushing against the naturalist's foot sharpen our attunement to all that might be possible. Reality lends weight to imagination, and imagination gives color to reality. The blueness and the foxness, as it were, are mutually stimulating. From a distance, "CoDex 1962," 's newly translated triple decker, might look like a simple enlargement of the principle, composed as it is of three short novels: "a love story," "a crime story" and "a science fiction story." These works were first published at intervals spanning 22 years, so we can track, as the pages turn, 's abiding interest in history, science and everydayness, on one hand, and folklore, myth and fabulism on the other. Yet in ways small and large, the formulation of "CoDex 1962" departs from that of "The Blue Fox" and its siblings, and rather than toking gently on opiated tobacco, the reader of the trilogy may feel instead as if she's ingested the legendary substance that crops up in an epilogue: "A fungus that can spread underground to cover an area of 60 square kilometers ... probably the largest individual organism on earth." In short, this book is psychedelic, it's potent and it wants to consume the whole world. It damn near gets there on synopsis alone. "CoDex 1962" begins in Nazi Germany and ends at a biotech start up in Iceland around the time of the 2008 crash. In between, it touches down with assorted fairy tales, the songs of the angel Gabriel, a theory of werewolves, some mild pornography, an avant garde stage play und so weiter. The central thread, though, is the origin story of one Josef Loewe, our narrator, who shares with the author a birth year, 1962, and a philosophical preoccupation with the nature and purpose of narrative. In fact, Josef will brush up against his double in the cafeteria of a Reykjavik college as a fellow undergraduate in the early 1980s. ("I know who you are. You're Ess jon," he says. "No, actually, it's pronounced ... like the word for 'vision,'" replies, helpfully.) But this encounter comes quite late in the book, for outside of "Tristram Shandy" and the Christian Bible, Josef Loewe must be the longest gestating protagonist in the history of world literature. Fully two thirds of "CoDex 1962" concerns attempts by his father, a Jewish refugee named Leo, to kindle life in the palm size figurine he's been dragging across Europe in a hatbox. Which makes Josef himself the MacGuffin with a thousand faces, somehow golem and homunculus and gingerbread man at once. Near the end of the second volume still as yet unkindled he gives a comic book recap of the eve of his parturition: A Soviet spy is "standing in the middle of the night on Oskjuhlid hill pumping Lysergene gas into the alcoholic twin brother of a convicted murderer who is, nota bene, in the boot of his car." Watching all this are "a giant black man dressed in a Mexican wrestling costume that's rather on the tight side and ... a sorcerer who has in his possession the clay image of a small boy." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Reinhard Selten, who shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, at his home in Konigswinter, Germany in 1994. Reinhard Selten, who was expelled from school in Germany when he was 14 because he was half Jewish, but returned after World War II to study mathematics and become the country's first and only Nobel winner for economics, died on Aug. 23 in Poznan, Poland. He was 85. His death was announced by the University of Bonn, where he had taught since 1984 and was professor emeritus. No cause was given. Professor Selten shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science with John C. Harsanyi, a Hungarian born economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and John F. Nash Jr., the Princeton mathematician whose severe mental illness and eventual recovery were recounted in the book and film "A Beautiful Mind." The prize celebrated their pioneering advances in game theory, or strategic decision making by individuals, businesses, nations and even nature on matters like playing poker, nuclear deterrence and biological evolution. By awarding them the prize, the Nobel committee also recognized a fundamental shift in economic theory: from the model of predicting that free markets evolve from perfect competition to more robust versions based on give and take behaviors that acknowledge other factors, like hostile takeovers, trade wars and big government. "It's like playing chess," Professor Selten told The New York Times when he was awarded the prize. "You have to think hard about what you think your opponent will do, and then you plan your own strategy based on that. You may not always be right, but such thinking probably makes you play better and keeps you from making as many dumb moves." Or, as Peter Passell wrote in The Times at the time, "While classical economics works for the international market in wheat with thousands of buyers and sellers, it takes game theory to try to figure out how Safeway will change the price of English muffins if the A. P. marks down bagels." Alvin E. Roth, another Nobel laureate in economics, who teaches at Stanford University, wrote in 1999 that game theory and experimental economics were two of the most important developments in the field in the second half of the 20th century. "Reinhard Selten is one of the pioneers in both of these endeavors, and he has been a leader in each of them throughout his career," Professor Roth wrote. "This makes him unique: No one else in the world has made such important or such sustained contributions to both fields." Reinhard Justus Reginald Selten was born on Oct. 5, 1930, in what was then Breslau, Germany, and is now Wroclaw, Poland. His father, Adolf Selten, a blind bookseller with a third grade education, was Jewish. His mother, the former Kathe Luther, was Protestant. The couple decided that they would let Reinhard decide on a religion for himself, but as the Nazis began imposing laws against Jews, they had him baptized. His father died in 1942. In his official Nobel biography, Professor Selten recalled that despite the baptism he was not only dismissed from high school as a son of a Jew but was also denied the opportunity to learn a trade. He was relegated to menial labor. "My situation as a member of an officially despised minority forced me to pay close attention to political matters very early in my life," he wrote. "Moreover, I found myself in opposition to the political views shared by the vast majority of the population. "I had to learn to trust my own judgment rather than official propaganda or public opinion. This was a strong influence on my intellectual development. My continuing interest in politics and public affairs was one of the reasons why I began to be interested in economics in my last high school years." In 1945, as the German defenses weakened and Soviet troops advanced, he, his mother, his brothers and his sister escaped Breslau by train and fled to Austria, where he worked as a farmhand. He returned to Germany after the war and was able to continue his education there. In high school, he was captivated by an article in Fortune magazine about game theory by the business writer John D. McDonald. "I had to walk to school, which took about three and a half hours there and back," Professor Selten recalled. "During these walks I occupied my mind with problems of elementary geometry and algebra." He graduated from Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, where he went on to receive his master's degree and, in 1961, his doctorate. He was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and also taught at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Bielefeld before joining the University of Bonn in 1984. He married Elisabeth Langreiner, whom he had met through the movement to spread Esperanto, a language developed in the 19th century to encourage global communication. Like Professor Selten, she had diabetes; both her legs were amputated below the knee. There was no immediate word on his survivors. The Nobel economics committee's recommendation to award the prize was almost overruled by the full Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and prompted an unprecedented floor debate because of concerns about Dr. Nash's mental state. But his advocates, and the committee's desire to acknowledge the growing importance of game theory, carried the day. Dr. Nash died in a car crash last year. Dr. Harsanyi died in 2000. Beginning in the mid 1960s, Professor Selten expanded on Dr. Nash's groundbreaking game theory research, devising complex formulas. One is colloquially called "the chain store paradox," whereby the threat of a price war in one market affects other markets; another is "the trembling hand equilibrium," whereby each player believes there is a small probability that a mistake will occur. Professor Selten's research topics "seem often strongly risk seeking and sometimes almost contrarian," Abdolkarim Sadrieh, a former student of his and now a teacher himself, wrote in 2010. But he said that the professor could be cautious in his personal life. For one thing, Dr. Sadrieh noted, he always carried an umbrella. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Kit Harington and Emilia Clarke in "Game of Thrones," which returns April 14 for its eighth and final season on HBO. This article contains spoilers for Seasons 1 7 of "Game of Thrones." It's been 541 days since "Game of Thrones" last aired a new episode. That was the cataclysmic Season 7 finale, which both demonstrated the annihilative power of a zombie ice dragon and finally paired the two most attractive people in the story, Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and Jon Snow (Kit Harington), not long after revealing that they are apparently aunt and nephew. (Other things happened, too.) Our long "Thrones" less night will end April 14, when the eighth and final season of HBO's biggest ever hit finally kicks off. The Times will be there with the usual array of recaps, interviews and explainers, as well as our day after newsletter. It will be an obsessive (in a good way) run up to the final season of "Game of Thrones" a deep dive into all the past twists, themes and connections you don't realize you've forgotten, along with tributes to characters we loved and lost. (Hodor.) If you aren't yet a subscriber to to our "Thrones" newsletter, here's a sign up link. You'll receive the preseason edition every Monday and Friday beginning Feb. 25, as well as our day after edition once the season starts. If you're already a subscriber, you'll get them automatically. Want some company? Share the sign up link with any friends who 1.) love the show but weren't previously part of our newsletter family, or 2.) don't really care about it but might want some background for pop cultural literacy reasons. All are welcome! And while we're here, here's a brief rundown of everything we know about Season 8 so far: It will be big! Monumentalism has always been a key component of a show that began with a giant sword beheading a deserter and most recently saw a zombie dragon destroying a leviathan Wall. But this season will be even bigger, with six nearly feature length episodes and some of the largest, most complex sequences ever filmed for television. The final clash between the heroes and the undead White Walkers, in particular, took many weeks to film, including 55 nights of outdoor shooting. That episode was overseen by the veteran "Thrones" director Miguel Sapochnik, whose previous episodes like "Hardhome" and "Battle of the Bastards" featured some of the show's most dazzling action scenes. But the new one "makes the Battle of the Bastards look like a theme park," Peter Dinklage told Entertainment Weekly. And that's presumably before the show even gets to the final clash to determine who actually wins this whole, you know, game of thrones. Ahead of season 8 of "Game of Thrones," relive it all with our ultimate watching guide, including episode recaps and deep plot dives. There will be new alliances. Some of the more enjoyable scenes of the occasionally lackluster Season 7 came when the far flung characters we've been watching for years finally met, or were reunited. Jon and Daenerys, of course, but also Cersei and Daenerys. Jaime and Daenerys. Arya and Sansa. The Clegane boys. As one might expect, battles between the living and the dead inspire new partnerships. A teaser scene released by HBO shows Sansa offering the Stark stronghold, Winterfell, to Daenerys, although Sansa doesn't seem particularly thrilled about it. According to EW, the season premiere opens at Winterfell and calls back to the show's pilot, with Daenerys and her army arriving at the castle much as King Robert's procession did in the beginning. Eagle eyed fans also noticed Jaime Lannister, last seen finally leaving his toxic sister, Cersei, sporting the armor of the North (Stark country) in a photo released by HBO. It will be satisfying. Or not. Casey Bloys, HBO's programming president, has said that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the creators of "Game of Thrones," have ended the show in a way that is both dramatically and emotionally satisfying. But what else would he say? More interesting were remarks last year from Sophie Turner, who plays the Stark daughter Sansa. In an interview with IGN, she said that the ending would probably divide viewers. "I think a lot of fans will be disappointed and a lot of fans will be over the moon," she said. This jibes with what George R.R. Martin, the godhead of the "Thrones" universe, has suggested, which is that the end of the saga will be bittersweet. "I don't know that I, as a writer, really believe in the conventional, cliched happy ending, where everything is resolved and the good guy wins and the bad guy loses," Martin said at a book fair in 2016. "We very seldom see that in real life or in history, and I don't find it as emotionally satisfying myself as what I like to call the bittersweet ending." Fan theories abound about, well, everything involved in this show. And a fringe y but persistent one holds that the show's ur bad guy, the undead Night King, will be the one who ultimately sits on the Iron Throne. That seems less "bittersweet" than "nutty and unlikely." But so did plenty of other things that eventually transpired on "Game of Thrones," so who knows? Of course, this isn't really the end. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Credit...Philip Montgomery for The New York Times In Neil Simon's "Plaza Suite," they are playing three different couples and are seeing more of one another than ever. One morning in January, Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick found themselves together on the Upper East Side, close to a luncheonette they used to love, with an hour to spare. Parker couldn't recall the name of the spot, but she did remember that 20 years earlier, Broderick had told her that it was the one from Robert Redford's C.I.A. lunch run in "Three Days of the Condor," and that shared memory was enough to navigate them to the door of the Lexington Candy Shop. "I never see you two together," the gentleman running the place said. "I see you, and I see you." But Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, showbiz couple, are an elusive sight in New York City. Soon, on Broadway, they will be on view together eight times a week. In Neil Simon's "Plaza Suite," they'll play three different pairs in three one act plays, each set inside suite 719 of the Plaza Hotel circa 1968. The play, which veers between tragicomedy and farce, was written amid the shifting marital expectations of the 1960s, and each couple is at a different temperature: Sam and Karen Nash, a couple whose 23rd wedding anniversary is chilled by the discovery of an affair; Jesse Kiplinger and Muriel Tate, estranged high school sweethearts who generate their own extramarital heat; and Roy and Norma Hubley, who melt down on the day of their daughter's wedding. When they exited the Candy Shop, Parker and Broderick took the bus to a rehearsal space in midtown, where they ran through the three plays backward and forward for six hours. Then I picked them up and walked them to dinner at the Theater District haunt Orso. Watching them together does feel like witnessing a rarefied coupling: With her windup impish curiosity and his reserved charm, they recall one of those adorable wildlife videos where, like, a coyote befriends a badger. When they sat down, Broderick read an alert from his Citizen app "two men fighting outside bank on West 14th street" with extreme dad energy, and Parker sweetly ordered, seriously, a Cosmopolitan. The show which begins performances at the Hudson Theater on March 13, and will run for 17 weeks means that Parker and Broderick get to spend a lot more time together. But they are also spending it under the spotlight, and talking about it to journalists, and exposing their private life to public examination. Parker runs an Instagram account that opens just a keyhole view into her private life: a child appears as a wrist adorned with a friendship bracelet, a husband as a pair of socked feet. They don't discuss work much at home, and they rarely talk about their relationship at work, and perhaps that is partly why it has worked so well for so long. And yet, every year around their wedding anniversary in May, they are ambushed by tabloid reports of their misery. (Really, they are so sweet together it's nuts). I asked if they thought The National Enquirer had a calendar alert for their joyous occasion. "In all seriousness, I think they actually do," Parker said. It's set to pop up again soon: During the run of "Plaza Suite," Parker and Broderick will mark the same wedding anniversary that Karen and Sam Nash do in the play their 23rd. "We only realized that maybe a few days ago," Parker said. "Now that it's been brought to our attention, it's a little bit ever more so like, Oh, God. People are going to think we're taking care of business in public, which is not at all of interest to us." Parker and Broderick last worked together in 1996, playing the ambitious window washer J. Pierrepont Finch and the adoring secretary Rosemary Pilkington in "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying." Broderick had opened the show on Broadway, Parker joined the cast when he left, and later Broderick returned to close the show opposite his then girlfriend. It happened too fast for them to think too much about it; it was a little as if the couple had been dropped, dreamlike, onstage together. In the 24 years since, Parker and Broderick got engaged, married, and had three children, but what they did not do is act together. But in 2017, a mutual friend, the actor John Benjamin Hickey, asked the pair to participate in a reading series at Symphony Space. They paged through works by American playwrights like A.R. Gurney and Elaine May before landing on Simon, and when they bandied the "Plaza Suite" lines back and forth on the Symphony Space stage to riotous laughter, they started to reconsider their professional separation. Broderick's career took off by playing Neil Simon's avatar: He won a Tony Award as Eugene in the 1982 debut of Simon's autobiographical "Brighton Beach Memoirs," and his first film was Simon's "Max Dugan Returns" the next year. But in recent decades, Simon's brand of broad situation comedy has fallen out of favor, its situations increasingly unrelatable, and a 2009 Broadway revival of "Brighton Beach Memoirs" closed after one week. Broderick last encountered Simon at that low point, when the actor came into Orso and saw Simon sitting right here at our table. Simon's death in 2018 only increased Broderick and Parker's interest in rekindling Simon's Broadway spark for a younger generation. Symphony Space, in the heart of the Upper West Side, "has a very Neil Simon audience," Parker admitted, "which you might argue is leading the witness a little bit." Added Broderick, "And that's how we got into this trouble." "That's the thing," Broderick said. "You don't want anybody to see." "It's all so embarrassing," she said. "The UPS guy comes, and it's like, We have to stop." "Look at what's happening," Parker said. She pulled at the gathered neckline of her top and fanned frantically at her skin. "I'm getting hives just thinking about you being on set." So for decades, they didn't do it. Anyway, it worked so well for their marriage not to work together. When their children were born, they staggered their schedules by necessity. With her shooting movies and TV during the day, and him doing theater at night, "we were always able to patch together a presence as parents," Parker said. Broderick and Parker could not be confused for any of the pairs in "Plaza Suite." They represent a throwback to a totally different style of coupling, in which the women are trapped in under stimulating domestic roles and the men are cornered by their own anxious masculinity. (Broderick, meanwhile, is so sheepishly conscientious that in the middle of dinner he had asked: "Can I sneak into the bathroom? Am I allowed?") These characters are from Parker and Broderick's parents' generation, and they sprouted from the mind of Simon, who was married five times, twice to the same woman. Parker and Broderick play them with retro costumes and elaborate wigs and outer borough accents. "I have pants in Act 2," Broderick said about the plaid set, "where I don't really have to do anything." The "Plaza Suite" cast of characters and their 1960s milieu "don't feel familiar to me at all," Parker said. The play "truly feels like a portal." That distance offers a kind of protective layer over their own relationship. But it also poses a challenge, which is how to make its dynamics spark in 2020. On the cover of the "Plaza Suite" Playbill, Parker and Broderick appear in chic vintage style he is in a tuxedo, she in a black dress and pearls. The actors are recognizably themselves. It looks almost as if they are a couple going to see this play, if they were a couple who had time to see plays together. "It feels like a party at the Plaza in 1950, but it's also us," Parker said of the image. They wanted it to feel like "this is a period piece, but these are people that you may know." One of the thrills of watching this play is that there is a fourth marriage hidden within its subtext. After watching three couples deflate and collapse and ignite onstage, Parker and Broderick emerge at the end and take a bow side by side. When I saw the show in Boston, he smiled his shy, closed lipped smile, and she waved brightly to the mezzanine, and then bent all the way over at the waist to keep waving as the curtain fell. As the audience headed for the exits, a woman turned to her companion and said, "I want to know where they're staying." When they arrived in Boston, Parker and Broderick developed a preshow ritual to help ease the other's nerves. They are in separate dressing rooms "one needs a room to put the mask on," Broderick joked and when it is time to head backstage, Parker departs hers first. "I come by your dressing room," Parker said. "You say, 'Have a good show,'" Broderick said. "And we kiss." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Following her husband's orders after he is paralyzed in an accident, Bess, the innocent, trusting victim of "Breaking the Waves" the 1996 Lars von Trier film, now an opera by the composer Missy Mazzoli and the librettist Royce Vavrek starts having sex with other men. But she lives in a close knit, deeply religious community in rural Scotland; humiliation, violence and a tragic demise follow. Our review of the opera's premiere in Philadelphia Played in the film by a wide eyed Emily Watson, Bess is a sometimes baffling, altogether unforgettable heroine. With the character now swooping through the soprano range and still demanding various states of undress, Kiera Duffy's star turn was one of the most riveting operatic performances of the year when Ms. Mazzoli's work, a co commission of Opera Philadelphia and Beth Morrison Projects, had its premiere in Philadelphia in September. She'll reprise the role Friday through Monday at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, as part of the Prototype festival of new music theater. For Ms. Duffy, having a full run under her belt hasn't decreased the work's emotional punch. She said in a phone interview that on the first day of rehearsals in New York, she "completely lost it" singing through her death scene. "I had a total ugly cry," Ms. Duffy said with a laugh. She also spoke about the influence of Ms. Watson, the grueling role's most challenging aspects and the fatty fish she binged on to build up the strength to get through it. These are edited excerpts. What was your reaction when you first saw the film? I was equal parts devastated and totally thrilled. Bess is a modern day martyr type, in the best sense, and Emily Watson gives this monumental performance. I'd be lying if I said I don't feel the specter of it. It is the kind of performance that leaves an impression. But I swore to myself that I would not watch the film again. I was very nervous, and wary, about Kiera Duffy playing Emily Watson playing Bess. James Darrah, the director, said we're not trying to do a theatrical remake of the film version. The beauty of opera is you're able to freeze moments in time and delve deeper into the psychologies. Missy created a piece that really stands on its own. It's hard to always understand what's motivating Bess. How do you approach her? I think this story is about a woman trying to survive in this very bleak emotional landscape, and trying to be good, as glib as that may sound. I think she's just trying to do the right thing. And unfortunately there's a lot of misunderstanding in Bess's world. She's childlike in her extremes. I have a 17 month old toddler and I see a lot of similarities. There's not a lot of nuance in her emotional world. When she's feeling good, she's feeling wonderful, and when she's feeling sad, she's in a level of desperation that most of us don't know. There's no pretense about her. She sees the world in this very open eyed way. Which makes the story so incredibly devastating. What were the most challenging aspects? Some of the sexuality is quite brutal, just as a human being and certainly as a woman. The first time, especially, when you start to do those scenes is really difficult. To James Darrah's credit, I think he could see me struggling with that and going into myself a little, which wasn't conducive to this character. And he would step in and make it very clinical. Because it was very scary for me. Is the nudity difficult? Surprisingly, not so much. Obviously the first time you drop trou is really scary. But quite honestly, there's just so much going on, there isn't a whole lot of time to dwell on it. And if I'm really in the moment, if I'm really in the head space of Bess, I'm not feeling self conscious. I had probably the most rigorous routine I've ever had in my professional life for this role. There was a lot of physical conditioning I had to do. It's a monster role, and the emotional stakes just get higher and higher and that takes an incredible toll physically. I have never done a role that requires this much singing, this heavy an emotionality. You have to be very mindful about when to save, just not putting all the emotion in the voice. The first act is almost a whole opera in itself. The first time we did the third act in the dress rehearsal, I almost couldn't make it to the end. So I would eat fatty fish beforehand. I would have chunky peanut butter toast. I would have a huge salad with nuts and more fatty fish. Bananas. I did a lot of coconut water. I did Gatorade, which I never do. But I felt since I was using the sugars and carbs, I could do it. It was very much what I imagine athletes do, not that I would want to compare myself to them in terms of physical condition. And then were you carrying the emotional weight home with you? It was hard to shake off, but when you have a small child you have no real choice but to hook back into your real life. I think it could have taken a much heavier toll on me had I not had my little guy to come home to. When you're changing diapers, you're not able to wallow. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The safety net helped keep Camille Saunders from falling, but not Charles Constance. The difference? Ms. Saunders has a job, and Mr. Constance does not. And therein lies a tale of a profound shift in government support for low income Americans at a time when stagnating wages and unstable schedules have kept many workers living near or below the poverty line. Assistance to needy Americans has grown at a gallop since the mid 1980s, giving a hand up to the disabled, the working poor and married couples with children. At the same time, though, government aid directed at the nation's poorest individuals has shrunk. "Most observers would think that the government should support those who have the lowest incomes the most, and provide less help to those with higher incomes," Robert A. Moffitt, an economist at Johns Hopkins University, writes in a forthcoming article in the journal Demography. "But that is not the case." Mr. Moffitt found that government assistance for families whose incomes flutter just above the poverty line nearly doubled from 1983 to 2004 after taking inflation into account. The numbers look very different for those scraping along at the bottom, generally unemployed single mothers with children. Their benefits declined in real terms by about one third. During the Great Recession, assistance to the poorest briefly expanded but has since fallen back, he said, and there is no indication that the long run trend is shifting. "There's been this emphasis on rewarding workers and people like the elderly or disabled who are considered 'the deserving poor,' " said Mr. Moffitt, referring to a revival in recent decades of age old attitudes toward those at the bottom of the economic ladder. "If you're not working, the interpretation is that you're not trying." President Obama's new proposals for a 500 tax credit for working parents with children, an increase in the minimum wage and paid parental leave are just the latest examples of this trend. More than 300,000 California workers at big companies like Walmart, for example, qualify for Medi Cal, the state's health insurance for the poor, according to a study from the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley. And in New York, 40 percent of bank tellers are on some form of public aid like food stamps. Across the country, working families account for nearly three quarters of the people enrolled in major public benefits programs and 63 percent of the costs, the Berkeley researchers concluded. Experts emphasize that they do not want to pit one needy group against another. "The working poor deserve some help; there's no way I want to cut any of that," Mr. Moffitt of Johns Hopkins said. "But there's a group here that's being left out." Distinguishing between people who deserve public generosity and those who don't dates to colonial times, but the idea has found powerful champions on both sides of the political divide, including Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the influential new Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. The move away from giving more aid to those in abject poverty can be traced, in part, to the campaign to "end welfare as we know it," promoted by President Bill Clinton during his 1992 presidential run and accomplished in 1996 when the system was overhauled. The program he created, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, imposes time limits and work rules on recipients. And when a state's allotted budget runs out, poor families are turned away. Like Mr. Constance. "I couldn't really find any kind of work or the help that I needed to help raise my son," said Mr. Constance, 53, who until recently had been living at a homeless shelter in New Orleans with his 9 year old son, Pablo. Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. A prison record from the 1980s, the result of selling two ounces of marijuana in Texas, has hampered his search for work as a house painter. "That's why I say it's been a hard road for me trying to raise my son, with all those ghosts and shadows over my head," he said. As he discovered, benefits vary greatly from one state to the next. He applied to the Temporary Assistance program in Miami, he said, but was uncertain about why he never received any. "It wasn't nothing but problem after problem after problem," he said. Last year, he moved with his son to New Orleans, where he said he was offered 123 a month in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families aid in exchange for community service. He tried it, but the time and money spent commuting wasn't worth it, he said, explaining that he was better off using the time to look for an odd job, a car to wash or a yard to rake. He said he received 318 a month in food stamps, and that his son received 390 a month from disability payments through his mother, who still lives in Florida. After months of bouncing around in emergency homeless shelters, the two are now settled in an apartment. The 700 monthly rent is being paid by the Salvation Army for six months, while Mr. Constance searches for a permanent job. "With the light bill and water bill, I don't have enough to take care of all of that," he said. And by saving 1,000 to put toward her dream of a cleaning service, she is now designated to receive a 4,000 tax free, no strings attached federal subsidy through the Individual Development Accounts program. These accounts, which are financed through public money and private donations, can be used only to help buy a home, pay for college or start a business. "This is not a handout approach," said Joseph Leitmann Santa Cruz, the head of Capital Area Asset Builders, the nonprofit organization that administers development accounts in the region. Earlier this year he insisted on rescheduling a meeting with Ms. Saunders so she could get some sleep after working an 18 hour double shift. "It's a way for society to co invest with a poor working family," he said. Ms. Saunders also has the advantage of living in the District of Columbia, which offers more generous benefits for low income families than many states. Mr. Constance in New Orleans knows the difference. "Not getting any kind of help or anything," he said, "it's been very rough." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
As the cast completed the movement scores in silence under David Ferri's lighting, icy and glowing by turn, there were some surprising shifts of momentum. No matter the velocity, the dancers remained loose and languid even as they wriggled uncontrollably. But were they in a dance or at a Grateful Dead concert? It's a fine line. Ms. Sigman's attempts at humor were on the stale side, especially when pieces of sod were draped over dancers' heads. (Ms. Suk attempted to comb hers.) Kate Kernochan had a running gag in which she held her hand like a microphone, said, "Hi," only to be stopped by the bell; later, she performed bird calls. But Ms. Sigman's ending was frustrating on another level: The dancers scattered piles of ceramic bits all over the stage and approached audience members in the manner of Greenpeace volunteers seeking a signature: "Would you like to come help us build?" Finally it felt like a lifetime the stage filled with men and women seated in groups as they took ceramic pieces and arranged them in small clusters on the floor or balanced them on their bodies: a dance reborn as activity therapy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Every time I blinked in this week's episode of "Star Trek: Discovery," directed by Hanelle M. Culpepper, there seemed to be another plot twist regarding the identity of the Red Angel. It was difficult to keep track, but let me see if I can run down the key ones: Future Burnham is the Red Angel and as she travels through time, she hopes a future bit of artificial intelligence will follow her. A reader points out that Burnham, in a precarious state, mutters "Mom" at the very last second of the episode, so it turns out the Red Angel actually might be not Burnham. 20 years before, Klingons were experimenting in time travel. Huh. Section 31 created Project Daedalus, the suit for time travel that would become the Red Angel. Burnham's parents were part of Section 31 and designed the suit. Their death was Leland's fault. They obtained something called a time crystal, and Klingons traced it back to them, and murdered them over it. Burnham has carried all this grief for years thinking she was responsible for their death and now she finds out it wasn't her fault. Cornwell used to be a therapist. This is just a sampling of this disjointed, crammed episode where simply too much happened, with minimal time to process and several distracting subplots. The biggest reveal Burnham being the Red Angel was an ambitious, interesting twist. But far too many scenes seemed extraneous: Why did Airiam get an onscreen funeral that rivaled Spock's from "Wrath of Khan?" Did we really need Culber having a therapy session with an admiral? And for the love of all that is Gene Roddenberry, what does Ash Tyler do? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Let us survey the many moods of Molly Brown: She is perky, chirpy, spunky, bubbly, cheerful. Even stranded on a raft after the Titanic sinks, she can't help being, ahem, buoyant. The resilient heroine of the Meredith Willson musical "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" was always an upbeat go getter, with an action packed journey that took her from a hardscrabble Rockies mining town to the Denver upper crust. But the Transport Group revival that just opened at Abrons Arts Center has turned Molly (played by Beth Malone, a Tony nominee for "Fun Home") into a human exclamation mark. The production is simultaneously busy and lifeless a feat of sorts, if not a desirable one. The 1960 show was Willson's follow up to "The Music Man," and lightning did not strike twice: There was a Hollywood adaptation four years later, but the stage steered clear, and "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" doesn't appear to have been revived on Broadway or Off in nearly 60 years. The choreographer/director Kathleen Marshall and the book writer/lyricist Dick Scanlan must have seen an opportunity to give vintage material a fresh start, so they went back to the drawing board: According to the production notes, "none of the characters in the 2020 version appear in the 1960 version. Both have characters called Molly, but she says and does different things. The two versions share three lines of dialogue." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
A five to 10 year lease is available, starting Aug. 1, for 10,600 square feet of office space on the entire sixth floor overlooking Union Square Park from this six story 1903 building, which has a seventh floor setback. The space features two conference rooms, common areas and a kitchen and pantry with bar seating and skylight. It is currently the headquarters of Union Square Hospitality Group, founded by the restaurateur Danny Meyer in 1985 at the time he opened Union Square Cafe. The building shares a lobby with No. 32, a 12 story building, and the owner of both buildings, the S. Klein Family, once ran namesake department stores, including the flagship S. Klein On the Square, on the site of the nearby Zeckendorf Towers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
So, in the case of Amazon, the accusation is that it is both a retailer and it is a platform for third party sellers in other words, another small business that might sell, let's say, a face mask or tissue paper that will sell their goods on Amazon. And the accusation is that Amazon abuses its position and its clout to make sure that their own products will always perform better than these third parties. And they also use the data and the intelligence they have to suppress and to charge these third party sellers more. In the case of Apple, the accusation is that it unfairly uses its clout over the App Store. The App Store is huge. It has more than a million apps on it. And it uses its power over the platform to block rivals and to force the apps that are on the App Store to pay high commissions. In the case of Facebook, the accusation is that it is a monopoly in social networking and that it has acquired rivals like Instagram and WhatsApp to maintain its monopoly. And in the process, really killed off competition on the internet. In the case of Google, the accusation is that it uses its dominant position in search and online advertising, and in the Android smartphone market, to crush rivals and to continue to maintain its dominance in all of those marketplaces. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Someone is weeping. You hear sobs, sniffles, the usual noises. Soon, though, the whimpering grows more elaborate, lengthening into song. The sound is beautiful and strange, yet perhaps the oddest thing about it is how a few notes sound familiar, as does the rhythm of a drum that softly joins in. Is this wailing person quoting Ravel's "Bolero"? He is. Which is less surprising if you know the name of this production: "Cion: Requiem of Ravel's Bolero." Still, this is no ordinary "Bolero." Ravel's relentless orchestral crescendo has been rearranged in the South African style called isicathamiya, the a cappella song and dance form popularized by groups like Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The whole production is South African. It borrows the first part of its title, and the character of a professional mourner, from a South African novel ("Cion" by Zakes Mda). But rather than telling a story, it functions as a danced requiem, one of stylized violence and choppily articulated motion reminiscent of hip hop popping and locking. The show, in other words, is idiosyncratic: in its conception and form, in its borrowings from Western and South African culture. That very idiosyncrasy is what makes it typical for the artist who conceived it, the choreographer Gregory Maqoma. In South Africa, Mr. Maqoma has long been a leader in contemporary dance. His company, Vuyani Dance Theater, celebrated its 20th anniversary last year and fills large venues. But apart from a 2013 performance of his solo "Exit/Exist," his award winning work hasn't been seen much in New York. Recently, that's been changing. In 2018, Mr. Maqoma appeared in William Kentridge's historical pageant "The Head and the Load," which he choreographed; and Vuyani performed an excerpt from his "Rise" in last year's Fall for Dance Festival. "Cion: Requiem of Ravel's Bolero," which has its United States premiere at the Joyce Theater, Jan. 15 18, as part of the Prototype Festival, is his first full length ensemble work to tour here. (It heads next to the Kennedy Center in Washington and Mass MoCA in North Adams, Mass.) What is distinctive about Mr. Maqoma's choreography? "He has coherently brought classical African dance into conversation with all that is contemporary," said Jay Pather, an associate professor and curator at the University of Cape Town. By "classical African dance," Mr. Pather explained, he means what is often called "traditional": long established practices of Zulu, Xhosa and Sotho people, "rituals and codes that are highly complex and have been passed on in highly sophisticated ways." Mr. Maqoma, who is of Xhosa descent, doesn't deconstruct these rituals and codes. He uses them to tell contemporary stories. "I would watch them dance their traditional forms, fascinated by their bodies and sweat," he recalled in a phone interview. "It was only later that I realized that movement was a survival mode for them, a way of dealing with their displacement and staying in touch with their old homes and the people they left behind." He also remembers seeing Michael Jackson on TV. "Everything else on television portrayed a black person as inferior," he said, "but here was this man who was black like me, moving people of all colors to tears. I said to myself, 'That's what I want my dance to be like.'" By the time he was 17, Mr. Maqoma was performing with an informal youth group coincidentally called the Joy Dancers. In a newspaper, he found an advertisement offering training to disadvantaged youth, an announcement of auditions for the trailblazing organization Moving Into Dance Mophatong. "I was used to dancing in the backyard, in the dust," he recalled. "This was my first time walking into a studio that had mirrors and a dance floor, the first time I was in the same room with people who were white and colored who were fighting for the same position." He had convinced his friend Vincent Mantsoe to join him. "We saw all these white people stretching in leotards," Mr. Mantsoe said over the phone from France, where he now lives. "And we were like, 'Maybe we don't belong here.' But we saw a few other black people, so we stayed to try our luck." Both were accepted into the training program, and then into the professional company, which worked in an Afro fusion style developed by its founder, Sylvia Glasser, combining African dance with Western contemporary forms. In a few years, Mr. Mantsoe became associate artistic director and a choreographer, winning awards in South Africa and France. Mr. Maqoma dropped out, thinking he might become an architect, but Mr. Mantsoe convinced him to rejoin for tours of Europe. These tours, along with a 1997 scholarship to a choreographic workshop at DanceWeb in Vienna, opened his mind to new possibilities. He recalls the choreographer Emio Greco encouraging him to "push more, go for more" and introducing him to improvisation. "That's now my starting point for every creation," he said. "When you work with what the body wants to release, then you are working with truth." But it was Rosas, the company of the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, that fascinated him the most. And it was in hopes of joining that troupe that he auditioned (successfully) to study at De Keersmaeker's Performing Arts Research and Training Studios in Brussels. Again, he had a friend with him, Shanell Winlock, a member of Moving Into Dance. And it was in Brussels, while choreographing a piece with her and another South African dancer, that he realized how much he missed home. "I felt it was important for me to be part of the changing artistic and political landscape of the country" post Apartheid, he said. "It was important to create a space not just for myself but for other artists like me, coming together to reinvent, as Africans, a notion of what dance is in Africa." So instead of joining a company in Belgium, he founded one back home, roping in Ms. Winlock among others. "Gregory was true to his roots, but also willing to accept all that he had absorbed in Europe," Ms. Winlock said. "And that's still what he's doing, on a grander scale." "Cion," made in 2017, has a cast of 13 dancers and musicians. It arose from Mr. Maqoma's troubled awareness of killings in his country. "It's happening so much that it does not shock us anymore when we hear of a child being killed and mutilated," he said. He thought of the professional mourner character, and of "Bolero," which sounds to him like a funeral procession and also like African music. "We want the music to reflect our languages, our traditions, our experiences of death," he clarified. "It's about how black bodies are treated cheaply, not only by the West but also in our own country, how we treat each other cheaply." Despite this rootedness in the South African context, Mr. Maqoma feels that "Cion" should resonate particularly in the United States. "I was thinking about the enslaved who were taken from our continent and never made it across the ocean," he said. "I want to call those spirits to come back and find a place to rest." And there is another theme, another familiar sound. "There's a message in it that I feel I have to keep making louder and bigger," he said. "Black lives matter." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.