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In 1900, the Manhattan philanthropist Jacob H. Schiff received a surprise gift from some people he had helped: a silver trophy the size of a punch bowl. Officially known as a loving cup, it is inscribed with text in ruffled and blocky typefaces, thanking him for financing the Young Men's Hebrew Association building on Lexington Avenue at 92nd Street. In 2016, the trophy surfaced unexpectedly at M.S. Rau Antiques in New Orleans, and in March, it will go on public view in a mirrored hall at the facility Mr. Schiff helped found, now known as the 92nd Street Y. Jo Frances Brown, who runs the 92nd Street Y's programs for seniors, spotted the trophy at the store, and the Y bought it for about 25,000. One side is etched with an image of the original four story Neoclassical building, which was razed and replaced with the current structure in 1928. Henry Timms, the executive director of the 92nd Street Y, said the upcoming display of the object is timed for celebrations of a fund raising campaign for 180 million worth of renovations, additions and other upgrades. No one knows who designed or made the trophy; the only prominent mark on its base is a cryptic "3154." Joseph P. Brady, a silver historian and appraiser in Atlanta, said he suspects the maker was the Whiting Manufacturing Company, a New York business known for applying elaborate fonts on custom vessels. He added that it is not unusual for forgotten trophies emerging on the market to be repatriated by the families or institutions that had originally commissioned them. "They do end up back where they belong," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The plot of "Deerskin" could fit on a postage stamp, but the titular obsession of its antihero only grows with every scene. Initially, when we accompany Georges (Jean Dujardin) as he buys a woefully unflattering vintage suede jacket from a private seller, his near erotic delight in the fringed relic seems rather sweet. By the end, though, we suspect that Georges's love for animal hide conceals a loathing for his own. A demented fetish comedy that escalates to startlingly nonchalant violence, "Deerskin" (written and directed by Quentin Dupieux) flickers tantalizingly between awful and awesome. In the first category is Georges's irrational quest to ensure that his beloved jacket be the only one left in the world; in the second is his sly dexterity in enlisting help to achieve this deranged goal. Pathetic and middle aged, with a spreading middle and shrinking cash reserves ("You no longer exist," his wife snaps during a phone call, locking him out of their shared bank account), he settles in a remote Alpine hotel using his wedding ring as security. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
At the turn of the 21st century, Wynton Marsalis was busy. In 1999 alone, two years after winning the Pulitzer Prize for his oratorio "Blood on the Fields," this jazz trumpeter and composer put out 10 different albums, one of them an eight hour plus live box set. His first symphonic composition, "All Rise," was released in 2002, in a performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Mr. Marsalis's Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. But over the following decade, even casual fans would have noticed a slowdown. Mr. Marsalis was still active, premiering and refining works like the "Swing Symphony" and "The Jungle." But the faltering record industry was no longer keeping pace with his pen. Sony put out compilations of existing pieces in 2012 and '13, but no new music. "It's gotten thin, man the higher levels of our thing," Mr. Marsalis, 57, said in an interview at Jazz at Lincoln Center. "It's not what I would have thought when I was 20, to be honest." The drought began to ease in 2015, with the founding of Blue Engine Records, an in house label for Jazz at Lincoln Center. And this year is already overflowing, with Blue Engine's potent release of Mr. Marsalis's "Swing Symphony" (featuring David Robertson and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra) as well as his score for the film "Bolden" and an album inspired by visual artists, "Jazz and Art." (Blue Engine has ambitious plans to release 100 albums, by Mr. Marsalis and others, over the course of five years.) And Blue Engine isn't the only way to hear Mr. Marsalis's latest music. A recording of his 2015 Violin Concerto, performed by Nicola Benedetti and the Philadelphia Orchestra, is also out this summer from the Decca label, representing Mr. Marsalis's return to a major classical imprint. The release, which also includes Mr. Marsalis's "Fiddle Dance Suite," is something of a turning point in his orchestral catalog, since it does not depend on his presence as a player or even that of his Jazz at Lincoln Center colleagues, as on the "Swing Symphony." Still, when I first listened to the Violin Concerto album, I nevertheless experienced one of those shivers of recognition that occurs when you re encounter a familiar presence in a sharp new guise. In four movements and 43 minutes, here is a portrait of a composer in a variety of moods, rambunctious as well as intimate a mixture handled, and integrated, with the same mastery as in his early 1990s septet music. (Check out at least the last two discs of the "Live at the Village Vanguard" box set.) Ms. Benedetti's playing embodies this range. "In this concerto, she's a bard," Mr. Marsalis said. "They come, and they go." The first movement features Romantic flourishes in the orchestra, as well as modernist 20th century style textures. But it's not all about boldness: There's captivating delicacy in the ninth minute of the first movement, as the Duke Ellington influenced woodwind texture trails off, making way for the entry of the harp and high flying tones from Ms. Benedetti. "That's one of my favorite moments," Ms. Benedetti said in a telephone interview. "A few friends of mine who are musicology types have asked to see the score, and studied it a little bit. It's those kinds of things that have been fascinations to them: where texture becomes 100 percent different, but the material or the harmonic progression, or the way an arpeggio is spaced is 100 percent related. It fills you with a lot of wonderment." With Mr. Marsalis, I brought up a bombastic orchestral chord that appears earlier in that first movement. When I ventured a point of comparison Bartok's jagged and majestic "Miraculous Mandarin" Mr. Marsalis said, casually, "You know, that was my favorite, when I was in high school." The Violin Concerto bears other traces of his long and eclectic musical career. The third movement includes yawping blues accents that the Philadelphia brass section handles with raucous facility. ("Man, they wanted to play it," Mr. Marsalis said, "and they were handling their business.") And the final movement has a celebratory air that evokes country fiddling as well as Leonard Bernstein. His reverence for both figures was clear. "We could go at it, philosophically," he said of arguments with Mr. Schuller about developments in jazz. "But the depth of his understanding, his love for music and his respect for it and his patience with listening to it and the weight of who he was as a scholar and a great French horn player, it was crucial to my musical development." "Sometimes," he added, "we don't do a good job of expressing the depth of the collegiality of the relationships across generations." It was an interesting comment, given critiques that have come Mr. Marsalis's way as the leader of Jazz at Lincoln Center, where the programming has, according to some observers, been focused too single mindedly on the music's early inventors at the inevitable expense of later innovators. In recent years, though, there have been instances in which contemporary experimentalists have been welcomed. The pathbreaking composer and improviser Wadada Leo Smith played Jazz at Lincoln Center earlier this year. And Myra Melford, a pianist most often heard in avant garde spaces, was a featured soloist on a recent Blue Engine release. (You can hear Mr. Marsalis fully engaged as a player during an ensemble performance of Ms. Melford's "The Strawberry," arranged by Ted Nash.) Mr. Marsalis lavished praise on his classical collaborators, like Ms. Benedetti and the conductor Cristian Macelaru, who conducts the Philadelphians in the concerto recording, for facilitating his continued growth. He added that he hopes "to develop the humility, as I grow older, to gain more insights when studying." Still, he said, he felt confident in his abilities. After years of dissatisfaction with another orchestral work his "Blues Symphony" he says he's learned from the experience. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
, 51, is the chairman and chief executive of the Naftali Group, a development company focused largely on high end residential projects in Manhattan. Before starting the company more than two years ago, served as the chief executive and president of the Elad Group, a development company based in New York whose projects include the redeveloped Plaza Hotel. Q. Why did you leave Elad? A. I felt, really, that it was time for me to go. I really wanted to go to spend my time on the development side create, design and develop properties. Q. It was your idea for Elad to buy and reposition the Plaza Hotel. What was the genesis behind that? A. I don't think it's really known. I was negotiating and trying to buy the Mayflower Hotel, which became 15 Central Park West. So I spent the year in endless meetings with the representative of the Greek family that owned it, and, frankly, I was sure that I'm buying it. So there was a point where they said, bring your best and final offer. I came with my proposal and I lost it. I offered 364 million and the partnership that eventually bought it, the Zeckendorfs, paid more. I was very, very upset, because I had all these visions and dreams about what we would develop over there. I said, I have to find something else that is overlooking the park. I wanted to create a mixed use development that will be the highest end that I can create. So it was just by coincidence that I was walking on Central Park South and I ended up at the steps of the Plaza and I looked and I said, "What about the Plaza?" Q. Your new company seems just as active as Elad. A. We are quite busy. In just a little bit over two years we closed 12 deals. The majority of them are development deals, but some of them are just existing buildings that we repositioned and increased the value. Q. How many projects are you working on now? A. Eight. In Chelsea I have two; both of them are on 25th Street. One of them is a rental at a prewar building, and right next to it I'm building a condo, ground up. It's going to be 12 stories. On 23rd Street in Gramercy is going to be a building with 21 stories; we started the demolition, and we are continuing to work on the design. That should be completed in 24 months. On 82nd Street on the Upper West Side we opened the sales office and have already sold over half of the units in just one month; 82nd Street is a boutique building that will be 11 units, but they're relatively big, between 2,500 and 6,000 square feet. On West 77th Street, we are designing right now but we are probably going to have around 30 units. Park Slope is basically complete. That's a rental with 104 units. We've leased just over 70 percent of the units. Blended, the rental rates are 60 a foot; the higher floors are reaching as much as 70 a foot. The building is open; we've already moved in 60 tenants. Boerum Hill is under construction. We basically topped out; we're planning to open it at the end of April, beginning of May. That's 85 rental units. The eighth project is student housing for Pace University. Q. One might call you prolific. A. That's correct. But at the same time I have a team, and as a team we worked on billions of dollars all over the world. We worked on multiple projects in New York. The development team that's surrounding me right now, that's the team that worked with me on different buildings in over nine states and in Canada and Singapore. We had an amazing ride and experience over there. Q. What else do you have in the pipeline? A. We are negotiating other deals right now in the New York greater area and obviously I can't tell you about them. 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. The market is difficult now very pricey and there's a lot of competition. But once we feel the market is too pricey we'll start to go outside. Q. Where would you like to see the Naftali Group in the next five to 10 years? A. Hopefully we'll own what I call investment properties, either rental buildings or office buildings. I would like to be in a position where we have income producing properties, residential and commercial, that create an ongoing income stream in good days and bad days. And then take advantage of development and repositioning opportunities in any market that we can find those opportunities. We have no vision to have 500 people working for us. The vision is to be lean, smart, take advantage of opportunities and always be prepared for the down cycle. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
BEIJING The fog of cyberespionage concerns surrounding Huawei has for years kept the Chinese technology giant largely out of the United States. Now it has cost the company potentially lucrative business in another country: Australia. Huawei said on Thursday that the Australian government had barred it and another Chinese company, ZTE, from providing equipment to support the country's new telecommunications networks. Mobile carriers around the world have been preparing to build infrastructure using fifth generation, or 5G, wireless technology, which promises to enable the ultrafast communications necessary for technologies such as self driving cars. On Twitter, Huawei called the decision an "extremely disappointing result for consumers." In a statement, the company said it "will continue to engage with the Australian government, and in accordance with Australian law and relevant international conventions, we will take all possible measures to protect our legal rights and interests." Huawei, one of the world's largest makers of telecom gear and smartphones, already sells equipment to major Australian telecom carriers. The company wrote to Australian lawmakers recently, arguing that concerns that its gear could be used by the Chinese government for spying were "ill informed and not based on facts." But in a statement on Thursday, two Australian ministers indicated that the government would move to exclude certain equipment vendors from the nation's 5G networks. Companies that "are likely to be subject to extrajudicial directions from a foreign government" pose unacceptable security risks, the ministers said. One of those ministers, Scott Morrison, is challenging Australia's prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, for leadership of the country. Neither Huawei nor ZTE was specifically named in the Australian statement. But the two companies' ties to Beijing have long been cited by United States officials to justify keeping them out of American mobile networks. Huawei has said repeatedly that it is a private company owned by its employees, and that it obeys the law wherever it operates. Still, large American wireless carriers have for years shunned both its and ZTE's equipment. With such concerns about Chinese technology continuing to spread globally, it seems increasingly unlikely that the tech cold war between China and the United States will be reconciled quickly. More and more, the two economic powerhouses view the race to develop key technologies, 5G wireless included, in strategic as well as commercial terms. Both have stood up for their own national tech champions. And they have each sought to kneecap the other's. ZTE was nearly driven out of business this year after the United States Department of Commerce barred American firms from selling components to the company. The sanctions, imposed as punishment for illegal sales made by ZTE in Iran and North Korea, were later lifted to help defuse tensions between President Trump and China's leader, Xi Jinping. Even Chinese firms' research partnerships with universities in the United States and Canada have come under scrutiny. In June, a group of Washington lawmakers wrote to Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, calling for a review of American universities' collaborations with Huawei. In response, Huawei's deputy chairman, Eric Xu, hit out at the politicians, saying that "their minds are still in the agrarian age." Mr. Xu added: "Their behavior shows not just an ignorance of how science and innovation works today, but also their own lack of confidence." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The Philharmonia Orchestra of London paid a visit to New York on Sunday and Monday with the conductor Esa Pekka Salonen, and all I want to talk about is its sound. But if I had to name the standout moment that's stayed with me from their two concerts at David Geffen Hall, it would be a brief pause that was filled to bursting with tension. It happened twice, actually, in the finale of a glittering performance on Sunday afternoon of Bruckner's Symphony No. 7, where the composer writes in a short silence before a fortissimo onslaught. Both times, the hall filled with a mighty unison inhalation, a collective gulp of oxygen and nerve as powerful as that of an Olympic swimmer coming up for air in the butterfly. See Mr. Salonen's thoughts on the modern orchestra. With good orchestras, you can sense the mental energy of 90 odd players bundled into one force. What I actually heard in those brief rests in the Bruckner were probably only the brass players reloading for the next big blow but that breath was so dramatic as to seem to truly unify this massive ensemble. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Few things are more coveted in New York City real estate than a single family townhouse, be it a historic Brooklyn brownstone or a stately limestone on the Upper East Side. But even those who can afford to own one may sometimes wish they could dial up a doorman or a super to handle the hassles. Businesses exist to make the wish for a little help around the house their command for a price. But now a short term rental company is offering townhouse owners basic caretaker services at no charge in exchange for the rental listing of the townhouse for part of the year. Hey, you go to Aspen in the winter and the Hamptons in the summer anyway, don't you? "We're calling them home managers," said Evan Frank, a founder of onefinestay, a high end vacation rental company with a portfolio of homes in New York, Los Angeles, Paris and London. "It's like a doorman meets a super." The company already offers end to end rental management for upscale homes and apartments while the owners are away. The new caretaker service for townhouse owners will be year round, whether the owners are there or not. The company hopes the added attention will help attract new clients and keep existing clients in its rental roster. "Over the last three years in New York, we've seen firsthand the unique challenges of owning and maintaining a townhouse," said Maria Casanova, a home manager for onefinestay. "We will know the ins and outs of the home, provide routine support, and salt and shovel snow in the winter." What the company is calling "home support" includes accepting delivery of packages, trash disposal and sweeping or shoveling the stoop, depending on the season. While there will be no charge for waiting for and minding the cable guy or the electrician, the actual cost of services, such as plumbing or heating repairs, will be billed to the homeowner. "We project manage it," Mr. Frank said, adding that the team draws the line on tasks homeowners would not typically ask of a doorman or super. "If you want someone to renovate your kitchen, we're probably not your guys, but if a burner is out in the stove and you need someone to go look at it, we will handle that." Onefinestay will offer the service for 1,000 a month to townhouse owners who do not wish to rent out their homes. Boutique management firms like Top Hat Home Services and XL Real Property Management also offer caretaking and rental services for the New York City townhouse market. But short term rentals are a smaller portion of their business. At the high end, said Dylan Pichulik, the chief executive of XL Real Property Management, "townhome owners in the 20 to 30 million range are less inclined to lease out their properties because of the inherent risk and inconvenience" of opening their homes to a stranger. "They are more focused on maintaining the integrity of their asset and less on recapturing income." Still, townhouse brokers say demand for assistance from buyers in the 15 million or less range may be on the rise. "I'm not surprised to see new services popping up," said George W. van der Ploeg, an associate broker with Douglas Elliman. "Many of the buyers of townhouses are former condo owners and are used to a level of service that is extraordinary, as the amenities in condos over the past 10 years have skyrocketed." Onefinestay specializes in turning homes into high end vacation rentals while the owners are out of town, handling everything from marketing, bookings, storing the owners' belongings and cleaning up after the guests go home. Mr. Frank said the company works out deals with homeowners on a case by case basis. For its townhouse clients, onefinestay takes anywhere from 20 percent to 50 percent of the rental proceeds, depending on a range of variables, including how often and for how long the place is rented. A six week minimum annually is generally required, according to the company's website. Onefinestay has about 100 townhouses in its New York City rental portfolio, and would like to add more. "Demand from our guests to stay in these homes is very high," Mr. Frank said. "Townhomes often have the space that memorable holidays can be built around fireplaces, gardens, beautiful kitchens so guests feel that there's also unique value here, versus condos or lofts. Also, some of our high profile guests request townhomes for anonymity and privacy." Besides, he said, "How many people have the opportunity to open their own front door to the streets of New York City?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
HOW do you start a dance craze? The members of the Dance Cartel think the next Nae Nae or Dougie could be the Space Bounce or maybe the Flickitty Poppitty. At least that's what this performance group is hoping by inventing those moves and posting short tutorials on YouTube like the one for Fluff the Haters Away, which functions as both choreography and snap snap attitude enhancement. The steps are "simple, idiotic nuggets of movement," said Ani Taj, the Cartel's founder and choreographer. "If you want it to be a populist experience, then people have to be able to do it in some way." The videos and the choreography are all part of the "shake it like you've got it" inclusive philosophy of the Dance Cartel, which in its two year existence has quietly built a cool kid following. At its sweaty monthly shows in Liberty Hall, the basement space at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan, audiences have stood and jiggled and eventually joined in as the company wove and spun and booty popped around them, covered in crop tops and glitter. Appearances on "Conan," with the musician and comedian Reggie Watts, and in a Yoko Ono video followed. The latest version of the Cartel's show, "On the Floor: Remix," which includes a retro chanteuse, a D.J. and an all female Brazilian drum line, opened on Thursday night and runs through Saturday at the Ace. In asking for a heightened level of engagement from its audience, it joins other boundary stretching live experiences, like "Queen of the Night," the new participatory dinner theater extravaganza with lascivious acrobats; the enduring "Sleep No More," a sexy version of "Macbeth" in a Chelsea warehouse; and "Here Lies Love," the David Byrne Fatboy Slim Alex Timbers collaboration, which returns to the Public Theater next week. But the Dance Cartel's DIY mission, its ragtag artistic sensibility and not incidentally its low ticket prices mean to be more accessible. It's haute performance theory with a house party vibe. "The work is intended to be contagious, and people pick that up," said Kay Takeda, director of grants and services at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which this year funded a series of pop up performances around town. "We've been looking at them for a while, and this year we could see that what they say is happening is happening they are actually getting people on the floor to start dancing. That's a lot of fun." Merging club styles, precision choreography, live music and multimedia in site specific locales, with audience participation "we haven't seen any other project that's seeking to do this same thing," Ms. Takeda added. For Ms. Taj, 26, who grew up on the Upper West Side and started dancing at 5, the show is an extension of her background (her father, Edmund Niemann, is a pianist who played with Steve Reich; her mother, Donna Niemann, is a former theater artist and nonprofit administrator with an activist bent) and her own interests: vintage musical theater, doo wop, hip hop, 1980s neon and the culture of Brazil, where she studies and teaches yearly. There, "music and dance are part of everyone's vocabulary from a very young age," she said. She was inspired not only by the rhythms and movements, but also by how willing all walks were to join in. "A lot of what I'm excited about is the transfer of our energy to the crowd," she said of her shows. "Part of what I find frustrating in a lot of dance performances is that I'm really relegated to my seat, and often I'm falling asleep." Her ambition is not to dis the dance establishment but to enlarge it. To that end, her company includes comedians, M.C.s, models and apprentices a range of bodies that won't appear in identical leotards. "My company is not uniform; I don't want my audience to be all the same demographic," she said. And she keeps the tickets affordable. "The economics of what we're doing matter to me," Ms. Taj said. "We're struggling sometimes to make ends meet because of this, but I don't want to offer tickets that are really more than 20. I think it's important that my friends from deep Brooklyn and the Bronx can come to this show; otherwise, like, what am I doing?" Her director, Sam Pinkleton, shares her technical rigor and sense of play. (They met at New York University, where they each earned a B.F.A. in drama, and where Ms. Taj teaches dance in the experimental theater program.) "I'm very firmly rooted in the institutional theater world," said Mr. Pinkleton, also 26, a director and choreographer whose credits include "Machinal" on Broadway. "I feel like I so often am working for people four times my age, and to see regular people enjoy live performance and participate in live performance and not be humiliated is major." "Stylistically, it's very much the opposite of everything I've been doing," Ms. Albrecht said of the Cartel. "When dancers come to the show, it's like, 'Who are you?' It's not expected of me to be a fake Britney Spears backup dancer," her occasional look with the Dance Cartel. But, she added, "I think it's made me more confident as a performer." For their latest 80 minute show, she will enter as a ninja, complete with nunchakus, before spinning into the crowd. The dancers are "their own kind of absurdist, surreal superhero," Ms. Taj said, "like wacko Power Rangers." At a recent performance at Le Poisson Rouge, the Cartel followed a group of nearly naked twerkers to the stage. To a soundtrack that included "Pulla Stunt," by the rapper Zebra Katz, and Wings' "Live and Let Die," they turned pirouettes into cartwheels and leapt to the floor, trailing glitter. The Ronettes' "Be My Baby" came on, and they did a partner number straight out of "Dirty Dancing." The crowd, which had watched the twerkers listlessly, was suddenly at attention, and when the Dance Cartel exited, they filled in the space, raucous and grooving. "I didn't know what to expect," said Deenie Hartzog, 31, a magazine copy director and style writer from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who saw the Cartel's show at the Ace last summer, when it included pop choreography, high velocity video, power singing, and a rap duo from the queer collective House of Ladosha. "I thought, what a weird thing, but it totally worked," she said. "It was really, really fun. And I liked the fact that not everybody was a professionally trained dancer." Ms. Hartzog, a former dancer, came primed to join in. Taking in the scene only drove her fervor. "It's almost like, the longer, the better," she said. "Everyone's so jazzed by the time you get to dance." She wore a prized silk jumpsuit. "I danced so hard that I actually ripped the back of my pants," she said unabashedly, "from the crotch all the way up." Her backside was out there; her moves did not stop. "I was like, 'Well, that's what happens when you have a really good dance party.' " | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Fans of the spare Joycean short stories of the American writer Bernard Malamud should see "A Gentle Man," the impeccable New York debut of the British artist Becky Beasley at 80WSE Gallery at New York University. So should those who don't know his work. Ms. Beasley calls her installation piece "a film with decor," using as its title a description of Malamud (1914 1986) by his longtime editor Robert Giroux. Actually the work is four short films that make highly particular use of light, color, music and words (all Malamud's); impinge on one another in thought out ways; and incorporate telling details and small objects gleaned from the Malamud archives, including to do lists and notebooks. The films are accompanied by austere wrought iron benches, linoleum and men's padded pullovers in a progression of colors. The piece illuminates the flow between Malamud's life and his heavily autobiographical fiction, centering on "Spring Rain," a short story so spare it almost seems flayed, written when Malamud was just 28, but only published three years after his death. It covers slightly more than one day and fully conveys the hobbled life of George Fisher, an older man played here by the British actor Peter Beasley, the artist's father, whose emotion filled, rain spattered face dominates the last film. A yellow highway line on the floor charts Broadway's course, and Malamud's early life and education, through Manhattan to City College. It also leads us from the only light source 80WSE's big front window into darkness, and night, like the story. Much is clarified and deepened by reading the available printed matter, an explanatory brochure and "Spring Rain" itself. Some may take issue with the need for ancillary information. Initially I did. But it is a great pleasure to read this material in the gentle atmosphere of Ms. Beasley's beautiful piece, and then walk through it, sitting here or there, occasionally returning to the light to reread. This intense, and intensely timely, summer group show starts with a formally self effacing 1992 newspaper collage by Robert Gober. In it, Mr. Gober juxtaposes a nauseating article about a serial child abuser with one whose headline reads "Bush Is Sent Forth as Champion of Family Values." None of the 15 other artists' pieces are quite as direct, but many of them share the same interest in sex that can't be distinguished from power and power that feels like violence. In Tala Madani's satirical small oil "A Banana Is Speaking," a phallic white banana, half peeled, approaches a microphone stand against a lush black background while onlookers watch in states of shock and dismay. In her two small oils, "Boceto del Zulia I" and "Boceto del Zulia II," Beatriz Gonzalez turns her focus toward dreamy archetype, rendering dislocated Colombians in Venezuela as nearly monochrome silhouettes without feet. Wu Tsang's "Female Hero," a wooden coffin with a mirrored interior in which neon letters spelling out "You Sad Legend" seem to echo down into eternity, demonstrates how easy it is to construct an intractable problem with a few simple pieces. Leon Golub's 1972 acrylic painting "The Assassin," of a couple in a violent erotic embrace, is a double St. Sebastian with bullet holes, and a couple of Catherine Opie's large color photographs of high school football players, in this context, are heartbreaking: Staring gravely into the camera, "Sean" and "Martin" look like eagerly budding victims of their own cultivated aggression. For millions of people migrating or living in refugee camps, tents serve as temporary homes and places of shelter. In Meschac Gaba's exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar in Chelsea, the large tent occupying the downstairs gallery space is a symbolic structure. It refers to Mr. Gaba's own experience but also draws attention to the plight of the displaced and the way nations and borders can restrict the movements of people. The tent is made with a bright fabric whose pattern is an imaginary global flag, which Mr. Gaba created by digitally fusing elongated versions of all the world's flags. Inside, you can sit and draw with colored pencils and hang your work alongside the works of other visitors, some of whom are artists represented by the gallery or art world figures. In the upstairs gallery is an installation of hand braided wigs mounted on armatures and displayed on pedestals, like ceremonial African headpieces. Continuing a project Mr. Gaba started in the early 2000s, the headpieces mimic architectural structures for this show, buildings in Washington, D.C. A nearby video captures 15 people walking solemnly, in single file, through the streets of Cotonou, Benin's largest city, wearing the Washington wigs. There is a sly humor to the project. Seeing the Pentagon, White House, United States Capitol and Hirshhorn Museum move by in wig form feels absurd, even silly. But this playful homage to Washington might be seen as something more serious: a protest or sacred ritual in which unilateral power is equalized, quietly, via a simple artistic gesture art. This summer group show offers an inspiring reminder of how broad the creative field can be even within a narrow formal stricture. As the title promises, every one of the 22 wall mounted works by mostly famous names is organized around horizontal lines. But otherwise they vary enormously. The works include Serge Poliakoff's 1937 gouache "Bandes Colorees," which runs through nine colored stripes from red to violet and back to yellow again, and Juan Usle's nine foot tall, overpoweringly handsome 2017 painting "Sone Que Revelabas (Missouri)," which mostly consists of black and verdigris colored vertical strokes. Matthew Wong's oil "Last Summer in Santa Monica," a browner take on Poliakoff's rainbow, becomes a hazy summer sunset with the addition of a tiny white V for a gliding sea gull, while Hiroshi Sugimoto performs an opposite transformation with his nocturnal photo "Baltic Sea, Rugen," which looks like a somber, two tone study of the color black. But what's still more interesting is the way the context of all these other stripes opens up the show's two Agnes Martins, especially her six foot square "Untitled 5," which is hung next to a tall, rectangular Louise Fishman painting called "Bitter Herb." Only after noticing the way Ms. Fishman's six dark bands of color seem to roll constantly upward did I appreciate, for the first time, the genius of Martin's square. Its own six creamy gray bands, divided by narrower lines of darker gray, held my gaze, buoyant and bodiless, in place. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Suites in the skies airline seats with doors that slide shut to give passengers total privacy have become de rigueur in international first class: Emirates and Singapore Airlines are two of the carriers that offer them on long haul flights. But an all suite business class? It has yet to be heard of, according to Delta Air Lines, and the carrier wants to be the first in the industry to change that with the fall 2017 debut of the Delta One suite in its Delta One business class category. "This product is meant to be as close to a private jet experience as possible and is driven by our customers, who were telling us that they wanted more privacy," said Tim Mapes, Delta's chief marketing officer. The suites will not be an additional category on top of Delta One business class, but a replacement for it entirely on some long haul flights, primarily those with a flying time of more than 12 hours, like the 14 to 15 hours it takes to reach Sydney Airport from Los Angeles International Airport (besides Delta One, the airline has one other class, main cabin its name for economy). The suites are expected to debut on Delta's first Airbus A350 plane in September 2017, and although tickets for the new aircraft are to go on sale in November, the route it will fly is still being determined. "Right now, we are focused on what these suites give our passengers, and that's more privacy and much more personal space," said Robbie Schaefer, Delta's onboard product manager. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The men's free skating program was like a rodeo, with the quadruple jump as the bucking bronco. Even the Japanese gold medalist Yuzuru Hanyu, above, tumbled during his performance. It's a consolation to know you aren't alone. A few days before the Sochi Olympics started, several figure skating luminaries gathered for a screening as part of the Dance on Camera festival at Lincoln Center. After viewing a clip of the transcendent British skater John Curry, Dorothy Hamill made an astute observation: "This was the first time I watched skating in a long time without swearing at the television set." There's nothing like the Olympics to incite foul language. It's not just the flawed judging system, in which skaters who hope to win a medal must focus more energy on racking up points than on refining their artistic point of view, or even Scott Hamilton's effusive screech. Not much has changed since the 2010 Olympics. For many figure skaters, artistry remains that elusive muse. The costumes are appallingly infantile. Why are male skaters so enamored of suspenders? What's the deal with grown women wearing skating dresses that look as if they were found on the sale rack at the tiara store? It's as if competitors were still on the junior circuit and hadn't made a commitment: beauty pageants or skating. Figure skating is gliding, and a jump is a continuation of that flow, a breathtaking release in which the human body conquers gravity and soars. But in competition, jumps have increasingly become cause for anguish. Must we be made to feel so worried? The men's final, which took place on Friday, made a case for why figure skating has turned into a coldblooded circus act. Four years ago, quadruple jumps weren't the norm. Perhaps by 2018, skaters will have figured out how to land them. This year, it was disheartening to see so many go down, a list that included the Japanese gold medalist Yuzuru Hanyu. The men's free skate was as nuanced as a rodeo on ice, where the quadruple jump was the equivalent of a bucking bronco. In most programs, you can tell that the word "compete" has replaced "perform," and the effect is devastating as you endure if you're a die hard rounds of skaters gritting their teeth as they pop from one element to the next. You could find solace in two skaters. The American Jason Brown, a happier version of Mitch Kramer in the film "Dazed and Confused," didn't attempt a quadruple jump. He's only 19, but his skating is already rich, enhanced by his flexibility, deep edge work and fleet spins. He performs as he skates; the two are interchangeable. And the French veteran Brian Joubert, whose scores didn't reflect his artistry, seemed like the only man out there. The pairs competition left me cold. But if you can get past the short program, where pasted on smiles and cruise ship costumes transform the ice into a low rent variety show, ice dancing has the most to offer. The technique is transparent, allowing emotion and imagination to shine through. Ice dancing ended on Monday, and, as expected, the Americans Meryl Davis and Charlie White defeated their Canadian rivals Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir for the gold. Both couples have soul: Ms. Virtue and Mr. Moir meld sophistication with emotional, fervent sensitivity, skating with a sweeping creaminess. On Wednesday, the women's competition begins, and with it, the return of the exquisite 15 year old Russian Yulia Lipnitskaya. She has it all: extension, deep plie especially after she lands a jump agility and theater. Ms. Lipnitskaya isn't yet another speed skater posing as a figure skater; her technique is all in the name of drama. There's another contender, of course: Kim Yu Na, the elegant 2010 gold medalist from South Korea. Still, in skating, anything can go awry. The only sure thing left is off the ice: the sparkling commentary of Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir, who, along with the sportscaster Terry Gannon, call the daytime live broadcast. They make it possible to suffer through wretched performances, not because they make fun of bad skating though you can usually count on priceless giggles at just the right moment but because they take it so seriously. While never short of opinions, they're generally quiet during performances. While they get to the nitty gritty of technique pointing out when skaters are flat on their feet, or why they fall out of synchronization they also have information about more obscure aspects of skating, like how ice temperature affects a performance (speed skating requires harder ice than figure skating) or how male ice dancers have been known to build up their heels for extra height. It helps that Mr. Weir is a champion of inspired one liners. While watching several near collisions during a men's warm up, he blurted, "It is Nascar out here in the world of rhinestones." And on Sunday, he described how knee movement, deep edges and the body's rise and fall work together to create ice dancers' speed. Ice dancing is "probably the fastest discipline," Mr. Weir said, "and with Danielle and Greg" referring to the Australian skaters Danielle O'Brien and Gregory Merriman "I find them very slow. I was watching curling earlier today, and I thought some of those curlers were going a bit faster. You have to really use your knees and dig deep." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Orange, mango, strawberry, lime. If an apartment could be said to be bursting with fruit flavor it would be this three bedroom, two bathroom apartment in Tokyo's Nagatacho district, renovated by Adam Nathaniel Furman, a British architectural designer, for a pair of very adventurous clients over the past two years. Mr. Furman's clients, a mixed Japanese expat retired couple, who regularly host guests from abroad, had owned the 1,700 square foot apartment since the 1980s, just after the building was completed. The existing layout was dark and self contained, with small rooms off a long corridor and ceiling heights of under eight feet. Mr. Furman, 36, whose maternal grandmother is Japanese, rearranged the plan to create an entrance vestibule and short hallway leading past twinned single bedrooms, after which the apartment opens up into a large living room that is united with the kitchen and eat in island. The separate master bedroom and bath are off the dining area, creating flexibility should the owners want to rent out part or all of the apartment. The line between living and dining is marked by a curve where lavender carpet meets green striped vinyl flooring. Once the hung ceiling was down, beams, ducts and other guts of the building were enclosed in tight cavities that were then covered in textured white wallpaper to keep the increased height. Mr. Furman ended the wall color at a uniform distance of just over four feet from the floor. "The white doesn't hide it," he said about the ceiling's irregularities, "but the color draws your eye somewhere else." "Originally they were referring to it as the 'bubble gum flat,'" Mr. Furman noted about the clients, who declined to be interviewed for this article. "Then they switched to 'watermelon.' You can see the hints of green, the stripes, the warm tones that turn into meaty, juicy pinks." Many of the client architect discussions devolved into conversations about senses, tastes and food, and Mr. Furman spent days with the couple shopping for materials. "I don't see how I could get clients more actively participating in the joy of designing," he said. The kitchen and bathroom counters, made from a semi translucent artificial marble manufactured by LG Hi Macs, was one of those sensual moments: "If you put that in front of people who love colors, they will fall in love," Mr. Furman said. The yellow bathroom fixtures were a harder sell. The faucets, a Danish classic designed by Arne Jacobsen in 1968 for Vola, are one of few selections for the apartment not sourced in Japan. "I spent quite a bit of time trying to get them to agree to that," Mr. Furman said, "I was very sure of myself." While most of the apartment's colors are somewhere between a pastel and a muted bright, the faucets came in hot "a bit of a Tabasco thrown on." Luckily Japanese manufacturers are more liberal with rainbow hues than American or British ones; the matching heated towel racks are from a standard catalog, as are the peachy toilets. "In the U.K. it is so hard to find colored sinks and toilets, they tend to be vintage from the 1970s," he said. These, by Lixil, are more affordable than Toto, and come in a range of Easter egg tones. While Mr. Furman is drawn to artificial materials like vinyl (the kitchen floor) and melamine (the dotted and arched doors), his clients wanted some natural elements as well. The connected kitchen living dining rooms revolve around a large custom made cabinet built from spruce, while the variegated aqua backsplash tile is from Nagoya Mosaic. "I wanted to find a place that produced ceramics that have a wonkiness to them that offsets the hard surfaces," Mr. Furman said. He gained money in the budget for the bespoke cabinet by saving on the bath and shower units, which came off a truck as one integrated piece. All those colors, all that jazz not everyone wants to live in a sweet or spice shop year round, so Mr. Furman has not had many opportunities to design permanent spaces. "A lot of people approach me and then see my portfolio and then run away screaming," he said. After working for architecture firms for eight years, he went out on his own two years ago and has had the most success designing temporary installations. These include Gateways, a series of ceramic tile arches sponsored by Turkish Ceramics and erected for the 2017 London Design Festival, as well as animated architectural logos for Britain's ITV network, on the air in March 2019. In published writing including "Revisiting Postmodernism," a book co authored with his former employer the British postmodernist architect Sir Terry Farrell (RIBA Publishing, 2017), Mr. Furman has argued for a more joyous and sensual approach to architecture, as well as the need to preserve a sometimes villainized moment in late 20th century building. In an essay in the Architectural Review on contemporary British architecture he compared the brick dominated palette to natural makeup artificial but unseen. In Nagatacho, he has created the opposite effect: There's something to see everywhere you look. What kind of client is comfortable living inside a melon? "They are very eccentric, not in terms of dress or outward appearance; they just don't accept norms," he said. "They enjoy finding new things to like between them." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Images of protest spread on social media reveal many other matching moments from opposite sides of the world, and they often feature everyday objects wielded ingeniously. Leaf blowers are used to diffuse clouds of tear gas; hockey sticks and tennis rackets are brandished to bat canisters back toward authorities; high power laser pointers are used to thwart surveillance cameras; and plywood, boogie boards, umbrellas and more have served as shields to protect protesters from projectiles and create barricades. An Xiao Mina, an author, internet researcher and alumnus of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, has studied these echoes. In the summer of 2014, when the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States that followed the police killing of Michael Brown were taking place, she noted that the protesters spoke a common language, even sharing the same hand gesture characterized by the chant "Hands up, don't shoot." Occasionally, there was even direct acknowledgment between the disparate groups, "as when Ferguson protesters donned umbrellas against the rain and cheekily thanked protesters in Hong Kong for the idea," Ms. Mina wrote in her 2019 book, "Memes to Movements." But often, she noted, the images' similarity was unwitting. In their spread, their simultaneity and their indirect influence on each other, the protest videos had all the characteristics of memes, those units of culture and behavior that spread rapidly online. The same cultural transfer that gives us uncanny cake slicing memes and viral challenges also advances the language of protest. "We live in this world of attention dynamics so it makes sense that tactics start to converge," Ms. Mina said. She called the images' tendency to build on each other "memetic piggybacking," and noted that everyday items that are subverted into objects of protest are "inherently charismatic." Franklin Lopez, a founder and former member of Sub.media, an anarchist video collective that has filmed dozens of protests, said that "videos shared through social media and mainstream media reports become rough 'how to guides' on protest tactics." "You see peeps in Hong Kong using umbrellas as countersurveillance tools and folks over here will say, 'hey, brilliant idea!' and you'll see umbrellas at the next militant protests," he said. Of course, it's not just social media mimicry. Ms. Mina pointed out that "activists from around the world do actively learn from each other and exchange tactical tips." On the topic of direct communication between groups in Hong Kong and the United States, Mr. Lopez said: "Texts outlining not only tactics and strategies but reports of what worked and what didn't are shared and translated, but also talked about in in person events, film screenings and internet talks." In June, for example, Lausan, a group that formed during the Hong Kong protests that seeks to connect leftist movements in various countries, was a host of a webinar. It provided a forum for Hong Kong and American activists to share strategies. Katharin Tai, a doctoral candidate in political science at M.I.T. who studies Chinese foreign policy and the intersection of international politics and the internet, separated information sharing between Hong Kong and the United States into two categories. One was group to group sharing of tactics between the sets of protesters, though she noted that because both protest efforts were non hierarchical, they were not necessarily organized from above. The second, she said, included the translation of helpful graphics and information say, which sort of gas masks best protect against tear gas that are then posted online. "That's the less organized way, where they're just kind of pushing it out into the ether," she said. The social internet has sped up a long history of direct and indirect dialogue between protest movements around the world. Mark Bray, an organizer of Occupy Wall Street and a lecturer at Rutgers University, said that sharing or imitating protest strategies and tactics is "as old as protest strategies and tactics are," but that social media "has exposed people to more different tactics." "In that sense, like all kinds of new communications technologies, it has shortened the perceived distance between movements around the world," said Mr. Bray, who is the author of "Antifa: The Anti Fascist Handbook," a history of that movement. But Hong Kong does play a central role in the activist imagination, scholars and activists said, thanks both to the tactical ingenuity of protesters there, as well as Western media's willingness to cover pro democracy demonstrations extensively. Gabriella Coleman, a professor at McGill University who studies digital activism, noted that even nonpolitical publications were moved to cover the Hong Kong protests. "Because Hong Kong is seen as a Western style democracy that's being eaten up by its authoritarian parent, there's no controversy in reporting on it," she said. Asked whether Hong Kong loomed particularly large in the eyes of experienced protesters, Mr. Lopez answered emphatically: "Hell yeah!" He called the protests in Hong Kong "epic." "More than anything the discipline, organization and persistence of these folks has been awe inspiring," Mr. Lopez said, adding that the people of Hong Kong "are showing us what is possible." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Stuck inside, looking at social media on your phone, bored with what's on streaming, it could start to seem like a good idea. A monolith, you might reason, could add a glimmer of mystery to your local wilderness, might make people laugh, or at least distract them with a literal shiny object. They've appeared in Utah, California and Romania. There's a three foot one in downtown Fayetteville, N.C., and one on a beach of England's Isle of Wight. Of course, there are plenty of reasons not to build a monolith. Like legality: Trespassing on private land aside, it's also illegal to install structures without authorization in many places, including on Utah's millions of acres of federally managed public land, where a 10 foot, stainless steel object was found last month, inspiring copycats around the world. Metalwork can be dangerous without training, and a large, unstable metal object could pose a danger to the people around it and the environment. There are cheaper, easier, more clearly legal and less hazardous ways to pass the time (books, walks, projects that don't involve monoliths). But still, people are making monoliths. And your own property is your own property. So if your front lawn's holiday decorations are crying out for one, here are some things to think about. The other monoliths as models It remains unknown how many people have built monoliths because they have backyards and easygoing neighbors, rooms with high ceilings or ambitions for only small monoliths that could, for instance, loom mysteriously over the dinner table. The best known monoliths, the ones you've seen all those headlines about, have been built on more contested ground. After the Utah monolith was found, the Bureau of Land Management said that it "would like to remind public land visitors that using, occupying, or developing the public lands or their resources without a required authorization is illegal." And building a monolith seems to invite the dismantling of a monolith, if not by the authorities, then by regular people. Other objects have been removed, shortly after discovery, from a parking lot in San Diego, a mountain in Atascadero, Calif., and a plateau in Romania. The Utah monolith had stainless steel pieces fastened with rivets, officials said. Its interior, exposed in a video of four men carting the monolith away in the dead of night, appeared to show a plywood frame. "The sizes aren't so bizarre," Mr. Bissinger said. "You could order them and no one would say, 'Oh, are you building a monolith in the desert?'" An interior frame can be made of plywood or a material along those lines, cut into a triangular shape with a simple handsaw or a circle saw. More ambitious monolith builders could use a CNC machine a sort of a computer controlled cutting tool to make the frame, Ms. La Scala said, and the metal could be cut into panels by a water jet machine "to ease the edges so they aren't a rough cut." A sheet metal brake can bend metal, though maybe not in large segments. A pickup, Jeep or rental truck would probably suffice to move the supplies, Mr. Bissinger said. To install a monolith, the designers said the base could be concrete footing or metal footing like rebar. Or, Mr. Bissinger said, monolith builders could simply dig a hole below the frost line and fill the bottom with aggregate or sandbags, "like if you were putting in a mailbox." Dan Toone, an artist in Salt Lake City, said that photos of the Utah monolith suggested its creators used a concrete saw to cut into the rock, mount a wood or metal framework, and then install the metal sheets on the spot. "It was very clean and very well done," he said. "Somebody professionally did that." Over all it's not a terribly expensive process. A lower end monolith could cost as little as 200 to 300, said Scott Neale, a professor of scenic design at Trinity University. He said that such an object could be completed by someone with "midlevel skills" in a theater's scene shop or someone's garage, with metal shears or an acetylene torch. A more expensive, more involved version could cost 1,000 or 2,000, he said. To strengthen a Utah style construction, the special effects artist Jamie Hyneman, who was a longtime host of the show "Mythbusters," said that a builder could coat the wood framing with epoxy to hold the sheet metal, and place another board on top with weights for a few hours to secure the construction. He also outlined another, sturdier version of monolith that would use thick pieces of metal, cast into the corners of the triangular shape, to hold the three panels of metal together. This construction might take some more work, in order to bevel the edges of the sheet metal and create the corner fasteners, but a monolith could still be ready in a day or two. "You could pretty much specify all this stuff at some machine shop and just assemble it," he said. "It's really kind of a dead simple thing." He warned that the devil was in the details. Thinner metal could make the monolith seem "kind of warpy," and require countersinking the metal. Cardboard could help prevent scratches while moving the monolith, and rope could help lift it. Rebar drilled into the base and stuck into the ground could secure it. So many kinds of monoliths For purists, a monolith is a single large block, usually made of stone, in the style of an obelisk or a geometric slab, like the rectangular one from "2001: A Space Odyssey." That film's director, Stanley Kubrick, originally wanted a transparent object, said David Mikics, a professor at the University of Houston and the author of a Kubrick biography. "He ordered up an enormous piece of Lucite, the largest Lucite object that had ever been made," Mr. Mikics said. But when the object was delivered, Kubrick was disappointed it was not, in fact, completely transparent. So he ordered up a new prop to be painted, over and over again, in a shade of matte black. "This of course was a great idea, it's just like an abyss," Mr. Mikics said. But most of the monoliths have gone unexplained. Observers largely agreed that, whatever the purpose of the Utah object, the monoliths that followed are imitators by people looking for something to do. "Festivals are off and theaters are closed," Mr. Dorey said. "Everyone's got time on their hands." Mr. Hyneman made a similar observation: "Everybody's got to have a hobby." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Mr. Rudin seeks to have the Alabama lawsuit dismissed. He is also asking for the New York court to declare that the play does not violate his agreement with Ms. Lee and that Ms. Carter does not have the authority to act on behalf of Ms. Lee's estate. He is demanding that the estate award him damages "in no event less than 10 million." "The Agreement did not give Ms. Lee approval rights over the script of the Play, much less did it give her a right to purport to edit individual lines of dialogue," he argued in the lawsuit. "It certainly did not give such rights to Ms. Carter, who is not an author, editor, literary agent or critic, and has no known expertise whatsoever in theater or writing." Ms. Carter emerged as a polarizing figure in the final years of Ms. Lee's life, as a debate raged over whether or not Ms. Lee had authorized the publication of her second novel, "Go Set a Watchman," which she had written in the 1950s and had abandoned. Ms. Carter initially said she stumbled upon the manuscript in a safe deposit box in 2014, but a conflicting account suggested the novel had been discovered years earlier. In a statement Monday, Ms. Carter said, "As the personal representative of the Estate of Nelle Harper Lee, I must protect the integrity of her beloved American classic, and therefore had no choice but to file a lawsuit against Rudinplay for failing to honor its contract with Ms. Lee. It is my duty and privilege to defend the terms of Ms. Lee's agreement with Rudinplay, and I am determined to do so." But, in his lawsuit, Mr. Rudin questioned Ms. Carter's status as a representative of Ms. Lee's will and for the first time accused Ms. Carter of having an ulterior motive in challenging the play: a desire to force the cancellation of the Broadway production because of a separate dispute between Ms. Lee's estate and the heirs of Gregory Peck, who played Atticus Finch in the movie adaptation, over stage rights. While a local theater group in Ms. Lee's hometown Monroeville, Ala., has staged a production based on the novel annually for nearly three decades, there has never been a Broadway adaptation of "Mockingbird," one of the most beloved novels in American literature. In the lawsuit, Mr. Rudin suggests he already intends to postpone the new production, writing that the legal dispute "has rendered it impossible for the play to premiere as scheduled in December, 2018, and unless this dispute is resolved in the immediate future, the play will be canceled." In an interview, Mr. Rudin said he was willing to take the unusual step of performing the play in a courtroom so a jury could determine whether or not the production is true to the spirit of the novel. "A play and a book are two different things. A book is meant to be read; a play is meant to be performed," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Keen to distinguish the Armory Show, which is facing competition from almost 300 other contemporary art fairs around the world, the New York art fair's executive director, Benjamin Genocchio, is playing up the gritty industrial space of Piers 92 and 94 on the Hudson River. For the fair's 2017 edition, which runs from March 2 through March 5, the first entirely under his direction, Mr. Genocchio said, "I wanted to make the building an asset." Working with the curator Eric Shiner, he has commissioned 11 artist projects throughout the piers "to allow you to better see the vast industrial structure." A giant chicken made from bamboo by Ai Weiwei will hang from the rafters of the 40 foot high ceiling, and a curved 63 foot long striped painting by Jun Kaneko will stretch the width of Pier 92, reflecting light from the Hudson. A constellation of polka dot biomorphic sculptures by Yayoi Kusama will populate a "town square" in the middle of Pier 94 and a word based light sculpture by Ivan Navarro will respond kinetically to the noise level of visitor traffic near the entrance. (The fair drew about 65,000 visitors last year, according to its owner, Merchandise Mart Properties.) Plumbing the history of the fair, Mr. Genocchio also tapped the dealer Jeffrey Deitch to recreate his "Florine Stettheimer Collapsed Time Salon," conceived in 1995 for the second Gramercy International Art Fair (renamed the Armory Show in 1999). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
On Sunday night, Bong Joon Ho's "Parasite" morphed from a merely great film into a history making phenomenon, becoming the first foreign language film to win the Oscar for best picture. It also won best director, best original screenplay and best international feature. Additionally, this South Korean horror comedy, a radical parable of inequality, won the Golden Globe for best foreign film, the Writers Guild Award for best original screenplay and the best ensemble prize from the Screen Actors Guild. No foreign film has ever been so honored in this country. Besides the excellence of the filmmaking, there's clearly something resonant about its bleak social vision, so different from anything coming out of Hollywood. Its reception is evidence of the same crisis of faith in capitalism that's making Bernie Sanders into a front runner for the Democratic nomination. "Parasite" depicts a world where a chasm divides the rich, who live in airy minimalist splendor, and the poor, who exist to a degree that becomes increasingly macabre as the film progresses literally underground. American viewers might get the impression that South Korea is an extremely stratified society, and while they'd be right, it's by some measures less unequal than our own. That makes the film's fatalism about social mobility, so foreign to traditional American sensibilities, particularly bracing. Americans tend to think of class as being about behavior, at least in part if you can master the mores of the rich, you can get ahead in the world. Consider the much loved recent film "Knives Out," a slightly woke version of an Agatha Christie style whodunit. (Beware, spoilers are coming.) Its protagonist, a saintly nurse with an undocumented mother, triumphs because she understands and outsmarts the venal rich family conspiring against her. By the end of "Hustlers," last year's class war crime thriller about strippers ripping off plutocrats, the central character played by Constance Wu has hustled her way into what looks like the middle class. Bong's world, by contrast, tends to be one in which there is no moving up. "Parasite" isn't even his most Marxist seeming film. That would be the 2013 dystopian thriller "Snowpiercer," in which a failed attempt to stop global warming has turned the planet into a frozen wasteland, and the remnants of humanity are stuck on an ever moving train. The poor live in cannibalistic squalor in the rear, their children fueling again, literally the hothouse luxury of the rich. Salvation comes only through blowing up the whole system and starting anew. The politics of "Parasite" are only marginally more subtle. It tells the story of a poor family, the Kims, who insinuate themselves into the home and lives of a rich family, the Parks. First the Kims' son, Ki woo, fakes university papers to become a tutor to the Parks' daughter. He manipulates them into hiring his sister as a high end art therapist for the Parks' hyperactive son. The siblings then get the Parks to replace the family chauffeur with their father and the meticulous housekeeper with their mother. None of the Kims, who never let on that they're related, have a problem fitting into their new milieu or doing the jobs they've conned their way into. If they lived in destitution before the Parks, it has nothing to do with their abilities. Nor do their new positions seem to raise their station much; they remain in the same dirty, verminous basement flat. It's the stink of that flat that comes close to giving Ki taek, the Kim patriarch, away. The Parks smell it on him. His place in the economic hierarchy is a material reality that has nothing to do with skill or competence; it sticks to him. Again and again, "Parasite" shows class as a steel trap. The film spins from comedy to grotesquerie when it's revealed that the original housekeeper's husband has been hiding in the Parks' basement for four years, pursued by debt collectors after his small business went bust. That couple discovers the Kims' scam, leading to a zero sum struggle for the scraps of the Parks' lives. At the film's end, after a spasm of murderous violence, infamy and grief, the Kims' son makes a "fundamental plan" to grow rich enough to save his father. There's a gauzy sequence where this seems to be actually playing out, and "Parasite" briefly dangles the prospect of a Hollywood ending. Only in the last shot is it clear that it's a fantasy and that he's stuck right where he began. According to the O.E.C.D., American social mobility is no more robust than South Korea's. But with a few exceptions like Boots Riley's surrealist 2018 indie film "Sorry to Bother You," American popular culture hasn't caught up to a world where brains and gumption are no match for larger material forces. At least, it hasn't caught up consciously: "Parasite's" feting at the Academy Awards where nominees received gift bags worth more than 225,000 that included gold plated vape pens could itself be seen as a decadent satire about inequality. Recently, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez elicited spasms of outraged mockery from the right wing media when she called the idea of lifting oneself up by one's bootstraps "a joke." But maybe "Parasite" has struck such a chord because for too many people inequality is turning modern capitalism into not just a joke but a nightmare. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Valerie Plesch for The New York Times Valerie Plesch for The New York Times Credit... Valerie Plesch for The New York Times Many of the 22,000 employees at Gannett, the nation's largest newspaper chain, have been ordered to take five unpaid days off per month through June. Roughly 37,000 workers at news companies in the U.S. have been laid off, been furloughed or had their pay reduced. Some publications that rely on ads have shut down. News Media Outlets Have Been Ravaged by the Pandemic The news media business was shaky before the coronavirus started spreading across the country last month. Since then, the economic downturn that put 30 million Americans out of work has led to pay cuts, layoffs and shutdowns at many news outlets, including weeklies like The Stranger in Seattle, digital empires like Vox Media and Gannett, the nation's largest newspaper chain. Finding a sizable audience has not been a problem for publishers. Hunger for news in a time of crisis has sent droves of readers to many publications. But with businesses paused or closed and no longer willing or able to pay for advertisements a crucial part of the industry's support system has cracked. The New York Times is continuing to gauge the pandemic's effects on newspapers, magazines and digital media companies through interviews with executives, newsroom employees and union leaders across the country. All told, an estimated 37,000 employees of news media companies in the United States have been laid off, furloughed or had their pay reduced since the arrival of the coronavirus. Below, a rundown, updated on May 21, of the effect on the industry since the advent of the crisis. The news chain whose properties include The Star Ledger of New Jersey has instituted one to two week furloughs for all staff members between May and December and pay cuts between 2 and 20 percent for employees making more than 35,000. The publisher of The National Enquirer, In Touch and Us Weekly has cut the pay of all employees by 23 percent. The venerable magazine and news site laid off 68 employees and reduced executives' salaries. This digital publisher laid off 24 employees and closed The Outline, a news site for millennials. The news and lifestyle site furloughed 68 employees and cut the salaries of all employees making more than 40,000 for a two month period. The magazine empire laid off nearly 100 employees after cutting pay by 10 to 20 percent over five months for those making more than 100,000. The paper has cut the pay of newsroom employees by 17 percent and by a greater percentage for executives. The British publisher laid of 90 non newsroom employees and folded the print edition of 1843, a bimonthly magazine. This publisher of seven alt weeklies in cities like Cincinnati, Detroit and San Antonio has furloughed more than 70 percent of its staff. The parent company of the politics publications CQ and Roll Call laid off 30 employees. The business publication laid off 35 people, or 10 percent of its staff. American's largest newspaper chain furloughed most of its roughly 20,000 employees for one week in each of April, May and June. The company has also confirmed an unspecified number of layoffs related to its recent merger with GateHouse Media. The owner of Gizmodo, Jezebel, The Onion and Deadspin laid off 14 people, or less than 5 percent of its employees. The publisher of The Dodo and NowThis has laid off roughly 50 people. This chain of 70 newspapers, including The Buffalo News and The St. Louis Post Dispatch, has instituted pay cuts and furloughs. 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. More than 430 newsroom employees will have their work hours reduced by 20 percent, or one day a week, through the summer. The newspaper chain that filed for bankruptcy before the crisis has put 120 non newsroom employees on leave and laid off four executives. There were 13 layoffs at The Denver Post, a dozen furloughs at The East Bay Times, and reports of other furloughs at newspapers around the country owned by this chain, which is controlled by Alden Global Capital. More than half the employees at the Des Moines, Iowa, publisher of Better Homes and Gardens and People have received graduated pay cuts between 15 to 30 percent. The radio and podcasting giant announced graduated pay cuts of up to 10 percent for those making more than 80,000, with steeper pay cuts for executives. The tabloid run by the media mogul Rupert Murdoch laid off 20 employees. The tech site affiliated with Political laid off 13 employees not long after going live in February. This city magazine laid off 37 employees everyone but the bookkeeper. This publisher of roughly 50 New York area community newspapers, including amNewYork, laid off or furloughed more than 20 employees. This newsletter for millennial women laid off roughly 25 people. The Delta Air Lines publication has been shuttered, with 16 jobs cut. The online pioneer reduced employee pay by up 20 percent, with steeper cuts for executives. Maven, the new parent company of the venerable publication, laid off 31 people, a group that included some Sports Illustrated journalists. This Seattle alt weekly laid off 18 employees and hopes to bring them back. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
OAKLAND, Calif. The first post in the new Facebook group that was started on Wednesday was innocuous enough. "Welcome" to Stop the Steal, it said. But an hour later, the group uploaded a minute long video to its Facebook page with a pointed message. The grainy footage showed a crowd outside a polling station in Detroit, shouting and chanting "stop the count." Below the video, which was quickly shared nearly 2,000 times, members of the group commented "Biden is stealing the vote" and "this is unfair." The viral video helped turn the Stop the Steal Facebook group into one of the fastest growing groups in Facebook's history. By Thursday morning, less than 22 hours after it was started, it had amassed more than 320,000 users at one point gaining 100 new members every 10 seconds. As its momentum grew, it caught the attention of Facebook executives, who shut down the group hours later for trying to incite violence. Even so, the Stop the Steal Facebook group had done its work. In its brief life span, it became a hub for people to falsely claim that the ballot count for the presidential election was being manipulated against President Trump. New photographs, videos and testimonials asserting voter fraud were posted to the group every few minutes. From there, they traveled onto Twitter, YouTube and right wing sites that cited the unsubstantiated and inaccurate posts as evidence of an illegitimate voting process. Stop the Steal's rapid rise and amplifying effects also showed how Facebook groups are a powerful tool for seeding and accelerating online movements, including those filled with misinformation. Facebook groups, which are public and can be joined by anyone with a Facebook account, have long been the nerve centers for fringe movements such as QAnon and anti vaccination activists. And while Stop the Steal has been deleted, other Facebook groups promoting falsehoods about voter fraud have popped up. "Facebook groups are powerful infrastructure for organizing," said Renee DiResta, a disinformation researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She added that the Stop the Steal Facebook group helped people coalesce around a baseless belief that the election was being unlawfully taken from Mr. Trump. Tom Reynolds, a Facebook spokesman, said the social network removed the Stop the Steal group as part of the "exceptional measures" it was taking on the election. "The group was organized around the delegitimization of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group," he said. Stop the Steal was born on Facebook on Wednesday at 3 p.m. Eastern time as the outcome of the presidential election remained uncertain. About 12 hours earlier, as the vote counts showed a tight race between Mr. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Trump had posted without evidence on Facebook and Twitter that "They are trying to STEAL the Election." Mr. Trump has since repeated that assertion openly in remarks from the White House and on social media. The idea of a stolen election quickly spread among Mr. Trump's supporters, including to a Facebook user named Kylie Jane Kremer. Ms. Kremer, 30, a former Tea Party activist, runs a conservative nonprofit called Women for America First. She created the Stop the Steal Facebook group. In an interview on Thursday from a protest in Atlanta, Ms. Kremer said she had started the Facebook group after speaking with conservative activists and seeing social media posts about voter fraud. She said she wanted to help organize people across the United States on the issue and centralize discussions over protests and rallies. "I knew other people saw this the same as I did, that there were people out there trying to steal the election from the rightful person," Ms. Kremer said, referring to Mr. Trump. "I wanted us to be able to organize to take action." Once the Facebook group was live, she said, it took off. Hundreds of members joined within the first hour. Then people began sharing videos including the one showing people chanting "stop the count" in Detroit and photographs, which were quickly shared to other Facebook pages and groups. "It was like lightning in a bottle," Ms. Kremer said. "The group grew so fast we were struggling to keep up with the people trying to post." Many of the posts shared anecdotal stories claiming voter fraud or intimidation against Mr. Trump's supporters. One post asserted that poll workers counting the ballots were wearing masks with the Biden campaign's logo, while another said that Mr. Trump's supporters were purposefully given faulty ballots that could not be read by machines. Many of these posts, images and videos have been proved false. Some of the photos and images were edited or otherwise manipulated to back the idea of election tampering. Facebook has removed or labeled some of those posts, though new ones are appearing faster than the company's fact checkers can take action on. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
It was supposed to be the year horror finally got some respect. While 2017 brought some stylish small films ("It Comes at Night," "Raw") and a megablockbuster ("It"), the real reason for optimism was "Get Out," Jordan Peele's trenchant indictment of liberal white orthodoxy told in the language of a paranoid gothic nightmare. Critics rightly received it as a weighty work of art, and it became the kind of prestige film that gets talked about during awards season, especially in the lead up to the Oscar nominations coming on Jan. 23. But when it was recently nominated for a Golden Globe, it landed in the comedy and musical category, and Mr. Peele weighed into the ensuing controversy with concerns that the comedy label trivialized the subject matter. At the same time, Mr. Peele didn't insist on it's being labeled horror, either. He said "Get Out" doesn't fit into a genre, and described it as a "social thriller." (It still didn't win anything at the Golden Globes.) He isn't the only one distancing the movie from the horror genre. At the National Board of Review gala this month, the screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher presented Mr. Peele with an award after saying that if "Get Out" is a horror film, "Jaws" is a "beach movie." To an unapologetic lover of horror, the attempt to push "Get Out," a movie with body snatching, jump scares and plenty of blood, out of the genre stings, in part because it's so familiar. Arguing over the definition of a genre, I should stipulate, is only slightly sillier than fighting over what movie should win an award, which doesn't mean that I haven't spent considerable stretches of my life doing both. But how we describe movies does matter, telegraphing value judgments and informing their context. There's a long history of movies being too good to be considered horror. Brian De Palma said he never thought of "Carrie," his movie based on Stephen King's novel, as horror, and William Friedkin has also rejected that label for "The Exorcist." In his review of "Jaws," Roger Ebert called it an "adventure movie," while The New York Times's Vincent Canby described it as "science fiction." When "Rosemary's Baby," an inspiration for "Get Out," premiered, the Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin panned it as "sick and obscene," before adding bluntly in a subsequent essay that it was "too well done" for a horror movie. For many, "horror" is shorthand for cheap, unreal, bad. The genre has garnered more critical respect today, but the tradition of dismissing it remains alive. Just last year, another film critic from The Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan, wrote off the entire genre in an essay that suggested he sees scary movies narrowly, a genre for escapist shocks. A similar condescension can be found from those who have told me that "Get Out" is a comedy because it has funny moments. "Hamlet" has laughs, but no one calls it a comedy. No wonder Mr. Peele prefers "social thriller." But by using this relatively obscure term, he implies the more common designation, horror, is unconcerned with politics or social issues, which couldn't be further from the truth. You need only look at the career of George Romero, who imbued his zombie movies with blunt social commentary on consumerism, race and Cold War militarism. When Mr. Romero ("Night of the Living Dead") and Tobe Hooper ("The Texas Chain Saw Massacre") died last year, horror lost two of its most important artists. They left behind movies that serve as a persuasive counterargument to the idea that horror cannot be righteous, funny or beautiful. They inspired generations of filmmakers, creating tropes of fear that have been adopted and refined, building a foundation for modern horror sturdy enough to support an incredibly diverse array of work, ranging from the queasy thrills of "Don't Breathe" to the austere shocker "It Follows" to the psychological blood bath "Mother!" In his review for The New York Times, A. O. Scott described "Mother!" as a comedy, but considering its outlandish gore, its debt to "Rosemary's Baby" and the director Darren Aronofsky's history with skewed world terror, I see it as closer to horror. Horror movies are nearly as old as film itself (the first "Frankenstein" movie was produced by Thomas Edison in 1910), and to be fair, over the last century, the definition of the horror movie has shifted and is still evolving. How do you define horror? It depends on what era you are referring to. Before the late 1960s, when someone referred to horror, they usually meant the supernatural. Carlos Clarens's pioneering 1967 book, "An Illustrated History of the Horror Film," made only brief mention of "Psycho" and "Peeping Tom" because they focused on humans, which, Mr. Clarens argued, put them outside the realm of what he considered "pure horror." In its current, mature incarnation, horror is applied to so many different kinds of movies that it's harder than ever to pin it down. But the traditions of the classic Universal monster movies and the new horror of the 1970s remain influential on screens today. Horror deserves to be considered as a broad genre, not a niche that exists outside rooms where the most prestigious awards are given out. Guillermo del Toro, the greatest monster movie director alive, seemed to be making a similar case in "The Shape of Water," a film widely described as a romance, with the lovers being a mysterious scaly beast and a woman played with terrific sensitivity by Sally Hawkins. By allowing the creature to not only get the girl but to also be plausibly loved by her, Mr. del Toro has extended his longstanding sympathy for monsters further than anyone else, while keeping elements of dread and violence in the mix. He didn't leave horror to make a romance so much as show us that romance was always inherent in horror. When he won best director at the Golden Globes, he started his acceptance speech by praising monsters as "patron saints of our blissful imperfections." He fully embraced the horror genre, ending on a pointed historical note referring to one of the earliest and greatest scary movie stars, famous for his performances as monsters like Quasimodo that inspired repulsion but also empathy. "Somewhere," Mr. del Toro said with a chuckle, "Lon Chaney is smiling upon all of us." Then he walked offstage and made his point more explicit in the pressroom, saying it's important that "Get Out" and "The Shape of Water" stood next to movies from more traditionally respected genres. "We have a place in the cinematic conversation that has led to the creation of beautiful powerful images but also, thematic weight," he said, as momentum surely built for his movie's Oscar campaign. The conviction in his voice made me think that maybe it is horror's time after all. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Another major world sports event has been disrupted by the coronavirus. This time, it's the Tour de France. The Tour had thus far avoided postponing, but organizers said on Tuesday that the race could not start on time in Nice on June 27 after President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday that public events would be banned through the middle of July. The Tour was scheduled to run for three weeks and end on the Champs Elysees on July 19. This year's race was to be heavy on climbing, including a visit to the top of the Grand Colombier in the Alps, and light on time trials. Tour organizers are no doubt hoping for only a brief delay. The schedule immediately after the Tour has opened up some because of the postponement of the Olympics, where the cycling road race was to have been held July 25, about a week after the Tour ended. But if the Tour is delayed much longer, it could bump into the Vuelta a Espana, scheduled for Aug. 14 to Sept. 6, and the world championships, at the end of September. The first of the three grand tours, the Giro d'Italia, has already been postponed from May and is also looking for a new date. With each Tour normally filling three weeks, the calendar is tight. Christian Prudhomme, the director of the Tour, expressed confidence in March that the race would go on, saying, "Only two world wars were able to stop the Tour de France." Covid 19 has now done the same. Tuesday's sports schedule included three soccer games, all friendlies in Sweden, a dozen hockey games in Russia and ... more than 250 table tennis matches. Maybe it's the social distancing between players that the table provides. Maybe it's ... well, that's all we can think of. But in any case, Russia, Ukraine and the Czech Republic are packing in table tennis matches, running them virtually all day long. Perhaps some Eastern European Ping Pong enthusiasts are excited about these games, but they could hardly be crossing over to mainstream sports fans. Or could they? At least one group of fans is following table tennis avidly: Of course, that's gamblers. "Table tennis is the No. 1 draw by a country mile," the William Hill sportsbook director, Nick Bogdanovich, told The Las Vegas Review Journal. "There's 90 matches a day, so it adds up." A Review Journal reporter stayed up late betting the action and actually made a few bucks. His secret: Take the underdog. New on the abbreviated world sports schedule on Tuesday, for some reason, was badminton from Armenia. Burundi has stuck out as one of the few countries in the world, and the only one in Africa, to continue with soccer. It too has now halted play. Curiously, the stated reason had nothing to do with the coronavirus. The president of the soccer federation said it was because stadiums would be needed for election rallies. Formula One continues to rip the Band Aid off slowly rather than all at once, canceling its races one by one. The latest to go is the French Grand Prix on June 28. That's 10 races that have been canceled or postponed indefinitely; 12 remain on the schedule for now. You know India is taking the coronavirus seriously. Not because the lockdown of more than a billion people has been extended to May 3, but because the Indian Premier League, the enormously popular cricket competition, has been postponed indefinitely. Field hockey, another popular sport in India, has also been shut down. The N.F.L. and its union agreed on Monday to allow teams to conduct virtual workouts until team facilities were allowed to reopen. The virtual off season will begin on April 20 for teams with new coaches and April 27 for the rest of the league. It will conclude on May 15. Teams will be allowed to hold workouts, classroom instruction and nonfootball educational programs. All activities will be voluntary, and teams are allowed to give players up to 1,500 worth of equipment. "We'll do the Zoom meetings when we're allowed to and do all the tele coaching that we can come up with," Arizona Cardinals Coach Kliff Kingsbury said. "Everyone is dealing with it, so the teams that are able to adjust and adapt the best are going to have the most success early in the season." Teams typically begin off season programs in mid April. Rookie minicamps are usually scheduled for May, followed by organized team activities and mandatory minicamps. It is not known yet if the pandemic will have an impact on training camps, scheduled to begin in July, or the regular season, which starts in September. A virtual version of the N.F.L. draft will be held next week. DANIELLE ALLENTUCK | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Marina Ratner, an influential mathematician and Russian Jewish emigre who defied the notion that the best and the brightest in her field do their finest work when they are young, died on July 7 at her home in El Cerrito, Calif. She was 78. The cause was cardiac arrest, said her daughter, Anna Ratner. Friends and colleagues have said that Dr. Ratner started as a good but unexceptional mathematician. "The beginning of her career was not particularly promising," said Anatole Katok, of Pennsylvania State University, who met her in the early 1960s when both lived in the Soviet Union. A common belief is that a mathematician who does not do great work by age 40 never will. But Dr. Ratner was about that age when she set off on an ambitious effort to connect the physics of the motion of objects with more abstract ideas of number theory. She proved her most influential theorem after she turned 50. "She struggled and went unrecognized for a long time," said Artur Avila, a mathematician at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris and the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics in Rio de Janeiro. "She is also one of the main examples to counter the myth that mathematics is a young person's game." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
NICOSIA, Cyprus With her wedding day three months away, Despina Charalambous is desperate to gain access to her savings, which have been frozen at the Bank of Cyprus for more than a week. She plans to take out all her money once the banks reopen, even though the new bailout plan for her country supposedly guarantees the safety of her deposits. "I have lost my trust in Bank of Cyprus and banks in general," Ms. Charalambous, 33, a biologist, said. She was still bitter that just last week the country's president was ready to skim money even from small savers like her to help secure a 10 billion euro, or 12.9 billion, lifeline to the nation's outsize banking industry. Multiply Ms. Charalambous's concerns by tens of thousands of account holders in Cyprus, and it becomes apparent why many people here and abroad have a sneaking suspicion that European leaders, in scrambling to cobble together yet another solution on Sunday night to the Cyprus crisis, have come up with little more than a Band Aid for what is likely to remain a gnawing wound. Stocks were down broadly in Europe on Monday, after the head of the Eurogroup, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, suggested that the idea of skimming savers' accounts to bail out banks could be considered a "template" for other countries. The borrowing costs of the financially shaky Spain and Italy surged upward as the markets digested the Cyprus news and the broader implications for the euro currency union. While depositors with less than 100,000 euros in their accounts will be untouched, people with more money will take losses in a first for euro zone bailouts. More broadly, this is the first time a euro zone country is planning to block depositors from taking their money out of financial institutions in large amounts and moving it elsewhere. In recent decades, such measures, known as capital controls, have typically been confined to emerging countries, like Argentina, or authoritarian states like Iran. Now Cyprus, a longtime haven for rich people from around the world, is struggling to figure out how to prevent them from going elsewhere. "For the first time, we have capital controls in the euro zone," said Nicolas Veron, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a policy research group in Brussels, and a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. "The next time there is a crisis somewhere else in the world, people will think of what happened in Cyprus and will try to get their money out much faster. These are the new rules of the game." Even many ordinary savers like Ms. Charalambous will have to wait a little longer for their cash. Despite promises since last week that the country's banks would reopen on Tuesday, the government late on Monday ordered all of them, including the Bank of Cyprus and Laiki Bank the nation's largest financial institutions, with most of the accounts on the island to stay shut through at least Thursday. And automated cash withdrawals will be limited to 100 euros a day. Under the terms of the bailout, Laiki will be restructured, with its guaranteed deposits transferred to the Bank of Cyprus. Local bankers conceded that the country was ill prepared to deal with carrying out capital controls. It had not, for example, determined what types of controls to put in place whether restricting local transfers, or forcibly extending the maturity of term deposits, or even in extreme cases closing bank accounts. Bankers and lawyers still working on the bailout deal on Monday said a decision had not been reached on whether Cypriots with deposits under 100,000 euros would be able to walk into their local branches and transfer their deposits to another, safer bank on the island. "They definitely will not be able to send their money overseas," said a person involved in the discussions who spoke anonymously because the person was not authorized to speak publicly. "But with regard to transferring them to another local bank, that has not been decided." No wonder Ms. Charalambous is edgy. "You just get the sense that they don't know what they are doing," she said. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. Banking experts say trust, once lost, is not easily regained. In the case of Cyprus, the deep desire by Germany and the International Monetary Fund to make those who took advantage of the system pay a share of Europe's latest bailout may have long term consequences not just for Cyprus but across the euro area. "Burden sharing is fine," said Adrian Blundell Wignall, the top financial economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and a member of the Financial Stability Board. "But if you make people nervous about their deposits, you are playing with fire." While analysts hailed Europe's decision to wind up Laiki Bank by transferring its poorly performing assets to a so called bad bank and the better performing ones to the Bank of Cyprus, it was far from clear how Cypriots would regard their largest bank when it did reopen its doors. The Bank of Cyprus reflected the ambition of this small island like Iceland before it to become a global financial player by attracting deposits from all over the world. But at its root, wealthy Russians and other foreigners aside, this century old institution is a local one handling the short term deposits, credit cards and working capital needs of Cyprus's 850,000 citizens with branches on practically every street corner in Nicosia and even in the most remote fishing village. If the concerns voiced by Ms. Charalambous and many other Cypriots over the last 10 days are an indication, the bond of trust between the bank and its clients may already be irreparably damaged. The uncertainty has also wreaked havoc with thousands of businesses of all sizes that had kept large accounts at the Bank of Cyprus and Laiki Bank. "We're talking about the two biggest banks that supply the financing in this country," said Vasilis Zertalis, chief executive of Prospectacy, a financial services consulting firm that helps companies set up shop in Cyprus. With the banks' prolonged closure, Mr. Zertalis said, "many of those companies are going to go out of business right away." Since last weekend, when President Nicos Anastasiades first floated the idea of confiscating a portion of bank deposits, Mr. Zertalis's phone has been ringing nonstop with clients looking for a way out. "We're just trying to keep our clients operational," he said. On Monday, he was frantically searching for a solution for one of his clients with a half million euro overdraft at Laiki which, like the Bank of Cyprus and other financial institutions here, took large losses on its holdings of Greek debt and lost piles of money lending to businesses, now bankrupt, in Greece. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
In His New Book, Daniel Kehlmann Says Hello to a Cruel World None Vincent Tullo for The New York Times BERLIN When Daniel Kehlmann read the news that the former Nissan executive Carlos Ghosn, facing financial misconduct charges in Japan, fled the country in a box, he couldn't help but feel a twinge of admiration. It was the kind of caper that he might have written into one of his novels, where escape artists, pranksters or con men often outwit their adversaries. For example: "Tyll," his latest book, which Pantheon will publish in an English translation by Ross Benjamin on Feb. 11. It has sold nearly 600,000 copies in Germany since it was published there in 2017, and is being adapted by Netflix as a television series. "Tyll" transmits the 14th century tale of the jester Tyll Ulenspiegel about 300 years into the future, plopping him into the Thirty Years' War. Tyll travels through a Europe devastated by conflict, encountering fraudsters, soldiers and royalty, including Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, whose love of Shakespeare chimes with Tyll's own sense of theatrical spectacle. Kehlmann's eighth novel and the sixth one to come out in English, "Tyll" is also his second book of historical fiction, following his 2005 best seller "Measuring the World." "Tyll" has either been or is being translated into more than 20 languages. But for a long time it was a novel that Kehlmann, who turned 45 in January, was reluctant to write. "It might sound very weird now, but I actually don't like historical novels," he says. "When I wrote 'Measuring the World,' I told myself: 'This is an experiment, I'm never going to write another historical novel.'" "Measuring," which is set in the 19th century, follows the adventures of two historic Germans the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss as they set out to measure the world from its highest mountain to its deepest cave. With "Tyll," Kehlmann envisioned something darker, about wars of religion and the impotence of statecraft. "Tyll" comes out in the U.S. on Feb. 11. "In a way, it's a serious literary experiment in trying to imagine what the world was like before the Enlightenment," he says, "what was it really like to live in a world before Voltaire, Newton and all these people. It's great to write about, but of course you wouldn't want to spend even an hour in this world." At one point, Tyll goads the residents of a German village to take off their shoes, throw them into the air and then reclaim the ones that belong to them watching with amusement as a brawl ensues. "I was about 7 years old when I heard this story at school, which was presented to us as something didactic, as if Tyll is showing people their folly," Kehlmann says. "But that's not true. The only thing that story actually demonstrates is that everyone had the same kind of shoes, and he's just being a really mean prankster." The idea of a jester character appealed to Kehlmann, he says, "because he's someone who could go anywhere and meet anybody at a time when there was not much social mobility." 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. "Tyll" took him five years to write, twice as long as any of his other novels. Kehlmann was about two thirds of the way through when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. Kehlmann, his wife, the human rights lawyer Anne Rubesame, and their son, Oscar, live in Manhattan, after years shuttling between New York and Berlin. "When Trump won, I was so shocked and worried that for a while I couldn't write anymore," Kehlmann says. "But then I thought of Tyll's resilience and his way of making fun of anything. It was revelatory because I'd never had any experience of my own character helping me to finish something or to cope." One of Kehlmann's hallmarks as a novelist is the impish humor that he injects into bleak and absurd situations. It is there in "Tyll" and "Measuring," but also in his modern day novels, such as "Me and Kaminski" (2003), "Fame" (2009) and "F" (2013), where the vanities of artists, actors, writers and businessmen are exposed by their appetite for outlandish quests. "His fascination for comic writing is very unusual in German literature nowadays, especially the way he combines it with elements of horror," says Alexander Fest, Kehlmann's longtime editor at his German publisher Rowohlt Verlag. "I think he grew fascinated by Tyll Ulenspiegel because two of the things he's interested in came together in this one character. Tyll is an uncanny figure in the way he makes fun of people and is funny not for the people he makes fun of, but for the others standing around." His new book is an attempt "to imagine what the world was like before the Enlightenment," Kehlmann says. "You wouldn't want to spend even an hour in this world." Vincent Tullo for The New York Times Kehlmann, who was raised in Vienna, credits his Austrian roots for this sensibility. "There is quite a lot of comic literature in Austria which didn't travel a lot because the canon of German literature is still very much formed by northern Germany," he says. "My growing up in Austria gave me a certain distance from the funny side of German culture, and the ability to make fun of it that maybe I wouldn't have had if I'd grown up in Berlin." He studied philosophy and German literature at the University of Vienna, but was more interested in Latin American magical realists like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. "I was always captivated by stories of escape, especially escape by means of tricks and brilliance of the mind," he says. Part of this fascination also stemmed from the experiences of his family during World War II. His paternal grandparents were assimilated Austrian Jews who survived thanks to forged documents that disguised their identity. His father, Michael, was imprisoned in the Maria Lanzendorf concentration camp, but was released about a month before the end of the war. Michael Kehlmann went on to have a productive career as a TV and theater director. Daniel Kehlmann regrets that his father never got to read "Measuring the World," as he was suffering from dementia and died two months after it came out. But without knowing it, a baton had been passed. While Michael Kehlmann was alive, his son never considered writing for the theater. "I always felt like theater was my father's world, so I didn't want to get close to it," Daniel Kehlmann says. "But when I wrote 'Measuring the World,' one of the upsides of writing a big best seller was that it freed me up to try out many things." He recently completed his fourth play, "The Voyage of the St. Louis," about Jewish refugees who left Germany in 1939, were refused entry in Cuba and the United States, then turned back to Europe. Later this year it will be performed as a BBC radio play in an adaptation by Tom Stoppard. For Kehlmann, the new play feels like a corrective. German fans for years congratulated him on writing books that had no relation to Nazi Germany. "I told them that I knew where they were coming from, but I didn't set out to be official proof that we have left that past behind," he says. "We haven't, and we shouldn't." Correction: Feb. 4, 2020 An earlier version of this article misstated the century in which Daniel Kehlmann's book "Measuring the World" takes place. It is set in the 19th century, not the 18th. Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Though Mister Jiu's black and gray green facade and idiosyncratic signage contrast with its neighbors in Chinatown in San Francisco, the chef Brandon Jew's year old restaurant seems at home among medical herb vendors and knickknack shops. Mr. Jew whose surname, he explained, was "lost in translation" when his grandfather came to the United States sees Mister Jiu's promise as being rooted in California cuisine and the region's Chinese American history. "I had a real passion for the things I was nostalgic for," he said. "The restaurant stemmed from my desire to have people think differently about Chinese food," Mr. Jew added. "We're doing that through Californian ingredients, organic local farms" like Hodo tofu from Oakland and oyster sauce made in house with Hog Island Oysters "and how those ingredients can be translated through a Chinese lens." Mr. Jew wants to cook food that is distinctly San Franciscan and Chinese American. Housed in a century old former banquet hall, Mister Jiu's is definitely not vintage Chinatown. On a recent Saturday night, the bar was crowded with Ivanka Trump types in tall heels and straight blond ponytails. Drinks were slow coming as the bartender, warm and apologetic, meticulously sprayed yin yang symbols onto the frothy tops of cocktails flavored with lotus and lemongrass. Despite its popularity, Mister Jiu's seems to go out of its way to avoid playing hard to get. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
BERLIN Debt was one of the core themes of the 14th edition of Documenta, the sprawling German exhibition of contemporary art that takes place every five years in the city of Kassel. The failure of this year's show to balance its own books may be one of its enduring legacies. The exhibition, which closed Sunday, was divided between two cities Kassel and Athens in part to draw attention to the failures of the capitalist system that led to Greece's near default on its debt in 2010. Bankruptcy there was averted by bailouts worth hundreds of billions, and Greece was plunged into a devastating economic crisis, from which it is only now emerging. Called "Learning From Athens," Documenta 14 appears to have practiced what its title preached at least in terms of relying on bailouts. The cost of operating a second venue appears to have contributed to a deficit of more than 7 million euros ( 8.4 million) in the finances of Documenta GmbH, the company that runs the exhibition, according to the Hessische Niedersachsische Allgemeine, a regional newspaper serving the Kassel area. The city of Kassel and the state of Hesse, which are both shareholders in the company, then stepped in to cover the deficit with loan guarantees, according to the newspaper. Christian Geselle, the mayor of Kassel, confirmed that the governments worked to address "looming financial shortfalls." But the mayor's office declined to provide specific figures, saying that accountants are examining the books and a full report is due later this month. "As shareholders, the city of Kassel and the state of Hesse have agreed that the company's liquidity must be secured beyond that," Mr. Geselle said in a statement. "Documenta is inextricably linked with Kassel." Just how much the cost of the exhibition escalated and exactly who is at fault remain matters of robust debate. The artistic director of the exhibition, Adam Szymczyk, said in an interview that its economic plan was created before he was appointed, that it had not been sufficiently adapted to take account of the double venue costs and that his team had been forced to work "under terrible budget constraints." "What is happening now is an attempt to make this a problem exhibition because of some financing issues at the end," Mr. Szymczyk said. Founded in 1955, the quinquennial "museum of 100 days" transforms working class Kassel which brands itself "Documenta City" into a cosmopolitan hub of creative activity and brings in welcome tourism revenue. Often described as the most important art exhibition in the world, Documenta is seen as a bellwether for the relevance and direction of art internationally. It is conceived as an exhibition that takes risks, and in recent days its organizers have used strong language to suggest that its high concept ambitions were being leadened by government leaders too focused on the bottom line. This year's extravaganza ran from April to July in Athens and from June to September in Kassel. It included works by 160 artists, most of whom were unknown and were featured in both cities. Conceived to "mirror, witness and fiercely comment on its time" in the words of Mr. Szymczyk its themes encompassed debt crises, migration, war and the rise of right wing populism. The budget agreed for Documenta 14 was 37 million euros (nearly 50 million) half to be financed by Hesse, Kassel and the German federal government and the other half to be raised by Documenta from ticket and merchandise sales and sponsors. Reporting by Hessische Niedersachsische Allgemeine has faulted management miscalculations for the budget overshoot, including what it said was an inability to prepare for soaring electric bills to air condition spaces in superhot Athens. But the Documenta curatorial team, led by Mr. Szymczyk, has fought back, suggesting that the miscalculations had been more broadly shared and the financial ramifications were being exaggerated. "Unfortunately, politicians have prompted the media upheaval by disseminating an image of imminent bankruptcy of Documenta and at the same time presented themselves as the 'saviors' of a crisis they themselves allowed to develop," a Sept. 14 statement from the curatorial team said. Mr. Szymczyk's decision to stage Documenta in Kassel and Athens faced what he described in an essay in the catalog as "pre emptive and at times disheartening critique" from the start. The Kassel branch of Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union had campaigned against the double venue plan in local elections last year, seeing the Athens offshoot particularly that the exhibition opened there as a threat to Kassel's identity as Documenta's home. Norbert Wett, a local C.D.U. politician who is running for Parliament in the national elections later this month, said that it was a mistake to take the focus of the exhibition off Kassel, whose taxpayers are helping to pay the bills and that it had been "predictable" that the budget would be inadequate. "We would like to know where the money went," Mr. Wett said in an interview. Mr. Szymczyk criticized Documenta's reliance on increased attendance to help underwrite each edition and noted that the Kassel part of this year's show had surpassed what he called the "already insane" 2012 figure of 850,000 visitors, while Athens which was mostly free of admission charges had drawn 330,000. "It is good to be democratic and art is for everyone, but the capacity of the infrastructure is an issue," he said. Mr. Szymczyk said he was concerned that the political establishment would use Documenta's financial woes "as a punitive instrument against the exhibition itself," reaching the point where "no crazy ideas are possible anymore." His curatorial team's statement went a step further, accusing authorities of conducting what amounts to a "political takeover of Documenta." It criticized the authorities for asking, as the statement put it, "a public cultural institution to become primarily an economic institution subject to the demands of profit and success." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The end of the world can't come fast enough for the miserable egotists in Torben Betts's "Caroline's Kitchen," which opened on Thursday night at 59E59 Theaters. Part of this year's Brits Off Broadway festival, this misanthropic comedy of disaster suggests that a life obliterating apocalypse might be not only just, but also merciful. Not that there's any nuclear bomb or runaway meteor heading toward the cheery London kitchen in the home of a celebrated television chef that gives the play its title. Though an increasingly ominous thunderstorm is raging outside, terminally self centered humanity is the real agent of destruction here. I hope I haven't misled you into expecting an "Avengers" style epic of stylized violence. (The body count of "Caroline's Kitchen" is modest, and there is only limited bloodshed.) Mr. Betts's play belongs instead to a genre much loved in Britain, in which domestic comedy explodes into a feral free for all. What's new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter. Alan Ayckbourn's plays about hapless middle class souls succumbing to moral chaos remain the gold standard for this form. But Mr. Betts, whose "Invincible" was part of Brits Off Broadway two years ago, has little of Mr. Ayckbourn's patience with and compassion for characters who consistently do the wrong thing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Supporters of President Obama's health care law had predicted that expanding insurance coverage for the poor would reduce costly emergency room visits because people would go to primary care doctors instead. But a rigorous new experiment in Oregon has raised questions about that assumption, finding that newly insured people actually went to the emergency room a good deal more often. The study, published in the journal Science, compared thousands of low income people in the Portland area who were randomly selected in a 2008 lottery to get Medicaid coverage with people who entered the lottery but remained uninsured. Those who gained coverage made 40 percent more visits to the emergency room than their uninsured counterparts during their first 18 months with insurance. The pattern was so strong that it held true across most demographic groups, times of day and types of visits, including those for conditions that were treatable in primary care settings. The findings cast doubt on the hope that expanded insurance coverage will help rein in emergency room costs just as more than two million people are gaining coverage under the Affordable Care Act. And they go against one of the central arguments of the law's supporters, that extending insurance to large numbers of Americans would reduce emergency room use, and eventually save money. In remarks in New Mexico in 2009, Mr. Obama said: "I think that it's very important that we provide coverage for all people because if everybody's got coverage, then they're not going to the emergency room for treatment." The study suggests that the surge in the numbers of insured people may put even greater pressure on emergency rooms, at least in the short term. Nearly 25 million uninsured Americans could gain coverage under the law, about half of them through Medicaid. The first policies took effect on Wednesday. "I suspect that the finding will be surprising to many in the policy debate," said Katherine Baicker, an economist at Harvard University's School of Public Health and one of the authors of the study. An administration spokeswoman, Tara McGuinness, said that the time frame was too short to expect much of a change, and that over the longer term, use would most likely decline. She pointed to a longer term study in Massachusetts, which expanded coverage for its residents in 2006, that found an 8 percent decline in emergency department use over a period of several years. "Medicaid saves lives and improves health outcomes," Ms. McGuinness said. "Plenty of studies show that." But many economists say that the emphasis on emergency room use, both in policy and in political speeches, is misplaced, as it makes up only a small part of health care costs in the United States. A federal government health survey found that emergency departments accounted for about 4 percent of total health spending in 2010, far less than inpatient hospital visits, which accounted for about 31 percent. Certain populations, however, like low income people with chronic illnesses, have much higher rates of use. Dr. Baicker and Amy Finkelstein, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, another author, said the increased use of emergency rooms is driven by a basic economic principle: When services get less expensive, people use them more. Previous studies have found that uninsured people face substantial out of pocket costs that can put them in debt when they go to the emergency room. Medicaid reduces those costs. Medicaid coverage also reduces the costs of going to a primary care doctor, and a previous analysis of data from the Oregon experiment found that such visits also increased substantially. "This is just one piece of an increase we found across every type of care," said Bill J. Wright, an author of the new study who is the associate director of the Center for Outcomes Research and Education in Portland, a part of Providence Health and Services, a large health care provider. The study's authors emphasized that Medicaid had many benefits. Previous analyses from the experiment found that gaining coverage reduced the incidence of depression and increased feelings of financial stability. The study drew on data from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment that included about 90,000 low income Oregonians and randomly assigned about 30,000 of them access to Medicaid. Health experts say the experiment's design random assignment of coverage through a lottery allowed them to isolate and evaluate the effects of the program. Such designs are the gold standard in medical research, but are rarely used for domestic health care policy. Some experts noted that the study measured only the first 18 months after people gained coverage, and that old habits of relying on the emergency room are often hard to shake. It also takes time to find a primary care doctor and make an appointment. "How to use a plan and when to seek emergency department care involves a learning curve that doesn't happen overnight," said Sara Rosenbaum, a health researcher at George Washington University who was not involved in the study. Amitabh Chandra, a professor and director of health policy research at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, said people may often use the emergency room because they need its services. Medicine has become increasingly complex, with teams of specialists using highly sophisticated equipment for treatments that often go beyond the capabilities of the family doctor. "We often say, 'If this person had just received preventative care at a doctor's office, we would not have seen emergency room use,' " said Dr. Chandra, who was not involved in the study. "But there is only so much that prevention can do." Professor Rosenbaum pointed out that a lot of the recent growth in emergency department use has been among the privately insured people, not the uninsured. She said insurers often recommend going to the emergency room for quick specialty care, like for stomach pain. Dr. Wright said that many participants in Oregon were already connected to a primary care doctor, and that it was unlikely that the rise in use had much to do with a lack of access to a physician. The study's lesson, he said, was that new coverage needed to be accompanied by broader changes to the way care was delivered, like those in Oregon and under Mr. Obama's new law. Heidi Allen, an assistant professor at Columbia University and an author of the study, said much of the non urgent emergency department use among patients she interviewed happened because those patients could not get same day appointments with their primary care doctors. Dr. Chandra, who helped conduct another analysis of emergency department use in Massachusetts after the overhaul, called the Oregon study, with its strong design and clear result, "breathtaking." In contrast, studies from Massachusetts have come up with conflicting findings. His study, for example, found that emergency room use did not change. "You would conclude what you wanted to conclude depending on which side of political aisle you were on," he said, adding, "Now we have an answer." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Though Marty Martinez has spent half his life in Boston and works as the city's chief of health and human services, he wasn't always sure finding total fulfillment in the city would be easy. "The gay community in Boston is pretty small," said Mr. Martinez, 42. "There's a lot of college students, but for people who are older the community gets tighter. You start to know everyone." So, five years ago, Mr. Martinez went on the dating site Scruff. He met several men that year. Some looked nothing like their profile pictures. A few dates, he said, were "just horrible." He kept trying to make a connection, though and at the end of the year, Matthew Hall found him. "We have different versions of who chased who on the app," Mr. Martinez said. "Matthew thinks I did it, but I'm pretty sure it was mutual." A flurry of messages turned into a Dec. 12 date at Chops, a restaurant in Boston's South End. Mr. Hall, 32, is the finance manager of the Clubhouse Network, a nonprofit organization that matches underserved youth with adult mentors. When he and Mr. Martinez started flirting on Scruff, he was less settled professionally and personally. After graduating from Suffolk University in 2010 and working as a personal stylist at Saks Fifth Avenue, he had just found a job in finance at a Boston publishing company. Mr. Martinez and Mr. Hall joke that they probably saw each other before Chops in Boston's gay community. "But I didn't have a beard then," said Mr. Hall, whose beard is now voluminous. Even if he had (Mr. Martinez favors the bearded look as does Mr. Hall), they might not have hit it off. Before they met, Mr. Hall described himself to Mr. Martinez as "aloof." Mr. Martinez is quite the opposite. Mr. Martinez was no longer concerned about Mr. Hall's possible aloofness when they met at the restaurant for their first date. "Matthew looked just like his picture," Mr. Martinez said. "He had the big beard, and he's very attractive and taller than me." More important, the conversation flowed. "It's interesting because Matthew really is somewhat reserved, and I'm not, but that night it was just great. We talked about our lives and our families." They discussed work, too, including Mr. Martinez's then recent promotion to chief executive of Mass Mentoring Partnership, the nonprofit organization he then worked for. "Matthew said I told him five or six times," he said. "I was definitely proud. He thought I was trying to impress him." Even if he wasn't, it worked. Mr. Hall, who grew up in Scarborough, Maine, with three older sisters, his mother, Christine Hall, and father, Gilbert Hall (who died in May after complications from a stroke), was inspired by Mr. Martinez's commitment to Mass Mentoring. The group serves youth development programs across the state. "You could see how happy it made him to be doing that kind of work," he said. Mr. Martinez started helping his fellow Bostonians as soon he arrived in 1998 to get a master's degree in urban and social policy at Tufts University. While taking classes, he worked 30 hours a week with teens at the Latin American Health Institute . He credits his mother with steering him toward public service. "All the activism and aggressiveness I could have ever wanted I got from my mother," he said. Before Ms. Martinez died after a monthslong illness in 2015, she was an advocate for Mexican American veterans. Her father and brothers, including one who died in the Vietnam War, were all military men. "When we didn't have any money at all, she would still donate to the church," Mr. Martinez said. At the end of their Friday Chops date, Mr. Hall was feeling an admiration as deep as his attraction to Mr. Martinez. After the restaurant, they went out for drinks, met with mutual friends, and headed back to Mr. Martinez's apartment in the South End. "We decided we were very serious," Mr. Hall said. By the end of 2015, Mr. Hall moved into Mr. Martinez's apartment and, motivated by Mr. Martinez's service work, found a new job then as a finance specialist for the Unitarian Universalist Association, the religious denomination based in Boston. He was also making meaningful adjustments to his idea of what partnership should look like. Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. "I remember onetime we were sitting in this South End restaurant a couple months after we had met, and Matthew was like, 'Yeah, I don't envision spending holidays with my partner,'" Mr. Martinez said. "'I see my family at holidays. I can see my partner the day after.'" Showing up as a couple to outings with Mr. Hall's friends was trickier. "I had mostly gay male friends when I met Matthew, and he had mostly straight female friends," Mr. Martinez said. While Mr. Hall got to know Mr. Martinez's friends during Saturday flag football games in the South End "I was the cheerleader," Mr. Hall said Mr. Hall's friends were less used to sharing him. "It definitely felt that way at first," said Baila Punch, who is among Mr. Hall's longtime friend group. "But then we saw that Matthew was becoming more open because of Marty. He worried less about himself and more about other people. When we saw how in love he was, we knew it was the right path for him." In February 2016, Mr. Martinez surprised Mr. Hall on his birthday with what he called "a big gesture of love." They went to a South End animal shelter and adopted Petey, their Manchester terrier mix. A year later, all three moved into a condo the men bought in South Boston and began making plans to travel together, and floating the idea of marriage. On Oct. 18, as twilight fell over Boston, the city they love, they were married downtown at the State Room before 125 guests. Mr. Martinez and Mr. Hall, wearing custom charcoal suits from Indochino and burgundy ties, walked down a staircase that afforded grand views of Boston's skyline. Mr. Martinez, who descended first, was escorted by his sisters, Carole Cruse and Bobbie Martinez; Mr. Hall was accompanied by his mother. Eight groomsmen and women dressed in charcoal suits and burgundy dresses flanked the officiant, Erika Argersinger, a friend who received permission to marry them from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In handwritten vows, Mr. Martinez described himself as "excited, nervous and ready." "You're the man who has made me a better person," he added. During his turn, Mr. Hall said, "You are the extrovert to my introvert, the big to my little. I want to be your husband as long as we both shall live." With the power vested in her, and to joyful whoops from the assembled, Ms. Argersinger made it so. Where The State Room: a Longwood Venue in Boston Tradition At the end of the ceremony, Mr. Martinez's brother, Robert Martinez, draped a Mexican lasso over the couple's shoulders to form an infinity symbol and mark the everlasting nature of their union. Boss on the Premises The night before the wedding, the couple held a rehearsal dinner and cocktail party at Parkman House, the mayor's official residence. After the ceremony, Mayor Walsh, who had another commitment and couldn't attend the wedding, stopped by a reception at the State Room to offer the couple private congratulations. "I told him, Don't call me! I'm off for a week," Mr. Martinez said, laughing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Some of the most popular tourist attractions in Paris, like the Louvre Museum, are temporarily closed to visitors because of heavy rains that have caused the Seine River to rise to its highest levels since 1982. But despite these closures, Myriam Guyon, the founder of the Paris based travel consultancy Voyages Confidentiels, said that tourists currently in the city aren't lacking in sightseeing options. "The attractions that are closed are mainly along the Seine River, but the city is fully functioning, and there are dozens of iconic sights that are still open including the Eiffel Tower, the opera house Palais Garnier and the Rodin Museum," she said. Below is a current list of what is closed because of the rains. Travelers can visit the official site of the city's Convention and Visitors Bureau for the latest updates. (Updated 6/6/2016) The Louvre Museum is closed at least through June 7. The Orsay Museum is closed at least until June 7, according to its website. The Grand Palais was closed on Friday and Saturday but reopened on Sunday. The Paris Sewer Museum is closed until further notice. No cruises are currently operating on the Seine. Some cafes located along the Seine's quaysides are closed. At train and metro stations: according to the Paris Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Saint Michel metro and RER station and the station Cluny La Sorbonne are closed to the public; there is no service on the RER C line in Paris, between the stations Paris Austerlitz, Javel and Avenue Henri Martin. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Every month, Netflix Canada adds a new batch of TV shows and movies to its library. Here are the titles we think are most interesting for April, broken down by release date. Netflix occasionally changes schedules without giving notice. After Spike Lee kicked the studio door open with "Do the Right Thing," the early '90s saw a mini wave of black filmmakers telling their own stories. None did so with more urgency than John Singleton, a recent University of Southern California grad whose debut feature, "Boyz N the Hood," was a type of coming of age story that mainstream audiences had rarely seen before. A then unknown Cuba Gooding Jr. stars as a teenager sent to live in the Crenshaw neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles with his father (Laurence Fishburne), who teaches him the ins and outs of this difficult environment. Ice Cube and Morris Chestnut play his friends, one a Crips gang member on parole and the other a scholarship hopeful who runs afoul of the wrong crowd. The iconoclastic German director Wim Wenders is most noted for the 1987 art house sensation "Wings of Desire," a black and white fantasy about angels in Berlin, observing the spiritual struggle of the mortals below. It's fascinating to see Wenders bring that curiosity to "Pope Francis: A Man of His Word," a documentary profile of a pontiff who's responsible for tending the souls of millions. Wenders's approach is perhaps too reverential, but he gets substantial interview time with Pope Francis and deftly underscores the modest, empathetic message he's trying to send around the world. It took a while for Brie Larson's directorial debut to find a home after premiering at the Toronto Film Festival in 2017, but Netflix has seized on her momentum post "Captain Marvel," as well as her buddy chemistry with Samuel L. Jackson, who co stars in both films. Larson stars as a struggling artist who moves back home with her parents and takes a job at a P.R. firm as a grudging concession to adulthood. Her life changes, however, when a mystery man (Jackson) invites her to "The Store," a place that allows her to sell whatever fantastical thing she wants. Given no restrictions, she turns to the whimsical creature she's loved since childhood: the unicorn. The author Sidonie Gabrielle Colette may be best known for her 1944 novella "Gigi," which was adapted into an Oscar winning musical a few years after she died. But the film "Colette" takes place much earlier, at the turn of the century, before she had the freedom to step out as an author. After marrying Henry Gauthier Villars (Dominic West), a "literary entrepreneur" popularly known as Willy, Colette (Keira Knightley) takes up work as one of his team of uncredited ghostwriters. When stories from her schoolgirl days are assembled into a novel called "Claudine a l'ecole," the book and its sequels become a cultural sensation, and she considers the difficult step of taking credit for it. The cinematographer turned director John R. Leonetti has worked exclusively in the horror and fantasy subgenres, turning out sequels to "Mortal Kombat" and "The Butterfly Effect" before graduating into the quickie horror hit "Annabelle" (a spinoff of "The Conjuring") and gimmicky thriller "Wish Upon." His Netflix movie "The Silence," based on Tim Lebbon's book, sounds a little like "A Quiet Place," which places it squarely in the "Bird Box" zone for the streaming service, complete with respected stars like Stanley Tucci and Kiernan Shipka. Shipka stars as a deaf teenager whose family lives remotely to hide from lethal batlike creatures called Vesps, which are sensitive to sound. The romantic comedy may be all but dead in theaters, but Netflix has discovered a popular niche for bright, modestly budgeted productions and pickups like "To All the Boys I've Loved Before," "Set It Up," and "The Incredible Jessica James." Produced by Paul Feig, among others, "Someone Great" is one of its most high profile rom coms to date, starring Gina Rodriguez as a music journalist from New York City who lands a big job in San Francisco, but can't persuade her longtime boyfriend (Lakeith Stanfield) to come along. Brittany Snow and DeWanda Wise are the best friends who attempt to nurse her through her breakup by giving her a night on the town. Kindly received in 1994, Gillian Armstrong's adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott classic is notable today as a remarkable incubator for young talent, with a cast that includes Winona Ryder, Samantha Mathis, Kirsten Dunst, Claire Danes and Christian Bale. As their father goes off to fight in the Civil War, the March sisters grow up with their mother (Susan Sarandon) in Concord, Mass., biding their time by performing original plays in their attic. As the years pass and the girls grow older, however, "Little Women" takes on a more serious and emotional tone, with several transformative events redirecting the family's future. It never seemed possible for Haruki Murakami's delicate, whimsical storytelling style to translate to the screen, but Lee Chang dong's masterful "Burning," based on a Murakami short story, coasts on those alluring qualities. Simply described, it sounds like a run of the mill love triangle, with an attractive young woman (Jeon Jong seo) courting interest from a taciturn former classmate (Yoo Ah in) and a rich hipster (Steven Yeun) who's hiding some dark secrets. But "Burning" unfolds like a mystery of human behavior, with Yeun a particular standout as a charming yet unmistakably sinister chaos agent with a Cheshire cat grin. After rolling out deeply flawed movies around label icons like Superman, Batman and Green Lantern, DC Comics finally connected with "Wonder Woman," mostly because the film's creators, the writer Allan Heinberg and the director Patty Jenkins, are so careful in sketching a character before diving into the CGI heavy action. The first third of the film is the strongest, following the Amazon princess Diana (Gal Gadot) as she comes into her own among the women on the island of Themyscira. After finding her power, Diana gets whisked to World War I era Europe, where she fights alongside an American pilot to put an end to the war and the war god Ares, whom she holds responsible. Want more Canadian coverage in your inbox? Subscribe to our weekly Canada Letter newsletter. David Attenborough's nature series "Planet Earth" and "Blue Planet" are visually lush yet sobering assessments of the natural world and the threats encroaching on it. "Our Planet" is another huge undertaking, an eight episode series that was shot over four years in 50 countries, encompassing natural habitats from the rain forests to the seas. Picturesque nature documentaries tend to follow a certain formula adorable or otherwise arresting animal footage, followed by a climate change update but Attenborough has promised to make conservation a primary theme, urging viewers to act now to protect the environment. On the heels of "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch," Netflix continues its experiments in interactive television with a clickable choose your own adventure around Bear Grylls, the cheery survivalist best known for the Discovery Channel series "Man vs. Wild." Over eight episodes, viewers are invited to direct Grylls's actions on a series of adventures, presumably to get him out of various wilderness related scrapes. Grylls is still alive, so no harm can come from choosing the wrong option, but the show stands to be a fascinating hybrid of nature documentary and stunt showmanship. Despite mixed reviews, the action horror series "Z Nation" aired for five seasons on Syfy, focusing on the few humans to survive a zombie apocalypse that had claimed most of the population over the course of three years. The eight episode "Black Summer" is considered a "companion prequel" to "Z Nation," starting in the chaotic and gruesome days immediately following the outbreak. Jaime King stars as a mother who searches relentlessly for her missing daughter, joining a cadre of American refugees as they fight through the monster hordes. In the chaos, it's not always easy to tell friend from undead foe. The French Moroccan Canadian comedian Gad Elmaleh has been called the Jerry Seinfeld of France for his stand up act, which trades in a similar form of observational humor, and he's been spending the last few years trying to break into Hollywood. "Huge in France" is Elmaleh's television roman a clef, complete with a cameo from Seinfeld refuting the comparison. The series is about the humbling reality of a star who gets a constant "no" to the "Do you know who I am?" question, and who struggles to reconnect with his estranged son, a 16 year old male model. Expect a fish out of water comedy with loads of self deprecation. After appearing in small but regular roles in critically beloved comedy shows like "Barry" and "You're the Worst," Rightor Doyle steps behind the camera for the irreverent comedy series "Bonding," based on his life experiences. The show starts with the reunion of two former high school friends: Pete (Brendan Scannell), a recently out gay man with few job prospects, and Tiff (Zoe Levin), a graduate student who moonlights as one of New York City's premier dominatrixes. Tiff hires the hapless Pete to be her assistant part bodyguard, part cleanup man and all around support system but the job leads him on some humiliating misadventures. Netflix food series like "Chef's Table" and "Salt Fat Acid Heat" have an irresistible eat with your eyes sheen, along with substantive documentary footage of culinary wizards and the scenes they represent. With his new series "Street Food," the "Chef's Table" creator David Gelb brings that aesthetic to the food trucks, pop up restaurants and other suppliers of on the go delicacies, focusing on nine Asian countries. Among the subjects is Jay Fai, whose street side restaurant in Bangkok, specializing in wok prepped seafood dishes, was the first of its kind to receive a Michelin star. Also of interest: "Kevin Hart: Irresponsible" (April 2), "Chilling Adventures of Sabrina" Part 2 (April 5), "Persona: Collection" (April 5), "The Oath" (April 8), "Special" (April 12), "I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson" (April 23), "Anthony Jeselnik: Fire in the Maternity Ward" (April 30). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire who is on the verge of buying the Mets for about 2.4 billion, is used to getting what he wants. He's long kept the temperature on the trading floor at his investment firm in Stamford, Conn., a cool 69 degrees Fahrenheit to keep his legion of traders on their toes. If anyone doesn't like it, they can wear a sweater, or a firm branded fleece vest. When the federal authorities forced Mr. Cohen's first hedge fund, SAC Capital Partners, to shut down after it pleaded guilty to insider trading charges and paid a total of 1.8 billion in fines, Mr. Cohen didn't skulk away and count his money. He plotted a path to return to Wall Street and opened a new investment firm, Point72 Asset Management, that charges his wealthy patrons some of the highest fees in the hedge fund industry. Now all that stands between Mr. Cohen, 64, and his decade long pursuit of owning a baseball team he previously made a play for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2011 is getting 23 of the 29 owners of other M.L.B. clubs to give their blessing to the deal. Mr. Cohen's past legal wranglings with federal prosecutors and securities regulators are not expected to cause much of a problem for other owners; he has been a minority owner of the Mets since 2012, after all. Having grown up in Great Neck, N.Y., just 12 miles east of Citi Field, the current home of the Mets, he has now amassed a fortune estimated to be 15 billion, which would make him by far the wealthiest owner in the major leagues. An M.L.B. spokesman said this week that the league had "just begun the due diligence process on the proposed transaction." In the past, that process has taken from between two to six months, with a dossier on the prospective owner being distributed to the owners before a vote. What might give some owners pause are several discrimination claims filed by women who have worked for Mr. Cohen's largely male dominated firm in an industry known for its rough and tumble cowboy culture, where he is revered as "the big guy." Two complaints were filed under seal earlier this year with the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities. They are still pending, according to a commission spokesman. It is not known what specific claims were raised in the two complaints filed this year, which came from Shannon Gitlin, who works in the investor relations department for Point72, and Sara Vavra, a former portfolio manager. M.L.B., too, has dealt with accusations of gender discrimination in recent years. In 2014, a league executive, Sylvia Lind, sued the commissioner's office, saying she had been denied a promotion because she was a Hispanic woman. Her case was later settled. In 2015, the Mets settled with an employee who had accused the team of discriminating against her for being pregnant without being married. More recently, the Houston Astros fired an executive, Brandon Taubman, after he directed inappropriate comments to a group of female reporters after a postseason victory last October. Ms. Bonner filed her lawsuit in early 2018, just as Mr. Cohen was making his return to the hedge fund world. Point72 and Mr. Cohen ultimately reached an undisclosed settlement with Ms. Bonner a few months ago. Ms. Bonner, who declined to comment for this article, left the firm in August, according to her LinkedIn profile. The most salacious claim in Ms. Bonner's lawsuit was that a profane word had been written on a whiteboard in an office at the firm and remained there for several weeks, making some women feeling uneasy. But some of Ms. Bonner's initial claims about who wrote the offensive word appear to be inaccurate based on subsequent legal filings, and it remains unclear who wrote that word and for what reason. Mr. Cohen responded to Ms. Bonner's lawsuit by hiring Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy United States attorney general and partner with the law firm WilmerHale, to conduct an internal review of the firm's policies toward female employees and to provide advice on how to foster best practices at the 1,000 employee firm. Ms. Gorelick declined to discuss her work, and referred all questions to Point72. A representative for the firm said the report that Ms. Gorelick produced was not public. While the lawsuit Ms. Bonner filed in federal court did not contain any direct allegations against Mr. Cohen though it did claim that several other people working at the firm had repeatedly made sexist and degrading comments an amended complaint filed in June 2019 during arbitration alleged that Mr. Cohen had retaliated against Ms. Bonner for filing the lawsuit and going public with her concerns. The retaliation, Ms. Bonner said in the legal filing, came when Mr. Cohen circulated a report within Point72 that showed Mr. Cohen's image had taken a hit because of "gender litigation impact." In the arbitration filing, Ms. Bonner said that Mr. Cohen had directed the report which pointed to a number of negative news stories about him to be distributed to employees around the office in order to intimidate her. Arbitration complaints are normally not publicly filed. But the amended complaint filed by Ms. Bonner was in response to a defamation lawsuit filed by Douglas Haynes, Point72's former president, who was also named as defendant in the matter along with Point72 and Mr. Cohen. Ms. Bonner had claimed that the offensive word had been written by Mr. Haynes on a whiteboard in his office, which Mr. Haynes denied, citing testimony from another female employee at Point72 who said that the whiteboard was not in his office and that she did not know who had written it. Tiffany Galvin Cohen, a spokeswoman for Point72, said in an emailed statement: "There were no adverse findings against Steve or P72. The matter was resolved to the parties' mutual satisfaction." Jeanne Christensen, a lawyer for Ms. Bonner, said she found it a bit unusual that no one representing the Wilpon family or Saul Katz, the current majority owners of the Mets, had reached out to her to inquire about Ms. Bonner's case, since some of it was already public. She also said no one from M.L.B. had reached out to her, either. The Mets declined to comment for this article. Ms. Christensen is no stranger to claims of gender discrimination at Point72. She is also the attorney for Ms. Gitlin in her discrimination complaint, but said she could not discuss that matter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The L.P.G.A. Tour rescheduled its tentative events to July from June on Wednesday because of the coronavirus pandemic, and the P.G.A. of America announced that the Women's P.G.A. Championship, a major, was moving to October from June. Five other L.P.G.A. events were canceled. The first event of a resumed L.P.G.A. Tour schedule, the Dow Great Lakes Bay Invitational, is set for July 15 18 in Midland, Mich. The next two events would be in Sylvania, Ohio, and Galloway, N.J., with a revised tournament schedule that continues into the third week of December, one week after the recently postponed United States Women's Open in Houston Dec. 10 13. There have now been nine L.P.G.A. tournaments canceled, although the shortened L.P.G.A tournament schedule will mean an increase in prize money for several events, with the average purse growing to 2.7 million per competition. Tour officials concede the schedule could be altered again in succeeding weeks. "While July seems like a long way away, we are certainly aware that restarting our season in Michigan, Ohio and New Jersey will require a continued improvement in the situation in each of those states," Mike Whan, the L.P.G.A. Commissioner, said in a statement. "We have built a schedule that we think is as safe as possible given what we know about travel bans, testing availability, and delivering events that our sponsors and our athletes will be excited to attend." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The numbers alone tell a disturbing story. During the first nine months of 2019, antidoping organizations collected more than 231,000 blood and urine samples from athletes for testing for performance enhancing drugs. During the same period in 2020, with the coronavirus making collection a high risk event, antidoping organizations collected about 111,000 samples. In April alone, when cities and countries around the world were locked down, only 576 samples were collected, compared with 25,219 for the same month the previous year. As the coronavirus pandemic has swept around the world, killing more than 1.1 million people as of Friday, it has caused lengthy lockdowns and untold economic hardship. But those same restrictions have also significantly reduced the ability of antidoping officials to collect biological samples, and that, experts said, has created a ripe opportunity for cheating as close monitoring of thousands of athletes before the Tokyo Games this summer is expected to begin. "That is a constant worry, even when there are no Covid related issues," said Dick Pound, the founding president of the World Anti Doping Agency. "It's more concerning now." With winter sports that are considered high risk for doping about to begin their World Cup seasons and the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics only eight months away, antidoping officials say the need to get testing back to previous levels is critical. This is particularly essential at competitions, they say, since those offer the best chance given current travel restrictions to catch athletes using illegal stimulants that have an immediate effect on performance. "It would be naive for us to think people have not taken advantage this time," said Travis Tygart, the chief executive of the United States Anti Doping Agency. Tygart knows that a certain number of the nearly 3,000 athletes based in the United States that his agency tracks have been taking illegal performance enhancing drugs. He said they told him so. While so many athletes were stuck at home with little to do during the pandemic, USADA worked with researchers at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro on a survey about doping. More than 1,400 athletes in the USADA testing pool participated in the anonymous survey. Just under 10 percent said they had taken a banned performance enhancing drug during the past 12 months, including 2.5 percent who admitted taking the most potent drugs, such as testosterone, human growth hormone and drugs that increase red blood cell production and oxygen capacity. Another 4 percent said they had used marijuana, with the rest admitting to using less potent drugs illicitly, such as medication for asthma that can improve lung capacity or drugs that modulate hormone levels. Tygart said he saw all of this as something of victory, since studies of doping prevalence from the past decade have recorded anonymous admissions of guilt from as many as 40 percent of respondents. While the athletes in the USADA study admitted to far lower levels of doping, they expressed deep skepticism that their rivals were abiding by the rules. More than 50 percent said they believed international athletes had used the lull in testing caused by the pandemic as a doping opportunity, and 30 percent said they suspected American athletes had done so. "Without testing, the confidence in the system goes way down," Tygart said. And the temptation remains. Just 42 percent of those surveyed said integrity in sports was more important than financial gain. James Fitzgerald, a spokesman for the World Anti Doping Agency, said testing numbers had been on the rise since May, though they still remained far behind last year's figures, in part because so many competitions, where a lot of testing occurs, had been canceled. In September, 17,643 tests were conducted, compared with 26,638 during that month in 2019. Fitzgerald said national and regional antidoping organizations were doing their best while adhering to limits the local health authorities have placed on their activities. But he added that WADA does have other tools. "While testing is important as a means to catch cheats and as a deterrent, it is not the only strategy available," Fitzgerald said. "There are other angles of attack being pursued, which include intelligence and investigations, technology and research, sample storage and re analysis, and the Athlete Biological Passport," which can track dramatic changes in blood and hormone levels over time. The damage to sporting integrity, though, may already be done. Studies have shown that even one cycle of performance enhancing drugs that quickly leave the body can produce benefits that last as long as four years. That would certainly make a cycle that took place last spring beneficial at the Olympics next summer, or the Winter Games in Beijing in February 2022. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Hurricanes Irma and Maria devastated many islands in the Caribbean region, including Puerto Rico, the British and United States Virgin Islands, Dominica and St. Martin. They also battered Anguilla, St. Barts, the Turks and Caicos and others. But many islands, including Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao in the southern Caribbean, and the central Cayman Islands and Jamaica were unaffected, prompting tourism officials to their bullhorns. "Over 70 percent of the Caribbean was not affected by the hurricanes," said Frank Comito, the chief executive and director general of the Caribbean Hotel Tourism Association, which has established CaribbeanTravelUpdate.com to track updates by island. "Most of the region is open for business and doing fine." Though Anguilla was severely hit by Hurricane Irma, the boutique Frangipani Beach Resort has announced it will reopen its 19 rooms in December with new roofing, windows, doors and furniture. Its four bedroom villa will reopen in February. Rooms from 450; frangipaniresort.com. The 72 room Curtain Bluff was closed for a six month, 13 million renovation when Irma arrived in the Caribbean and has just reopened with redecorated rooms, redesigned public spaces and the addition of private pools at its four signature suites. Rooms from 800, all inclusive; curtainbluff.com. The Moorings, a charter yacht company, has announced it will begin charter operations on Antigua this month with unmanned and crewed boats for rent. The 4.2 billion Baha Mar resort on Nassau debuted last spring with the opening of one of three hotels planned, the 1,800 room Grand Hyatt Baha Mar, as well as an 18 hole Jack Nicklaus Signature golf course, a 100,000 square foot casino and a 24 treatment room Espa spa. This month, the SLS Baha Mar is set to join the development with 299 rooms, three chef driven restaurants and the first rooftop bar on the island. Rooms from 325; slsbahamar.com. Nikki Beach, the global chain of party throwing beach clubs, will expand this winter with a club location in Barbados. Located at the Port Ferdinand development, the oceanfront Nikki Beach Barbados will include a swimming pool, a poolside runway for fashion shows and an open air restaurant with seating for 200. Information: Portferdinand.com. Mandarin Oriental has taken over management of one of the most exclusive resorts in the Caribbean, the Pink Sands Club, Canouan. Though the resort has only 26 suites and six villas, amenities abound, including a nine treatment palapa spa, three tennis courts, an 18 hole golf course and five food and beverage options. Rooms from 1,400. The long anticipated Park Hyatt St. Kitts opened Nov. 1 with a new spa from the Tucson based Miraval Life in Balance Spa. The 126 room resort has two swimming pools, including one for adults, and three restaurants. The nearly 38,000 square foot spa will house nine treatment rooms and a yoga and meditation area within a replica sugar mill. Rooms from 450; stkitts.park.hyatt.com. Across the channel on Nevis, Paradise Beach Resort, a boutique property with seven villas, plans to expand with five more beach houses in December. The new two bedroom units, raised on stilts above the resort's private beach, will have blue tiled plunge pools, wraparound porches and ship bells that guests ring to call for a concierge. Rates start at 1,495; paradisebeachnevis.com. About 40 miles from the main island of Providenciales, South Caicos was hit hard by Hurricane Irma, but its new Sailrock Resort, which opened last January, is set to reopen Dec. 16. Additions include a second restaurant and a new spa. Scuba diving, snorkeling and kayaking are big draws in the area and operators report that the reefs and mangroves are healthy. Rooms from 750; sailrockresort.com. On Providenciales, the Shore Club, which opened last December, experienced no major damage and has reopened its 106 suites. Four pools include those devoted to adults and to lap swimming, and five culinary concepts include a fine dining restaurant and a craft cocktail bar. Rooms from 699, with breakfast; theshoreclubtc.com. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
EDMONTON, Alberta For the first time in 20 years, the Dallas Stars will play for the Stanley Cup. The third seeded Stars erased a two goal deficit in the third period, then eliminated the Vegas Golden Knights with a 3 2 overtime win in Game 5 of the Western Conference finals at Rogers Place in Edmonton. The rookie forward Denis Gurianov scored the winning goal at 3:36 of overtime, after third period goals from Jamie Benn and Joel Kiviranta erased Vegas's 2 0 lead built from goals by Chandler Stephenson and Reilly Smith. Both teams came into Game 5 with their lineups unchanged. For Dallas, that included forward Roope Hintz, who left Game 4 in the first period with an apparent injury and whose appearance was said to be a game time decision. In net, Robin Lehner made his fourth consecutive start for top seeded Vegas, while Anton Khudobin improved his postseason record to 12 6 with the win. Once again, Khudobin was strong in the Dallas net, stopping 34 of 36 shots. Through the first four games of the series, the Golden Knights outshot the Stars by an average of 9.5 shots per game. Going into Game 5, Khudobin had faced more shots and made more saves than any other goalie in the N.H.L.'s 2020 postseason. Throughout the series, the Stars used their strong defensive structure to minimize high danger scoring chances and to shake the confidence of Vegas's scorers. Khudobin did the rest. Through their first 12 postseason games, including the round robin, Vegas posted a 10 2 record and averaged an impressive 3.75 goals per game. But after taking a 3 1 lead in their second round series against the Vancouver Canucks, the Golden Knights managed just 12 goals four in three games against the Canucks, then eight in five games against the Stars in their final eight games. With the possibility of elimination looming, Vegas failed to build on its 1 0 first period lead during three consecutive power play opportunities in the second. The Stars surrendered one power play goal in each of the previous three games, but the penalty killers went 3 for 3 on Monday while Dallas's power play went 2 for 4 and delivered the tying and winning goals. Early in overtime, Vegas defenseman Zach Whitecloud took a delay of game penalty when he accidentally shot the puck over the glass while trying to clear the zone. With 39 seconds left in the penalty, Gurianov fired a shot from the point that beat Lehner over his glove to end the series. Benn had gotten the Stars on the board with 10:06 to play in regulation, extending his scoring streak to three straight games. He picked up a loose puck after a shot from the sideboards by defenseman Esa Lindell and put it past Lehner. The goal was Benn's eighth of the postseason. "He's a great captain and a great person and I'm happy that he's getting rewarded with points because people always judge him on his points," Stars Coach Rick Bowness said of Benn. "We judge him: what are you doing to help us get in? He showed me he can help us get in the playoffs and keep moving forward." Later in the third, Vegas winger Alex Tuch was whistled for his second penalty of the game after tripping Hintz with 5:24 left to play in the third period. Kiviranta tallied the tying goal with 23 seconds left in the man advantage, lifting the puck over an outstretched Lehner. The goal was the first from Kiviranta since his hat trick in Game 7 of the second round, including the overtime game winner, helped the Stars advance past the Colorado Avalanche. In that series, like this one, Dallas had led three games to one. "We played with fire," Dallas forward Tyler Seguin said. "That was the message tonight, that we didn't want to do that. We were thankful in a way that just the two weeks ago that happened to us we weren't ready. So I think you saw us more prepared." The win is the first time that Bowness has advanced to the Stanley Cup Final as a head coach. He previously served as an assistant coach for the Vancouver Canucks in 2011 and as an associate coach with the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2015. Both those teams lost in the final. "When you're behind the bench and you see that puck go in and you know you're going to the Stanley Cup finals, words can't describe the emotion that comes through," Bowness said. In Stars franchise history, including their time as the Minnesota North Stars from 1967 to 1993, their only Stanley Cup win came in 1999, against the Buffalo Sabres. They returned to the final the next season but lost to the Devils. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Ruby Kaur Gill and Dr. Raja Ravinel Narayan were married Dec. 29 at the Fairmont San Jose hotel in San Jose, Calif. Pundit Parma Sharma, a Hindu priest, officiated. Dr. Gill, 31, is a product manager at Dave Health, a company that develops medical devices in San Mateo, Calif. She graduated from Boston University and received a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of California, Davis. She is the daughter of Jaswinder K. Gill of San Jose and Satwant S. Gill of Palm Harbor, Fla. The bride's father is the director of program management at Tech Data, an information technology and services company in Clearwater, Fla. Her mother is a research and development engineer at Honeywell in Sunnyvale, Calif. Dr. Narayan, 31, is a general surgery resident at the Stanford University Hospital and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Sloan Kettering Institute, where he studies genomic targets for liver and pancreatic cancer. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and received a master's degree in public health from Yale and a medical degree from the University of California, Irvine. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The world's tech powers have moved to Cambridge, England including Microsoft, in the building at left snapping up engineers and researchers, particularly in the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence.Credit...Benjamin Quinton for The New York Times The world's tech powers have moved to Cambridge, England including Microsoft, in the building at left snapping up engineers and researchers, particularly in the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence. CAMBRIDGE, England When you step off the train here and walk into the city square outside the railway station, you will not see the spires of King's College Chapel or the turrets atop the Trinity Great Court. The University of Cambridge is still a cab ride away. But you will see a stone and glass office building with a rooftop patio. This is where Amazon designs its flying drones. Just down the block, inside a stone building of its own, Microsoft is designing some sort of computer chip for artificial intelligence. And if you keep walking, you will soon reach a third building, marked with a powder blue Apple logo, where engineers are pushing the boundaries of Siri, the talking digital assistant included with every iPhone. For years, journalists, city planners and other government officials have called this "Silicon Fen," envisioning the once sleepy outskirts of Cambridge as Britain's answer to Silicon Valley. The name a nod to the coastal plain, or Fenlands, that surrounds Cambridge never quite stuck. But the concept certainly did, so much so that the world's tech powers have moved in, snapping up engineers and researchers, particularly in the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence. There are more than 4,500 high tech firms in Cambridge, employing nearly 75,000 people, many of them commuters from other communities, according to Cambridge Network, a city business group. Just across the street from Amazon's Cambridge headquarters, ARM, the computer chip company owned by SoftBank, the Japanese tech giant, recently moved a team of engineers into a row of temporary offices. And a new building is going up just yards away. This is where Samsung, the South Korean tech conglomerate, will soon open another artificial intelligence lab, hiring as many as 150 researchers, engineers and other staff. But those buildings outside the train station are reminders that Britain like Europe as a whole does not have its own internet powerhouse, a corporate power capable of pushing the world in new technical, cultural and political directions. The closest match was ARM, and that was acquired by SoftBank in 2016. In London, a 45 minute train ride from Cambridge, you will find DeepMind, perhaps the world's leading A.I. lab. DeepMind is at the forefront of a technological revolution that many believe will shift economic and societal norms across the globe, and it was acquired by Google in 2014. "We welcome the big existing companies," said Matthew Hancock, the British secretary of state who oversees digital policy. "But we're incredibly determined to ensure that the next generation of companies are built here." On a recent Friday morning, Chris Bishop, who oversees Microsoft Research Cambridge, looked out his fifth floor office window, with its panoramic view of Cambridge, and pointed to the spires of King's College Chapel rising over the trees in the distance. "Alan Turing was at King's," he said. In 1950, with his essay "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Turing, the British mathematician, codebreaker and computing pioneer, asked whether machines would ever think on their own. Mr. Bishop, an A.I. researcher who studied at Oxford and took a professorship at the University of Edinburgh before moving to Cambridge, views his work as another link in a long British legacy. Mr. Bishop joined the lab in 1997, just after it was founded. In those days, Microsoft was the one tech giant paying big money to lure top academics into this kind of corporate research. Now, as artificial intelligence takes center stage at leading tech companies, paying big dollars for academics is common. Five years ago, Microsoft moved its lab to the city block size building near the rail station. Many of Mr. Bishop's former students and colleagues now work at other big tech companies. Neil Lawrence, a University of Sheffield professor who studied with Mr. Bishop at Cambridge, now works at the new Amazon Cambridge Development Center just down the street. Two prominent A.I. researchers who worked under Mr. Bishop at Microsoft have since moved to Google and DeepMind. Many of these researchers, like a number of other top A.I. researchers in Britain, were born outside the country. Still, local policymakers are concerned about local talent moving into foreign companies. "We have some of the top A.I. researchers in the world in the U.K.," said Dame Wendy Hall, a computer science professor at the University of Southampton. "How do we stop the A.I. brain drain to the U.S. or to the U.S. companies anyway?" Last year, the British government commissioned a report on the country's A.I. landscape from Dame Hall and Jerome Pesenti, the chief executive of BenevolentAI, an artificial intelligence start up based in London. Within weeks of the report's release, Mr. Pesenti moved to Facebook. He is now vice president of artificial intelligence in the company's New York office. "It does illustrate the point," Dame Hall said. "Once your head is above the parapet in this world, you draw interest, particularly from the big Silicon Valley giants." The report called for increased financing for universities, and in the months following the government responded, saying it would fund 200 new Ph.D.s in artificial intelligence and related fields by 2020 and invest a total of 500 million in math, digital and technical education across Britain. In Cambridge, there are bigger questions about the boundaries between academia and industry. Even those who have prospered financially from the dynamic aren't sure where to draw the line. Zoubin Ghahramani, a Cambridge professor who sold a start up to Uber and is now the company's chief scientist while still maintaining his ties with the university, worries about a brain drain from Europe in artificial intelligence. He has called for the creation of a European research institute to recruit people in the region who may otherwise go work for a Silicon Valley firm. His colleague at Cambridge Steve Young, a respected speech recognition researcher who has sold companies to Microsoft, Google and Apple, noted that it was "almost impossible" for the university to compete for staff against tech companies, limiting who will teach the next generation of students. "That could have some very severe consequences," he said. Vishal Chatrath was the first employee and the chief business officer at VocalIQ, a Cambridge speech technology start up that Apple acquired in late 2015 and transformed into a local Siri development center. Now, just two blocks from Apple's Cambridge outpost, he oversees a new start up called Prowler, which aims to automate business decisions that are typically made by humans. For Mr. Chatrath, Prowler shows how acquisitions by foreign companies can spur the creation of new start ups. A second VocalIQ employee left and recently founded a start up called PolyAI, which is trying to build truly conversational computing systems. "A lot of capital is now flowing in Cambridge, and that capital helps push the next wave of entrepreneurs," Mr. Chatrath said. For others, the question is whether start ups like this will evolve into vibrant companies or just disappear into a company like Apple or Google. The big American companies are also attracted by the salaries they can pay here. According to the recruitment website Hired, the average tech salary in London is 78,000 a year, versus 142,000 in Silicon Valley. "It remains one of the huge competitive advantages that you can get the same, or better, talent for cheaper and less churn," said Matt Clifford, a co founder of Entrepreneur First, a start up incubator in London that recruits students from Cambridge and Oxford. Entrepreneur First helped create Magic Pony, yet another A.I. company, which Twitter acquired for 150 million in 2016. But some wonder whether these companies could better serve Britain by staying independent. Ian Hogarth trained as a machine learning researcher at Cambridge, founded the live music app Songkick and is now an angel investor in Britain. He argued that if DeepMind had remained an independent, it may have grown into the country's first tech superpower. Following a similar path were start ups like VocalIQ (acquired by Apple) and Evi, the company that Amazon acquired in 2013 as part of its effort to build the Alexa digital assistant. Evi was the foundation for Amazon's Cambridge operation. Many have applauded the enormous economic change these acquisitions are helping to drive in London and Cambridge. But not everyone is clapping. Last year, in Cambridge, a new housing development was vandalized with graffiti written in Latin: "Locus in Domos Loci Populum." As the BBC reported, this translates to "local homes for local people." As the tech workers land the big salaries, home prices are skyrocketing, and the locals are being squeezed out. It is yet another example of Silicon Fen's looking a lot like Silicon Valley. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
SYDNEY, Australia On March 2, for the first time in 240 days, not a single bush fire burned in the state of New South Wales. The state's Rural Fire Service declared the worst fire season in history, during which 25 people in NSW were killed, officially over. In those eight months, 6 percent, or 13.6 million acres, of the state that a third of Australians call home had been incinerated. The world's attention, riveted on the fires earlier this year, has understandably shifted to the ongoing coronavirus crisis. But the devastating fire season has left lessons in its wake. As Australia looks toward a future of more frequent and dangerous fires, scientists and officials are working together to develop fire prediction technologies that will enable firefighters to work faster and more safely when the next season expected to be perhaps equally grueling begins in just a few months. What Australia continues to learn could be used elsewhere everywhere from other countries, including the United States, to outer space, in software that must withstand the searing, blustery and otherwise inhospitable conditions of other planets. When a wildfire breaks out, one of the most difficult decisions faced by the operations team is who and what to send where, and which resources to keep in hand in case they are suddenly needed elsewhere. "Whether you hold resources back in reserve in case more fires break out, or whether you hit that fire very hard, can mean the difference between a fire that's put out in 15 minutes and one that goes for weeks," said Greg Mullins, a former commissioner of Fire and Rescue New South Wales. To make that decision correctly, firefighters first must know which areas are high risk. Central to many of the more recent technologies is the ability to predict the influence of Australia's eucalyptus trees on a given fire. Eucalyptus are particularly fire intensive; their dry, shedding bark catches easily, and the embers can be blown ahead of a blaze, lighting others. This phenomenon is known as "spotting," and it is one of the most challenging problems in predicting a fire's behavior. An Australian computer program called Phoenix RapidFire models this kind of spotting, simulating the spread of fires across a given area. It has been relied upon to predict fire behavior in both Victoria, where it was introduced after the Black Saturday bush fires that killed 173 people in 2009, and New South Wales. A similar program, FarSite, is used in the United States. When a wildfire starts, analysts at the NSW Rural Fire Service headquarters in Sydney, who may be 200 miles away or more, enter variables into Phoenix, such as the fire's location, the time it started and the terrain. Closer to the fire, regional teams feed information back to headquarters, where the fire management team, with the help of manual analysts, decides where to send resources like firefighters, trucks and water bombing helicopters. "Nine times out of 10," he said, manual analysts produce more accurate results than the model. Using their experience, analysts are able to incorporate the uncertainty inherent in fire behavior, something "the computer just isn't able to grasp." But where the computer model excels, Dr. Heemstra said, is in analyzing several fires at once and determining which one poses the greatest risk and therefore which one manual analysts should focus on. Australia's national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, has developed computer software called Spark, which aims to improve upon Phoenix. Phoenix was built to predict fire behavior in forest and grass, Dr. Heemstra said, so for several other fuel types, like shrub land, "it's a bit like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole." Spark, because it uses unique equations for each fuel type, is more intuitive and reliable. It could be "the next evolutionary step" in firefighting models, Dr. Heemstra said, and the NSW Rural Fire Service hopes to use it as early as the next fire season. Whereas fire behavior models like Phoenix and Spark help predict the spread of a fire, drone technology may be able to predict where fires are likely to start. For the moment, drones are used mainly to monitor grassland fires. Forest fires burn particularly hot, and are volatile, making them unsafe for drones to fly over or for anyone nearby to operate the devices. The wildfire conditions in Australia are sufficiently severe that they verge on otherworldly. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif., has been exploring, with the CSIRO, the possibility of testing artificial intelligence for drones, rovers and satellites not yet developed but intended for future space exploration on the fires. This software would need to withstand extreme conditions on other planets, like "hot temperatures, low visibility and turbulent winds," said Natasha Stavros, a science system engineer at J.P.L., in an email. A November 2019 study by J.P.L.'s Blue Sky Thinktank, on which Dr. Stavros was an author, found that the fire management technologies offering the highest return on investment were autonomous micro aerial vehicles small drones typically weighing less than a quarter of a pound that would be able to navigate themselves through wildfires. Eventually, these drones would operate in autonomous groups or "swarms," which could monitor wider areas. Their ability to communicate with one another and a distant control center could potentially be used in exploring other planets. On Earth such drones, equipped with infrared sensors, could also read the heat signatures of plants to determine how stressed the vegetation is in an area and thus how dry and fire prone the terrain might be. On the International Space Station, a similar sensor (though not yet small enough to fit on a drone) called Ecostress has been measuring the temperature of plants for almost two years. As Australia seems to have entered a new era of more extreme and frequent fires, researchers, firefighting organizations and the government increasingly are also looking at ways to help the environment itself adapt in the long run. Scientists with the University of Melbourne Bushfire Behavior and Management group have developed the Fire Regime Operations Simulation Tool, or FROST, which aims to predict fire behavior over the course of the next century, by taking into account how vegetation transforms after it is burned. Major trials are expected to begin within the next year. FROST takes uncertainties into account using Bayesian networks, predictive statistical tools that are designed to ask "What if?" of every assumption and then produce a range of possible outcomes in response. Faced with live fires, firefighters need to decide within a matter of minutes what to defend. Wildlife and vegetation inevitably come second to people and property. By simulating long term risk, FROST can help find and protect zones for particular wildlife or plant species within a fire prone area that are less susceptible to the flames. In late January, Trent Penman, a bush fire risk modeler who leads the group that developed FROST, used the program to identify areas that might act as refuges for a species of tree known as the alpine ash, which is particularly vulnerable to the increasing frequency of wildfires. Alpine ash trees die in high intensity fires, regenerating from seeds left in the ground. But these seedlings take 20 years to reach maturity. Should the area burn again before then, the young trees will die before any new seeds have been left behind. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
It was not a Cinderella choice, not one that spoke of fantasy or old fashioned fairy tales, but one that placed the woman proudly front and center. It underscored Ms. Markle's own independence by divesting her of frippery, while also respecting tradition and keeping her covered up. It celebrated female strength in the rigorous nature of its line six exactingly placed seams the substance of its fabric (double bonded silk cady), and the choice of designer: a British woman who, as a statement from Kensington Palace read, had "served as the creative head of three globally influential fashion houses Pringle of Scotland, Chloe, and now Givenchy." And it extended a hand across the water: to Europe, where Ms. Waight Keller takes the Eurostar twice a week to her maison Givenchy also, by the by, made Ms. Markle's wedding shoes, which are silk duchesse satin, and the bridesmaid's dresses and to all the countries of the Commonwealth, which were represented in Ms. Markle's veil. Five meters (that's a little over 16 feet) long and made from silk tulle, the veil was "a vision Meghan and I shared," according to a statement from Ms. Waight Keller. It was embroidered with the flowers of all 53 Commonwealth nations along the edge, each one different, to represent the roles Ms. Markle and Prince Harry will assume as Youth Ambassadors to the wider British world. Also included were wintersweet, a British flowering plant, to represent Kensington Palace and Ms. Markle's new home, and the California poppy, her home state's flower. And it was held in place by Queen Mary's diamond and platinum bandeau tiara, made in 1932 with a centerpiece of a diamond brooch from Queen Mary's wedding in 1893, which had been lent to Ms. Markle by the queen and described a "a flexible band of eleven sections." "As a British designer at a Parisian haute couture house, and on behalf of all of us at Givenchy who have been able to experience such an extraordinary process of creativity, I am extremely proud of what we have accomplished and grateful to Meghan Markle, Prince Harry and Kensington Palace for allowing us to be part of this historical chapter," said Ms. Waight Keller in her statement. Speaking of surprise though, perhaps the most surprising thing of all was that in this age of rampant leaks and gossip, Ms. Markle had managed to keep all of this completely secret. In all the rumors that had swirled around The Dress with the Daily Mail announcing with confidence it was Ralph Russo and Page Six claiming rather Stella McCartney and book makers putting odds on Burberry and Erdem Moralioglu (indeed, the Royal College of Art mistakenly tweeted out that Mr. Moralioglu had actually made The Dress, before having to amend the news and acknowledge it was another of their alumna, Ms. Waight Keller) Ms. Waight Keller's name had never even once come up. In the end, Ms. Markle did exactly what she promised: she brought change and out thought us all, in her dress as in her entire wedding ceremony. Long may such smart symbolism continue. And the symbolism did not stop with the new Duchess of Sussex and her dress. There were all sorts of fashion statements being made by family and guests at this wedding, seemingly in honor of Ms. Markle, this marriage and what the marriage represents. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Applying to live in a Pure House apartment is a little like signing up for an online dating service. Prospective residents answer probing questions like "What are your passions?" and "Tell us your story (Excite us!)." If accepted, tenants live in what the company's promotional materials describe as a "highly curated community of like minded individuals." In other words, they rent a room in an apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, but with opportunities for social and spiritual growth, like dinner parties and meditation sessions. Pure House is among a handful of businesses that are renting rooms at a premium in exchange for access to amenities, a dormlike atmosphere and an instant community. For a certain set of New Yorkers, often new arrivals to the city with an income but no rental history, Pure House offers something of a reprieve. No credit check. No draconian rules about earning 40 times the monthly rent. No 12 month lease. Instead, they sign a 30 day membership agreement, paying from 1,600 to 4,000 a month for a room in an apartment to be shared with others who, theoretically, have a similar worldview. The arrangement is a commercial outgrowth of co living, taking life with roommates to a different level. "We live in a super disconnected city that has tons and tons of people, but it can feel really lonely here," said Harrison Iuliano, who until last week worked as the programming director of Pure House, which rents out rooms to about 40 people in nine apartments in various buildings around Williamsburg. "Our goal is to make that a nonissue." Russell Jackson relinquished a studio six months ago to live in a six bedroom Pure House apartment with a rotating cast (he presently has three flat mates). "I'm getting exposure to stuff and things that I would not have had sequestered on the Upper West Side," said Mr. Jackson, a 52 year old chef. "Laundry services and cleaners and masseuses all of that is icing," he said. The real perks are the people he has met along the way. "How cool is it that I walk in the door and they ask me, 'How's your day?' And I am genuinely interested in hearing from them," said Mr. Jackson, who considers himself the Den Dad to the other tenants, who generally are two or three decades his junior and stay a month or two at a time. Mr. Jackson, who has appeared on "Iron Chef America," also orchestrates Pure House's food events, including its pop up dinner parties. At one such party, none of the 30 guests knew one another, but most embraced when the night was over, Mr. Jackson recalled. Co living has gained traction on the West Coast, particularly among the tech crowd in places like Seattle and the Bay Area. Rambling Victorians have been turned into "hacker houses" peopled with young tech entrepreneurs plugged into their laptops like a scene plucked from "The Social Network," the 2010 film about Mark Zuckerberg, a Facebook founder. But in New York, where apartments are generally small and do not immediately lend themselves to communal living, the concept has been slow to catch on. But now, a few companies are assembling bundles of apartments in New York with plans to fill them with cherry picked inhabitants. Promising "a modern, urban lifestyle that values openness, collaboration and relationship building," Common has entered into agreements with developers to renovate properties in Crown Heights and Bedford Stuyvesant. This fall, it will begin renting 19 rooms at a Crown Heights property. "We found a group of property owners and investors who are interested in owning real estate but don't want to deal with the management and think that this model of co living is in huge demand," said Brad Hargreaves, 29, the founder of Common. Of course, like minded pals have been pooling resources and talents to create ad hoc communities for generations, and that's not even taking into account boardinghouses and residential hotels. But with the advent of the sharing economy, which has brought about a proliferation of companies that make it easy for people to do everything from rent a cubicle in a common work space to share a taxi with strangers, some entrepreneurs are betting co living has the potential to go mainstream. And as renters warm to the idea of micro units, co living might not be much of a stretch, either. Both housing models are structured around shared common areas and amenities. And sometimes the lines are blurred: Bedrooms in Stage 3's apartments are to start at 80 square feet, and come outfitted with space saving furniture. "There is a very real shift occurring, and I think it has to do with different expectations for privacy and for sharing," said Andrew Till, a vice president of Simon Baron Development, which is partnering with Stage 3 Properties. Many New Yorkers need more flexible housing arrangements, particularly those who come to the city for a brief stint, or do not have the credit history or income requirements needed to qualify for a yearlong lease. "In cities, especially in New York, there has been and still is a huge need for exactly this," said Kathy Braddock, a managing director of the New York City office of William Raveis. Critics, however, say the co living business model could ultimately drive up housing costs, since many of the companies sublease units and charge a premium on the rent. And in some cases, the arrangements could violate city and state housing laws. For example, it is potentially illegal for a tenant of an apartment or a house to have more than two roommates who are not family members. And to limit single room occupancy hotels, city law prohibits landlords from renting out individual rooms in apartments. "I think it's only a matter of time before the courts recognize them as effectively landlords who are running S.R.O.'s," said David E. Frazer, a Manhattan lawyer who represents tenants. It remains to be seen how successful these companies will ultimately be. Campus, which has co living spaces in the Bay Area of California and in New York City, announced in June that it is shutting down operations on Aug. 31. Campus is now trying to find housing for residents living in its various properties. Ultimately, the company was "unable to find a way to make Campus into an economically viable business," Tom Currier, 24, a founder, wrote in an email. Mr. Gerstley, 30, a May graduate of New York University's Stern School of Business, has been renting out the rooms for seven years, charging up to 2,500 a month for a spacious bedroom with several windows. He declined to say how much he pays for the entire lease, although it is up for renewal in 2016 and the rent could rise. Mr. Gerstley, who lived in the apartment until October, married in February and now lives on the Upper West Side with his wife, Ashley Feinstein Gerstley, 29, a financial adviser. "My wife thinks this is all I should do," said Mr. Gerstley, who is searching for a job. He has considered repeating the co living model with other properties, but has yet to find another one as well suited to that use as the Loft. The apartment has a large, open living room with a 20 foot projection screen, three sofas, a large dining table and a Ping Pong table. There is also a small gym space and a tiny windowless guest room that residents can reserve for overnight visitors. The Loft is currently home to six single people in their 20s, although one is moving out in September. Getting accepted into the Loft is an informal but challenging process. Prospective tenants are subjected to several lengthy interviews with Mr. Gerstley and the residents, who collectively agree on their next housemate. Usually, the process involves a fair amount of alcohol and a visit to a favored Loft haunt, Fresh Salt, a Beekman Street bar. "We look for friendly people who aren't super weird," said Akshay Nagula, 24, a software engineer who moved into the Loft last October. Mr. Nagula had considered living in a hacker house when he was in the Bay Area, but found it off putting, describing the household as "eight super nerdy awkward dudes living together." The Loft is different, he said, with a collegial atmosphere. Residents frequently share meals and even go on group outings, like a geo tracking expedition that soon devolved into a bar crawl. For Mr. Gerstley, playing the role of landlord comes with its responsibilities. Even though he no longer lives in the apartment, none of the tenants communicate with the real landlord. So when a leak from an upstairs unit damaged Mr. Nagula's computer monitor, Mr. Gerstley had to resolve the problem from Italy, where he was on his honeymoon. "My biggest job is making sure everybody stays happy, because you can get a bedroom in New York for less than 2,500," he said. In order to charge residents top dollar for living with others, bells and whistles are in order. Pure House, for example, offers a premium 4,000 a month package that includes massage, yoga, fresh fruits and vegetables, personal coaching and wellness counseling. The company's founder, Ryan Fix, 40, sees Pure House as a departure from the standard rental model that binds tenants to a long term lease with a landlord who does not view the tenant as a consumer who deserves to be wooed. The Pure House website includes images of people gazing at breathtaking vistas with inspirational taglines like "We design experiences that empower our members to thrive." "The traditional landlord renter model is broken," said Mr. Fix, who launched the company in January. Instead, the company strives to "provide an amazing experience and leave with a hug." The arrangement is not for everyone. "I think it's just better to have a lease and know your roommates," said Anthony F. Dzaba, 34, who has lived in two different Pure House apartments in the past three months and rarely sees his fellow inhabitants. Pure House might strive for a collegial vibe with its residents, avoiding words like "tenant" and "landlord," but ultimately, he said, the relationship is still a traditional one. But perhaps the biggest drawback is the 30 day lease that many co living advocates rally behind. It provides residents with virtually no housing security at all. Their rent could rise or they could be displaced with as little as a month's notice. "We are hopeful that many of our members will be able to stay in their homes after the company winds down," Mr. Currier of the disbanding Campus wrote in an email. And as for the traditional tenant who happens to share a building with a co living apartment, the advent of short term rentals means living next door to neighbors who stay for a few months, if that long. Some critics argue that month to month rental agreements do not amount to a housing collective, even if residents attend social events. "To me, it seems like a bastardization of the idea," said Oriana Leckert, the author of "Brooklyn Spaces: 50 Hubs of Culture and Creativity" (Monacelli Press, 2015). "It's not the real world. The real world isn't where you crash somewhere for 30 days and you get to immerse yourself in a neighborhood and then you leave," said Linda B. Rosenthal, a member of the New York State Assembly who has been critical of short term rentals. "It's about a few people making a lot of money masquerading as a shared economy." While collective housing has historically often been a way to live more economically, for some of the new adherents your home is not only where you lay your head, but also where you forge business relationships and advance your career 24/7. On a sweltering July evening, about two dozen people gathered around an oversize dining table at Gramercy House, an elegant shared townhouse on East 18th Street. Guests mingled at a potluck dinner that included, among other things, Spam sushi. ("I wouldn't try it," joked one.) The purpose of the night: networking. "I wanted to live in a place where I could invite people over and we could build something that is bigger than the sum of its parts," said Gillian Morris, a founder of Gramercy House and the travel app Hitlist, as she prepared her signature drink for the party, a mix of rosemary, grapefruit juice, soda and gin. Ms. Morris, 29, a Harvard graduate, rented the apartment in January with two other entrepreneurs to create a household that could double as a place to build a brand. The apartment, two floors connected by a staircase with a handsome curving banister, was listed for 12,500 a month when the three rented it. The residents (who now number four) host brunches, dinners and a meditation class, all with the intent of enlarging their social sphere. "We're willing to give up living alone for a few years because we define privacy differently," said Melissa Kwan, 32, a founder of the real estate app Spacio and of Gramercy House, who hopes that the connections she makes there will help her find investors in her fledgling company. "I think as an entrepreneur, it's not only motivating, but necessary for you to constantly surround yourself with these kinds of people." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
THE ROAD FROM RAQQA A Story of Brotherhood, Borders, and Belonging By Jordan Ritter Conn "Humanizing" the word often used to praise immigrant and refugee narratives should be unnecessary: The fact that we are all human should be a baseline assumption, not an argument or a writerly achievement. Yet it's never been clearer that the basic humanity of others is something that is now continually in question, both in the United States and around the world. Jordan Ritter Conn's riveting debut book, "The Road From Raqqa," is a well wrought portrait of two brothers, Riyad and Bashar Alkasem, and their journeys out of Syria: Riyad as a young lawyer who went to California to learn English in 1990, and Bashar, also a lawyer, who fled to Turkey and then Europe in the midst of the Syrian civil war in 2016. Conn pushes beyond simply humanizing the Alkasems; the book portrays Syria and the United States as multifaceted and complex, both capable of generosity and oppression, with histories as interconnected as the brothers' own. As a child, Riyad is steeped in family lore that traces his ancestry back to the founding of Raqqa, on the Euphrates River, through a gracious act of generosity. In government run summer camps, he falls in love with a version of Syria that exists only in regime propaganda. Disillusioned after learning of the massacre of members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama by the Syrian Army in the 1980s, he leaves a burgeoning legal career to chase the ephemeral America of inspirational politicians and tree lined movie scenes. If Riyad's trajectory from dishwasher in Los Angeles to restaurateur in suburban Nashville is quintessentially American success comes after his restaurant, Cafe Rakka, is featured on Guy Fieri's show, "Diners, Drive Ins and Dives" so too are the indignities and injustices he faces. Especially after 9/11, Riyad asks: "Who is a bigot? Who is just a jerk? Does the difference matter?" For Riyad, his new country is a mixed place that has "confounded him," but also "delivered delirious joys." As he learns to live with the contradictions, however, he experiences a growing nostalgia for the Raqqa of his childhood. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Can certain medications increase your risk of dementia? A new study suggests that people who take a class of common medicines called anticholinergic drugs for several years may be more likely to develop dementia as they age. This is not a new hypothesis about these drugs , which are used to treat a wide range of conditions from depression to epilepsy to incontinence. But the study, published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, is large, and it analyzed the use of the medications in more detail and over a longer period of time than many previous studies. Here's what is known about the potential link between anticholinergic medicines and dementia: Which drugs are we talking about? Anticholinergic drugs include the antipsychotic clozapine; the bladder drug darifenacin (marketed as Enablex); the anti nausea drug scopolamine; the bronchodilator ipratropium; the muscle relaxant tizanidine; antihistamines such as diphenhydramine (brand names include Benadryl), and antidepressants such as paroxetine (brand names include Paxil). These medications work by blocking a chemical called acetylcholine, which acts as a neurotransmitter and is involved in many nervous system functions including muscle movements, heart rate, the widening of blood vessels, respiratory functions and muscle contractions in the stomach during digestion. Older adults are more likely to be prescribed many of these medications, simply because they tend to have more health issues. Some experts say that because people produce less acetylcholine as they age, drugs that inhibit that neurochemical can have a stronger effect on older people. Other studies have also suggested that long term use of some anticholinergic medications might increase the risk that older people will develop dementia. For example, a 2015 study by researchers at the University of Washington found that people age 65 and older who took these medications for three years or more had a 54 percent greater risk of developing dementia than people who took the medications for three months or less. A 2014 review found more than 30 studies that suggested confusion and other symptoms of cognitive decline increase with the amount of anticholinergic medication someone takes. Dr. Malaz Boustani, director of the Regenstrief Center for Health Innovation and Implementation Science at Indiana University, has created a tool called the anticholinergic cognitive burden scale, which ranks drugs by their suspected effects on cognition. Experts suggest avoiding extended use of drugs with a rating of 3 on the scale or combinations of drugs that together rate 3 or higher. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. What did the new study involve? The research, conducted by Carol Coupland, a professor of medical statistics in primary care at the University of Nottingham in England, and colleagues, evaluated anticholinergic drugs prescribed to nearly 285,000 people age 55 and older. About 59,000 of them had a diagnosis of dementia. The information came from a database of medical records from patients in more than 1,500 general practices in Britain, the authors said. Researchers looked at the medical records of patients who were diagnosed with dementia and examined the drugs they had been prescribed from 11 years to one year before their diagnosis. They compared their medications during that time frame with those of people who did not have a diagnosis of dementia. They recorded which of 56 anticholinergic medications people were prescribed, and at what dose and how long. They accounted for factors like body mass index, smoking, alcohol consumption, other medical conditions and use of other medications. The study found a 50 percent increased risk of dementia among people who used a strong anticholinergic drug daily for about three years within that 10 year period. The association was stronger for antidepressants, bladder drugs, antipsychotics and epilepsy medications, the study said. Researchers did not find any increased risk of dementia with antihistamines, bronchodilators, muscle relaxants or medications for stomach spasms or heart arrhythmias. The link between anticholinergic drugs was stronger for people diagnosed with dementia before they turned 80 and in people with vascular dementia compared to people with Alzheimer's disease, the authors reported. What are the limitations of the research? An important caveat with this type of study is that it is observational meaning there is no way to know if the medication use played any direct role in causing dementia. All it shows is that the risk of developing dementia appears to be higher for people who take some of these medications. It's also possible, the authors note, some conditions, like depression, may be early harbingers of cognitive decline. It's possible, for example, that some people taking antidepressants might actually be being treated for what will turn out to be an early symptom of dementia, so it's their depression that goes along with an increased risk of dementia not the medicine they are taking to treat it. It's possible, but not proven, that some anticholinergic drugs increase the risk of dementia. If you need long term treatment for one of the relevant medical conditions, talk to your doctor about other medication options that are not in the anticholinergic class, such as antidepressants like Celexa and Prozac. In many cases, there may be choices. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
'HUMA BHABHA: WE COME IN PEACE' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Oct. 28). This spare and unsettling sculptural installation for the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden Commission includes two figures: one that is somewhat humanoid but with a ferocious mask face and that visually dwarfs the jagged Manhattan skyline behind it, and another bowing in supplication or prayer, with long cartoonish human hands and a scraggly tail emerging from its shiny, black drapery. The title is a variant on the line an alien uttered to an anxious crowd in the 1951 science fiction movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still," but it ripples with other associations: colonization, invasion, imperialism or missionaries and other foreigners whose intentions were not always innocent. The installation also feels like an extension of the complex, cross cultural conversation going on downstairs, inside a museum packed with 5,000 years of art history. (Martha Schwendener) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'THE FACE OF DYNASTY: ROYAL CRESTS FROM WESTERN CAMEROON' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Sept. 3). In the African wing, a show of just four commanding wooden crowns constitutes a blockbuster in its own right. These massive wooden crests in the form of stylized human faces with vast vertical brows served as markers of royal power among the Bamileke peoples of the Cameroonian grasslands, and the Met's recent acquisition of an 18th century specimen is joined here by three later examples, each featuring sharply protruding cheeks, broadly smiling mouths and brows incised with involute geometric patterns. Ritual objects like these were decisive for the development of Western modernist painting, and a Cameroonian crest was even shown at MoMA in the 1930s, as a "sculpture" divorced from ethnography. But these crests had legal and diplomatic significance as well as aesthetic appeal, and their anonymous African creators had a political understanding of art not so far from our own. (Jason Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'HEAVENLY BODIES: FASHION AND THE CATHOLIC IMAGINATION' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters (through Oct. 8). Let us pray. After last year's stark exhibition of Rei Kawakubo's irregular apparel, the Met Costume Institute is back in blockbuster mode with this three part blowout on the influence of Catholicism on haute couture of the last century. The trinity of fashion begins downstairs at the Met with the exceptional loans of vestments from the Vatican; upstairs are gowns fit for angels in heaven (by Lanvin, Thierry Mugler, Rodarte) or angels fallen to earth (such as slinky Versace sheaths garlanded with crosses). The scenography at the Met is willfully operatic spotlights, choir music which militates against serious thinking about fashion and religion, but up at the Cloisters, by far the strongest third of the show, you can commune more peacefully with an immaculate Balenciaga wedding gown or a divine Valentino gown embroidered with Cranac's Adam and Eve. (Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION' at the Museum of the Moving Image. The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America's great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program "Sam and Friends" before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother's old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace and love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Farago) 718 784 0077, movingimage.us 'HISTORY REFUSED TO DIE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE SOULS GROWN DEEP FOUNDATION GIFT' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Sept. 23). This inspired foundation is dispersing around 1,200 works by black self taught artists from the American South to museums across the country. The Met's exhibition of 29 of the 57 pieces it received proposes an exciting broadening of postwar art. It is dominated by the dialogue between the rough hewed relief paintings of Thornton Dial and the geometrically, chromatically brilliant quilts of the Gee's Bend collective. But much else chimes in, including works by Purvis Young, Joe Minter and Lonnie Holley. (Roberta Smith) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'ALEJANDRO G. INARRITU: CARNE Y ARENA' at 1611 Benning Road NE, Washington (through Aug. 31, 9 a.m. 9 p.m.). Perhaps the most technically accomplished endeavor yet in virtual reality but closer in form to immersive live theater, created by a two time Oscar winner has arrived at a former church in Washington after outings in Cannes, Milan, Los Angeles and Mexico City. In "Carne y Arena" ("Flesh and Sand"), you explore the exhibition on your own with a motion sensitive headset that transports you to Mexico's border with the United States; brutal encounters with border guards interweave with surreal dream sequences, which you can perceive in three dimensions. The characters are computer renderings of the bodies of actual migrants; the landscapes are photographed by Mr. Inarritu's brilliant longtime cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki. It remains too early to say whether virtual reality will reshape art institutions, but this is a rare achievement, and not only for its political urgency. Tickets will be released only on the website at 8 a.m. Eastern Time on the 1st and 15th of each month of the exhibition's duration. (Farago) carneyarenadc.com 'THE INCOMPLETE ARAKI' at the Museum of Sex (through Aug. 31). It remains a bit of a tourist trap, but the for profit Museum of Sex is making its most serious bid yet for artistic credibility with a two floor exhibition of Japan's most prominent and controversial photographer. Nobuyoshi Araki has spent decades shooting Tokyo streetscapes, blossoming flowers and, notably, women trussed up in the baroque rope bondage technique known as kinbaku bi, or "the beauty of tight binding." Given the venue, it's natural that this show concentrates on the erotic side of his art, but less lustful visitors can discover an ambitious cross section of Mr. Araki's omnivorous photography, including his lastingly moving "Sentimental Journey," picturing his beloved wife, Yoko, from honeymoon to funeral. (Farago) 212 689 6337, museumofsex.com 'BODYS ISEK KINGELEZ: CITY DREAMS' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Jan. 1). The first comprehensive survey of the Congolese artist is a euphoric exhibition as utopian wonderland featuring his fantasy architectural models and cities works strong in color, eccentric in shape, loaded with enthralling details and futuristic aura. Mr. Kingelez (1948 2015) was convinced that the world had never seen a vision like his, and this beautifully designed show bears him out. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'LIKE LIFE: SCULPTURE, COLOR AND THE BODY (1300 TO NOW)' at the Met Breuer (through July 22). Taking a second run at the splashy theme show extravaganza, the Met Breuer has greater success. This one is certainly more coherent since it centers entirely on the body and its role in art, science, religion and entertainment. It gathers together some 120 sculptures, dolls, artist's dummies, effigies, crucifixes and automatons. Many are rarely lent and may not return anytime soon. (Smith) 212 731 1675, metmuseum.org 'THE LONG RUN' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Nov. 4). The museum upends its cherished Modern narrative of ceaseless progress by mostly young (white) men. Instead we see works by artists 45 and older who have just kept on keeping on, regardless of attention or reward, sometimes saving the best for last. Art here is an older person's game, a pursuit of a deepening personal vision over innovation. Winding through 17 galleries, the installation is alternatively visually or thematically acute and altogether inspiring. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'THE METROPOLIS IN LATIN AMERICA, 1830 1930' at Americas Society (through June 30). Fans of Latin American architecture are overly besotted with the modernist era: Luis Barragan's color saturated houses in Mexico City, Oscar Niemeyer's cutting edge presidential palace in Brasilia. But this eye opening exhibition turns the clock back 100 years and shows how six cities Buenos Aires; Havana; Lima, Peru; Mexico City; Rio de Janeiro; and Santiago, Chile used architecture and urban design to express new national ambitions. Vintage photographs disclose how in Mexico's sprawling capital its new republican government erected statues of Cuauhtemoc, the last Aztec emperor, while Argentina plowed out lordly avenues in imitation of Haussmann era Paris. All these cities had keen architectural ambitions, though if you have to pick the most sophisticated, it's Rio in a landslide. Stare at Marc Ferrez's jaw dropping 1895 panoramic photograph of the erstwhile Brazilian capital, with Sugarloaf Mountain looming over Botafogo and Flamengo, and book the next flight. (Farago) 212 249 8950, as coa.org 'MILLENNIUM: LOWER MANHATTAN IN THE 1990S' at the Skyscraper Museum (through June 24). This plucky Battery Park institution transports us back to the years of Rudy Giuliani, Lauryn Hill and 128 kilobit modems to reveal the enduring urban legacy of a decade bookended by recession and terror. In the wake of the 1987 stock market crash, landlords in the financial district rezoned their old skyscrapers for residential occupancy, and more than 20 towers were declared landmarks, including the ornate Standard Oil building at 26 Broadway and the home of Delmonico's at 56 Beaver Street. Battery Park City flowered; yuppies priced out of TriBeCa came down to Wall Street; a new Guggenheim, designed by a fresh from Bilbao Frank Gehry, nearly arose by South Street Seaport. From this distance, the 1990s can seem almost like a golden age, not least given that, more than 16 years after Sept. 11, construction at the underwhelming new World Trade Center is still not finished. (Farago) skyscraper.org MUSEUM MILE FESTIVAL at Fifth Avenue Between 82nd and 105th Streets (June 12, 6 9 p.m.). Fifth Avenue will be closed to traffic so people can revel in the cultural riches at six institutions along Museum Mile. Take in "Giacometti" at the Guggenheim; attend a workshop with the Little Orchestra Society at El Museo del Barrio; soak in the sunset with Huma Bhaba's sculptures at the Met; catch Frank London's Klezmer Brass All Stars at the Jewish Museum, where "Chaim Soutine: Flesh" is on view; engage all your senses at Cooper Hewitt; and discover Stanley Kubrick's photography at the Museum of the City of New York. All for free. (Peter Libbey) museummilefestival.org 'GEORGIA O'KEEFFE: VISIONS OF HAWAI'I' at the New York Botanical Garden (through Oct. 28). Finding out Georgia O'Keeffe had a Hawaiian period is kind of like finding out Brian Wilson had a desert period. But here it is: 17 eye popping paradisal paintings, produced in a nine week visit in 1939. The paintings, and their almost psychedelic palette, are as fleshlike and physical as O'Keeffe's New Mexican work is stripped and metaphysical. The other star of the show, fittingly, is Hawaii, and the garden has mounted a living display of the subjects depicted in the artwork. As much as they might look like the products of an artist's imagination, the plants and flowers in the Enid Haupt Conservatory are boastfully real. On Aloha Nights every Saturday in June and every other Saturday in July and August, the garden is staging a cultural complement of activities, including lei making, hula lessons and ukulele performances. (William L. Hamilton) 718 817 8700, nybg.org 'RENOIR: FATHER AND SON/PAINTING AND CINEMA' at Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (through Sept. 3). Jean Renoir transformed the history of cinema with humanistic, precisely edited films like "The Grand Illusion," and especially "The Rules of the Game" considered one of the greatest films ever made, though it was a box office flop on its release in 1939. Yet the critic he most strove to please was his father, the Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir. This terrific dad and lad exhibition, organized with Paris's Musee d'Orsay, interweaves painting and cinema into a heartfelt survey of Jean Renoir's career, and finds paternal influence in the pastoral romance of "A Day in the Country" or the bright landscapes of his 1959 color film "Picnic on the Grass." The irony? It is Jean Renoir who now seems the more inventive artist, even if he was convinced that "I have always imitated my father." (Farago) 215 278 7000, barnesfoundation.org 'ALBERTO SAVINIO' at the Center for Italian Modern Art (through June 23). The paintings of this Italian polymath have long been overshadowed by the brilliant work of his older brother, Giorgio de Chirico. This show of more than 20 canvases from the late 1920s to the mid 30s may not change that, but the mix of landscapes with bright patterns and several eerie portraits based on family photographs are surprisingly of the moment. (Smith) 646 370 3596, italianmodernart.org 'SCENES FROM THE COLLECTION' at the Jewish Museum. After a surgical renovation to its grand pile on Fifth Avenue, the Jewish Museum has reopened its third floor galleries with a rethought, refreshed display of its permanent collection, which intermingles 4,000 years of Judaica with modern and contemporary art by Jews and gentiles alike Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and the excellent young Nigerian draftswoman Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. The works are shown in a nimble, nonchronological suite of galleries, and some of its century spanning juxtapositions are bracing; others feel reductive, even dilletantish. But always, the Jewish Museum conceives of art and religion as interlocking elements of a story of civilization, commendably open to new influences and new interpretations. (Farago) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org 'THE SENSES: DESIGN BEYOND VISION' at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (through Oct. 28). There's a serious, timely big idea at this exhibition: As social media, smartphones and virtual reality make us ever more "ocularcentric," we have taken leave of our nonvisual senses and need to get back in touch, literally. Thus "The Senses" features multisensory adventures such as a portable speaker size contraption that emits odors, with titles like "Surfside" and "Einstein," in timed combinations; hand painted scratch and sniff wallpaper (think Warhol's patterned cows but with cherries cherry scented, naturally); and a device that projects ultrasonic waves to simulate the touch and feel of virtual objects. The show also presents commissions, videos, products and prototypes from more than 65 designers and teams, some of which address sensory disabilities like blindness and deafness, including Vibeat, which can be worn as a bracelet, brooch or necklace and translates music into vibrations. And if you bring the kids, they will likely bliss out stroking a wavy, fur lined installation that makes music as you rub it. (Michael Kimmelman) 212 849 8400, cooperhewitt.org 'CHAIM SOUTINE: FLESH' at the Jewish Museum (through Sept. 16). The Russian Jewish artist Chaim Soutine (1893 1943), who spent most of his life in Paris, is best known for bloody, ecstatic paintings of beef carcasses. But it wasn't death that interested him it was the immaterial life force of the material world. Along with an instructive lineup of naked fowl, silver herring and popeyed sardines, this indispensable tribute to the transcendent but still undervalued painter centers on a stupendous 1925 "Carcass of Beef," glistening scarlet, streaked with orange fat and straddling a starry sky. (Will Heinrich) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org 'THROUGH A DIFFERENT LENS: STANLEY KUBRICK PHOTOGRAPHS' at the Museum of the City of New York (through Oct. 28). This exhibition of the great director's photography is essentially Kubrick before he became Kubrick. Starting in 1945, when he was 17 and living in the Bronx, he worked as a photographer for Look magazine, and the topics that he explored are chestnuts so old that they smell a little moldy: lovers embracing on a park bench as their neighbors gaze ostentatiously elsewhere, patients anxiously awaiting their doctors appointment, boxing hopefuls in the ring, celebrities at home, pampered dogs in the city. It probably helped that Kubrick was just a kid, so instead of inducing yawns, these magazine perennials struck him as novelties, and he in turn brought something fresh to them. Photographs that emphasize the mise en scene could be movie stills: a shouting circus executive who takes up the right side of the foreground while aerialists rehearse in the middle distance, a boy climbing to a roof with the city tenements surrounding him, a subway car filled with sleeping passengers. Looking at these pictures, you want to know what comes next. (Arthur Lubow) 212 534 1672, mcny.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Last year Hamish Bowles, a writer for Vogue, asked Rihanna in an interview about her big picture plans for her fashion brand. "I know where I'm going next," she said. "But I can't tell you that. What's the fun in that?" After her Savage x Fenty lingerie show last night, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Rihanna's strategy seemed clear: She plans to broaden the fashion community while also disorienting it. She wants to entertain herself, too. "I get bored. I get very bored," Rihanna said backstage after the show. "It's like a pair of shoes, you know. They're only good until tomorrow." Already, the singer and designer has shown that restless daring with her personal style, turning an ever present wineglass into an accessory and wearing a dress by a young designer fresh out of Pratt Institute in a music video. Now, perhaps in a riposte to Victoria's Secret, Rihanna is doing the same with lingerie. Yes, supermodels including Gigi and Bella Hadid made an appearance. But the collection was much more about presenting women of all sizes and ethnicities, including two visibly pregnant models. Raisa Thomas, a 26 year old makeup artist and plus size model, said she "got hit up by a casting director in a DM" and wound up in the show. She appreciates how Rihanna is diversifying the fashion industry, she said. "She's putting it on the map for people to be inclusive," Ms. Thomas said. "Plus size, white, black. It's good for young women to see different types of people in a fashion show." The crowd, too, felt more diverse than the typical celebrities and fashion regulars, many of whom were on their way to the airport to catch flights to Europe for the shows there. As for the disorientation, the presentation paid little attention to fashion show protocol. Models emerged unannounced in dim light until the milling crowd took notice that the show had actually started; cellphones were then whipped out. The elevated stage was more built installation than runway, with a pond, a "growing station" and tropical plant filled botanical domes that blocked sightlines. Unless you moved around the room (there was no seating), you missed half the looks. The vibe was less lingerie show gawkfest than performance art piece, with models moving in slow motion, crawling on all fours, executing fierce choreographed dance moves. Backstage, Rihanna said the concept was about mixing the organic with the futuristic, "or what we hope to see in the future. Women being celebrated in all forms and all body types and all races and cultures." Though her sportswear line with Puma was a success, the clothing brand didn't show a collection this year. And her shows during New York Fashion Week have seemed more an outgrowth of convenient scheduling, coming during the same week as her Diamond Ball fund raising gala. One wonders where she will go from here. Asked about her move into lingerie, Rihanna said, "I wanted to do it, I wanted to get it right and I wanted it to be something that was respected. So I took my time." She was still "shocked," she said, that the industry takes her seriously as a designer. "I know where I'm at. I'm brand new. I'm learning still and growing. I love to create. I love the process." "I get that it helps the brand and it's a way of communicating your events and your new products to your fans and to the world," Rihanna said, before adding, "there's a battle between what you genuinely want to share and what people care to know." She laughed. "I respect it. But, you know, I'm not going to put my every meal" on it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
LONDON When she was young, Marie Pierra Kakoma's mother gave her an equation for success: When you're Black, you have to work twice as hard. When you're young, Black and female, make that 10 times as hard. Making music as Lous and the Yakuza, Kakoma has embraced this message, and the journey to releasing Lous's debut album, "Gore," last month has taken more sacrifices than even her mother would have liked. In the last several years, the 24 year old Kakoma has moved countries, dropped out of college and endured months of homelessness. For Kakoma, whose life has long been marked with periods of turbulence, there's no question that it was all worth it. "Music is an outlet, it's where we leave our reality," Kakoma said in a video interview from Paris. "We put our reality on paper and then it's there, it exists. For me it explains to me what's going on in my own life." Lous and the Yakuza's debut album, "Gore," is out on Columbia Records. The genre fluid artist blends sultry hip hop with harsh trap beats to create tracks that are both a declaration of her resilience and an exploration of Generation Z concerns, including race, loneliness and despair. With words sung and rapped in French, Lous and the Yakuza feels like a distinctly globalized project, interweaving Kakoma's Belgian Congolese Rwandan background with eclectic influences including politics past and present, manga comics, Mozart and Whitney Houston. The bulk of her fans hail from France and Belgium, but she also has followings in South Africa and Germany, and huge popularity in countries like Italy, where a remix of her soul flecked track "Dilemme" ("Dilemma") rose through Spotify's Top 200 chart to its Top 20 in April. "I like to describe my music as a constant search for truth," Kakoma said, occasionally flashing her distinctive collection of rings. "It brings confusion and that's what artists should do, we're here to disturb." Lous and the Yakuza seeks to disturb and provoke in myriad directions. In "Solo" she asks whether she needs to cry to be heard, mentioning Congo's independence in 1960 and questions "why isn't Black a color of the rainbow?" Over the bouncing trap beat of "Messes Basses" she sings "yo, yo, yo," a refrain used in Rwanda when someone is suffering. And for the video for "Tout est gore" ("All Is Gore,") she sits on steps with rivers of red dripping around her. The album's themes of violence and gore reflect experiences from Kakoma's own life. Kakoma was born in 1996 in Lubumbashi, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Two years later, her mother was imprisoned for being Rwandan as part of Congo's period of drawn out civil violence, which is often referred to as one of the bloodiest conflicts since World War II. After spending months in prison, Kakoma's mother was released and instructed to leave the country immediately. She fled to Belgium, taking her youngest child, but was forced to leave her other three children, including Kakoma, in Congo. "I think that's something that shaped me so much," said Kakoma, who joined her mother in Belgium two years later. By age 7, Kakoma had developed an artistic flair, but the poems, books and songs she made were riddled with grief, death and tragedy. The cause, she said, was feelings of abandonment rooted in the two years of separation from her mother. As a child, her father an activist and prominent doctor in Congo was shuttling back and forth to Belgium. In 2005, Kakoma and her younger sister were sent to live in post genocide Rwanda with their grandmother. "For me, we were living in a ghetto in Belgium," Kakoma said, "but the ghetto was actually so privileged compared to the basic life in Africa at that time." When she was 9, she learned of the genocide her grandmother and cousins endured. "It was very explicit and that traumatized me," she said. "All that shaped me into a person who believes very strangely in hope. I have a lot of hope in the future because I overcame so many things." Kakoma returned to Belgium at 15 and attended first an all girls boarding school and then the University of Namur, where she began studying philosophy. She quit after four months, to her parents' alarm, to focus on singing. At age 18, a succession of wrong decisions and encounters getting fired from several jobs, hanging out with the wrong crowd and a falling out with her roommate's mother left her homeless in Brussels for six months, Kakoma said. "That's when I learned everything that I know today," she said. "At that point it was either crying, getting suicidal or start laughing and find a way out." Kakoma got back on her feet with the support of friends and released her first song "Full of You" in English in 2015. For the next few years she uploaded music to SoundCloud and took gigs across Brussels until she signed with Columbia Records in 2018. Lous is an anagram of "soul," and Yakuza means loser or a person outside of the norm (it's also the name of Japan's infamous crime organization). "I think it's a testimony to my resilience," she said of the moniker. The album's title, "Gore," is a metaphor for Kakoma's life, she said, and the darkness she's faced. To make this autobiographical work, Kakoma enlisted the Spanish producer El Guincho, known for producing Rosalia's album "El Mal Querer" in 2018. When El Guincho received a folder of songs from his management, he had never heard of Lous and the Yakuza, but was instantly drawn to her songwriting skills and voice. "She is different in a way that she really is a natural, she has an incredible set of skills for making music," El Guincho said in an email. "While that is a very good thing, sometimes it is harder to push an artist so effortlessly talented to go further." "I think by the end of the process of making the album she really understood that, so now the sky's the limit for her," he added. Today, Kakoma can count Madonna and the producer and actress Issa Rae among her fans. Last month she made her American television debut, on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon." Recently, Kakoma's distinctive style reflected in the symbols she draws on her face, her boyish swagger and striking elegance saw her starring in fashion campaigns for Louis Vuitton and Chloe and striding down the catwalk for Paris fashion week. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
A Tikuna mask designed by Jean Baptiste Debret during the French Artistic Mission (1816 31). It was part of the collection at Brazil's National Museum and may have been lost to fire.Credit...Museu Nacional Brasil, via Associated Press A Tikuna mask designed by Jean Baptiste Debret during the French Artistic Mission (1816 31). It was part of the collection at Brazil's National Museum and may have been lost to fire. David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, said he had struggled to think of an appropriate way to understand the destruction of Brazil's National Museum by fire. "It's as if the Metropolitan Museum of Art burned down," he said. He was responding to a question about Luzia, one of the oldest examples of human remains in the Americas. It may have been lost in the fire on Sunday night, and it was certainly damaged. But his reaction was to the extent of the loss, not the specimen itself. As valuable as that specimen was to those who study the peopling of the Americas, it was almost trivial in comparison to the vast scope of the museum, which was a cultural and scientific treasure. Science museums are not only displays of what we have learned, but also chances to learn so much more from studying the specimens stored there. The Luzia fossil, for instance, is the skull of a woman who lived 11,500 years ago in Brazil. It is valuable to science not just because it is rare and has already told us much about who lived in the Americas, but also because of how much more it could say. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Dr. Reich is a specialist in ancient human DNA, using such material to study our species' migrations around the planet. He was unaware of any retrieval of DNA from the Luzia fossil. But while no sufficiently preserved DNA has so far been reported from bones older than 1,000 years in South America, technology for the study of ancient DNA is advancing by leaps and bounds and a specimen like Luzia might have concealed genetic secrets. Michael Novacek, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, said that museums maintain "our tangible record of life on earth." A great collection, he said, is like new terrain to explore, a place of rediscovery, where new studies of old objects yield new truths. Much of the entomology collection at the museum in Brazil was lost, including dragonflies and beetles. Part of its collection was of lace bugs, which was preserved in no other museum. Marcus Guidoti, a Brazilian entomologist and former researcher at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, says it's likely that about a quarter of Brazilian lace bug holotypes, or unique specimens used to describe a species, was lost in the fire. " The Smithsonian collection on lace bugs is the biggest in the world," he said, but he said that because of a feud between an American and a Brazilian scientist, it has "a big hole: South America. " | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The Russian ballerina Diana Vishneva, a principal with American Ballet Theater since 2005, will give her farewell performances with the company, at the Metropolitan Opera House, on June 19 and June 23, 2017. She will dance the role of Tatiana in John Cranko's "Onegin," with Marcelo Gomes. Ms. Vishneva, 40, is also a principal dancer with the Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg, and will remain with that company. In an email, she wrote, "I certainly don't stop doing the big classics!" She said that she had made the decision to leave Ballet Theater because she felt she had "too many big demanding projects on my plate." She added: "I am simply unable to give 100 percent of myself to A.B.T. and this is not the way I function." She said that she had chosen the role of Tatiana for her farewell because of its powerful dramatic component, and because it allowed her to dance with Mr. Gomes, "one of my best partners." Ms. Vishneva said that although the June performances would be her official farewell, she did not rule out one off guest performances with the company in the future. She has a large repertory to choose from: in her 12 years with Ballet Theater she has performed in an extensive range of work, from the 19th century classics to pieces by George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan, John Neumeier and Alexei Ratmansky. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Laurie Santos, a psychology professor at Yale University and host of The Happiness Lab podcast, is a leading expert in positive psychology, a relatively young field. Since she began teaching "The Science of Well Being" in 2018, it has become the most popular course in Yale's history, with nearly a quarter of students enrolling. The class, now online for free, applies what Dr. Santos calls a "preventative medicine approach" to mental health harnessing science and evidence to help people lead more fulfilling lives. Her podcast devoted a full season to episodes contending with the mental toll of the coronavirus pandemic, and she warns in an essay in a forthcoming collection "Which Side of History? How Technology Is Reshaping Democracy and Our Lives" (out Oct. 13) of the "cognitive costs" of our always on relationships with our devices. In a recent telephone interview, which has been edited and condensed, Dr. Santos said that many of her students at Yale have misconceptions about what makes a happy life, and that she too is not immune from having the wrong intuition about the issue. "One of the most shocking ones for me is a study looking at how simple interactions with strangers positively affect your well being," she said, adding that, even for introverts, "a simple chat with a stranger can make people feel great." During Covid, we have limited chances for small exchanges so how can we still fulfill that need? It's much harder right now. We need to be much more intentional about it. We need to recognize that it's missing and that its absence is having a huge effect on our well being from the chat with the barista at the coffee shop to the water cooler interaction with the people in the office. Those things matter for our well being, but many of us don't have them anymore, at least not in the same way that we had before the crisis started. We need to double down on the social connection we do have. In my class, I'll say, "Hey, I'll be on Zoom a little bit earlier if you want to just hang out and chat not about work, but just for some social contact." Research shows that the mere presence of technology can be detrimental to our relationships and in person experiences yet we're relying on devices now more than ever. Understanding where things go wrong is a powerful tool. While I'm on a Zoom meeting, if I have my email in the background and I hear a little ding, it's going to be really hard to pay attention. The screens we're using really affect our attention. So we should try to mitigate that by shutting off notifications really being careful about our attentional hygiene when we're using this stuff. It also means that we need to pay attention to how this is affecting our real life social interaction, which we don't get that much of. It's funny my husband told me, "You're the only person I've seen, but I also feel like I haven't seen you in a long time." We can get that with the people we're near in real life, because there's screen things happening. We're checking Facebook and looking at Instagram, and it can steal the time we do have in real life. That time is so precious right now, so we need to fight the screens to get some of that back. There's a lot of hype around self care. But you've said, "We're really obsessed with treating ourselves and self care at the expense of being other oriented enough to care about other people." Self care is great, if you're doing it the right way. I'm all for improving your happiness. That's what the whole class is about. The problem is just how far. We assume that self care looks like a nice bubble bath or even hedonistic pursuits, selfish pursuits. But the data suggests that the right way to treat ourselves would be to do nice things for other people. We actually get more out of being more open and more social and more other oriented than spending money on ourselves. It's a bigger increase to your happiness. How can we do that during Covid? Use the tools we do have to really connect. A quick text to a friend you haven't seen or a family member you're worried about, like "Thinking of you. Wishing I could get together. Thinking of this fun memory." Sharing happy times, expressing gratitude and using the tools we do have to do nice things for others. I'm a big fan of surprise presents. Everyone knows they're going to get presents on their birthday, but people don't expect a random, tiny gift and a gratitude letter out of the blue. It's easy to underestimate how powerful that can be to our relationships and how nice that is to get. You're helping others, but the thing we forget is that it's a way to boost our well being, too. What does the research say about how happiness is affected during Covid? The message I've seen from the current research is that Covid's not great for well being; symptoms of depression and symptoms of anxiety tend to be going up. And those are systematically worse in more vulnerable populations. So if you look at, say, African Americans right now, the effects of that stuff is worse. If you look at lower income individuals or folks who don't have child care help all the folks who would normally be getting a well being hit it's worse in the context of Covid. So how can we achieve happiness in chaos? Try not to run away from those negative emotions. As parents, when kids are expressing uncertainty, your instinct is to just deny it or pretend it's not there, to "power through it." But uncertainty, fear, frustration, anger, jealousy all of those negative emotions they're not going away. You need to give them space. One technique is to use meditation, where you really try to recognize and accept those emotions. In particular, RAIN: recognize, accept, investigate and nurture. If I'm trying to plan my class and I'm just like, "Oh gosh, we're not even going to get to the new semester," that's uncertainty. That's fear. Let me just acknowledge, accept. "OK, that's what it feels like. I'm in that state right now. Let me investigate what it feels like in my body." I'm watching my face get tense. My heart is beating a little faster. I'm feeling antsy. I want to run away from it. I want to eat something or check social. I just want to run away from those emotions, not feel it. But I need to sit with it. You don't need to shut off negative emotions those are real. You would need to shut Covid off to shut those down right now. But you can deal with them and accept them and work with them, given that that's our situation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The stylistic versatility offered by American Ballet Theater at its best is a marvel. During this spring season, it has been dancing choreography by four thoroughly unalike 20th century masters Leonide Massine, George Balanchine, Kenneth MacMillan and Frederick Ashton and, often enough, the standards it has set in each have been world class. Last week at the Metropolitan Opera House, Ashton's wonderful, strange and elusive three act "Cinderella" (1948), set to Prokofiev's 1945 score, joined the company's repertory. The roles of Cinderella and the Prince were danced by four casts; supporting roles were taken by two or three interpreters. Many New Yorkers kept returning to it in fascination and awe: something only possible because of the stylistic immersion with which Ballet Theater's dancers committed themselves to Ashton's work. He created "Cinderella" with the company that is today's Royal Ballet; but, though the work is beloved, many of its roles, steps and jokes have proved far from fail safe. Today the ballet is staged at Covent Garden and for companies around the world by Wendy Ellis Somes and Malin Thoors. The chance to watch successive Ballet Theaterperformances gave hope that the company can get much more of this ballet right than was evident at Monday's opening night. Ballet Theater has quickly absorbed an idiom that includes some of the most multidirectional dancing in the ballet lexicon, and that often coordinates separate upper and lower body movements with rococo intricacy. Already its dancers execute some things much better than the Royal has often managed this century. At one point in the ballroom, the 12 female Stars, one by one, rush back onstage, hitting the centerline with a sudden death plunging step: a piquee penchee arabesque, in which the torso dives low, and then rears high while on point. At Covent Garden this is often fudged. Not so at Ballet Theater, where the 12 dancers really threw their torsos excitingly into the action. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
PIERCE, NEB. So your winning bid at the Lambrecht auction here last weekend put a treasure on your trailer, and you've brought it home. Now what? It's a matter that demands more than the usual amount of consideration. The sale, which disposed of the 500 car holdings of a Nebraska Chevrolet dealer who hoarded his trade ins and stashed scores of never sold models that he thought special, was nothing like this summer's auctions in tony Pebble Beach. No bright lights, gleaming paint or shiny chrome: this was an as found event, in a soybean field, of cars that been parked most outdoors and left to nature's ravages. News of the sale became an Internet sensation. The tiny farm town was overrun with bidders. The vehicles particularly the many examples with just a few miles on them sold for far more than even perfectly restored examples might have. Which creates a dilemma: if there's a price premium attached to the authentic Lambrecht grime, does a new owner dare wash his prize? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
A lot goes into choosing the rightboat, crew and destination, so anexperienced broker is a must. ADAM ROSENFELD, a lifelong Miami resident, needed a vacation, but he was struggling to persuade his wife to go anywhere with their toddler in tow. Gone were the days when the couple could jet around Asia, jamming as many things into a vacation as they wanted. "To her, what fun would it have been being on vacation with a 1 year old?" he said. So he decided to pony up for a vacation that would cost a lot more than he normally spent but would guarantee that all three of them could get away and relax: He chartered a 126 foot Norship yacht for four days in the Bahamas. "It was the only thing I could have gotten her to go along with," Mr. Rosenfeld said. "This was my way of actually getting her to go through with it. It was something to really look forward to and was very exciting." The yacht, called Impulsive, usually charters for around 100,000 a week plus expenses like food, fuel and gratuities for the crew. That can add another 20 to 30 percent or more to the bill, depending on destination. Mr. Rosenfeld would not specify the price, but he said because it was just four days in the yacht's off season, he paid less than half of that. "It's a bigger number because it's one number," he said. "It wasn't that much more expensive than being in Asia for two weeks, with everything from the round trip travel to the hotel and food. Then again, I'm not going to Asia every week." He was hooked on the experience. But he admitted he had gotten lucky: A friend had chartered the same boat so he knew what to expect, from the fittings to, more important, the crew. Given that this is a prime time for chartering in the Caribbean before many of the big boats are moved elsewhere for the summer, how does someone who has never chartered a yacht before go about doing it? The short answer is, slowly. "It's different seeing a yacht on the Internet and feeling a yacht when you step on board," said Katie Macpherson, luxury yacht charter specialist at Worth Avenue Yachts in Palm Beach, Fla. "Getting an idea of the spacing, the carpet, the materials, the TV in relation to the sofa there are a lot of aspects of the yacht you can't see in photos on the Internet." Ms. Macpherson said she likes to start first timers off with a comparatively small yacht: Her preference is a 112 foot Westport, which has four staterooms. She said it costs 49,500 for a week, plus expenses. "I don't like to overwhelm people with massive yachts right out of the box," she said. "For somebody who hasn't chartered before, you want something that is comfortable that they'll have a great time on and has a great crew and just knock it out of the park." Yet like the weather on the water, rules of thumb change quickly. In this case, they depend on whether the passengers are couples out for a relaxing week of eating and sightseeing or a family with children who want to enjoy all kinds of water sports. If it's a trip with children, D.J. Parker, president of Neptune Yachts and president of the American Yacht Charter Association, a membership organization, recommends larger boats and a more protected first voyage. "Whenever there are children in the trip and the boat is under 150 feet, I'd propose the British Virgin Islands," she said. "It's an archipelago. The wind is broken up. It's crystal clear. And there is nothing that is typically going to bite you in the water." Just as important as where you're going is the crew that is taking you there. Some are great with children and get right in there with the water toys. Others are better for couples who want to do a lot of cruising and sightseeing. Then there are the formal crews that can prepare restaurant quality meals on the high seas. If it is a yacht under 60 feet, Trish Cronan, president of Ocean Getaways in Fort Myers, Fla., said she likes to find "bulletproof crews" that is, seamen who can handle any group, from the cheerful to the demanding. "I like to know that no matter how those clients show up, that crew is going to maintain equanimity and graciousness," she said. People also need to be realistic about how far they can cruise in a given number of days. "If someone calls me off the cuff and says 'I want to cruise from Croatia to Greece,' I'll say that's pretty ambitious," Ms. Parker said. "That sounds like two trips." But of course, as anyone who has been on even a small runabout knows, boats break all the time. And what if something big breaks when it's your week? After all, if you get a bad room at the Ritz Carlton, you just can ask to be moved. It may not always be that easy to pull up another 150 foot yacht in the same harbor. "The contract has stipulations for all the eventualities," Sharon Bahmer, a charter broker and the president of the Charter Yacht Brokers Association, said. "If there is a breakdown, there is a stipulation. If it's force majeure or weather related, there is a clause for that. Everything will be laid out. If the yacht is broken down, you try to find a replacement vessel so the client can continue on his charter." Part of this, though, is having a broker who is experienced. Ms. Bahmer said her association had created a code of ethics for its brokers. Its members must commit to going to the various charter boat shows around the world to meet the crews and see the yachts firsthand. They also need to have proper escrow accounts to receive and hold payments before they are dispersed to the yacht owners. For owners, there are advantages beyond the weekly fees to putting their yachts out to charter. "The upside for me is it covers some of my expenses and it keeps the crew busy," said Hank Freid, chief executive of The Impulsive Group, which owns the yacht Mr. Rosenfeld chartered. "If the crew is just sitting there and maintaining the boat, they get lax. They work much more efficiently if they're busy. And they're making money." Still, for people who have both owned and chartered yachts, there is at trade off. John Allen, a retired computer executive who lives in Sausalito, Calif., has owned sailboats and power boats of various sizes and now charters large yachts for vacations. He said one downside of not owning a big boat was the loss of spontaneity. "You can't say to your buddy, 'What are you doing next weekend? You want to fly down to Miami and go fishing?'" he said. But what is gained is flexibility. Mr. Allen said he was chartering a yacht next month to go around Turks and Caicos; a month after that, he has another one chartered in Croatia. "If it's my own boat, that's a lot of moving your boat around," he said. "You have to be organized and planned about that." For Mr. Rosenfeld, that first trip, over a year ago now, made a big impression. "I liked the idea of being in one place where you could kind of bounce around," he said. "I don't want to say it was a once in a lifetime experience. I will do it again. I felt very comfortable and relaxed and free." And that is no small feat when vacationing with a toddler. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
MELBOURNE, Australia Could the 2019 Australian Open be the Grand Slam tournament in which a budding cast of young American men breaks through? The odds remain against that happening thanks in part to a guy named Roger Federer and there remains much tennis to be played. But after a pair of second round upsets by Frances Tiafoe and Taylor Fritz on Wednesday, the stage just might be set. The first surprise came when Tiafoe, who turns 21 on Sunday, finished off fifth seeded Kevin Anderson behind powerful forehands and serves. It was the biggest win of Tiafoe's young career and the biggest shock of the tournament so far. "C'mon!" he shouted, rolling up his right shirt sleeve, then thumping his right biceps repeatedly with his left hand, a move that seemed freighted with both bravado and relief. Tiafoe, the son of immigrants from Sierra Leone who learned the game at the Maryland tennis club where his father was a custodian, has long been touted as a prodigious talent. But he has also seemed burdened by the weight of expectations. "It means the world to me," Tiafoe told a crowd he had clearly won over during the tense three hour match. The arena scoreboard flashed with the final score, 4 6, 6 4, 6 4, 7 5, telling a story of its own. Early on, Anderson had pushed ahead, leading by 3 0 in the second set after winning the first. Then Tiafoe turned the tide. "I lost to Kevin three times last year," Tiafoe, ranked No. 39, explained in an on court interview. "I was down a set and break today. I went to a different place. I dug deep. It's just how bad you want it, and I wanted it bad." Indeed, in the beginning, it looked as if Tiafoe might soon be flying home for more practice at the United States Tennis Association's campus in Orlando, Fla., where many young American hopefuls train. But then he altered his approach and flashed the kind of game that he will have to employ if he is to get past Andreas Seppi of Italy, a tour veteran ranked No. 35, in the third round. He had decided to "kind of just mix it up," he explained. "Play smarter. Don't try to go for cannons. Be unpredictable." Once he settled on a game plan, Tiafoe was particularly effective mixing a slew of low bouncing slices into his powerful repertoire, forcing Anderson out of his comfort zone, making Anderson bend and contort his 6 foot 8 frame. How far can Tiafoe go at this tournament? When I posed that question to him, he was succinct. "To the third round, man," he said, before laughing slyly. Should Tiafoe beat Seppi on Friday, he would find himself deeper in a Grand Slam tournament than he has ever been. Maybe because he's keenly aware of that fact, he leaned on a tried and true sports cliche but one that might show he has enough locked in maturity to do real damage right now. He said he couldn't afford to consider anything more than the next match. "Look at today, I mean, he is five in the world," Tiafoe said, referring to Anderson, who is actually ranked No. 6. "I was able to beat him. It's so tight now. Anybody plays a good match, you can beat anybody on a given day." Fritz, 21, a Californian ranked 50th, can only hope those last words ring true. Shortly after Tiafoe's win, Fritz upset 30th seeded Gael Monfils of France, 6 3, 6 7 (8), 7 6 (6), 7 6 (5). The match featured some of the most exquisite shotmaking of the tournament's opening days. "I learned my lesson last time we played," Fritz said. "I won the second set, and it was one of the most amazing feelings I have ever had playing tennis, winning a set off Roger Federer! And then we were deep in the third and I had a chance to break his serve, and I started thinking: Oh my God, I am about to beat Federer. I might beat Federer. "And then that thinking definitely lost me the match pretty quick. I didn't win another game after that. I have definitely learned I just have to treat it like any other match." Playing Federer in Melbourne will not be any other match, of course. Same for Tiafoe, when he battles Seppi. But both matches present a real opportunity. "Between Frances and Taylor today, we saw something different, something better, an intensity and composure I have never seen before," said Martin Blackman, the U.S.T.A.'s general manager for player development. "All of our players can learn from this." Blackman oversees a group that includes the 7 footer Reilly Opelka, 21, who upset ninth seeded John Isner on Monday before losing a five setter on Wednesday, and Mackenzie McDonald, 23, the former N.C.A.A. champion who fell in four tight sets to sixth seeded Marin Cilic. If any of the young American men are to begin making a bona fide dent in pro tennis, there is no better time to start than now. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
In a sweeping overhaul of its leadership, Tribune Publishing announced on Wednesday that it was combining the role of editor and publisher across its portfolio of newspapers, which include The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune. With the reorganization, Davan Maharaj, the editor of The Los Angeles Times, will become publisher and editor in chief of the newspaper, and Bruce Dold, who was named editor of The Chicago Tribune two weeks ago, will also take on dual responsibilities. Similar changes will occur at the company's other daily newspapers, including The San Diego Union Tribune and The Hartford Courant. The management changes are the latest under the Tribune Publishing's new chairman, Michael Ferro, one week after the company abruptly replaced its chief executive, Jack Griffin. "By giving our newsroom leaders dual responsibilities, we are ensuring our local brands remain vital to the communities they serve with our journalists and creators producing premium, compelling content across all mediums," said Justin C. Dearborn, a close associate of Mr. Ferro, who succeeded Mr. Griffin as chief executive. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Celebrities, such as Simon Cowell and Adam Carolla, gathered with a horde of largely unknown journalists Tuesday night to greet the new Jaguar F Type Coupe, which the automaker unveiled at an event near the Los Angeles Auto Show. There was no shortage of union jacks, Pimm's cups and even paper cones full of fish and chips at the event to remind guests of the car's British pedigree. But the real excitement came when Ian Callum, Jaguar's design director, finished his remarks and stepped away from the stage. A curtain swept to the side, revealing the cavernous interior of a former aircraft hangar, and lights and sounds simulating a helicopter assault of sorts rocked the building as a series of red lasers shone from the far end of the tunnel. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
As a result, we aren't seen as part of the national fabric. President Trump made this clear when he asked one of his supporters at a campaign rally in New Mexico, "Who do you like more the country or the Hispanics?" as though these were incompatible. Of course, campaigns have limited resources, so they spend strategically. What I have in mind, though, wouldn't cost a penny. Instead of talking to American voters as representatives of distinct groups of dairy farmers, autoworkers or suburban housewives who, by the way, are also Latinas and Latinos candidates should work to stitch our communities together, making all Americans feel invested in the lives of others. The idea goes contrary to Latino political strategists, who say that candidates should segment and micro target Latino voters Cubans, Venezuelans and Puerto Ricans in Florida, or Mexicans in Arizona, for example with advertisements that feature familiar accents, cultural icons and issues specific to individual national groups. This approach demonstrates a campaign's implicit understanding of Latino diversity, but it's overly simplistic. Even as we articulate our respective national identities, we increasingly see ourselves as members of a pan ethnic Latino community, who are also representatives of our particular national groups. These two identities are not mutually exclusive. Vicki Ruiz, as president of the Organization of American Historians, called for a rethinking of how we talk to and about Latinos more than a decade ago, when she argued that Latino history is the history of the United States. It may seem like a pie in the sky idea that candidates would engage and sustain relationships with Latinos everywhere, even in swing states where they don't represent a large slice of the electorate. This moment seems ripe for such a fundamental rethinking. It should be possible for a candidate to acknowledge that a Mexican American garment worker in Los Angeles may have different concerns than a Mexican American business owner in Chicago, while also addressing them as part of the same national community. Politicians reckon with shifting demographic realities by following new voters wherever they may be, but when it comes to Latinos they also need to think beyond elections, and beyond the strategic importance of Hispanic Heritage Month itself. When they see us as more than voters, we may give them our votes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Facial exercises may significantly reduce some of the signs of aging, according to an interesting new study of the effects of repeating specific, expressive movements on people's appearance. The study, published in JAMA Dermatology, found that middle aged women looked about three years younger after a few months of exercising, perhaps providing a reasonable, new rationale for making faces behind our spouses' backs. As all of us regrettably know, the human face changes with age. It begins to accumulate the grooves and wrinkles that connote either lengthening years or deepening character, depending on your viewpoint, and also starts, almost invariably, to sag. This sagging occurs in large part because the fat pads that underlie the skin on our faces thin with age. When we are young, these pads snuggle together like Lego pieces, providing much of the structure of the contours of our faces. But as the pads change with age, their connections loosen and gravity draws them downward, leaving cheeks hollowed and visages generally droopier. In recent years, a number of facial exercise programs have become available that claim to be able to reverse many of these visual effects of aging. The programs, often advertised as "nonsurgical face lifts," generally have been developed by self taught men and women, with only anecdotal evidence showing any beneficial effects. But they have become popular enough that they recently drew the attention of a group of dermatologists at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. "We became aware that there were all of these commercial programs DVDs, instructional videos, even personal trainers that purported to be able to help people exercise their faces in ways that would make them be happier, healthier, and maybe look younger," says Dr. Murad Alam, the vice chairman of dermatology at Northwestern University, who led the new study. "But we were not aware of any scientific proof that these programs could be effective," he adds. So he and his colleagues decided to test the usefulness of facial exercises. They began by getting in touch with Gary Sikorski of Providence, R.I., who had developed Happy Face Yoga, one of the longest established facial exercise programs. Mr. Sikorski suggested using a program of 32 facial exercises that would target most of the muscles in the face and neck. The basic premise of facial exercising, Mr. Sikorski says, is that it provides a kind of resistance training for the facial muscles and, as with any type of strength training, should make those muscles stronger and larger, theoretically filling in spaces hollowed out with age, reducing wrinkling and rounding facial contours. With that lure, the Northwestern scientists had little difficulty in recruiting 27 women between the ages of 40 and 65 who wanted to try facial exercising. They used only women because this was meant to be a small, pilot study, Dr. Alam says, and the fewer additional variables the better. The women all were photographed and then met with Mr. Sikorski for two 90 minute, in person sessions, during which he taught them the 32 exercises. Some are elaborate, involving using fingers to provide light resistance while someone smirks, puckers or otherwise manipulates muscles in the cheeks, forehead or neck. The women were asked to practice the exercises every day at home for eight weeks. Then they were photographed again and told to continue with the full routine every other day for another 12 weeks. Over the course of the 20 weeks, 11 of the participants dropped out, leaving 16 who finished the full program. The researchers showed the photographs of these women to dermatologists who did not know them and asked the doctors to rate the appearance of various facial features on a standard numerical scale and also to estimate the women's ages. They also asked the women how satisfied they felt at the end of the study with the appearance of a number of their facial features. The women were enthusiastic, finding improvements in almost all of their facial features. The dermatologists were more circumspect. They noted significant improvements in the fullness of the women's cheeks after 20 weeks but little noticeable change elsewhere on their faces or necks. But they also estimated the women to be younger after the exercise program. They ranked the women as, on average, about 51 years old in the photographs at the start of the study, but closer to 48 years old after 20 weeks of facial workouts. "The improvement was actually greater than I had expected," Dr. Alam says. But this study was obviously small, he says, as well as short term and without a control group. Perhaps most concerning, more than a third of participants quit, suggesting that the exercise program was onerous. "It would be good to do follow up studies to determine which exercises are the most beneficial," Dr. Alam says, and then suggest that people concentrate only on those facial gymnastics. (He and his colleagues have no financial or other relationship with Happy Face Yoga, which is owned and operated by Mr. Sikorski.) But for now, it is reasonable to consider contorting and pinching up your face if you wish to try to look younger, he says. "It's a nontoxic, inexpensive and self administered" therapy, he says, "and I suspect it would be hard to hurt yourself," he says, unless your ego takes a pounding from any onlookers' snickering. To try some of the exercises from Happy Face Yoga used in the 30 minute program, see "Exercising Your Face." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
A secretive United States Air Force space plane is on a fourth trip into orbit. As with the previous flights, the Air Force revealed few details about what the unmanned X 37B spacecraft, which resembles a smaller version of NASA's retired space shuttles, will be doing. "The test mission furthers the development of the concept of operations for reusable space vehicles, and fine tunes technical parameters for an affordable, reusable space vehicle," said Capt. Christopher M. Hoyler, a spokesman for the Air Force. Boeing has built two X 37B spacecraft for the Air Force. The first launched in April 2010, setting off speculation over the vessel's purposes. Some suggested that the craft had something to do with space weapons, which the Pentagon denied. It landed in December that year. The second orbiter was sent up from March 2011 to June 2012. The first craft made a second flight, launching in December 2012 and returning 674 days later, in October 2014. The Air Force was not saying which of the two was packed inside an Atlas 5 rocket on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral, Fla. "We are excited about our fourth X 37B mission," Randy Walden, the director of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, said in a statement released last month. "With the demonstrated success of the first three missions, we're able to shift our focus from initial checkouts of the vehicle to testing of experimental payloads." One of the experiments the Air Force has talked about is an improved version of an electric thruster. Unlike conventional thrusters employing chemical reactions, electric thrusters are more efficient, accelerating charged ions through electric fields. Electric thrusters are common on commercial satellites, but the Air Force needs more powerful propulsion. Aerojet Rocketdyne has built thrusters for three military satellites that run at 5 kilowatts, or about four times the power of those on commercial satellites. The thruster on the X 37B is a modified version, intended to improve performance, although it still generates less than a tenth of a pound of thrust. "But it does it very, very efficiently from a fuel standpoint," said Fred C. Wilson, director of business development at Aerojet Rocketdyne. "It's a higher power, higher performance device." NASA is also taking advantage of this X 37B flight to test how almost 100 materials react to the harsh conditions of space, like the barrage of radiation and swings of temperature the craft will experience while passing between the day and night sides of the Earth for at least 200 days. "It's just sitting there and letting the environment hit it," said Miria Finckenor, a materials engineer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. She is the principal investigator for the experiment, which is housed in the space plane's cargo bay. The materials to be tested include thermal coatings to keep spacecraft components within a certain range of temperatures, clear materials under consideration for lighter windows on NASA's Orion crew capsule and ink to make sure that markings on parts do not fade away. NASA previously tested more than 4,000 samples outside the International Space Station, but it is difficult to carve out time during spacewalks to set up and retrieve the experiments. "This opportunity presented itself, and we just needed to take advantage of it," Ms. Finckenor said. The information gleaned from such experiments helps engineers choose materials for spacecraft components like antennas. In addition to the space plane, the Atlas 5 rocket gave 10 tiny satellites known as CubeSats a ride to space. The CubeSats will be deployed to test technologies like new propulsion and communication systems. One of the CubeSats is LightSail, developed by the Planetary Society, a nonprofit that promotes space exploration. On launching, it is about the size of a loaf of bread, but after a month of testing, it is to deploy four 13 foot booms and unfurl four triangular pieces of Mylar to act as a sail, propelled by sunlight. For this test flight, the orbit will be too low for the force of photons to overcome atmospheric drag, and the satellite is expected to fall out of the sky within a few days. A second LightSail, scheduled to lift off next year on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, is to be sent high enough to demonstrate controlled solar sailing in orbit. The second LightSail is already built, but the society is raising additional money through a Kickstarter campaign for education and promotion. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
As a veteran television journalist, Sally Ann Roberts knows how to tame an unsteady landscape and will it into submission. She survived 40 years reporting and anchoring the news for WWL TV in New Orleans, covering 10 races for mayor and in 2005, Hurricane Katrina, a storm that submerged four fifths of the city in water and left her rebuilding her home for nearly two unforgiving years. But as far as grandparenting during the coronavirus pandemic, she says she's met her match. "I am not doing the job I should be doing as a grandparent," she said. "Before Covid, we'd have the five grandkids over for 'Sunday Time,' from the afternoon until after dark. I'd usually have time to take each one of them aside. Give them each undivided attention. Now, that's ended. Now, that special time is rare. Now, when we get together, we can't even sit at the same table." Ms. Roberts had a different kind of grandparenting in mind when she retired in 2018. Early on in the pandemic, she decided it would be safer for her and her family if she kept her distance. She reduced their visits from once a week, often more, to about once a month. Yet even when they do see each other, the need to wear masks and maintain physical distance has changed the quality of her interactions, she says, making conversations with her grandchildren more "transactional" and less meaningful. Conversations now with the oldest of her grandchildren, two boys, 5 and 12, center more on schedules and grades rather than deeper talks about faith and what she hopes for their future. Tashel Bordere, assistant professor of human development and family science at the University of Missouri and her wife, Dr. Kate Grossman, a pulmonologist, are raising their daughters, 14 and 3, in Columbia, Mo., hundreds of miles from their nearest set of parents. The last in person visit their children had with any grandparent was in December. "We invested heavily in plane tickets," Dr. Bordere said of their pre Covid 19 routine that included visiting or hosting her parents, who live in Louisiana, and her in laws, who reside in New York. "We'd usually see one set of grandparents every other month." But Christmas 2019 ended up being their last face to face visit. Now it's been 10 months since any part of the extended family has shared a meal, the couple canceling all vacations, including their usual spring and summer plans, because travel of any kind feels too risky. The latest AARP survey of grandparents, in 2019, suggests they're not alone in making these kinds of decisions. More than "half of grandparents have at least one grandchild who lives more than 200 miles away," the report found. While some grandparents have been spending lots of time in the pandemic with their grandchildren, many of those who live at a distance are making do with video calls. Dr. Bordere and Dr. Grossman say their daughters have replaced cuddles with their grandparents with far less satisfying virtual waves and kisses. "We're a diverse family. We're a same sex couple with children of color," Dr. Bordere said. "Grandparents are essential for us because they give our children another set of people who reinforce their beauty and value. That's harder to do on Zoom or FaceTime. The quality of our conversations has shifted," she said, and although all of them have been trying, "the girls are missing out." Although many families are finding video calls dispiriting, child development experts urge parents and grandparents not to give up on them. Instead of stilted, office style Zoom sessions, families can use digital connections in creative ways to foster more meaningful relationships, they say. Routine tasks, such as helping grandchildren with homework or listening to them sing or practice a musical instrument, have the capacity to build the most rewarding and enduring relationships. "The way you get to a meaningful, deep relationship is by having a set of transactional relationships," said Chuck Kalish, a cognitive and developmental psychologist and senior adviser for science at the Society for Research in Child Development. "The way a child will have a rich relationship with a grandparent is if that grandparent really is a resource in the child's life." The key to heightening relationships right now is increasing the number of shared experiences grandparents and grandchildren have, experts say. There are a few simple ways to do this. Grandparents have an opportunity to become part of their grandchild's daily routine, even remotely. For older children, grandparents can be homework helpers and tutors. Dr. Arthur Lavin, a Cleveland pediatrician and chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on psychosocial aspects of child and family health, has two granddaughters, one school age, who live in Hong Kong. "We see her lessons and we can comment on them. It's actually strengthened our connection," he said. For younger children, AARP's family and caregiving expert, Amy Goyer, suggests grandparents buy two copies of the same book, keeping one and mailing the other to their grandchild to read together over a video or phone call. "That could be Grandma's job every night before the child goes to bed," she suggested. "That establishes a routine. It's their special thing. And it gives the parents a break." Grandparents can also strengthen their connections by bending to their grandchildren's interests and allowing them to be their teachers. Remote online gaming is a perfect activity for this, Dr. Kalish said. "One of the things kids really like to do is feel super confident," he said. "The fact they might be better at it than their grandparents, that can be super rewarding." And the child who gets to play a game on a call with a grandparent rather than being pulled away from a game when a grandparent calls will probably see the call as a treat rather than a chore. "Grandparents have to be the grown ups in this relationship," Dr. Kalish said. "Kids are not going to come most of the way to meet the grandparents. The grandparents have to come most of the way to meet the kid." Grandparents may also pass along family history, culture and traditions via real time cooking lessons, offering recipes and step by step instructions in their native language. "You could share your great grandmother's chocolate chip cookie recipe and agree to both make them and then eat them together on the phone," offered Dr. Ken Ginsburg, director of programs at the Center for Parent and Teen Communication at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Dr. Ginsburg also suggests families ditch technology at times and fortify their bonds by sending letters. "It's really important for children to know that adults think about them even when we're not talking to them or present with them," he said. Another upside of writing letters is that they can be saved, leaving open the possibility that grandchildren will reread them with new understanding and appreciation as they grow. Surprise packages also do the trick. "Everybody likes receiving packages," Dr. Ginsburg said. "When you open it up, you're literally reminded, someone was thinking about me." Parents may also encourage children to send art projects and drawings to grandparents. These strategies may be worth keeping up even after the pandemic, because grandchildren and grandparents benefit from spending time together. In a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Science in 2018, focusing on grandparents, researchers noted that "There is now a growing body of research that illustrates grandparent involvement is associated with improved mental health, improved resilience and pro social behaviour in grandchildren." Other research found that's particularly important if their parents are divorced, separated or remarried. Likewise, the 2019 AARP survey found that grandparents who feel invested in the lives of their grandchildren enjoy better emotional and physical health. To Ms. Roberts in New Orleans, this kind of purposeful relationship building feels urgent. "I'm losing time. I have fewer days ahead of me than I have behind me," she said. "I need to make an impact." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
WASHINGTON For 50 years now, all tobacco products sold in the United States have had to display warnings about the health risks they carry. But that could change if the maker of a popular Swedish tobacco product called snus convinces a panel of experts convened by the Food and Drug Administration this week that it is less harmful than cigarettes. Snus (pronounced "snoose") is moist, loose tobacco packaged in a pouch like a tea bag and tucked between the lip and the gums. Starting on Thursday, the company that makes it, Swedish Match, will have two days to try to persuade the F.D.A. and its experts that the traditional smoking warnings are too harsh to describe its product. Swedish Match is asking the agency for permission to remove the language on snus packages that warns consumers that it could cause mouth cancer, gum disease and tooth loss; the science, Swedish Match contends, shows otherwise. It wants the new warning to say that its products carry "substantially lower risks to health than cigarettes," and argues that snus has been a major reason that tobacco related cancer rates in Swedish men are the lowest in Europe. If the F.D.A. panel agrees, it will be the first time since Congress passed the law requiring warning labels in 1965 that any product has gotten a gentler warning. Such a decision could blaze a trail for a far more popular smokeless product, the e cigarette, which has divided public health experts since appearing on the market. It could also reshape American tobacco regulation, tilting it away from requiring the maximum warnings for every product and toward a principle of reducing harm. In other words, proponents of this strategy say, smokeless tobacco like snus may not be good for you, but it is not as bad as cigarettes and should be treated accordingly when it is regulated. The approach is often compared to other harm reduction strategies, such as giving intravenous drug users clean needles or handing out condoms in high schools. "Society should have something to offer the 45 million people in the United States who still smoke and are just not able to quit," said Dr. Lars Erik Rutqvist, senior vice president of scientific affairs for Swedish Match. Under policies that treat all tobacco products as equally dangerous, "these people are being told they should just quit," Dr. Rutqvist said. "But they aren't. They can't. So they end up being left out there in the cold. I think that's ethically problematic." But it is not clear the F.D.A. will buy the argument. In briefing materials released on Tuesday, the agency expressed reservations about the company's proposal, "particularly with respect to whether it adequately reflects the health risks of using snus," and cited studies that found an increased risk of pancreatic cancer, heart attack, stroke, diabetes and bad pregnancy outcomes among snus users. The two day meeting will culminate in a vote on Friday. The agency does not have to take the advice from such panels, but it often does. In 2009, Congress gave the agency the authority to regulate the tobacco industry, including deciding whether to let companies make so called modified risk claims that their products are less harmful than cigarettes. The Swedish Match proposal is the first such application that the agency has seriously considered. Dr. Rutqvist, a former oncologist, argues that if Swedish Match cannot persuade the F.D.A., then no one can. The company makes its case in over 135,000 pages, using 50 years of data from Sweden's public health authorities and citing dozens of health studies. He says the product is different from other smokeless tobacco on the American market because it is cured and pasteurized in a way that he says produces fewer toxins. He checked off the numbers: Just 11 percent of Swedish men smoke, far fewer than in 1989, when 27 percent smoked. Snus use among men jumped to 21 percent from 17 percent over the same period. Meanwhile, tobacco related cancer rates among men there have fallen, including for mouth cancer, and are now the lowest in Europe. (The F.D.A., in its preliminary analysis, said the company cited six studies on snus and oral cancer, with five of them finding no link.) But that is exactly what opponents of smoking fear. Tobacco companies have a long history of concealing or lying to the public about the health risks of their products, and mistrust among opponents of smoking runs deep. Swedish Match is requesting that all warnings about specific diseases be removed from its labels, a move that many smoking opponents say is a step too far. "All of the data from Sweden indicates that products that meet the Swedish standards still increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and pose a risk of pancreatic and esophageal cancer and are harmful if used by pregnant women," said Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, an antismoking group. "There is no mention in the Swedish Match proposal of any of these specific risks." One big worry is whether labels that indicate lower risk may tempt people, particularly young people, to use tobacco products that they might not have tried otherwise. But company officials say that concern proved to be unfounded in Sweden, and that there is strong evidence that the product helped to bring down smoking rates. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
That Virus Alert on Your Computer? Scammers in India May Be Behind It MUMBAI, India You know the messages. They pop up on your computer screen with ominous warnings like, "Your computer has been infected with a virus. Call our toll free number immediately for help." Often they look like alerts from Microsoft, Apple or Symantec. Sometimes the warning comes in a phone call. Most people ignore these entreaties, which are invariably scams. But one in five recipients actually talks to the fake tech support centers, and 6 percent ultimately pay the operators to "fix" the nonexistent problem, according to recent consumer surveys by Microsoft. Law enforcement authorities, working with Microsoft, have now traced many of these boiler rooms to New Delhi, India's capital and a hub of the global call center industry. On Tuesday and Wednesday, police from two Delhi suburbs raided 16 fake tech support centers and arrested about three dozen people. Last month, the Delhi authorities arrested 24 people in similar raids on 10 call centers. In Gautam Budh Nagar, one of the suburbs, 50 police officers swept into eight centers on Tuesday night. Ajay Pal Sharma, the senior superintendent of police there, said the scammers had extracted money from thousands of victims, most of whom were American or Canadian. "The modus operandi was to send a pop up on people's systems using a fake Microsoft logo," Mr. Sharma said. After the victims contacted the call center, the operator, pretending to be a Microsoft employee, would tell them that their system had been hacked or attacked by a virus. The victims would then be offered a package of services ranging from 99 to 1,000 to fix the problem, he said. Such scams are widespread, said Courtney Gregoire, an assistant general counsel in Microsoft's digital crimes unit. Microsoft, whose Windows software runs most personal computers, gets 11,000 or so complaints about the scams every month, she said, and its internet monitors spot about 150,000 pop up ads for the services every day. The company's own tech support forums, where people can publicly post items, also see a steady stream of posts offering fake tech support services. "The success of the legitimate industry has made it easier for the illegitimate industry there," Ms. Gregoire said. As in any con, experience helps. "You have to convince them they have a problem," she said. "You have to have the touch." Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. For tech companies, combating the impersonators is complicated by the fact that many legitimate tech support operations, including some of Microsoft's, operate from India. The scam is quite lucrative. Researchers at Stony Brook University, who published a detailed study of fake tech support services last year, estimated that a single pop up campaign spread over 142 web domains brought in nearly 10 million in just two months. Najmeh Miramirkhani, lead author of the research paper, said the network of entities involved in the scams was complex, with some making their own calls and others running the sites but outsourcing the calls to India. Many of the scammers also share data with one another. "This is an organized crime," she said. Microsoft said it was working with other tech industry leaders such as Apple and Google, as well as law enforcement, to fight the scourge, which is migrating beyond the English speaking world to target other users in their local languages. In the 16 countries surveyed by Microsoft, people in India and China were the most likely to pay the con artists. The problem extends beyond fake tech support, too. In July, the Justice Department said 24 people in eight states had been convicted for their roles in a scheme to use Indian call center agents to impersonate tax collectors at the Internal Revenue Service. The thieves duped more than 15,000 people out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Thirty two contractors in India were also indicted. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Twyla Tharp is a brand name twice over. She's the maker of both a large, epoch making body of choreography and a legendarily sensuous dance style. And Tharpian style, though it has evolved over the years, is omnipresent throughout her current season, which began on Tuesday night at the Joyce Theater and includes the world premiere of "Dylan Love Songs," featuring the music of another brand name. The bill of fare, which runs until Oct. 8, also included a surprise a new piece, "Entr'acte," in which Ms. Tharp, 76, dances with her troupe, while talking as if in rehearsal. It was especially good to see '70s classics. "The Raggedy Dances," though beloved, became a rarity; most audience members will be seeing it for the first time. It abounds in Tharpish ingenuity. To ragtime piano music by Scott Joplin, Charles Luckeyth Roberts and William Bolcom, admirably played by Joseph Mohan, dancers cross and recross the stage in cartoonlike horizontal paths, mainly in duos, all so lively and individual that they're like classic vaudeville acts. Their punctuation alone sudden stops between long, action packed phrases becomes the essence of wit; and their body language, with energy often rippling right up from the instep, is entirely engaging. I'm especially entranced by Kaitlyn Gilliland: tall, elegant, alternately deadpan and twinkling. (We get to see her in all four pieces.) But every performer in Twyla Tharp Dance, as the company is called, is a singular sensation. The difference between Ms. Gilliland and the smaller, equally riveting Kara Chan tells us how happily catholic Ms. Tharp's taste in dancers is. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
From left, James Lim, Martin Richard Borromeo, Resa Mishina and Paulina Meneses perform a scene from "The Crossing," a work about Asian American fraternities by Kenneth Tam screened by The Kitchen. The movement is by a contributing choreographer, Alyssa Forte. As drums and cymbals of Taoist funeral music filled Queenslab, an 8,000 square foot art space in Ridgewood, Queens, four performers chanted, marched, and body slammed one another. They were dressed in identical, modified hooded tracksuits and tennis shoes, their faces hidden behind white masks. Height became their only distinguishing feature. Tragedy haunts Kenneth Tam's live performance art piece, "The Crossing," inspired by his research into the hazing rituals of Asian American fraternities and fraternities of color more broadly. Lumi Tan, a curator at the Kitchen, invited Mr. Tam, 38, to develop and perform the piece in partnership with Queenslab, a former carpet warehouse just a block from the sprawling belt of cemeteries that separates Brooklyn and Queens. I witnessed its final rehearsal before the work is livestreamed by the Kitchen on Dec. 5 and 6. (Tickets are free but viewers must register here.) The rituals in "The Crossing" are inspired by a group of online videos that Mr. Tam first encountered last November. Deep into a YouTube "rabbit hole," in his words, the artist came across a video posted by the Asian American fraternity Pi Delta Psi's New York University chapter. Footage shows a row of young men standing in Washington Square Park, in black masks, red ties, and dress clothes. Like recruits in boot camp, they bark out scripted lines while following highly coordinated movements. They step together, kneel, or bash their closed fists against their chests. Spectators cheer them on. As Mr. Tam learned, the video captures what's known as a probate: a public presentation of a Greek organization's newest additions as they "cross" over to their new lives as fully fledged members, and are unmasked to an audience with great fanfare. Pioneered by African American fraternities, probates were eventually adopted by other Greek organizations of color across the United States. As ritualized performances, probates were of natural interest to Mr. Tam, whose work has long explored "moments of intimacy and vulnerability within groups of men," as he put it in an interview by Zoom in November. One of the artist's recent videos looks at Asian American men in the context of American cowboy culture. Titled "Silent Spikes," it will be screened in public for the first time this week, followed by a conversation with both Kyung An, an assistant curator at the Guggenheim, and Sophia Marisa Lucas, a Queens Museum assistant curator who is organizing a solo show of Mr. Tam's two channel video installation with sculptures set to open next year. "At its core, Kenneth Tam's work expresses the necessity of care and intimacy," Ms. Lucas said in an email, noting that his upcoming exhibition "departs from an underrecognized history to explore how movement and connection can help us to honor selfhood and transcend centuries old social narratives that exploit difference." Though Mr. Tam also uses other media, ranging from photography to sculpture, his recent video work features unscripted interactions between male "participants," as he calls them. With open ended prompts, he persuades them to talk about awkward subjects and act out awkward scenarios. In Artforum magazine, the critic Bruce Hainley has praised the artist's "engrossing" videos, describing Mr. Tam's projects as "heir to the rowdy incorrigibility of Jackass and its blunt knockoffs, like Impractical Jokers." I like to think of Mr. Tam more as a freewheeling and slightly sadistic improv teacher bent on pushing everyone out of their comfort zone. In one video, he prompted participants to wear tuxedos and re enact striking prom photo poses. For the "Made in L.A." art show at the Hammer Museum, Mr. Tam solicited men from social networking online forums to bring them together for a series of playful activities. At one moment, attendees each describe another man's physical attributes to his face. Their squirming responses to essentially harmless activities are caught in close up shots. According to Mr. Tam, these are moments when participants' "internal social scripting fails them, and they have to do something for the very first time." In "The Crossing," however, Mr. Tam forgoes improvisational humor for choreographed gravitas. In examining Asian American fraternities, he pays particular attention to the story of Chun Hsien Deng, who went by Michael, a Pi Delta Psi pledge at Baruch College. In 2013, during a hazing ritual known as the "glass ceiling," Deng was shoved to the ground while blindfolded and carrying a backpack filled with sand. He died the next morning of traumatic injuries to his head. Pi Delta Psi was found guilty of a felony count of involuntary manslaughter and four of his fraternity brothers were sentenced after pleading guilty. Mr. Tam remembers feeling a sense of recognition as he learned about Michael Deng's life. They'd both gone to specialized math and science schools in the city: Mr. Deng to Bronx Science, Mr. Tam to Stuyvesant. "He played handball, I played handball," Mr. Tam said. "Long commutes, hanging out in Flushing, or those kinds of Asian spaces that all felt very, very familiar." Mr. Tam was also struck by a New York Times Magazine piece about Mr. Deng by the writer Jay Caspian Kang. The essay made waves among many Asian American youth, giving voice to the feeling that the tragedy of Mr. Deng's death was somehow compounded by a melancholy, and futility, that underpins any search for Asian American belonging. As Mr. Kang's essay argued, "'Asian American' is a mostly meaningless term." He added, "nobody sits down to Asian American food with their Asian American parents and nobody goes on pilgrimages back to their motherland of Asian America." Those lines are among the first words uttered in "The Crossing." Later on, one of the performers reads a letter by Mr. Deng's roommate shared in Mr. Kang's article. Much of the action onstage takes place within the Taoist diagram of a bagua the energy map. It's Mr. Tam's way of nodding at the yin yang symbol in Pi Delta Psi's coat of arms a "convenient shorthand for Asian American identity," according to Mr. Tam, "which is itself kind of problematic, as a westernized notion of Asian ness." That coat of arms is just part of a larger issue. As Mr. Tam notes, these fraternities try "to express Asian ness, but they do so in the most conservative, Western way, particularly with the hazing, which has nothing to do with being Asian. You're just taking these oppressive models found in the military or other sorts of places that are about destroying individual identity in order to embolden the group." Which isn't to say that the artist is exempt from the appeal of, say, a Pi Delta Psi probate video, which he likens to a sales video. "Like, if you do this, then you get this hanging out, getting dim sum at a party. Things that young men do." "That's the sad part," Mr. Tam said. "You can't just hang out. You have to create this apparatus in order to get to that." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Facebook has data sharing partnerships with at least four Chinese electronics companies, including a manufacturing giant that has a close relationship with China's government, the social media company said on Tuesday. The agreements, which date to at least 2010, gave private access to some user data to Huawei, a telecommunications equipment company that has been flagged by American intelligence officials as a national security threat, as well as to Lenovo, Oppo and TCL. The four partnerships remain in effect, but Facebook officials said in an interview that the company would wind down the Huawei deal by the end of the week. Facebook gave access to the Chinese device makers along with other manufacturers including Amazon, Apple, BlackBerry and Samsung whose agreements were disclosed by The New York Times on Sunday. The deals were part of an effort to push more mobile users onto the social network starting in 2007, before stand alone Facebook apps worked well on phones. The agreements allowed device makers to offer some Facebook features, such as address books, "like" buttons and status updates. Facebook officials said the agreements with the Chinese companies allowed them access similar to what was offered to BlackBerry, which could retrieve detailed information on both device users and all of their friends including religious and political leanings, work and education history and relationship status. Huawei used its private access to feed a "social phone" app that let users view messages and social media accounts in one place, according to the officials. Facebook representatives said the data shared with Huawei stayed on its phones, not the company's servers. Senator John Thune, the South Dakota Republican who leads the Commerce Committee, has demanded that Facebook provide Congress with details about its data partnerships. "Facebook is learning hard lessons that meaningful transparency is a high standard to meet," Mr. Thune said. His committee also oversees the Federal Trade Commission, which is investigating Facebook to determine whether the company's data policies violate a 2011 consent decree with the commission. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia pointed out that concerns about Huawei were not new, citing a 2012 congressional report on the "close relationships between the Chinese Communist Party and equipment makers like Huawei." "I look forward to learning more about how Facebook ensured that information about their users was not sent to Chinese servers," said Mr. Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee. "All Facebook's integrations with Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo and TCL were controlled from the get go and Facebook approved everything that was built," said Francisco Varela, a Facebook vice president. "Given the interest from Congress, we wanted to make clear that all the information from these integrations with Huawei was stored on the device, not on Huawei's servers." Banned in China since 2009, Facebook in recent years has quietly sought to re establish itself there. The company's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has tried to cultivate a relationship with China's president, Xi Jinping, and put in an appearance at one of the country's top universities. Last year, Facebook released a photo sharing app in China that was a near replica of its Moments app, but did not put its name on it. And the company has worked on a tool that allowed targeted censorship, prompting some employees to quit over the project. Still, Facebook has struggled to gain momentum, and in January an executive in charge of courting China's government left after spending three years on a charm campaign to get the social media service back in the country. None of the Chinese device makers who have partnerships with Facebook responded to requests for comment on Tuesday. Huawei, one of the largest smartphone manufacturers in the world, is a point of national pride for China and is at the vanguard of the country's efforts to expand its influence abroad. The company was the recipient of billions of dollars in lines of credit from China's state owned policy banks, helping to fuel its overseas expansion in Africa, Europe and Latin America. Its founder, Ren Zhengfei, is a former engineer in the People's Liberation Army. The United States government has long regarded the company with suspicion, and lawmakers have recommended that American carriers avoid buying the network gear it makes. In January, AT T walked away from a deal to sell a new Huawei smartphone, the Mate 10. United States officials are investigating whether Huawei broke American trade controls by dealing with Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria. The Trump administration has taken aim at Huawei and its rival ZTE in recent weeks, and in April the Federal Communications Commission advanced a plan to bar federally subsidized telecom companies from using suppliers that are considered national security threats. Facebook has not entered into a data sharing agreement with ZTE, officials at the social network said. TCL, a consumer electronics firm, has accused the Trump administration of bias against Chinese companies and last June dropped a bid to buy a San Diego based company that makes routers and other hardware. Lenovo, a maker of computers and other devices, recently shelved ambitions to acquire BlackBerry after the Canadian government signaled that such a deal could compromise national security. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The mathematics section of the National Academy of Sciences lists 104 members. Just four are women. As recently as June, that number was six. Marina Ratner and Maryam Mirzakhani could not have been more different, in personality and in background. Dr. Ratner was a Soviet Union born Jew who ended up at the University of California, Berkeley, by way of Israel. She had a heart attack at 78 at her home in early July. Success came relatively late in her career, in her 50s, when she produced her most famous results, known as Ratner's Theorems. They turned out to be surprisingly and broadly applicable, with many elegant uses. In the early 1990s, when I was a graduate student at Berkeley, a professor tried to persuade Dr. Ratner to be my thesis adviser. She wouldn't consider it: She believed that, years earlier, she had failed her first and only doctoral student and didn't want another. Dr. Mirzakhani was a young superstar from Iran who worked nearby at Stanford University. Just 40 when she died of cancer in July, she was the first woman to receive the prestigious Fields Medal. I first heard about Dr. Mirzakhani when, as a graduate student, she proved a new formula describing the curves on certain abstract surfaces, an insight that turned out to have profound consequences offering, for example, a new proof of a famous conjecture in physics about quantum gravity. I was inspired by both women and their patient assaults on deeply difficult problems. Their work was closely related and is connected to some of the oldest questions in mathematics. The ancient Greeks were fascinated by the Platonic solid a three dimensional shape that can be constructed by gluing together identical flat pieces in a uniform fashion. The pieces must be regular polygons, with all sides the same length and all angles equal. For example, a cube is a Platonic solid made of six squares. Early philosophers wondered how many Platonic solids there were. The definition appears to allow for infinite possibilities, yet, remarkably, there are only five such solids, a fact whose proof is credited to the early Greek mathematician Theaetetus. The paring of the seemingly limitless to a finite number is a case of what mathematicians call rigidity. In common usage, rigidity connotes inflexibility, usually negatively. Diamonds, however, owe their strength to the rigidity of their molecular structure. Controlled rigidity that is, flexing only along certain directions allows suspension bridges to survive high winds. Dr. Ratner and Dr. Mirzakhani were experts in this more subtle form of rigidity. They worked to characterize shapes preserved by motions of space. One example is a mathematical model called the Koch snowflake, which displays a repeating pattern of triangles along its edges. The edge of this snowflake will look the same at whatever scale it is viewed. The snowflake is fundamentally unchanged by rescaling; other mathematical objects remain the same under different types of motions. The shape of a ball, for example, is not changed when it is spun. In Dr. Ratner's case, that motion was of a shearing type, similar to a strong wind high in the atmosphere. Dr. Mirzakhani, with my colleague Alex Eskin, focused on shearing, stretching and compressing. These mathematicians proved that the only possible preserved shapes in this case are, unlike the snowflake, very regular and smooth, like the surface of a ball. The consequences are far reaching: Dr. Ratner's results yielded a tool that researchers have turned to a wide variety of uses, like illumining properties in sequences of numbers and describing the essential building blocks in algebraic geometry. The work of Dr. Mirzakhani and Dr. Eskin has similarly been called the "magic wand theorem" for its multitude of uses, including an application to something called the wind tree model. More than a century ago, physicists attempting to describe the process of diffusion imagined an infinite forest of regularly spaced identical and rectangular trees. The wind blows through this bizarre forest, bouncing off the trees as light reflects off a mirror. Dr. Mirzakhani and Dr. Eskin did not themselves explore the wind tree model, but other mathematicians used their magic wand theorem to prove that a broad universality exists in these forests: Once the number of sides to each tree is fixed, the wind will explore the forest at the same fundamental rate, regardless of the actual shape of the tree. There are other talented women exploring fundamental questions like these, but why are there not more? In 2015, women accounted for only 14 percent of the tenured positions in Ph.D. granting math departments in the United States. That is up from 9 percent two decades earlier. Dr. Ratner's theorems are some of the most important in the past half century, but she never quite received the recognition she deserved. That is partly because her best work came late in her career, and partly because of how she worked always alone, without collaborators or graduate students to spread her reputation. Berkeley did not even put out a news release when she died. By contrast, Dr. Mirzakhani's work, two decades later, was immediately recognized and acclaimed. Word of her death spread quickly it was front page news in Iran. Perhaps that is a sign of progress. I first met Dr. Mirzakhani in 2004. She was finishing her Ph.D. at Harvard. I was a professor at Northwestern, pregnant with my second child. Given her reputation, I expected to meet a fearless warrior with a single minded focus. I was quite disarmed when the conversation turned to being a mathematician and a mother. "How do you do it?" she asked. That such a mind could be preoccupied with such a question points, I think, to the obstacles women still face in climbing to math's upper echelons. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Welcome to the fun house. Opened last year, the second Grimm's Hotel in the German capital is bigger, bolder and more tranquil than its little brother, thanks to an eye catching wedge shaped building and nearby green spaces. The design is inspired by Grimm's fairy tales, infusing the flamboyant lobby and 110 rooms and suites with bright colors and strange characters. Outfitted with a wall of wooden shingles and a fireplace crackling with digitally generated flames, the faux lodge lobby is a kaleidoscope of hues and textures. Trippy, color soaked forest scenes maidens, wolves, giant mushrooms cover the wall over the reception desk, while the lounge is inhabited by a sculptural wild boar (propping up an end table) and a lamp shaped like a rabbit. Chairs and couches in a mishmash of forms, colors and patterns (calfskin, plaid, orange, turquoise) complete the hallucinogenic atmosphere. No bread crumb trail is necessary to find your way to the hotel, which is tucked in a niche alongside a tranquil park and canal near the bright lights and crowds of Potsdamer Platz, the Times Square of Berlin. A 10 minute walk brings you to its shopping malls, multiplex cinemas, restaurants and casino. The Berlin Philharmonic and Gemaldegalerie museum, known for European art, are also nearby. Angular and white, the uncluttered room was suffused with light from large windows and featured a small balcony. Fabrics and surfaces in autumnal colors brown, beige, gray enhanced the relaxed vibe. Silvery contemporary lamps, a flat screen TV and a sliding wall panel that hid a spacious lighted closet all provided reasonable functionality, though certain standard features of contemporary hotel rooms (docking station, coffee maker, minibar) were conspicuously absent. One wall had a colorful fairy tale mural rendered in pixilated, geometric forms. Its repeating, futuristic images a blond princess beckoning to a frog in a golden crown appeared to allude to the story of the Frog Prince. More than a kiss from a fairy tale princess would be required to transform the rather pedestrian bathroom into something special. Though clean, the narrow, minimalist space had no tub and lacked standard extras: robes and toiletries (there was a wall mounted tube of dual shampoo shower gel). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
"Haiti," she said, rushing in after them. Moments later, the journalist Roger Friedman caught Mr. Penn by the bar and engaged in a couple of moments of pleasantries, which ended the minute Mr. Friedman asked, "How's El Chapo?" Oh, well. You can't blame a guy for trying. From there, the evening took surreal twists and turns. Anderson Cooper emceed the proceedings and talked about how one of the strangest nights of his life was being brought onstage by Madonna at a recent concert, where she spanked him and sent him off with a banana as a prize. Mr. Penn spoke about his work in Haiti, his anger at nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations, and his realization that, ultimately, everyone needs to work harder to make the world a better place. Guests sitting at their tables struggled to read the latest on Mr. Guzman on their cellphones, which barely got a signal. Guests not seated made their ways to the center of the room to check the level of PDA going on between the former spouses. (Little information there, either.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
ROSWELL, Ga. It was 1 in the morning, and the orthopedic surgeon on call was preparing to operate on a woman whose foot had been shattered in a car wreck, after hours of tending to other patients. The woman's husband, Jeff Anderson, asked him, "Are you too tired to do this?" "He looked me straight in the eye very quiet guy and said, 'I was born to do this,'" Mr. Anderson recalled. The surgeon that night more than 20 years ago was Representative Tom Price of Georgia, President elect Donald J. Trump's nominee for secretary of health and human services, the cabinet official who will lead the new administration's efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. Since then, the assuredness that defined Mr. Price as a surgeon has carried into his political career. He has always listened politely to other viewpoints but never swerved from his policy mission to protect his former profession from what he views as heavy handed government intrusion. Many who knew Mr. Price as a doctor here in Atlanta's affluent northern suburbs praise his commitment to his patients. But his legislative record shows that over eight years in the Georgia Senate and 12 years in Congress, he has advocated at least as much for physician groups and health care companies seeking to limit damages in malpractice cases, for instance, and voting against legislation that would have required the government to negotiate lower drug prices for Medicare beneficiaries. Mr. Price has routinely argued that patients are the driving force behind his efforts. Still, his positions have often coincided with the financial interests of groups whose donations have helped advance his political career. Doctors themselves are sharply divided over his nomination, and some are particularly galled by Mr. Price's enmity for the Affordable Care Act and opposition to abortion rights. Some of his positions even clash with those of Mr. Trump, who wants to pressure pharmaceutical companies on drug prices, for example, and has pledged to largely leave Medicare alone. As Mr. Price prepares for two confirmation hearings the first of which is scheduled for Wednesday his past efforts on behalf of health related companies, which have donated generously to his campaigns, are under scrutiny. So, too, is Mr. Price's history of trading in biomedical, pharmaceutical and health insurance stocks while serving on the health subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee. Democrats have called for investigations into whether he traded stock based on information he gleaned as a congressman. Last year, Mr. Price bought stock in a company that makes orthopedic implants shortly before introducing legislation that could have protected the company, Zimmer Biomet, from financial losses due to a new federal regulation. The regulation sought to rein in spending on joint replacements for Medicare patients; Mr. Price's legislation would have delayed its implementation. After he introduced it, Zimmer's political action committee contributed to his re election campaign; the string of events was first reported Monday by CNN. Phillip J. Blando, a spokesman for the Trump transition team, said Mr. Price "had no knowledge or input into the purchase" of the Zimmer stock, which he said was made by a broker. Asked why Mr. Price had not directed his broker to avoid buying health related stocks while he wrote and voted on health legislation, Mr. Blando said, "We know that other members of Congress, including Democrats, have holdings in health care stocks and vote on health related legislation." In a letter to an ethics lawyer at the Department of Health and Human Services last week Mr. Price said he would divest himself of holdings in 43 health related and other stocks to avoid conflicts of interest. Noting that the Office of Government Ethics had completed an "exhaustive review" of Mr. Price's financial holdings, Mr. Blando said last week that Mr. Price "takes his obligation to uphold the public trust very seriously." Although not among the billionaires whom Mr. Trump has tapped for his cabinet, Mr. Price has profited from medicine, both as a doctor and as an active investor in health care related companies including Aetna, Bristol Myers Squibb and Zimmer Biomet, which makes artificial joints and other medical devices. He has an estimated net worth of 13.6 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, with assets that include real estate. He has also been an effective fund raiser: Even in his first run for office in 1996, his war chest of 173,000, much of which came from doctors and medical companies, led his poorly financed Democratic opponent to call him "Dr. Dollar." A brisk, hyper focused workaholic who relishes the granular details of legislative proposals and process, Mr. Price expressed concern last year about Mr. Trump's grasp of the issues. Taking questions from a student group at Emory University, he said he had voted for Marco Rubio in the Republican primary and called Mr. Trump an "empty policy vessel" who was "dangerous for politics and the economy," according to the student newspaper. He has also written a fairly detailed plan for replacing the Affordable Care Act. It would repeal the law's expansion of Medicaid and provide tax credits to help with the cost of coverage based on age instead of income, with older people getting higher credits. Mr. Price grew up in Dearborn, Mich., the son and grandson of doctors who heavily influenced his career choice. He has publicly recalled making house calls with his grandfather, who practiced medicine into his 90s. After medical school at the University of Michigan, he moved to Georgia, completing his residency at Emory and setting up practice in Roswell, a relatively affluent, conservative suburb of Atlanta. In the 1990s, his practice, Compass Orthopedics, was among seven in the Atlanta area that merged into a large group that became known as Resurgens Orthopaedics. It became the largest orthopedic practice in Georgia, and now has 100 doctors and 1,000 employees spread over 21 locations. Dr. Steven B. Wertheim, another founding partner of Resurgens, said one goal of the consolidation was to gain bargaining power with insurance companies and to provide M.R.I.s, physical therapy and even certain outpatient operations in house rather than referring patients to other providers or operating at hospitals. More leverage with insurers often allows doctors to extract higher rates. "His overall gist was, 'Look, if all we did was practice good medicine, we'd be broke by tomorrow,'" Dr. Wertheim said of Mr. Price. "He understood the need to run a business." As a physician, Mr. Price was constantly frustrated by having to seek insurance companies' approval for his patients to get an expensive diagnostic test or physical therapy a common complaint among specialists. Similarly, he resented when federal health regulators intervened in something he and his partners thought they were already doing well, like using electronic medical records. "Those are the things that drove him crazy," Dr. Wertheim said. His resentment of government intervention in medicine drove Mr. Price to become involved in the Medical Association of Georgia early in his career, and his work there led him to run for office in 1995, when the House seat in his district opened up. But by 2002, as his legislative duties increased, he traded his suburban practice for a job at Grady Memorial Hospital, a vast, chaotic, aging complex, just a few blocks from the State Capitol. For the next two years, Mr. Price was the medical director of Grady's orthopedic clinic, seeing a vastly different population than the well off, privately insured patients he was used to. Most of Grady's patients are poor and black, and many lack any form of insurance. Long waits for care are the norm, and trauma, including gunshot wounds, is a big part of the caseload. "He called me and asked if there was a position," said Dr. James R. Roberson, the chairman of the orthopedics department at Emory University School of Medicine, whose residents train at Grady. "He needed some flexibility that was most of his impetus to want to return to Grady, because he was really very interested in pursuing a political career." Dr. Roberson said that Mr. Price played a "unique role" at the clinic, training residents and overseeing patient care but also seeking to address inefficiencies long wait times, for example and representing the clinic at hospital administrative meetings. Although he saw patients, he did not perform surgery or need to be on call at night an unusual arrangement, Dr. Roberson said. In the Legislature, Mr. Price spent his first six years in the powerless minority, although he quickly rose to the position of minority whip. His fortunes changed in 2003, after Sonny Perdue became the first Republican governor since Reconstruction and persuaded enough Democrats to switch parties to put the Senate into Republican hands. "There was not a lot of bipartisan collegiality when it came to trying to control the government in Georgia," Mr. Paul said, "and that environment was the crucible that began to turn Tom into a hardened political warrior." In Congress, Mr. Price has made frequent speeches to health industry and physician groups, and has occasionally introduced legislation on their behalf. Last year, for example, he sponsored a bill fighting new lower Medicare payment rates for "durable medical equipment" like wheelchairs and canes. A few months later, he spoke at a conference for companies that supply such equipment, which held a 100 a head fund raiser on his behalf that same day. Mr. Price has also supported proposals to overhaul Medicare potentially putting him at odds with his new boss, Mr. Trump, who has pledged not to "touch" the program. Speaking to a student group at the University of Michigan in 2015, Mr. Price expressed concern that Mr. Trump would not listen to others, including Congress, if elected. "When I hear Trump saying things like, 'I'll just do XYZ,' without seemingly any regard for the legislative branch," Mr. Price told the group, "it gives me some thought." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
No Chris Paul. No Eric Gordon. No Clint Capela. No problem. The Houston Rockets still have James Harden. In a mind boggling performance, Harden and his supporting cast if you can call it that managed to beat the Memphis Grizzlies by 112 94 at Houston's Toyota Center, with Harden scoring 57 points in 34 minutes. It was the 17th game in a row in which Harden scored at least 30 points a feat previously accomplished in a single season by only Wilt Chamberlain and it was Harden's third game of 50 or more points this season. No other player has more than one. Coach Mike D'Antoni may have recorded the 600th win of his N.B.A. career in the game, but he was more interested in making sure people recognized the greatness of Harden's feat. Harden, however, tried to keep the focus on Houston continuing to climb in the standings, and making up for Sunday's loss to Orlando. "I don't know if it was an emotional lift," Harden told reporters of Monday's win, "but I know it's crunchtime in the sense that we've got three starters out and guys have got to pick up the slack. There's no excuse." While the outburst was hardly unexpected for Harden, who is now averaging an N.B.A. leading 34.8 points a game, the Rockets' personnel situation made it stand out. Paul has been out with an injured hamstring since Dec. 20 and Gordon has been out with an injured knee since Dec. 29. Houston's injury report then took on what seemed like a crippling blow earlier on Monday when it was revealed that Capela, the team's center and the most frequent recipient of Harden's assists would be out for four to six weeks as a result of ligament damage in his right thumb. That list of injuries left Harden starting alongside the forgettable quartet of P.J. Tucker, Nene, Austin Rivers and Danuel House Jr. No matter, as Harden joined Kemba Walker as the only players to score more than half of their team's points in a game this season. Harden was hot from the start, setting a Rockets record with 36 points in the first half, and he succeeded all game with his typical combination of 3 pointers (6 for 15) and free throws (17 for 18). He also led all players in the game with nine rebounds and committed just five turnovers despite his outrageous level of usage. The last time Harden scored fewer than 30 points was Dec. 11 in Houston's win over the Portland Trail Blazers, and he just barely missed the feat that night, with 29 points on 10 of 21 shooting. Since then he has averaged 41.3 points a game over the 17 games in which the Rockets, who got off to a poor start this season, have gone 13 4. In the 17 games, Harden has topped 50 points twice and 40 points 10 times. He has also recorded five triple doubles. While Harden's performance on Monday broke his tie with Kobe Bryant and Kareem Abdul Jabbar for the N.B.A.'s longest single season streak of 30 plus points by a player not named Chamberlain, Harden has a long way to go before catching Wilt. Chamberlain had 30 point streaks, of 20, 25, 31 and 65 games in his career, according to Basketball Reference.com. The longest one, which came during the 1961 62 season, is likely an unbreakable record, but it comes with an amusing footnote: In Chamberlain's last game before the streak started, he was held to 28 points in a loss to Bill Russell's Boston Celtics. When the streak finally ended more than three months later, Chamberlain was held to 26 points in a loss to Russell's Celtics. As it currently stands, though, Harden does not appear to have a foil that can be his version of Russell, so there is no telling when this streak will end. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
PARIS Carlos Ghosn, the chief executive of Renault, sought to defuse an employment conflict with the French government, telling President Nicolas Sarkozy over the weekend that the automaker would split production of its new Clio model between France and Turkey, and would produce its new electric vehicle entirely in a plant near Paris. The French state is Renault's largest shareholder, with a stake of a little more than 15 percent. Mr. Sarkozy and the industry minister, Christian Estrosi, have been pressing the company to maintain employment at its French factories. Mr. Sarkozy summoned Mr. Ghosn to the meeting on Saturday, according to a statement from the Elysee Palace, "to discuss Renault's industrial strategy." "I confirmed to the French president that we will produce the Clio 4 in Flins," near Paris, Mr. Ghosn said in a statement after the meeting. There will be "double sourcing" with the company's plant in Bursa, Turkey, he said. The future of the French plant "is guaranteed," he added, and Renault will produce its "core" electric model, the Zoe, at the Flins plant beginning in 2012. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
For some New Yorkers who have been priced out of New York City's real estate game, pooling resources with friends and siblings has become the quickest path to homeownership. And while sharing a front door can put even the best relationships to the test, some are finding it's worth the risk. For Laurie Savage, a writer and restaurant server, and her husband, Garette Henson, a filmmaker, both 36, the arrival of their son, Fox Henson, almost 2, sparked the idea of buying real estate with a friend. That friend was Alix Frey, 37, whom they had met when they were all students at Sarah Lawrence College. The group recently moved into a three story two family townhouse in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Ms. Frey, the director of the Blum Poe gallery in Manhattan, occupies the top level while the couple have the lower level, including the basement and the backyard. The parlor level is divided between the Savage/Hensons and Ms. Frey. For assistance in their search for a place to buy, the three, who had rented apartments in the same brownstone in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, for eight years, turned to Marina T. Schindler, a saleswoman at Compass real estate and one of Ms. Frey's close friends. "It's a really good way for people to work the system," Ms. Schindler said. "Not everybody has that money for a down payment. They realize if they team up, they get more bang for the buck." It's a complicated process, she added, "because they've got to have an agreement between each other, they have to trust each other, but it's a great way for young families to make a bigger, better investment." The friends had originally looked at properties separately, almost immediately concluding that they were priced out of Fort Greene. As they expanded their searches to Crown Heights and Bedford Stuyvesant, the numbers still seemed shocking. "Alix was looking at a one bedroom for 750,000. She wanted a two bedroom for less than that," Ms. Savage said. "We realized we can get a better space if we buy together," she said. "The apartments priced at what we're each getting our units for were like tiny boxes. It was startling, the difference in the quality of what we could get. So very quickly we said we're open to it." The most difficult part was getting a mortgage together, which required the friends to be totally open about their finances. They have a single mortgage, with the payments based on the percentage of property owned. The Savage/Henson living space is bigger than Ms. Frey's, so the couple pay a bigger share. "For us, it was about getting comfortable with that transparency," Ms. Savage said. Having already lived in the same building made the prospect of buying together almost a matter of course. Ms. Savage said she feels a sense of pride that they were able to pull off homeownership. "People have asked me if it's less exciting because you're sharing with someone," Ms. Savage said. "It's actually quite the opposite. No one expects anyone to want to share; that's not the way our society is built. We feel really proud of what we did in finding a way to make it happen." Over in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn, a pair of enterprising siblings and their families had the same idea when it came to finding new digs. Jonathan Blyer, 34, a custom bicycle fitting specialist and the owner of the Acme Bicycle Co., is excited that renovations have finally begun on the four story limestone that he and his wife, Adriana Pezzulli, 39, bought with his older sister, Raina Blyer, 39, a freelance tailor, and Luis Cornier, 45, a master coach for Precor, a fitness equipment manufacturer. The target move in date is early 2017. Mr. Blyer and Ms. Pezzulli, the director of development at the Lower Eastside Girls Club, have a daughter, Eva Newman, 9, from Ms. Pezzulli's previous relationship, and a son, Noah Blyer, 9 months. Ms. Blyer and Mr. Cornier have three children Chloe Cornier, 8, from Mr. Cornier's previous relationship, Rumi Cornier, almost 3, and Shai Cornier, 8 months. "We've been very open and communicative about things," Mr. Blyer said. "At the end of the day we don't want to ruin our relationship with each other." The two families looked for property independently but quickly realized that if they could agree on a neighborhood, they'd get more for their money by going in together. In their chosen Flatbush, Mr. Miller said, the median price for a two family house is 562,000. "It made sense to do it together to have one contractor, one set of plans," Mr. Blyer said. "It seemed a lot simpler than dividing our family resources to do it." Misha Chiporukha, a salesman with Douglas Elliman Real Estate, helped the Blyer siblings and their partners find their home. "Buying together was the best option that they had," he said. "In the past year, I've met several buyers who were not able to afford a townhouse on their own, but with friends and family, it becomes possible. Plus, you get more square footage, family gatherings are easier, and with sharing child care expenses, it's a no brainer." The couples plan to convert the property into two condos. Mr. Blyer and his family will have the top two floors, while his sister and her family take the bottom two, including the backyard. They will live by certain boundaries. As Mr. Blyer pointed out: "Of course, she says, 'You can use it anytime you want,' but I'm not just going to walk through her house at any given moment that I want to get a suntan." Finances will also be handled formally a joint bank account has already been set up to handle the upkeep of the house. But more than just a sound financial decision, living in the same home will provide a sense of community for the two families. "Our son is going to have these cousins that are going to grow up kind of like brothers that's really special to me," Mr. Blyer said. New York City isn't the only place where friends and relatives have realized the advantages of banding together. In January, Marc Aschoff, 25, a financial adviser in New York who lives in Hoboken, N.J., and three childhood friends from the Jersey Shore threw their money in a pot and paid 240,000 for a single family fixer upper in Springfield, N.J. "We were looking for a place to purchase to live together," Mr. Aschoff said. "Our thinking was, find a place, live there for a year or two, fix it up and resell it for a profit." Mr. Aschoff's partners in homeownership are Michael Carbonara, 26, an electrical engineer who lives outside Philadelphia; Michael Zonin, 25, a staff engineer at Langan Engineering in New York; and Chris Sorrentino, 25, a Realtor at Keller Williams City Life in Hoboken. The men had some previous experience as property owners, having purchased three houses over two years near Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and rented them out to students. When they embarked upon that venture, it seemed that everyone was skeptical of the idea. "At that point, most of us were living with our parents," Mr. Aschoff said. Mr. Carbonara said: "We bought the first one and everyone was on edge. Then we bought the second one and we were addicted. My mom was like, 'This kid's for real.' " "We started ripping down all the plaster, and we could see there were things wrong internally," Mr. Aschoff said. "Now we're down to the frame of the house. We didn't want to get this deep." They've put their blood, sweat and tears into the place Mr. Sorrentino received a dozen stitches between his eyes after he was struck by a wayward wheelbarrow careening off the side of a dump truck. The house is still uninhabitable, although the men have undeniably added value to the neighborhood. "Before we were here, the whole yard was overgrown," said Mr. Carbonara, the de facto project leader. And ever since Mr. Sorrentino power washed a neighbor's deck, she has regularly treated the men to homemade lunches of chicken parmigiana and meatball sandwiches. And as the house has tested their tempers, it has also tested their initial resolve: Whether the buddies will move in together, or resell the house when it's finally done, is up in the air. Buying a place with other people has predictable pitfalls. "When people purchase property together, they become jointly liable for all the expenses," said Jaime Lathrop, a lawyer in Park Slope, Brooklyn, who handles real estate litigation and transactions. "If one person wants to sell, then they can force a sale, with very limited exceptions. If people go in on loans, it's a great way to wreck your credit. Each person should retain their own attorney to advise them on their rights and responsibilities." Stuart Berg, a partner in the real estate department of the New York firm Kurzman Eisenberg Corbin Lever, said it's essential to map certain things out in advance of a group purchase. "Decide how the property will be owned. Will it be owned by an entity such as a limited liability company or individually?" he said. Owning under an L.L.C. can protect buyers from personal risk and may offer certain tax benefits. "It's essential to determine up front the financial arrangements of each party and whether each party will be entitled to the full use and enjoyment of the property," Mr. Berg added. It's also important to put in writing what would happen "if one party cannot meet his or her agreed upon financial obligations." Lindsay Liu, 28, the group director of marketing at Work Co, a digital product design and technology company, owns a vacation house with three others in the Catskills. Ms. Liu and her sister, Christy Liu, 34, a creative strategist at Facebook; Evan Schneyer, 33, the founder of Living Breathing, a digital product, marketing and strategy collective and Christy's partner since their freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania; and David Kenji Chang, 34, a friend who works in asset management, purchased land in Narrowsburg, N.Y., in November 2014 and built a house from the ground up, for a total of 374,000. Lindsay Liu didn't think twice about turning to her sister and Mr. Schneyer when she and her boyfriend, who does not wish to be named, started looking for a new place to live in Brooklyn. "I started talking to these guys about it and said: 'Why don't we do it? It's going to give us the ability to look in a higher price range,' " she recalled. In August 2015, Christy Liu, Mr. Schneyer and Lindsay Liu and her boyfriend purchased a one bedroom duplex in Williamsburg for 839,000. The apartment is occupied by Lindsay Liu and her boyfriend, who pay rent. "If we were to sell today we'd make a profit," she said. To avoid problems, the team has created an agreement for housing that's very much like a prenup. "The key factor is having these discussions upfront," Mr. Schneyer said. "It's not that you have to figure every possible scenario, but it's about talking through them and building the possibilities into the operating agreement." Potential scenarios: What if one of the couples breaks up? What if someone runs into financial difficulty and wants to withdraw? "Even if it's your spouse, there are the same risks," Mr. Schneyer said. "It happens all the time, people split up and you have to figure things out." As for home design by committee, they figured that out, too. For the Catskill house they use a shared Pinterest account to "upvote" and "downvote" furnishings, including everything from sofas to doorknobs. "Most people use Pinterest to fantasize about their dream house. We're actually using it to create the real thing," Lindsay Liu said. While group home buying ventures may seem novel to these forward thinking friends, the blueprint is tried and true. For the Blyer brother and sister team, friends and family going in together on property is nothing new their parents paved the way. Linda and Al Blyer purchased their home in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn in 1981 by pooling funds with one of Mr. Blyer's fellow workers. The two families still share the two family house, these days with visiting grandchildren often filling the backyard with activity and laughter. "It was the same thing back then, they were young professionals with families and they couldn't afford to get something on their own, so they went in together," Jonathan Blyer said. "And here we are, 35 years later, doing the same thing." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Aldo Leopold's "A Sand County Almanac" is an environmental classic. First published in 1949, a year after Leopold's death, it chronicled and celebrated the natural life amid the changing seasons around his scruffy weekend retreat and family farm, in a dirt poor region of Wisconsin that starts an hour's drive north of Madison, the state capital. The area is still dirt poor, particularly once you get away from the honky tonk tourist attractions and water parks surrounding the Wisconsin Dells. The nearest big city is Milwaukee, more than 150 miles away. O'Hare airport, in Chicago, is four hours by car; so are the Twin Cities. It's not exactly the first place that comes to mind when one thinks of building a world class golf resort. But nestled near the tiny towns of Rome and Nekoosa, about 100 miles from Madison, hidden away for decades under vast rows of red pine trees planted to produce pulp, was something extraordinary: a stunning section of the exposed sandy bottom of a prehistoric glacial lake that, geologists say, flooded a large area of central Wisconsin about 18,000 years ago, when an ancient ice dam collapsed. Mike Keiser, who made a fortune in the greeting card business, is known to avid players for creating the golf mecca Bandon Dunes on the Oregon coast, a long 250 mile drive from Portland. He found his way to this equally far off the beaten path spot in Wisconsin in 2013. It lacked the year round playing possibilities of places like Myrtle Beach, S.C., and Scottsdale, Ariz., and the picturesque seaside locale that Mr. Keiser had considered essential to luring golfers away from home, but he fell in love with the place anyway. What the land had, in spades, was immense tumbling dunes, some 50 feet high or more. And the potential, once the nonnative trees were cleared, of becoming home to not just one but four or five spectacular courses. The firm, sandy fairways, long open views, and exposure to strong winds would evoke the famous links of Scotland and Ireland and pay direct homage to the less well known but well loved "heathland" courses outside London. Mr. Keiser bought 1,700 acres from a tree plantation owner. He commissioned the golf design team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, a former touring pro, to create a new course, to be known as Sand Valley. It opened last week. I've managed to play at some of Wisconsin's better known public access golf courses, including Erin Hills outside Milwaukee, where the United States Open will be held in June, and Whistling Straits, along Lake Michigan, which anchors the Kohler luxury resort complex. It is one of four courses, all designed by Pete Dye, that offer a rare combination of links style and parkland golf within proximity of one another. Last year I learned about the ambitions of Sand Valley, and that it would be open for limited preview play that summer. As it turned out, my wife, Lisa, and I were planning to drive to Minneapolis from our home outside New York last fall so that I could attend the Ryder Cup golf tournament and we could visit Lisa's sister and her partner. Sand Valley was not far off our route. When we drove toward the course, on the last Monday morning of September, I didn't know what to expect. A couple months earlier, I had made a reservation by email to play that afternoon, spend the night at one of the new rooms that were supposed to have opened, and then play again the next morning before moving on to Minneapolis. Where we would go for dinner was an open question. Our GPS device led us astray, and as we wandered around the countryside of farms, cottages, cranberry bogs and lakes, we came upon a roadside bar with an original Pabst Blue Ribbon logo, passing numerous lawn signs for the Trump campaign. Eventually, having stopped to call for directions, we found a small sign directing us onto a gravel road, and entered what looked a lot more like a sprawling construction site than a golf resort. In the strong wind, sand was blowing everywhere across an unpaved parking area. The future clubhouse was a hole in the ground, with a foundation in place and not much else. We found the check in desk and golf shop, in a nearly windowless converted 40 foot shipping container. However, as soon as we saw the immense landscape of wide green fairways, golden colored prairie grasses, low shrubs and acres of washboard sand dunes, we knew we had come to someplace special. At first blush, though, this didn't look like Aldo Leopold's vision. "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community," Leopold wrote in one of his most famous passages. "It is wrong when it tends otherwise." Could a sprawling golf development really reflect his conservation ethic? Maybe it could. Mr. Keiser's son Michael lives in Madison and is responsible for carrying out the project. In an email after our visit, he said that Leopold's words "inspired us to rebuild a forgotten world in Adams County," where Sand Valley is located. "The pine barrens of central Wisconsin are as rare as they are beautiful we'd like to help them flourish." Last year, the Keisers bought another 7,000 acres, setting it aside in a land conservation easement. Ultimately they hope to return at least 100,000 acres to their natural state. "Golf and restoration will have a symbiotic relationship at Sand Valley," he said. "The success of the golf resort will feed the expansion of the restored landscape." That afternoon, when I stood on the first tee, at a high point that the developers call the "Volcano," the endless landscape of rolling hills and emerald green fairways, interlaced with waving grasses and ripples of sand, seemed to be dancing in the wind. I was thrilled. The course is for walkers, except for those with disabilities that require a cart. My caddie, Mark Schroeder, a retired teacher, urged me to play from the middle "Sand" tees, which made the length of the course a modest 6,100 yards. He pointed to a distant spot on the right side of the first fairway and we were off. I don't remember that much of the individual holes, perhaps because I rarely got into too much trouble and I was having too much fun. I almost never break 80, but that day, despite the wind, I shot a 77, with one birdie (on the fourth hole, a par 5) and no double bogies. There are five par 3s, all of different lengths and styles. The 17th was one of my favorites; a mound partially blocked a view of the punch bowl green but my slightly wayward shot nonetheless funneled onto the surface, where I managed to two putt from 60 feet away. The par 5 18th, which had a bent elbow green just below Craig's Porch (the food stand, named for the Wisconsin golf contractor who found the site), plays back up to the Volcano. My second shot had to find an opening between a steep dune on the left that pinched the fairway and a tremendous trap on the right that stretched at least 120 yards. I finished with a nifty par and rewarded myself with a mouthwatering chocolate peanut butter Nye's ice cream sandwich. Despite the nearby construction, wildlife was thriving. Birds were everywhere, and we saw two foxes and a family of deer. That evening was the first presidential debate. We were offered an excellent dinner, served in a common room with a big screen TV, shared with other guests. Bill Coore, the course co designer, was staying there, too, with his wife and two friends from France. Mr. Coore, in a later telephone conversation, said Sand Valley was one of those relatively rare sites that "feels like golf in a natural state. You can lay it out pretty quietly on the land to bring the golf course to life." The course, he said, is intended to appeal to players of any caliber, particularly those with average skills. When he and Mr. Crenshaw started designing golf courses decades ago, "everybody was trying to build courses to test the best players. "That's fine in a limited edition," he added, "but we are more interested, like Mike, in making a golf course that is extremely enjoyable to play on a repeated basis, and naturally spectacular in terms of visual presentation." After the resort's opening, the Coore/Crenshaw layout will be the only course fully available for play. But a second design, by David McLay Kidd, who created the first links at Bandon Dunes, is already well underway. A six hole loop named Mammoth Dunes is expected to open for preview play this summer, and the full 18 holes might be ready as early as September. Lisa and I walked the first hole and a couple others as the sun was setting, and the course looks like it will be as beautiful, and even more wide open, than Sand Valley. Mr. Coore and Mr. Crenshaw are also designing a short par 3 course, which should be ready in 2018. "There's already great golf in Wisconsin," said Josh Lesnik, an executive at KemperSports, which will manage Sand Valley for the Keisers. "But soon golfers will look to Wisconsin as a place like Scotland or western Ireland, where they can go for a week and, within a short drive, play someplace special every day." The next morning, I couldn't wait to play a second round. With Mr. Schroeder as my caddie again, I teed off early from some longer tees. It was tougher, and the best I could manage was an 85. If anything it was even more exciting, and I was able to truly appreciate the natural features of the land. "Mike gave us a great gift, a really spectacular site for golf," Mr. Coore said. "And I remember he told us, 'If the first course is not very good, there won't be a second or third course, so don't mess it up.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
"Well, of course, Britain's most important citizens are all old: the queen, Dumbledore, even that one doctor who's been on TV for over 50 years. Who is that? Who? Who?!" STEPHEN COLBERT "Although, on the other hand, she's the only person in the whole country who is now safe to go out, so she's just going to be out hitting the club, like, 'Woo! Where are all my party girls at? Seriously, where is everybody?'" TREVOR NOAH "Just in time she has plans to go see the Chainsmokers live next week." JAMES CORDEN "That's right, 90 year old Margaret Keenan is the first patient in the world to receive the Pfizer vaccine. Or as the queen put it, 'Sure. Sure, she was.'" JIMMY FALLON "The U.K. vaccine underwent rigorous testing. Apparently Gordon Ramsay would try every version and then berate the scientist." JIMMY FALLON "Yep, the vaccine is starting in the U.K. and then coming here, but your one annoying friend will be like, 'I actually liked the original British version better. It's just nuanced and way more subtle.'" JIMMY FALLON | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Asking audiences to sit with characters whose beliefs they don't share is a "radical act," says the playwright Will Arbery. A Play About God and Trump, From a Writer Raised on the Right For a young playwright in New York, it's one thing to draw buzz from critics and theater fans. It's quite another to have your dense and boundary pushing Off Broadway play become a talking point among religious conservatives and not because they hate it. Shortly before the opening last week of "Heroes of the Fourth Turning" his new play about a group of conservative Roman Catholic millennials arguing all night in a Wyoming backyard about God, love and Donald Trump Will Arbery sent the script to Rod Dreher, the prominent Orthodox Christian blogger. And Dreher responded with an exuberant 5,000 word blog post, praising the play's "depth of moral vision" and declaring, "I don't know how anyone progressive, conservative, anyone walks out of 'Heroes of the Fourth Turning' without the conviction that somehow, they have to change their life." "I would never want this play to breed any complacency on either side," he said over lunch at a cafe in Park Slope, Brooklyn. "This was a play that was meant to trouble." "Heroes of the Fourth Turning," directed by Danya Taymor and extended through Nov. 10 at Playwrights Horizons, is hardly the first play to be hailed as illuminating our polarized political moment. (Jesse Green, in The New York Times, called it "astonishing" and "riveting.") But where most works of theater seen as "explaining Trump" have explored the economic anxieties of the Rust Belt white working class, "Heroes" focuses on the distinctive, heady and what Arbery calls the "secretive" world of conservative Catholic intellectuals. It's a world Arbery, who recently turned 30, knows well. His father, a literary scholar, is currently the president of Wyoming Catholic College, a tiny conservative institution whose mixture of Outward Bound style wilderness training and Great Books curriculum inspired the play's fictional Transfiguration College. His mother, a political philosopher, also teaches there. Arbery, the only boy in a family of seven sisters, describes his parents as supportive of all their children following their passions. Which doesn't mean he wasn't so nervous before showing them the script for the first time that he had to go into therapy. "It ended up being great, but I was really scared," he said. "I am a sort of quiet and affable presence in my family, and this felt like such a declaration of how much I'd been listening and absorbing." He grew up in Texas, where his parents ran a cultural organization connected with the University of Dallas, a Catholic institution. It was a home full of art and argument, he recalls, where dinner table conversation was likely to include discussion of Machiavelli, Shakespeare and St. Augustine. He wrote and acted in plays at an all boys school run by Hungarian monks, and also devoured every movie he could find at the public library. "I always felt a tension between the very rich, complex, nuanced, passionate hive of ideas and faith that was my household, and all the beauty of everything else and everyone else," Arbery said. "I was always pulled between those two, and endlessly curious about everyone else." He began the process of "uncoiling," as he puts it, at the secular Kenyon College , where he majored in English and drama, and attended Mass regularly until about halfway through his junior year. Today, Arbery who wears hipster nerd glasses and described his plays as partly about "unpacking whiteness" might blend in with any number of self questioning, progressive minded young artists in Brooklyn. Asked about his current relationship to Catholicism, Arbery, already given to thoughtful pauses, paused even longer. "I struggle with it," he said. "I don't know how to even put it into words." He paused again. "I feel called to investigate that rather than deny it." And then again. "It was hard for me to admit this, but to deny myself my own particularity was not what the world was asking of me." Arbery, who received an M.F.A. at Northwestern University, drew on his family obliquely in "Plano," a surreal comedy about three Catholic sisters haunted by the men in their lives (and, seemingly, an actual ghost) that was produced by Clubbed Thumb last spring at the Connelly Theater in the East Village. "Heroes," with its more frontal turn toward the world of his parents, grew out of a short piece presented at Ensemble Studio Theater the Sunday before the 2016 election. Set in the imagined aftermath, it featured early versions of some of the same characters bemoaning what Arbery presumed would be a Hillary Clinton victory. Instead, of course, Donald Trump won, sending Arbery, along with most of the predominantly progressive New York theater world, into disoriented shock, and convincing him that he needed to write a full play. "I personally felt a lot of anger, and perceived a lot of anger, at the people who could've made that happen," he recalled. "I just felt like I had a responsibility to write about five of those people." Running two intermission less hours, "Heroes" unfurls in big sweeps of intense, rapid fire political and theological debate intertwined with revelations of its characters' complicated histories with each other. Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger and "The Benedict Option" (Dreher's manifesto arguing that Christians, having lost the culture war, should build their own counterculture) are invoked. So are "Portlandia," "BoJack Horseman" and Townes Van Zandt. The play takes its title from "The Fourth Turning," a 1997 pop history treatise on the supposed cycles of American history by William Strauss and Neil Howe that has been embraced by Steve Bannon, and by the character Teresa, an ambitious, Bannon loving writer living in Brooklyn, who enthusiastically warns, "There's a war coming, dude." As it happens, Teresa's hunger for culture war, and the skeptical reaction from some other characters, echoes a recent ideological clash among real life conservatives. And some of the combatants have stopped by to see Arbery's take on it. At one preview, R.R. Reno, the editor of First Things, sat with Sohrab Ahmari , the op ed editor at The New York Post and author of a recent manifesto in the journal calling on conservatives to stop being "nice" and fight back against drag queen story hours at public libraries and other weapons of progressive "mono thought." It touched off months of fierce debate on the right. Both men, like much of the audience, could be seen doubling over in laughter at some of the play's comic high points, including a scene where a recitation of the rosary is interrupted by a spectacularly messy bit of bodily stage business. Reno, who is friendly with Arbery's parents, said that even just presenting anti abortion and anti L.G.B.T. views onstage without signposting those airing them as villains, or satirizing them, was "huge." "They disagree among themselves in profound ways," Reno said of the characters, not all of whom admire President Trump. "But there's no liberal reassuring the audience by correcting them." The lack of any overt liberal counterpoint, Arbery said, had been a stumbling block for some theaters that considered staging the play. And it has been a point of criticism for some theatergoers on Show Score, an audience rating site, which Arbery sheepishly confessed to checking "because I'm a masochist." The goal, he said, wasn't to convince anyone or to stir empathy a concept both he, and the play's characters, question but to ask audiences to sit with the characters' ideas, which he calls "a radical act." Still, he confessed to having his own doubts as he was writing the play, at one point even "thinking it was evil." "There was the worry that it was just giving a platform to hateful speech, " he said. "And there was the worry that I was exploiting people I love, using their story and their pain for my benefit." One person he drew on was his younger sister Monica, whose ordeal with chronic Lyme disease and experiences working in a home for underprivileged pregnant women inspired the character of Emily. ( She opposes abortion, but her belief hotly contested by Teresa that someone who works for Planned Parenthood can still be a good person makes Emily the play's closest thing to a liberal foil.) "I told Will, couldn't you have made the school in Montana or something?" his father, Glenn, said with a laugh. Arbery said his parents had questioned the play's ending. But they said they would reserve judgment about that until they saw the production later this month the first time they will have seen one of his plays since freshman year in college. "If it's a really good play, it shouldn't just send you out with your opinions confirmed," Glenn Arbery said. "It should shake you." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
SAN FRANCISCO Slack, a workplace messaging company, said Monday that it had confidentially filed paperwork for an initial public offering, joining the growing number of technology start ups heading to the stock market. Slack, which is based in San Francisco, gave no details about the offering's timing and said it was awaiting a standard review of its paperwork by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The move was expected given that Slack's chief executive, Stewart Butterfield, had long indicated that he planned to take the company public. Slack recently hired Goldman Sachs to lead the offering. Slack's confidential filing comes amid a rush by privately held companies to go public this year. Many of these start ups, which have been highly valued by private investors, are part of a generation of technology companies known as unicorns. Public share sales by the companies are expected to create a bonanza of riches in Silicon Valley for entrepreneurs and venture capital investors. In December, the ride hailing companies Uber and Lyft filed confidential paperwork for their own public offerings. Their efforts stalled temporarily last month when a government shutdown hampered the S.E.C.'s ability to review the companies' registration documents. Other tech companies expected to go public this year include the online scrapbooking firm Pinterest. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
What all these dissimilar interpretations shared was an element of monstrosity. I don't hesitate to say Mr. Zhurbin's could be their equal. He has been an exceptional performer in many roles large and small. In this Franklin version, however, he like others who have played the same role in it is merely a harmless buffoon. (An artificial nose and a wig of untidy white hair make him unrecognizable and less authoritative.) There are other reasons this "Coppelia" should be immediately replaced. It cuts good music from Act III; it takes the czardas, an Act I highlight, and inserts it into Act III, where it dilutes the aural atmosphere; and it diminishes the central role of Swanilda by blurring her musical and entrancing energy. (I'd love to see this company acquire the production that Sergei Vikharev staged in 2009 for the Bolshoi, which reconstructed the 1894 St. Petersburg version with its marvelous scenic detail and temperamental range. It is the only other current production to equal the Balanchine Danilova staging across Lincoln Center plaza at New York City Ballet.) Ms. Copeland one of Ballet Theater's several remarkable female soloists has played full length roles before, notably Gamzatti in "La Bayadere." She has the charm, liveliness, and technique for Swanilda. In another production, she would surely shine brighter; I'd love to see her rival Coppelius in determined monstrosity in Act II, and play teasingly with the music of her solos in Acts I and III. It's not her fault if this heroine becomes trite; the production has had the same effect with more experienced ballerinas. Instead, the life enhancing character was Mr. Cornejo's Franz. When "Coppelia" was last revived here in 2011, an injury kept us from seeing his good interpretation. Instead we saw the amazing Ivan Vasiliev, who blew the Metropolitan Opera stage apart with the large scale of his dancing. Yet now that we see Mr. Cornejo's Franz, it proves every bit as superb. Mr. Cornejo different in every role is the most miraculous male dancer before the New York public, and the most complete, complex artist in Ballet Theater's roster. The way he claps his legs together in an ultrahigh cabriole is thrilling; and here again was his rapid fire, pop pop pop series of three double air turns. His Franz is no moral paragon: Mr. Cornejo is very funny in the way he slicks his hair down in his efforts to impress Coppelia (thinking she is Coppelius's daughter rather than the perfect doll of his making), and vivid in the way he mimes his quandary of choosing between her and Swanilda. He's impulsive, ardent, lovable, and a fountain of energy. At his Act III wedding celebration, however, love makes him not just heroic but chivalrous and poetic, too. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
If these two were any closer, they'd be wearing each other's skin. First seen in silhouette, in profile, the pair of performers who make up the entire cast of Erin Markey's "Singlet," which runs through June 3 at the Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn, suggest a pair of cranially conjoined twins. They are breathing as if they shared a single set of overtaxed lungs. And when they speak, it is directly into each other's open mouths. Eventually, and inevitably, they separate, to become their autonomous selves. But as these two actresses, Ms. Markey and Emily Davis, go on to portray a succession of distinct individuals, the will to be one with the other keeps pulling at them, like some ineffable but unavoidable force of gravity. The word singlet has a physics related meaning, which is (and I am borrowing from the most accessible one I found online), "a single unresolvable line in a spectrum." It can also refer to the stretchy, torso covering garment worn by wrestlers. Both meanings apply to this intense performance piece, which is directed by Jordan Fein. Ms. Markey, a cult cabaret artist and experimental actress of a singular stripe, is considering the nature of relationships in which one and one often seem to add up to, well, one. As for the wrestling garb aspect, Ms. Markey and Ms. Davis have that covered, too, with their two tone spandex athletic wear. They are indeed dressed to wrestle. Their hair has been pulled into identical, tightly braided ponytails, presumably to emphasize them as mirror images of each other, but also to avoid the distractions of stray locks falling into their faces. For soon enough, they will be going mano a mano, with holds and twists and headlocks, accompanied by grunts of determination and frustration that verge on orgasmic. Are they trying to master each other, destroy each other or be subsumed by each other? The answer, I would venture, is all of the above. That response would appear to hold true for all the various identities that Ms. Markey and Ms. Davis assume during the show's 80 minutes. The first of these are (hilariously) a teenage girl who has discovered, triumphantly, that she can wear a size small, and is being photographed by her best friend, who urges her, in the voice of a tough coach, to go for extra small. At least, that was how I read the scene. There is no contextual explanation given, and we are thrust in medias res into each of the play's duets. Other characters in Ms. Markey's portrait gallery include two schoolteachers who identify themselves as Coach Christie Brinkley and Coach Pooh Bear; Coach Christie and a recalcitrant female student; a mother and daughter holding vigil at the deathbed of the mother's mother; and a high school age daughter and her single parent dad, drinking beer together at the end of a hard day. The family scenes are genuinely affecting, conjuring the blurring of identities that can happen, without anyone's even realizing it, among blood kin. (For the father daughter sequence both actresses wear mustaches and speak their lines together.) Replete with self consciously arch dialogue, the script often brings to mind a role playing, late night improv session by two smart, spliff toking college students, who are perhaps a bit too pleased with their own wit. But there's no denying the discipline of the performance itself, and the rigorous matching of form and content throughout. Carolyn Mraz's set has the look of a photo shoot, with its white seamless, curved walls, crucially accessorized with professional lighting equipment. (Barbara Samuels is the lighting designer.) This feels fitting for a show that is all about self image as perceived through the eyes of others, or one significant other, who you like to think knows you better than anyone else. Ms. Markey and Ms. Davis (who have appeared together previously in the teasingly dreamlike plays of the Half Straddle company) bring a gymnast's vigor and precision to all their interpretations. They also, occasionally and charmingly, allow us glimpses of the giddy pleasure they derive from their performances. While none of the couples they portray are lovers (though I do wonder about Coaches Brinkley and Pooh Bear), an erotic energy pulses throughout "Singlet," reminding us that physical intimacy in almost any form is only one remove or so from sexual contact. It is in this sense that the show feels most transgressive and illuminating. Toward the performance's end, father (Ms. Markey) and daughter (Ms. Davis) fall into a clutch for a slow dance, and as his hand strays down her back, you hold your breath. That hand doesn't venture too far beyond the bounds of decency. But the point has been made, and its disturbing suggestiveness lingers afterward, like the acrid smoke of a sneaked cigarette. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
For the past few months, public health officials have been unyielding in their stance that healthy people should not wear masks as a way to protect themselves from coronavirus. But with new information about how the virus is spread potentially through the air and by people with no symptoms the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday recommended that everyone wear nonmedical face coverings in public settings. President Trump said the guidelines were voluntary, leaving the decision about wearing masks up to individuals. Top health officials, including Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House's coronavirus response coordinator, warned that masks should not replace social distancing and hand washing. While longtime advocates for mask wearing applaud the shift, they said it should also include a plan for providing masks to the public. For now, commercially made masks are virtually impossible to find. Many people have hoarded masks in recent months, and everyone agrees that any available supply of medical masks should be reserved for hospitals and emergency workers. That means if you want a mask, you probably have to make it yourself. Last week, the German Medical Association suggested that citizens find or make a simple fabric mask when out in public and leave medical grade masks for front line workers. In Austria, grocery store shoppers are now required to wear masks. In New York City, officials advised residents to shield their faces with a scarf, bandanna or other covering when leaving their homes. "Cover your face with cloth however you want to do that," said Shan Soe Lin, a lecturer at the Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs who was a co author of a widely shared article about the need to cover your face. "Cover your face pretty thoroughly from your mouth to your nose to prevent large aerosol droplets coming out or going in." Dr. Soe Lin said she didn't understand why public health officials have been so reluctant to recommend nonmedical fabric masks for the public. Even if they aren't as protective as a medical mask, they are better than nothing, she said. "We are in the upswing of a pandemic," Dr. Soe Lin said. "These cloth masks are protective. It's a really important complement to the social distance and hand washing instructions." Experts say it's important for people to understand that a simple face covering offers enough protection for someone who is practicing social distancing and has only limited exposure to others during brief time outside for exercise or groceries. The highest quality, most expensive medical masks called N95 respirator masks should be reserved for hospital workers and emergency responders who are regularly exposed to high viral loads from infected patients, both from frequent contact as well as medical procedures that can spew tiny viral particles into air. "The potential for exposure is so much lower in a grocery store compared to working in a hospital close to patients," said Linsey Marr, a Virginia Tech scientist and an expert in the transmission of viruses in the air. If you're not a health care worker and you have a stash of N95 masks or standard surgical masks, consider donating it to a hospital. If you're staying home and nobody in your family is infected, you don't need a mask most of the time. Studies of mask use to prevent the spread of respiratory illnesses, including SARS, another form of coronavirus, show a simple mask can lower risk of infection. The effect is greatest when masks are used along with hand hygiene and social distancing. "I think the vast amount of data would suggest that the coronavirus is an airborne infection carried by respiratory droplets, and it also can be passed on by direct contact," said Dr. Mukherjee, who recently wrote an article about how the coronavirus behaves inside patients. "The mask works two ways not only to protect you from me, but me from you." If you decide to start wearing a mask, you should know that it takes some getting used to. A mask can be hot and uncomfortable and fog your glasses if you wear them. But pulling it up and down defeats the purpose of wearing it. While we don't have a lot of research on the effectiveness of homemade masks in preventing the spread of infection, scientists who study airborne diseases can offer some guidance. A mask sewn from a pattern or an improvised face covering made with a T shirt probably offers some protection. The thicker the fabric, the better: think heavy cotton T shirt or a thick, felt like fabric, said Dr. Marr, the Virginia Tech aerosol scientist. While some people have suggested using a bandanna, the fabric is typically so thin and flimsy that it would likely offer little protection. Double or triple the bandanna fabric if that's all you have. "I've been saying some protection is better than none," said Dr. Marr, who noted that local health departments had been asking aerosol scientists for guidance on potential mask materials to deal with supply shortages. She said her team would have results soon with more specific recommendations for materials to use in masks. Dr. Soe Lin said she believed an added benefit of a mask was that it serves as a constant reminder against touching your face, a major way that the virus is spread. But no face covering, whether it's homemade or a medical mask, makes you invincible. Pulling a mask on and off or fidgeting with it will lessen its effectiveness. And in theory, fiddling with your mask could contaminate it. Always remove a mask by the ear loops or the tie never the part that covers your face. Dr. Soe Lin said she had used cloth masks for three weeks and washed and dried them regularly. Someone with only one mask can hand wash at night and let it air dry. If a mask gets wet or damp while you are wearing it, it's less effective, she said. Other experts said worries that fabric masks won't offer enough protection were misguided. "I don't think there is any evidence that this is going to make things worse, but there is evidence that it provides some additional good," said Robert Hecht, professor at the Yale School of Public Health, who was the co author of the face mask article with Dr. Soe Lin. "Under this emergency situation we're in, it seems, in our view, hard to argue against covering your face. We have large numbers of infections occurring which don't need to happen if people were to use the masks." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Three months after departing the Amazon series "Transparent" amid accusations of sexual harassment, the actor Jeffrey Tambor is poised to return to television. Mr. Tambor, who left his Emmy winning role on "Transparent" after being accused of harassment by a fellow cast member and a former assistant, will appear regularly during the forthcoming season of "Arrested Development" on Netflix, according to a spokesman for 20th Century Fox Television, the studio behind the show. The season, the show's fifth, was filmed last year, before the allegations were made against Mr. Tambor, the spokesman said. It is not clear if there were any discussions about pulling Mr. Tambor from the show or not using the scenes in which he appeared. A Netflix spokeswoman did not immediately respond to inquiries. Mr. Tambor plays the patriarch of the Bluth family, the dysfunctional clan at the center of the show. Last year, Netflix fired Kevin Spacey from "House of Cards" after he faced numerous allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct. The next and final season of "House of Cards" will appear later this year, without Mr. Spacey. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
For a concert on Monday featuring the baritone Gunther Groissbock, the State Theater of Hesse in Wiesbaden, Germany, which normally seats 1,000, held fewer than 200 audience members. An Audience Comes Out of Lockdown for Schubert and Mahler WIESBADEN, Germany Normally, when a performer peers beyond bright stage lights into a darkened theater and sees every fourth seat occupied, it's not a good sign. "Is it because we're no good?" Gunther Groissbock, an Austrian bass, recalled thinking as he stepped before a sparse audience at the State Theater of Hesse here on Monday evening. "Is it because we're unpopular?" At least three empty seats separated every occupied one in the neo Baroque auditorium, which normally holds 1,000 but accommodated fewer than 200 on Monday. This was by design, part of a hotly debated and potentially risky attempt to revive live performance as the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic ebbs in Europe. Wiesbaden's concert could serve as a model for other theaters or as a warning, if anyone who attended gets sick. "At the beginning it felt almost like an art installation, an experiment," he said. "But from song to song, it very quickly became something very human." Concertgoers were required to wear face coverings to the theater, though they were allowed to remove them once seated. Tickets came without seat assignments, and members of a household could sit together. The theater recorded everyone's name and address, so they could be contacted later in case someone turned out to be infected. The driving force behind the event was Uwe Eric Laufenberg, a veteran actor who is the Wiesbaden theater's director. Not everyone is happy about his aggressive push to restart live performances. Last month, Mr. Laufenberg stirred a political firestorm when he called government mandated restrictions a violation of the German constitution and suggested reaction to the pandemic was overblown. He was accused by some commentators of echoing the arguments of right wing groups that have protested measures designed to stop the virus's spread. Mr. Laufenberg said in an interview that some theater employees had reservations about opening so soon. But the performance on Monday, the first in a series that continues daily through the first week of June, is part of a general return to normal in Germany, where the growth of new cases has fallen well below 1 percent. The country is ahead of the curve in reviving its culture sector. Shops, hairdressers and nail salons are also taking customers again, and schools are operating on abbreviated schedules. In the state of Hesse, of which Wiesbaden is the capital, restaurants and gyms have been allowed to reopen, provided visitors observe distancing. Elsewhere in Europe, governments are also taking steps to get music lovers back into concert halls. Austria announced last week that events of up to 100 people, with social distancing, can be held starting May 29. In August, a new limit of 1,000 people has been proposed, if an event's organizers present a safety plan for government approval a development that led the Salzburg Festival, one of Europe's grandest summer traditions, to announce that it hopes to go ahead with performances, in some form. In Italy, the government passed a decree on Monday allowing concerts starting June 15, so long as they meet certain conditions, including everyone involved musicians as well as audience remaining at least one meter, or about three feet, apart. Mr. Laufenberg said that putting on a concert while respecting health guidelines involved negotiating with officials and reprogramming the theater's ticketing software in less than three days. Barriers were erected to funnel the audience into the theater without crowding. Signs were put up to direct the flow of foot traffic and explain anti contagion measures. Hand sanitizers were placed at strategic locations. "It's easier to close a theater than to reopen one," Mr. Laufenberg said. During intermission, wine, pretzels and other refreshments were served outdoors from a food cart near the colonnaded theater entrance, instead of in a foyer, like normal. Luckily the weather on Monday was clear and warm. "It's not the atmosphere we're used to," Wolfgang Allin, an Austrian architect who has a home in Wiesbaden, said shortly after he and his wife, Angelika, took their seats in the balcony. "But you have to take it as it comes." Mr. Groissbock and Alexandra Goloubitskaia, the pianist who accompanied him, accepted drastically lower fees than usual. "Money is the last priority at the moment," he said, adding: "I'm overjoyed this is even happening." For an encore, Mr. Groissbock sang an excerpt from a role he was scheduled to perform at Bayreuth if the pandemic had not interfered: Wotan's Farewell from the end of Wagner's "Die Walkure." The audience was ecstatic, making up in volume what it lacked in numbers. But Mr. Laufenberg said that performances like this were not a permanent solution, either financially or artistically. "If you want to tell the story of Romeo and Juliet, they aren't going to be able to follow social distancing rules," he said. "I can't imagine that. I don't want to imagine it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Clare Hollingworth was a reporter for the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph when she broke the news of the start of World War II. From a single gust of wind, Clare Hollingworth reaped the journalistic scoop of the century. Ms. Hollingworth, the undisputed doyenne of war correspondents, who died on Tuesday in Hong Kong at 105, was less than a week into her first job, as a reporter for the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, on that windy day in 1939. Driving alone on the road from Gleiwitz, then in Germany, to Katowice, in Poland a distance of less than 20 miles she watched as the wind lifted a piece of the tarpaulin that had been erected on the German side to screen the valley below from view. Through the opening, Ms. Hollingworth saw, she later wrote, "large numbers of troops, literally hundreds of tanks, armored cars and field guns" concealed in the valley. She knew then that Germany was poised for a major military incursion. Hastening back across the border to the Polish side, she telephoned her editor with the news, a world exclusive. The date was Aug. 28, 1939, and her article, published the next day, would become, as the British paper The Guardian wrote in 2015, "probably the greatest scoop of modern times." On Sept. 1, Hitler's forces invaded Poland, marking the start of World War II. For the next four decades, Ms. Hollingworth (who over the years contributed articles to The Telegraph, The Guardian, The International Herald Tribune and The Wall Street Journal) covered World War II from Eastern Europe, the Balkans and North Africa; the Greek and Algerian civil wars; hostilities between Arabs and Jews in the waning days of the British mandate in Palestine; and the Vietnam War, among other conflicts. Often under fire, occasionally arrested and possessed of such a keen nose for covert information that from time to time she was accused of being a spy both by local governments and by the British Ms. Hollingworth was friend, or foe, to seemingly everyone in a position of power in the world at midcentury. She obtained the first interview with Mohammed Reza Pahlavi after he became the shah of Iran in 1941, and what was very likely among the last, after he was deposed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979. In 1965, wanting to cover hostilities between India and Pakistan but discovering that reporters were barred from the front, she simply secured permission from an old acquaintance, Indira Gandhi, who was then India's minister of information and broadcasting. Ms. Hollingworth was also one of the first Western journalists to report regularly from China, opening The Telegraph's Beijing bureau in 1973. Her other major scoops included a 1963 article for The Guardian in which she cautiously identified the British intelligence agent Kim Philby as the long sought "third man" in the ring of Soviet spies then known to include the Englishmen Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess. Another was a 1968 article for The Telegraph in which she reported the United States' incipient plans for peace talks with Vietnam. (The talks opened in Paris later that year and were concluded in 1973.) Ms. Hollingworth was never so happy, she often said, as when she was roaming the world equipped with little more than a toothbrush, a typewriter and, if need be, a revolver. Embedded long before the term was applied to journalists, she slept in trucks and in trenches, at times buried up to her neck in sand for warmth on cold desert nights. She once held off an armed Algerian policeman by threatening to hit him about the head with a shoe. Had her eyesight not begun to fail some 20 years ago, it was a life, Ms. Hollingworth made clear, that she would gladly have continued to the end of her days. "I must admit that I enjoy being in a war," she told The Telegraph in 2011, on the eve of her 100th birthday. In 1989, though nearly 80 and nominally retired, Ms. Hollingworth, attired in a safari suit, her working uniform of choice for 60 years, was spotted in Tiananmen Square shinnying up a lamppost for a bird's eye view of the government's violent crackdown against civilian protesters. She periodically slept on the floor of her home in Hong Kong well into her 90s, just to keep from going soft. Through all her travels, with all their attendant rigors, there was only one thing, Ms. Hollingworth said, that she truly could not abide. "I do not mind not washing for a week or more," she wrote, "but I do hate getting fleas in my hair." Her Graham Greene existence, with its typewriter, revolver and most particularly its fleas, was a far cry from the life her conventional, well heeled British parents had envisioned for her one of quiet propriety, dutiful wifehood, charity balls and hunting. Clare Hollingworth was born on Oct. 10, 1911, in Knighton in central England, outside Leicester. As a child, she enjoyed touring the historic battlefields of England and France with her father, who ran the family's boot and shoe factory. At her parents' insistence, the young Ms. Hollingworth attended domestic science college in Leicester, an experience that did nothing to make the prospect of hearth and home attractive. ("Although it is useful to be able to make an omelet," she later wrote, "my domestic science training caused me to hate having anything to do with housework.") Partly in deference to her upbringing, she became engaged "to a suitable young man," though she soon broke off the engagement and further scandalized her parents by announcing her intention to become a journalist. "My mother thought journalism frightfully low, like a trade," Ms. Hollingworth said in the 2011 interview with The Telegraph. "She didn't believe anything journalists wrote and thought they were only fit for the tradesmen's entrance." In the 1930s, Ms. Hollingworth attended the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London and afterward studied at the University of Zagreb, then in Yugoslavia. Working for the League of Nations Union, a peace and social justice group established in Britain in 1918, she was dispatched to Warsaw. There, in early 1939, she aided thousands of refugees from the Sudetenland the region of Czechoslovakia that had been annexed by the Nazis in October 1938 arranging travel documents that would let them cross into Poland. She wrote about their plight for small publications in Britain. The Telegraph learned of Ms. Hollingworth's work in Poland, and on Aug. 25, 1939, while she was visiting London, it hired her as a correspondent. Assigned to cover the prelude to war in the region, she flew to Warsaw the next day. From Warsaw she traveled to Katowice, commandeering an official car from the British consul general there. It was in that car, Union Jack boldly flying, that she drove over the border, past astonished Nazi guards and into Germany on Aug. 28. Ms. Hollingworth's scoop comprised two parts. The first was her story of Aug. 29, about the advent of war. The second was her report on the start of the war itself. Awakened by explosions at dawn on Sept. 1, Ms. Hollingworth, from her quarters in Katowice, saw German bombers overhead and the flash of artillery fire in the distance. Over time, some members of the British press grew alienated by what they saw as Ms. Hollingworth's imperious manner. "Ms. Hollingworth's snobberies are very tiring, her cozy relations with British embassies irritating," the English journalist Robert Fisk wrote, reviewing her 1990 memoir, "Front Line." But she remained a widely admired, even venerated, figure, a recipient of the Order of the British Empire in 1982 and a perennial fixture at the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Hong Kong, where she had made her home since the early 1980s. Her other books include "The Three Weeks' War in Poland" (1940), "There's a German Just Behind Me" (1942), "The Arabs and the West" (1952) and "Mao and the Men Against Him" (1985). As Ms. Hollingworth made clear in later interviews, though there was no dearth of wars to accompany her old age, she did not truly expect to be called upon to cover them. Yet to the end of her life she slept with her passport and a pair of shoes within easy reach, just in case. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Len Wein, second from right. during a panel discussion in Beverly Hills, Calif., in 2013. With him, from left, were the executive producer Michael Kantor and the comic book writers Todd McFarlane and Gerry Conway. Len Wein, a prolific comic book writer who collaborated on bringing to life two of the art form's best known characters, Wolverine and Swamp Thing, died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 69. His wife, Christine Valada, said he had been struggling with heart problems and other ailments for some time. In a career spanning almost a half century, Mr. Wein wrote for Batman, the Flash, Superman, the Justice League of America and numerous other comics series. He was also a comic book editor, perhaps most notably on DC's pivotal Watchmen series in the 1980s. He had writing credits on numerous television shows, many of them based on characters he had helped create. Leonard Norman Wein was born on June 12, 1948, in New York. By the time he received an art degree at Farmingdale State College on Long Island, he was already known around the DC Comics offices in New York; he and his friend Marv Wolfman had begun turning up for the regular tours of those offices as teenagers. Ms. Valada said Mr. Wein was aiming to become an artist until someone at DC, assessing his offerings, told him, "I don't think the art's quite there, but I kind of like these stories." He and Mr. Wolfman sold their first work to DC in 1968. Mr. Wein found success relatively quickly when he and the artist Bernie Wrightson created Swamp Thing, who first appeared in 1971. (Mr. Wrightson died in March.) The creature, a humanoid, plantlike superhero, made a strong impression, especially on others who were writing comics or aspired to. "Unless you were around when that book debuted, you can't really grasp how truly revolutionary Swamp Thing was, how different from everything that had come before it," the writer J. M. DeMatteis said in a posted tribute to Mr. Wein. "I remember being floored by the emotional power of the art, the pulp poetry of the language and the big beating heart at the story's core." The character proved both durable and adaptable, turning up over the years on television and in film. And Mr. Wein became an early example of a change that would wake up the somewhat predictable world of comics, one that made the stories deeper and more ambitious. "For more than a decade, from the early '70s to the mid '80s, as both a writer and an editor, he really sat on the leading edge of what the comics medium could be as it was growing up," Paul Levitz, author of "75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking," said in an interview on Monday. In 1975, Mr. Wein joined with the artist David Cockrum to relaunch Marvel Comics' X Men, the team of mutant superheroes created in 1963 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Mr. Wein and Mr. Cockrum created new characters, including Storm, Nightcrawler and Colossus. Wolverine, who first appeared in an "Incredible Hulk" story Mr. Wein wrote, also joined the X Men universe, which yielded not only many comics but also a profitable series of movies. Mr. Wein was an editor for Marvel, DC and Disney Comics. He brought the British writer Alan Moore into the Swamp Thing series in the early 1980s, and in 1986 he was editor on the Watchmen series by Mr. Moore, the artist Dave Gibbons and the colorist John Higgins. That work, Mr. Levitz, said, was "arguably the most important comic published by a traditional comics publisher in the '80s" and helped usher in the era of the graphic novel. Mr. Wein and Ms. Valada were married in 1991. Mr. Wein's previous marriage, to Glynis Oliver, a colorist who worked with him, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a stepson, Michael Bieniewicz Valada. Ms. Valada said Mr. Wein had recently returned to writing Swamp Thing. But his favorite characters to write, she said, were two he did not create: Batman and the Incredible Hulk. That suggests a fondness for tradition, but Mr. Wein in fact helped bring a younger, innovative sensibility to the art form. Years ago, barely in his 20s, he got a sense of the generational divide in the comic book making world of the time when he worked on the television tie in comics for "Star Trek" being published by Gold Key. The staff there, he once said at a panel discussion, was on the older side. "I was the first guy to write the book who actually ever watched the show," he said. "I sent all kinds of notes: 'You know the backpacks? They don't really need the backpacks. They want anything, they pick up the silly little phone things and call, and it gets teleported down.' " | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Malibu and the areas surrounding it are home to a handful of renowned but challenging weight loss retreats where guests hike for several hours a day and stick to a low calorie, vegetarian diet. Aja Malibu, opening June 20, wants to offer health seekers a less aggressive way to achieve their goals. Nestled on a 23 acre knoll in the Santa Monica Mountains, the property accommodates just seven people at a time. Guests begin their day with a smoothie and a 90 minute hike, and throughout the day, they take part in nutrition workshops, classes on healthy cooking using produce and herbs grown in the expansive gardens, meditation sessions and treatments in a spa adorned with healing crystals. They can also use a sound healing room and a swimming pool filled with filtered, chlorine free water. The meals, shakes and snacks are all plant based and gluten and dairy free, but the portions are generous, and there is no calorie counting. "We believe that transformation, including weight loss, can happen with our holistic approach," said Airrion Copeland, the general manager. Prices from 10,000 for seven nights, all inclusive. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
LOS ANGELES While Harvey Weinstein awaits trial on five felony charges related to allegations of sexual abuse, his brother, Bob, has announced his re entry into Hollywood. On Friday, the younger of the two brothers revealed to the trade publication Deadline Hollywood that he would be starting a new production company with a focus on family films, comedies and upscale adult thrillers. The company will be called Watch This Entertainment and its first movie will be an animated family adventure called "Endangered." The film will be co produced by the actress Tea Leoni, who will also be the voice of the lead character. Pantea Ghaderi, a longtime publicity executive at the Weinstein Company, will be the president of creative development at the company, which intends to produce two to three films a year. The news comes two years after Harvey Weinstein was fired from the Weinstein Company after accusations from dozens of women of sexual misconduct and one year after Bob Weinstein stepped down from the company's board. The company filed for bankruptcy in March 2018, and its assets were later sold to Lantern Capital Partners, a private equity firm. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
What is it with designers bringing back their greatest hits? First, Donatella Versace offered an ode to her brother Gianni's archives, as well as to his most celebrated supermodel moment, in 2017, on the 20th anniversary of his murder; then Fendi brought back the baguette bag; then Marc Jacobs announced his "grunge redux" collection, which officially goes on sale this week. And on Sunday night in New York, Ms. Versace was at it again, reincarnating the notorious safety pin gown of 1994. You know: the one worn by the then fairly unknown starlet Elizabeth Hurley, who was accompanying her boyfriend, Hugh Grant, to the premiere of "Four Weddings and a Funeral," catapulting her to paparazzi stardom overnight. Also, the palm tree print chiffon number that Jennifer Lopez wore to the Grammy's in 2000, which won the public's eye that night. And you can understand the thinking, in the current uncertain climate. It worked very well once, why shouldn't it work again? Plus, on the constantly churning fashion hamster wheel, it takes a little creative pressure off designers to constantly make something new and fabulous. Instead, they can give you the familiar and fabulous! The occasion for the Versace trip down memory lane was the brand's first pre fall collection show, its first show in New York and its first show as a member of the Michael Kors family sorry, the Capri Holdings family (remember, the holding company has been renamed, now that it's a group). As a way of announcing Versace's new status and suggesting that, contrary to some fears, being owned by an American company would not make the brand forget its roots, the show was a pretty high profile statement. "Donatella came to me and said she wanted to do something big, and I was all for it!" said John D. Idol, chief executive of Capri, before the show. It was the first Versace show he attended, and he was wearing his first Versace suit (black, slim cut), as well as a pair of Versace Chain Reaction sneakers (also black, with white soles). He was very excited. He was standing on the edge of the cavernous former trading floor of the old American Stock Exchange, where the show was held. In the center of the room was another recreation: the hand holding the torch from the Statue of Liberty but this being Versace, it was gilded. Which was part of a whole ode to New York thing that Ms. Versace saw as important to the collection, as well as being part of an ode to female freedom thing (ditto). The overarching theme, though, was again an ode to her brother, down to the fact the show was held on his birthday, Dec. 2 (he would have been 72). And that one of the prints a multicolored heart number that replaced the palm trees that had been on ye olde J. Lo dress (worn in Sunday's show by Amber Valletta, who also wore the original palm tree dress on the Versace runway) came from the artist Jim Dine's work for Gianni's New York townhouse, which the designer had also used in a collection in 1997. Because you can bring back the past, but you have to update it a little. Otherwise it just looks like a lack of imagination. So the oversize gold safety pins of fashion legend came not just on a slinky black gown slit up to here and sliced down to there, more asymmetric and twisty than the original, but also on nipped in black jackets, holding together seams on the back and shoulders and paired with cropped mohair sweaters (stomachs were a prime erogenous zone) and black miniskirts. They also, not coincidentally, showed up half a world away on a bright yellow custom made Versace jumpsuit Beyonce wore over the weekend at the Global Citizen concert in South Africa. It, too, was inspired by the pre fall line (see! synergy!), highlighter shades being another part of the collection, though back on the New York runway they came in the form of vinyl minidresses. Which were in turn mixed in with a whole wild kingdom of not in nature animal prints themselves (and fur, though the fake kind), which were mixed in with the brand's signature Barocco swirls of gold, black and white, and more hearts, for men and women no matter. Oh, and there were sneakers. Cat's eye bejeweled sunglasses and crazy 1960s bouffants. One "I Love New York" Medusa head T shirt. Also lots of gold buttons, and even more celebrities, including Kim and Kanye, Bradley Cooper, Lupita Nyong'o, 2 Chainz, Paris Jackson and Blake Lively. Even the models stayed on the runway to sip Champagne and dance around in their new vintage finery after the show was all over. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Harlan Coben's latest TV project, "The Stranger," is part of a long term deal granting Netflix the rights to 14 of his novels. "To get the chance to collaborate with people I respect and like has been joyful," he said. There are many writers of best selling thrillers out there, but few are as savvy about television as Harlan Coben. Not content with 75 million books in print in 44 languages, Coben, 58, has forged a fruitful collaboration with Netflix in recent years, beginning in 2016 with the original mini series "The Five" and continuing with "Safe," starring Michael C. Hall, from 2018. That same year, he made a deal granting the streaming service the rights to 14 stand alone novels, as well as first refusal rights to new TV ideas. His newest Netflix collaboration is an eight episode adaptation of Coben's 2015 novel "The Stranger." It begins as the titular stranger, a mysterious woman played by Hannah John Kamen, informs the lawyer Adam Price (Richard Armitage) that his wife, Corinne (Dervla Kirwan), faked a pregnancy and the ensuing miscarriage the first in a startlingly high number of twists and revelations that make the show addictively bingeable. As with most Coben works, "The Stranger" exposes secrets and lies behind the happy facades of his suburban families, with devastating results. But viewers familiar with the novel will notice some fresh material having to do with the teenagers in the series. Their shenanigans were hatched partly by Coben's 25 year old daughter, Charlotte, who wrote Episode 5. One key to Coben's global success is that his books travel very well: All his writing and producing credits so far have come from shows produced outside the United States, including Britain ("The Five," "Safe" and "The Stranger") and France ("No Second Chance," "Just One Look"), as well as Poland and Spain ("The Woods" and "The Innocent," both forthcoming). "Harlan writes largely about New York or New Jersey, but his characters and themes are universal," the screenwriter Danny Brocklehurst, who has worked on Coben's three English language projects, said. "They're usually about families, and they're usually about love and friendship. "The biggest complications about adapting the books for us in England always have to do with guns," he added, laughing. "Ordinary people in the U.K. just don't have them in the house." Coben spoke on the phone last week from his home in New Jersey, describing his ever evolving relationship with TV and why so many second seasons aren't just unnecessary; they're also unfair. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. What do you enjoy about working in television? I think my new book, "The Boy from the Woods," is my 31st or 32nd novel, and that's a lot of time alone in a room. Laughs. So to get the chance to collaborate with people I respect and like has been joyful. Maybe I would not have been nearly as interested in doing this 15 or 20 years ago. But I was lucky to have a very positive experience when I did the 2006 French film "Tell No One" with Guillaume Canet, where they kept me involved and I didn't experience the nightmare stories you hear about Hollywood. Are those stories part of why your books have been adapted so much outside of the United States? Was it just easier outside of Hollywood? When I optioned "Tell No One" with France, people thought I was nuts. But I knew I had a much better chance of getting a good film made by Guillaume. And because I like changes, to me it's interesting to move the story's location a bit, to have a hybrid of an American sensibility and a European sensibility. I think it's worked for us. Can you talk a bit about those changes the ones you make in your adaptations? The title character in "The Stranger," for example, is a white man in the book, but on Netflix she's a biracial woman. Part of it was, when we started to audition people, the men just weren't working. It didn't look or feel right. Once I saw Hannah do it, there was no one else for me. She has the right touch of being a little cool, a little damaged, really interesting and mysterious. She's a great actress, and with Richard in that very first scene, they just worked. How hands on are you in the television process? For "The Stranger," I was involved in pretty much everything. I probably watched 300 audition tapes for different roles. Some of the big actresses and actors, like Richard or Siobhan Finneran , we did not audition. Jennifer Saunders I wrote a half begging letter to. They said she'd never do it, she just does comedy. But I said, "She'd be perfect in this role!" So I wrote to her and sent her the script, and she said, "Yeah, this looks like fun; I'd love to do it." This is her first dramatic role. Why do you remain committed to the mini series in our age of sprawl? I'm attached to it for now. I don't think it's fair to ask people to watch an eight episode crime story like this and not give you the ending, and make you wait for Season 2. That's just not fair to me. We'll do a Season 2 only if we can think of an idea that's just as good for the characters, but I'm not going to hold something back or not give the full answer in Season 1. And really, the novels don't lend themselves to more than one season. Everyday technology, like social media and phone tracking apps, plays a big part in your plots. How do you use it as a thriller writer? We all remember those great old movies where you'd see someone desperately call somebody and you'd say: "Pick up the phone! Pick up the phone!" Well, I can't do that because everybody has a cellphone. If you're going out with somebody, you're going to Google their name first. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
KANT'S LITTLE PRUSSIAN HEAD AND OTHER REASONS WHY I WRITE An Autobiography in Essays By Claire Messud We dog people are incorrigible, so after dutifully reading the first few essays in Claire Messud's new book in order, I of course skipped ahead to the one titled "Our Dogs." Its opening sentence "People react differently to our canine situation" worried me: Who has a canine situation as opposed to too many dogs, too few, tongue lolling angels or fang baring devils? What a technical locution. What a cold one. I was given even more pause on the next page, where Messud devotes an entire paragraph to the "holistic foulness" of her dachshund's stench. Where was this essay going? And was I supposed to be enjoying it? Eight pages later pages, I should add, that went by with steadily increasing logic and ease I was reading the last words, flicking away a tear and nodding gently at her question: "How does our strife with the dogs differ from our general strife: Could it not be said that our canine situation is simply our life situation?" It could, and while it could be said more colloquially than in this odd and oddly affecting rumination, it really couldn't be said a whole lot better. Read an excerpt from "Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write." "Our Dogs" is one of about 25 essays in "Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write," and it's in many ways emblematic the elegance of it, the challenge of it. Messud isn't a writer who grabs her subject matter by the throat or pumps her prose full of kinetic energy. She moseys, she circles, she lies in wait. She sighs where others might scream, mists up where others might sob, ponders "holistic foulness" where others might just run for the cleaner smelling hills. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. But more often than not, it works. There's usually a moral in her sights, one worth getting to, and there's sometimes a deceptively strong current of feeling beneath a surface of reserve. I didn't gobble these essays down, as I would a bucket of buttered popcorn. I savored them in unhurried spoonfuls, as with a bowl of glistening consomme. And I felt amply fed. I'm speaking in large part of the first section of the book, which is the heart of it. It's called "Reflections" and comprises essays that, like "Our Dogs," are essentially snippets of memoir, with the exception of two, "How to Be a Better Woman in the Twenty First Century" and "The Time for Art Is Now," that are more topical, political and not especially memorable. The book's second section, "Criticism: Books," is slightly longer, while its third and last section, "Criticism: Images," is the shortest of all. Nearly all of these essays have been published before, in places as diverse as Vogue, Granta, Kenyon Review and The New York Review of Books. Messud is best known to readers not for nonfiction like this but for fiction, especially "The Emperor's Children," her exploration of three young strivers (of sorts) in New York City in the prelude to 9/11. Count me among the many happy readers who found that novel an indelible portrait of a certain kind of entitlement, a certain cast of ambition, and of the laughable, pitiable chasms between who we are, who we expect to be and who we really want to be. It was packed with cutting social observations and, even more so, with wisdom. These essays don't carry the same weight or deliver the same punch, perhaps because they don't enjoy the free rein of imagination. They're confined by the parameters of Messud's own life and the lives of the writers and artists she examines in her criticism. But a similar intelligence courses through them, coupled with an erudition that, unfortunately, tilts into exhibitionism. If you played a drinking game in which you took a shot every time you tripped across an invocation of Tolstoy, Nabokov, T. S. Eliot or the like, you'd be tipsy just a few paragraphs into some essays and blotto by the end of others. Messud's literary criticism is more absorbing than her arts criticism and its appeal is proportional to a reader's familiarity with the subject. I'm less versed in Albert Camus than I should be, even now that we're living "The Plague," so the three essays about his work written long before the coronavirus mattered less to me than her vivid, insightful analyses of three novels that I read in the recent past and remember well: Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go," Magda Szabo's "The Door" and Teju Cole's "Open City." The beginning of her take on "Open City" demonstrates her great talent for enlarging the context of whatever she's writing about and weaving in astute bits of broader commentary. It also captures her determinedly elevated tone and vocabulary, which won't be to every reader's taste: "In our age of rapid technology and the jolly, undiscriminating ephemeralizing of culture and knowledge, an insistence upon high stakes a desire to ask the big questions can seem quaint, or passe, or simply a little embarrassing." The ending of her take on "The Door" demonstrates her even greater talent for bringing her essays to a poignant, haunting close, with a few final phrases that distill the meaning of all that preceded them and send a kind of shudder through your mind and heart. If she were a gymnast, she'd be renowned for sticking her landings. The essays in "Reflections" reflect a background that is geographically expansive, privileged and bereft of big, messy drama the word "genteel" kept popping into my brain. "Like many of us, I'm a mongrel, a hybrid, made up of many things," she writes in the title essay. "My childhood was itinerant, my identity complicated. My father was French, my mother Canadian. I grew up in Sydney, Australia; in Toronto, Canada; and then at boarding school in the United States. I went to graduate school at Cambridge University, where I met my British husband." That doesn't make Messud the most relatable narrator, but it affords her a panoramic perch and allows her, for example, to take readers on an extensive, evocative tour of Beirut in "The Road to Damascus." With that essay and others, she explores two themes two conflicts in particular: the impermanence of human circumstances versus the durability of art, and the evanescence of experience versus the tenacity of memory. In her memory, her mother and her father's sister live large; so she immortalizes them in "Two Women," about what strange bedfellows some in laws make. A long ago friend's disappearance endures as a lesson in people's inscrutability that she imparts in "Teenage Girls." Messud makes the point that every relationship we've had and every residence that we've inhabited survives in the scrapbooks that constitute ourselves: We leave them far behind and never leave them at all. "It is wrong to think of them as past: Sydney, then, was just beginning; and Toronto was, in our lives, a constant, and then, for a time, a home; just as Toulon, my father's family's chosen place, remained until just a few years ago my life's one unbroken link," she writes in "Then." "They were concurrent presents, and presences, and somehow because of this, and magically, they have remained always present. If I crossed the ocean today, would I not find my childhood friends dangling from the monkey bars, their ties flailing and their crested hats in a pile upon the grass?" Now those friends, those monkey bars, those ties and those hats exist not just in her thoughts but in these pages, where they're fixed forever. That's why Messud writes. It gives the past a future. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Vernon Schmidt, who has been a repairman for almost 35 years, recommends calling authorized servicers for repairs. I'M going to tell you the tale of my refrigerator breakdown and recovery. Now, I'm not devoting a column to this because I believe you are all so fascinated by the life of my appliances. But rather, I learned some valuable lessons on the way, and I thought my mistakes and discoveries might help others. It all started when I opened our refrigerator on Monday as I usually do on a school morning half asleep and took out the milk. It dawned on me that the milk felt warmer than usual, but I didn't really think much about it. After getting my sons off to school and puttering around, I went back to the refrigerator again, and when I reached in this time, a light bulb went off (in the refrigerator, yes, but also in my head). The refrigerator was functioning but nowhere near as cold as it should be. I opened the freezer (we have an LG with French doors on the top and a freezer on the bottom). The freezer was appropriately cold. I checked the control panel. The numbers that typically show the temperature for the refrigerator didn't light up. I pushed the buttons. The control panel beeped, but nothing happened. This didn't look good. So I checked the warranty. The manufacturer's warranty of a year had, of course, lapsed six months earlier. And even more dismally, for some reason, we had not bought the refrigerator with our credit card, but with a debit card. This was unusual for us, and a mistake. That is because major credit cards will often double the life of a manufacturer's warranty. But debit cards usually do not. "Always make major purchases with a credit card," Mark Kotkin, director of survey research at Consumer Reports, told me later. Then I searched the Internet looking for similar problems to see if there was a simple fix. I couldn't find one. I called the number for LG service, which, since I was out of warranty, referred me to Sears, where we bought the refrigerator. The repairman couldn't get to us until Wednesday. And if he didn't have the part we needed, we might have to wait a week or more until it was fixed. But I was offered an extended warranty, at the price of 270, that would cover all repairs up to 500 and be good for a year. I questioned the customer service representative closely. Were parts excluded? No. Labor? No. It would definitely cover the repair I was calling about? Yes. I am not usually an advocate of extended warranties. Mr. Kotkin said that they were almost never worth the money. And since Sears wouldn't allow me to talk directly to a technician to explain the problem, I was still looking at a long wait for a repair. So I started calling around to find an appliance repair shop that fixes my brand. I found one nearby, which could send someone out in a few hours for 65, which is pretty reasonable in the New York area. The repairman showed up, spent less than 10 minutes looking at it and told me it was an expensive computer problem that could cost half the price of the refrigerator. This freaked me out. I told him I would think about it, paid him his fee and panicked. So I decided to turn to someone who had given me good advice in the past Vernon Schmidt, who has been a repairman for almost 35 years and is the author of a self published book, "Appliance Handbook for Women: Simple Enough Even a Man Can Understand." Unfortunately, he is based in Indiana, so he couldn't pop over. But I asked him if he had any suggestions. "Did the repair guy call LG?" he asked me. No. Was he an authorized servicer for LG? he also asked me. Well, he told me he could repair the LG refrigerators, I replied. Not the same. Mr. Schmidt, who is authorized to service LG and many other brands told me that an authorized servicer has to go to annual training workshops to learn to repair that particular brand. In addition, as an authorized servicer, he can avail himself of a dedicated technical helpline on the spot to resolve issues. "It's not like the old days," Mr. Schmidt said. "Everyone needs technical help nowadays," because appliances change so often and are so sophisticated. And that technician on the other end of the phone is required to keep a record of the problem, he said. So if it crops again, the history can be traced. Oh. So, I called LG back and got a list of authorized repair shops. I made a few calls and managed to reach one shop. The people on the phone did seem pretty knowledgeable. They figured that if it was the problem they thought it was, it would cost about 150 for the part, plus labor. Much less than the 500 or 600 the repairman predicted. The charge for coming out to look at my refrigerator was high though, 80 plus tax. So all in, it would be about the same as the cost of the Sears extended warranty. Now I was in a quandary. Do I go with the faster service? But what if the refrigerator had trouble again in six months? Wouldn't it be better to go with the extended warranty at this point if it was all going to cost the same? In the end, a very nice service man from Sears came out. He started by putting his ear up to the refrigerator, like a doctor listening to a patient's chest. He was seeing if the compressor was running. From there, he set out to investigate every possible problem by delving deep into the appliance's insides. He worked diligently for more than an hour. The disparity between the first repairman and the second was the difference between a casual once over and a thorough physical exam. In the end, it was neither the computer nor the other possible problems that the authorized repair service people had diagnosed over the phone. It was a loose connection to the fan. Job done. So here's what I hope you all learned from my experience: PUse your credit card to buy any appliance. PCheck to see exactly what benefits your credit card offers in terms of warranties and other issues related to large purchases. PSearch the Web to see if anyone has reported a similar problem and found a solution. It didn't work this time for me, but it has in the past. PIf you don't have a trusted repairman, at least use an authorized servicer who has some training with that specific brand. If I didn't have the extended warranty, the service job would have cost about 175, the Sears repairman told me. So I was out of pocket about 95 for the extended warranty. But at least I have coverage for the next year. Call me cynical, though. Why do I think the next refrigerator problem may come up, say, 13 months from now? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
SFMOMA is now having a wider discussion of race, and on Tuesday, the board chairman sent an email to staff in which he said the director "is committed to transforming SFMOMA into an anti racist institution." The senior curator resigned amid anger among staff that boiled over when he used the term "reverse discrimination" and now the museum is trying to address additional staff complaints. SAN FRANCISCO The meeting was about safety protocols in the time of coronavirus. There was talk of masks, sanitizers and Plexiglas barriers. But that is not what people will remember about the all staff Zoom call at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday, July 7. In its waning moments, during a Q. and A. part of the call, Gary Garrels, the museum's longest tenured curator, was asked about comments attributed to him in a changethemuseum Instagram post in June. The post recounted that when Mr. Garrels had earlier spoken about "acquisitions by POC artists," he had added, "Don't worry, we will definitely still continue to collect white artists." Mr. Garrels responded to this on July 7, saying that his comments were "a little bit skewed." He then explained efforts on "broadly diversifying the collection." "We have put a lot of focus," he continued, "on collecting women, Black artists, first nation, Native, L.G.B.T.Q., Latino and so on." He added: "I'm certainly not a believer in any kind of discrimination. And there are many white artists, many men who are making wonderful, wonderful work." When a staff member suggested that Mr. Garrels's comment was equivalent to saying, "All lives matter," Mr. Garrels responded: "I'm sorry, I don't agree. I think reverse discrimination " What he said after that was drowned out by gasps and someone saying, "He didn't say that!" Five days later, Mr. Garrels, 63, senior curator of painting and sculpture, resigned. It is a decision that has drawn criticism from his many defenders in the art world, cheers from many in a museum staff that declared him a symbol of an objectionable status quo and a renewed focus on the term "reverse discrimination." Used by opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the expression, said Justin Gomer, assistant professor of American studies at California State University at Long Beach, "has been one of the most effective ways to undercut efforts to achieve racial equality." He said, "It was popularized in the 1970s by civil rights opponents." Leigh Raiford, associate professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, called the term "the hollow cry of the privileged when they find themselves challenged to share power." And even some of Mr. Garrels's defenders are surprised he used it. Kevin Beasley, a Black artist who views Mr. Garrels as a supporter, and credits him with collecting his work for the museum, said that when he heard Mr. Garrels's comment he "was shocked," and wondered, "Is this Gary? It didn't make sense." But supporters of the curator say that his use of the term, which Mr. Garrels has apologized for, did not warrant his abrupt departure from a post in which he had a record of supporting artists of color and others. Just last year, in a move he championed, the museum sold a Mark Rothko painting for 50.1 million and used the money to acquire works by women and people of color including Frank Bowling, Alma Thomas, Sam Gilliam and Mickalene Thomas. Gary Garrels championed the sale of a Rothko to acquire works by women and people of color, but his remark on "reverse discrimination" led to his resignation. J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times "I am deeply saddened that Gary is viewed as having any racial prejudice toward artists," said Komal Shah, a museum trustee who said Mr. Garrels had helped establish many young artists of color in the collection. "In my experience it simply isn't true." Support came from outside the museum as well. "Gary Garrels is not a white supremacist," Tom Eccles, executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, said. "He has championed the voices of those who were in the margins." But others say Mr. Garrels did not just momentarily misspeak. Many staff members say they recalled remarks he made during a panel discussion about female artists in January in which he spoke about "parity" for women and that it would take time and added: "The other thing I have to say is I reassured artists we will continue to collect white men. There are a lot of great women artists but also still a lot of great men out there as well." Aruna D'Souza, the author of "Whitewalling: Art, Race Protest in 3 Acts," said in an interview that Mr. Garrels's remark "wasn't just a slip of the tongue." His message, she said, was: "'Don't worry, we can keep collecting men, too. Things aren't going to change that much.'" "Gary Garrels's comment," she continued, "was upsetting because he was making it explicit, whiteness will still be at the center of the institution." Mr. Garrels is perhaps the most prominent figure to tumble so far as art museums around the country, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art, grapple with cultural tumult amid nationwide unrest after the death of George Floyd. In addition to Mr. Garrels's 19 years at SFMOMA, he had also been a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. After the Zoom meeting, an anonymous group of former museum employees calling themselves xSFMOMA started a petition that drew several hundred supporters and called out Mr. Garrels for using "white supremacist and racist language." The petition demanded he resign. Then the museum's store employees sent an email to the executive staff denouncing Mr. Garrels's comments as racist. "We are not asking for an apology we're asking for action and accountability," the letter said. The next day, Mr. Garrels lost some essential support when an unsigned email to staff from "Members of the Curatorial Division" was sent, saying they "collectively" disavowed Mr. Garrels's reverse discrimination comments. They added, "We will no longer accept such racism denial; unilateral power over systems, money and colleagues; and comments, made publicly and internally, that are offensive and reckless." It demanded "actions and accountability for Gary's conduct." Mr. Garrels resigned the next day, apologizing to the museum staff for using "an offensive term." He wrote, "I believe that true diversity and the fight for real and meaningful equality is the important battle of our time." Then he said, "I can no longer effectively work at SFMOMA and so I have offered my resignation." One museum employee of color who asked to not be named because of fears of losing a job said it felt like time for Mr. Garrels to leave. "We were trying to make all these changes," the employee said. "He was an obstacle to that. We were working so hard for so long and for him to make these statements, it was so disheartening." Mr. Garrels's departure was part of an ongoing debate about racial equality in the staffing and the collecting at the museum, which draws close to one million visitors annually. The staff, which numbered nearly 500 before a coronavirus closure and layoffs, was 59 percent white, 16 percent Latino, 12 percent Asian and 4 percent Black (the remaining staffers identified with two or more races), a spokeswoman said. Maria Jenson, executive director of SOMArts, a San Francisco organization that supports art for social change, and a former SFMOMA public partnerships manager, said the resignation was a "reflection of much larger issues." Since his resignation, the museum has outlined a number of steps it is taking in response to the criticism. Last week, it announced it will be hiring a director of diversity. It also promised to investigate new and old discrimination complaints, and to revise the exhibition review process to consider diversity, equity and inclusion. Last Thursday, the museum curators, who had denounced Mr. Garrels, sent a letter to Mr. Benezra in which they said, "We write to voice our support for you and your understanding of the need for change." On Tuesday, the museum's board chairman, Robert J. Fisher, sent an email to his staff in which he said the board supports Mr. Benezra, who, he wrote, "is committed to transforming SFMOMA into an anti racist institution." "Our staff is hurt, exhausted and frustrated," Mr. Fisher said. "They have been courageous in voicing their experiences of racism and inequity. We are deeply sorry for the pain and anger this has caused our wonderful team and our community." "We hear your calls for change," he continued, "and are united in the commitment to respond with action." Some of the announced plans address demands made by No Neutral Alliance and the museum said it was trying to schedule a meeting with members of the group. And for now, there are no more Zoom meetings. Last week, Davida Lindsay Bell, the museum's chief human resources officer, sent an email saying all staff Zoom meetings would be postponed "until we resolve and improve format and logistics." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Creatures resembling dragons dwell deep within the caves of Slovenia. And now with the help of biologists, a new brood is set to hatch at an unusual aquarium, accessible by underground train. This crystal clear egg is one of three recently laid by an olm, a cave amphibian whose long sinuous body, stubby legs and frilly gills led people in the 15th century to believe it was the offspring of dragons. Though it does not breathe fire, the olm has several attributes fitting a creature of mythology. It can live as long as a hundred years and survive without food for 10. It is blind, but hunts using its incredible sense of hearing and smell, and it can detect electric and magnetic fields. Female olms only reproduce once every six years and it takes them until the age of 15 to become sexually mature. The aquarium, located at a tourist site known as Postojna Cave, last expected baby olms in 2013. But none of those eggs hatched and several were eaten by other olms in the tank, explained Saso Weldt, a biologist who works there. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Cue the Johnny Cash music. On Sunday, a "ring of fire" eclipse will blaze over parts of South America and the southern and western tips of Africa. Scientifically known as an annular eclipse, this solar phenomenon occurs when the moon moves in between the sun and the Earth but is too far away to completely block the sun as it would during a total solar eclipse. "Because you have this thin little ring around the edge of the moon where the sun pokes out, it gives it that ring of fire effect," said C. Alex Young, a solar astrophysicist from NASA. The moon's orbit around the Earth is elliptical, meaning that at some points it is farther away from the Earth than at others, according to Dr. Young. Annular eclipses occur when the moon is at or near its greatest distance, known as apogee. The countries with the best chance to watch the "ring of fire" burn burn burn include Chile and Argentina in South America as well as Angola, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa. They are along something called the path of annularity. That's where the moon's shadow is cast on Earth, and it varies between 18 miles and 55 miles in width as it moves. Those outside of the line will be able to see a partial solar eclipse, which looks like some galactic giant took a bite out of the sun. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Ben Cross in London in 2012. After the success of "Chariots of Fire," he tried to avoid being typecast. Ben Cross, the actor best known to one generation for playing a determined runner in the 1981 Academy Award winning film "Chariots of Fire" and to another audience decades later for his role in a reboot of "Star Trek," died on Tuesday at a hospital in Vienna. He was 72. His daughter, Lauren, confirmed the death but did not specify the cause, though she said it was not Covid 19. "Chariots of Fire" tells the true story of two track stars representing Britain in the 1924 Paris Olympics who are vying for medals and world records but also for something greater. Mr. Cross played Harold Abrahams, a furiously competitive athlete and a son of Jewish immigrants who fights anti Semitism as a Cambridge student while seeking visibility in Anglo Saxon society. In 2009, Mr. Cross appeared in the "Star Trek" reboot playing Spock's father, Sarek, who imparts this bit of advice to this son: "What is necessary is never unwise." In between Mr. Cross worked in television and film for decades. At his death he had just completed shooting "The Devil's Light," a forthcoming film about an exorcism, according to his representative, Tracy Mapes. She said he would also be seen in the coming movie "Last Letter From Your Lover," about a journalist who discovers a series of letters depicting a star crossed love affair from the 1960s. In a 1983 interview, Mr. Cross described his acting style as "a method, not The Method," referring to the school of acting that promotes emotionally and psychologically naturalistic performances. "The whole thing about acting is that you draw on other people's experiences," he said. "I watch them and I listen to them. How I play it is my instinctive interpretation." Harry Bernard Cross was born on Dec. 16, 1947, in London. His father was an apartment house doorman who struggled to support the family. The younger Mr. Cross quit school at age 15 and worked as a window cleaner, a butcher's boy and a dishwasher until eventually landing work as a theater stagehand. After roles in regional theater and a brief part in Richard Attenborough's 1977 epic war film "A Bridge Too Far," Mr. Cross got his break when he joined the cast of a Broadway musical, "I Love My Wife," which had transferred to London's West End. Then came another musical, "Chicago," in which he was performing when he read for a role in "Chariots of Fire." After getting the part he trained daily for two and a half months to prepare for it. The film co starred Ian Charleson as Eric Liddell, a Scottish Presbyterian missionary who refuses to take part in the Games on the Sabbath. Mr. Charleson died of AIDS in 1990 at 40. (The movie also starred Ian Holm, who died in June.) "Chariots of Fire" won the Academy Award for best picture. Vincent Canby of The New York Times declared the film, with a stirring Oscar winning score by the Greek composer Vangelis, "unashamedly rousing, invigorating" and a "very cleareyed evocation of values of the old fashioned sort that are today more easily satirized than celebrated." Mr. Canby described Mr. Cross as "handsome in a Byronic way" and wrote that he was "tough, abrasive and completely believable as the low born but richly bred Cambridge student who fights for his rights with a mixture of extroverted charm and naked ambition, which shocks the Caius College dons." Mr. Cross and Mr. Charleson "are so good," Mr. Canby wrote, "that one wonders why it's taken even this long for them to receive the kind of attention that each will certainly enjoy from this film forward." Mr. Cross went on to gather numerous credits in films, television series and TV movies, but his "Chariots of Fire" performance would be his high water mark. Mr. Cross's marriages to Penny Butler, in 1977, and to Michele Morth, in 1996, ended in divorce. He married Deyana Boneva in 2018. In addition to his daughter, Lauren, from his first marriage, he is survived by his wife as well as a son from his first marriage, Theo, and three grandchildren. After the success of "Chariots of Fire," Mr. Cross seemed to go out of his way to avoid being typecast as a Harold Abrahams kind of character again. After a man spotted him at a New York hotel in 1983 and said, "Say, aren't you that guy from 'Chariots of Fire?,'" Mr. Cross responded by deliberately lighting a cigarette in front of him. "I wanted to disillusion him," Mr. Cross said. "I am a smoker, and until people stop identifying me with 'Chariots of Fire,' I will continue to smoke." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
SAN FRANCISCO Uber is the subject of a United States Department of Justice inquiry over a program that it used to deceive regulators who were trying to shut down its ride hailing service. The inquiry concerns Uber's use of a software tool called Greyball, which the company developed in part to aid entrance into new markets where its service was not permitted. The tool allowed Uber to deploy what was essentially a fake version of its app to evade law enforcement agencies that were cracking down on its service. The New York Times reported on Greyball in March, raising questions about the legality of the practice. After the report, Uber said it would prohibit employees from using the software to thwart regulators. The federal inquiry was disclosed in a transportation audit conducted by the City of Portland, Ore., published last week. In the audit, Portland officials said they had been notified by the United States attorney's office for the Northern District of California about the existence of the inquiry. The City of Portland said it was cooperating with the inquiry. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
new video loaded: Hike to Find the Magic of Santorini | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
BalletCollective's program "Invisible Divide" leaves a number of burning images in the mind, chiefly ones that revealingly illustrate modern masculinity. Thanks to the choreographer Troy Schumacher, the three male dancers Harrison Coll (who has moments worthy of James Dean), David Prottas and Taylor Stanley register with powerful individuality. The way they do so in the contexts both of women and of one another is arresting, fresh, exploratory. The excitement is heightened by live, new music. There are four scores, all commissioned for the company and all good, played at the Skirball Center at New York University for this two night engagement by the 10 players of Hotel Elefant (the instrumentation of each score is especially fine) and composed by Ellis Ludwig Leone and Mark Dancigers. And stronger than any one dancer is the sense of modern quasi adolescent community, as in so many of the ballets of Jerome Robbins. The climate is often that of a youth club, with steps being passed around like wildfire. These young people don't yet know who they are; phrases are all stops and starts; body language is informal; everything is an investigation. Mr. Schumacher and his seven dancers all belong to New York City Ballet, for which he has now also choreographed twice. The program takes its name, "Invisible Divide," from one of Wednesday's two world premieres, an ensemble featuring Mr. Coll. Another premiere, "The Last Time This Ended," is a duet for Mr. Prottas and Mr. Stanley. The other two pieces were seen in BalletCollective's 2014 season: "All That We See," for five dancers, and "Dear and Blackbirds," a male female duet for Ashley Laracey and Mr. Coll. All the performers look marvelous; Vanessa Upson, the singer in "Invisible Divide," makes an impression of appealing intensity. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The next round of fashion shows will be virtual fashion shows. This is not in doubt. The British Fashion Council announced at the end of April that it would be combining its men's and women's shows during what used to be London Fashion Week: Men's in June. It also plans to roll out an entirely digital "cultural fashion week platform" for designers to use as they see fit. Shanghai and Moscow went digital for their fashion weeks in late March and April. Ermenegildo Zegna, the Italian men's wear powerhouse, is forgoing ye olde schedule entirely and doing its own digital thing in July, for which it has a whole new word: "phygital" (that's physical space and digital technologies). What does it mean? On Friday, an answer of sorts was provided. The occasion was Fashion Unites, a YouTube streamed edition of CR Runway, the special fashion show run by Carine Roitfeld, the former French Vogue editor and Tom Ford muse, and her son, Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld, the president and chief executive of CR Fashion Book Ltd., to raise money for the amfAR Fund to Fight Covid 19. Billed as "the first of its kind" by its host, Derek Blasberg, the head of fashion and beauty for YouTube, it was hailed as "a high fashion runway show entirely from home." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The great masters of theater know how to place a smile on your face, then wipe it off. You thought that was funny? Happy? Sweet? Now see the heartbreak within; now see how comedy contains tragedy. A phenomenal example of this happens in George Balanchine's "Divertimento From 'Le Baiser de la Fee'" (1972), which returns to repertory at New York City Ballet on Saturday. Most of this ballet is seemingly plotless an apparently bright dance fest for a man and woman, with a female corps de ballet swelling the forces onstage to heighten the festive spirit. The mood is that of a wedding celebration. Do the bridal couple show signs of distance as well as intimacy? Well, it's easy to overlook them. Are there signs of inner conflict in the hero when he dances alone? Certainly, but they seem to pass. Then, however, comes the finale, which changes everything onstage. Inexplicably yet inexorably, the nuptial embraces between heroine and hero become valedictory. Then, after a brief parting, there's a heart stopping image. Like a thunderbolt on a powerful chord in the music the ballerina, crossing the stage, arrives once more with the hero, but now clinging to his waist, her head and shoulders arched away from him in a deep backbend, as caught in the photo above. He, with his arms raised as if in astonishment, now looks down at her. From then on, however, their eyes never meet. What follows is more heart stopping yet. The ballerina, who still holds that backbend, and her partner gaze behind themselves and yet they are propelled in the opposite direction, by her legs, which stretch, flourish and, walking on point, slowly lead the way. It's as if she contains two different forces at the same time: the lover who holds on to him as if in despair and the fate figure that leads him where neither wants to go. Kneeling, they embrace again and again. But the mood is now one of resignation and farewell. In an uncanny masterstroke, the female corps de ballet returns to the stage in a single diagonal line heading straight for the lovers, making them separate (again and again) even as they kneel. The corps de ballet re forms, becoming an avenue or forest through which hero and heroine walk slowly on separate paths, looking for each other in vain. But the ballet has already implied that the forces that part them come from within themselves from their own sense of tragic destiny. Balanchine added this finale in 1974. Its music comes not from the "Divertimento" but from Stravinsky's complete "Le Baiser de la Fee" (1928), a narrative work in four scenes. Stravinsky used elements from multiple Tchaikovsky scores; this finale dwells on the desolate melody of the song "None but the lonely heart." The ballet's hero is implicitly an artist singled out from birth by the inexorable fairy (or muse) who can never enjoy the ordinary life and loves of other men. And in that final scene, the fairy lures him deeper into her realm while his fiancee is left alone in anguish. Balanchine, who first staged the complete "Baiser" in 1937, found it was close to his heart. He staged it for several companies up to 1950, but he seems never to have been satisfied with his solution to that finale. Just as Shakespeare has Cassius say to Brutus "The fault ... is not in our stars/But in our selves," so Balanchine, in 1974, here eliminates the fairy the supernatural and shows the lovers parting because of their own natures. As the ballet ends, man and woman are both walking backward, slowly, in separate zones of the stage, facing up to the heavens with arms stretched out both pleading and resigned. I have sometimes called Balanchine one of the two greatest dramatists of the 20th century (Samuel Beckett is the other). The ending of this "Baiser" Divertimento always confirms my conviction. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Donnie Fritts, a songwriter, singer and piano player who helped shape both the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Ala., in the 1960s and the outlaw country sensibility that bucked Nashville norms in the 1970s, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Birmingham, Ala. He was 76. His death was confirmed by his friend and musical collaborator Andreas Werner, who said Mr. Fritts had been in declining health and had recently undergone heart surgery . Though better known to enthusiasts of American roots music than to the general public and probably better known as the pianist in Kris Kristofferson's band than as a performer in his own right Mr. Fritts was a creative force in Southern popular music for more than two decades . As part of a close circle of songwriters working in Northern Alabama in the '60s, he wrote or co wrote signature songs for the likes of the soul singer Arthur Alexander ("Rainbow Road," with Dan Penn) and the Box Tops ("Choo Choo Train," with Eddie Hinton). "Choo Choo Train" is also featured on the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino's latest movie, "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
BRITAIN AT BAY The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938 1941 By Alan Allport "In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. ... History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes." Those were Winston Churchill's words in one of the greatest, though least remembered, speeches of his life, his elegy for Neville Chamberlain days after Chamberlain had died in November 1940. They remain singularly apt for the years before and after Churchill spoke. That story, of how the British found themselves at war and then how they survived it, is the subject of Alan Allport's "Britain at Bay." The author of several books, including a valuable study of British servicemen in 1939 45, Allport begins with a chapter called "Shire Folk." This allusion to Tolkien becomes a riff on which he then plays throughout the book, and an unfortunate one for this reviewer, who has since boyhood suffered from acute Hobbitophobia. But the point Allport wants to make is a good one: The British saw themselves as a kindly, gentle, puzzled people, like those cute little critters in the Shire, which was not how others always saw them. In a sharp turn, when this unusually informative and stimulating book really gets going, Allport takes two snapshots of violence. Coventry was bombed by the Luftwaffe in November 1940, but it had already been bombed by the Irish Republican Army in August 1939, when five people were killed by an explosive planted in a shopping street. The English had tried to forget or ignore Ireland since 1921, as Allport reminds us in a chapter called "Ulster Kristallnacht" (he likes provocative phrases: Another chapter is called "American Lebensraum"). A second snapshot, of Palestine during the Arab Revolt of 1936 39, shows shocking reprisals by British soldiers. If this sheds a sharp light on English complacency and self esteem, Allport queries other myths as well, like "the Hungry Thirties": By the end of the decade the country "was far more prosperous than it had been a generation earlier." One man who could take much credit for that was Neville Chamberlain, as chancellor of the Exchequer from 1931 to 1937, and before that as minister of health from 1924 to 1929, when he had been responsible for much more of the system of public welfare than is usually remembered. Instead he is reviled for trying and failing to prevent war, and Allport joins in, calling Chamberlain "vain, mean ... spiteful, obstinate." They say there's no disputing taste and, just as I don't share Allport's fondness for the Shire, I don't share his loathing for Chamberlain, who had another side, a deep love of nature: the man who, as a chancellor wrestling with a severe crisis, could write to The London Times in January 1933 to say that, walking through St. James's Park, he noticed something he had never seen before in London, "a gray wagtail ... picking small insects out of the cracks in the dam." 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. Not that his affinity with the natural world did him any good when he had to deal with Hitler, who was quite beyond his comprehension. Allport correctly recognizes that the Munich Agreement was an expression of Woodrow Wilson's principle of self determination, and he makes the interesting point that "skepticism about democracy in the 1930s was felt particularly strongly among those who opposed the National Government's appeasement of Hitler." Richard Law, an M.P. who bitterly attacked the Munich Agreement, thought that the enfranchisement of women had "brought nothing but degradation and dishonor to politics," while Churchill, who had opposed the vote for women until 1918, had "surprisingly complicated" views about democracy. Quite a few other received ideas are deftly skewered. Churchill was wrongheaded about the kind of forces and arms needed. "A larger land army was the one rearmament measure the British could have carried out that just possibly might have made Hitler pause for thought in the 1930s," Allport writes, but Churchill was just as unwilling to support that as any appeaser. And this sets the scene for the Finest Hour. Churchill's ascent to power was as remarkable as it may have been providential, since in his 40 years in Parliament he had become one of the most disliked and distrusted politicians of his age. If he became an admired national leader it was "because he happened to fill a role that very badly needed filling at that moment." While the 1940 triptych of Dunkirk, Battle of Britain and the Blitz became the founding epic for our damp little island ever since, there is another and important theme here. Latterly the Americans seem to have persuaded themselves that Churchill's Finest Hour was part of their own story: See the runaway success three years ago of the films "Dunkirk" and the ludicrous "Darkest Hour," and also what Allport calls saccharine tales of Franklin and Winston. In fact, Franklin Roosevelt had met Churchill in 1918, and disliked him. He was now told by his ambassador in London, the horrible old corrupt anti Semite and defeatist Joe Kennedy, that Churchill was useless and England was finished. Nor was Kennedy alone. In late June 1940 a poll found that only one American in three expected the British to win the war, and Roosevelt himself was not much more confident until later in the year. Allport has some sharp and well chosen words about Americans who deride Chamberlain, "flattering themselves and their own fortitude in comparison." He adds that "the United States was going to have a very fortunate Second World War," suffering relatively modest casualties before emerging hugely richer and more powerful from a war that bankrupted England. By the end of 1940, and after the first months of the Blitz (or "The Scouring of the Shire Folk"; oh well), more British civilians than soldiers died, as was still true in late 1942. Quick success in North Africa was followed by endless defeat, there, in Greece, and in Crete in May 1941. (A personal memory: My mother's brother, my Uncle Bob, was one of more than 10,000 British soldiers left behind in Crete to spend four years in prison camps.) Besides, there were two contrasting campaigns. Bombing Germany, not surprisingly, was popular with the British ("R.A.F.'s giving it to 'im worse than what we 'ad it"), but it was a disastrous failure for more than two years, epitomized by a raid in September 1941 that killed 36 Berliners while 15 aircraft with 87 crew members were lost. Even when the kindly English finally destroyed every town in Germany and killed hundreds of thousands of women and children, it made little difference to the outcome of the war. But the Battle of the Atlantic was crucial, heroic and ultimately triumphant. Churchill claimed afterward that the U boat threat was "the only thing that ever really frightened me," forgetting what he had said in 1939, that "the submarine has been mastered." Allport calls Churchill "the most self assertive, disputatious and dogmatic prime minister in history," demonstrating that his military judgment before and during the war was often wildly wrong. In June 1941 Hitler invaded Russia, ultimately sealing his fate, although that was far from clear at the time, and in August Churchill and Roosevelt met off the coast of Newfoundland. For over a year "Churchill had been assuring his colleagues in London that Roosevelt was itching to fight," Allport says, but after the meeting he "had to come to terms with the possibility that the president really meant it when he said he wanted to keep America out of the war." He still didn't go to war in September, when American warships were fighting U boats, which Allport calls one of three critical episodes that month. Another was the private agreement of the Japanese leadership that war might now be necessary. And the third was the decision taken by Churchill and his colleagues to proceed with what a group of scientists had said would be feasible, making a bomb from uranium that was "equivalent ... to 1,800 tons of TNT" and whose radioactive aftereffect "would make places near to where the bomb exploded dangerous to human life." The gentle English became the first people "to commit to a nuclear weapons program," Allport writes. He ends his valuable book a little bathetically but correctly: "The war was going to be very different from this point onwards." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, spent much of this year promoting investigations into Hunter Biden, trying fruitlessly to show corruption on the part of Joseph R. Biden Jr. Now Mr. Johnson, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, is more focused on another narrative sympathetic to President Trump if not to established science: that the reaction to the coronavirus pandemic has been overblown and that public health officials have been too quick to come to conclusions about the best ways to deal with it. So on Tuesday, for not the first time, Mr. Johnson lent his committee's platform to the promotion of unproven drugs and dubious claims about stemming the spread of the coronavirus while giving prominence to a vaccine skeptic. In a move that led even most members of his own party on the committee to avoid the hearing, Mr. Johnson called witnesses who promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. The National Institutes of Health guidelines recommend against using either drug to treat coronavirus patients except in clinical trials. Hydroxychloroquine is an antimalarial drug that President Trump has heavily promoted but has shown disappointing results in many clinical trials. Ivermectin is used to treat parasites in humans as well as to prevent heartworms in dogs; research on its effectiveness in treating the coronavirus has been mixed. Despite the regulatory warnings and the lack of substantial scientific evidence for their efficacy, Mr. Johnson claimed that "discouraging and in some cases prohibiting the research and use of drugs that have been safely used for decades has cost tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people their lives." Just three other senators on the 14 member committee attended Tuesday's session "such low participation," Mr. Johnson acknowledged at one point. Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the top Democrat on the committee, criticized the hearing in opening remarks but left before asking questions. On the Republican side, only Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Josh Hawley of Missouri made appearances. For about two and a half hours, the participants continuously challenged public health consensus, sometimes advancing inaccurate and previously debunked claims. One witness, Dr. Ramin Oskoui, a cardiologist in Washington, argued that "masks do not work" and "social distancing doesn't work" by citing a recent study published in The New England Journal of Medicine. The study tracked virus transmission among Marine Corps recruits who underwent quarantine. But two of the study's authors refuted Dr. Oskoui's interpretation. Rather, they said, the study showed that nonpharmaceutical interventions like masks and social distancing cannot be relied on alone to eliminate transmission. "For me, drawing the conclusion from our study that masking is not effective is like claiming that car brakes are not effective in preventing crashes because accidents still occur when they are used," said Dr. Stuart C. Sealfon, the senior author of the study and a professor at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "This is either a mistaken or a deliberately misleading interpretation of the results of the study." Dr. Sealfon added: "In view of the preponderance of evidence in the scientific literature supporting the benefits of mask wearing in reducing the transmission of SARS COV 2, no reasonable scientist would conclude that these measures are ineffective. They are very effective, but they are not foolproof." Throughout the hearing, Dr. Oskoui also promoted prescribing zinc and vitamin D. He said that the United States should follow the example of Britain and distribute vitamin D supplements to older people. The N.I.H. also recommends against using zinc to treat the coronavirus except in clinical trials. The British government has offered 2.5 million people free vitamin D to keep bones and muscle healthy, especially as more people stayed indoors, but the National Health Service has noted that "there is currently not enough evidence to support taking vitamin D to prevent or treat coronavirus." Dr. Jane M. Orient, a prominent skeptic of vaccines, also cast doubt on mask wearing, suggesting that "maybe instead of putting masks on everybody, we should be putting lids on the toilet or putting Clorox into it before you flush it." While there is some evidence that toilet bowls can be infectious, the virus is most commonly distributed through close contact with others, and masks do offer some protection. Dr. Orient also cited "192 studies compiled on hydroxychloroquine with all showing some benefit when used early." That appeared to be an exaggerated reference to a database of studies gathered by an anonymous group. Of those studies, about 40 were categorized as researching use of hydroxychloroquine as an early treatment, and about two dozen of those concluding that the drug demonstrated "positive" effects. Mr. Hawley criticized lockdowns as harmful to mental health, accurately citing a government survey showing that a quarter of young adults seriously thought about suicide in June. He then repeated an inaccurate claim from Mr. Trump that the World Health Organization no longer recommends lockdowns. Mr. Johnson himself echoed praise for hydroxychloroquine, claiming that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also "talked" about the drug. While it is true that Dr. Fauci has discussed hydroxychloroquine in the pandemic, he has warned against its use. As the hearing drew to a close, the senator offered his opinion of the severity of the pandemic. "It's certainly worse than the flu, but is it that much worse to cause that much economic devastation with that severe of a human toll?" Mr. Johnson asked. That prompted almost immediate pushback from one of his own witnesses, Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya of Stanford University School of Medicine, who told the senator: "It is worse than the flu." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
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