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Margo Lion, center, the lead producer of the Broadway musical "Hairspray," with the show's stars Harvey Fierstein, left, and Marissa Jaret Winokur in Mr. Fierstein's dressing room at the Neil Simon Theater in 2004. Margo Lion, a theater producer who was largely responsible for bringing "Jelly's Last Jam" and "Hairspray" to Broadway and played a major role in other important shows, including "Angels in America," died on Friday in Manhattan. She was 75. Her son, Matthew Nemeth, said the cause was a brain aneurysm. She had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, one of several causes she supported, and had a lung transplant in 2018. In an era when big budget theater was an increasingly corporate affair, bankrolled by companies like Disney Theatrical Productions, Ms. Lion was an independent producer, putting up her own money and recruiting other investors to get a show mounted. "She was passionate," the producer Rocco Landesman, who worked with her on "Angels in America" and other shows, said in a telephone interview, "and she was always all in." Unlike some producers, who commit to a show only after it has proved itself in workshops or out of town trial runs, she was known for getting on board early often initiating a project, as she did with "Jelly's Last Jam" (1992) and "Hairspray" (2002). And she stuck with shows she believed in despite the considerable risk of losing money, as most Broadway productions do. She often put up her West Side apartment as collateral in support of a project. "People think I'm nuts," Ms. Lion told The New York Times in 2002. "But once you get going on these shows, you have so much invested in them emotionally, you have to believe completely in the purpose of what you're doing, so you risk the farm." People who worked on her productions knew her to be interested more in the art than in the bottom line. One admirer was Susan Birkenhead, the lyricist for "Jelly's Last Jam," a show about the jazz pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton that Ms. Lion began developing in the mid 1980s. Where other producers might be cautious, Ms. Birkenhead found Ms. Lion to be encouraging and open. "It was a nurturing I'd never experienced in a producer," Ms. Birkenhead told The Baltimore Sun in 1993. "She allowed us to fail, and she allowed us to experiment, and the more innovative and dangerous it became, the more willing she was." Ms. Lion transferred to George Washington University and earned a bachelor's degree in history and politics before going to work on Capitol Hill for Senator Daniel B. Brewster, Democrat of Maryland, and then for Senator Robert F. Kennedy in his New York office. After Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, "I just said I never wanted to do politics again," she said. She became a teacher at the Town School in Manhattan, but when her husband at the time, Ted Nemeth, enrolled in the playwriting division of the Iowa Writers Workshop, she followed him there and rediscovered a love of theater she had nursed in school productions as a girl. "I loved hanging out with the playwrights, the theater world," she said. She and her husband soon separated and later divorced, and, back in New York, she grew more serious about theater. "I really thought I would have three kids, four dogs and be the woman behind the man," she said. "But I found when Ted and I separated that I had all of this energy and this passion to do something." A second cousin, the choreographer Martha Clarke, introduced her to Lyn Austin, who had founded the nonprofit Music Theater Group, which produced idiosyncratic performance works. Ms. Austin brought Ms. Lion aboard. She eventually became a producing director alongside Ms. Austin. "She was the perfect person for me to learn from," Ms. Lion said. "She was a gambler." After five years there she struck out on her own, and by 1984 she was working on a musical tentatively titled "Mr. Jelly Lord." The show, retitled "Jelly's Last Jam," didn't make it to Broadway until eight years later a measure of how long it can take before a new musical reaches the stage. Gregory Hines played Jelly Roll Morton; his wife at the time, Pamela Koslow, was Ms. Lion's co producer. To keep the show afloat during its development, Ms. Lion put up as collateral a Matisse sculpture she had inherited from her parents. "She put that in hock to meet the payroll on 'Jelly,'" Mr. Landesman recalled, and it wasn't the last time. "She must've pawned it half a dozen times. If she was determined to do something, she did it and worried about how later." The show ran for 569 performances. It was nominated for 11 Tony Awards and won three, although it lost out on the prize for best musical to "Crazy for You." By then Ms. Lion already had three Broadway credits, as associate producer on two shows and a producer on one, "I Hate Hamlet" (1991). Her Broadway credit after "Jelly's Last Jam" was atypical, in that it was not a project she had been with from the beginning; it had been developed in productions in San Francisco, London and Los Angeles. The show was Tony Kushner's two part work about AIDS and homosexuality, "Angels in America." Mr. Landesman's company, Jujamcyn Theaters, had won the competition to bring it to New York, and Ms. Lion bought in, becoming a significant voice in the still evolving work as it headed to Broadway. "She really loved discussion," Mr. Kushner said in a phone interview. "And she would have ideas and make suggestions, but they were done with the utmost respect, and always with the preface of, 'I don't know if you're going to want to do this, but here's what I'm thinking.'" Perhaps her biggest contribution to "Angels" was to help recruit George C. Wolfe the young director she had used on "Jelly's Last Jam" to direct the New York production. He had been nominated for the best director Tony for "Jelly," his first Broadway credit, and he went on to win the award for each of the two parts of "Angels in America." "Because of Margo, I had my first Broadway show," Mr. Wolfe said by email. "She was the first person to suggest I direct 'Angels in America.' I was on President Obama's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities because of her. The list goes on and on. She was a true friend, protective, caring, loving, loyal." Ms. Lion had her share of failures, perhaps none bigger than "Triumph of Love," a musical that died on Broadway 85 performances after opening in 1997. But it wouldn't be long before she was struck by the brainstorm that would become her biggest hit. Ms. Lion had seen the movie "Hairspray" (1988), directed by her fellow Baltimorean John Waters, soon after it came out, but admitted that she didn't embrace it initially. "To be candid," she told The Sun in 2002, "I think I wasn't sophisticated enough when I first saw 'Hairspray' to appreciate its many virtues." But in 1998 she rented the video and watched the movie again while recovering from a cold. "Halfway through," she recalled in the 2002 interview with The Times, "I literally said: 'Yes, this is it. I found it.'" She had not yet met Mr. Waters. By the time she did, she had acquired the rights and had sent him the first few songs for the musical, by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. When they finally did meet, Mr. Waters said in a phone interview, she promised him that she would make sure that the musical, about a chubby Baltimore teenager who wins a spot on a local television dance show, stayed true to his voice and vision. "She stuck to her word," he said, "and we were lucky. It went right, right from the beginning. She honored everything about the original intentions of the movie." The musical version of the Waters movie, with a book by Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan, opened on Broadway on Aug. 15, 2002, and ran for almost six and a half years, a total of 2,642 performances. It won eight Tony Awards, including best musical. Ms. Lion's other Broadway producing credits included the August Wilson plays "Seven Guitars" (1996) and "Radio Golf" (2007), as well as "Elaine Stritch at Liberty" (2002), "Caroline, or Change" (2004), "The Wedding Singer" (2006) and "Catch Me if You Can" (2011). Ms. Lion was an early supporter of Barack Obama's presidential candidacy. In 2009 he named her to the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. In addition to her son, she is survived by two grandchildren. In a 1997 interview with The Associated Press, Ms. Lion described what drew her to producing despite the long odds of making money. "There is something that is very compelling about the live theater," she said. "It's a family. You create this very warm community within the production. And, of course, you have the satisfaction of actually making something that may last." Mr. Kushner commended both her nuts and bolts knowledge and her passion. "She was one of those people who really knows how to get things done," he said. "A fantastic practical mind married to a great love." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. A lawsuit against Purdue Pharma has thrown back the curtain on the Sacklers, one of America's wealthiest families. Their company produced OxyContin and subsequently covered up the drug's addictive qualities, according to the suit. Until recently, the Sacklers have been known for their philanthropy more than their business. But that is changing, as Samantha Bee pointed out in a withering segment of "Full Frontal" on Wednesday. She blasted the Sacklers for their displays of wealth (and somehow slipped in a nonsensical but still funny reference to Post Malone, the heavily tattooed rapper). "The Sacklers aren't just rich, they are rich. They have wings named after them at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, an entire museum at Harvard, a center at the Guggenheim and, if the deal goes through, Post Malone will soon be called The Sackler Post Malone. Horrifying and yet somehow an improvement." SAMANTHA BEE, showing a touched up image of Post Malone with the name "Sackler" emblazoned across his chest "One of their children likes to grow herbs as 'a self taught student of traditional medicines.' Ha, traditional medicines! What a great hobby for the 40,000 children in foster care because of their parents' opioid addiction. Maybe they wouldn't be in this predicament if they just crushed up a wholesome yaro root for Mommy's headache. Aw." SAMANTHA BEE, quoting from a 2013 Vogue article on Mortimer and Jacqueline Sackler's vacation home Late night hosts have been having fun all week with the recently surfaced allegation that President Trump asked Michael Cohen, his former lawyer, to threaten schools Trump had attended to prevent them from releasing his transcripts. On Wednesday, Jimmy Kimmel and James Corden each piled on with more jokes about it. "In 2011, Trump challenged President Obama to release his high school records, and then days later someone called Trump's high school and demanded they find and bury Trump's transcripts. So I would bet that Trump's grades were so bad he couldn't even get into Trump University." JIMMY KIMMEL "Including the hush money payment he made to a porn star, this makes two attempts by Trump to hide his secret F's." JAMES CORDEN Michael Cohen on the Stand Again Stephen Colbert is eager to know what went on behind closed doors on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, when Cohen made what was expected to be his last visit to testify before lawmakers. "This morning, Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, returned to Capitol Hill for private testimony to the House Intelligence panel. One thing that might have come up were the checks that Trump wrote to reimburse Cohen for paying off porn star Stormy Daniels. It's an accounting method known in the payroll industry as 'a crime.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "A new study reveals that sales of potato chips, cookies and ice cream have increased in states that have legalized recreational marijuana. I mean, is this a shock? Are we surprised by this? I mean, the real takeaway from this study is that scientists have officially run out of actual things to research. But one snack maker has already jumped on this study, which explains their newest product: Chocolate Mint BBQ Cool Ranch Ice Cream Cookies." JAMES CORDEN "Today is Ash Wednesday, it's the first day of Lent. And with all the terrible things going on right now, this year for Lent I'm not giving up anything. I'm just giving up, in general." JIMMY KIMMEL Amy Hoggart, the resident expert on all things British at "Full Frontal," gave viewers a crash course on the history of Britain's exit from the European Union, known as Brexit. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
LONDON In 1900, a Jewish Lithuanian immigrant named Meshe David Osinsky arrived in Britain alone at the age of 19. He set up a clothes peddling business, adopted the name Montague Burton and then opened a tailoring store in Chesterfield, a northern industrial town. By 1939, Burton had 595 retailers across the country offering made to measure suits for men. By the time World War II broke out, the company made a quarter of all British military uniforms and a third of demobilization suits (issued to soldiers returning home), making it the affordable brand it remains today. Just in time for the men's wear season, his story is one of dozens finally being told in "Moses, Mods and Mr. Fish," a small but powerful exhibition on display through June 19 at the Jewish Museum London, in the borough of Camden Town, which aims to document the role of Jewish designers in shaping the male wardrobe over the last century, including Moss Bros. and Marks Spencer. While the show is rich in photographs, video footage and advertising campaigns, examples of the suits themselves are relatively few. "Women have tended to acquire more and save items for different occasions," she said. "But men, particularly in the first half of the 20th century, would only own one or two suits, and wear them near daily for much of their lives until they were utterly worn out. Many of these items are from the private collections of individuals, and sourced with a fair amount of luck." The starting point of the exhibition is a series of 100 year old black and white photographs and catalogs, depicting the off the rack tailoring shops and one room factories that at one point occupied every street corner of London's East End. Entrepreneurial Jewish immigrant tailors like Burton, who flooded into the country in the tens of thousands from Eastern Europe and Russia over the course of the 19th century, quickly became instrumental in the development of the ready to wear industry after they found that their fabric focused skill sets often a result of workforce discrimination in their home countries were suddenly in demand. As a result of these advances, fashion became more accessible to all, and men's wear trends became less formal and indicative of social background during the years between the wars. The lounge suit became suitable for virtually every occasion, for example, and the popularity of sportswear soared. In the postwar years, a new generation of consumers rejected the dress codes of their fathers, opting instead to embrace the latest looks sported by celebrity idols. One retailer, Cecil Gee, injected a touch of Hollywood glamour into the British mainstream by pioneering the short, lightweight, single breasted Italian look that later came to define the archetypal Mod suit and was embraced by youthquake pop and rock stars like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. On view at the exhibition, for example, is a suede jacket designed by Gee and worn by John Lennon on tour in 1964. Michael Fish, the extrovert pioneer of the so called kipper tie and an inner circle confidant of the biggest celebrities of the day (and the Mr. Fish in the exhibition's title), was the most outrageous and provocative of the lot, with an unabashed more is more aesthetic. He fused luxury bespoke tailoring and hippie florals and silks, and his clashing palettes, metallics and Lurex became wardrobe staples for male as well as female clients. Mick Jagger wore one of his mini dresses at a 1969 concert in Hyde Park. Traditional retailers reacted to this style revolution with chutzpah, opening in store shop in shops geared toward the increasingly powerful youth market, in the earliest examples of "fast fashion." The response to the show "has been incredibly positive," Ms. Phelan said, "at a time where people are thinking about men's wear in a very different way: with less formula and more experimentalism." By highlighting the colorful (and not always recognized) individuals who have contributed to the British fashion scene in the past, she said, "the changes we are seeing in the present on the catwalk and in the streets are put in far greater context." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Each week, technology reporters and columnists from The New York Times review the week's news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here. Hello, It's Erin Griffith, reporting, happily, from my home base in San Francisco and not the carnival of virtual assistants, shiny screens, crowded smart homes and greasy VR demos in Las Vegas. Our correspondents made the CES maze of gadgets look almost fun, which anyone who has been there before knows is an impressive feat. Back in the land of magical, billion dollar start up unicorns, things have been quieter, thanks to the federal government shutdown. No Securities and Exchange Commission means no progress on initial public offering plans of the larger start ups, including Uber and Lyft. Any other time in the last five years, this would not have mattered. The unicorns have been putting off their public market debuts for as long as possible what's another month or two? But a volatile stock market and signs of a possible recession have fostered a creeping sense of panic. As The Times reported in December, Uber and Lyft already accelerated their I.P.O. plans to try to get ahead of a potential market shift. This week, Dara Khosrowshahi, chief executive of Uber, tempered expectations, telling The Wall Street Journal that market turbulence was not likely to affect the company's plans, but "if it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen." Uber shareholders would most likely be disappointed if the company does not go public in the coming year, he added. The shutdown, volatility and recession fears are happening at a crucial moment. The start up world's success hinges, in part, on its ability to use hype and "trust me" confidence to persuade people to believe in a vision of the future. It's easy to get caught up in the narrative of innovation, disruption and rising valuations (and ignore the lack of profits). But not everyone has, and skeptics are getting louder. Chamath Palihapitiya, a prominent venture capital investor, recently called the entire start up and venture capital system a "charade" and "an enormous multivariate kind of Ponzi scheme." He's right in one sense: A Ponzi scheme relies on its creator's ability to persuade ever larger crowds to buy into his or her vision. Same goes for start ups that haven't proved they're able to turn a profit. A flash of doubt, especially among public market investors, could spiral into a broader questioning of the entire start up ecosystem. For the largest, most valuable start ups in Silicon Valley, many of which plan to prove themselves and their unprofitable business models to the world by going public, there could not be a worse moment for that to happen. If Uber can't go public, what does it mean for all the "Uber for X" companies that followed its lead? Cracks are beginning to show. This week, two high flying start ups experienced a reality check in their fund raising. WeWork sought to raise 16 billion in new funding from SoftBank, its main backer. The company wound up raising just 2 billion still an enormous pile of cash, but a steep step down from its original plan. And Bird, a two year old scooter company that was so sought after by investors last summer that they doubled the company's valuation in just a few weeks, is now raising funding at a flat valuation, according to Axios. Some venture capital investors say they welcome a downturn, as I wrote this week. They're hoarding cash and making "downturn lists" of companies to invest in once valuations become more reasonable. And some companies have seen the venture fueled madness and decided it's not for them. Economists and investors are clashing over the health of the American economy. No one is debating the health of the Chinese economy, with concerns spreading to non tech companies including Ford, FedEx, Starbucks and Tiffany, Matt Phillips writes. Apple's biggest issue is not the Chinese economy, it's that people like the columnist Kevin Roose's mother don't feel the need to replace their phones every two years anymore. That may explain the surprising news from CES that Apple struck deals with a number of hardware companies, including Vizio, Samsung, Sony and LG, to use its software. The deals something the company has resisted in the past show Apple's ambition to make more money from content and services, as sales of its cash cow, the iPhone, slow down, Brian X. Chen writes. When the government asked Palantir and Oracle to share the number of women and minorities it employs, the companies tried to hide the numbers, citing them as "trade secrets." According to a report from Reveal News, the numbers are abysmal. (Palantir has no female executives and just one female manager.) The publication sued to obtain the letters the companies sent justifying their privacy around the issue. The Palantir letter cited fears that competitors would steal their lone female manager. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Mike Isaac, a reporter for The New York Times, connects Facebook's gamble on augmented reality apps with a murder posted on the social network. SAN JOSE, Calif. Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has long rued the day that Apple and Google beat him to building smartphones, which now underpin many people's digital lives. Ever since, he has searched for the next frontier of modern computing and how to be a part of it from the start. Now, Mr. Zuckerberg is betting he has found it: the real world. On Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg introduced what he positioned as the first mainstream augmented reality platform, a way for people to view and digitally manipulate the physical world around them through the lens of their smartphone cameras. What that means today is fairly limited. Augmented reality is nascent people can add simple flourishes on top of their photos or videos, like sticking a pixelated blue beard on a selfie or adding puppy stickers to a photo of the front yard of their house. But in Mr. Zuckerberg's telling, there are few boundaries for how this technology will evolve. He said he envisioned a world in which people could eventually point smartphone cameras at a bowl of cereal and have an app create tiny sharks swimming in the milk. Friends can leave virtual notes for one another on the walls outside their favorite restaurants, noting which menu item is the most delicious. Apps like Pokemon Go, the augmented reality game that was a global hit last year, are just the beginning for Mr. Zuckerberg. One day, he mused, household objects could perhaps be replaced entirely by software. "Think about how many of the things around us don't actually need to be physical," Mr. Zuckerberg said in an interview last week. "Instead of a 500 TV sitting in front of us, what's to keep us from one day having it be a 1 app?" Facebook does not expect to build all of these software experiences itself. At its annual developer conference on Tuesday, it called for computer programmers to help by building augmented reality based apps to work with what Facebook calls its Camera Effects Platform. Facebook announced new tools to aid developers and will begin the initiative with a small number of partners in a closed test. Mr. Zuckerberg's goal is ambitious perhaps overly so. Augmented reality efforts have flopped in the past, including Google's much promoted attempt around spectacles with the technology, known as Google Glass. Facebook has previously gambled on other futuristic technologies including virtual reality, with a 2 billion purchase of Oculus, the virtual reality goggles maker, in 2014 but Mr. Zuckerberg has acknowledged that it has had difficulty finding traction. He is also grappling with many issues that have the potential to distract Facebook. The company is under scrutiny for its position as an arbiter of mass media and faces questions as to what role Facebook should play in policing content across its platform of nearly two billion regular users. That issue was thrust to the forefront this week after a man posted on his Facebook page a video of a murder he had committed; the suspect shot himself to death Tuesday Still, Mr. Zuckerberg said he intended to create the next major app ecosystem that would work with Facebook's in app camera. If successful, Facebook could be in a position similar to that of Apple, which relies on the hundreds of millions of apps in its store to keep users buying the company's smartphones and tablets every year. Facebook, in turn, wants developers to build experiences that entice people to visit its website and apps on a daily if not hourly basis. "Just like Apple built the iPod and iTunes ecosystem before the iPhone, you want to make sure there's a set of content there, even if there's not everything," Mr. Zuckerberg said. Facebook has been building toward this goal for some time. Mr. Zuckerberg has spent the last 18 months reorganizing his company and its suite of consumer apps Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger around a new interface, focused almost entirely on the camera. Slowly, the company has played down the role of text inside its apps, instead encouraging people to take and send photos and videos to one another by using the in app camera features. In time, Facebook hopes that companies like Electronic Arts, Nike and Warner Brothers which are part of the initial set of partners will be the ones to bring immersive augmented reality experiences to Facebook's platform. One early partner app is Giphy Thoughts, made by Giphy, a start up that acts as a search engine for animated GIFs, which play as something like short form videos. With Giphy Thoughts, for instance, people can place cartoon thought bubbles above the heads of others they view through their Facebook camera lens. "It goes back to creative expression," said David Rosenberg, director of business development at Giphy. "Facebook Camera is just going to be this massive audience of people ready to make deeply personal content they can share with their friends." Whether Facebook can make it worth the time of more developers to create such apps remains a question. "Software developers might ask, why would I create something for Facebook's platform that I am presumably giving away for free?" said Jan Dawson, chief analyst for Jackdaw Research, an industry analysis firm. "And then when competitors introduce A.R. offerings, will I have to create it for Facebook and then a different lens for Snapchat? Or do I wait for Apple and Google to release their A.R. platforms?" Facebook's past attempts to be at the center of an apps ecosystem with developers have not been particularly successful. In 2012, the company released App Center, a hub within Facebook to discover third party apps like Farmville, Goodreads and Spotify and use them on the Facebook desktop site. But that initiative fizzled as consumers slowly shifted away from desktops to smartphones. One year later, Facebook tried to emulate Apple's and Google's platform strategies more directly with its own branded smartphone, called Facebook Home. The phone, a product of a partnership with AT T and HTC, sold poorly and was eventually abandoned. Then came Facebook's most aggressive move, the acquisition of Oculus in 2014. Facebook is investing hundreds of millions of dollars more in V.R. content and apps in the hopes that it will mature into a full fledged ecosystem similar to Apple's App Store, but sales of the Oculus Rift goggles have been slow. "They are shaking things up there but haven't quite found their stride," said Stephanie Llamas, head of virtual reality and augmented reality strategy at SuperData Research, a game industry research firm. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
BEIJING Deng Yufeng wanted to create art that prods people to question their lack of data privacy. What better way, he reasoned, than to buy the personal information of more than 300,000 Chinese people off the internet and display it in a public exhibition? The police did not appreciate the irony. Last week, the authorities in the Chinese city of Wuhan shut down Mr. Deng's exhibition in a local museum after two days and told him that he was being investigated on suspicion of amassing the information through illegal means. Mr. Deng's project coincides with a growing debate about the lack of data privacy in China, where people are starting to push back against tech companies and their use of information. Online brokers regularly, and illegally, buy and sell personal information online. Chinese people are often bombarded with calls and text messages offering bank loans or home purchases that seem too personalized to be random. Mr. Deng, a 32 year old artist based in Beijing, said he hoped to get Chinese people to question that everyday scenario. Last month, Robin Li, the chief executive of the search giant Baidu, set off a firestorm when he said that Chinese people were willing to trade privacy for convenience, safety and efficiency. In December, the software developer Qihoo 360 angered many internet users when a blogger discovered that the company was taking surveillance footage from restaurants and gyms in Beijing and broadcasting it without permission onto its platform. The rising public anger is taking place amid a similar debate in the United States, over Facebook. But Beijing officials keep the volume lower because personal data is broadly available to another powerful constituency: the Chinese government. Tech companies cooperate with the police in handing over information, with few questions asked. Citizens are resigned to the fact that they are tracked by the government, and there is little pushback about the increased state of surveillance. So six months ago, Mr. Deng started buying people's information, using the Chinese messaging app QQ to reach sellers. He said that the data was easy to find and that he paid a total of 800 for people's names, genders, phone numbers, online shopping records, travel itineraries, license plate numbers at a cost at just over a tenth of a penny per person. He said he knew he was breaking the law. He wanted to prove a point. "Artists are not merely aesthetic creators," Mr. Deng said. "In the very complicated state of our world today, we should also bear social responsibility." At his exhibition, called "346,000 Wuhan Citizens' Secrets," he printed the pieces of personal data on sheets of paper using a special liquid solution. The sheets were hung in neat rows and columns on a wall. Museumgoers could only see the data under a special light source, and key identifying details were redacted. According to Mr. Deng, plainclothes police officers took him away on April 6, two days after his exhibition opened. They told him that he was being investigated for the buying of citizens' information online and was barred from leaving Wuhan. When reached for comment, a Wuhan based police officer from the station investigating the case said she did not know anything about it and hung up. Under Chinese criminal law, Mr. Deng faces up to seven years in jail. But Raymond Wang, a lawyer who specializes in data security, said he believed it was unlikely that Mr. Deng would be sentenced because there were no "damaging consequences." Whether Mr. Deng's exhibit will catch the attention of China's leaders isn't clear. But Legal Daily, an official, government run publication, said Mr. Deng's project showed how the existing laws on the protection of personal information were weak and enforcement was poor. "The organizer's purpose was to call for the protection of personal privacy, and he himself violated the law to purchase personal information," the newspaper wrote in an opinion piece. "Due to the complexity of the plot, it will make for a lively legal lesson." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Back in March, when New York's governor abruptly ordered Broadway theaters to shut their narrow lobby doors, many of us thought they would soon open again in April or July, surely by January. I remember kidding a friend, via text, about it: "If not, I'll just make the kids do 'Hamlet.'" Careful what you joke about. Because on Thanksgiving Day, my children put on a show. It wasn't "Hamlet." ("Hamlet" is dark. And very long.) But it had costumes, props, a set change and even a couple of light gels. This was courtesy of Play in a Box, a new initiative from Young People's Theater in Toronto. For those who have tired of remote theater, Play in a Box joins several recent, child friendly efforts to bring theater to you, for you and most importantly by you. And many of these makers have created holiday themed work, which is (depending on your lighting rig) merry and bright. This summer we had a sublime experience with "Charlotte Holmes," a story box from children's theaters in England, about a young evacuee who solves rural crimes during World War II. Its cheerful videos taught my kids solitaire, a substitution cipher and the fundamentals of Morse code. (The "Charlotte Holmes" people have a new box in the works, the magic themed "Balthazar Snapdragon," which should arrive in time for Christmas.) After that success, we wanted to keep the theatrical, recyclable good times going. Enter Play in a Box. Not every packet was assembled with the same care. The costume one held just a square of blue felt and an outline of animal ears. But our box was a prototype. And besides, polished elements run counter to the gentle, D.I.Y. ethos. After reading through a few plays, the children, chose "The Paper Bag Princess" and spent a cheerful morning attaching wings to a dinosaur bathrobe, repurposing packing materials as the paper bag and labeling a couple of cardboard boxes "CASTLE" and "CAVE." With minimal squabbling, they performed a few suggested warm ups, planned blocking, ran lines and drafted their not especially enthusiastic father to run sound ("Make your phone play castle music," the 7 year old ordered) and lights, shining a flashlight through gels to create a pretty decent flame effect. The enterprise had Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland vibes, without the later descent into pill and alcohol addictions. It also had a very "Midsummer" rude mechanicals feel. "This is a castle because this box says CASTLE," the 4 year old explained. But the audience (their grandmother) applauded vigorously. Though no one had explicitly requested an encore, they performed one in a friend's backyard over dessert. The next day, we tried a new experience from Threshold, a new company started by a pair of Australian theatermakers, Sarah Lockwood and Tahli Corin. A few months ago, Threshold had sent us a pass to "Mountain Goat Mountain," an audio experience that asks you to gather a couple of props and then embark on a 45 minute journey through peak, lake and cave (also known as bedroom and combination living room/ kitchen) in search of a magical creature. The children have asked to do "Mountain Goat Mountain" again and again, and as it's the closest we will come to actual travel for a while, I have agreed. In this new piece, "Feather Quest," an adult hides seven cards around the house and the children find them, creating the story of a bird from egg to chick to fledgling. It has less replay value than "Mountain Goat Mountain," as a lot of the pleasure comes from the surprise of finding what each new card asks. Still, everyone enjoyed creating a family bird song, trying to keep a feather aloft using only breath, feeding pretend worms to pretend chicks in a pretend nest and reading a message using a mirrored reflection. On the following afternoon, in lieu of a working fireplace, we gathered around a cozy Zoom window for "The Hot Chocolate Incident," a playfully designed escape room style experience presented by a live actor from Improbable Escapes in Kingston, Ontario. The children, cast as trainee toymakers, had been invited to dress as elves, so one had selected a unicorn onesie, the other a zookeeper costume. Magic of Christmas, folks. Our assigned elf, Jingles (Candice Burn), took us through some employee basics before spilling hot chocolate all over her keyboard. (Extremely relatable.) To rebuild the mainframe and speed Santa on his way, we had to solve various puzzles, some doable, others more challenging. I may have become somewhat short with Jingles during a Santa suit calibration riddle. Several other puzzles seem like they would be more fun to solve in person. Remotely, it was like watching someone else lick a candy cane. But despite a last minute snowflake miscalculation, we managed to save Christmas. Which I consider a particular triumph because I am Jewish. At night, we settled down with "Sleep Squad," an online bedtime experience from the Story Pirates with a companion box that includes sleep mask, dream journal, stickers and night light. It stars the buoyant Lilli Cooper as Siesta Shuteye, the captain of a sleepy time spaceship. She introduces three stories, created using the Story Pirates methodology kids outline, trained improvisers riff and perform. It's an entirely admirable approach and also somewhat crazy making. Children don't always have the best sense of narrative momentum. (Actually, neither do improvisers.) But mine enjoyed creating each story behind their sleep masked eyes. And this is the first time in 20 years of theater criticism that I can unashamedly make this claim: The show put me to sleep. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
But, I hear you say, a driver of an electric car in California will be getting cleaner power than a driver in the Midwest, which is heavily dependent on coal fired power plants, right? The app lets you customize by region. The paper, by Jessika E. Trancik, a professor of energy studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleagues, noted that the cars with the lowest emissions also tended to be the cheapest, which undercuts the notion many people have that living a greener life is necessarily more expensive. "Consumers can save money and save emissions at the same time," Dr. Trancik said. This app thrills me, because it turns out that I own the gas powered car with the smallest carbon footprint and physical footprint on the market, according to the app: a Smart. I bought the tiny two seater in 2008, and it has long been a point of contention between my wife and me. When people see us in the parking lot and ask how we like the car, I say "I love it!" and she says "I hate it" at the same time. She doesn't like its bumpy ride or the finickiness of its transmission. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos and anything else that strikes them as intriguing. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. The ceaseless self consciousness of a social media universe makes true connection ever more tricky. "Why would you believe you could control how you're perceived/when at your best you're intermediately versed in your own feelings?," Matty Healy sings, with passive aggressive gentleness, in "Sincerity Is Scary" from the 1975's new album, "A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships," due next week. The track is a loping piano shuffle with a gaggle of improvising horns busy in the background, while a mini gospel choir joins Healy for a decidedly nongospel chorus: "Why can't we be friends when we are lovers?," he ponders. "Instead of calling me out you should be pulling me in." He's sincere: sincerely petulant. PARELES J Balvin is a superstar of reggaeton's second pop crossover wave the smooth, light variant that emerged from Colombia in the 2010s and became the anchor for contemporary Latin pop, and which set the stage for the emergence of Latin trap. So there's heavy meaning embedded in his new single, "Reggaeton," which is a sonic throwback to the genre's 1990s roots. The rhythm is low and hard, the production has a handmade texture. The stars of the first crossover wave had distinctive, serrated voices, but Balvin is all light touch and near whispers the production makes a statement more than he does. Except in the video, in which he raps in what looks like the bedroom of a Puerto Rican teenager circa 2005, with posters on the walls of Don Omar, Zion y Lennox, Luny Tunes and, of course, Daddy Yankee. CARAMANICA Anderson .Paak's new album, "Oxnard," sets street stories, boasting, raunch and California hip hop solidarity in tracks that thoroughly interweave rapping with funky, tuneful neo soul. "6 Summers" rides on a springy bass line and zesty Latin percussion while Anderson .Paak raps and sings about gun violence: police killing unarmed teenagers, school shootings, assault rifles in the city and a president who's "tryin' to start a war on the Twitter feed." The chorus cools with electric piano chords and an almost wistful melody, but it stays hardheaded: "Pop pop pop goes the shooter/Reform, reform should've came sooner." PARELES The upbeat, psychedelic surf rock foundation of "Sundress" stomping drums, effects laden chords comes from Tame Impala's 2010 song "Why Won't You Make Up Your Mind," and ASAP Rocky and his collaborators (among them Danger Mouse) add falsetto oohs and ahs to point it back toward the Beach Boys. Meanwhile, the lyrics sketch a complex double rebound scenario. He's got a new girl, she's got a new guy, but when he sees her, he's convinced that "You in love with me still." Tables turned, or projection? PARELES Billie Eilish, who has been building a catalog of whispery singles devoted to insecurity, longing, sulkiness and empathy, is at her most quietly, patiently benevolent in "Come Out and Play," addressed to a desperately shy "you." It begins like a lullaby, with acoustic guitar picking; "Don't hide," Eilish coaxes, with her voice so hushed it wouldn't carry across a room. As she sings about the expansive possibilities of a wider world "It's worth it to show 'em everything you kept inside" a beat and a band gather behind her, but evaporate before they can frighten away that skittish listener. PARELES The trio Harriet Tubman plays hard, sizzling, electrified music that has as much in common with dub and doom metal as it does with jazz. Over more than 20 years, the guitarist Brandon Ross, the bassist Melvin Gibbs and the drummer J.T. Lewis have developed a telepathic improvising rapport, and a group sound that's equal parts seduction and invective. Their new album, "The Terror End of Beauty," opens with "Farther Unknown," a Gibbs composition built on the layered rhythms of historic Juba dancing. Eventually, Ross's distorted guitar erupts into dissonant sunbursts over the roughly galloping beat. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO Sure, why not? This collaboration by dartboard is virtually indistinguishable from any number of Spanish English alliances that have arrived in the wake of "Despacito." It's unclear whether the Latin boy band CNCO, the American pop star Meghan Trainor and the dancehall stalwart Sean Paul ever met before the filming of this video, which has the mood and feel of a well orchestrated heist a group of people who all show up to contribute their piece of alienated labor, then disappear into the night. Which makes sense for this song, which is amiable, feather light and perfectly evanescent. CARAMANICA Captured during a recent performance in the South Bronx, "Live at Pregones" spins through Los Pleneros de la 21's songbook, which is now 35 years in the making. A proud courier of Puerto Rican tradition (and now a nonprofit organization), the ensemble focuses on bomba and plena, the island's historic musical forms. On "Camelia," the six piece percussion section's elegant plena rhythm lifts up a romantic plea from the call and response chorus. The performance hits its high point on a shapely, dancing piano solo from Pablo Mayor. RUSSONELLO The Spanish electronic musician who calls herself Rrucculla merges digital expertise with wildly eclectic sources and a sense of timing like sped up slapstick. She officially releases her album "Shush" on Nov. 30, but it's already streaming on her Bandcamp page. "Vestido de Parpados" "Dress of Eyelids" takes a little while to get into motion, then runs calculatedly amok: placing toy piano tones against jittery drum and bass beats, swooping and sliding, racing and crunching, summoning blips and pizzicato and free jazz saxophone and white noise crashes. Who needs caffeine? PARELES | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The tomato hitching a ride home in your grocery bag today is not the tomato it used to be. No matter if you bought plum, cherry or heirloom, if you wanted the tastiest tomato, you should have picked it yourself and eaten it immediately. That's because a tomato's flavor made up of sugars, acids and chemicals called volatiles degrades as soon as it's picked from the vine. There's only one thing you can do now: Keep it out of the fridge. Researchers at The University of Florida have found in a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that when tomatoes are stored at the temperature kept in most refrigerators, irreversible genetic changes take place that erase some of their flavors forever. Harry J. Klee, a professor of horticultural sciences who led the study, and his colleagues took two varieties of tomatoes an heirloom and a more common modern variety and stored them at 41 degrees Fahrenheit before letting them recover at room temperature (68 degrees Fahrenheit). When they looked at what happened inside the tomatoes in cold temperatures, Dr. Klee said the subtropical fruit went into shock, producing especially damaging changes after a week of storage. After they were allowed to warm up, even for a day, some genes in the tomatoes that created its flavor volatiles had turned off and stayed off. It's like a symphony: "Remove the violins and the woodwinds," Dr. Klee wrote in an email. "You still have noise, but it's not the same. Add back just the violins and it still isn't right. You need that orchestra of 30 or more chemicals in the right balance to give you a good tomato." When you can get fresh tomatoes, Dr. Klee recommends storing them at room temperature, to preserve their flavor, and eating them within a week of bringing them home. If you see your grocer storing them at temperatures that are too cold, tell them not to, he says. But this research may seem mostly academic. The average American consumes nearly 20 pounds of fresh tomatoes a year. And despite researchers, industries and farmers all striving to create the tastiest tomatoes, there are some things we can't yet control. After all, most of the tomatoes we eat out of season are plucked from their vines probably in Florida or Mexico, just as they started to ripen. They are sorted, sized, graded and packed into a box with other tomatoes, totaling 25 pounds. Then they stay in a humidity and temperature controlled room (no less than 55 degrees Fahrenheit) and ingest ethylene, a gas to make them ripen, for two to four days before being transported on a temperature controlled truck to a warehouse. There they are repackaged, re sorted and shipped to your grocer. There, if demand is low or if there's no room, they may be stored in a fridge, and by the time you get them, it's been a week to ten days. "It's probably never going to equal the one that matured in your backyard over the 80 or 90 days that you grew it, but it beats stone soup" said Reggie Brown, a manager at Florida Tomato Committee, which produces up to half of America's fresh tomatoes in the winter. In cold months, should you endure a tomatoless diet? There are alternatives, says Dan Barber, chef at Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York, who has received multiple James Beard Awards. "My advice for consumers is don't eat a tomato in the winter," he said. "Make a tomato jam in the summer and store and preserve it. Use dried tomatoes from the store. Make a tomato ketchup and can it you can have it for the whole winter." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Have you turned off your phone? Have you unwrapped those famous candies? Do you have a few hankies at the ready? If not, sprint to the bathroom and stuff your pockets with toilet paper squares before Donja R. Love's throat lumpening, nose reddening, fantastically moving and not entirely persuasive "Sugar in Our Wounds" really gets going. You are going to need them. Produced by Manhattan Theater Club and directed by Saheem Ali, "Sugar in Our Wounds," set in the antebellum South, is an old fashioned weepie written in lush, poetic dialect, with up to date interests and politics. Its techniques are melodramatic. Its assault on the tear ducts is aggravated. And yet its message is unimpeachable that when we fail to treat one another as fully human, we invite tragedy. The stage is dominated by a massive, moss laden tree, lit by so many green and purple lights that I felt like I'd microdosed and gone to Disneyland. This was before the tree started singing. (The set is designed by Arnulfo Maldonado, the psychedelic lights by Jason Lyons.) Beneath its heaven stretching branches, where generations of men have been hanged, we meet James (Sheldon Best), Aunt Mama (Stephanie Berry) and Mattie (Tiffany Rachelle Stewart), slaves on a Southern plantation in 1862. Into their shack strides Henry (Chinaza Uche), recently sold to the plantation. His description of having been ripped from his family mother, father, sister, brothers synchronizes so neatly and so devastatingly with today's migration crisis that it should wring the show's first tears. "Stead uh hangin' us, day tear us part," he says. "Dat feel worse den bein' hanged, I imagine." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Re "Why Do We Have an Electoral College, Again?," by Jesse Wegman (Editorial Observer, Jan. 26): The problem with the Electoral College is not the faithless electors who vote for whomever they please, which is the focus of Mr. Wegman's piece. Instead, it is that the plurality winner, except in two states (Maine and Nebraska), wins all a state's electoral votes in presidential elections. If electoral votes were awarded to candidates in proportion to the popular votes they receive in a state, the victories of the Republican candidates in 2000 and 2016, both of whom lost the national popular vote, probably would have been reversed. We do not need a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College. A federal law that requires the proportional allocation of electoral votes or laws that replace winner take all in all states would almost always ensure that the electoral vote winner would also be the popular vote winner. Steven J. Brams New York The writer is a professor of politics at New York University and author of "The Presidential Election Game" and "Mathematics and Democracy: Designing Better Voting and Fair Division Procedures." Jesse Wegman notes that "Americans would rightly revolt if a handful of people they'd never heard of ignored their votes and decided the election for themselves." Because of winner take all awarding of Electoral College votes, the sad truth is that even without faithless electors, ballots cast by two thirds of voters who live in reliably red or blue states don't matter. Americans should revolt because elections are decided by the minority of voters living in battleground states. Fortunately, the solution doesn't require a revolt, just the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Once the threshold of 270 electoral votes among participating states is met, they will vote their electors for the candidate who receives the most votes in all 50 states, achieving the same outcome as a direct election. According to Making Every Vote Count, over 70 percent of American voters favor guaranteeing the presidency to the candidate who wins the popular vote. To date, 15 states and the District of Columbia have joined the compact, together accounting for 196 of the 270 electoral votes needed. Jonathan Perloe Cos Cob, Conn. The writer helped lead the effort to get Connecticut to join the Compact in 2018. We have an Electoral College to make sure that a few heavily populated states do not hold absolute sway over the many lesser populated states in the presidential election. Each state has its own interests to advance. The Electoral College system most fairly allows a majority of the states the opportunity to elect the president, so that their interests might be addressed. It seems disingenuous to leave out this fact. Democrats can bemoan the Electoral College all they wish. Nonetheless, 538 electors will ultimately pick the next president of the United States. Donald Trump is a dangerous threat to our country. Democrats have to win the fight in front of them, not complain about the rules. Discussing the demerits of the Electoral College is pointless. Democrats must follow the football team owner Al Davis's maxim: "Just win, baby." Editors' Note: We asked Jesse Wegman, the author of the Editorial Observer as well as a forthcoming book about the Electoral College, to respond to our letter writers: Brian Magwood's argument that less populated states benefit from the Electoral College, and that in a popular vote their interests would be drowned out by the more populous states is one of the oldest defenses of the College; it's also the opposite of reality. The interests of smaller states are ignored right now, under the existing system, as are the interests of bigger states and medium sized states all states, in fact, other than the handful of "battleground" states in which the popular vote outcome is too close to call. Every election year, the presidential candidates spend virtually all their time and money focused on those few states, and catering to their interests. In other words, roughly 80 percent of American voters, living in every size of state, are ignored at the expense of the 20 percent who live in battleground states. The reason candidates focus almost exclusively on these states is the winner take all rule, which Steven Brams rightly identifies as the Electoral College's biggest distortion. Mr. Brams's proposal to instead allocate electors proportionally an idea that has been floating around for decades sounds appealing, but it has serious problems. First, it would still not guarantee victory to the popular vote winner, thus failing to eliminate what most people consider to be the Electoral College's fundamental flaw. Second, it would exacerbate the existing distortions of the winner take all system. Why? Because states would be forced to round off their popular vote results to the nearest electoral vote, which would lead to hugely distorted outcomes, especially in smaller states. The fix would be to allocate electoral votes in fractions. This would get us much closer to a popular vote than we currently are, but because it would require getting rid of electors who are human beings and can't be divided into fractions it would require a constitutional amendment. (In fact, an amendment doing just this passed the Senate by a supermajority in 1950, but failed in the House.) A better approach, requiring no amendment, is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. As Jonathan Perloe explains, the compact, which has been slowly gathering member states since 2007, is a clever and elegant way to use the Constitution's own language to achieve a popular vote. While the compact still has a ways to go before it takes effect, and will certainly face legal challenges if it does, it is currently the most plausible path to electing the president directly. Last, Alex Whitworth argues that it's "pointless" to complain about the Electoral College because everyone knows that's how the game is played. Of course both parties must win under the existing rules; that does not mean we can't also work to make the election of the president fairer and more equal to all Americans. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
A private investor has bought this 6,440 square foot 19th century five story townhouse in the East Village, with five floor through market rate apartments, including four nonworking fireplaces and period details. The 23 by 54 foot brownstone, which sits across from Tompkins Square Park and next to the Charlie Parker Residence in the East Village, was once home to the actress Marisa Tomei and the musician and composer Charles Mingus. A family had owned it for almost 60 years. Its cap rate is about 3 percent. This 1991 two story, 20,000 square foot elevator building in Washington Heights offers 100 feet of frontage and 14,400 square feet in unused air rights. It has six ground floor retail spaces and five offices above. Tenants include a liquor store, a beauty salon, and New York Neuro and Rehab Center. The Bx7 and M100 buses stop in front of the building. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Bill Cosby's "Little Bill" children's book series was among the 10 "most challenged" books in 2016, according to a list compiled by the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom. A book is "challenged" when someone, like a parent or other community member, complains and tries to get the book removed from a library or a school curriculum. It's the first time the Cosby series has attracted a complaint, the organization said. The "Little Bill" books, first published in 1997, tell the adventures of Bill Jr., a 5 year old Philadelphia boy, and were the basis for an animated TV series. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The statement concluded by saying that Ms. Jarrar would now "focus on new projects." But what those may be remains unclear. Ms. Jarrar, the former design studio head for Balenciaga, who last week was made an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters, one of France's highest honors, closed her eponymous fashion label following her appointment at Lanvin in March 2016 to focus on the daunting task in hand. Her arrival came at a moment of crisis for Lanvin, one of France's last major independent fashion labels in an industry dominated by multibrand groups such as LVMH and Kering. The house, founded by Jeanne Lanvin in 1889, had fallen into chaos following the acrimonious ousting of Alber Elbaz, Ms. Jarrar's popular predecessor, by Ms. Wang in October 2015. The decision had resulted in both walkouts and the workers' council suing Lanvin's management. Yet despite having the good will of the industry, impeccable design credentials and initial backing of the board, including chief executive Michele Huiban, Ms. Jarrar did not manage to begin a successful new chapter in its history. Her two ready to wear runway collections received lukewarm reviews from critics. Reports of internal disharmony continued as external consultants were brought in with a mission to cut costs. Then, in June, Lanvin reported a 23 percent fall in revenue for 2016, down to 162 million euros after a net loss of EUR18.3 million. By comparison, in 2015 it reported a profit of EUR6.3 million, and in 2012, at the zenith of the label's success, revenues were EUR235 million. Both retail buyers and Lanvin's clientele, it appeared, were struggling to adapt to Ms. Jarrar's monochromatic and minimalist silhouettes, at stark odds to the unashamed maximalism and explosion of color that came to define the aesthetic of the house during Mr. Elbaz's 14 year tenure. In the final months at the design helm of Lanvin, and amid the continuing turmoil, it became clear that Ms. Jarrar had started to feel the strain. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
On the campaign trail, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has highlighted the first two years of the Obama administration as a time when he helped enact sweeping legislation to widen access to health care and revive the economy, accomplishments most Democrats revere. But to many union officials, those years were a disappointment a time when the administration failed to pass a labor rights bill that was their top priority and imposed a tax that would affect many union members' health plans. And they partly blame Mr. Biden. "They were in the driver's seat for the first two years, and what did they get done from a labor perspective?" said Chris Laursen, the president of a United Automobile Workers local in Ottumwa, Iowa, with nearly 600 members. "Joe Biden is complete status quo." Since Mr. Biden began his third campaign for the presidency last April, his supporters have portrayed him as the Democrat best positioned to win back union members who deserted the party in 2016 in crucial industrial states. There is some basis for that claim. Mr. Biden, who has longstanding ties to many labor leaders, quickly gained an endorsement from the politically powerful firefighters' union, and just won an endorsement from the ironworkers' union. Polls frequently show him leading other Democratic candidates in battleground state matchups against President Trump. But for many labor voters even white, blue collar union members whose votes skewed toward Mr. Trump the reaction to the former vice president has been more mixed. They frequently cite his policy centrism, which many associate with his time in President Barack Obama's White House. The reservations of union members could be a bigger problem for Mr. Biden than they were for Hillary Clinton during her 2016 Democratic race against Mr. Sanders. Some large unions, including the American Federation of Teachers, endorsed Mrs. Clinton, though many members later supported Mr. Sanders. In the current cycle, many of these unions have skipped an early endorsement, making it easier for individual members and in some cases locals to support their own candidates. The teachers' union in Los Angeles has endorsed Mr. Sanders, as has the Ottumwa local of the United Food and Commercial Workers, whose 1.3 million member international endorsed Mrs. Clinton before the 2016 Iowa caucuses. A large Pennsylvania local of the food workers' union has endorsed Mr. Biden. While the Labor Department recently reported that union membership last year fell to a record low 10.3 percent of the work force labor endorsements can still be critical because of the role of unions in educating members about candidates and canvassing for them on the ground. Mr. Laursen, the U.A.W. local leader in Ottumwa, estimates that more than half his members who are primarily workers at a John Deere plant backed Mr. Trump in 2016. But he says many of those who oppose the president's re election are supporting Mr. Sanders over Mr. Biden. And the skepticism toward Mr. Biden among union voters may be even more pronounced in the less white, less male parts of the labor force. Nicole McCormick, a West Virginia music teacher who helped organize a statewide walkout that made national headlines in 2018, said she worried that Mr. Biden wasn't "willing to push for the things that we as Americans look at as radical, but the rest of the world looks at and is like, 'We did that 50 years ago.'" She cited expanded access to unions, universal health care and paid parental leave as examples. "He failed to fight for our priorities and stand up for the main reason we endorsed him card check," said Norwood Orrick, a telecom technician and member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Tampa, Fla. "It was discussed a lot in my immediate circles of activists." Beyond any single policy, there are complaints that the Obama administration sometimes treated labor as an interest group to be managed rather than a partner in making policy. Ana Avendano, a former senior official at the A.F.L. C.I.O., recalled a White House meeting on immigration that the federation's president, Richard Trumka, attended. "They sat him at one of the corners of the table," squeezed between two other people, Ms. Avendano said. "He couldn't even open his pad. In D.C. terms, it was a show of disrespect." A spokesman for Mr. Trumka said: "While President Trumka worked with and respected President Obama, he felt there were times when the president tried to split the difference between Main Street and Wall Street. That did not serve him or us well." Some labor officials and union members see the more pragmatic approach of the Obama years, and Mr. Biden's moderate reputation, as a selling point. "Our guys lean 55 percent Republican," said Thomas Hanify, president of the Indiana firefighters' union. "Over all for my members, Warren and Bernie Sanders are a little extreme." And many prefer Mr. Biden's approach to health care, voicing concern that Mr. Sanders would do away with insurance plans that unions have worked hard to negotiate. Other labor leaders, while citing shortcomings of the Obama presidency, say Mr. Biden was an advocate for their interests within the administration. Teachers' unions were furious after Mr. Obama publicly embraced the firing of the entire faculty of an underperforming school in Rhode Island in 2010. But Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said Mr. Biden helped resolve the situation. "We started having a fairly heated argument, me and the vice president, at an A.F.L. meeting," Ms. Weingarten said. "But he heard what I was saying." Jared Bernstein, an economic adviser to Mr. Biden during his vice presidency, said the same was often true on trade and other issues, including labor law reform, which faced a complicated path in the Senate. "I know for a fact where Biden is on these things," Mr. Bernstein said. "But he was part of an administration that at times very much pleased the unions, and at other times very much pissed them off." But many labor officials regard Mr. Biden as essentially a sympathetic face for unfriendly policies he was either powerless to reverse or personally advanced. One cited Mr. Biden's role in leading the negotiations with Republicans over a long term deficit cutting deal that could have led to cuts in programs like Social Security and Medicare. Mr. Biden, whose record on Social Security has been a subject of sparring with the Sanders campaign, says he supports an expansion of benefits for many retirees. Frank Flanders, the political director of the food workers' local in Ottumwa, said that he was skeptical of Mr. Biden's views on trade and his more hawkish foreign policy views, and that he regarded Mr. Biden as a "corporate Democrat." "I think we had a lot of Trump voters in the general, for the most part it's because he wasn't Hillary," said Mr. Flanders, describing how his members voted in 2016. "It's also a concern I have about a Biden candidacy." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The bassist and singer Thundercat's latest album, "It Is What It Is," is a meditation on living with loss partly inspired by the death of the musician's friend Mac Miller. He'd Always Been Thundercat, Whether He Knew It or Not OAKLAND, Calif. In a few hours, Stephen Bruner, the singer and bassist professionally known as Thundercat, had a sold out show to play at the Fox Theater, a former 1920s movie palace on Telegraph Avenue. Somewhere inside the Fox, there was a dressing room with his name on it. But Bruner's plan for the afternoon was to stay on the bus, where he feels at home. "I'm a road dog," Bruner said, then corrected himself. "Cat. Road cat." He was half prone on a couch in the bus's back corner, in skinny black jeans and a T shirt proclaiming, in bumper stickerish terms, his love of a particular excretory function; his nails were painted eggplant purple. A screen near the bus's ceiling displayed a game of Mario Kart, on pause. Every so often, to keep from losing his place in the game, Bruner would stretch out a silver socked toe and wake the console from sleep mode by nudging the stick of his controller, which lay at the far end of the couch, next to an Aldi shopping bag overflowing with crumpled laundry, including a silver Lurex cargo vest designed by Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton. Anything else he could have needed in this moment was close at hand water, plastic sleeved X Men comics, a reference book on an obscure genus of Pokemon, or a Pikachu shaped backpack with a miniature Pikachu hanging from the zipper and a Pikachu yellow sweatshirt inside. McDonald, who got his big break as a backup singer on Steely Dan's "Katy Lied," suggests that Bruner is pulling off something similar to what Walter Becker and Donald Fagen accomplished with their band decades ago. "From the '70s to the '80s, those guys were Top 40 radio darlings," McDonald said. "And I'm going, How did that happen? Their songs are so strange, and so sophisticated. It just goes to show you there's that audience out there, that's waiting for something really good." On record, Bruner's songs split the difference between thumping pop funk, emotive swells of melody and jazz fusion's heady cosmic undertow. Live at the Fox that March night, he and his touring band the keyboardist Dennis Hamm and the drummer Justin Brown would surrender to that undertow, turning once concise tunes into pretexts for extended, stormy jams. But they also played "A Fan's Mail (Tron Song Suite II)," a song about Bruner's cat, with most of the audience providing meow along backup vocals on the hook. No matter how interstellar Bruner's music gets, his goofy sense of humor always anchors it in the day to day. "He's the coolest bass player that ever walked the Earth, period, point blank," said the singer and guitarist Steve Lacy, who's featured on one of the new album's singles, "Black Qualls." Lacy, 21, said that Bruner and Ellison "are the reason I'm doing this they just opened my mind up to all the possibilities in music. Even though my music sounds nothing like theirs they inspired me to try." Bruner grew up in Compton and other regions of Los Angeles. His mother, Pam Bruner, plays flute and percussion. His father, Ronald Bruner Sr., is a drummer who's played and recorded with Diana Ross, Gladys Knight and the Temptations. Bruner remembers accompanying him to performances as a child and dozing off during his father's drum solos. At Locke High School in Watts, Bruner played in the Multi School Jazz Band, run by a music teacher named Reggie Andrews. Andrews, who taught at Locke on and off for 40 years, is probably best known for co writing the Dazz Band's immortal "Let It Whip." In the course of his tenure at Locke, he nurtured artists like Patrice Rushen, Tyrese Gibson, members of the Pharcyde, the jazz drummer Ronald Bruner Jr. Bruner's older brother and Bruner himself, who refers to Andrews as his "second dad." Through Andrews and the Jazz Band, Bruner reconnected with a tenor saxophonist named Kamasi Washington, who'd grown up in nearby Inglewood but attended Alexander Hamilton High School in West Los Angeles. Washington and Bruner had met as children, when their fathers played together in what Washington called a "gospel fusion band." "Stephen was always who he is, way before it was cool to be that way," Washington said. "He's always been a completely unique individual. I'll never forget, we had a gig one time, and we were supposed to wear all black. I came to pick him up, and he was like, 'Man, I don't think I have any black pants.' I was like, 'You've got to have a pair of black pants.' He went in his closet. Purple, green, orange, canary yellow, but no black." Bruner's parents were strict about curfews, but being musicians, they saw Washington as a positive influence, Bruner said. "They didn't have to worry if we were out trolling and being idiots," Bruner said. "They almost didn't have to worry about chicks because we were nerds." Although they were underage and Bruner is four years younger than Washington they'd sneak into jazz clubs and other concert venues, first as spectators and then as performers. Eventually Washington acquired a 1982 Ford Mustang; the hatchback didn't close, and parts of the interior were held together with duct tape. But it allowed Bruner, Washington and their compatriots to play anywhere in Los Angeles that would have them. "It was insanely horrible," Bruner said. "Sardine can. It was hilarious we'd try to fit all my brother's drums and my bass amp in this two seater." Between gigs, Bruner, Washington and a small circle of like minded young jazz musicians would jam in Washington's father's Leimert Park garage, which became known as "The Shack." Bruner, Washington and the fellow Locke alum Terrace Martin along with Flying Lotus would one day contribute extensively to Kendrick Lamar's "To Pimp a Butterfly," on which Bruner's bass is often as prominent a lead instrument as Lamar's vocals. By the early 2000s Bruner was touring the world as a sideman, first as a member of what he called "a little German signed multicultural pop group" called No Curfew, which released one album on Polydor in 2001; the following year, Bruner joined the L.A. thrash punk stalwarts Suicidal Tendencies, where his breakneck speed bass playing was put to better use. Not every employer whose road band Bruner passed through was interested in the full Thundercat experience. Snoop Dogg whose nickname for the fresh faced Bruner was "Baby Bass" once cut short a Bruner bass solo during a show, grumbling, "Ain't nobody tell you to play all that." "Raphael Saadiq once told me, 'Man, play the record,'" Bruner said, laughing. "Nobody wants to hear what you have to say. Play the record." It was good advice to give a bass player; Bruner said he didn't begin to think of himself as something more than that until the mid 2000s. He became close to the hip hop production unit Sa Ra Creative Partners; at their Silver Lake studio/clubhouse, he'd meet artists like Ty Dolla Sign and J Dilla, as well as Erykah Badu, who took him on tour. "Erykah was the one that genuinely cultivated me as an artist," Bruner said, gathering his bleached dreads into a Gucci hair clip. "She taught me what it means to be Thundercat, and what that entailed for me as an artist. More than playing bass in her band she would hold my hand through stuff. She would make me stand out in front and sing with her." Badu may have given Bruner the courage to step forward as a frontman, but according to Ellison, he'd always been Thundercat, whether he knew it or not. "He was always the craziest dressed person in the room," Ellison said. "That ain't nothing new. Somewhere in there was a latent superstar." In September 2018, the rapper Mac Miller died of an accidental drug overdose. "That was my ace, my best friend," Bruner said. His voice became quiet; the bus's air conditioning seemed suddenly loud. Miller's death was the first of a string of difficult losses and transitions, Bruner said. He was in a serious relationship "I was on the edge of getting married" which went south not long after Miller died. There was also the death of the rapper Nipsey Hussle, who was shot and killed in South Los Angeles, not far from where Bruner's family lives. But it's Miller who haunts "It Is What It Is," which begins with a song about being metaphorically lost in space and ends with Bruner calling out "Hey, Mac" into the void. "It's like, he's not really here anymore," Bruner said. "He's not going to pull up and park wrong in front of my spot, get a ticket and show up and knock at the door." (That was Miller's signature parking style, Bruner said: "He'd just park on the wrong side of the street, and get out of the car and some girl would faint.") Miller, Bruner said, was the person in his life "who I would call when stuff got weird. Talk to Mac." After he died, Bruner said, he found it difficult to write music, or even to pick up a video game controller. He quit drinking for a while. "I had to sit with it," he said. "I had to let the pain in. I had to cry, a lot." Then he made "It Is What It Is," an album that's ultimately less about overcoming uncertainty, fear, decay and heartbreak as it is about learning to live with those things as constants conditions of staying alive. It's the kind of cultural product that will inevitably feel eerily right on time when it drops amid the chaos unleashed by the coronavirus pandemic. On March 12, almost a week after the Oakland show, Bruner tweeted the title phrase; the following day, he canceled the remaining dates of his North American tour. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
What books are on your nightstand? "The Road of Lost Innocence," by Somaly Mam, about child selling, enslavement and sadistic "sex" trafficking in Cambodia. Bombed out, psychologically traumatized Cambodia has become a place where even children are seen as commodities and treated worse than never terrorized or subjugated humans can imagine. Mam, a modern heroine who was once a captive herself, rises to protect and save those few young girls that she can. I couldn't sleep after reading this book. I felt a duty to read it, however, and others like it, to know without forgetting, that for countries devastated by war, often wars "we" cause, or extend by carpet bombing or laying of land mines, the suffering, usually for the most vulnerable, never ends. "And the Truth Shall Set You Free," by David Icke. In Icke's books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person's dream come true. "Perfect Peace," by Daniel Black. I am rereading this incredible novel about a young boy in the Deep South who was raised until he was 8 as if he were a girl. A fantastic investigation of gender issues, large and small. Audio is ideal for this book, especially for readers who did not grow up in the South. "Mom Me Mom," by Maya Angelou. This is my favorite Angelou book. It is revelatory about a life of high adventure with her completely tough, gun toting, charming, fearless and seductive mother. Here's a Reader Center guide to how the By the Book column works. Who is your favorite novelist of all time? Charlotte Bronte. My feeling of kinship with "Jane Eyre" has never waned. What's the last great book you read? 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. "Who Asked You?" by Terry McMillan. This novel is a rich celebration of mothers who have, in the age of crack cocaine, been forced to raise their own grandchildren, having lost their daughters to the epidemic. It is word perfect, sometimes hilarious, always honest to the life of its characters and to "ghetto" society. I don't understand the title of the book or the book jacket art, but the book itself is essential reading for these and future times. I recommend audio for a captivating listening experience. Whom do you consider the best writers novelists, essayists, critics, memoirists, poets working today? Viet Thanh Nguyen, Arundhati Roy, Yaa Gyasi, Aida Edemariam, Joseph O'Connor, Helene Cooper, Chris Hedges and Elizabeth Gilbert are a few I think of! What's the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently? That though captured while in Africa, Africans became slaves only during the long crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, when they were treated so horrifically that those who could manage it jumped into the sea. They had no place in their psyches to fathom their abuse: Subjected to every kind of depravity and horror, during the passage and after, they arrived to be forced onto platforms and bid on, a process that could drag on and on, as plantation owners rejected those for whom they had no use. Africans were "broken in" physically, and broken down spiritually, to such an extent they became what they had not been in their homelands or halfway through the voyage: slaves. This treatment, deliberately calibrated to destroy their inner sovereignty, was called "seasoning." In Daniel Black's extraordinary book "The Coming," we have an unprecedented opportunity to be with ancestors who probably never dreamed a scribe would one day appear to make their descendants not only imagine their plight but also, by being brought to tears by the narrative, gain access to an emotion that makes us one with them. Shamanic work. What moves you most in a book? The witnessing of a great soul. A magnificent spirit in action. A warrior whose mental weapons seem to come equally from heart and air, and whose soul is nourished by solitude and dreams. In other words, the writer's courage. Did you read poetry as a child? We owned two or three thick volumes of English literature called "Prose and Poetry." I wish I knew where they are now! They were the foundation of the family's literacy and love of literature. "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you...." The refrain was: "You'll be a man, my son." But I ignored the "man" part. I knew I was being spoken directly to, and this has turned out to be true. I have gone my own way, because of that early impression that it is right to do so. Poetry is that kind of gift. I was also strengthened by the love the people in my community had for poetry. They appreciated my first poem: "Easter lilies pure and white, blossom in the morning light." Their praise, when I was 3 or 4, gave me permission to be a poet, with all the intrigue and adventure that would later involve. Well, if only they knew! Was there a book of poems or a poet in particular that inspired you to write? I loved Emily Dickinson. Robert Frost. T. S. Eliot. Paul Laurence Dunbar. Langston Hughes. Margaret Walker's "For My People" moved me deeply. Also her poems "October Journeys" and "We Have Been Believers." But no, I think sorrow more than poets inspired me to write. That and the most rapt love of nature all around me, that seemed to require something creative from me to attempt to match a gold and crimson leaf, perhaps, or the way a turtle's shell fits perfectly, or the notion that horses, though heavy, could swim! The wonder of it. I felt from a very young age that somehow we had, as humans, emerged into a magical world, a true wonderland, for which my deepest sadness was no match. Which poets continue to inspire you? Taoist poets. "The Activist's Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for a Modern Revolution," by William Martin, is a recent inspiration. Rumi, always. Among modern poets, I like Mary Oliver. Do you see your writing as having evolved over the course of your career? In what ways? It feels more direct. In fact, I have a blog and I publish directly on it, sometimes several pieces a month. I have always wanted my heart to be directly in touch with the reader's. I have wanted to say, on a day when things look dark, here is a reason this moment is not without beauty, nor is it final. As someone who has suffered from depression, I know how important this kind of signal from another human can be. If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be? Probably "Gulliver's Travels." I was 11 when I read it and it encouraged me to believe the world was large, fascinating, and with incredibly interesting creatures in it! And I have discovered this to be true! So when I fall in love, for instance, it is never an impediment that the object of my affections might be, or seem to others to be, odd. What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves? Every novel by Richard Yates. Except the one about prep school days. I was glad there was a movie of "Revolutionary Road." Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio (one of my favorite actors; brilliant also in "The Wolf of Wall Street") were flawless. I don't understand why Yates isn't read in every English class. I think he's much more interesting than either Hemingway or Fitzgerald. Whom I also like and read. He's more crazy, of course. More truthful, too. "Down and Out in Paris and London," by George Orwell. "Animal Farm" and "1984" overshadow Orwell's essays and travel writing. "Down and Out" is hilarious, with a humor quite unexpected in the otherwise seemingly somber Brother Blair. I listen to it often (a couple of places are dated and I have to skip) when I want to laugh. If Rhett Butler, in "Gone With the Wind," had not been a racist who killed a black man during Reconstruction for being "uppity," he would be not a "favorite," but at least someone, as a character of fiction, truly interesting. He is exceptionally understanding of women. Of the books you've written, which is your favorite or the most personally meaningful? "The Temple of My Familiar," because I was aware I had help from beyond my usual Nature and ancestral accomplices. (I wrote about the journey of writing it somewhere, "Writing 'The Temple of My Familiar,'" but can't find it.) For one thing I became obsessed with the colors turquoise and coral. And as I was looking everywhere for those colors from Bali to Mexico to everywhere else! the stories in the novel, covering thousands of years, began to emerge from some formerly unknown layer of understanding. It was quite a new experience for me, and one I enjoyed tremendously. If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? "Why War Is Never a Good Idea." It is a book for children that I wrote many years ago. I believe it is immoral for adults to distort the reality of war to children. As a writer I felt I could introduce war as the disaster it is for creatures including children and the planet. Without scaring them, but by making them thoughtful about wearing those camouflage diapers. I will always be on the side of babies. Which is why I support a woman's right to abortion. How dare we bring anyone so small and helpless into our dangerous situation? You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
EMANUEL AX, LEONIDAS KAVAKOS AND YO YO MA at Carnegie Hall (March 4, 8 p.m.). The Beethoven survey at Carnegie continues with the first of three concerts from this chamber music supergroup, all of which feature a cello sonata, a violin sonata and a piano trio: here, the Cello Sonata Op. 102 No. 1, the Violin Sonata Op. 96 and the Piano Trio Op. 1 No. 3. The further concerts are on March 6 and March 8. If you are looking for Beethoven with a bit more grandeur this week, Bernard Labadie conducts the Orchestra of St. Luke's at Carnegie in works including the "Choral Fantasy" and the Mass in C, with Jeremy Denk as the pianist and Karina Gauvin among the vocal soloists (March 5, 8 p.m.). 212 247 7800, carnegiehall.org 'DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER' at the Metropolitan Opera (March 2, 8 p.m.; through March 27). Francois Girard's production of "Parsifal" made quite the splash when it was introduced in 2013, and it remains one of the most interesting and innovative in the Met's repertoire. What, then, will he make of the first of Wagner's canonical operas? Anja Kampe sings Senta opposite the Dutchman of Evgeny Nikitin, with a strong cast filled out by Franz Josef Selig as Daland, Mihoko Fujimura as Mary, Sergey Skorokhodov as Erik and David Portillo as the Steersman. Valery Gergiev, for better or worse, is on the podium for all but the last two performances. 212 362 6000, metopera.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
When a writer sets a fantasy novel in our dusty old real world, the general approach is: "Everything cruddy just like it is now, except, also magic!" The intrusion of magic is then generally used to make sense of inexplicable or terrible things in our world, for example, why the stock market does stuff. And cancer. It also is used to explain the sadness that young people feel. If only there were an enormous secret lurking just out of sight, providing meaning and conveying specialness upon the knower. ... The latest entrant into the wonderful and ever growing library of "like here but magical!" literature is Leigh Bardugo's "Ninth House," set on the Yale campus in New Haven, that creepy old witchland. The secret societies there, like Scroll and Key and Skull and Bones, each have an array of magical powers that rich young people have been abusing for generations. (This explains the frankly quite bizarre architecture of Yale better than "rich people sure are weird.") In "Ninth House," the university's secret societies are being watched by a powerful and even more secret society, Lethe. The newest recruit to Lethe is Galaxy Stern, who has a very troubled past and, relatedly, has the rare and quite awful ability to see ghosts. Turns out they're all around us! She is grateful, we slowly learn, to start over at Yale. Her story and the inevitable abuses of power she encounters unfold together. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Aren't the days of dances having to be about something long gone? Inspired by Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation," Mr. Greenberg, in his new dance "This," fights the idea that meaning must be assigned to choreography. His last work, "(like a vase)," presented four years ago, explored the tension created by the desire for meaning. In "This," he goes further by focusing on dance as a crystallization of the performance moment. He worked painstakingly to recreate improvisations that were videotaped. Joined by the dancers Molly Lieber, Mina Nishimura, Omagbitse Omagbemi and Connor Voss, Mr. Greenberg will recast and reconfigure the movement at different times. His diaphanous dances keep you at a distance: Once you think you know what you're looking at, the image evaporates. It's best to relax into it. (7:30 p.m. Wednesday to next Saturday, New York Live Arts, 219 West 19th Street, Chelsea; 212 924 0077, newyorklivearts.org.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
In his meticulously crafted Netflix special "Tamborine," Chris Rock says Donald J. Trump might just work out as president, then takes a moment to listen to the silence of the crowd at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. "Yeah, I said it," he adds, in what has become something of a catchphrase for him. Wearing a simple black T shirt and jeans, Mr. Rock, 53, made his case based not on Mr. Trump's potential, but rather on how his disastrous tenure could lead to something better, reminding the audience that the mistakes of George W. Bush led to Barack Obama. "People overlook George Bush's contribution to black history," he joked. This was one of the few bits in this triumphant comeback special, posted Wednesday, that I don't recall from his show in Durham, N.C., exactly one year ago, the opening night of his "Total Blackout" tour. Major chunks of material were the same, yet the comedy still seemed transformed. This special, his first in a decade, is more searching and confessional than his previous work, digging into the end of his marriage after 16 years. He has honed this material, beefing up jokes and cutting out fat, and his comedy has become tighter, funnier if also slicker, shifting from a story of a comic struggling with demons to one describing how he once was lost and now he's found. Mr. Rock's humor has long married a supremely controlled craft with an appealing sense of danger. "Yeah, I said it" lets you know he wasn't supposed to. When he started in New York clubs in the 1980s, he closed some sets by saying: "I was in South Africa the other day. Or was it Boston?" After telling that joke on "The Arsenio Hall Show," the host asked him if he ever worried that his jokes would upset people. Mr. Rock responded that his next target would be Johnny Carson because of a tabloid report that he had a black grandchild he did not financially support. Mr. Hall cut him off, abruptly ending the interview. Mr. Rock rocketed to fame in the next decade with virtuosic specials that were full of intellectual provocations that would probably cause more controversy today when the politics of comedy are more scrutinized. But as he got older, Mr. Rock chose his spots more carefully, calibrating his gibes when he was host of the Oscars in 2016 (though there was a backlash to one about Asian Americans) and releasing specials infrequently. One of his few peers, Dave Chappelle, who also recently returned from a long hiatus to make a Netflix special, provides a contrast. It's hard to imagine Mr. Rock releasing a club set after hardly any time to refine it, the way Mr. Chappelle did over New Year's. Mr. Rock is too much of a perfectionist. And while Mr. Chappelle shows up at clubs and spends hours onstage riffing, gathering ideas through free association, Mr. Rock's process is much more focused and linear, like his comedy. Whereas Mr. Chappelle escapes tricky territory through sweeping history lessons or literary flourishes, Mr. Rock builds forceful arguments that culminate in precise and memorable epigrams. "Pressure makes diamonds, not hugs" is the pithiest defense of bullying you will hear. Mr. Rock's booming act has always been built for bigger rooms, but he goes smaller for this special, with the help of the comic Bo Burnham, whose artfully idiosyncratic direction emphasizes intimacy and studiously avoids cliche. The show begins with a casual shot of the back of Mr. Rock's head while he is chatting backstage and ends abruptly. When the star drops the microphone, Mr. Burnham fades to black before we hear the familiar sound of it hitting the floor. Crisp images of the front row of the theater, juxtaposed with smoky backdrops and ghostly lighting, make the audience appear on the same level as the performer, creating unusually striking images for stand up comedy. In filming just the first joke "You would think that cops would occasionally shoot a white kid, just to make it look good" Mr. Burnham shifts angles four times, but he also knows when to stop moving the camera. As Mr. Rock confesses he cheated on his wife, he goes in for the close up and lingers. This risks heavy handedness but displays a perceptive eye for the importance of a pivot point where the star could lose his audience. Kevin Hart, who recently confessed to cheating on his wife before announcing a tour called "Irresponsible," might face a similar onstage moment soon. When I saw Mr. Rock play Madison Square Garden in December, he took a few glancing shots at Matt Lauer, the "Today" host who was fired over allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior, but the comic mostly avoided MeToo as he does in the new special. Though Mr. Rock evoked the movement at one point by shifting from his mistakes with his wife to a broader question: "What is wrong with men?" Over the course of his career, mixing the voice of a preacher with that of a litigator, Mr. Rock has built up an authority skewering the foibles of the world while keeping his own offstage. This special represents a shift in that dynamic. In describing his flaws, Mr. Rock says he was hooked on pornography. There is a lot of comedy about pornography, but to hear a superstar break down how watching it made him "sexually autistic" is bracing, and may even provide grist to certain warnings against online porn. In that North Carolina show, Mr. Rock went into more detail about his affairs. That was cut from the special, leaving nothing to invite jealousy. His tone is contrite, but it also suggests he has recovered, both from porn addiction and cheating, which he says he's done with. In an hour dense with jokes, he gets serious. "When guys cheat, we want something new," he says, still in close up. "But you know what happens? Your woman finds out and now she's new. She's never the same again. You got new but you got a bad new." Offstage, Chris Rock is soft spoken, thoughtful, even shy an alter ego to the strutting superhero he becomes in his stand up specials whose titles ("Bigger Blacker," "Never Scared") telegraph swagger. In the age of Trump, he has shifted to something quieter, more humble, and yet, with the same old confidence, with lessons learned at the end. Mr. Rock does not wallow in melancholy and regret over lost love. He turns them into a great comedy special, just in time for Valentine's Day. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
So says Alibaba Group, the Chinese e commerce giant, which on Thursday reported strong financial results for the three months that ended in June, despite China's slowing economic growth and a trade war with the United States that has hit the country's factories. The results, from a company that symbolizes the rising confidence of the Chinese consumer, suggest a mixed picture for the world's second largest economy after the United States. Just the day before, the country reported its worst monthly figures for industrial output in 17 years. Exports have fallen, though they rose unexpectedly in July, and the country's factories are having a harder time charging higher prices for the goods they turn out. But Alibaba's results point to strengths. Though the pace of growth has slowed, Alibaba is still adding customers. China's overall retail sales growth, while also slowing, is still strong compared with that of other countries. "The question that is invariably asked is: How does Alibaba's business, which is consumption driven, continue to deliver robust growth despite challenges in the broader economy?" an Alibaba co founder, Joseph Tsai, said in a conference call. "I want to offer two reasons. Both are big secular trends that are happening in China that we have taken advantage of. First is demographics, and the second is the rapid pace of digitization." China's 5.5 trillion domestic consumption market is driven by the emergence of a middle class of over 300 million people living in large cities as well as the rapid urbanization of the countryside, Mr. Tsai said. The question for Alibaba and for China's leaders as the trade war grinds on is how long that strength will last and whether it will be enough to blunt other headwinds. Alibaba said on Thursday that revenue had risen 42 percent, to 16.7 billion. Its net profit more than doubled to 3.1 billion from a year earlier, when costs involving employee compensation sharply reduced the bottom line. The company's shares, which trade in New York, rose about 3 percent on the day. Alibaba's earnings were consistent with retail sales in China that showed shoppers continued to spend. According to official statistics, retail sales rose 8.3 percent in the first seven months of the year compared with a year earlier, though July retail sales were up 7.6 percent, missing estimates. "Confidence has improved somewhat," said Wang Tao, chief China economist for UBS. "Late last year, there was a wall of uncertainty." Ms. Wang cited a survey of 3,000 consumers that UBS conducted in May that showed consumers were still buying because, they said, their salaries had increased and their property wealth had risen. "In general, the trade war has not had a big impact on the labor market," she said. It is not clear how long that will last. Ms. Wang said she believed the tariffs could still add to economic uncertainties and slow growth. But e commerce remains an area where shoppers seem to be still optimistic. A case in point: Alibaba's closest rival, JD.com. On Tuesday, the company posted a profit of 90.1 million, compared with a net loss of 310 million a year ago. Alibaba's strong result did not come just from consumer growth. The company, which provides digital marketplaces in which retailers set up virtual shops to sell their wares, said its strong results were due in part to improved algorithms that better connected buyers and sellers. It also saw strong sales growth from the commissions it charges retailers for using its services, in another positive sign. As China's economic news turned markedly gloomier toward the end of last year, Alibaba executives said that the company would delay charging merchants higher rates for placing ads on its digital shopping sites. The company also added customers at a slowing but still healthy clip. In the last quarter, the number of annual active consumers rose by one sixth, to 674 million. That was a slower pace than the increase from a year before but still showed interest by consumers wanting to buy goods online. Alibaba may have also benefited from shifts in what Chinese consumers want to buy. Analysts say the trade war with the United States has prompted shoppers to become more selective, and many have switched to buying domestic brands that they feel are of high quality. "There's definitely a 'China for China' trend that's happening right now, meaning people shifting toward domestic brands," said Ben Cavender, a senior analyst at China Market Research, a consultancy based in Shanghai. Even though Alibaba makes nearly all of its money in China, the company's shares have swung wildly this year as the trade war has continued on its roller coaster course. Since talks between Washington and Beijing hit an impasse in May, Alibaba shares have lost around 15 percent of their value. Alibaba is considering a second share listing in Hong Kong. That would allow mainland Chinese investors to invest more easily in the company and give it a backup source of funding in case Washington decides to curb Chinese businesses' access to Wall Street. The company received an unwelcome bit of publicity last week when Malaysia filed criminal charges against several people, including Alibaba's president, Michael Evans, a former Goldman Sachs executive, in connection with a multibillion dollar fraud scandal. Alibaba said at the time that it was monitoring the situation. Mr. Tsai and other executives did not comment on the accusations on Thursday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
In the week since Donald J. Trump's election as president of the United States, much has been written about the potential conflicts of interest a sitting president with a global business may encounter (among other things). Less attention, however, has been paid to the even fuzzier situation of the close family members of a sitting president, and their business interests though on Monday, it became clear that this is another potential minefield, at least when it comes to the first daughter Ivanka Trump and a brand that is largely built on her image. A group of journalists, including reporters at The New York Times and Vogue, received an email from Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry, the upscale brand Ms. Trump founded in 2007, entitled "Style Alert" and touting "Ivanka Trump wearing her favorite bangle from the Metropolis Collection on '60 Minutes.'" The bangle, a gold and diamond bracelet that costs 10,800 on her website, was clearly pictured on her wrist during her interview with her father, stepmother and grown siblings with Lesley Stahl on Sunday night. Such emails are not uncommon among fashion brands, which tend to trumpet every celebrity sighting in their products to the world at large. What was different about this email, however, was that it came not from the communications office, but from the vice president for sales, the person in a brand who would generally work with a company's wholesale partners (in Ms. Trump's case, stores such as Neiman Marcus in Georgia, Florida and Illinois, and Charles Schwartz Son in Washington, D.C.). And that after pointing out the bracelet, it urged recipients to "Please share this with your clients." In other words, it used Ms. Trump's appearance by her father's side to directly promote the selling of her products. When reached, Monica Marder, the vice president, said repeatedly, "I am not available for comment," and then, when asked if she had sent the email, hung up the phone. But a day later, Abigail Klem, president of the Ivanka Trump brand, said: "This notification was sent by a well intentioned marketing employee at one of our companies who was following customary protocol, and who, like many of us, is still making adjustments post election. We are proactively discussing new policies and procedures with all of our partners going forward." This is not the first time Ms. Trump's brands have used her role in her father's political career for marketing purposes. In July, Ms. Trump wore a dress from her own collection to introduce her father at the Republican National Convention (she also wore her own brand shoes and jewelry). The next day, her company tweeted out a picture of her from the podium with the words "Shop Ivanka's look from her RNC speech" and a link to the Macy's website, where a similar style from the brand was offered. The 138 dress reportedly sold out in a day. Mr. Trump has stated that his children will have no formal roles in his White House, because they will be running his business, and there is no law that prohibits presidential relatives from continuing their own business, though Section 713 of Title 18 of the United States Code forbids the use of likenesses of the presidential seal for promotional purposes. Ms. Trump has not come close to that, but the appearance is still ethically blurred. Whether or not Ms. Trump knew of the bracelet email before it was sent, her name is still on the top of the alert. In the past, attempts by relatives to profit from a connection to a president, such as Billy Carter's introduction of Billy Beer during his brother Jimmy's administration, and the creation of Roger Clinton's band, Politics, during his half brother Bill's terms in office, were roundly deemed inappropriate. The tension between Ms. Trump's position on her father's transition team and her unofficial, but powerful, role as a representative of women and the younger generation in his organization, and the fact that she is her own best ad and her brand is thus understandably using her as a celebrity, makes the issue even more complicated, and it underscores her status in the public eye and the amount of attention she will incur. The question now is how she uses it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Roger Brown accessorized some of his landscape paintings with ceramics and, in at least one instance, a taxidermied antelope. From left: "Virtual Still Life 5 Elegant Pot With Gold Sky," 1995; "Pronghorn Diorama," 1987; and "A Painting for a Sofa: A Sofa for a Painting," 1995. Roger Brown, the Imagist painter and collector extraordinaire, was born in Alabama in 1941 to a religious family that encouraged his art. He remained close to them, returning home in 1997 to die of AIDS at 55 . The artist, however, lived most of his life in and around Chicago, where he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and consorted with other Imagists (initially known as the Hairy Who), an often ribald group that included Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Ray Yoshida and Christina Ramberg. They emerged in the early 1970s, making irreverent figurative works rooted in Surrealism and popular culture that snobby, ill informed New Yorkers (which was most of us at that time) called Regionalist. Brown also lived surrounded by dizzyingly dense arrays of flea market and thrift shop finds, some of which eventually made their way into his artworks. A slide show of the three homes Brown assembled and lived in is the place to start in the idiosyncratic but excellent exhibition "Roger Brown: Virtual Still Lifes" at the Museum of Arts and Design, the first museum show devoted to his work in New York. The slides, projected large, as if you might almost step into them, form a gripping account of one artist's taste and voracious acquisitiveness as well as the rich veins of Americana that fed his art. Put another way, Brown assembled the museums of his dreams to live in. In each of his three home studios two of which he built he created a different assortment, cued to its location (Chicago, a beach town just north of Los Angeles and the dunes of Lake Michigan 's eastern shore). There are thrilling sights. For example, in one shot of the interior of the Chicago storefront building that he bought in 1974, you'll see a comfy seating nook: Its walls are triple hung mostly breathtakingly with drawings by the great Joseph Yoakum, a Chicago self taught artist that the Imagists helped bring to prominence. The most sparsely furnished house was in Michigan, which Brown's partner, the architect George Veronda (1940 1984), designed in the late 1970s. It was an a near replica of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's 1951 Farnsworth House in Illinois at once an outrageous bit of collecting and a testament to Brown's appreciation of modernism and, perhaps, his conviction that his work was part of it. (Brown left the Chicago building and its contents to the School of the Art Institute; they now form the Roger Brown Study Collection.) In the last few years of his life, Brown sought to combine his art and his collection in his "virtual still lifes." Mainly he accessorized his highly stylized landscape paintings with ceramics from his collection, lined up on narrow shelves attached to the bottom edges of his canvases, like actors in front of a painted backdrop. "Virtual Still Life 15 Waterfalls and Pitchers" (1995), for instance, features a quintessential Roger Brown landscape seven misty waterfalls painted blue against brown with Minimalist regularity. Down front, six vigorously mismatched pitchers echo this palette while suggesting mouths open to receive libations. Sometimes a single addition was more than enough, like the taxidermied antelope of "Pronghorn Diorama." Over the course of this motley, illuminating exhibition, it may occur to you that all of Brown's works are still lifes a silent absence, or freezing, of motion of some sort. This applies to the repeating patterns of the landscapes fed by Art Deco, the comics, Navajo blankets, Yoakum's landscapes and quilts that Brown collected, as well as Minimalist abstraction. It's also true of his urban nocturnes, which feature gray, stripped down houses, apartment buildings and skyscrapers in whose windows tiny silhouetted figures enact terse domestic dramas against bright yellow light. The show includes a cache of Brown's little known early paintings of movie theater interiors the source of both the emoting silhouettes and the cantilevered shelf stages. The instinct to combine objects and images is evident in several works from 1975: pieces of midcentury furniture painted with what would become typical Roger Brown scenes a bed's footboard cum billboard, a chair, an old shoe store stool and "Untitled (Crawling, Flagellated Building)" from 1975. This work gives us a kind of architectural Christ figure in painted wood: an anguished skyscraper on its hands and knees before a painting of the soft grays of a cloudy Chicago sky. Also on view are parts of the collection, including two very different groups of ceramics earnestly modern postwar vases purchased in California, and exuberant dinner plates, mostly from Mexico arranged on handsomely handmade, unpainted wood shelves, also Mexican. (They appear in the slides of the beach house designed by Stanley Tigerman that Brown built near Ventura, Calif., in the early 1990s, and reflect the fruits of local shopping as well as wares from trips to Mexico.) This show, organized by Shannon R. Stratton, a former curator at the museum, is not quite the full dress New York retrospective that Brown deserves; few of his Chicago cohort have had the honor, nor have similar artists from Northern California, most notably the great "Regionalist" Roy De Forest. This show needed more examples of Brown's unaccessorized landscape paintings, which are his best work, and there are two underused walls that could have accommodated them. But the virtual still lifes bring together the through lines of Brown's aesthetic, in art and life. They also reflect an artist who knew his time was cruelly limited and was trying to reveal more of himself, more of his object love and more of his debt to the often abandoned corners of American visual culture. Through Sept. 15 at the Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle, Manhattan; 212 299 7701, madmuseum.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
In a coda to one of the most notable music copyright lawsuits in years, the Warner Music Group has agreed to pay 14 million to settle claims over "Happy Birthday to You," after a judge ruled last year that the company's long claimed copyright to the famous song was invalid. Warner Music, through its publishing subsidiary Warner/Chappell, agreed after mediation to pay the settlement to a class of "thousands of people and entities" who had paid licensing fees to use the song since 1949, according to filings in federal court on Monday. The terms of the settlement, which are subject to approval by the judge in the case, George H. King of United States District Court in Los Angeles, call for the judge to declare "Happy Birthday" part of the public domain. The settlement would also grant 4.6 million in fees to the lawyers for the plaintiffs, a group of independent artists and filmmakers who filed separate suits in 2013 that were later combined. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
A Long Way From Home Bob Ripka, left, travels to work in the Williston oil fields from Pine City, Minn.; Randall Ervin comes from Beaverton, Ore.; Guy Miramontes from Las Vegas, NV. LAST spring, Bob Ripka decided the time had come for drastic change. His once robust income from his job at a printing company was dwindling. His family lost its house in the real estate crash. And employment prospects around his home in Pine City, Minn., more than an hour north of Minneapolis, appeared scant. He heard talk around town about plentiful work in North Dakota, where new drilling technologies are driving an oil boom. "And I decided, 'Well, I'm going to go make some money,' " he recalled in an interview. So on Memorial Day weekend, Mr. Ripka, 48, removed the rear seats from his 2003 Dodge minivan and replaced them with a mattress. He threw some clothes in a bag, said goodbye to his family and drove 10 hours west to Williston ground zero in the North Dakota petroleum explosion. After filling out a round of applications and sleeping in his car for several nights, Mr. Ripka was offered a job driving heavy trucks for an oil services company, helping to pour cement to secure casings for new wells. He passed a drug test and trained for two weeks in Denver before settling, in July, into his new home away from home: a 7 by 11 foot cubicle at a "man camp." A sort of cross between a military barracks and a college dormitory, temporary man camps have sprung up in and around Williston to help house the influx of workers from around the country. Mr. Ripka is one of thousands of men with similar stories. They have descended on Williston and its environs over the last two to three years, pulled by the magnet of jobs created by an oil boom with the potential to make the region one of the largest petroleum resources in the country, and pushed by the hope that a steady income can put their finances back on track after a grueling downturn. While the national unemployment rate is 8.3 percent, in North Dakota it is 3.2 percent and it is 1 percent in Williams County, where Williston has grown from a population of 12,500 before the boom began in 2008 to an estimated 20,000 now. Many newcomers are, like Mr. Ripka, middle age family men angling for a fresh financial start. Builders cannot throw up homes fast enough to house them; an estimated 1,200 housing units are expected to be completed in Williston in the next few months, and one bedroom apartments rent for 1,700 or more a month, if they are available. With an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 job openings in the area, many men live where they can in their cars, or in illegally parked campers and send their earnings to their families while they hunt for housing. Because of the fast pace of oil well development to tap the Bakken shale field, the men often are on call around the clock and are away from their families for extended periods. A typical schedule might be to work 15 days straight, followed by six days off to go home. Airfare out of Williston can be steep, though, so many workers drive or take an Amtrak train, which adds travel time that cuts into their visits. (Some companies occasionally offer to put family members up in local hotels for visits.) But not everyone goes home. The men can earn extra money 150 to 200 a day or more, depending on the job by working their scheduled days off, so many do. That means, though, that they are away from home for five weeks at a stretch, or even longer. Mr. Ripka, for instance, was home in January but then stayed in Williston, working, through early March. It is worth the sacrifice financially, he said. Back home, he said, he made 27,000 for the last six months he worked at his printing job; after six months in Williston, he had earned 45,000. Mr. Ripka plans to continue for about five years, long enough to pay down some debt, including a loan his parents took out to help finance the purchase of the home in Pine City where his family lives. He said his credit was marred by the loss of the family's former home in a short sale, in which the lender agreed to accept less than what was owed, so his parents pitched in to help. "I'd rather be home every day and see my family," he said. "But this economy nowadays, you got to do what you got to do." Mr. Ripka is one of the lucky ones in Williston, as far as housing: his employer, the Sanjel Corporation, contracts to house its workers at a man camp, so his lodging and meals are subsidized. One afternoon last month, Mr. Ripka gave a tour of his camp, operated by Atco Structures and Logistics, a Canadian company. The "lodge," as Atco calls it, comprises four, 49 room modular dormitories. His room has a twin bed, a cabinet, a television and DVD player, a chair and a single window. A blue felt blanket hung tenuously over the blinds, secured with tape Mr. Ripka's attempt, when working night shifts, to block out the daylight while he sleeps. Mr. Ripka says long hours help him to sleep soundly most of the time but not always. The walls are thin, and other workers may come and go at different hours. One neighbor sometimes forgets to adjust his alarm clock when his shift changes; its "beep, beep, beep" echoed down the hall. Mr. Ripka installed a small refrigerator so he can get a cold drink without walking to the camp's communal kitchen, but has otherwise made no attempt to personalize his living space. "I'm here to work," he shrugged. Just inside the exit door sits a bin filled with blue surgical bootees. Workers must either take off their boots, or slip the covers over them when they come inside, to help keep out the ever present mud. When the men forget and track in grime, "We scold them, and make them clean it up," said Sally Hojnacki, an assistant manager at the lodge, who also acts as a sort of adviser and den mother to the residents. The "no boots" edict is one of about two dozen rules given to the men on laminated cards when they arrive. Others include a ban on alcohol in common areas, no smoking inside the camp and no visitors after 10:30 p.m. The many restrictions grate on one of Mr. Ripka's fellow campers, Randall Ervin, 38, of Beaverton, Ore. "Here I am 40 years old and it's like I got a mom, you know what I mean?" said Mr. Ervin, a burly, gregarious sort who works as an oil field pump operator. "You're not really free to do anything you want to." Nevertheless, Mr. Ervin said, coming to North Dakota has been the start of a financial rebound and, he hopes, a new career. A native of Heflin, Ala., he proudly wears a University of Alabama lanyard around his neck. "Roll, Tide!" he said, smiling, evoking Alabama's nickname, the Crimson Tide. He joined the Navy after high school and eventually settled in the Portland area, where he met his fiancee, Melani Stewart, while playing arena football. The couple has twin 5 year old girls; Mr. Ervin's son from a previous relationship lives with the boy's mother. Mr. Ervin started a firm in Oregon that did drilling for underground conduits used by communications companies. But even though Mr. Ervin's being an African American meant his company qualified for minority business status, it was increasingly underbid for contracts by larger companies, he said. The venture went belly up. Soon, he and Ms. Stewart were hard pressed to pay the mortgage on the half of a duplex she had owned when they met. Ms. Stewart's job as a supply planner at Nike was secure, so they borrowed against her 401(k) to make ends meet. "We ran through our money pretty quick," he said. "We started to struggle." They ran up nearly 30,000 in debt, in part to pay medical bills after Mr. Ervin injured his knee while repairing his truck. They were reluctant to confide their troubles to family members and friends, so Ms. Stewart juggled bills, clipped coupons and skipped haircuts to save money, while Mr. Ervin scoured help wanted ads. While out on walks to help his knee mend, Mr. Ervin picked up cans and redeemed them for the deposits. "If we'd get 10 to 15, we used it," he said. "Did what we had to do." IN August, the couple was "a month behind on the mortgage and headed for disaster," Mr. Ervin recalled, when he saw an ad on Craigslist, seeking heavy equipment operators willing to travel. Even after the recruiter told him the job was in the oil fields of North Dakota, where subzero temperatures in the double digits are common in the winter, Mr. Ervin didn't waver. "At this point in my life, I didn't care," he said. "It was either sink or swim, and I thought I'd try the swim part." He drove nearly eight hours to an interview in Post Falls, Idaho, and three days later was told the job was his. He next set out to Billings, Mont., with 100 in cash, for a two week training period. The men were fed breakfast, but he had to buy the rest of his meals. "I would buy a sandwich and eat half for lunch and save the other half for dinner," he recalled, "just so I wouldn't blow through my money so fast." Now, all his meals are provided at the Atco camp. The cooks serve up hearty if bland fare, including prime rib once a week, along with mashed potatoes and gravy, in the cafeteria. Like Mr. Ripka, Mr. Ervin sometimes works on his time off to make more money an extra 1,200 if he works all of his six days off which helps raise his annual salary to about 80,000. He and Ms. Stewart have paid off about 8,000 in credit card debt and are planning to take their children to Disney World this summer. "It's been worth it financially," he said. "I don't know what we would have done, honestly." Mr. Ervin said he did not mind hard work, but he did yearn for his home life. "I think the hardest thing is just missing the everyday things that go on at home, you know?" he said. "I think I miss most my kids jumping in bed with us like at 7 or 8 in the morning. I still get a kick out of it even though they are getting bigger." He does not foresee moving his family to Williston, but he hopes to work two more years in the field and then, perhaps, move into an administrative role, helping to train new employees for Sanjel somewhere else Texas, perhaps. "I might just ride this thing until the wheels fall off," he said. One day last summer, he saw a television report on the oil boom in Williston. Soon he could think of nothing else, and told Imelda he was going to North Dakota. "I could stay there and wallow in the self pity of what we were going through," he said. "But as we sink, eventually we'd be on the street, too." In early September, he put a small fold up mattress in his Honda CR V, along with an alarm clock and a pair of heavy boots; he was hoping for oil field work, but packed his set of chef's knives, just in case. "I drove straight through for 24 hours, white knuckle the whole way," he said. He packed peanut butter and jelly and beef jerky, so he would not have to spend much on food. He parked at the Wal Mart in Williston, for what he hoped would be a brief stretch of living in his car before finding work. "Actually it wasn't that easy," he said. "I stayed in my car for three weeks." He learned to move his car around the lot throughout the day, following the shade. (The Wal Mart has since stopped the practice of newcomers' sleeping in its parking lot, according to Williston's mayor, Ward Koeser.) He showered at a local recreation center, and ate as cheaply as he could at a local sandwich shop. He visited the local library daily, to check his e mail for possible replies to job applications. After a week, Imelda pleaded with him to return home, but Mr. Miramontes felt desperate. One day, driving around, he passed a man camp under construction, housing a skeleton crew. He walked in the back door, in his cowboy boots and carrying a resume, and found the catering manager. "I'm looking for work and I'm a real good cook," he told him. He called daily, repeating the same thing. Finally, the cook on duty needed a week off, and Mr. Miramontes had his chance. He was hired, and has worked there since. He goes on duty at 11 p.m. and works until 11 a.m. preparing breakfast for the camp and readying food for two days ahead. "These people come in tired from work and they want to eat on time," he said. "They are up there to make money. That's what it's all about, to have a better life." He is grateful for the job, but bitter at the economic mess that pushed him into it. Coming to North Dakota "was by choice," he said, "but a forced choice." For now, Mr. Miramontes is not looking too far into the future. He has a son who is grown and on his own, but he worries about having to be far away from his mother, 81, who lives outside Las Vegas. His wife, who works for a Las Vegas hotel, may consider moving out to join him eventually, if it looks as if the boom will last a while. "I'll put in as many years as I'm able to," he said. Back at home, the women with children must adjust to being single parents for weeks or even months at a time. For Danette Radermacher, Mr. Ripka's partner of 22 years, duties now include digging out after snowstorms, without Mr. Ripka's help. At the end of February, with northern Minnesota under a severe storm warning, Ms. Radermacher woke every couple of hours to check the weather, and watched as the drifts piled up against the kitchen window. The couple's sons, 17 and 10, are old enough to help with chores like shoveling snow. But she is keenly aware that she is the sole adult there, no matter how many times she speaks to Mr. Ripka on the phone. "I get nervous when it snows," she said in a phone interview just after the storm. "What if we lose power?" Despite the challenges, Ms. Radermacher said Mr. Ripka's new job had thrown the family a financial lifeline. Although she is a registered nurse, Ms. Radermacher had only been able to find work locally as a home health aide, covering the overnight shift on weekends so she could work while her boys slept. So when the opportunity came up in North Dakota, she agreed Mr. Ripka should go. She considered going, too, with the boys, since nurses are in demand in Williston and she could very likely find good work. But their older son is nearly finished with high school, and they did not want to make him leave his friends so close to graduation, "We have to do what we have to do." Even when she is not trapped in the house by the weather, she is often lonely. Entertainment is mostly watching cable television, and taking her sons to play after school sports. "Sometimes," she said with a wry laugh, "I forget how to talk to adults." THE separation is hard on the children, too. They like that their parents can now afford to buy them electronic gadgets as birthday gifts, Ms. Radermacher said. But Mr. Ripka's job meant missing his son Dakota's 10th birthday in February. During Mr. Ripka's visit home in January, the boy presented his father with a jar of spare change, and asked if it were enough to pay for a family trip to the beach. Mr. Ripka decided that they had earned a family vacation, and that he would work extra weeks to pay for it. When Ms. Radermacher was told by her employer that she would be denied time off from her job for the trip, she said, she quit in frustration. She has been applying for jobs locally, but has not yet landed one. Mr. Ripka took the train from Williston on March 6, meeting with his family before heading to Florida for a week together in the sun. In Oregon, Ms. Stewart is coping as best she can in Mr. Ervin's absence. "It's lonely, especially when he's out on long jobs," she said in a phone interview. "He can't always call." They tried video chats using Skype for a while, but often when Mr. Ervin has time to talk, the girls are in bed. So she takes pictures of their daughters to show him when he comes home, to help keep him connected with what they are doing. And they make the most of Mr. Ervin's visits home, hiring a sitter so they can have date nights. His job has let them stem a scary financial spiral and opened the door to a new career for Mr. Ervin, so Ms. Stewart makes the best of the situation. Once their finances are back on track, the couple can perhaps think about setting a wedding date, she said. "I almost feel like I can't complain," she said. "This is a choice we've made. I can't sit home and feel sad." Still, she is unsure how long they will keep up the extended separations. "For now, it needs to be done," she said. "But there has to be light at the end of the tunnel." While the men's families muddle through at home, workdays can stretch around the clock in Williston, depending on the situation at the drilling sites. During their off time, some of the men at the Atco camp gather in a common area for darts, cribbage or television; the local movie theater has limited showings during the week. A sort of camaraderie has evolved, based on the shared experience of long hours and loneliness. A half dozen men in Mr. Ripka's work group were temporarily bald this winter, having shaved their heads together as part of an autism fund raiser. On weekends, there are outings for pitchers of icy, light beer at D.K.'s, a Williston watering hole where visitors are scanned with security wands, like at the airport. A bouncer with a curly mullet scans driver's licenses into a hand held gadget; if the holder makes trouble, he explains, he or she will not be allowed in again. On a recent Friday night, a gang of workers from the Atco lodge drove to D.K.'s, where the scene was a sort of college mixer meets biker bar. The men watched as girls in jeans and heavy boots line danced until, emboldened by beer and the thumping beat of Lady Gaga, younger flannel clad men joined them on the dance floor, mugs in hand. At about 10:30, women in decidedly different attire short, skintight dresses teetered onto the dance floor, in spike heels. Prostitutes, as well as oil workers, are said to be doing a brisk business in Williston. The separation can strain even strong relationships. One camper said his wife objected to his removing his wedding ring while at work, even though it is advisable for safety. Another said he would not let his girlfriend visit him in Williston; he worried that he would be too jealous, with all the men around. The men, too, worry about their partners left home alone. "If you don't have a lady at home that you can trust, you are going to have a hard time up here," Mr. Ervin said. Yet, some of the men are reluctant to bring their wives and children to live in Williston, which has developed a decidedly gritty, frontier town feel. Recently, the local news has been dominated by the story of a woman in nearby Sidney, Mont., who was kidnapped and, it is presumed, murdered while jogging; two Colorado men said to have been looking for oil field work have been charged in her disappearance. And in late February, the local newspaper ran an article saying that the number of registered sex offenders in the area had doubled over the previous year because of the influx of newcomers. Mayor Koeser calls the rapid growth a "crisis" that has strained local resources with, among other challenges, increased traffic and litter, often blowing out of pickup trucks used for shelter. Patrick Schneider, 30, left his wife and 3 year old daughter back in Bemidji, Minn., to work pouring cement for oil wells around Williston. His employer is building family housing, and the couple is considering applying for it so they can be reunited on a regular basis. But the recent headlines gave him pause. "I think it's a good town, but they say crime is getting bad," he said. "I'd hate to move them out here and have something happen. That would be horrible." While many of the men plan to stick it out as long as they can take it, some decide relatively soon that being separated from their families is more than they can handle. Ronald Powell, a native of Winter Haven, Fla., lasted about four months as a heavy equipment operator for an oil field services contractor before throwing in the towel. Mr. Powell had been out of work for some time when he was hired last fall at 25 per hour to drive trucks in Williston; he settled into a man camp operated by Target Logistics. A gruff, churchgoing man, with hands like catcher's mitts, Mr. Powell said he was often uncomfortable in the rough and tumble environment of Williston. Yet things were tolerable, until he had a disagreement with his employer over working conditions and, he said, a proposed pay cut. So when a company in Florida offered him 18 an hour to work back home, he quickly accepted it. Speaking by phone after leaving Sunday services in Winter Haven with his granddaughter, Mr. Powell said he was bitter about his treatment by his employer, but had no regrets about trying out the work life in Williston. "Everything," he said, "happens for a reason." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
NAUCALPAN DE JUAREZ, Mexico Nine holes into his record tying round Sunday, Justin Thomas bumped into Rory McIlroy, who was waiting to tee off on the first hole at Club de Golf Chapultepec. He said he asked McIlroy how he thought the afternoon would go. McIlroy began the final day of the Mexico Championship four strokes behind Dustin Johnson, a deficit that was daunting but hardly insurmountable; the previous Sunday, J. B. Holmes charged from four strokes back to beat Thomas at the Genesis Open. McIlroy told Thomas it would be hard to catch Johnson because of how well he was playing, a prediction that proved to be hit the flagstick accurate. Johnson, who was sixth on the PGA Tour in driving distance last year, ranked first in this week's field in putting. It was an unbeatable combination as Johnson closed with a five under par 66 to finish five strokes clear of McIlroy, who posted a 67. Johnson's 72 hole total in this World Golf Championships event outside Mexico City was 19 under. McIlroy finished at 16 under, which would have been good enough to win each of the previous two years that the tournament was held here. On Sunday, all it got McIlroy was a five stroke cushion over the third place finishers: Paul Casey (65), Ian Poulter (68) and Kiradech Aphibarnrat (68). Tiger Woods recorded a 69 to finish in a four way tie for 10th at eight under. "It was sort of like there was two different golf tournaments going on and I won the second one," said McIlroy, who has posted top five finishes in all four of his tour starts in 2019. Thomas, who played in the first group off the back nine, took advantage of pristine greens and nonexistent pressure to record a 62, tying his year old course record, vaulting him into ninth. His score represented a 13 stroke improvement over his final 18 last Sunday at Riviera Country Club. "I would sure play a lot of money to switch the two," Thomas said with a smile. "I would gladly take a 50th place this week to win last week." Johnson, 34, became the first player since Davis Love III in 2008 to reach 20 PGA Tour titles. "To get 20 wins out here is very difficult, and do it before I turn 35 is pretty incredible," Johnson said, adding, "This is a big one for me, and it gives me a lot of confidence for the rest of the year." Johnson is not lacking for confidence. He has two victories and a tie for ninth in his last four starts. He also extended his streak of seasons with at least one tour title to 12, an emphatic argument for his inclusion among the finest players in the men's game (Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer share the record at 17, one better than Billy Casper and three more than Woods). McIlroy, 29, also extended a streak, this one more enigmatic. Since January of last year, he has played his way into the last group for the final round eight times without emerging triumphant. McIlroy's lone title run in that stretch came at Bay Hill last March when he started the final round in the next to last group. To mount a charge, McIlroy needed to get off to the kind of hot start engineered by Casey, who teed off four groups ahead and birdied the first three holes. Johnson started shakily, playing the first five holes in one over, but McIlroy, despite making a birdie at the second, could not swing the momentum his way. He did not find a fairway off the tee until the eighth hole and he missed a birdie putt of 11 feet on the first hole and a 6 footer for par on the fourth. After playing the first nine in one over, McIlroy settled for par on No. 10, which Johnson birdied. At that point, McIlroy said, his caddie, Harry Diamond, told him to forget about trying to catch Johnson and concentrate on consolidating second place. "I knew at that point that I didn't have a chance; D. J. was playing too well," McIlroy said. McIlroy covered the final eight holes in five under and all he could do was equal Johnson's final nine 31. "I felt like I was standing still," McIlroy said with a laugh. "I was making birdies and going nowhere." The other member of the final threesome on Sunday was Patrick Reed, who was grouped with McIlroy on Sunday at last year's Masters and claimed the green jacket with a 71 to McIlroy's 74. That was McIlroy's second cubic zirconia in the lustrous string. The fourth was the World Golf Championships event in Ohio, where he could not overcome Thomas's three stroke advantage. The sixth was the Tour Championship, where he started three behind Woods. The seventh was the Tournament of Champions, where Xander Schauffele shot a 62 to leapfrog into first. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The designers of Vaquera from left, Patric DiCaprio, Claire Sullivan and Bryn Taubensee with a model wearing one of their typically restrained looks.Credit...Shawn Brackbill for The New York Times The designers of Vaquera from left, Patric DiCaprio, Claire Sullivan and Bryn Taubensee with a model wearing one of their typically restrained looks. On a Tuesday afternoon in September at Public School 42 on Hester Street, there were drinks spilled on the floor of the cafeteria and wadded up notebook paper littered here and there. Tiny chairs for tiny students were arranged in loose lines, barely at knee height, but P.S. 42's students weren't coming. The chairs were awaiting a raft of Vogue editors, major retailers and critics from The New York Times, The Washington Post and Women's Wear Daily. While the students were off for Rosh Hashana, Vaquera, an upstart New York design collective, had convinced their principal, May W. Lee, to rent out the school for its spring 2019 fashion show. There were no seat cards, not even seat assignments. People who later in the week would be guided to front row seats at Michael Kors and Marc Jacobs air kissed and how was your summered by a flotilla of publicists, would be more or less finding their own way. "We want to make people really uncomfortable, really insecure," said Emma Wyman, Vaquera's stylist, smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk outside. "Like the first day of school." "I met Patric while he was still styling," said Carol Song, the fashion director of Opening Ceremony. "This was his passion project." She liked the outfits, but they required the kind of styling someone used to photo shoots would be able to do, not the kind that sells a garment off a hanger on a rack. "I loved that vibe," Ms. Song said. "But to be honest, at the end of the day, I'm a business. I need to be able to sell this." She encouraged Mr. DiCaprio to envision how a customer would approach one of his pieces without him standing by to explain it. He did, and she bought the collection the following season, and has carried it ever since. "I didn't expect it to sell," she said. "We were just getting the word out. I was really surprised when we got it, and it actually did sell, really well." At boutiques with a strong following among the young and boundary pushing, Vaquera has always found support. Irikita Akihiro, the founder of Radd Lounge in Tokyo, has been buying it since its second season , though he has never met the designers or been to one of their shows . "When I started selling them, there was a frenzy, and now the brand seems to be generally recognized," he wrote in an email. "From this year's spring collection, we sold out of 100 key chains." The designers are understandably frustrated by criticisms like these, even while they admit that the quality of their production is a work in progress. (Ms. Song at Opening Ceremony, for the record, said she had never experienced any problems with the craftsmanship of their clothes. "It may look like they just sewed that up, but that's kind of the intent of it," she said.) "We aren't doing something that there's a precedent for, or that maybe makes sense to these people in the industry," Mr. DiCaprio said. "But their industry is failing right now. It's maybe, like, don't be so critical and maybe accept that we're doing something that could work. And even if it doesn't work, it's a suggestion, and it's opening up a space for new things." They recall, to their fans, the spirit of an earlier era in fashion, a smaller, scrappier, precorporate time. "They remind me of the energy that was around at the turn of the century that grungy, dirty, downtown edginess," said Nicole Phelps, the director of Vogue Runway and a judge of the Fashion Fund. "I think we need them in New York fashion right now." In August, Mr. DiCaprio, Ms. Taubensee and Ms. Sullivan invited me to their studio in Greenpoint. It is a cramped one room space that they share with their studio manager and a rotating cast of interns; the bathrooms are down the hall. Each of the designers mentioned feeling marooned there, though they have an easy camaraderie, passing rhinestoned Juuls back and forth. Mr. Moses had left the company, they said, a mutual parting of ways that had been difficult. It had the air of a foregone conclusion after the feedback they'd received about the difficulty of groups, though they insisted the issue had been personal, not professional. He and Mr. DiCaprio still work side by side at Beacon's Closet. Mr. Moses's absence had led to a recalibration of their responsibilities. Each of the Vaquera members handles a bit of everything; labor had not been divided along any traditional lines, though each has his or her strengths, and defined roles are emerging. Ms. Taubensee, quieter than her collaborators, has a head for business, and also designs statement pieces, and all the hats and bras. Mr. DiCaprio designs more "men ish" wear and pieces he described as "asymmetrical/oversize/confusing blobs." Ms. Sullivan, with a husky voice and a pile of curls, designs more feminine pieces, both staples and some of Vaquera's wildest offerings. Ms. Taubensee and Ms. Sullivan had together taken a Fashion Institute of Technology course to better understand their business. "It was really hell to sit through," Ms. Taubensee said. "But we learned a lot of good things from it." It helped them to organize their time and their production; it also helped them consider who they were designing for. They divided their imagined customer base into three categories, based on age and income. "The bottom one is Young Visionaries," Ms. Taubensee said. "The middle one I can never remember." "And then the top one is ..." Ms. Taubensee said. "Upscale Influencers," they all said in unison. Such marketing speak is a joke and not a joke, easy to poke fun at, but undergirded by a reality that's harder to ignore. The gap between affect and spending power can be wide: If Vaquera is beloved of the young visionaries of the world, they may nevertheless lack the 650 for a patchwork shirt. Slowly, the school hallways filled up with models waiting for the show to start, pecking at their phones. The August heat had barely dissipated two weeks into September, and the room was sweaty. Principal Lee, in track pants and a Gucci bag, invited models into the cooler air conditioning of her office. "Some kid's throwing up," Mr. Pearce said. "It was his birthday yesterday, so we're pretty sure it's not the flu. We replaced him with an intern I like him better than the original kid. I don't think I've ever done a show where I didn't replace someone with an intern." Leo Becerra, the show's producer, appeared in a doorway with an apparently necessary announcement. "Absolutely no smoking or Juuling," he said. "This is a school." I can now report from experience that a show passes instantly, quicker even than the scant eight or so minutes it takes. You line up (here, in a back stairwell behind the cafeteria), you are doused (here in Axe body spray, for high school verite), you are dabbed (to desweat), the music pounds, and you go. I could see nothing, hear nothing. I stomped through the cafeteria, scowling as instructed, and felt, for those few, seemingly second length minutes, like one of Vaquera's young visionaries, a fellow traveler in a pack of cultishly self possessed, if nearly feral, creatures. If fashion is about feeling more than merely clothing and I think it is I could understand paying for Vaquera. I would have paid a lot. The Vaqueras installed fall stock from their web shop on a few racks and covered the walls and floors with a snowfall of fake dollar bills. It was a surprisingly savvy business move. Every few minutes, a gawker from the street would come in and scoop up a handful of fake bills, exclaiming merrily as he did. Most were not customers. But, to the designers' happy surprise, the store had been slowly but steadily selling. Still, in the aftermath of the show, the Vaqueras were deflated. The collection had been greeted, not altogether warmly, as a cute, kitschy take on high school archetypes: the jock, the goth, the cheerleader. The finale look had been a mega graduation gown, hoop skirted and enormous, a gonzo but hopeful vision. "It looked like we were just, like, 'Goths rule!'" Mr. DiCaprio said. "Instead of 'high school's scary, the fashion industry's scary, it's scary having no money.'" "I feel like we were really scared this season at least, I was," Ms. Taubensee said. "I've been living in fear for so long, and this whole thing is very scary. All these people looking at you. Having to survive and having to not just design but all these other things. It puts so much fear into me." To keep a fashion label running is all consuming. There are no days off. It is an existence frequently a hand to mouth one that excludes all others. The designers are colleagues, but also friends and basically family. Ms. Taubensee has a boyfriend, but Mr. DiCaprio and Ms. Sullivan do not. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
In Detroit, Is There Life After the Big 3? CRUISE the blighted streets that shoot off in either direction from 8 Mile Road, and the scars of the automotive crisis abound. "For sale" signs adorn the front of long shuttered metal, paint and tool and die shops. And at factories still in business, the small number of cars in the parking lots testify that the shops are working below capacity. But pull into the bustling headquarters of W Industries, a compound of imposing black structures at 8 Mile and Hoover Street, and you'll encounter a more hopeful vision of Detroit's future. Once an exclusive supplier to the auto industry, this machine tool and parts company is rolling in new business. In one section of the cavernous shop floor, machinists use powerful lasers to slice thick steel plates. They're making parts for Humvees and Stryker combat vehicles destined for Afghanistan and Iraq. Elsewhere, they are assembling a 60,000 pound apparatus for testing the Orion space module by simulating the violent vibrations of liftoff. Other workers are finishing a steel mold that will be used to make 70 foot long roof sections of Airbus A350 passenger jets. Dozens of Michigan manufacturers like W Industries are discovering there is indeed life beyond the auto industry. Over the last two years, multinationals and start ups alike have been coming to the state to build, buy or design a hodgepodge of products, whether aircraft parts, solar cells, or batteries for electric cars. In September, for instance, NTR, a solar energy company from Ireland, awarded contracts to two Detroit area auto suppliers, including the race car engine developer McLaren Performance Technologies, to make components for thousands of SunCatcher solar dishes. "It should be no surprise we went to Detroit," says Jim Barry, NTR's chief executive. "The standard of manufacturing in the automotive industry is extraordinarily high, and that is the only place you can find such a concentration of skills." Of course, nobody expects Michigan to regain anytime soon all of the estimated 216,000 auto related jobs lost in the past decade. Most of the new projects create 50 to 100 jobs at a time, while auto plant closures have shed tens of thousands. Some of W Industries' work is on a large scale, above, including jobs for plane makers and others. Below is a mold for a carbon fiber fuselage for Airbus A350s. Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times "You could bring a whole new industry in here, and it may replace one auto plant," says David E. Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor. THE economic impact of the new industries is also hard to gauge: Michigan has few statistics on revenue from industries like clean technology and aerospace. Much of the new work, moreover, is limited to machining and developing prototypes. Mass production will most likely head elsewhere to save costs or to be closer to end customers. In short, the full payoff of the investments outside the auto industry is unlikely to be felt for several more years. "What we really are talking about is R D, pilot projects and early stage production," says Peter Adriaens, a University of Michigan entrepreneurship professor tracking the trend. "There is virtually nothing we can do to keep large scale production here." Still, Mr. Cole and Mr. Adriaens say, the opportunities for auto suppliers are huge and could leave the state with a healthier, more diverse industrial base. For example, virtually all of the 50 million in engineering projects at the Detroit campus of Ricardo Inc., a British engineering services firm, are for products like remotely piloted military aircraft, construction equipment and lithium ion batteries. And Global Wind Systems, a developer of wind farms that is based in the Detroit suburb of Novi, says it is working with 18 local suppliers to design next generation turbines to be assembled nearby in 2012. General Electric, meanwhile, is investing 100 million in a 1,000 worker research and manufacturing facility for wind turbines outside Detroit, and Aernnova, a Spanish company that is a supplier to Boeing, Airbus and Bombardier, is planning an engineering center in Ann Arbor that will eventually employ 600. New plants to make lithium ion batteries are in the pipeline from A123, Johnson Controls and LG Chemical. "There is a lot of business out there that is really suited to Detroit's automotive skills," says Edward Walker, the chief executive of W Industries, a privately held company. Among all the projects, the biggest is in Wixom, Mich., just northwest of Detroit. There, a mothballed Ford plant that had turned out millions of Thunderbirds, Town Cars and GTs is getting a 1.5 billion facelift. Two investors Xtreme Power of Austin, Tex., and Clairvoyant Energy of Santa Barbara, Calif. plan to hire 4,000 workers by late 2011 to make solar panels and battery systems for utilities. "As the alternative energy space builds out, we expect these plants will create a lot of opportunities for Michigan suppliers," says Greg Main, the chief executive of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, the state's investment promotion agency. Mr. Main estimates that at least 100 auto suppliers already have secured contracts in other industries and that at least 250 have bid for work. At Dowding Industries, the skills that have served the auto industry are proving useful in fields like wind power, softening the blow of lost auto jobs. Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times Federal and state tax credits, loan guarantees and grants certainly help stimulate investment. But the main allure of the Detroit area is its ability to quickly turn designs into workable products that can be economically mass produced. The region remains the country's premier precision manufacturing base, with 2,500 auto suppliers and tens of thousands of highly skilled, underemployed mechanical engineers, machinists and factory managers. "We have the best manufacturing resources on the planet here in Michigan," says Chris Long, the founder and chief executive of Global Wind Systems. "We just need to get aligned." IN 1981, W Industries was founded by Robert Walker, Edward's father, to make wooden crates used to ship car windshields and windows. It eventually expanded into a wide range of machine tools and metal parts for car frames and bodies. The younger Mr. Walker, a 42 year old with a fondness for wearing black, started working on the shop floor as a teenager and took the helm in 1993. To give the company a distinctive look, he adopted a bold red "W" logo and had all the buildings redone in red and black. The only way W Industries could grow, Mr. Walker soon concluded, was to diversify. He started with military contracts. By law, most of the work must be done on American soil. And by manufacturing within Detroit's city limits, W Industries benefits from federal policies requiring that a certain portion of military contracts be given to companies in depressed areas. Another lure is abundant and cheap industrial space. Mr. Walker says he spent around 20 a square foot to buy and upgrade factories from bankrupt auto suppliers, about one fifth of the cost of new buildings. Since landing its first military contract in 2004, the company has secured jobs to make hundreds of heavy steel parts for the frames, bodies and gun mounts of vehicles like the Stryker and the mine resistant Cougar, both made by General Dynamics. Demand for such vehicles surged as the military sought to replace Humvees, which proved vulnerable to roadside bombs. Such work "requires a different mind set and an entirely different way of operating your business," Mr. Walker says. Rather than cranking out high volumes of parts for years, jobs come in small batches and are highly customized. Each month, for example, W Industries builds a dozen 25,000 pound frames for rough terrain military vehicles that the Kalmar Corporation, based in San Antonio, builds for the Army. Leah Nash for The New York Times To win such business, W Industries has spent 50 million on modern machinery since 2006. The mold for the Airbus sections, which it is building for Spirit AeroSystems of Kansas, is being made with one of the world's largest computer controlled machine tools. It moves along a 200 foot long rail shaving steel to create a super polished surface. Spirit selected W Industries largely because it offered "an attractive combination of fabrication and expertise," says Ken Evans, a Spirit spokesman. W Industries also got the Orion simulator project in part because it was one of the few companies in the United States with the right equipment. The Orion space program aims to send human explorers to the moon by 2020 and then to Mars and beyond. But NASA hasn't built a space capsule since the Apollo program ended in 1975. Five years ago, W Industries had 15 million in annual sales. This year, it expects at least 150 million, two thirds of it from military and aerospace contractors. It has bought three old factories in the area and is looking for more, and it plans to double its work force to 500 by 2011. Dowding Industries, a family owned company in Eaton Rapids, is also wagering its future on diversification. It was founded in 1965 as a tool and die shop for Oldsmobile and later expanded into metal auto parts. The company branched out into tractor and rail car parts in the 1990s, as the Big Three pinched costs to compete with overseas rivals and "started getting real brutal" on suppliers, says Jeff Metts, Dowding's president. He said that after Dowding had invested in new machine tools and perfected a part, the work was often shifted to China six months later. "There seemed to be a real effort to remove our profit," Mr. Metts recalls. In 2006, he attended a wind power trade show in Los Angeles. "We were really shocked at how big this industry was becoming," he says. That year, Dowding won a 5 million contract from Clipper Turbine Works of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Other wind customers followed. After the recent recession, in which it laid off 130 of its 280 workers, Dowding made a bigger bet on wind, forming a venture with MAG Industrial Automation Systems in Sterling Heights to develop tools for turbine components. MAG also makes machines used to fabricate carbon composite airframes for planes like the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. In October, the venture will introduce a system that Mr. Metts says can make better performing wind turbine hubs in one fifth the time of current methods. The next goal is a machine for carbon composite blades that, he says, will be 30 percent lighter than fiberglass blades and last 20 years or longer. Mr. Metts says Dowding has commitments from several turbine makers, and he sees opportunities to use similar machines and technologies for bridges, expressways and ships for which production methods and materials haven't changed much in decades. The company is led by Maurice Dowding, left, and Jeff Metts. Leah Nash for The New York Times "This will be as big as the shift from metal to plastics," Mr. Metts says. The need to turn prototypes into real products is what lured NTR to the Detroit area. The company, based in Dublin, is installing the first 60 of its SunCatcher dishes, which cost 50,000 to 60,000 each, in Phoenix. If all of its solar plant deals with California and Texas utilities are completed, it expects to sell 65,000 of them over the next two years. In 2008, NTR's manufacturing arm, Stirling Energy Systems, hired Tower Automotive in Novi to develop modules with mirrors that will reflect the sun's energy. It also enlisted McLaren in Livonia to help design and build the motorized units that will convert concentrated sunlight into electricity. Founded in 1969 by Bruce McLaren, the New Zealand born auto racer, and bought in 2003 by Linamar of Canada, the firm is best known for developing turbocharged engines for race cars. Five years ago, all of McLaren's business was with carmakers. Now, nearly a third is in developing motorized devices for the solar and wind industries. McLaren's engineering team redesigned the SunCatcher engine and each of its 100 parts to make them more efficient, less expensive and easier to mass produce. "We put everything on a wall," recalls Phil Guys, McLaren's president. "We got 500 suggestions from engineers." McLaren has shipped its first batch of power conversion units to Stirling and is developing new prototypes. A BIG question is whether the new work will sustain Detroit's manufacturing ecosystem if auto assembly keeps migrating elsewhere. As suppliers close, more managers and engineers could move away. To illustrate how difficult that talent would be to replace, Bud Kimmel, vice president for business development at W Industries, points out Jason Sobieck. A 30 year old machining whiz sporting a green tattoo, gray T shirt and jeans, Mr. Sobieck manages the Spirit and Orion projects. "Jason is like an artist," Mr. Kimmel says. "We built our whole program around him." Mr. Sobieck began work at 17 at a small Detroit welding shop. He then worked for tooling companies, where he learned to program automated systems and manage projects. "These skills really aren't taught in school," Mr. Sobieck says, dragging on a cigarette. "This is a trade you learn on the shop floor." That's one reason that W Industries wants to snap up as many good machinists and engineers as it can afford. "If we don't re engage the automotive workers soon in major programs," Mr. Kimmel says, "this set of skills will be lost." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
"Danger. Danger. Danger. To lower the bar of impeachment, based on these articles of impeachment, would impact the functioning of our constitutional republic and the framework of that Constitution for generations." So warned Jay Sekulow, President Trump's personal lawyer, in the defense's last day of its opening arguments in the Senate's impeachment trial. Mr. Sekulow was obviously quite taken with his triple "danger" conceit, because he used it again and again, typically when he wanted to draw attention to one of the defense's core claims. Is the Senate really going to "have a removal of a duly elected president based on a policy disagreement?" he asked as though that's what this trial is about rather than about the president's hijacking American foreign policy for his personal political gain. "Danger. Danger. Danger," he said. "Because the next president or the one after that he or she will be held to that standard." Mr. Sekulow also griped about process, one of the presidential apologists' favorite distractions. Citing the monthlong delay by Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, in transmitting the articles of impeachment to the Senate in an attempt to press that chamber to call witnesses, he intoned: "Danger. Danger. Danger. That's politics." As on Saturday, the president's team held their presentation on Tuesday to two hours. For them, shorter is better. Additional details and facts are not helpful. Their goal is to keep the audience's eye on their central claims: This impeachment is purely political. The House managers failed to present any direct evidence of presidential wrongdoing. To legitimize this partisan sham will undermine American democracy. First up Tuesday was Patrick Philbin, deputy counsel to the president, whose job appeared to be to do damage control on the presentation delivered on Monday by his teammate, the celebrity defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz. Mr. Dershowitz had asserted that impeachment requires an explicit act of criminality a position that many, many people have disputed, including Mr. Dershowitz during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton back in the day. Mr. Philbin spent quite some time explaining that, even if you don't buy Mr. Dershowitz's argument, that's not a problem, because what Mr. Trump is accused of doing isn't impeachable by any reasonable standard. And he didn't do it anyway. Mr. Sekulow went next, with a presentation that seemed to have been plucked straight from the president's Twitter feed. Condensed version: Mr. Trump is a victim of partisan witch hunts and deep state coup attempts the likes of which would crush an ordinary mortal. As on Saturday, Mr. Sekulow kept asking people to put themselves in the president's shoes. Consider all that Mr. Trump has suffered, he urged. Mr. Sekulow then ticked through the high points of the pet conspiracy theories peddled by the president and his Fox News fan club. The Steele dossier got a mention, as did Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, Bruce and Nellie Ohr, James Comey and, of course, Robert Mueller, as Mr. Sekulow pursued the Trumpian path of attacking the credibility of everyone who has ever dared question this president's chronically questionable behavior. "So that's what the president's been living with," Mr. Sekulow said sadly. The day's closing act was Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, who assured his audience that "all you need in this case is the Constitution and your common sense." He then showed a quick montage of old video footage featuring Democratic lawmakers decrying the partisan nature of the Clinton impeachment and warning that it would devalue the coin of impeachment. "You were right!" he assured the Democrats, prompting laughter in the chamber. Mr. Cipollone reminded the senators that this was an election year and pleaded with them to "trust the American people with this decision." He opted not to mention his client's efforts to deprive the American people of this decision by pressuring a foreign government to meddle in that election. And he closed with the plea, "This should end now, as quickly as possible." Translation: Please don't vote to call witnesses just because of the Bolton bombshell. Indeed, the day's presentation included numerous attempts to minimize this week's revelation that, in his forthcoming book, John Bolton, the former national security adviser, writes that the president told him that the release of security aid to Ukraine was contingent upon Ukraine's announcing the investigations Mr. Trump sought into Democrats. "It is not a game of leaks and unsourced manuscripts," Mr. Sekulow said at the start of his remarks. "Responding to an unpublished manuscript that maybe some reporters have an idea of maybe what it says. That's what the evidence is if you want to call that evidence. I don't know what you'd call that." Many people would call that a compelling reason for the Senate to hear Mr. Bolton's own account of the president's actions. Which may in fact happen, despite Mitch McConnell's having urged his troops not to go down the path to witnesses. The prospect of testimony from Mr. Bolton and perhaps other witnesses extending the trial is certain to discomfit Mr. Trump and his defenders. That way, they well know, lies danger, danger, danger. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Luka Sabbat, an 18 year old model in New York whose Twitter and Instagram feeds are closely watched. Prada T shirt, 460, at prada.com . Raf Simons pants, about 723, at rafsimons.com . Styling by Alex Tudela. Grooming by Brit Cochran for Dior Homme.Credit...Clement Pascal for The New York Times Luka Sabbat, an 18 year old model in New York whose Twitter and Instagram feeds are closely watched. Prada T shirt, 460, at prada.com . Raf Simons pants, about 723, at rafsimons.com . Styling by Alex Tudela. Grooming by Brit Cochran for Dior Homme. Lil Yachty is fire. Astrud Gilberto and Hedi Slimane are sick. Playboi Carti is in this minute's rotation, right there alongside Chet Baker, Bad Company, Kanye and the Germs. Call of Duty: Black Ops III is a dope game, though maybe not as dope as Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege. Stephane Ashpool's pastel Pigalle cardigan is the latest score at retail that, and a bomber from Alyx and a ring from Saint Laurent. If, in the profoundly solipsistic age of social media, each of us is definable according to what we consume, then assemble the names and labels listed above and you have the makings of an algorithm whose endpoint is Luka Sabbat. Who is Luka? The question, which also happens to be his Twitter handle ( whoisluka), is unlikely to go unanswered for long. Among his roughly 184,000 Instagram and 64,000 Twitter followers, the 18 year old New Yorker has already established himself as the coolest teenager on the Internet. That is what Complex magazine termed him last year soon after he appeared out of nowhere or, anyway, from that singular cohort of New Yorkers who line up on any given Thursday outside Supreme to become a social media phenomenon. By occupation, Luka Sabbat is a model (and sometime stylist). He has been featured in campaigns for Tommy Hilfiger, American Eagle and Hood by Air, appeared in an Adidas NMD billboard that towered over Times Square and was cast by Kanye West for his Yeezy spectacle. Discovered in SoHo by Kevin Amato, at the time doing casting for Hood by Air, he was signed soon thereafter by the owner of ReQuest Model Management, who intercepted him on the way to buy a new video game. "I never thought about fashion that much," Mr. Sabbat said. "I was way more into hip hop or playing video games or sleeping than modeling." The word "model" does not quite encompass the varied reasons Mr. Sabbat has evolved into something more compelling an "influencer,'' and among the more persuasive ones around. "Here's how it starts," said Dave Marsey, the managing director for the digital agency DigitasLBi North America. "Someone randomly publishes on YouTube, Vine, Twitter or Instagram, just for friends, and it somehow strikes a chord and takes off. Before you know it, you have millions of followers." Teenage and tweenage girls mobbed the street outside the show space, chanting Mr. Dallas's name. Amid the unanticipated hubbub, front row types were sent scrambling to the Internet to search for a name few of them could identify, yet one familiar to more than 11 million followers on Instagram. It remains unclear what those numbers signify or whether Mr. Dallas's appearance at the Calvin Klein show benefited the label or the Internet sensation himself. Still, questions like that have not slowed the corporate hunt for young influencers and the intimate link they represent between consumers and products by means of the smartphone, the only platform that seems to matter in 2016. By the standards of some social media hotshots, Mr. Sabbat is a modest presence. Yet, unlike some demi celebrities whose fame is as fleeting as a mayfly hatch, he has an advantage. The Paris apartment of Mr. Sabbat's mother sometimes served as a stopping off point for fashion industry unknowns; Luka may be the only style influencer around whose babysitter was the Dutch model Lara Stone. Though still in its infancy, his career as a stealth ambassador for brands across the consumer spectrum owes a lot to the broad appeal he projects as a hooked up and yet wholesome cool kid, said John Jannuzzi, the United States deputy editor of Twitter Moments: "He represents a life a lot of people want, and that's important to advertisers. I wish I was that kid." To Patrick Finnegan, a 20 year old consultant who specializes in linking luxury brands with Generation Z, the relative modesty of Mr. Sabbat's online metrics is far outweighed by the fervid attention his followers pay to his every move. "He might not have 30 million on social, or whatever," Mr. Finnegan said. "But the influence he carries is enormous because, if you look at every post, there are thousands of 'likes.'" What's more, Mr. Finnegan said: "He's young, he's biracial, he's straight but hangs out with gay and trans people, and he's friends with designers and rappers. A young generation that looks up to his lifestyle wants to know everything about him, from what he buys to what he wears to what he eats." On a chilly, damp afternoon, Mr. Sabbat is ordering but not eating. Slouched in a chair in the lobby of the Mercer hotel, he seems cozy and at ease. "This is, like, one of my favorite places," he said. "I'm here at least four times a week." Although it is just 1 o'clock, he has already had several business meetings and, with each, the sort of nourishment a plate of madeleines, a slab of chocolate cake you might favor if you were a lanky 18 year old. A sushi roll and bowl of fried calamari sit untouched on a side table. When a server offers to take a drinks order, the young man who smokes a pack a day ("I'm totally against it,'' his father said); often ends his evenings at the Up Down club on West 14th Street; refers to the owner of Cipriani as his "homie"; and counts Kanye West, Jaden Smith and Ian Connor among his friends replies, "I'll have some ice water, please." "Steez" is a term thrown around a lot lately to describe those who manage to look ineffably stylish seemingly without much effort. And clearly what the brands that employ Mr. Sabbat find compelling about him, as do his followers, is not merely his good looks think of a young Jimi Hendrix with dimples and an mop of unruly locks but the precociousness of his steez. Now nearly every image of Mr. Sabbat, his most telegraphic online musing, generates a level of follower engagement that is catnip to the corporate world. "That's why brands and designers really want to work with people like Luka," said Mr. Marsey of DigitasLBi. "They can weave their products into this ongoing social media narrative, but in an organic way. You want to know him. You want to be around him. He's the cool kid at the party we all want to be." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The Whitney Museum of American Art has again reached within its ranks to select a pair of curators to steward its Biennial exhibition in 2021, which aims to reflect the current social, political and cultural moment through art. The curators, announced on Monday , are both relatively recent additions to the museum's staff. David Breslin, who this month assumes his role as curator and director of curatorial initiatives, joined the Whitney in 2016 as curator and director of the collection. He previously worked at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston and at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. Adrienne Edwards in 2018 became the Whitney's curator of performance. Before that, she served for eight years as curator of Performa and for two years as curator at large for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. "They're both serious art historians and yet very involved with our moment," said Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney's senior deputy director and chief curator. "They're sort of secretly known and loved by so many artists and colleagues, and I look forward to seeing them work under the Biennial's larger spotlight." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
What do literary tourists look for when they visit the British Isles? Often it's the quaint, old fashioned bookshops that provide the perfect excuse to browse uninterrupted and to disconnect from the world. Until recently, the trend for barista made coffee and high speed Wi Fi was considered by some in the city's bookish crowd to be ruining London's centuries old tradition of disconnected browsing. But a crop of bookshops is rebelling against frenzied online engagement and is creating environments where the real life, internet free book browse is the most effective way to expand your social and professional networks. And in countering the internet overload, some stores are proving to be among London's hottest hangouts. "We're celebrating human curation over algorithmic rhythms," said Mr. Silva, who was spurred to open his shop after experiencing a common affliction for London's bibliophiles the repetitive, grating ring tones of smartphones disrupting the tranquillity of his bookshop experience. "We wanted to get people using their human intuition when they shop for books. You can get Wi Fi anywhere now, it's not necessary in a bookshop." Libreria is in the company of Tenderbooks (tenderbooks.co.uk), Buchhandlung Walther Konig (buchhandlung walther koenig.de), Lutyens Rubinstein, (lutyensrubinstein.co.uk) and Word on the Water (facebook.com/wordonthewater), all independent book shops shunning high speed cables and lattes. Their mantra has drawn a sophisticated, brainy crowd, but its premise is simple: In the digital age, the bookshop should be a refuge, an information overload in its own right. "If someone gets a phone call, they leave the shop. It's the same with the internet people just know this isn't the space for being online," said Tamsin Clark, owner of Tenderbooks, which opened in 2014 in Covent Garden, a lively neighborhood packed with theaters and rare book shops. "The thing about books is that they're more interesting than the internet we assume that everyone who comes here believes that." Creative downtime means embracing slow over fast and rejecting years of bookshop cool that's embodied by overeager baristas and a goofy Wi Fi code scrawled on a chalkboard. The internet free bookshop campaigns for the days of haughty glances over the tops of reading glasses, gentle tutting at noise, and hours spent simply considering the words on the page. Perhaps the most serious of the bookshops is Lutyens Rubinstein. Since 2009 its Notting Hill building has been divided between a bookshop and a literary agency and the presence of the highbrow mood of the agency is what sets the tone for the prevailing silence of the reading room. "You wouldn't even dare ask for the Wi Fi code here," a customer there said recently. The ambience at Tenderbooks, meanwhile, tends to be a little more relaxed: "The internet can cause so much stress; we want people to come in and be more focused than they are online," said Ms. Clark, the owner. "We've got a record player, we're small and intimate. People respond really well to that. I think it's necessary in today's cultural climate. And because we're in the center of London, we offer creative downtime in the heart of the city." Taking its name from Jorge Luis Borges's cult 1941 classic "The Library of Babel," a story in which every book ever written, or might ever be written, is reprinted in a 410 page edition, Libreria emphasizes a meditative experience that its owner said Wi Fi would ruin. On Libreria's floor to ceiling shelves, books are thematically curated by a rotating British who's who cast of the literary, political and media world, who has dreamed up book categories like "Mothers, Madonnas and Whores" and "The Sea and the Sky." Next up as curator is the recently elected mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. The distraction free library ethos is actually a city tradition, from the private tranquil libraries of stately homes such as North London's 17th century estate Kenwood House in Hampstead Heath to the British Library's Reading Room in King's Cross a place where the etiquette policy strongly discourages the presence of mobile phones entirely with tactfully placed signs. It's in this tradition that these bookshops operate. Mr. Silva of Libreria Books said "an old fashioned space" is clearly appealing to book lovers. He said his shop has had twice as many customers as anticipated, with visitors from as far afield as Australia and China. Confronted with a bookshelf curated by the popular new mayor or surrounded by first editions, who wants to download a morning full of emails? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The M.I.T. Media Lab's proposition is simple: Break the rules or shake up the status quo, and you might win 250,000 in cash no strings attached. No, it's not a joke. Nominations for the lab's new Disobedience Award are open. "There are people doing really important things, breaking either the rules or sticking to their principles with knowledge that they will be hurt or punished in some way," Joi Ito, the director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "There are a number of really amazing people who just don't get attention we hope it will be someone who gives us courage like Malala," he added of the eventual recipient, referring to the Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai. The lab created the award after realizing that "in a lot of large institutions there's really two ways you make progress," Ethan Zuckerman, the director of M.I.T.'s Center for Civic Media, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "You make progress when people follow the rules and work their way through the processes, and then sometimes you make very radical progress by someone who essentially says, 'Look, these processes don't work anymore, and I need to have a radical shift in what I'm doing.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The artist Kubra Khademi in a street performance in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2015. A crowd of men appeared "insulting me and making fun of me," Ms. Khademi said. On the afternoon of Feb. 26, 2015, the artist Kubra Khademi strapped a suit of metal armor over her clothes and headed outside. The armor, which she had cobbled together in the workshop of a local blacksmith, had bulbous breasts and an ample bottom. It was the centerpiece of a carefully planned street performance. Only this wasn't just any street: It was a busy thoroughfare in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Sheathed in her bulging suit, Ms. Khademi walked along the road in a silent eight minute performance. By the time she left, traffic had stopped and a mob of menacing men had formed. "They were insulting me and making fun of me, saying 'She's crazy, she's a foreigner, she's lost her mind, she's a prostitute,'" the artist recalled in a telephone interview from Paris, where she now lives. "Yet, had I not put on this performance, I would have been unhappy. It was a complete success. It shook everyone up, and brought the debate brazenly out into the open." "There isn't a single woman in Afghanistan who hasn't been violated on some level in her lifetime," Ms. Khademi said. "We live in a culture of violation." She recalled suffering sexual abuse at age 5, and longing, as a child, for protective armor. Ms. Khademi's metal suit and a video of her performance are among the 60 or so artworks in the exhibition "Kharmohra: Art Under Fire in Afghanistan," running at the Mucem museum in Marseille, France, through March 1. The show features paintings, drawings, photographs, installations and videos by 11 Afghan artists, most of whom still live in their homeland. That homeland has now endured some four decades of conflict. Afghanistan was occupied by the Soviet Union from 1979 to 1989, overtaken by the Taliban, then invaded in 2001 by the United States and its allies. Today, the country is on the brink of civil war, with the government in Kabul controlling about half the territory, and the Taliban the other half. "Contemporary art is not well regarded in Afghanistan," said Guilda Chahverdi, the "Kharmohra" show's Iranian born curator, as she pointed to works in the Marseille museum. "It's seen as undermining religion, morality and the dignity of Afghan tradition. Anything that undermines that dignity is unacceptable, and must be eradicated," she added. Ms. Chahverdi, who lived and worked in Kabul between 2005 and 2013, said that, because of an association with the "impure" West, art and culture were "clearly a target of the Taliban." During the decade or so that American led coalition forces were in Afghanistan, the country experienced a "mini golden age," according to Ms. Chahverdi. Western cultural centers, exhibitions and workshops proliferated. A new art school, the Center for Contemporary Art Afghanistan opened, at first admitting students of both sexes and later becoming a women only institution. Documenta, the German exhibition of international art held every five years, staged a satellite event in Kabul in 2012, drawing 27,000 visitors. The French Institute in Kabul, which Ms. Chahverdi ran from 2010 to 2013, reopened during the period, hosting weekly events in its exhibition spaces, two theaters and 450 seat auditorium. Yet as Western troops began pulling out, the institute became a target. In December 2014, a theater performance about terrorism was attacked by a teenage suicide bomber, who killed three people. Despite the perils, Afghan artists have, in the past two decades, consistently portrayed their country and its many facets. But gradually, everyday life in Afghanistan started feeling unsafe, Mr. Hassanzada said, especially for gay men like him. He taught at the Center for Contemporary Art, which received regular threats from militants who considered it anti Islamic. Suicide bombings became a daily occurrence in Kabul. "I was in the middle of the nightmare," he recalled. His 2015 painting "Kabus," which means "Nightmare," shows a terrified, goggle eyed figure, which the artist said represented himself. With the departure of the U.S. military on Aug. 30, Afghanistan quickly fell back under control of the Taliban. Across the country, there is widespread anxiety about the future. None Vanishing Rights: The Taliban's decision to restrict women's freedom may be a political choice as much as it is a matter of ideology. Far From Home: Some Afghans who were abroad when the country collapsed are desperate to return, but have no clear route home. Can Afghan Art Survive? The Taliban have not banned art outright. But many artists have fled, fearing for their work and their lives. A Growing Threat: A local affiliate of the Islamic State group is upending security and putting the Taliban government in a precarious position. In 2016, Mr. Hassanzada's 66 foot mural for the Cactus Cafe, an artist run Kabul space for exhibitions, concerts and readings, was destroyed by the cafe's managers after religious extremists said that monsters in the painting were blasphemous images of the devil. That year, Mr. Hassanzada moved to Istanbul, and later to Chicago, where he now lives and works. For those who stay behind, particularly women, life can be a perpetual struggle, as work by the female artists in the exhibition boldly illustrates. "Protest" (2008), a photograph by Farzana Wahidy, shows the naked torso of a woman who has survived self immolation, covered with knotty lesions. She is one of the numerous Afghan women who set themselves on fire to escape a life of domestic violence and confinement. In a text message exchange from Kabul, where he lives and works, Mr. Eshraq said he had no hesitation in representing the ordeal on canvas, despite the risks. "A painter speaks through painting. Are we to fall silent when there is a danger?" he said. Few countries in the world have suffered so many invasions and upheavals, yet these recent events are not taught in Afghan schools, Ms. Chahverdi said. She suggested that, given the deep divisions and conflicting viewpoints, there was no single acceptable narrative. The warring factions in Afghanistan may be "busy destroying," said Ms. Khademi, the performance artist, "but we are very peacefully writing this history." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
On anagrams: I guess I'll be known for nothing more than being the man who realized that "Spiro Agnew" was "grow a penis." Gore Vidal said, "It could be 'grow a spine,' too, but yours is better." On misbehaving celebrities: People known to be the worst in show business, and there are quite a few, unbearably adored me. I don't know what that says about me. I was very fond of Lucille Ball, but she was nasty to people. Every time I took a plane I would ask a stewardess, as we were still allowed to call them, "Who's the worst celebrity you've ever had on a plane?" Every single time it was her. She'd be sitting there with her secretary or whoever and the stewardess would say, "Would you like a cocktail, Miss Ball?" and she would say, "Tell her I don't drink on the plane." But I adored her, and she me. She called me Little Dutch Boy, because I had a cap from England, a corduroy mod cap. She thought it looked Dutch. On his friend and rival Johnny Carson: He underestimated his intelligence considerably. It is probably having to do somewhat with his wretched mother. Actually that came out on a biography done of Johnny, where he tells about how he got some very, very prestigious broadcasting award. He went and told his mother and she said, "Well, I guess they know what they're doing." He was crushed. He was really only happy on the air. On his early success, writing for Jack Paar: Jayne Mansfield was going to be on one night, and Jack was so nervous he was checking his hair in the mirror. All of us writers gave him intros for her, with any jokes they had, and Jack threw them all in the wastebasket. He said, "It's Jayne Mansfield. You can't just give me stuff like this. I haven't gotten a joke I could use in two weeks." Total lie. But that was Jack. The three veteran writers said to hell with it and went home. Well, I wasn't in a position to do that, so I dutifully went back to the typewriter and typed out the words, "Ladies and gentlemen, here they are, Jayne Mansfield." Jack later said, "Hey, Cavett had the line of the year." On awkward interviews: There was a notorious appearance by Sly Stone that I've never been able to bring myself to look at over all these years. I don't know what the hell he was talking about. It seemed like no word connected with the word before it, or after it. People enjoyed my perplexedness. Actually, though, he came back later and he was fine. So he must have been in a different chemical situation. On meeting Nixon: I was still persona grata at the White House and was invited to an evening of Shakespeare performed by Nicol Williamson. Tricky Dick had heard about how great he was. That's where I first met Nixon. It was a reception line, people in tuxedos, and suddenly I found that I was standing in front of him, as in dreams, staring at that nose. It looked like Herblock's caricatures of him. Known to be second in conversation only to the late Noel Coward, Nixon said to me, "Who's doing your show tonight?" I said, "Joe Namath is sitting in for me." "How are his knees?" "Well, the last time I fondled them, Mr. President, they felt nice." On Rudolph W. Giuliani: It's sad that America's mayor has become America's loony. And I remember when had certain admirable traits. Imagine trying to convince someone of that now. On meeting John Lennon: It was a rainy day, and I went over to the St. Regis in a work shirt and trousers. I didn't know what to wear to the Lennons'. When I went into their suite, there was stuff all over the bed. Envelopes and folders and projects and things they were working on. John was just very, very personable right away, easy to talk to, that feeling of, "Haven't I known you before?" I remember saying, "I really hope you're going to do the show." John said, "Well, you know you've got the only halfway intelligent talk show on television." I said, "Would you want to be on a halfway intelligent show?" He laughed heartily, fortunately. After the show, I went around to the stage door, and Hope came out, a Cadillac waiting to take him to the Cornhusker Hotel. He came tripping down the stairs, elegantly it seemed, and I said, "Fine show, Bob." He said, "Hey, thanks, son." And it just went to me, through me, as he got in the Cadillac and drove away. I wanted to go with him. On ambition: My dad wanted me to check out the fine dental college at the University of Nebraska, and maybe the law. "Your cousin Bob has done very well in that," he said. "You're never going to make any money in show business." What do they say, one in 10 million makes it? I didn't pay much attention to that. When I got my Yale acceptance, I remember feeling, "That means the East, where New York is." I didn't think of Boston. I didn't think of anything but New York, where "The Jackie Gleason Show" and "Your Show of Shows" and "Mister Peepers," and all those shows I watched live in Nebraska, were. I eventually made it to all of their studios, and usually went right into the stars' dressing room, in my pushy way. On the New York party scene: I didn't do a lot of that. It seemed like I didn't do hardly anything, except the show. I remember going into the office around noon, taping wasn't until 7 p.m., and when I finished a 90 minute show, halfway home I would start descending into sleep. It seemed like every time my picture was taken, it appeared, but I think that gave an impression that I was out more than I was. About five years into being recognizable and known, I started to hide. On regrets: Two of the greatest guests I ever had were David Niven and James Mason. Superb. Talk about good talkers. I have found letters where they invited me to see them next time I'm in Europe "Here's my phone number, and my house in Switzerland." And I didn't. It's insane. So many regrets. On interviews: What makes a good talk show host comes up an irritating number of times in your life. And you know you're going to say, "Well you have to listen." Which, by God, is hard at first because you're distracted in four directions at any given moment: a sign is up, oh I missed it. And there's a disturbance in the audience and you don't know if a gun is going to go off. And you try to remember what they told you to be sure to say to Mr. X and you forgot. Will I ever learn to write these things down? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
In the Woods of Greenwich, a Studio for Writing Poetry This article is part of our November Design special section, which focuses on style, function and form in the workplace. GREENWICH, Conn. Inspiration sometimes comes to the poet John Barr while he gazes at boulders beneath his new cantilevered writing studio here. Or as he strolls along its entry passageway lined in oak shelves, with 1,500 volumes of other people's poetry organized alphabetically from Bronte to Yeats. During struggles to find the right words, Mr. Barr explained during a recent tour, "I'll start reading another voice, and it basically dissolves the logjam." The studio's architecture, he added, "unfolds itself a line at a time, like a poem, and then the lines begin to comment on each other." His cube of stone and glass, designed by the Manhattan based architect Eric J. Smith and constructed by Nordic Custom Builders, is officially called "The Studio in the Woods: A Place for Poetry." It has also been called "Heron's Haunt," which is the title of one of Mr. Barr's most recent poems, based on a real life heron that visits ponds on his property "when the light is right." The poem describes the bird forming its neck into "a question mark" to feed on fish between its motionless legs "that rise like reeds to a distant body above." The poem concludes, "Perfect hunger. Perfect hunter. Perfect prey./I wait for the heron to come." Mr. Barr, 76, a former investment banker who long headed the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, has waited years to realize his dream Connecticut workplace. He and his wife, Penny, acquired forested acres in Greenwich in the 1990s. Mr. Smith's and Nordic's teams have restored the site's masonry main house, which was built in the 1920s its previous longtime owner was the fashion designer Adele Simpson. The restoration work attracted some media attention after the Barrs spent more than 100,000 on fireplace stone carvings alone. (The couple, who married in 1968, have three grown children and one grandchild, and they also have homes in Chicago and on Mackinac Island in Michigan.) Mr. Barr said he had hoped to build himself an isolated writing studio akin to Thoreau's cabin ever since he was a teenage aspiring poet, growing up in a Chicago suburb. Thoreau paid about 28 to construct his retreat. The Greenwich studio "cost more than that," Mr. Barr said, deadpan. He declined to disclose further details about his investment in an austere place of solitude. The studio, perched on a knoll a few hundred yards from the main house, is meant to resemble a ruined outbuilding a springhouse or root cellar, perhaps that has been rediscovered and repurposed. The largest windowpane, which weighs 2,400 pounds and stretches 16 feet long, has views of a narrow streambed and a huge square edged boulder that Mr. Smith described as "the writer's rock, as opposed to writer's block." The seemingly pristine terrain is populated with hawks, deer, coyotes, wild turkeys, fox, at least one bobcat and "chipmunks beyond number," Mr. Barr said. But during construction, the site teemed with dozens of workers. Machinery and supplies arrived via a temporary roadway made from wooden planks, and the steel frame is engineered to withstand blows from trees felled in hurricanes. No mortar is visible between stones, inside and out, as if they were simply stacked. Interior woodwork has no moldings and does not brush up against the stone. "Each material is able to be honest to itself," Mr. Smith said. He compared the design's rhythmic grooves and recesses to punctuation marks and stanza breaks in poetry, where readers and writers can take breaths: "It's that ability to stop and pause." Mr. Barr's minimal furnishings include vintage pieces made by the California woodworker Sam Maloof and new works built in homage to Mr. Maloof's signature soft curves. A trundle bed is tucked into a wooden drawer below a shelf that holds Mr. Barr's own published works, including The Adventures of Ibn Opcit (2013) and Dante in China (2018). He rolled out the bed and joked, "I did not want this to be lockable from the outside my wife might leave me there for a day or two." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Jennie Somogyi, who as a child played Marie in "George Balanchine's The Nutcracker" at New York City Ballet and then went on to become a celebrated principal dancer with the company, performing major roles and battling her way back from several serious injuries, plans to retire this fall, the company announced on Wednesday. Ms. Somogyi, 37, is to dance her farewell performance in Balanchine's "Liebeslieder Walzer" at the Oct. 11 matinee at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. Her dancing has long been praised for its dramatic intensity and technical mastery. When she first performed the double role of Odette Odile in Peter Martins's production of "Swan Lake" in 2003, Anna Kisselgoff wrote in The New York Times that she had "stayed close to the textbook ideal of classical style, perfect in balance and harmony." Born in Easton, Pa., Ms. Somogyi began her ballet training at 7 with Nina Youshkevitch, before entering the School of American Ballet, the official school of City Ballet, when she was 9. She joined the corps de ballet in 1994 and became a principal in 2000. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
As more people use organic and natural personal care products, the companies behind these goods are becoming more aggressive about courting them. Honest Company, founded by the actress Jessica Alba in 2012, introduced its first brand campaign in February. Eclair Naturals, a body care line introduced last year, is advertising for the first time. And the pioneering company Burt's Bees, which has grown since 1984 from a manufacturer of honey and beeswax products in rural Maine to a producer of about 350 natural health and beauty care products now owned by Clorox Company, is increasing its marketing after advertising on TV for the first time in 2014. The new outreach and the activism that often accompanies it perhaps should not come as a surprise. According to Spins, a Chicago based consulting company, sales of natural body care products which do not contain artificial colors, preservatives, flavors or sweeteners and are minimally processed jumped 10.6 percent, to 1.1 billion, for the year that ended March 19. In addition, according to the Organic Trade Association, organic personal care products defined as those containing at least 70 percent organic ingredients, as defined by the United States Department of Agriculture are "still only 1.25 percent of total U.S. sales of personal care products, so there's lots of room to grow." After its first foray into TV, when it advertised lip balm flavors, Burt's Bees subsequently began advertising new lines of 100 percent natural lipsticks and tinted lip oils. Until recently, it worked with Baldwin , an agency based in Raleigh, N.C.; it now works with the New York office of McGarryBowen. According to Jim Geikie, the general manager of Burt's Bees, the company's target market is "healthy living advocates," who he said are American women who are "really interested in a holistic lifestyle conducive to health and wellness." "They look for products that are more natural and less processed," he said, adding that they cut "across all ages" and tend to be better educated. The company also introduced a "bring back the bees" campaign last year to raise awareness about the decline of bees and other pollinators. This spring, that campaign is featuring the YouTube star Megan Batoon and the actresses Troian Bellisario, Taylor Schilling and Zosia Mamet and encourages people to purchase limited edition lip balms and take "selfless selfies." For each purchase and each selfie, the Burt's Bees Foundation will donate funds to plant 5,000 wildflower seeds, with a goal of planting two billion bee nourishing wildflowers. What is common to all of Burt's Bees' messaging, Mr. Geikie said, is a "combination of efficacy with authenticity." The company, he continued, tries to "help people connect with the wisdom, power and beauty of nature." The most visually striking of the new campaigns is that of Eclair Naturals, which began selling its hair, skin and personal care products last year. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. The centerpiece of the campaign, created by the Pittsburgh based Marc USA, is an almost four minute video featuring Eclair's founder and chief executive, John Matise; Hadley King, a dermatologist who was paid for her appearance; Kayla Jacobs, the beauty and style editor of mindbodygreen.com, where Eclair advertises; and models. All discussed the general lack of transparency surrounding ingredients used in most bath and body care products. The video also shows Joanne Gair, a body painting artist whose work has appeared in many Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues, using vegetable based paints to write the names of nonnatural ingredients of which there are "never any" in Eclair products on the bodies of three nude models. Another component of the campaign, which was shot by the fashion photographer Ruven Afanador, says Eclair dares "to bare what we never stand for." The end of the video asks consumers what they oppose, stating: "How about you? NeverAnyJudgement. NeverAnyViolenceAgainstWomen. NeverAnyFear. NeverAnyDiscrimination. NeverAnyCorruption. What's your NeverAny?" In addition to running on the Eclair Naturals website, the video and a 30 second version of it are running on social media and in digital advertising. Full page print ads with the painted models are running in April through September issues of women's magazines such as InStyle, Cosmopolitan and Harper's Bazaar. The video says that although Canada and European countries have banned nearly 2,000 chemicals from personal care products in the past decade, the United States has prohibited only 10 and has not passed a major federal law to regulate ingredients in such products since 1938. A dozen 15 second spots featuring children and parents and promoting specific products were also released in February. One, for a multisurface cleaner, shows a little boy running into the bathroom, then shutting the door while he urinates, apparently onto the floor, rather than into the toilet. His father knocks on the door and asks if he needs help. The boy's reply, after saying no, is "Uh oh." The ads, which were developed in house and feature music by Will.i.Am, are being shown on TV channels such as Lifetime, Oxygen, WE, NBC and ABC, as well as on Facebook and Instagram. Liz Elert, a senior vice president for Honest Company, said the advertising was the company's response to "the moments we share as humans." The company's mission, she added, "is to provide products that empower people to live their healthiest and happiest life." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
It seems fitting that the 1950s, a period of conformity and affluence, would inform a downtown night life scene that could be described the same way. Such blitheness is on display at the Happiest Hour, a cocktail bar from Jon Neidich (an owner of Acme) and Jim Kearns (bartender at NoMad Hotel and Pegu Club) that opened last fall in Greenwich Village. On a frigid Friday in February, the place was packed with after work patrons sloshing away memories of the paper chase. One burly 30 something man in a pencil stripe oxford shirt, stymied by the impregnable mob surrounding the bar, howled instructions to a colleague in better position. "Give me the 'loco taco' or whatever it's called," he said, perhaps butchering the name of the menu's Ol' Wisco cocktail. "Something with lots of tequila. I'm letting loose." Across the street from leafy Jefferson Market Garden, the Happiest Hour rejiggers the two level space that housed Kingswood. Inside, bartenders in short sleeve Hawaiian shirts grind ice behind a horseshoe shaped bar, and visitors slip into booths that reference midcentury modern design. The tropical resort decor (palms painted on the walls, pink and green hues, rosily glowing light) recalls velvet rope spots like Paul's Baby Grand in TriBeCa and London's Chiltern Firehouse. While Mr. Neidich's clientele at Acme trends toward fashionable and young, the Happiest Hour crowd veers toward yuppies, brunchers and Tinder daters. Men wear button downs, blazers and glossy Moncler puffer jackets; women opt for fur vests, bandage dresses and professional ensembles meant to avoid scrutiny. "Acme has a more specific appeal as a nightspot," Mr. Neidich said. "This is a great neighborhood bar." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
LONDON You might call it a triumphal return: "Angels in America" is back at the National Theater here. Marianne Elliott's revival of Tony Kushner's epic play about the AIDS crisis and the Reagan era, with a cast featuring the "Hacksaw Ridge" star Andrew Garfield and the two time Tony winner Nathan Lane, comes 25 years after its British premiere at the same institution. Mr. Kushner's play is rightly deemed an American success, a Pulitzer Prize winner with consecutive Tony Awards to its name. It was developed and had its premiere at the Eureka Theater in California under the dramaturgy of Oskar Eustis, now artistic director of the Public Theater, and went on to Broadway via Los Angeles. What tends to get overlooked, however, is the vital importance of its London outing. Indeed, it's entirely possible that, without "Angels" in London, there would have been no "Angels" on Broadway. Richard Eyre, then the artistic director of the National Theater, was a huge admirer of the play. He had, he said then, been waiting "for a play to match the catastrophe" of AIDS. In Mr. Kushner's sweeping two parter, which ties the closeted lawyer Roy Cohn to others entangled in the epidemic, he found it a vast, imaginative elision of the personal and the political, spirituality and sexuality. He sent the play to his associate director, Declan Donnellan, then on tour in Brazil with his company Cheek by Jowl. "I'd never read anything that ripped off the page like that," Mr. Donnellan said in a recent interview. "We said we'd do it after reading, literally, a few pages." It wasn't all so smooth. Though firm friends now, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Donnellan had a fractious working relationship, born of differing sensibilities. "Tony has a very clear vision of how he wants a work staged," Mr. Donnellan explained. His own style is less fixed, more fluid. The playwright would later describe his "paroxysms of rage and despair" in rehearsals: "I drove him nuts with tons of pages of notes. I was totally convinced it wasn't going to work," he told Vogue magazine as the play opened on Broadway. But work it did despite Mr. Kushner's anxieties about how British audiences would receive his play. For Mr. Donnellan, in fact, the distance helped. It kept the America onstage at one remove. "You see things much clearer from far away," he said. "We can put a frame around things." Yet the play registered in England, too, after 13 years of right wing government policies that enraged gay activists. Like the Reagan administration, Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives failed to grasp the enormity of AIDS. "It's hard to remember now just how frightening and how all engulfing AIDS was," Mr. Donnellan said. "That made the play's concerns very real." All of which fed into critical success, with some exceptions and some reservations. The noise was nonetheless enough to draw Frank Rich of The New York Times to London, and his rapturous review that March "Mr. Kushner may very well be creating a great work in 'Angels in America'" made waves. "We had this big New York hit in London," Mr. Donnellan said. "The great and the good of Broadway buying crisps in the Cottesloe." Meryl Streep and Stephen Sondheim dropped in, but, more important, so did owners of Broadway theaters like Rocco Landesman, and Bernard B. Jacobs and Gerald Schoenfeld of the Shubert Organization. Eventually, Mr. Landesman would land "Angels" for the Walter Kerr Theater. Ms. Elliott, a two time Tony winner for "War Horse" and "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time," both shows that use spectacle, has opted for the National's 900 seater, the Lyttelton. But the Cottesloe (now the Dorfman) only held 325. Given the scope of Mr. Kushner's play the angels, the Antarctic planes, and the rest it's strange to imagine it in the National's smallest space. It was, Mr. Donnellan recalled, "a very small show, the size of any other Cheek by Jowl show" just eight actors on a fairly bare stage. In hindsight, size seems crucial and not just for the edge of exclusivity that makes a must see. "Angels in America" can falter when directors aim too squarely at spectacle. Mr. Donnellan didn't have that option acting and imagination did the work, just as Mr. Kushner's script advises. He always insisted that the heart of the play was its humanity: "The most important thing was that we had to feel for these people and understand their plights," he said. The Cottesloe "maximized the intensity of the experience." That scale brought two things: speed and intimacy. Mr. Donnellan sought fluidity in his staging, often overlapping one scene into another. The result was a hurtle, highly praised by critics, including Mr. Rich, who deemed Mr. Eustis's Los Angeles production "stodgy" by comparison. "You had that sense of panic," Mr. Donnellan explained. "Helter skelter." In a small space, acting can intensify, and Mr. Donnellan pushed his actors to own and occupy their roles. According to Henry Goodman, who played Roy Cohn, the cast went "way beyond the codes of British acting." The director insisted that performing should "cost" them something, Mr. Goodman remembered; it should require some element of self revelation. That, coupled with the nearness of the stage, gave the production its power. "That intimacy was hugely important," Mr. Goodman insisted. "You were in the bedroom of a man dying of AIDS. You were whisked off to Antarctica." If that sounds almost immersive, that was the intention of Nick Ormerod, the set designer, long before the term became popular. His angel, as played by Nancy Crane, didn't simply crash through the ceiling (there being no ceiling through which to crash). Instead, on descending, she swooped forward unexpectedly, right over the audience's heads. Mr. Ormerod had roped in a rig from Michael Jackson's recent tour. By the time the Broadway production opened the next year, George C. Wolfe was at the helm, Mr. Kushner having parted ways with Mr. Eustis for the sake of his play. The New Yorker critic John Lahr noted that his production "benefited and borrowed" from its London incarnation the pacing, sharper; the design, simpler; the human dynamics, more defined. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In India, Everything Can Be Delivered (Except Clean Air) How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Vindu Goel, a technology reporter for The Times who moved last year from San Francisco to Mumbai, India, discussed the tech he's using. What's your favorite tech tool for staying on top of your beat? What do you like about it, and what could be better? The most vital tool for me here is WhatsApp, a messaging service owned by Facebook. Although I barely used the app when I worked in San Francisco, every smartphone user in India seems to be on it more than 200 million people, according to the company. So WhatsApp is the main way people communicate words, links, photos, videos, holiday greetings. Since WhatsApp is linked to your phone, Indians give out their mobile numbers the way Americans give out email addresses. I do wish it were easier to search WhatsApp messages something I do all the time in Gmail and it would be helpful to be able to use a single account from multiple phones, as you can do with other services. Cellphone service in India is still spotty, so I carry one iPhone and one Android, with SIM cards for India's three biggest carriers and power banks to recharge them both. If I have to go somewhere in heavy traffic, I often turn one phone into a Wi Fi hot spot and work on my laptop from the back seat while the driver worries about the road. How do people use tech differently in India compared with the United States? What are the most popular homegrown apps there? Smartphone use has exploded in the past year. A price war started by a new phone carrier, Reliance Jio, in 2016 has given India one of the lowest prices for data in the world. My primary phone plan costs less than 10 a month for unlimited India calls and more data than I ever manage to use. Cheap data has led to a surge in streaming video. YouTube is popular. But Indians also watch local services like Hotstar, a service owned by 21st Century Fox in the United States. It bundles live cricket, Indian television and American cable shows like "Game of Thrones." Jio offers local TV and many movies through its own apps. Amazon Prime and Netflix operate here, too. Food delivery apps like Swiggy and Zomato are also big, although I don't think anyone is making any money at it. Delivery is very much a part of Indian culture you can get virtually anything delivered, from a single cup of hot coffee to furniture that they assemble in your house. Mobile payments are another hot area. Local apps like Paytm are battling it out with Google's Tez, Amazon Pay and a payments feature that's coming in WhatsApp. What are the biggest consequences of people in India getting onto the internet for the first time via their smartphones? I don't think we really know yet. Most new users know little or no English. So app makers and internet companies like Google are racing to adapt their products to handle different languages. Android phones, for example, offer a choice of keyboards in 33 different Indian languages besides English. Google also says that more than one quarter of searches in India are done by voice command instead of typing. The combination of smartphones and cheap data has the potential to transform how poorer Indians find a job, socialize, do basic banking, get health care, even pursue an education. One big hurdle, though, is that even a basic Android smartphone starts at about 50, which is still out of reach for a lot of people. What is Mumbai's high tech scene like? Mumbai, like New York, is still primarily a hub for finance and trade. In tech, telecom is big Reliance Jio and Vodafone's Indian operations are based here. Two huge outsourcing companies, Tata Consultancy Services and Tech Mahindra, also have their headquarters here. Bollywood, India's film industry, is centered in Mumbai, too. So services like Hotstar, Amazon Prime and Eros Now are here to be close to the studios. There are a few start ups founded by people who simply like the city, such as Cleartrip, a travel booking site, and Hopscotch, an online retailer of children's clothing. With so many major banks here, there is also an emerging scene of so called fintech companies that are trying to apply technology to disrupt traditional financial services. Tech firms have been pushing for merchants to support digital payments in India. Do you think e wallets will ever replace cash? Traditional e wallets, where you store money until you need to spend it, will probably disappear. The government ordered e wallet companies to get more identification information from customers by Feb. 28. Most customers did not cooperate, which limits their ability to refill their wallets. I doubt cash will ever disappear, though. Even in the United States, about one third of all transactions are still cash. Beyond your job, what tech product are you currently obsessed with using in your daily life? Like China, India has a big problem with air pollution in its major cities. Unlike China, the government is doing very little to address the problem. In New Delhi, the nation's capital, the wintertime air is so bad that its chief minister called it a "gas chamber." In Mumbai, which is on the coast and gets nice ocean breezes, the air tends to be better. But by World Health Organization standards, the level of tiny particles in the air is still unhealthy, especially in the mornings. And sometimes it's downright toxic. So we run Swiss made IQAir purifiers for at least part of every day. Our 2 year old is obsessed with FaceTime on our iPhones. She loves to call her grandparents in New York and carry the phone around the apartment, giving them a prime view of our ceiling as she chatters away. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Clemente Dimonda climbed into the barber chair, explaining how he came to operate a barbershop in Manhattan, and to cut the hair of a generation of men's wear executives, including Ralph Lauren. "I used to work on Jamaica Avenue," in Queens, Mr. Dimonda said. "One of the old men, Sicilian guy, he used to work in the shop where I used to work." In the stories of Mr. Dimonda, who is from Naples, barbering is filled with moments of high drama. In his Italian accented English, he went on: "One day, this man grab me by the jacket like this" Mr. Dimonda seized his suit vest with both hands "and he say, 'Look at me!' I say, 'I look at you!' He say, 'You're too qualified for this area. You got to go to New York. You make a lot of money.'" The barber raised his finger and poked the air to finish: "I never forget." That was 50 years ago. Today, Mr. Dimonda still wields a pair of scissors at age 85. He is known for giving what he calls a "gentleman cut, no crazy look, high class, clean cut," and for using old fashioned supplies like witch hazel, cotton necklaces to catch loose hair and monogrammed capes. Designed by Mr. Lauren and rather unusually tucked into the eighth floor of the Polo Ralph Lauren headquarters at 650 Madison Avenue, Mr. Dimonda's operation looks, as one customer described it, like "the sort of a barbershop you'd expect to see on an ocean liner in the '30s." Mr. Dimonda's voice swells with admiration when discussing his most famous client and patron. He began cutting the fashion designer's hair in the late 1960s, "when he was a regular guy." He styled Mr. Lauren when he appeared on the cover of Time in 1986, and on many other magazine covers, and still tends to his hair today, though not as frequently since the designer has come to prefer longer locks. Pictures of the barber with Mr. Lauren adorn the shop walls, and Mr. Dimonda recalled the time another customer, an executive for Saks Fifth Avenue, cast a disparaging eye on them. "He say, 'Why you have a picture of him in the shop?' I say, 'Take it easy. Be like him and I put your picture up.' It's impossible to find another man, a generous man, like Ralph. The best." Mr. Lauren praised Mr. Dimonda as well. "Clemente has a very interesting personality. He's a fun guy to talk to," he said on the phone. "The persona is one thing, but his expertise as a guy who knows how to cut hair is the most important thing." For many years, Mr. Dimonda operated a barbershop on Fifth Avenue and 46th Street, and before that at the Berkshire Hotel, where Winthrop Rockefeller was a client. It was there that he cut the hair of the executives who worked for the fabric mills and clothiers, who in turn introduced him to Mr. Lauren. As Mr. Lauren's business grew and he became busier, it was harder for him to interrupt his workday to visit Mr. Dimonda, he said: "I asked, How would he like a barbershop? I built him a classical barbershop. There's no rent. It was convenient for me and good for Clemente because I said if he wants any accounts to come in, that's fine with me." Mr. Dimonda initially had trouble adjusting to the move into the Ralph Lauren offices, 27 years ago. He felt that some employees didn't understand his stature in the trade, or why he was in their pantry using the coffee machine. He recalled: "One of the ladies she was a big shot, now she's out she say, 'Oh, too many people over here.' Later, when she saw me and Ralph walk down the street together, then she become my best friend." Mr. Dimonda smiled as he remembered the triumph: "Now she knows who is Clemente. Who's a barber who got this kind of relationship with the clientele?" In recent years, some of Ralph Lauren's young female employees have adopted Mr. Dimonda as a grandfather figure. They created and run his Instagram account, and stop in to see him during work hours. Jessica Malot, a graphic designer for Polo Ralph Lauren, has visited Mr. Dimonda at home on Long Island, where he lives alone as a widower, to help him hang drapes. White haired and bushy mustached, compact and courtly, Mr. Dimonda always wears a tailored suit and tie, often set off with a fedora. He reigns over his shop like the king of a tiny city state, banishing customers who have shown him disrespect and yelling across the partitioned space for the second barber and manicurist under his employ. The Xeroxed newspaper article, from 1991, described Mr. Dimonda as the barber "whose clientele reads like a who's who of men's wear." The garmentos came in part to hear industry gossip; what one executive said in the barber's chair often got passed on to the next. Many of the people cited Kenny Bates of Roger LaViale; Cliff Grodd of Paul Stuart; Peter Strom of Polo Ralph Lauren are now dead or out of the industry. But some of Mr. Dimonda's clientele from that period remain, including Alexander Julian, the men's wear designer, who was scheduled to come in that afternoon. While he waited, Mr. Dimonda told of how he also cut the hair of Tommy Hilfiger, who "used to come here for an excuse," Mr. Dimonda said, suggesting that Mr. Hilfiger was less interested in a "gentleman cut" than in getting a look around the Polo offices. "He used to come at night all the time," Mr. Dimonda said. "One night I show him out, I say, 'Tommy, let's go.' He say, 'No, go ahead, I follow you.' I say, 'No. You follow me.' And since then, no more Tomm y." Mr. Hilfiger did not return a request for comment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
IN the world of computers, Silicon Valley is recognized as the spawning ground of technology start ups. For financial institutions, Lower Manhattan has long been the place to set up shop. And of course Detroit has historically served as the epicenter of American automaking, evolving in recent times from a manufacturing center to a headquarters city. Still, there is no guaranty that its dominance is permanent. Among the places vying to become a nexus of automotive development is this college town of 140,000 at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, some 1,300 miles from the Motor City. Already it has earned a reputation as one of the country's leading engine and transportation research centers, digging into the dirty business of civilizing some of the industry's biggest and least sophisticated engines. The Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory here, part of Colorado State University's school of mechanical engineering, was founded 20 years ago by Bryan Willson. The results of its work, especially in fuel injection and ignition systems, have been adopted by major industry suppliers like Delphi, Bosch and Eaton, component providers to auto, truck and industrial engine makers. Work at the laboratory also involves emerging technologies smart grids, electric vehicle components, alternative fuels and new twists on conventional drivetrains that will be vital for transportation systems of the future. Bringing this work to market will require a new approach. "With such a diversity of new technologies, you are starting to see expertise emerge and new businesses form in places like Silicon Valley, Austin and Colorado," Dr. Willson said. "I expect much of this will not happen in Detroit." Many start ups, hoping to commercialize these new technologies, have already formed or been drawn to the area as a result of programs sponsored by the city of Fort Collins in collaboration with local companies. The goal, according to Josh Birks, the city's economic adviser, is to build a critical mass of clean tech and transportation related businesses. This transformation started with a competition. In 1990, General Motors, with the Energy Department as a co sponsor, challenged 25 engineering schools around the country in a program that converted GMC 2500 Sierra pickups to run on natural gas. Though the Colorado State University team did not win the competition, placing second, the technology it developed proved useful for a fleet of natural gas hybrid buses operating in Denver. From that experience, Dr. Willson took away a guiding principle that would inform his future work. "We didn't want to just conduct experiments or write papers and have them sit on a shelf," he said. "We wanted to have impact, so what we do here is the messy work to make sure these innovations actually become products." The lab's messy work was evident on a tour through the facility. In one corner sat an enormous 140 liter natural gas powered engine that once turned a compressor used on natural gas pipelines. Over the years, Dr. Willson and his students have pioneered several improvements to a computer controlled fuel delivery system that greatly reduces the engine's nitrogen oxide emissions. Today the technology can be found on almost every gas pipeline engine in the country, and it has helped establish a national reputation for the laboratory. Enginuity, a start up working here, commercialized much of this technology and in 2008 was acquired by Dresser Rand, which supplies equipment to the oil and gas industry. Nearby, a team of graduate students huddled around a large engine connected to a bank of diagnostic machines by a tangle of wires. A test of a laser ignition system, in which light rather than electric current runs over fiber optic cables to optical spark plugs, was under way. "If you look at the future of automotive engines," Dr. Willson explained, "you are going to see higher levels of exhaust gas recirculation and a much more difficult ignition problem, one that we are looking to lasers to solve." Exhaust gas recirculation directs some of the engine's exhaust back to the cylinders, where it combines with the air fuel mix to help reduce nitrogen oxide emissions. Many automotive engines depend on this technology to meet emissions standards. In the building's basement is a small scale electricity grid where, among other projects, students study the impact that a growing population of electric vehicles may have on the power distribution network. Behind the building, a company co founded by Dr. Willson, Solix Biofuels, is developing a low cost system for producing fuels from algae. Solix intends to license the technology to large energy producers. In the far corner of the building was a Cummins diesel engine owned by VanDyne SuperTurbo, a spinoff from Woodward Governor, a large Fort Collins based energy management company. VanDyne pays to use the laboratory's resources, including several students, to conduct durability and emissions testing on its SuperTurbo technology, a device that adds a two way mechanical drive to a turbocharger. In this wrinkle on conventional turbocharger design, the engine can drive the turbo directly, and the turbo can push power back into the engine through a direct mechanical link, a system known as turbocompounding. Testing suggests that the technology could offer fuel efficiency gains and carbon dioxide emission reductions of 30 percent, enabling automakers to use smaller engines. VanDyne is in its second round of venture financing and talking to several truck and auto diesel engine manufacturers, according to its chief executive, Ed VanDyne. It recently signed a deal with the Army, which will test the SuperTurbo on its tanks and heavy vehicles. For its first three years, VanDyne occupied space at the Rocky Mountain Innosphere in Fort Collins, a nonprofit business incubation program started in 2007 and supported by the university, local businesses and the city. Since then, the program has created 27 companies that now employ 133 high tech workers, according to Mike Freeman, who serves as chairman of the Innosphere board. Mr. Birks, the Fort Collins economic adviser, said the Innosphere was emblematic of the city's commitment to what he called "the front end of business formation." Through this program, VanDyne received low cost office space and free access to patent lawyers and accountants, as well as help developing business plans and raising financing. High tech businesses in the area can also participate in one of the local innovation clusters where local start ups and established companies in related industries work together, with help from the university and city on marketing and skill building. Initiatives typically involve projects in the community that allow member companies to showcase their capabilities. Once these start ups can stand on their own through the efforts of Innosphere or one of the cluster programs, most are choosing to stay in the area, Mr. Birks said. "What we are seeing is that corporate headquarters, research and development and the prototyping all stay fairly close to where the company was incubated and founded," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
You Want to Buy Art. Is It About Love or Money? The value of a Picasso or a Ferrari typically rises in a strong economy, as do shares in a consumer staple like Procter Gamble. But when the economy sours, those shares may be easier than the other possessions to shed. As wealthy collectors pull back on extravagances, investors could get stuck holding an asset they might have to unload at a loss. In 2012, when the market was roaring for passion assets those in which you put money where your heart is I wrote a series of columns on why people invested in things like vineyards, racehorses and sports teams. This time, I will look at five nontraditional asset classes that are popular with wealthy investors and with an eye on what to expect in a market downturn. Art is the first of five valuable but illiquid assets I plan to examine in the coming weeks. The others are cars, collectibles like wine and jewelry, private equity and real estate. Collecting fine art is as much about beauty and desirability as it about the investment value. Given how strong the art market has been over the past few years, many collectors may not be prepared if the economy slows and the appetite for art cools. Roy Sebag, a hedge fund analyst turned entrepreneur, has a collection that includes a drawing by Pablo Picasso and works by 17th century Dutch masters. He said he took an objective view of his collection's value: looking at both the art's intrinsic value how an artist's work has appreciated and its social currency. "It's subjective," but it still allows for analysis on historical pricing, said Mr. Sebag, founder of Goldmoney, a site for buying and selling precious metals, and co founder of Mene, a jewelry line. "It isn't a coincidence that Picasso is viewed by every high net worth individual as an asset they want to own." There are supposedly 5,000 works by Picasso, he said, a stock large enough to build a network of interested parties. By his analysis, avoiding emerging artists and buying works of a well known artist like Picasso, despite having to pay millions of dollars to do so, is like buying a hedge against recession. "We know trends change quickly," he said. "While happy to pay big money for rare and high quality works with irreproachable provenance, they often 'pass' on other works," its report said. In 2008, the art market was not immune to huge swings in value. Sales of postwar and contemporary art fell by more than two thirds from 2008 to 2009, according to data collected by Athena Art Finance, which lends against art portfolios. It took until 2012 for sales to surpass pre recession levels. To guard against seeing the value of an art collection plummet, dealers advise prudence and, not surprisingly, connoisseurship. If there is a lesson to be drawn from the recession, it is that buyers become more discerning in both the artists they favor and the price they will pay, said B. J. Topol, co president of Topol Childs Art Advisory, which works on behalf of wealthy clients. "There's a reshuffling in a recession," she said. "The trendy artist of the time, people aren't looking at him. People want to make sure they're buying a known commodity and not taking risk." Ms. Topol said she saw signs of a slowdown in the art market at the Art Basel international art fair in Miami Beach in December. Art wasn't being snapped up in the first few minutes. Instead, buyers had a chance to digest what they were seeing and negotiate on price. "If you combine your passion with an informed decision," she said, "you'll have something you love every day and maybe it goes up one day." Other collectors amass idiosyncratic collections whose value is greater together than apart. Peeling off several pieces in a downturn could depress the value of the collection as a whole, said Jean Pigozzi, a venture capitalist and art collector. "I'm not at all like all the other hedge fund collectors," said Mr. Pigozzi, who has amassed a significant collection of contemporary African art. "I've never collected thinking what I collect would be a good investment." He said most of his pieces were not worth more than 100,000. Compare that with a work by Jean Michel Basquiat, among the best selling contemporary artists today. Mr. Pigozzi paid 1,000 for an artwork by Basquiat in 1982 and sold it last year for 3.2 million. What he has is a unique collection that is often included in museum shows and sought after by auction houses. In its totality, it offers a window into sub Saharan art of the past 30 years. But Mr. Pigozzi knows selling it would be difficult without breaking it apart. Instead, he hopes to create a museum for it. Approaching art as a pure investment can be difficult, because values of an artist's work can change substantially in ways not associated with typical capital markets investing. The value of works by Wifredo Lam, for instance, has doubled or even tripled in the last decade because of a reappraisal of his place in art history, said Isabelle Bscher, the third generation owner of Galerie Gmurzynska, which has represented artists including Yves Klein, Joan Miro and Picasso. Lam, who died in 1982, was Cuban by birth and grouped with other Latin American artists at auctions, which drew a specific collector. But he was later seen as a modern artist, because he was a friend of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and other midcentury artists. As his artworks moved to more popular auctions, their value has doubled or tripled in a decade, Ms. Bscher said. A similar shift happened with Picasso about 15 years ago, she said. Collectors did not want to buy his work created after 1965, when the artist was in his 80s and seen as past his prime. At the time, the artworks were inexpensive, but they have since risen in value. Her advice: "If you buy the period of an artist that is not in fashion, you can make a great investment." There are of course plenty of collectors with enough wealth to not really care about the short term hit in value that the work on their walls may take. Hilary Geary Ross, an art collector and the wife of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, said she had always loved the work of Rene Magritte, the Belgian surrealist, and began buying his work when she and Mr. Ross married in 2004. She has 36 pieces by Magritte, worth in excess of 100 million. They include famous works like "La Clairvoyance." The billionaire couple have rarely sold any of their works, but Mrs. Ross said they did take advantage of the 2008 downturn to buy paintings. "People come to us with them, because they know we like them," she said. In distressed markets, social concerns may keep some people from working with auction houses. They can try private sales as happened with the Ross's acquisitions in 2008 to sell something quietly. But Ms. Topol said that even then, discerning collectors were going to drive a hard bargain. If that happens, she said, dealers and auction houses can step in to help. But her advice echoes that of others: Don't sell art in a downturn unless other sources of liquidity have dried up. Mr. Sebag said that the art he owned had increased in value far more than other investments he had made, but that he would sell it only if he ceased to enjoy it. "I think art is something you purchase without an exit strategy," Mr. Sebag said. "My idea of liquidity is in other investments." Having those other buckets to draw from is important otherwise, you could be forced to sell a prized work for less than you would want to when the economy sours. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
WASHINGTON The Food and Drug Administration said Friday that it was moving to toughen regulation of the industry that produces heart defibrillators devices used to jolt a failing heart back into its regular rhythm after tens of thousands of malfunctions and hundreds of deaths in recent years. In one case, a nurse was trying to hook up a defibrillator to a patient in cardiac arrest when its electronic screen read "memory full" and then shut down, according to one example provided by the F.D.A. The patient soon died. In another case, a software defect caused the device to show an "equipment disabled" message. That patient also died. The devices, which can be found in malls, airports, casinos and churches in addition to medical settings, re establish cardiac rhythms in patients whose hearts have abruptly stopped or lost their regular beats. Such cardiac arrests kill as many as 400,000 people a year in the United States, according to the American Heart Association, more deaths than caused by Alzheimer's disease, diabetes and accidents combined. There have been 45,000 reports of the devices failing or malfunctioning since 2005, agency officials said. The vast majority of them were due to manufacturing problems, officials said, but some were because of improper maintenance, like battery failure. Manufacturers have recalled the devices 88 times in that period. The problems led the agency to propose a change that would allow it to more closely monitor how the devices known as automated external defibrillators, or A.E.D.'s are designed and made. There are about 2.4 million of them in public places across the country. Dr. William Maisel, chief scientist at the F.D.A.'s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in a conference call with reporters on Friday, "We think tens of thousands of adverse events is too many and 88 recalls is too many." On Friday, the agency issued an order that, if made official after a public comment period, would require manufacturers to submit details of their designs and the controls they use in buying defibrillator components, many of which are produced abroad. Regulators would also be able to inspect manufacturers' factories. Normally, for devices regulated under this framework, manufacturers would have to conduct costly and time consuming clinical trials, but Dr. Maisel said that most of the manufacturers have already collected the data that such trials would produce, and that only a couple would need to carry out such studies. A spokeswoman for Philips, one of the manufacturers, said the change would not interrupt distribution, but she added that the company needed to review the F.D.A. order before commenting on whether future supplies would be affected. Another major manufacturer, Physio Control, in Washington State, said in a statement that it was "extremely confident in our ability to meet these new regulations, if adopted." A spokesman said the change would be more difficult for smaller manufacturers, because more resources would be required to follow the rules. Death rates from cardiac arrests have changed little since the 1980s, when defibrillators first became widely available to the public. Experts say those statistics could improve if more of the devices were accessible to more people. Bystanders use them in just 5 percent of cardiac arrests, according to data from the Emory University School of Medicine, in part because patients usually become ill in private homes where there are no defibrillators. Dr. Mickey Eisenberg, the emergency medical services director for King County in Seattle, said he worried the changes would hinder innovation, which he said was critical to better use of the devices and could lead to fewer deaths. The price of defibrillators, which cost 1,000 to 2,000, needs to drop, he said, to make them affordable for home use, a bit like a fancy smoke detector. "A.E.D.'s in public places will never solve the problem," he said. "They need to become consumer items, to enter people's bedrooms and homes." Even for manufacturers that would not be required to conduct clinical trials, the cost of complying with the new regulations would rise to about 220,000 from about 5,000, according to Dr. Maisel. He said that companies with multiple models would have to pay that money only once, and that the sum could also be applied to subsequent versions. Elliot Fisch, the president of Atrus, which provides defibrillator location information to dispatch agencies during cardiac arrest calls, said cost increases could be passed on to the consumer and make the devices less affordable. He said survival rates have improved sharply in recent years in Seattle, in part because defibrillators are more easily accessible. "If this is going to increase costs to where it becomes prohibitive for organizations to purchase them, that's not good, because the biggest problem is access," he said. But Dr. Gordon Tomaselli, chief of cardiology at Johns Hopkins University and a past president of the American Heart Association, said the F.D.A.'s move could boost confidence in the devices and encourage their use. "People already have a lack of comfort in using these devices," he said. "If word is out there that they don't work anyway, people will be even more reluctant to do something that they were pretty nervous about to begin with." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
When most Americans think of Korean pop music, colloquially called K pop, what comes to mind is usually Psy's "Gangnam Style" a high octane fusion of rap verses, techno beats and pop hooks, complete with an ultrabright music video and hypersynchronized dance moves. But the playwright Jason Kim is hoping to change that. "There's a desire to look at K pop as goofy and strange and funny," Mr. Kim said, referring to that 2012 crossover hit. "What's so wonderful is that it's incredibly diverse there's very serious K pop and there's very goofy and funny K pop." This month, he is helping to introduce New York theatergoers to the varieties of the genre with the world premiere of a musical called "KPOP." Mr. Kim co conceived and wrote the book for the immersive show, which opens on Sept. 22 at A.R.T./New York Theaters, in a coproduction by Ars Nova, Ma Yi Theater Company and Woodshed Collective. "KPOP" aims to give the audience a firsthand look at such hit factories. Ticket buyers will get to tour a two floor complex and watch as singers practice dance moves, construct an album, are evaluated by their labels and try to make themselves more palatable to American listeners. It culminates in a concert, with songs in both Korean and English. Helen Park and Max Vernon wrote the music and lyrics. Not every audience member will have the same experience or encounter the same characters. So here's a chance to meet six "KPOP" performers. And true to the art form, some are experienced, others are novices, and not all of them are Korean. PORTRAYS Epic, a performer in the five member boy band F8 (pronounced "fate"). Half Korean, half American, he was brought in "to make the band viable in America," said Mr. Tam, causing tensions with his bandmates, who are all Korean. INSPIRED BY Justin Timberlake and Exo, a boy band that performs in Korean and Mandarin. KOREAN? No. Mr. Tam is Chinese, Hawaiian and Caucasian. He learned the Korean songs in the show by recording himself on his iPhone and "listening and adjusting accordingly." PREPARATION A weeklong cast boot camp, eight hour days that included body conditioning, "swag" exercises and learning four songs a day. "There's a lot of drilling, more than in regular musical theater," said Mr. Tam, who has been on Broadway in "A Chorus Line," among other shows. "They make it look so easy, but it takes so much blood, sweat and tears that you don't see." PORTRAYS Oracle, a member of F8 who objects to the group's attempts to be more "Americanized." INSPIRED BY The chance to pursue a lifelong dream. "K pop was something I always yearned for and I was never brave enough to reach out to," he said, citing the rigorous training. He became an actor instead. KOREAN? Yes; Mr. Jung was born in South Korea and moved to the United States five years ago. PREPARATION Watches videos of live performances by Big Bang, a K pop boy band, before he goes on: "I always want to have their attitude." PORTRAYS XO, a member of the six member girl group Special K. "She's the rapper, like a bad bitch," Ms. Kim said. INSPIRED BY For her "KPOP" audition, Ms. Kim performed a Korean rap from the song "Fan" by the male hip hop trio Epik High. "I really liked that I was cast as the rapper, because that's something I'm interested in." KOREAN? Yes; Ms. Kim was born in New Jersey and speaks Korean. "What helped me learn Korean was watching Korean dramas," Ms. Kim said. "And driving by Flushing and trying to read the signs really fast." APPEAL OF THE SHOW It has made her realize that "being something hyphen American is its own identity and culture very beautiful and also very real." PORTRAYS Callie, a member of Special K who is told that she needs to lose her accent in order to be more marketable to Americans. KOREAN? Yes; Ms. Park was born in South Korea and moved to the United States five years ago. PREPARATION This is the first time Ms. Park has performed in a musical. "I'm not really a singer and I'm not really a dancer," she said. "Every day, every night, when I'm back home, I always rehearse in front of the mirror." It's been illuminating: "I never thought about K pop stars as really performers. Because they are always being pretty and sexy, like dolls. But singing and dancing and being pretty and everything it's so hard!" KOREAN? No. The only non Asian cast member, Ms. Williams also does double duty as the dance captain for "KPOP." APPEAL OF THE SHOW Ms. Williams was a dancer on Beyonce's Formation world tour. "As an African American woman, the struggles are so similar," she said. "A lot of the things that they're doing in order to be perfect changing their faces and having surgeries and things like that it's so relevant here in America. There's such a similarity in cultures, even though there's so many differences at the same time." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Long before "interdisciplinary" became a cultural buzzword, Heiner Goebbels was smudging all manner of artistic boundaries. For the past three decades, Mr. Goebbels, 66, has been puzzling and invigorating audiences with works that aren't quite concert music, theater, installation or performance art. His music has embraced rock, jazz, classical styles, voice, text and ambient sound with equal vigor. In his latest work, "Everything That Happened and Would Happen ," which opens at the Park Avenue Armory on Monday and runs through June 9, Mr. Goebbels takes on 20th century European history in a characteristically elliptical fashion. He has created a phantasmagoric, ever changing landscape permeated by spoken text and film, and populated by 12 dancers and five musicians who perform for almost three hours amid a plethora of constantly manipulated props and objects. Although it contains no literal depictions of historical events, the work "evokes the ghosts of the entire 20th century," Richard Morrison wrote in a review of the premiere in The Times of London, summing up the piece as "sometimes bewildering, occasionally boring, often bewitching and always bizarre." Pierre Audi, the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory, said that it is "one of those pieces you need to surrender to over time, and the length is important for that." In a telephone interview, Mr. Goebbels spoke about the inspirations for "Everything That Happened and Would Happen," and his collaborative creative process. But he remained noncommittal about its themes. "In this landscape of micro narrations, voices, sounds, images which we present, I guess this question can only be answered individually," he said. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. Why did you want to make this piece? I don't make a decision to create a work unless I have four good reasons. The first here was that I had never worked with dancers, which I wanted to do. The second was that I wanted to use the scenic elements of John Cage's "Europeras," which I directed in 2012 when I was the director of the Ruhrtriennale. The third was Patrik Ourednik's book, "Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century," which I had read and found fascinating. The fourth source was a program called "No Comment" from the Euronews television channel. Every hour, it shows a few minutes of news footage without any comment. In the show, we use the live footage of the day. You see the date and location, but nothing else is explained. You might see someone throwing a milkshake at Nigel Farage, or a school strike for climate change, or students with signs. I am like the viewer: I am not prepared, I don't know what is coming. You have to make up your mind about what you see and hear. I love this, because it's a strong intrusion of reality into the artificial world of performance, which I am always looking for. How did you move from these first ideas and sources to creating material? I did four workshops with dancers, performers and musicians in Germany, France, Vietnam and Manchester to find a form, in which movements and objects, light and sounds, words and the news of the day can all contribute to what the piece is "about." We worked with theatrical props, with encounters with other realities in the form of objects, textures, materials. I am not a choreographer, and I told them this, but their movement is choreographed by what they need to do. I wanted to use dancers because I think that, like musicians, they have an instrumental relationship to their bodies; they don't use their bodies to manifest "meaning" in the same ways as actors. They can simply be. What about the musicians? Is their material also improvised? Yes, within certain guidelines. According to the order of scenes we developed specific guidelines together regarding intensity, character, timing, duration, instrumentation. Within these frames they react freely to each other every night, with instruments from different eras: a medieval analog organ, a saxophone, electronics, percussion and an ondes Martenot, a kind of early 20th century synthesizer. The music is improvised every night, the dancers have their own responses, and I don't know what the news footage will be. In this way, the piece is a collaboration between musicians, dancers, unforeseeable news and the text, which takes on different resonances depending on all these other things. It's not a strict composed machinery. But as the creator of the piece, you have to impose a structure? Overall, I am a composer, and a piece like this is a composition of light, space, color, movement and sound. In the end my decisions always have a musical reason, like a counterpoint between what we see and hear, or a polyphony composed of the video, the movement, sound and the light. Music can touch you without you being able to name why. It offers you freedom in how you hear it, and you may hear it differently every time. This is the quality I want to transfer to a nonacoustic field, to theater. Mr. Ourednik's book is a history of 20th century Europe, starting with World War I. In creating this work, did you want to say something about Europe? It is interesting that the text digresses radically from any linear chronology, and with a lot of humor. This digression can be a creative pleasure for an audience. Art and politics are a very difficult couple, and I believe that any piece of art, especially theater, can only be political in a nonintentional way, or it's in danger of just making statements. I don't want to make statements; I believe that in times of too many opinions, simplifications, and too much ideological overflow, art can give us space to determine ourselves, to sharpen our perception, to mistrust what we hear, to look at the context in which things are said and why. After "Stifters Dinge," people said to me, "Finally: No one onstage telling me what to think." I wanted to perpetuate that freedom for the viewer, so that people have space for the imagination. Everything That Happened and Would Happen Monday through June 9 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The central design of an AIDS quilt panel friends made to honor the memory of Tom Rauffenbart was inspired by a 1989 painting by David Wojnarowicz, his partner. In it, Mr. Rauffenbart's silhouette encompasses a galaxy. Since the fall of 2019, six women, some from the art world, others retired social workers, had labored on two AIDS quilts devoted to the memories of the artist David Wojnarowicz and his partner, Tom Rauffenbart. The women converged from all over New York City on the neighborhood of Washington Heights, at the home of Anita Vitale, who had met Mr. Rauffenbart, a fellow social worker, in the 1980s. Then, in mid March, in what you might call a sad cosmic coincidence, their work was interrupted by the arrival on the scene of another pandemic. Mr. Rauffenbart, who learned he had AIDS before his partner but lived until last year, had always wanted to create a quilt for the artist, who died in 1992. In 2018, when the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted the retrospective "David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night," he decided it was time, but then became too ill to carry it through. The sewing circle the arts writer Cynthia Carr, author of the stunning "Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz"; the artists Jean Foos and Judy Glantzman; the retired social worker Virginia Hourigan; the art dealer Gracie Mansion, who showed the artist's work at her gallery in the '80s; and Ms. Vitale have kept hope alive through video chats while locked down at their homes. Mr. Wojnarowicz (pronounced voy na RO vich), after starting off as a poet, took up other writing formats as well as music, performance and various forms of visual art. His work, which was always political but became furiously so with the arrival of the AIDS epidemic and especially with his own diagnosis in 1988, now resides in institutions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Tate Gallery in London, and beyond. Ms. Vitale's walls constitute a veritable Wojnarowicz museum, with iconic works of his and some that have never been exhibited, as well as portraits of the artist by the likes of Nan Goldin and Timothy Greenfield Sanders. She took over the apartment from Mr. Rauffenbart when he died; if you call and get the voice mail, you still hear his outgoing announcement. It is roomy enough to accommodate dining tables that, leaves inserted, can support the large quilts. Mr. Wojnarowicz has been featured in no fewer than three Whitney Biennials, and artists like Nayland Blake, Every Ocean Hughes (formerly known as Emily Roysdon) and Wolfgang Tillmans have found his art and writings inspiring. The Whitney Museum's director of curatorial initiatives, David Breslin, who co curated "History Keeps Me Awake at Night" with David Kiehl, a curator emeritus, says that a younger generation of queer artists is thinking a lot about those from Mr. Wojnarowicz's generation, felled by AIDS: "These artists feel like, 'These would have been my teachers, the ones to create a different model for what I could be and what the art world could be.'" Somewhat inexplicably, none of Mr. Wojnarowicz's many fans had created a quilt for him. As one might expect from a crew involving artists, the quilts, on richly textured red cloth (from Mr. Rauffenbart's own supply of quilting materials, no less), are a worthy tribute, lush and gorgeous. Each is, like all the quilts donated to the AIDS Quilt, an individual piece that will become part of the whole. They will go on view as part of the show "The David Wojnarowicz Correspondence with Jean Pierre Delage, 1979 1982," tentatively scheduled for 2021 at the New York gallery P.P.O.W; the show is curated by Ms. Carr and the gallery's Anneliis Beadnell. While the women arrived at a plan for the imagery together, the design was entrusted to Ms. Foos, who collaborated with Mr. Wojnarowicz on one of his best known pieces, "One Day This Kid (1990)." That work shows a childhood photo of the artist, surrounded by text of his own writing that detailed the sickening bigotry that awaited "this kid" at the hands of what he, in other writings, indicted as "a sick society." Center stage in Mr. Wojnarowicz's design is his 1988 89 painting "Something from Sleep IV (Dream)," in which the plates lining a stegosaurus's spine spell out his last name. The image of the dinosaur, he wrote, had to do with an anxiety dream in which he saw himself as alien, and alienated from "the forward thrust of civilization." Reviewing the Whitney show for The Times, Holland Cotter wrote: "From the start, he took outsiderness itself, as defined by ethnicity, gender, economics and sexual orientation, as his true native turf. And from it he attacked through writing, performing and object making all forms of exclusion and oppression." Lending resonance to the dinosaur iconography, the artist "saw himself as someone who was about to become extinct," Ms. Carr said in a phone interview. Lined up below the painting are smaller squares, several devoted to his animal imagery. "He was so gentle with animals," Ms. Vitale noted in a Zoom chat with the other quilters this spring. Ms. Mansion added, "He was from such an abusive family, he took refuge in the woods." Ms. Carr's biography details sadistic torture that the artist's father heaped upon Mr. Wojnarowicz and his siblings; as a child, he escaped not only to nature, but also to the streets of New York. Dominating Mr. Rauffenbart's quilt, meanwhile, is his partner's 1989 canvas "Something from Sleep III (For Tom Rauffenbart)," which had resided at Mr. Rauffenbart's apartment for decades before it was exhibited in the artist's 2018 show. Within the silhouetted figure of Mr. Rauffenbart looking into a microscope, we see a rendering of our solar system, the very cosmos within the frame of the lover. Ms. Vitale remembers Mr. Rauffenbart as a man who could find humor in even challenging situations, and who loved to cook one photo reproduced in his quilt shows him clowning around with a pot on his head, brandishing serving spoon and spatula. Ms. Hourigan describes him as a Renaissance man, with interests in music, theater, food and travel. They all say he was completely devoted to Mr. Wojnarowicz. Conceived by the gay rights activist Cleve Jones, the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt offered a way for friends and lovers to commemorate people who were often abandoned by their families. Ms. Vitale recalls that some found the news that their children were gay even harder to accept than the fact that they were dying. The Quilt had its first public showing on the National Mall in 1987, when it consisted of just 1,920 panels, each measuring three by six feet, about the size of the average grave. "At the time, I said, 'This is our Arlington,'" Ms. Carr said, comparing the Quilt to the national military cemetery. It now memorializes more than 94,000 people in 50,000 panels and weighs about 54 tons. (Among those panels is one Mr. Wojnarowicz designed for his onetime lover, longtime friend and enduring mentor, the photographer Peter Hujar, of whom he said, "Everything I made, I made for Peter.") Mr. Jones wrote of the Quilt in his 2016 book, "When We Rise: My Life in the Movement," that "It could be therapy, I hoped, for a community that was increasingly paralyzed by grief and rage and powerlessness." That is proved by the experience of these women, who have found it very moving, and helpful in working through their grief. To talk to them is to quickly learn that, for them, the height of the AIDS crisis was not so long ago at all, that the grief remains, and that the current pandemic brings back vivid memories of seeing close friends and loved ones mowed down by a mysterious killer, of checking the obituaries each morning to see who had been taken from them now. "At least one terrible thing is the same a failed response from the federal government," Ms. Carr said. "But that's for different reasons. "During the AIDS epidemic, there was so much homophobia. During Covid, we've had Trump denying reality." Caregiving has been on Ms. Foos's mind: "We've been caring for each other in grief for so many years." Another echo is the presence of Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, whose sober, fact based assessments of the Covid 19 pandemic have served as a counterweight to those of the president; he was both the object of gratitude and the target of protests from AIDS activists. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
It's the deadliest time of the year for deer, which also pose a particular danger to motorists in autumn with the arrival of the mating and hunting seasons. Nearly half of vehicle accidents involving white tail deer occur from October to December, according to Chad Stewart, a deer research biologist at the Indiana State Division of Fish and Wildlife. "With the number of deer and the number of vehicles out there, deer vehicle accidents will happen," Mr. Stewart said. "The best thing drivers can do is to take measures to keep them to a minimum." The confluence of mating and hunting seasons makes November the month with the most deer vehicle collisions about 18 percent of the annual total according to State Farm. In 2001 11, collisions with animals resulted in 2,083 fatal crashes nationwide, according to AAA's examination of data from the federal Fatality Analysis Reporting System. In New York state, there were about 35,000 reported deer crashes in 2011, the latest data available, according to Carol Breen, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Department. That year, four people were killed and 1,311 injured in deer related accidents. And while deer collisions tend to get the most attention, encounters with smaller animals like squirrels, raccoons and dogs also cause drivers to veer and crash, noted William Van Tassel, who leads AAA's national driver training programs. He recommends that drivers entering a roadway especially from sunset to sunrise scan the area continuously and play a "what if game" a couple of times. "What if a deer or animal runs out in front of me what should I be doing?" Mr. Van Tassel said. This allows drivers to prime their brain, hands and feet, he said, "to do what they need to do, just in case." Among the driving tips offered by the Insurance Information Institute are these: be aware that deer tend to travel in groups; that they are most active in the evening, around 6 to 9 p.m.; and that they can be highly unpredictable, especially when caught in headlights, exposed to loud noises like horns or confused by fast moving vehicles. The institute says drivers should not rely on devices like car mounted deer whistles or roadside reflectors, which despite advertising claims have not proved effective at keeping deer out of a vehicle's path. In a recent study of fatal animal crashes, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that 60 percent of the people who died were not wearing safety belts. "Most of the human deaths could be prevented if every driver buckled up and every motorcyclist wore a helmet," said Russ Rader, the organization's senior vice president for communications. Recently, State Farm noted a 3.5 percent drop in deer collisions nationwide, to 1.22 million, for the one year period ending on June 30, 2013. It said the odds of a driver striking a deer had declined by 4.3 percent from the period a year earlier. However, State Farm said the average deer collision damage claim in that period had risen 3.3 percent, to 3,414. Using its own claims data and drivers' license information, the insurer said in September that it had calculated the chances of a driver hitting a deer over the next 12 months to be 1 in 174, down from 1 in 167 in its estimate for the previous year. Chris Mullen, director of strategic resources at State Farm, said that it was hard to pinpoint a single reason for the decline, but that factors like driver awareness, deer crossing signs, fences and technology might have contributed. A disease that reduced the deer population last year may also be a factor, Mr. Stewart of Indiana said. In 2012, he said, deer were hit hard by epizootic hemorrhagic disease, which spread particularly during drought conditions in states including Indiana. The disease is not as much of a factor this year, he added. In New York, one element that helped to make 2012 the safest year in the nearly six decades of the New York Thruway, with a total of 2,053 incidents, was the addition of deer crossing signs at locations with a higher than average history of vehicle deer collisions, said Dan Weiller, a spokesman for the New York State Thruway Authority. Those high traffic areas included Westchester and Rockland counties in the lower Hudson Valley. "We analyze all accidents that occur on the Thruway to determine if there are changes we can make in the roadway to lessen the chance of recurrence of a similar accident," he said. The Thruway is on track for another decline in deer collisions, with 1,052 reported through September. To be sure, technology like night vision systems and pedestrian avoidance systems may be aiding some drivers as well, according to Mr. Rader of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. He noted that for the first time in September, the group issued crash avoidance ratings. What's more, automakers are starting to roll out animal detection technology. The 2014 Mercedes Benz S Class is now available with a third generation infrared night vision system developed by Autoliv Electronics Night Vision, that detects animals in the car's path and alerts the driver. The system will soon be offered on some Audis and BMWs. Volvo is also working to develop an animal detection system. The unit of Autoliv, a large Swedish supplier of auto safety systems, says its system allows drivers to detect wildlife and pedestrians "in about 150 milliseconds, which is as fast as a blink of the eye." Once the infrared unit detects a hazard, the system provides visual and audible warnings to alert the driver about a potential collision. It has a range of about 525 feet. "In the future," said Mr. Rader of the insurance institute, "we can foresee that some of these systems will be beneficial in preventing both pedestrian collisions and collisions with animals." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
One of the great science fiction fantasies of all time that you might discover aliens texting you from outer space on your computer is about to take a breather. For the last 21 years ordinary people, armchair astronomers, citizen scientists, sitting at home or in their offices, were able to participate in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence SETI thanks to a screen saver called seti home. Once installed, the program would periodically download data from the University of California, Berkeley, process it while the computer was idle, and then send it back. On March 2, the ringleaders of the seti home effort, a beleaguered and somewhat diminished band of Berkeley astronomers, announced on their website that they were taking a break. On March 31 the program will stop sending out data and go into "hibernation." The team, they explained, needs time to digest its decades of findings. The suspension of new data mining removes yet another pleasant diversion that some of us there were about 100,000 seti home members at last count could pursue during our social distancing prompted by the coronavirus pandemic. Launched in May 1999, the program was one of the first great innovations of a then young internet, one of the first and most popular efforts to crowdsource difficult computations. It allowed you to imagine that you might one day receive a spam call or email from a real estate agency on some asteroid, or a little green salesman trying to sell you black hole insurance. I was an early and enthusiastic adopter of seti home. I spent many a slack moment that is to say, most of my moments staring at the shifting mountain range of graphics that appeared on my office screen, constantly rearranging themselves in mysterious ways. I wondered what, if anything, they were saying if someday the news that we are not alone would have my computer to thank. Participating gave me the same feeling as being at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory during Voyager's planetary encounters. In those wonderful days, images beamed back from the spacecraft of moons, rings and other baffling phenomena in the outer solar system appeared on screens in the reporters' newsroom at the same time that scientists, huddled in their offices, saw them for the first time. We were united in our ignorance and our curiosity, wondering what the universe held in store for us that day. We still don't know. But the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has become a much more hopeful endeavor since 1960 when Frank Drake, now a retired professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, pointed a radio telescope at two nearby stars in the hope of catching an interstellar broadcast. He thought he heard something, and then he didn't, which has been the story of the search ever since: thousands of stars, millions of radio frequencies, cosmic silence, the Great Silence. The logic of this endeavor is as unassailable as its prospects are rickety. Sentient beings anywhere in the galaxy, having reached a certain level of technological sophistication, would realize that the distances between stars are physically unbridgeable and would likely choose to communicate with radio waves. But joining the cosmic conversation, if there is such a thing, would require us humans on the listening end to know which of 100 billion stars to point our receivers at, and which frequency to tune in to. That's an optimistic scenario. And, of course, we would have to be able to figure out what they are saying once we heard it. We now know that there are billions of other planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Thanks to efforts like NASA's TESS satellite, we are beginning to discern some details of the closest ones. We know that they can look at us just as we are looking at them. These days, one of the most extensive searches is being made by Breakthrough Listen, a program underwritten by the billionaire Yuri Milner and his friends. Seti home has been piggybacking on its telescopes, looking at whatever they are looking at. Once upon a time, almost 2 million computers were subscribed to the program, but it has since declined twentyfold. As the seti home team explained in a recent conference call, they have been able to gauge the average lifetime of personal computers by how long they remain registered on the website about three years. All this has not happened without a few ruffled feathers. Legend has it that some I.T. administrators have found their networks bogged down by too many people running the screen saver at once. Dan Werthimer, who holds the Watson and Marilyn Alberts SETI Chair at the University of California, Berkeley, said this was overblown. Once, he said, a school administrator got in trouble after downloading seti home to all the computers in the school. But after 21 years, the team doesn't yet know whether their screen saver recorded any alien signals. "Our resources have been limited," Eric Korpela, the current director of the seti home program, said. A couple of years into the program, the team went to the Arecibo radio telescope with a list of promising signals worth checking out, to no avail. Now there are 20 billion events it would be presumptuous to call them "signals" awaiting another look. In the meantime the team, never large, has shrunk to Dr. Werthimer, Dr. Korpela, David Anderson, the project's founding director, and Jeff Cobb, who developed much of its software. In the recent phone call, they said they had been too busy keeping the computer servers running over the years to actually analyze all that data, and it is weighing on their minds. If they don't take a break and do it now, they never will. "We're getting older," Dr. Korpela said. "Some of us are retiring." "We haven't published," Dr. Werthimer said. "Our colleagues let us know about it every time we see them at scientific conferences." He added, "We'll keep working on results. One of them may be from E.T. We don't know." Noting that most of the sky had been seen many times, he said, "You might not be the only one who saw it." Dr. Drake once speculated that SETI was most likely to tap into cosmic religious radio broadcasts of the sort that predominate if you happen to be driving cross country. Personally, I'm steeling myself for a birdlike voice warning me that the warranty on my antimatter drive is about to expire. Yearning for companionship is eternal. Even if it comes with cosmic spam. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
On Jan. 22, two days after Chinese officials first publicized the serious threat posed by the new virus ravaging the city of Wuhan, the chief of the World Health Organization held the first of what would be months of almost daily media briefings, sounding the alarm, telling the world to take the outbreak seriously. But with its officials divided, the W.H.O., still seeing no evidence of sustained spread of the virus outside of China, declined the next day to declare a global public health emergency. A week later, the organization reversed course and made the declaration. Those early days of the epidemic illustrated the strengths and weaknesses of the W.H.O., an arm of the United Nations that is now under fire by President Trump, who on Tuesday ordered a cutoff of American funding to the organization. With limited, constantly shifting information to go on, the W.H.O. showed an early, consistent determination to treat the new contagion like the threat it would become, and to persuade others to do the same. At the same time, the organization repeatedly praised China, acting and speaking with a political caution born of being an arm of the United Nations, with few resources of its own, unable to do its work without international cooperation. But a close look at the record shows that the W.H.O. acted with greater foresight and speed than many national governments, and more than it had shown in previous epidemics. And while it made mistakes, there is little evidence that the W.H.O. is responsible for the disasters that have unfolded in Europe and then the United States. The W.H.O. needs the support of its international members to accomplish anything it has no authority over any territory, it cannot go anywhere uninvited, and it relies on member countries for its funding. All it can offer is expertise and coordination and even most of that is borrowed from charities and member nations. The W.H.O. has drawn criticism as being too close to Beijing a charge that grew louder as the agency repeatedly praised China for cooperation and transparency that others said were lacking. China's harsh approach to containing the virus drew some early criticism from human rights activists, but it proved effective and has since been adopted by many other countries. A crucial turning point in the pandemic came on Jan. 20, after China's central government sent the country's most famous epidemiologist, Zhong Nanshan, to Wuhan to investigate the new coronavirus racing through that city of 11 million people. Dr. Zhong delivered a startling message on national television: Local officials had covered up the seriousness of the outbreak, the contagion spread quickly between people, doctors were dying and everyone should avoid the city. Dr. Zhong, an eccentric 83 year old who led the fight against the SARS outbreak of 2002 and 2003, was one of few people in China with enough standing to effectively call Wuhan's mayor, Zhou Xianwang, a rising official in the Communist Party, a liar. Mr. Zhou, eager to see no disruption in his plans for a local party congress from Jan. 11 to 17 and a potluck dinner for 40,000 families on Jan. 18, appears to have had his police and local health officials close the seafood market, threaten doctors and assure the public that there was little or no transmission. Less than three days after Dr. Zhong's warning was broadcast, China locked down the city, preventing anyone from entering or leaving and imposing strict rules on movement within it conditions it would later extend far behind Wuhan, encompassing tens of millions of people. Despite Dr. Zhong's warning about human to human transmission, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.'s director general, said there was not yet any evidence of sustained transmission outside China. "That doesn't mean it won't happen," Dr. Tedros said. "Make no mistake," he added. "This is an emergency in China, but it has not yet become a global health emergency. It may yet become one." The W.H.O. was still trying to persuade China to allow a team of its experts to visit and investigate, which did not occur until more than three weeks later. And the threat to the rest of the world on Jan. 23 was not yet clear only about 800 cases and 25 deaths had been reported, with only a handful of infections and no deaths reported outside China. "In retrospect, we all wonder if something else could have been done to prevent the spread we saw internationally early on, and if W.H.O. could have been more aggressive sooner as an impartial judge of the China effort," said Dr. Peter Rabinowitz, co director of the MetaCenter for Pandemic Preparedness and Global Health Security at the University of Washington. Amir Attaran, a public health and law professor at the University of Ottawa, said, "Clearly a decision was taken by Dr. Tedros and the organization to bite their tongues, and to coax China out of its shell, which was partially successful." "That in no way supports Trump's accusation," he added. "The president is scapegoating, dishonestly." Indeed, significant shortcomings in the administration's response arose from a failure to follow W.H.O. advice. It is impossible to know whether the nations of the world would have acted sooner if the W.H.O. had called the epidemic a global emergency, a declaration with great public relations weight, a week earlier than it did. But day after day, Dr. Tedros, in his rambling style, was delivering less formal warnings, telling countries to contain the virus while it was still possible, to do testing and contact tracing, and isolate those who might be infected. "We have a window of opportunity to stop this virus," he often said, "but that window is rapidly closing." In fact, the organization had already taken steps to address the coronavirus, even before Dr. Zhong's awful revelation, drawing attention to the mysterious outbreak. On Jan. 12, Chinese scientists published the genome of the virus, and the W.H.O. asked a team in Berlin to use that information to develop a diagnostic test. Just four days later, they produced a test and the W.H.O. posted online a blueprint that any laboratory around the world could use to duplicate it. On Jan. 21, China shared materials for its test with the W.H.O., providing another template for others to use. Larry Gostin, director of the W.H.O.'s Center on Global Health Law, said the organization relied too heavily on the initial assertions out of Wuhan that there was little or no human transmission of the virus. "The charitable way to look at this is that W.H.O. simply had no means to verify what was happening on the ground," he said. "The less charitable way to view it is that the W.H.O. didn't do enough to independently verify what China was saying, and took China at face value." The W.H.O. was initially wary of China's internal travel restrictions, but endorsed the strategy after it showed signs of working. "Right now, the strategic and tactical approach in China is the correct one," Dr. Michael Ryan, the W.H.O.'s chief of emergency response, said on Feb. 18. "You can argue whether these measures are excessive or restrictive on people, but there is an awful lot at stake here in terms of public health not only the public health of China but of all people in the world." A W.H.O. team including two Americans, from the C.D.C. and the National Institutes of Health did visit China in mid February for more than a week, and its leaders said they were given wide latitude to travel, visit facilities and talk with people. Whether or not China's central government intentionally misstated the scale of the crisis, incomplete reporting has been seen in every other hard hit country. France, Italy and Britain have all acknowledged seriously undercounting cases and deaths among people who were never hospitalized, particularly people in nursing and retirement homes. New York City this week reported 3,700 deaths it had not previously counted, in people who were never tested. The United States generally leaves it to local coroners whether to test bodies for the virus, and many lack the capacity to do so. In the early going, China was operating in a fog, unsure of what it was dealing with, while its resources in and around Wuhan were overwhelmed. People died or recovered at home without ever being treated or tested. Official figures excluded, then included, then excluded again people who had symptoms but had never been tested. On Jan. 31 a day after the W.H.O.'s emergency declaration President Trump moved to restrict travel from China, and he has since boasted that he took action before other heads of state, which was crucial in protecting the United States. In fact, airlines had already canceled the great majority of flights from China, and other countries cut off travel from China at around the same time Mr. Trump did. The first known case in the United States was confirmed on Jan. 20, after a man who was infected but not yet sick traveled five days earlier from Wuhan to the Seattle area, where the first serious American outbreak would occur. In fact, the W.H.O. had not said to limit testing, though it had said some testing was a higher priority. It was and still is calling for more testing in the context of tracing and checking people who had been in contact with infected patients, but few Western countries have done extensive contact tracing. But the organization took pains not to criticize individual countries including those that did insufficient testing. On March 16, Dr. Tedros wrote on Twitter, "We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test." Three days later, a W.H.O. spokeswoman said that there was "no 'one size fits all' with testing," and that "each country should consider its strategy based on the evolution of the outbreak." The organization was criticized for not initially calling the contagion a pandemic, meaning an epidemic spanning the globe. The term has no official significance within the W.H.O., and officials insisted that using it would not change anything, but Dr. Tedros began to do so on March 11, explaining that he made the change to draw attention because too many countries were not taking the group's warnings seriously enough. Reporting was contributed by Selam Gebrekidan, Javier Hernandez, Jason Horowitz, Adam Nossiter, Knvul Sheikh and Roni Caryn Rabin. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
PARIS Saab Automobile said Friday that it had won a reprieve from collapse after two Chinese carmakers agreed in principle to buy the ailing Swedish automaker just hours before it faced court action that could have led to its liquidation. Zhejiang Youngman Lotus Automobile and Pang Da Automobile Trade agreed to pay 100 million euros, or 140 million, for Saab and its British unit, according to Saab's parent company, Swedish Automobile. "We had been struggling for the last six or seven months, to the extent that many people had given up on us," Victor R. Muller, the Dutch entrepreneur behind Spyker cars and Swedish Automobile, said in a conference call with journalists. With the new owners, he said, "there will be stability, there will be funds and there will be clarity for the future of our business." It was the second time in two years that Chinese investors had come to the aid of the Swedish auto industry. Last year, the Zhejiang Geely Holding Group paid Ford Motor 1.8 billion for Volvo. Martin Skold, a scholar at the Stockholm School of Economics who follows the auto industry, said it was too early to say Saab was saved. "Saab is in great need of an enormous amount of money," he said, estimating that it would take at least 800 million and possibly as much as 1.5 billion to turn it around. "We'll have to wait to see how much the Chinese are willing to invest in it," he added. Mr. Muller acquired Saab last year from General Motors, which was then recovering from its own bankruptcy. But Saab, which has a long established base of dedicated customers, has so far not been able to right itself. The Chinese companies agreed in the spring to invest a combined 245 million euros ( 347 million) for a 54 percent stake after Saab's main factory in Trollhattan, Sweden, shut down over unpaid bills. But negotiations dragged on, leaving Saab in an increasingly precarious state. With employees unpaid for months, Saab's unions began legal proceedings in September that could have put the company into bankruptcy. Mr. Muller sought and received court protection from creditors to reorganize and complete the Chinese investments. Jamie Dimon walks back his quip that JPMorgan would outlive China's Communist Party. Stocks slip as interest rates rise, while jobless claims drop to their lowest point since 1969. The U.S. effort to cut energy costs may not have the intended effect. Within the last week, it appeared that the final countdown had begun, when the administrator in charge of the voluntary reorganization, Guy Lofalk, recommended to the court overseeing the case that the effort be halted. Saab said Friday that Mr. Lofalk had "withdrawn his application to exit reorganization." The agreement with the two Chinese companies is valid until Nov. 15, Saab said, provided the reorganization continues. Mr. Lofalk did not immediately reply to a request for comment. Mr. Muller, who owns 30 percent of Swedish Automobile, declined to detail how his involvement with Saab, including the sale to the Chinese, had affected his personal wealth. But he said: "You can rest assured that I lost a lot of money." He said Youngman and Pang Da had "expressed a desire for me to remain involved," but he said whatever role he played in the future would "absolutely be up to the new owners." The Chinese companies have demonstrated that they have the resources to invest up to 500 million euros ( 708 million) in Saab, he said, and are planning to resume production at the Trollhattan plant as well as in China, "which will become the second home market for Saab." The deal first requires the approval of the authorities in Beijing, a requirement that put an end to the efforts of a previous would be rescuer, the Hawtai Motor Group. It must also pass muster with the European Investment Bank and the Swedish government, both of which have lent money to Saab, as well as G.M., which has lingering links to Saab, including intellectual property and preferred shares with a face value of 326 million. James R. Cain, a G.M. spokesman, said it was "impossible to say anything constructive" because G.M. had not been briefed on the agreement and was waiting for information. But the big question now lies in whether Chinese officials, silent on the deal so far, have secretly blessed the offer by the two Chinese companies and plan to give it regulatory approval. "Beijing does not like to endorse companies that fly outside their radar screen," said Michael Dunne, an independent auto analyst specializing in Asian manufacturers. "We'll very quickly find out whether Youngman and Pang Da have enough political muscle to get this deal done." A woman answering the phone at the general manager's office of Pang Da confirmed Friday that an agreement had been reached with Saab, but she had no comment on the details. A woman answering the phone at Youngman said that she had no information and that all senior people in the office were traveling and could not be reached for comment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Henry Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" and Benjamin Britten's "Curlew River" aren't an obvious pair. They may both be short English music dramas centered on the suffering of a woman, but they are otherwise so different that putting them together begs some explanation. The link is Mark Morris. When the Tanglewood Music Center asked Mr. Morris to direct the Britten in 2013, that led to the plan of coupling it with his dance company's beloved 1989 production of the Purcell. Watching "Dido" on a double bill with his "Curlew River," you can see why the idea makes sense, and why Mr. Morris is an ideal director for both. New Yorkers are lucky that this pairing has arrived at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. "Curlew River" is an odd bird. An Anglican parable based on a Japanese Noh play, it could be tediously precious, stilted, all the emotion in its story (a Madwoman searches for her son) suffocated under layers of stylization. Not, however, in Mr. Morris's staging. The singers and instrumentalists wear basic white clothing: no costumes, no masks. (Mr. Morris's dancers do not participate.) That they enter in procession, singing plainchant, is enough to make them seem like monks. That they remove their zori sandals and go barefoot is enough to suggest Japaneseness. The principal stylization is plainness. These performers aren't dancers, but Mr. Morris has them move. The chorus even does an endearing little Japanese folk dance. Their gestures are communicative, making the clear diction of the sung words even clearer; returning later in the story, the same gestures deepen and connect. The placement and rearrangement of bodies focuses the drama and heightens the character of the chorus, whose members grow from laughing at the Madwoman to pitying her. By standing and sitting, they become water lapping at the banks of the river. Leaning on one another and swaying, they show the crossing of a ferry. More Japanese touches origami birds, a paper parasol for the Madwoman risk triteness but keep blossoming into beauty. And amid an excellent cast, the tenor Isaiah Bell as the Madwoman gives a performance of exquisite poignancy. The scooping of his voice, up and down, could provoke laughter, but Mr. Bell makes you hear the grief in it, the text's "wandering mind." His hesitations pierce the heart, and his physical performance is no less delicate and affecting. Mr. Morris has never shied away from spiritual subject matter. "Curlew" ends with "a sign of God's grace," the arrival of a spirit, and Mr. Morris's stripped down production allows you to hear it in Britten's gorgeous score. Left alone, the Madwoman seems at once consoled and inconsolable. "Dido" is rich with such ambiguities. Here, the singers and the instrumentalists are in the pit, and the characters are danced by Mr. Morris's company. This division of duties allows for increased complexity. This work reveals how intricate simplicity can be, the gestural strategies of "Curlew" raised a few powers. In 1989, Mr. Morris cast himself as Dido, the Queen of Carthage who falls in love with Aeneas and dies when he leaves to pursue his destiny, and also as the Sorceress, who plots Dido's ruin. This doubling added layers of meaning, and the cross gender casting, as in "Curlew" and its Noh precedents, supplied a distancing that refined and distilled emotion. Since then, Mr. Morris has sometimes split the roles, giving Dido to a woman and the Sorceress to a man. Now Laurel Lynch dances both parts (she's the second woman to do so), both of which are sung by Stephanie Blythe. Ms. Blythe is magnificent, but Ms. Lynch is timid, especially as the Sorceress, which is essentially a drag role. Because she is less lewd than the role calls for, and thus less funny, our complicity in Dido's fate stings less. The production's balancing of nobility and bawdiness, its profound conflation of tragedy and humor, sex and death, is off. Conducted by Mr. Morris with solid performances onstage and in the pit, "Dido" is still a masterpiece, but one from which something is missing. Not "God's grace." More like the spirit of Mark Morris. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
EXPOSURE Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer's Twenty Year Battle Against DuPont By Robert Bilott with Tom Shroder Robert Bilott never set out to be anyone's hero. He made his living defending chemical companies at an old line corporate law firm based in Cincinnati when, just a few months shy of making partner, he received a call from a West Virginia farmer who was convinced that the runoff from a nearby DuPont plant was killing his cows. The man had heard Bilott was an environmental lawyer, apparently not understanding that he wasn't the kind of attorney who brought cases on behalf of aggrieved individuals; instead, Bilott defended companies against such complaints. The caller, however, dropped a magic name: that of Bilott's grandmother, a beloved figure in his life. The farmer's case, filed in 1999, and a second, larger class action suit that grew out of it, would dominate the next 20 years of Bilott's life. Bilott skillfully tells the story of his epic battle with DuPont and its lawyers in "Exposure," which lands in bookstores just ahead of a new movie, "Dark Waters," starring Mark Ruffalo as Bilott and Anne Hathaway as his put upon wife. The screenplay is based on a 2016 article in The New York Times Magazine ("The Lawyer Who Became DuPont's Worst Nightmare"), not Bilott's manuscript. But as you read "Exposure," it's easy to imagine scenes in the film version of Bilott's life. You see the time he was unable to reach his office phone because of the small skyscrapers of boxes and documents that blocked his way, and the time he was rushed to the hospital because of the physical toll the case was taking on his life. In a made for Hollywood twist, DuPont bests Bilott by exploiting his pre existing relationship with a DuPont lawyer and then he bests DuPont's attorneys through clever legal maneuvers of his own. If Bilott makes for an unlikely warrior in the battle for safe drinking water, DuPont plays to type as the faceless behemoth that seems to care more about its bottom line than the health of its employees or the tens of thousands of people who lived near the giant plant it operates outside of Parkersburg, W.Va. Because, of course, it wasn't just the cows that were suffering. Scientists inside the company were concerned enough about a particularly noxious chemical called PFOA used to manufacture Teflon, among other products that they began testing DuPont's workers for exposure. But when the results suggested potential health problems, corporate's answer was to stop the testing. The ever thorough Bilott discovers old laboratory animal studies that DuPont and 3M, which manufactured PFOA, had conducted decades earlier. The results showed dogs and monkeys dying from exposure to PFOA, cancer in rats along with birth defects in its unborn. Yet Bilott found no follow up investigations. At least within the pages of "Exposure," plausible denial seems to be DuPont's corporate motto. Ultimately, Bilott discovers dangerously high concentrations of PFOA leaching into the surrounding community's drinking water. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
In this week's special Europe issue, explore the rivers, lakes and shorelines of 10 favorite places; follow in the footsteps of Carl Linnaeus in Swedish Lapland; dine along the Adriatic coast between Venice and Trieste; and find a serene hotel with a water view (below). Whether they sit beside city splitting rivers, Alpine lakes or oceans, waterfront hotels connect guests to nature, through merely a glance out the window. The following new and renovated European hotels and resorts enjoy the reflected light of their littoral locales. The 1913 landmark Hotel Excelsior Dubrovnik has long been celebrated for its location near the gates of the walled city overlooking the Adriatic Sea. In May, it will reopen after a seven month renovation, promising 158 contemporary rooms divided between the original Villa Odak and a modern addition. Public spaces, including a light flooded lobby and piano bar, have been reimagined, and outdoor dining, with views of the town's red rooftops, remains. Rooms from 600 euros, or about 655; adriaticluxuryhotels.com. The Good Hotel doesn't just face the Thames River. It floats on it or, at least, on a port off the river, known as the Royal Victoria Dock. It's a cable car ride across the water from Greenwich. The 148 room pop up hotel crossed the North Sea to London from Amsterdam, opening last December for an intended five year stay. Social sustainability is at its heart, with materials and food sourced locally and training and jobs for the unemployed. Most rooms are ship style compact, but industrial public areas, including a work space, restaurant and a parklike roof space, encourage lingering in view of the river. Rooms from 80 pounds, or about 103; goodhotellondon.com. Opened in April in a former Georgian estate, Lympstone Manor overlooks the protected Exe Estuary in southwest Devon. Each of its 21 rooms is named after a bird found near the estuary, such as kingfisher or heron. The space blends modern elements like free standing bathtubs in living areas with vintage chandeliers and fireplaces. Owned by the chef Michael Caines, the country house hotel makes food its focus. The seven course "Taste of the Estuary" menu features local seafood. Guests can walk off any food splurges on the site's 28 acres and along its waterfront trails. Rooms from PS305, including breakfast; lympstonemanor.co.uk. On the French Riviera, between St. Tropez and Cannes, the 50 room Hotel Les Roches Rouges, a Design Hotel opening in May, pares an original 1950s building to its core to emphasize its seaside location. Nautical accents and Provencal ceramics decorate whitewashed rooms, some with ocean views (even from the marble bathrooms). Two saltwater pools edge the crashing sea; the lap pool is cut into shorefront rock. Activities include snorkeling and paddleboarding. On land, guests can stroll the gardens, play petanque or attend the outdoor cinema, all while listening to the surf. Rooms from EUR210; hotellesrochesrouges.com. Designed by Herzog de Meuron, the new Elbphilharmonie building on the Elbe River is best known for its concert hall within a glass crown atop a vintage brick warehouse. But it also contains the new 244 room Westin Hamburg, where curved window walls frame views to the river and the ships coming and going from the Hamburg port. The eighth floor BridgeBar serves port and tonic cocktails and those panoramic views. An expansive spa features saunas, steam baths and an indoor swimming pool. Rooms from EUR273; westinhamburg.com. The "lungarno" in Hotel Lungarno translates to "along the Arno," the river that bisects Florence. The luxury hotel is just steps from the Ponte Vecchio bridge. Owned by the fashion famous Ferragamo family, the hotel closed this year for renovations, and will reopen in June with 64 expanded rooms, including 10 spacious family rooms; 40 will overlook the Arno, as does the lounge terrace. The designer Michele Bonan references the waterway in the new blue and white color scheme, a backdrop to the 400 piece art collection, which includes works by Picasso and Cocteau. Rooms from EUR410; lungarnocollection.com. The new Gran Hotel Miramar in Malaga, built in 1926 as a hotel and serving more recently as a courthouse, returns to its original purpose. The palatial property sits opposite a Costa del Sol beach. Indoors, the arched atrium has been restored as a lobby, and geometric patterned screens, keyhole recesses and perforated metal pendant lamps lend an Andalusian accent to its 200 rooms, which overlook palm filled gardens or the Mediterranean. Opened in January, the hotel will add two outdoor swimming pools and a spa, and bring the number of restaurants and bars to five this spring. Rooms from EUR184; granhotelmiramarmalaga.com. The chef Nobu Matsuhisa and his partners, one of whom is Robert DeNiro, are expanding their hospitality empire to a growing string of Nobu Hotels. In June, they plan to open Nobu Hotel Ibiza Bay on curvy Talamanca Bay. Its 152 guest rooms, most with sea views and all with terraces, adopt a palette of golden sand, pale driftwood and marine blues. There will be a Nobu restaurant, with the chef's signature Japanese Peruvian dishes, as well as a gluten free cafe, and in keeping with Ibiza's reputation as a party place, a beach club. Rooms from EUR490; nobuhotelibizabay.com. The serene Alpine lakes Champfer and Silvaplana lie below the stately Suvretta House, a 1912 mountain resort reopened this year with 181 refurbished rooms. Guests can take a chairlift above the Engadine Valley for mountain hikes, descend to walks along the chain of lakes threading the valley or just work up an appetite en route to two chalet restaurants run by the Suvretta House. Glaciers above and lakes below provide a scenic backdrop to tennis matches on the resort's clay courts, swims in the outdoor pool or time out on lounge chairs scattered across the lawn. Rates from 660 Swiss francs, or about 660, including breakfast; suvrettahouse.ch. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
LONDON After months of delay, the Spanish government is edging closer to making a decision about whether to ask for European financial assistance. But if the call for help comes, it might stop well short of seeking an outright loan from Europe's bailout fund. Instead, Spain might simply seek a precautionary line of credit, to be used only in emergencies. Spanish government officials said on Tuesday that they expected Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to decide in the next few weeks whether to request that credit line. If market conditions continue to improve, officials said, Madrid might decide that even that precautionary measure is unnecessary. Many analysts, though, continue to say that Spain is likely to need some form of relief, whether a line of credit or an actual bailout, if the economy continues to deteriorate. The ratings agency Standard Poor's downgraded Spain's debt to near junk status last week. With the Spanish economy in recession and his domestic political support receding, Mr. Rajoy is trying his best to indicate that Spain unlike Greece, Portugal and Ireland before their bailouts is not in desperate straits and can afford to take or leave Europe's offers of assistance. And so the government has been pushing the idea it might apply for a precautionary credit line from Europe's bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism, which has a potential firepower of 500 billion euros (about 650 billion). Spanish officials describe the credit line as "virtual," in that they would reserve the right not to borrow the money. "Spain may not need to use the credit line," said a government spokeswoman, pointing out that Spain's borrowing needs are limited for the rest of the year. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. Reflecting Madrid's continued optimism, investors on Tuesday bought 4.8 billion euros worth of 12 and 18 month Spanish Treasury bills at a government auction. The average yield, or interest rate, for the one year paper was 2.82 percent, even lower than the 2.83 percent paid last month, when markets were buoyed after the European Central Bank said it would buy the country's bonds if asked. European officials have said a credit line would be an option for Spain. But even in this lesser form of assistance, they say, the Rajoy government would still be required to sign a memorandum of understanding that would, in theory, commit it to putting in place even more of the austerity measures that the Spanish public has been protesting. Spain remains insistent, though, that another round of draconian steps would not be needed with the spending cuts and tax increases already in place. "Our view is that we have already done quite a bit," said the spokeswoman, who could not be identified by name as a matter of government policy. Analysts say Spain also continues to hold out hope that the European Commission might relax the deficit reduction target of 6.3 percent of gross domestic product for this year a lower deficit level that many expect Madrid to miss, in any case. If there is less pressure on Spain to make that target, Madrid might be able to buy even more time before having to request financial aid. While Mr. Rajoy has been criticized for his dilatory ways, experts in Spain point out that the go slow approach actually represents more of a calculated strategy advocated by one of Mr. Rajoy's top economic advisers, Alvaro Nadal, who is a member of Mr. Rajoy's center right Popular Party. Mr. Nadal, who speaks German and is one of the main point men in the talks with Germany and other nations that use the euro, is said to support the notion that Spain, as the euro zone's fourth largest economy, should not be rushed into seeking a demeaning, full fledged rescue program. By waiting, and using its size and importance as leverage, Spain might be hoping to secure better terms in whatever aid package it might negotiate. It is a risky strategy. So far, investors believe Spain will ask for assistance, be it a credit line or some other aid that would involve the European Central Bank's intervening in the market for Spanish bonds. For that reason, investors have been buying Spanish bonds, especially the two year securities the central bank has said it would focus on. But if investors came to conclude that Spain was waiting too long to seek aid, or might avoid it altogether, bondholders could quickly unload their positions. That could throw Spain once again into the condition of the summer, before the central bank calmed the markets by announcing its willingness to engage in "unlimited" bond buying. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
The drugmaker Moderna announced highly encouraging results on Monday, saying that complete data from a large study show its coronavirus vaccine to be 94.1 percent effective, a finding that confirms earlier estimates. The company said that it applied on Monday to the Food and Drug Administration to authorize the vaccine for emergency use, and that if approved, injections for Americans could begin as early as Dec. 21. The hopeful news arrives at a particularly grim moment in the U.S. health crisis. Coronavirus cases have surged and overwhelmed hospitals in some regions, and health officials have warned that the numbers may grow even worse in the coming weeks because of travel and gatherings for Thanksgiving. The new data from Moderna show that its study of 30,000 people has met the scientific criteria needed to determine whether the vaccine works. The findings from the full set of data match an analysis of interim data released on Nov. 16 that found the vaccine to be 94.5 percent effective. The study also showed that the vaccine was 100 percent effective at preventing severe disease from the coronavirus. The product was developed in collaboration with government researchers from the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Stephane Bancel, the chief executive of Moderna, said in an interview that the company was "on track" to produce 20 million doses by the end of December, and from 500 million to a billion in 2021. Each person requires two doses, administered a month apart, so 20 million doses will be enough for 10 million people. Moderna is the second vaccine maker to apply for emergency use authorization; Pfizer submitted its application on Nov. 20. Pfizer has said it can produce up to 50 million doses this year, with about half going to the United States. Its vaccine also requires two doses per person. The first shots of the two vaccines are likely to go to certain groups, including health care workers, essential workers like police officers, people in other critical industries, and employees and residents in nursing homes. More than 100,000 Covid deaths have occurred in U.S. nursing homes and other long term care centers. On Tuesday, a panel of advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will meet to determine how to allocate initial supplies of vaccine. "Be thinking people in nursing homes, the most vulnerable, be thinking health care workers who are on the front lines," Alex M. Azar II, the secretary for health and human services, said on the CBS program "This Morning" on Monday. He said the C.D.C. advisers would base their recommendations on the latest data on virus cases across the country. Asked about the role of states in the distribution process, he said that doses would be shipped out through normal vaccine distribution systems, and governors would be "like air traffic controllers," determining which hospitals or pharmacies receive shipments. Although governors will determine which groups are prioritized, he said he hoped that they will follow the federal recommendations. He added that he would speak to governors on Monday afternoon with Vice President Mike Pence. In response to a question about how officials could guard against people using money or connections to jump the proverbial line, Mr. Azar vowed to "call out any inequities or injustices that we see." The White House moved quickly to take credit for the progress on vaccines. "President Trump's Operation Warp Speed is rapidly advancing on a trajectory of success to save millions of American lives five times faster than any other vaccine in history," Michael Bars, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement. Over all, about 13.3 million Americans have contracted the virus, and more than 265,900 have died. In November alone, there were more than four million new cases and 25,500 deaths in the United States. Worldwide, there have been nearly 62 million cases and almost 1.5 million deaths. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. More than 70 coronavirus vaccines are being developed around the world, including 11 that, like Pfizer's and Moderna's vaccines, are in large scale trials to gauge effectiveness. One of those is made by AstraZeneca, which announced positive but puzzling preliminary results on Nov. 23: Its vaccine was 90 percent effective in people who received a half dose and then a full one, but 62 percent effective in those who received two full doses. Researchers are waiting for more data. Officials at Operation Warp Speed, the government's program to accelerate vaccine development, have said vaccinations could begin within 24 hours after the F.D.A. grants authorization. Mr. Bancel said that Moderna had not yet begun shipping vaccines across the country, and that it would not do so until the emergency authorization was granted. The government has arranged to buy vaccines from both Moderna and Pfizer and to provide it to the public free of charge. Moderna has received a commitment of 955 million from the U.S. government's Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority for research and development of its vaccine, and the United States has committed up to 1.525 billion to buy 100 million doses. Shares of Moderna's stock surged on Monday from the news, by 20 percent, to nearly 153 a share. Both Moderna's and Pfizer's vaccines use a synthetic form of genetic material from the coronavirus called messenger RNA, or mRNA, to program a person's cells to make many copies of a part of the virus. That viral fragment sets off alarms in the immune system and trains it to recognize and attack the real virus if it tries to invade. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Something is deeply wrong when the pope's voice, reputation and influence can be borrowed by a source that describes itself as "a fantasy news site" to claim that he has endorsed a presidential candidate, and then be amplified, unchallenged, through a million individual shares. The attention paid to fake news since the election has focused largely on fabrications and outright lies, because they are indefensible, easy to identify and extraordinarily viral. Fake news is created by the kinds of people who, when asked, might call their work satire, or admit that they're in it for the money or for the thrill of deception. Theirs is a behavior that can and should be shunned, and that Facebook is equipped, and maybe willing, to deal with. For many people, and especially opponents of President elect Donald J. Trump, the attention paid to fake news and its role in the election has provided a small relief, the discovery of the error that explains everything. But as the attention has spread widely even President Obama talked passionately about it on Thursday it may lead to an unwanted outcome for those who see it not just as an explanation, but also as a way to correct the course. It misunderstands a new media world in which every story, and source, is at risk of being discredited, not by argument but by sheer force. False news stories posted on fly by night websites were prevalent in this election. So, too, were widely shared political videos some styled as newscasts containing outright falsehoods, newslike image memes posted by individuals and shared by millions, and endlessly shared quotes and video clips of the candidates themselves repeating falsehoods. During the months I spent talking to partisan Facebook page operators for a magazine article this year, it became clear that while the ecosystem contained easily identifiable and intentional fabrication, it contained much, much more of something else. I recall a conversation with a fact checker about how to describe a story, posted on a pro Trump website and promoted on a pro Trump Facebook page and, incidentally, copied from another pro Trump site by overseas contractors. It tried to cast suspicion on Khizr Khan, the father of a slain American soldier, who had spoken out against Donald J. Trump. The overarching claims of the story were disingenuous and horrifying; the facts it included had been removed from all useful context and placed in a new, sinister one; its insinuating mention of "Muslim martyrs," in proximity to mentions of Mr. Khan's son, and its misleading and strategic mention of Shariah law, amounted to a repulsive smear. It was a story that appealed to bigoted ideas and that would clearly appeal to those who held them. This was a story the likes of which was an enormous force in this election, clearly designed to function well within Facebook's economy of sharing. And it probably would not run afoul of the narrow definition of "fake news." Stories like that one get to the heart of the rhetorical and strategic risk of holding up "fake news" as a broad media offensive position, especially after an election cycle characterized by the euphoric inversion of rhetoric by some of Mr. Trump's supporters, and by the candidate himself. As the campaign progressed, criticism of Mr. Trump was instantly projected back at his opponent, or at the critics themselves. "No puppet. No puppet. You're the puppet." This tactic was used on the language of social justice, which was appropriated by opponents and redeployed nihilistically, in an open effort to sap its power while simultaneously taking advantage of what power it retained. Anti racists were cast as the real racists. Progressives were cast as secretly regressive on their own terms. This was not a new tactic, but it was newly effective. It didn't matter that its targets knew that it was a bad faith maneuver, a clear bid for power rather than an attempt to engage or reason. The referees called foul, but nobody could hear them over the roar of the crowds. Or maybe they could, but realized that nobody could make them listen. What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. "Fake news" as shorthand will almost surely be returned upon the media tenfold. The fake news narrative, as widely understood and deployed, has already begun to encompass not just falsified, fabricated stories, but a wider swath of traditional media on Facebook and elsewhere. Fox News? Fake news. Mr. Trump's misleading claims about Ford keeping jobs in America? Fake news. The entirety of hyperpartisan Facebook? Fake news. This wide formulation of "fake news" will be applied back to the traditional news media, which does not yet understand how threatened its ability is to declare things true, even when they are. Facebook may try to address the narrow version of the problem, the clearly fabricated posts. Facebook has plenty of tools at its disposal and has already promised to use one, to bar sites that have been flagged as promoting falsified content from using its advertising platform. But the worst identified defenders make their money outside Facebook anyway. Another narrow response from Facebook could be to assert editorial control over external forces. Facebook tried this, to a very limited extent, with Trending Topics. Members of the company's editorial staff wrote descriptions of trending news stories, accompanied by links they deemed credible. This initiative collapsed in a frenzy of bias accusations and political fear. But it is easy to imagine a system in which a story, upon reaching some high threshold of shares, or a source, upon reaching some cumulative audience, could be audited and declared unreliable. This could resemble Facebook's short lived experiment to tag satire articles as such. A number of narrow measures could stop a fake story about the pope, for example. But where would that leave the rest of the media? Answered and rebutted, and barely better positioned against everything else that remained. It would be a still dominant news environment in which almost everything there before remained intact, the main difference being that it would have all been declared, implicitly, not fake. Facebook is a place where people construct and project identities to friends, family and peers. It is a marketplace in which news is valuable mainly to the extent that it serves those identities. It is a system built on ranking and vetting and voting, and yet one where negative inputs are scarcely possible, and where conflict is resolved with isolation. (Not that provisions for open conflict on a platform present any easy alternatives: For Twitter, it has been a source of constant crisis.) Fake news operations are closely aligned with the experienced incentives of the Facebook economy more closely, perhaps, than most of the organizations that are identifying them. Their removal will be an improvement. The outrage at their mere existence, and at their promotion on a platform with the stated goal of connecting the world, will have been justified. But the outrage is at risk of being misdirected, and will be followed by the realization that the colloquial "fake news" the newslike media, amateur and professional, for which truth is defined first in personal and political terms, and which must only meet the bar of not being obviously, inarguably, demonstrably false will continue growing apace, gaining authority by sheer force, not despite Facebook but because of it. The company that created the system that resulted in hoax news stories should try to eliminate them, and with any luck it will. But the system stands to remain intact. Media companies have spent years looking to Facebook, waiting for the company to present a solution to their mounting business concerns despite, or perhaps because of, its being credited with causing those concerns. Some have come to the realization that this was mistaken, even absurd. Those who expect the operator of the dominant media ecosystem of our time, in response to getting caught promoting lies, to suddenly return authority to the companies it has superseded are in for a similar surprise. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Bari Weiss, a writer and editor for the opinion department of The New York Times, has resigned from the paper, citing "bullying by colleagues" and an "illiberal environment." In a nearly 1,500 word letter addressed to A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher, Ms. Weiss offered a deep critique of Times employees and company leadership, describing a "hostile work environment" where co workers had insulted her or called for her removal on Twitter and in the interoffice communications app Slack. "I do not understand how you have allowed this kind of behavior to go on inside your company in full view of the paper's entire staff and the public," she wrote. Mr. Sulzberger declined to comment. In a statement, Eileen Murphy, a Times spokeswoman, said, "We're committed to fostering an environment of honest, searching and empathetic dialogue between colleagues, one where mutual respect is required of all." More than 1,000 Times staff members signed a letter protesting the Op Ed's publication, and James Bennet, the editorial page editor, resigned days after it was published. An editors' note was added to the essay, saying it "fell short of our standards and should not have been published." The opinion department of The Times is run separately from the newsroom. In a tweet, Ms. Weiss described the turmoil inside the paper as a "civil war" between "the (mostly young) wokes" and "the (mostly 40 ) liberals." Many staff members objected on Twitter to her comment, saying it was inaccurate or misrepresented their concerns. In her resignation letter, which was posted on her personal website Tuesday, Ms. Weiss said "intellectual curiosity" was "now a liability at The Times." She added: "Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor." Kathleen Kingsbury, the acting editorial page editor, said, "We appreciate the many contributions that Bari made to Times Opinion. I'm personally committed to ensuring that The Times continues to publish voices, experiences and viewpoints from across the political spectrum in the Opinion report." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
This is how Maya Angelou opens her third memoir, "Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas," from 1976. When she was piecing together a life in 1940s San Francisco as a single teen mother, it was the need for vinyl the blues of John Lee Hooker, the "bubbling silver sounds of Charlie Parker" that drew her to the Melrose Record Shop on Fillmore. Her passion for records drove her to snatch two hours between jobs so she could rove its aisles. It was "where I could wallow," Angelou writes, "rutting in music." Angelou would go on to join the store's staff, basking in a world of wall to wall sounds Schoenberg, Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie ordering stock and playing records on request. Maya the music wonk. Maya the D.J. Maya the record collector. This is a side of Black women's cultural lives rarely considered and yet deeply woven into our modern pop universe. This week marks the 100th anniversary of Mamie Smith recording "Crazy Blues," African American women's breakthrough into the mainstream recording industry a feat that is stunning and impactful, yet so often misunderstood or forgotten that most people would be hard pressed to name the artist whose smash altered the course of pop. And though they're rarely acknowledged in histories of music, the Black women and girls who responded to Smith's sound en masse helped upend the anti Blackness of America's nascent record business in the early 20th century. For Smith and Bradford, one of the biggest questions was whether they could prove to record executives that, without a shadow of a doubt, Black music fans mattered. Such a claim had, so far, fallen on deaf ears. At the time, it was acceptable for a Black musician to record renditions of and opera and theater fare, and even phonographic curiosities like the 1890 blackface adjacent "Laughing Song" by George W. Johnson, one of his two recordings believed to be some of the earliest by an African American. But that Southern vernacular lowdown sound? Those straight out the juke joint blue notes and bends? Early white labels saw no reason to record them unless they could be repackaged with white artists for the phonograph owning bourgeoise of the Progressive Era. Bradford and Smith's strategy was simple yet novel: allow an African American woman blues vocalist to appeal to Black listeners, proving they had a taste for popular sounds while spotlighting the artistry and the seriousness of the singer and her accompanying band. In short, they would showcase Black pop music excellence as achievable and commodifiable and win over manufacturers who, as the Chicago Defender noted on July 31, 1920, "may not believe that the Race will buy records sung by its own singers." Recorded on August 10, 1920, for Okeh Records and released in November, Smith's gripping and rambunctious "Crazy Blues" hit all of those benchmarks and more. In its nearly three and a half minutes, Smith sings in a robust vibrato atop horns and woodwinds, lamenting a love affair that brings her a boatload of pain. This is heartbreak that demands a multitude of emotions, so it's no surprise that she would lean into her pronounced theater world chops. On one end of "Crazy Blues," our heroine is all tied up in knots about the man she loves doing her wrong; by its close, her despair has morphed into a militant rage. "Gonna do like a Chinaman, go and get some hop," she sings, invoking an inflammatory term that was unfortunately not uncommon even among Black folks at the time, "Get myself a gun and shoot myself a cop." Somehow we've gone from "Crazy in Love" to " tha Police" over the course of one song. Bradford had assembled an all Black band, the Jazz Hounds, who played live, improvised music that was its own unpredictable, breakneck adventure a refreshing contrast to the buttoned up versions of the blues interpreted by white artists across the 1910s. And Smith was game about playing along with them. "It's remarkable," said the critic David Wondrich, whose gutsy book "Stomp and Swerve" documents a history of America's "hot" music. "She's a part of the band. She's bending notes with them. She's not flinching whenever the trombone drops a bomb." The reaction to the song, particularly among Black audiences, was groundbreaking. The explosiveness of its parting lyrics, its references to drugs and vigilantism caught the public's attention and broke boundaries: Something taboo was being uttered on a record for the first time in a popular song by a Black woman entertainer. Bradford's gamble on "a Black woman nobody's ever heard of," as the popular music historian Elijah Wald put it in a phone interview, was "a huge conceptual leap." It's also possible that Black listeners were dazzled by a phenomenally well executed record that captured an even bigger, existential ache than its lyrics describe. It was an expression of the grandeur and complexity of Black life, finally available for their phonograph. Sales figures for "Crazy Blues" show an estimated 75,000 copies purchased upon its release, and in 1921 Billboard credited the song as pulling in "a million dollars' worth," a giant sum at the time that stood for "lots and lots" in this era, Wald said. Black recording artists subsequently made significant inroads riding the coattails of Smith's success. Blues women dominated the first half of the decade, with Waters, Rainey and Bessie Smith at the forefront of the craze. Waters's popularity would almost single handedly keep the African American owned Black Swan Records afloat in the early 1920s. Rainey, called "the Mother of the Blues," signed with Paramount Records in 1923 and would go on to crank out more than 100 songs covering topics like lesbian pride and the perils of patriarchy. And that other Smith, the "Empress" Bessie, would hold court at Columbia Records as the most formidable and original voice of the blues. These were the pioneers who upended the soundtrack of American life. Record labels now believed in the (monetary) value of Black mass cultural art, and they provided Black artists with access though still heavily mediated by white executives to recording their own music. Pop music was transformed by a people whose musical innovations were and remain today the manifestation of a brutal, centuries long, blood soaked struggle to be regarded as human in the West. Smith had an impressive run as a mega wattage celebrity who capitalized on the success of "Crazy Blues" into the mid 1920s with lavish wardrobes and sold out shows. This is "one of the first cases in history," Wald said, "where a record makes a difference in somebody's career." She was drawing white as well as Black audiences in droves. But blues veterans (like that other Smith) were nipping at her heels and would soon eclipse her in fame. This is where the story of "Crazy Blues" often reaches its climax in the history books with Smith's risk taking innovation. But the popularity itself is often left unexamined. The other side of the "Crazy Blues" story is how African American women and girls found their way to that record and the ones that followed and loved them fiercely. Many of these listeners were absorbing the straightforward opinions, demands and perspectives stored up in the music. Angela Y. Davis pointed this out in "Blues Legacies and Black Feminism," her landmark study on blues women, cataloging the variety of topics covered in their songs: explosive eroticism, queer desire, the horrors of domestic violence, segregation, poverty and racial terrorism. The music articulated much about post captivity Black life in all its vicissitudes and pleasures. If we were to widen the lens to look at the lasting legacy of "Crazy Blues," we might find out more about those Black masses especially the Black women and girls who turned their record buying into a full blown revolution. These were the people who possessed tastes and ideas about culture, who constructed elaborate leisure rituals around their records and who used these records to articulate their wants and needs, their hopes and dreams. Only a handful of scholars have bothered to extensively explore the history of African American record fans, buyers and collectors, and yet we know that Black listeners got a hold of this music through a variety of ways. As the historian Joshua Clark Davis points out, there were few Black owned brick and mortar shops in those early blues years. His own research found a shop owned and operated by the Louis Armstrong associate Erskine Tate selling "Crazy Blues" in November 1920. The scholar Stephen Robertson's work identifies James H. Tetley's Harlem Music Shop as "the largest colored music store in the city" in 1921. And Lynn Abbott and Douglas Seroff's indispensable study "The Original Blues" alludes to other Black shops that played pivotal roles in marketing early blues records in places like Dallas, Kansas City and Los Angeles. Black people were also selling and buying records through other means as the Smith phenomenon rolled on, getting around a largely white controlled retail culture. "It could be a news stand. It could be a furniture shop. It could be a variety store," Davis said in an interview. The culture of the Black record shops evolved through the post World War II era, and Davis said that it played a big part in fostering community. The stores were "Black public spaces" with a don't cost a thing barrier for entry, where kids "could come in and hang out." They were safe, convivial places Black folks could call their own, and they were organized around exploring, thinking about, discussing and purchasing laying claim to music. This is the compelling forgotten history sparked by "Crazy Blues" that's worth lingering on: the sites and cultural rituals created by Black record lovers, particularly women. And while most books won't tell you their stories, the memories shared by everyday African American women who are living archives of cultural knowledge do. Take, for instance, my 94 year old mother, Juanita, whose teen years in Jim Crow Texarkana, Tex., included regular excursions with her girlfriends to the local Beasley's record store in the early 1940s. They requested music they'd heard on the radio, which held their imagination again and again in the shop's listening booths. The local Detroit legend and public historian Marsha Music said her father, Joe Von Battle, opened his own store in 1945. According to Music, Joe's Record Shop stood out because of his decision to "feature old blues," the sound of Black migrants' "last years in the transition period" from "the South to the North." Her father would blast music from a big speaker out front, so patrons and passers by could soak up the sonic energy of whatever was spinning inside. Having grown up in her family's store in the early 1960s, Music developed a rich repository of wisdom about record culture and the ways shops like her father's, similar to bookstores, held the potential to cultivate curiosity and nurture intellectual perspectives. By the time she was 8 or 9 years old, she was fully "immersed" in this world, reading Bobby "Blue" Bland and Ahmad Jamal album covers. "In those days, album covers were the window on the world," she said. This is certainly how I experienced my own record shop culture while growing up in the Bay Area in the 1970s and '80s when Tower Records ruled the day. The pilgrimages my friends and I made to the Mountain View and the Columbus Avenue stores were steeped in hard core fandom and a pursuit of knowledge about Prince, Bowie and the Police (I had a thing for the band's drummer) and, later in my Gen X 20s, riot grrrl and neo soul. These were ludic dwelling places where my crew and I identified our shared affinities, our likes and dislikes. The 2020 Hulu reboot of "High Fidelity" starring Zoe Kravitz, Da'Vine Joy Randolph and David H. Holmes gets as close to this kind of feeling that I've ever seen. It plays with the original's white masculinist ideas about pop music culture the semi self conscious "rock snobbery" sentiments of Nick Hornby's novel and its slightly more expansive film from 2000 starring John Cusack and Jack Black as fanatical record shop clerks. Social media and streaming have given fans in 2020 a lot of power. But they can't ultimately repair a broken system. The early record industry's root and branch white supremacy and sexism have resulted in lasting structural inequalities in the label boardroom (where Sylvia Rhone of Epic Records is one of the few Black women executives), in the studio (where men outnumber women as engineers and producers) and in arts criticism (where white voices speak more often about Black music than African American women do). These problems are indicative of a larger crisis that neither an ardent fan base nor a Blackout Tuesday protest can swiftly repair. But in the meantime, Black women and girls will make their voices heard in the blogosphere, and on Twitter and Instagram. They'll be there to hold the Grammys accountable when "Lemonade" is snubbed or when Nicki keeps it real with Taylor or Miley, reminding both superstars how racism and privilege operate in their own careers. These fan warriors are part of a legacy that stretches back 100 years. Mamie Smith's achievement not only made way for the Billies, Arethas, Whitneys and Beyonces who followed her path to pop dominance. She also changed presumptions about what popular music was, what it could do what kind of language it could speak to us about the depth and intricacies of our inner lives. Her record hailed us, and we responded by carrying it into the center our lives and the intimacy of our homes, building entire life worlds around it, sound fortresses to resist the catastrophe of our chronic invisibility. Daphne A. Brooks is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of African American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of "Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound," forthcoming in 2021 from Harvard University Press. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The 2019 ketubah observes tradition while incorporating couples' tastes and personalities. It also functions as decor. In a Jewish marriage, the modern day ketubah, a prenuptial agreement, is standard and unorthodox. The traditional ketubah outlined the responsibilities within a couple's union. It was typically written in Aramaic, signed by two witnesses and geared toward Jewish heterosexual couples. But the document has evolved, just like the idea of marriage. "The ketubah in its original text is entirely about what the husband is supposed to provide for the wife," said David Gerber, a Reform rabbi at Gates of Prayer in Metairie, La. "We simply don't do marriages the way we used to. In modern era, it's not an expectation that one provides for the other. Sometimes they provide for each other. Sometimes the wife provides for the husband." Rabbi Gerber, who has officiated at 50 weddings, says many couples still use Aramaic text verbatim, accompanied by English words that describe their commitment to one another, rather than a direct translation. But other's don't it's up to the bride and groom (or one of them) to decide. "He told me I got like two goats and a donkey, so we better not get divorced," she said, jokingly. The document, created by their rabbi and signed off by Mr. Torjman, is a little larger than a standard piece of paper, according to Ms. Knapp, colored with pinks, gold and turquoise, a border design and a crown up top. "It's pretty run of the mill, knowing there are better ones," she said. "I really didn't know there was anything that could be special about a ketubah at all." Less constricted by heritage and archaic social norms, ketubot (plural) now commonly reflect Jewish customs while emphasizing the couple's vows, interests, tastes and personalities. Given specific requests and intricate details, often they simultaneously function as decor. Ms. Knapp says her Jewish friends showcase their gold, sparkly, shiny and ornate ketubot in custom frames. "I've seen it in their living rooms, or in entryways, sitting areas," she said. Given a choice, Ms. Knapp says she would have commissioned a piece with a "more organic feeling," perhaps on linen paper or leather. "It's something like a wedding ring that is with you forever and ever and ever it's a covenant and something symbolic of that day," said Ms. Knapp, who didn't initially understand it's broader significance. "I would've been a little more involved in the process and not left it up to my husband had I known it's something that would be framed and up for display," she added. Couples today, regardless if they are Orthodox, Conservative, interfaith, LGBTQ, Reform or another religion entirely, have a variety of choices. They can scroll through preset text options on Ketubah.com, the self proclaimed "largest ketubah gallery on the planet." The website features 80 artists and more than 750 limited edition artworks, from fancy gold leaf to Japanese washi paper. Prices range from 50 to 1,000 plus, and it takes two to six weeks to create the art piece. Brides and grooms with larger budgets ( 1,500 to 3,500), can opt for three dimensional, free standing sculptures by Timeless Ketubah. Some are 25 inches tall, 16 inches wide and 6 inches long. Couples will also require a more liberal production time frame, of three weeks to five months, for ketubot made of bonded bronze (resin mixed with bronze powder), sometimes with a wood component. "There's a lot of back and forth with a couple, deciding different aspects in terms of artistic elements, and also which texts you use, which can take quite a bit of time," said David Master, the owner and artist at Timeless Ketubah, in Brooklyn. Mr. Master's custom designs, weighing five to 20 pounds, each utilize one of many preset narratives, including secular humanistic, traditional spiritual and nonreligious sentiments, which are often engraved into wood. Mr. Master has designed ketubot for clients in Miami, Philadelphia and New York. His first creation was for his own wedding in Rockleigh, N.J., on May 18, 2014. Adriana Saipe, the owner and artist at Ink With Intent, started her ketubah making business after creating one for her own wedding in Madison, Wis., on Oct. 5, 2013. Ms. Saipe's illustrations are printed onto paper and canvas; most fit in standard frames. Texts range from traditional to gender neutral, and there are about a dozen design categories, from text only (starting at 163) to paper cut and custom ( 500 to 900). Orders usually take three to six weeks. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
BOOMERANG at the 92nd Street Y (March 17, 8 p.m.; March 18, 4 and 8 p.m.). This five year old company, led by Kora Radella and Matty Davis, offers a new evening length work, "This Is a Forge," as part of the Y's annual Harkness Dance Festival. Ms. Radella's choreography, developed with the performers, is fearlessly athletic, shot through with an energy befitting of the troupe's name. The dancers Simon Thomas Train and Massimiliano Balduzzi will be joined by the violin duo String Noise as they explore the uneasiness of human connection. The piece also features text by the Detroit born poet Jamaal May, drawn from his books "Hum" and "The Big Book of Exit Strategies." 212 415 5500, 92y.org/harknessfestival ASHLEY BOUDER PROJECT at Symphony Space (March 17 18, 8 p.m.). The ballet world has long suffered a lack of female leadership, and Ms. Bouder, a principal dancer with New York City Ballet, is taking the matter into her own hands. For this engagement of her fledgling company, she presents three works choreographed by women two of them set to music by female composers with live accompaniment by the New York Jazzharmonic. The evening includes a new duet for Ms. Bouder and her fellow City Ballet star Sara Mearns, created by the contemporary choreographer Liz Gerring, and a revival of Susan Stroman's "Blossom Got Kissed." Ms. Bouder also unveils a work of her own for members of the City Ballet's corps. 212 864 5400, symphonyspace.org FOOD FOR THOUGHT at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery (March 23 25, 8 p.m.). This recurring event at Danspace Project benefits the food distribution programs at St. Mark's Church; donate two cans of food and tickets are just 5 each. (Admission without donations is 10.) The latest edition includes three mixed bills, each organized by a different artist from Danspace's advisory board: Heidi Latsky (March 23), Donna Uchizono (March 24) and Nami Yamamoto (March 25). The atmosphere is relaxed and exploratory. 866 811 4111, danspaceproject.org HAMBURG BALLET at the Joyce Theater (March 21 22, 7:30 p.m.; March 23 24, 8 p.m.; March 25, 2 and 8 p.m.). This German troupe makes its Joyce debut with "Old Friends," a collage of ballets for 25 dancers by the artistic director John Neumeier, who has led the company for 44 years. Mr. Neumeier uses perpetual motion the continuous merging and diverging of couples to suggest the evolution of relationships over time. The score includes music by Chopin, as well as the Simon and Garfunkel song for which the work is named. A discussion with Mr. Neumeier follows the Wednesday performance. 212 242 0800, joyce.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
An independent committee of experts advising the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Saturday afternoon voted to recommend the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine for people 16 and older. That endorsement, which now awaits only final approval by Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the C.D.C., is a key signal to hospitals and doctors that they should proceed to inoculate patients. The endorsement follows Friday night's emergency use authorization of the vaccine by the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees licensing of medical products. The advisory committee, which typically meets three times a year to review amendments to routine schedules for child, adolescent and adult vaccines, has been engaged in numerous marathon length sessions this fall to discuss a plethora of knotty issues surrounding the introduction of the novel vaccine, which is in limited supply, during a pandemic. In meetings on Friday and Saturday, the panel's heated discussions centered mainly on three areas: whether to recommend the vaccine for patients 16 and 17 years old, for pregnant and lactating women and for patients who have had an anaphylactic reaction to other vaccines. C.D.C. officials and scientists will review the debate and post more precise guidance about those specific groups and others on Sunday and in the coming weeks, as more information about the vaccine becomes known. Shipments of nearly three million doses of the vaccine will begin going out to states this weekend. Most states are expected to follow C.D.C. guidelines to reserve those doses for heath care workers and residents of nursing homes and long term care facilities. Pregnant women were not included in clinical trials of the vaccine. The expert panel's discussion about pregnancy centered on the fact that at least 330,000 health care workers in the first cohort of vaccine recipients are expected to be pregnant or lactating women. While the committee urged that the decision on whether to get the shot be left to pregnant women in consultation with their doctors, it also suggested they weigh their personal risk of being exposed to the virus against the efficacy of the vaccine and the paucity of data about it with respect to pregnancy. Italy prepares for an 18th weekend of demonstrations against the country's health pass. The pandemic 'is not yet over': Portugal is set to add further restrictions. Austria braces for violence at mass protests over Covid measures. The committee noted that because it is not a live virus vaccine, it is not considered a risk to a breastfeeding infant. Pfizer representatives said on Friday that they had seen no evidence that the vaccine affects gestation or fertility. About two dozen women became pregnant during the clinical trials after being vaccinated, and the company is monitoring them. The committee members drilled down on warning labels and instructions that would address anaphylaxis, after two British health care workers had severe allergic reactions immediately after their inoculations. The members were trying to strike a balance: providing reasonable cautions without alarming a public that already may be skittish about the vaccine. On Saturday, they were leaning toward advising that patients with "severe allergic reactions," such as anaphylaxis, to any ingredient in the vaccine not get the shot. In addition, they were recommending that patients generally be monitored for 15 minutes immediately after being vaccinated and, for those with a history of anaphylaxis, 30 minutes. On the issue of whether to permit the vaccine for 16 and 17 year olds, several pediatricians on the committee expressed concern that Pfizer's data so far with respect to the youngest participants was "thin." But other committee members pushed back, saying that the physiological difference between a 16 year old and an 18 year old was minimal. People under 18 who work in long term care facilities and "essential" jobs such as grocery clerks are at high risk for getting the virus, and would likely be recommended for the early shots, they said. The doctors noted that these teenagers might be disproportionately people of color. By ruling them out, the doctors argued, the committee would inadvertently discriminate against them because of their age. And, as they added, because the data on side effects and effectiveness is so positive, the risk of teenagers getting the virus as well as spreading it and having their schooling interrupted outweighed the known risks of the vaccine itself. The committee also expressed support for offering the vaccine even to people who have previously tested positive for the virus. But given the limited supplies now, they urged those who had been infected within 90 days to wait until that period expires. The C.D.C. is expected to release more precise clinical advice on Sunday. In addition, it has posted an extensive "tool kit" for providers and patients, intended to give ample information to address potential concerns. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
As temperatures drop and Canada geese catch thermals, one's thoughts turn to redecorating for the indoor months ahead. This fall's crop of home design books offers the usual inspiration and escapism. In "Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History," (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 25), Witold Rybczynski chronicles a genre of furniture we never stop fussing over. Given astonishing form by the ancient Egyptians and perfected by the ancient Greeks, chairs eventually stretched, rocked and rolled. Designing an effective chair is never easy. "Any culture that decides to sit on chairs," Mr. Rybczynski writes, "must come to terms with a challenging reality: human posture." The title and lists of Parisian vendors notwithstanding, there is nothing particularly French about Sarah Lavoine's "Chez Moi: Decorating Your Home and Living Like a Parisienne" (Abrams Image, about 25). Except maybe the easygoing way in which Ms. Lavoine, a French design celebrity, appears to throw a room together with a bold stripe of wall paint here and a mosaic of floor tiles there. This book is most endearing when she gives etiquette advice for example, never burden a hostess with flowers when you arrive at a party, but send a bouquet ahead of time. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
I was trudging through calf high grass in an industrial zone just a couple of miles north of Toronto's city limits. Having crossed through a car dealership, I sprinted across a highway and traversed a seemingly endless mall parking lot. There were now large swaths along the road where the sidewalk completely disappeared; construction was constant, and new buildings appeared to be popping up everywhere. I made a mental note to drive next time. Why would I bother to spend time in Markham and Richmond Hill, when Toronto and its wonderful restaurants, welcoming public spaces and extraordinary cultural diversity were so nearby? Because I was looking for good really good Chinese food. And everyone I spoke to told me that the classic Toronto Chinatown, with the intersection of Spadina Avenue and Dundas Street West as its nucleus, while charming, had begun to decline in terms of quality. And so I was headed to the suburbs, to the corridor along Highway 7, an unscenic but pulsing artery of high quality, delicious and inexpensive regional Chinese cuisine. Back to my trek through the weeds: I finally made it to my destination, an enormous, generic looking strip mall called First Markham Place. I wanted dumplings, and xiao long bao were prominent in my mind. I walked into Ding Tai Fung (not Din Tai Fung, the famous Taiwanese chain) for an order of the soup dumplings, which are shaped a bit like a flattened onion and pinched together at the top, and come steaming hot in a bamboo basket. The dried scallop and pork version (8.49 Canadian dollars, or about 6.40), served with a red tinged vinegar and slivers of ginger, were small explosions of flavor. One companion was Suresh Doss, a local food writer and journalist who had directed me to a number of the places I visited. "Over the last 10 or 15 years, uptown Markham has quickly become the best place for Chinese food," he said. Rising costs led business owners in the downtown core to spread out toward the suburbs. "The result you have a large cluster regionally specific restaurants that use the commuting conduit of Highway 7 as home base," he said. Additionally, he said, families coveted the larger, newer homes that were being built in northern Toronto suburbs. Or as my Aunt Grace Kwan joked, "Chinese people like new things." (It is a traditional Chinese belief that old houses, used cars and the like have the potential to be contaminated with bad history or disagreeable spirits.) She lives in Toronto and we shared a meal one evening at Congee Queen, which sounds like something you might read on a sash at a county fair. Regardless, the southern Chinese cuisine there is excellent, particularly the namesake congee, a hearty rice porridge to which any number of toppings can be added. We ordered the House Super Bowl Congee and received an enormous bowl packed with surf clams, shrimp, scallops, salmon, grouper and other sliced fish. It was a dish to bring tears to the eyes of any seafood lover, and, at 12.95 dollars, a fantastic bargain. The other direction down Highway 7 and a short detour off Kennedy Road, one finds the Pacific Mall, a huge structure housing hundreds of businesses, including an excellent food court. At Sun's Kitchen, I watched as a man prepared hand pulled noodles with a satisfying thwack on the steel countertop. The beef noodle soup (6.99 dollars) with thick, chewy noodles and chunks of tender meat had a pleasantly savory broth that tasted of star anise. The other item I got there, the dandan noodle soup (6.50 dollars), was a riff on the traditional fiery Sichuan dish. The noodles sat in a spicy, peanuty broth that went well with a free glass of soybean milk. Nearby in the same complex was Fortune Star, a stand serving Hong Kong style small bites. I ordered a small plate of spicy grilled squid, both tender and satisfyingly chewy, for 5.95 dollars that caused beads of sweat to form on my temples. I drank an ice cold Hong Kong milk tea (2.75 dollars) to quench the fire on my tongue. Enjoying familiar old standbys is great, but it's always a pleasure to be introduced to a type of cuisine you've never tried before. At the Federick restaurant in the New Delhi Plaza I experienced a mash up of Indian and Chinese cuisine. (They call it Hakka Chinese, though that term usually just refers to an ethnic group in China. The origins of the term in relation to Indian food may lie with Kolkata born Chinese chefs.) The combo pakora (11.50 dollars) contains the items to get big chunks of chicken, scallops and shrimp rolled in chickpea flour and deep fried. They go fantastically with soy sauce and black vinegar. The series of plazas we rolled through on this food crawl were, not to put too fine a point on it, unattractive. The New Kennedy Square in Markham was no different, a drab and squat complex. But it held one of the better and more imaginative desserts I'd had in a while. Woofles and Cream serves up Hong Kong style egg waffles with different toppings in imaginative and unconventional flavor combinations. Some tastes are predictably delicious, like a red bean and coconut flavored waffle that visually resembles soundproofing in a music studio. Other combinations, like lap cheong (Chinese sausage) and seaweed aren't as obvious, but work wonderfully as a savory counterbalance to the sweetness of the waffle. Alongside a big portion of matcha flavored soft serve ice cream, it's the ideal treat. Both waffles cost 4.50 dollars. Southern Chinese cuisine is fairly well represented in the area, but there are some good Northern joints, as well. Northern Dumpling Kitchen, or NDK as it is known, serves some cheap and high quality northern fare. Leek and pork dumplings (4.99 dollars) are savory and teeming with natural juices. The onion pancake (2.99 dollars) is a crispy, oily, reliably delicious stalwart. The cold dishes are where Northern cuisine really shines, though: cold, spicy and garlicky diced cucumbers (4.99 dollars) as well as slivers of savory, sour potato (4.99 dollars). There's no better place to cap off a day of eating than with a visit to the outstanding Lucullus Bakery in Richmond Hill. My companions and I enjoyed a Chinese smorgasbord, if you will, of fresh baked goods: a coconut bearclaw and a buttery and crunchy pineapple bun (1.35 dollars each), chestnut bao with chestnut puree (2 dollars), and an almost comically bright yellow egg tart (1.35 dollars). The most enjoyable item, though, was the iced Ovaltine. I'm biased because I drank Ovaltine as a kid. If you didn't, you may find chocolate milk preferable to the sweet, slightly grainy, almost minerally drink. But if you drank Ovaltine as a child, it's a must try. The 2.95 dollars cost will provide you with a cold, syrupy blast of nostalgia worth 10 times the price. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
"Blessed Child" could only be made by someone caught in that maddening push pull. Jones's former affiliation presumably helped with access; adherents seem to trust her, and some clips are credited to the church. It also gives her a complicated, at times surprisingly sympathetic outlook on the cult. But while "Blessed Child" makes no pretense of extending its purview beyond memoir, Jones, perhaps because of her insider's perspective, leaves certain basic questions (how do church members normally interact with apostates?) unaddressed. She also keeps much of her own story, particularly the years between her college age doubts and the present action, offscreen. Blessed Child Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes. Rent or buy on iTunes, Google Play, Amazon and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
If you're on the cusp of retirement or have just stopped working, it's hard to tune out the stock market's recent gyrations. Most investors who are still saving can safely ignore the headlines, turn off the television and go on with their lives. New retirees may feel they're in a more precarious position. But maintaining a healthy dose of stocks still provides the best chance they won't run out of money over what could be a three decade period. If your money is evenly split among stocks and bonds which is often the case for retired people then it already has a built in cushion: The stock market has plunged 12 percent from its high in mid February, but many funds tailored for retirees are down less than half of that, or roughly 4 percent. That shouldn't set off any alarm bells or prompt any rash moves. That's not to say timing doesn't matter. It does and big losses now are the hardest to overcome for people who are in the early stages of their retirement. During the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, the stock market lost roughly half of its value from peak to trough. For many retirees with investments evenly balanced among stocks and bonds, that translated into a loss of more than 25 percent over that period. That kind of drop or even a less dramatic one may require some retirees, particularly those early in retirement, to make certain adjustments. Here's why: When the market delivers a punch just as you need to start withdrawing money, you're forced to sell when your investments are down, locking in losses. Selling when your investments are down also eliminates any chance that you will benefit when the market recovers. And you'll need to sell more shares to come up with the same amount of money you took out before the market dropped, which only accelerates a portfolio's depletion. "The first couple of years of retirement, those are the years where we don't really want to suffer tremendous losses that we have to sell out of," said Jamie Hopkins, director of retirement research at Carson Group, a wealth management firm in Omaha, Neb. "That is your biggest risk period, from an investment standpoint, when you should probably have the most conservative portfolio." Many but not all investors hew to that advice, particularly those in target date funds, whose mix of investments gradually become more conservative as you approach a specific date. Many of the major target date funds tailored for people retiring in 2020, for example, have roughly 50 to 55 percent of their investments in stock funds. They generally move further away from stocks as you age. But some retirement experts have found that an even more conservative mixture at retirement may be ideal. What they suggest next is counterintuitive, but underscores the long game that is the stock market: Instead of maintaining that lower allocation to stocks, they suggest you gradually increase it as you age. A study from 2013 found that portfolios that started with about 20 to 40 percent in stocks at retirement, then gradually increased to about 50 or 60 percent, lasted longer than those with static mixes or those that shed stocks over time. The analysis was conducted by the retirement experts Wade Pfau, professor of retirement income at the American College of Financial Services, and Michael Kitces. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' Certainly, such a strategy could backfire, especially if you have trouble sticking with it. But becoming too conservative introduces another set of risks: Maybe the money won't last as long as you do, or it won't grow enough to offset inflation. For Americans who are 65 now, the average life expectancy is 84.4 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There's also a strong chance those Americans will live into their 90s. That longevity calls for a decent helping of stocks. So what do I do? If you haven't retired yet, there are some simple ways to give your portfolio some breathing room. Working a little longer, even part time, is effective when that's possible. And if you're able to postpone collecting Social Security, that's another way to guarantee a higher paycheck in retirement over the long run. If you recently retired, what's your next best step? First, consider what your portfolio mix looks like now the recent market mayhem may have brought your overall asset allocation to a more conservative place, and maybe it makes sense to maintain that for now. If you have a significant chunk of cash, or another source of income outside your portfolio, experts suggest tapping that money in times of market turbulence instead of selling stocks. "A really simple rule that I found works quite well and does just as well as more complicated rules, is that you just look at your portfolio balance on the date you retired," said Mr. Pfau of the American College, which trains financial professionals. "Whenever the current balance is less than that number, draw from the buffer asset. Otherwise, you withdraw from your portfolio. This is simple and works well." Besides cash, investors with a whole life insurance policy which typically includes a cash savings component that can be tapped can potentially borrow from that pot of money, he said. (It is later repaid by being deducted when the death benefit is paid out.) And Mr. Hopkins suggested first selling your safe assets bond funds even if that feels counterintuitive. There are other adjustments you can make. The most obvious one plays into our base instincts: Spend less during market downturns and spend a bit more when the market is doing well. The traditional 4 percent rule remains a solid place to start that's when retirees withdraw 4 percent of their initial portfolio balance, and then adjust that first withdrawal upward each subsequent year for inflation. One strategy is to skip the inflation adjustment and keep your spending steady for a while. "If you have some flexibility with your spending, just being able to cut a little bit can go a long way to help improve how long your portfolio will stick around for," Mr. Pfau added. But if thinking about all of this causes too much anxiety, it may be worth considering whether an insurance product, like an annuity, can take some of the pressure off. Annuities come in a variety of flavors, but some of them can be incredibly complex, expensive and even deceptive and they're often sold by brokers who aren't necessarily acting in your best interest. There are cheaper, more straightforward products, however including single premium immediate annuities. You pay an insurance company a pile of cash, and, in return, the company sends you a stream of income for the rest of your life. Or, you can buy an income stream for a set period say, 10 years. Experts suggest figuring out what your fixed costs are housing, food, taxes, other basics and then buying enough of an income stream to cover the portion of expenses that Social Security does not. One downside: Since interest rates are low, the amount that annuities pay out right now are also low, or roughly 5 percent of your investment. For a 65 year old married man and woman, it would cost 200,000 to receive a monthly paycheck of 858 that would last both of their lives (and heirs receive nothing after both people die), according to a quote on ImmediateAnnuities.com. That may not sound appealing. But David Blanchett, head of retirement research at Morningstar, suggested considering how much of an emotional burden an annuity could lift. "How is this affecting your happiness?" Mr. Blanchett said. "What kind of behavioral cost are you incurring? You can get rid of that if you delay Social Security or buy an annuity." And if you haven't already considered paying for a dispassionate analysis of where you stand, now may be that time. But you need to be careful here, too. Find a certified financial planner who promises to serve as a fiduciary, which means the planner will put your interests ahead of their own. In times of uncertainty, some extra hand holding could save you from a costly mistake. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
If, as seems possible, Joe Biden wins the presidency by peeling away older white voters from the Republican coalition, liberals won't just win the White House; they'll gain a new generational villain to bemoan. Instead of laments about The Villages and sneers of "OK Boomer," there will be a realization that the last bastion of conservatism in a leftward shifting country may soon lie with my own Generation X. Let's stipulate that generational divisions are somewhat arbitrary and artificial, and that they track imperfectly with the age divisions favored by most pollsters. Generation X consists of Americans born between 1965 and 1980, which means that we're currently in our 40s and early 50s, and pollsters prefer to poll the 45 64 year old cohort, where President Trump's clearest strength now lies. Still, pollsters who track the generations show Xers as more Republican than other groups. In the Morning Consult survey, for instance, Joe Biden has led consistently with baby boomers since the spring, while Generation X is the only generation with whom Trump occasionally pulls into a tie. Which means that my generation, so often passed over, merits some ideological analysis. And Noah Smith, the economics writer for Bloomberg and an edge of Generation Xer (born in 1980), offered the beginnings of one last week on Twitter. The formative world of Gen X, he pointed out, was one of Republican dominance in presidential politics, evangelical revival in American religion and diminishing social conflict overall. "Xers grew up in a nation that was rapidly stabilizing under conservative rule," he writes, suggesting that many Americans now in midlife associate the G.O.P. with that stability and the subsequent trends pushing the country leftward with disorder and decline. To Smith's list of Gen X ian distinctives I'd add a few more: the conservative influence of John Paul II's papacy for Generation X Catholics, the seemingly positive trendlines on race relations (visible in polls of African Americans as well as whites) from the 1990s through the early Obama years and the effects of the Reagan and Clinton economic growth spurts, which enabled my generation to enter adulthood under more prosperous conditions than the Great Recession era landscape that hobbled millennials. A critique of Gen X conservatism that started from this framework wouldn't accuse my cohort of nostalgia for the racial or religious landscape of the 1950s; we don't remember it, and we don't want it to return. Instead the characteristic Gen X weakness on race is a complacent assumption that the Clinton to Obama period resolved issues like the wealth gap or police misconduct, instead of just tabling them which in turn makes middle age conservatives too apt to see Black Lives Matters or Obama himself as reckless disturbers of the racial peace. On economics, meanwhile, Gen X conservatives can be tempted into uncharity toward younger Americans, interpreting their struggles and sympathies for socialism as a moral failure, as opposed to a response to a more hostile economic landscape than we faced. And the Gen X conservative can struggle to move beyond what I've called Zombie Reaganism, sticking with a conservative policy agenda that's lost much of its relevance, precisely because the Reagan agenda helped make the world in which we came of age. But alongside generational myopias there is wisdom, too. By virtue of having "adulted" more successfully than millennials marrying, homebuying and having kids earlier and in larger numbers Generation X enjoys a certain bourgeois realism about what sustains human societies, what choices in your 20s will make you happiest in your 40s, that's absent from the very online progressivism of the young. There is an emotivism and narcissism that millennial liberalism and boomer liberalism seem to share, and in strong doses it's poison for institutions. The ironic communitarianism of Gen X conservatism probably isn't the perfect antidote, but it may be all we've got. And Gen X conservatives come by their hostility to emotivist liberalism honestly, because many of us grew up amid its wreckage. "Xers have little collective memory of either instability or liberalism," Smith suggests, but that part of his analysis is wrong. To grow up in the '70s or '80s was to come of age just after liberalism's last high tide, and to see evidence of its failures all around from the urban blight and ugliness left by utopian renewal projects to the adult disarray and childhood misery sowed by the ideology of sexual liberation in its Hefnerian phase. Americans younger than us have seen a lot of elite failure in the last 20 years, much of it conservative or centrist, and the idea of voting Republican, let alone for Trump, because of liberalism's dangers seems to many of them absurd. But what Generation X conservatives remember is not a distant past, nor an unlikely future. Their Trump support may be a folly, but their concern for what comes next is earned. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
During a recent operation to repair a metal rod in her hip, Susan Miller says she briefly died on the table. But there were no white lights, and she woke up with no divine realizations. Instead she began seeing disturbing, recurring visions of what looked like meteorites flying at her when people were framed a certain way by the light. She says she was mid interview with a reporter from the New Delhi Times when she saw a "great big meteorite" zooming toward her. She burst into tears. Ms. Miller says she later discovered a possible meaning to these new visions. The meteors she was seeing, she realized, were memories of her view from the operating table when she was resuscitated. The shapes were simply "the light above you when you're being operated on, and the doctor is in front of that light," she said. A Chanel clad Upper East Side mother of two, who looks and dresses not unlike Jackie Kennedy, Susan Miller still talks about her life with the wide eyed wonder of a child who has just seen a reindeer fly. Ms. Miller's enduring appeal she has been the dominant publishing astrologer for decades now seems to stem from the fact that she talks about everyone else's lives with the same practical marvel. Her forecasts aren't always accurate, in part, because astrology, though rooted in ancient history and inexorably linked to self identity in the age of social media, isn't a real way to predict the future. In early 2016, Ms. Miller predicted, for example, that Donald Trump would "wobble and won't make it to the election" and that Hillary Clinton's "email scandal isn't resurfacing, and there won't be others." She did, however, correctly predict Prince Louis's birth week, Beyonce's wedding year, Britney Spears's comeback and President Obama's re election. Ms. Miller's official stance is that practicing astrology can give her insight into the circumstances of the future, but not necessarily the outcome. Unofficially, it seems the planets serve foremost as creative writing prompts for kindly advice on living what she deems a "wholesome life." She is unfailingly positive: No matter what happens, she reassures her followers each month, you're going to be fine, and if you're not, here are some ways to cope. It's not unlike a mental health counselor armed with star charts instead of a DSM 5. Ms. Miller put it best in a 2001 interview with CBS, summing up her work as a tool for "problem solving or creative thinking." She provides hypotheticals, and her readers try them on for size. "Socrates said an unexamined life was not worth living. That's pretty dramatic, but it's kind of true. The better part of many actions is the thinking you do ahead of time," Ms. Miller elaborated 17 years later over dinner in Midtown Manhattan. "A woman once told me, 'I love your stories about my life.' I had never thought of it that way." An enduring endorsement from Hollywood hasn't hurt her popularity. Many of the people who seek out Ms. Miller to ghostwrite their life stories are investors with questions about the best time to start a deal (this summer, it was not until after July's eclipses had passed) or where the next boom will be (Ms. Miller says all signs point to cryptocurrency). But Ms. Miller's orbit has also long been populated with stars of the corporeal sort. Cameron Diaz asked her for advice before purchasing real estate. She's done readings for the designer Raf Simons. The actress Kirsten Dunst is a fan, and so is Lindsay Lohan, and so is Katy Perry. The set of "Outlander" apparently just shuts down for a reading break when she posts. When Emma Stone wanted to learn astrology, she called up Ms. Miller for help. Anderson Cooper's mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, contributes watercolors to accompany Ms. Miller's horoscope calendars, which she sells for 19.99 but hands out for free when the planets align her with a potential new friend. After bumping into each other at a party, Jennifer Aniston volunteered her condolences that Ms. Miller's mother had died and Ms. Aniston's then partner Justin Theroux invited Ms. Miller to have dinner at their home. The calls go both ways. Years ago, when Ms. Miller's rental building converted to condos and residents were told to buy in or move, she says she enlisted the help of the Smashing Pumpkins, who wrote the tenants a protest song called, "Don't Take Our Skyscraper Away." (She ended up purchasing the three bedroom apartment and still lives there today. Her now ex husband does not.) It's a trait she's passed on to both her youngest daughter, Diana, who books talent for the James Corden series, "Carpool Karaoke," and her eldest, Chrissie, who is currently working on celebrity partnerships for the eyeglasses company Warby Parker. As a young adult, Chrissie once hosted so many celebrity friends at her apartment that the space became the subject of its own New York Times profile, though she's said in recent interviews people are more star struck now by the fact that she's Ms. Miller's daughter. "I had a dinner with Pharrell and his wife a few months later, and I said, 'Neil deGrasse Tyson was nice to me.' Pharrell said, 'No he wasn't! He gave you a hard time on Mercury retrograde, and I won't let him live it down.' I said, 'Oh Pharrell, he was O.K. He was nice to me. I was scared but he was respectful,'" Ms. Miller says. (A rep for Mr. Williams confirmed the story: "He loves her.") Whether you believe in her methods or not, though, Ms. Miller is devoted to providing advice for you and the other millions of readers who visit her site when she distributes her free horoscopes, usually on the first of the month. To supplement her income, she offers even longer forecasts for what she says is about half a million paying app subscribers, writes regular columns for a handful of magazines including Vogue Japan and has a partnership in the works with her favorite hotel, the Four Seasons Los Angeles in Beverly Hills. Here it is necessary to address the situation surrounding Ms. Miller's forecasts, which is that they are often published days, and sometimes weeks, past her self imposed deadlines, and often without a satisfying explanation. One summer, a particularly late July column made tabloid headlines replete with quotes from her readers, who found themselves incapacitated from having to start the month off blind. Her fans know from reading about her over the years that these delays are usually related to unforeseeable flare ups from chronic illnesses she says have plagued her since she was left bedridden for a year with a rare disease at the age of 14. Since then, she says, she's undergone dozens of surgeries, and been in and out of the E.R. with broken bones, recurring infections and symptoms of muscular degeneration. Her eyesight is failing, and she says that earlier on the day we spoke she took a breath test for the gastrointestinal disease ulcerative colitis. Or maybe the breath test took place four years ago. Like Ms. Miller's forecasts, her medical history does not follow a strict linear narrative, and she breaks off on tangents and circles back many times. All you really need to know is that she's sick quite a lot, and so sometimes, she says, she takes longer to write than she anticipated. Ms. Miller's mother taught her the art of astrology while she was bedridden as a teen. She also accurately predicted her daughter's career trajectory. So when Time Inc. approached Ms. Miller in 1995 to write one of the first ever internet astrology columns after she impressed an executive with a reading, "I thought, this is what she always thought for me. And she always said, 'Go with the newest, the latest, the greatest. Even if you're afraid of it, keep going toward it.'" Ms. Miller licensed her forecasts to the company for four years, jumped to Disney in 1999 and finally went independent in 2001, where she's been ever since. Still, there's a more cynical explanation for her mother's prediction. Later in the conversation, Ms. Miller mentions the age 40 again. "My mother used to say this over and over, 'When you're 40, you're gonna have to have a plan.' I said, 'Why do you say that?'" Ms. Miller said. "And she said, 'Well, companies say produce or get out. So you have to produce or get out, and at 40, they could hire people younger.' I had no idea what she was talking about. I wasn't even in college yet. But she was right." Stepping aside from the question of whether Ms. Miller's success was preordained or knowingly incubated, the two lines of reasoning can still comfortably coexist, for both Ms. Miller, who has centered her life around the idea that it is ruled by fate, and for a nonbeliever who, considering her rapidly approaching, now inevitable fate as a wealthy woman, might feel well emboldened to pursue the outcome on her own. Then again, maybe nothing matters, and we're all just characters in a simulation playing out on someone's laptop. There's really only one way to find out. As a child, Ms. Miller said, "I would ask my father and mother, 'Is there a Santa Claus?' They said, 'Of course.' Because they meant that Santa Claus is love." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Maya Moore, the W.N.B.A. star regarded as one of the greats of the sport, will sit out for a second straight season and remove herself from contention for the Olympics so she can continue to push for criminal justice reform and the release of Jonathan Irons, a man she believes is innocent of the crime for which he was sentenced to prison. "I'm in a really good place right now with my life, and I don't want to change anything," Moore, an eight year Minnesota Lynx forward, told The New York Times in a telephone interview this week from her home in Atlanta. "Basketball has not been foremost in my mind. I've been able to rest, and connect with people around me, actually be in their presence after all of these years on the road. And I've been able to be there for Jonathan." Irons, now 39, whom she met in 2007 during a visit to the Jefferson City Correctional Center in Missouri, is serving a 50 year sentence after being convicted of burglary and assaulting a homeowner with a gun. Born into severe poverty, Irons was 16 when the incident occurred in a St. Louis suburb. The homeowner, who was shot in the head during the assault, testified that Irons was the perpetrator, but there were no corroborating witnesses, fingerprints, footprints, DNA or blood evidence to connect Irons to the crime. Prosecutors said Irons admitted to a police officer that he broke into the victim's home, a claim Irons and his lawyers have steadfastly denied. The officer had interrogated Irons alone and did not record the conversation. Moore shocked women's basketball last winter by announcing that she was taking a season off to support Irons as he appealed his conviction. Only 29 years old at the time and still in her prime, she left the door open for a return to the Olympics this summer in Tokyo and the W.N.B.A., where she has led the Lynx to four championships since her rookie season in 2011. Moore said she was fatigued by the grinding year round schedule that top female basketball players endure to supplement a W.N.B.A. salary of roughly 120,000 a season about one quarter of what LeBron James makes in a single regular season game. (A new labor agreement will boost W.N.B.A. salaries and benefits in coming years.) Moore tried to maximize her earnings by playing in leagues around the globe throughout the year with little rest. Including the Olympics, she had rarely had time away from competition since her teens. Now, her decision to take a second year off is a blow to women's basketball. Moore's haul of Olympic gold medals from the 2012 and 2016 Summer Games, W.N.B.A. titles and her leadership of two undefeated championship teams at the University of Connecticut qualify her as one of the greatest winners that basketball has ever known. She also has a charisma that has endeared her to fans and corporate sponsors. Her absence will affect more than the marketing of the women's game. The Lynx, who have lost in the first round of the playoffs the past two years, could use her leadership. So could the Olympic team, which was stunned by the University of Oregon in a November exhibition loss. "We are going to miss Maya tremendously, but we also respect her decision," said Carol Callan, director of the United States national team. "A player of Maya's ability does not walk away from the gym lightly. Everyone feels it. The thing that makes her so special is her approach, her dedication, which has always been contagious for our team." The Lynx released a statement Wednesday expressing support for Moore's decision to stay away from basketball. "Over the last year we have been in frequent contact with Maya around the great work in criminal justice reform and ministry in which she is fully engaged," said Cheryl Reeve, the team's coach and general manager. "We are proud of the ways that Maya is advocating for justice and using her platform to impact social change." Asked during an interview this week if she would ever play again, Moore paused to consider her response. "I don't feel like this is the right time for me to retire," she said. "Retirement is something that is a big deal and there is a right way to do it well, and this is not the time for me." Nonetheless, she added: "I have had such a unique experience in the game. I got to experience the best of my craft, and I did that multiple times. There is nothing more I wish I could experience." Moore's family had come to know Irons through a prison ministry. He and Moore have become close friends, although she did not speak about their sibling like bond until after 2016, when she began advocating criminal justice reform after a series of police shootings of unarmed black men and the killing of five law enforcement officers by a sniper in Dallas. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
"Do you realize that from now on, even if we are apart we will be together?" So wrote Julia Blackburn's husband, in a fax he sent her during a long ago period when they were newly married but living on opposite sides of the North Sea. "When I first read it," Blackburn writes in "Time Song: Journeys in Search of a Submerged Land," "it was a declaration of love; now it has become part of my precarious understanding of the nature of time." Probing that slippery concept is Blackburn's underlying mission as she tries to see the death of her husband through the lens of lost worlds vanished civilizations, vanished animals, vanished lands that once existed not far from where she now walks. Ghosts from the deep and deeper past are ever present near Blackburn's home on the southeastern coast of England, where the shorelines and estuaries, the cliffs and mud flats, yield mammoth bones, arrowheads, ancient footprints and other talismans. Having rambled this coast for years, collecting artifacts along the way, Blackburn has become particularly fascinated by evidence of Doggerland, an inhabited land bridge between Britain and the Continent that sank into the ocean around 8,000 years ago, after the last ice age ended and sea levels rose. But while this is the "submerged land" of the subtitle, the book is less about Doggerland itself than about its absence, and about the tantalizing objects, be they fossils or faxes, that can bridge the living to the dead. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
At first glance, Cleopatra seems every inch an ordinary teenager. In a ponytail and sneakers, her white pants rolled up below her knees, she's hiding from Caesar's approaching army. A stranger appears, and she urges him to save himself. "Climb up here," she says, "or the Romans'll come and eat you." She has no inkling that the mild man before her is Caesar himself. In George Bernard Shaw's "Caesar Cleopatra," adapted and directed by David Staller in a briskly entertaining, winningly down to earth revival for Gingold Theatrical Group, the young queen of Egypt is charming in her naivete. Of course she is, right? Much like Eliza Doolittle in Shaw's later play "Pygmalion," she's raw female material, ready for molding by an expert male hand. Shaw liked that dynamic. But he also genuinely liked women as human beings, intellectual sparring partners and actors. The parts he wrote for them have real substance. Teresa Avia Lim digs into this role with a vengeance, delivering a smartly calibrated comic performance. A blustering, artless kid as the play begins, Cleopatra is amused by her new mystery acquaintance, who stays mum about his identity as she mulls how to get the upper hand with the Romans. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
ROWING, ANYONE? Many of the homes in Cos Cob sit on or near the water. A view of Mill Pond from a bridge over East Putnam Avenue, the neighborhood's main business district. COS COB, a snug enclave in Greenwich about 32 miles from Manhattan, seems a place in perpetual motion. There are all the cars, zipping in and out of the parking lots of the lively commercial strip along East Putnam Avenue. And there are the ones that go by at a faster clip, and more thunderously, on Interstate 95, whose elevated light blue roadbed casts shadows on some streets. Then there are rowers teenagers from private schools, as well as adults looking to stretch their limbs who skim past in crew boats along the Mianus River. Others sail past in yachts from the necklace of marinas along River and Strickland Roads. Also, a handful of commuters use bikes to get to Cos Cob's wood frame Metro North Railroad station, before chugging off to Grand Central Terminal. About 20 percent of residents say they use public transportation to travel to work, census records indicate, versus 4 percent statewide. Yet engines, pedals and oars are not the main reason that many end up in Cos Cob. Residents say the like the neighborhood's walkability. Playgrounds, mom and pop restaurants and a beloved library are often no more than a five minute stroll away, and it is not uncommon to see people making their way there on the shoulders of roads, undeterred by the occasional lack of sidewalks. Even after decades of living there, the novelty hasn't worn off for Faith Toraby, who walks to the post office nearly every day at 4:30 p.m. to catch up on gossip, and sometimes even buy stamps. Having everything close in many ways recalls New York City, where Ms. Toraby worked as a lawyer for 12 years. Ms. Toraby's home, a daffodil yellow Federal style structure with six bedrooms, gazes down on it all from a perch on a hill. It cost her 660,000 in 1991, she said, estimating that it might sell for 3 million today, in part because she added a wing with a garage to the back. From her windows, she can see I 95 in the distance. But if not for the efforts of preservationists in the 1950s, it might be much closer. They were the ones who urged highway planners to reroute it slightly south, historical accounts show. Today the Interstate is more friend than foe, especially at night, Ms. Toraby said. "There's something nice having a little twinkling of lights going by," she said jokingly. If there's any outdoor noise to speak of north of East Putnam Avenue, it probably emanates from children skateboarding in the street, said Laura Yens, a new resident. She considers those sounds pleasing. Last fall, she and husband, John McDonald, both lawyers, relocated from Bethesda, Md., after more than a year of hunting on Long Island and in Connecticut. Greenwich was an early favorite, but in the older houses they saw in Old Greenwich and Central Greenwich, the kitchens and baths weren't always up to snuff. But the three bedroom Foursquare they found in Cos Cob, with an octagonal window by the door, had up to date amenities, she said. It cost 800,000. Though a newcomer, Ms. Yens has already broken in her shoes. She frequently makes use of a little red wagon to tow her son, Ryan, who is nearly 2, to the library, which on Wednesdays hosts sing alongs with offerings like "The Wheels on the Bus." But no wheels are needed when she craves veggie wraps from Arcuri's, a nearby pizzeria. "You feel silly getting in the car," Ms. Yens said. "And it's actually faster to go out the door and get them." Cos Cob's four and a half square miles correspond roughly with the boundaries of the 06807 ZIP code, which follows the Mianus from its mouth to the Stamford border. There are about 9,000 residents, about a quarter of whom claim Italian ancestry; historically, Italians lived in the microneighborhood of Mianus, which hugs the dammed portion of the river. Between Valley Road and Bible Street, near Scarpelli's market, is a mix of modest Capes and two families, many of them amply clad in stucco. The backyard privacy so typical of Greenwich, enforced by privet hedges, is notably absent. Houses are cheek by jowl on sixth of an acre lots. Farther north the landscape opens up, and two acre zoning is the rule. Contemporary styles and newer colonials relax on wooded cul de sacs off Cat Rock Road, where it is not unusual to find a pool or tennis court, or both. The area around Valleywood Road was known as Little Millbrook when it was built in the 1920s, to differentiate it from the Millbrook community off Indian Field Road. Both have brick and stone Tudor homes, though Valleywood's tend to be much smaller and usually sit atop one car garages. There are also narrow driveways nearby on Butler Street, which means people park on the sides of roads; homeowners who do so pay 10 for a yearly pass. On Mead Avenue, rambling Second Empire style houses jostle vinyl sided colonials, creating a hodgepodge look; an open air porch supported by posts with purple colored brackets sheltered a set of Adirondack chairs in repose. There are some condominiums. The largest complex is the 74 unit Palmer Point, built in 1979, on the waterfront site where the Palmer Engine Company outfitted fishing trawlers with 300 horsepower engines. About a quarter of Cos Cob residents are renters; rental buildings are usually the ones with fire escapes. In late March, there were 45 single family homes for sale in Cos Cob, at an average of 1.22 million, according to the Greenwich Multiple Listing Service. They ranged from an expanded five bedroom Cape, at 645,000, to a five bedroom 2002 colonial on two acres, on rural Cognewaugh Road, at 3.2 million. Though the market has healed since its low point of the recession, it's still far below its peak. In 2011, 51 single family houses sold; in 2007 the number was 71, according to data prepared by Anderson Associates, a real estate firm. That represents a 28 percent decrease. The average sale price in 2011 was 1.12 million, down from 1.57 million in 2007, so prices are down nearly 30 percent, the data show. The rental market, which often moves inversely to the sales market, has improved over the same time frame. In 2011, 48 single families were leased in Cos Cob, as compared with 36 in 2007 a 33 percent jump. And the average monthly rent for those houses in 2011 was 5,200, as compared with 3,400 in 2007, a 53 percent increase. Central Middle School, which has 630 students, teaches sixth to eighth grade. And Greenwich High School, which is among the top rated schools in the state, teaches 2,700 students, who can choose among seven languages, including sign language, and 24 Advanced Placement classes. Sports include crew. SAT averages last year were 585 in math, 566 in reading and 579 in writing, versus 505, 502 and 506 statewide. The Cos Cob station, one of four in Greenwich, has seven trains daily between 6 and 8 a.m. The shortest trip to Grand Central takes 46 minutes. There are 556 parking spaces there; permits cost 279 a year. There is a two year waiting list. The origin of "Cos Cob" is a mystery, but the name has existed on maps, as "Coscobneck," since 1668, according to the historical society, which is housed in the Bush Holley museum complex. For 40 years, starting in the 1890s, that property played host to an arts colony dedicated to Impressionism; it was spared when plans for I 95 were changed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
An outbreak of respiratory illness first observed in the Midwest has spread to 38 states, sending children to hospitals and baffling scientists trying to understand its virulent resurgence. As of Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had confirmed 226 cases of infection with enterovirus 68. But it is likely that many times that number have been stricken. One case involved an adult, and no deaths have been linked to the infection. "What the C.D.C. is reporting is clearly the tip of the iceberg," said Dr. Mary Anne Jackson, the division director of infectious diseases at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Mo. The hospital was the first to alert the agency last month to an unusual increase in children with trouble breathing. Since then, Dr. Jackson has received calls from colleagues nationwide seeking guidance. Some report that the influx of children to hospitals is "almost outweighing the resources available," she said. Three times in the past month, the University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children's Hospital has had to divert ambulances to other hospitals because its emergency room was filled with children, most of them younger than 5, with severe respiratory illness. Before the outbreak, the hospital had not had to divert ambulances in 10 years, said Dr. Daniel Johnson, the interim section chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the hospital. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
From top to bottom, at center: Otto Nhlapo and Katleho Lekhula in "Cion: Requiem of Ravel's Bolero," by the choreographer Gregory Maqoma, at the Joyce Theater. The Prototype festival's tagline is "opera, theater, now," and it is usually described as a presenter of new opera. But it speaks to this annual January event's capaciousness, its wide open eyes and ears, that the most memorable show this year I saw five of the six offerings last week was barely an opera at all. Seemingly not even barely: "Cion: Requiem of Ravel's Bolero" was plainly a dance, conceived and choreographed by the South African artist Gregory Maqoma. Its primary medium was bodies in space; it was performed at the Joyce, a dance theater. And yet the human voice the vehicle through which opera creates drama permeated it. Chant, whisper, Xhosa language clicking consonants: From its first moments, when a man stumbling across the stage wailed over the insistent march rhythm that runs through Ravel's "Bolero," crisply rattled out on a snare drum, "Cion" was, for me, as much a vocal event as a choreographic one. So with his collaborators the music direction and arrangements were by Nhlanhla Mahlangu he broke up and reconjured the Ravel, offering a kind of distant echo of molecules of "Bolero." These fragments passed, by way of four singers, through other textures and sounds, including the mellow, melancholy a cappella style of Isicathamiya, familiar from Ladysmith Black Mambazo. On a stage dotted with spindly crosses, a wall looking like craggy rock looming in the back, nine dancers created images of collective prayer that kept dissolving into violence. Celebrations continually became killings; mourning went on, in all its sadness and ecstasy. A vocabulary derived from traditional African dance was seamlessly married to contemporary street genres like krump and flex; anxious, seizurelike movements broke into sinuous floating. Most moving was a sequence in which the dancers together formed a shape that suggested a boat surging through stormy waters, an evocation of forced migrations past and present. The piece ended with a graveyard dance, Ravel's unflagging rhythm accelerating into ferocity: The effect as of the whole hourlong piece both somber and exhilarating, even hopeful. This was an impact achieved by voices as much as by bodies: opera, then, in the most fundamental sense. "Cion" was hardly out of place amid the more characteristic presentations of this Prototype, which closed on Sunday and was produced by Beth Morrison Projects and the arts organization HERE. The festival's work tends shortish in length, intimate in size, and darkish, ambiguous and poetic in mood. This describes Mr. Maqoma's work as much as Danielle Birrittella and Zoe Aja Moore's "Magdalene," performed at HERE's home in SoHo. "Magdalene," a song cycle delegated among 14 female composers, draws its text from poetry by Marie Howe that explores women's lives, obliquely, through the virgin whore archetype of Mary Magdalene. There was a nice tension between cohesion everyone was composing for string quartet and harp, conducted by Mila Henry and variety, with some numbers spare, some lush, some poppily alert, some sincerely mild. I feared, in the first minutes, a tone of turgid solemnity. ("Who had me before I knew I was an I?") But "Magdalene" grew on me. This was partly because of its inherent diversity of expression, and partly because of its eventual openness to humor, most winningly in a sly setting of "Their Bodies," an enumeration of the physical and emotional qualities of different penises. But mostly it was because of Ms. Birrittella, who gave an exposed, intelligent and earnest performance in what was essentially a one woman show. (Her character, M., had a silent dancer double, the unflinching Ariana Daub, who joined her in moodily traipsing in and around a large, shallow pool at the front of the stage.) Ms. Birrittella was asked to make an eerily elderly twang at one point, and to rise to grandeur near the end, in a long final monologue with music by Emma O'Halloran. She was persuasive and powerful throughout. Persuasive and powerful, too, was Jennifer Zetlan as the tormented psychoanalytic patient at the center of "Ellen West"; Ms. Zetlan was focused through rangy, angry vocal lines and sweetly plangent in nostalgic reflection. The piece, presented at the Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center, is a setting of Frank Bidart's long poem about a mid 20th century case study of a woman suffering from body dysmorphia and gender dysphoria. The text is an enigmatic and poignant expression of a self that feels itself unreal. But while Ricky Ian Gordon's elegantly impassioned score drew dusky lyricism from the Aeolus Quartet, conducted here by Lidiya Yankovskaya, and though the baritone Nathan Gunn was a comfortably paternal presence as the therapist, the work strained to form this material into more than a monodrama. (Emma Griffin's production also needlessly included two dancers, dressed as hospital orderlies, making twitchy movements on the sidelines.) You got the sense that Ms. Zetlan would have been more than capable of holding her own. On a larger scale by far the largest of this festival "Rev. 23" was a madcap explosion of lovable ludicrousness for a large orchestra and a substantial cast. Performed at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, it was a sustained exercise in a comic energy unusual for, and therefore welcome from, Prototype. The title refers to an as yet unwritten next chapter of the biblical Book of Revelation, and the plot, such as it is, involves an effort by the forces of the underworld to balance out the prevailing goodness of the universe with badness, by bringing culture and politics the messy substance of human life up to Adam and Eve on Earth. Sun Tzu, author of "The Art of War," acts as strategist for Hades and Lucifer; heaven is a re education camp overseen by the Archangel Michael, wielding a sparkly yardstick. But while Cerise Lim Jacobs's libretto seemed to want to echo the zany yet cutting anti authoritarian satire of Ligeti's 1978 classic "Le Grand Macabre," her story was difficult to decipher even by the standards of absurdism, and even given the bright, clear production by James Darrah, its prevailing color electric green. The daffy libretto, however, inspired Julian Wachner, best known as the director of music and the arts at Trinity Wall Street, to create an explosively, virtuosically eclectic score, with the pummeling perpetual motion of John Adams, the burbling angularity and dark comedy of Stephen Sondheim, the arpeggios of Philip Glass, and the coloratura of Handel all thrown into a blender with some amphetamines. There were self contained arias here, including one that ended neatly enough to garner applause a rarity in Prototype style contemporary opera as well as moments of disarming pastoral prettiness. Mr. Wachner handled this 50 car pileup of styles with confidence and apparently inexhaustible verve; the singers and the orchestra, NOVUS NY, conducted by Daniela Candillari, shared both those qualities. However mystifying it all was, I enjoyed it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Last Wednesday, astronomers in Europe released a three dimensional map of the Milky Way. It is the most detailed survey ever produced of our home galaxy. It contains the vital statistics of some 1.3 billion stars about one percent of the whole galaxy. Not to mention measurements of almost half a million quasars, asteroids and other flecks in the night. Analyzing all these motions and distances, astronomers say, could provide clues to the nature of dark matter. The gravity of that mysterious substance is said to pervade space and sculpt the arrangements of visible matter. Gaia's data could also reveal information about the history of other forces and influences on our neighborhood in the void. And it could lead to a more precise measurement of a historically troublesome parameter called the Hubble constant, which describes how fast the universe is expanding. The map is the latest result from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, which was launched into an orbit around the sun in December 2013. It was built by an international collaboration of European astronomers and universities as the successor to the Hipparcos satellite, which charted the positions of about 2 million stars. Gaia's cameras find the distances to stars by triangulation, measuring how their images shift against background stars and quasars as the spacecraft swings from one side of its orbit to the other a baseline of about 186 million miles. A preliminary data release, containing information on 2 million stars, was published in 2016. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
When Kobe Bryant first arrived in Los Angeles, Jerry West, left, and Del Harris, right, agreed that it would be best to gradually increase the young star's workload. The math was, shall we say, daunting for Kobe Bryant's first coach with the Los Angeles Lakers. Del Harris had a veteran team with two future All Stars in his backcourt even before Bryant arrived in the summer of 1996. Harris's priority was thus ensuring that those two star guards, Nick Van Exel and Eddie Jones, had the room to orbit comfortably around the Lakers' other marquee newcomer entering the 1996 97 season: Shaquille O'Neal. As supremely skilled as Bryant was for his age, Harris and the Lakers' general manager, Jerry West, agreed that finding minutes for the impatient teenager would be best done gradually. Bryant, of course, did not agree with that plan. He wanted to start immediately and was not dissuaded by the injury that knocked him out of his entire first training camp and preseason as a pro. "In his exuberance to play, he couldn't wait for camp to start and broke his hand playing pickup ball at Venice Beach," Harris said. "He was so hungry that he would go and find places to play and work on his own. "He was so oriented to being the best. Not only the best he could be. The best period." Harris is one of the game's foremost storytellers and my go to N.B.A. historian. So we naturally spent almost an hour on the phone on Thursday night comparing notes and tales in advance of a memorial service in Los Angeles on Monday to celebrate the lives of Bryant, his daughter Gianna and the other seven victims aboard a helicopter that crashed into a hillside Jan. 26 near Calabasas, Calif. As usual, Harris remembered much more than I did. As usual, I did more listening than talking as we reminisced about Bryant's nascent days as a Laker from our old vantage points: Harris as the coach and me as the newspaper beat writer. Yet what struck me most as we rewound through the years is how thoroughly sobering the math is now. Bryant's career, spanning 20 seasons with the storied Lakers, seemed so rich and long, only for the crash to snatch his life away not even four years into retirement at the age of 41. "I'm twice as old as he is," Harris, 82, said softly. "The two youngest players I ever coached in all my years were Moses Malone and Kobe Bryant. And they're both gone." Nearly a month since the crash, prominent N.B.A. figures like Harris and O'Neal continue to struggle to process the news. Numerous players and coaches leaguewide have taken to wearing various models of Bryant's signature sneakers and scribbling messages onto whatever they wear to salute him. Moving remembrances have already taken place, both before the Lakers' first home game since the accident and throughout the All Star activities last week in Chicago. Attention turns now to Monday's memorial, which is bound to be the most emotional public tribute. N.B.A. commissioner Adam Silver, in an appearance last Sunday on NBA TV, acknowledged feeling "the heaviness" at every league gathering in Chicago. Yet he asserted that "there is something cathartic about coming together and being able to talk about these things." O'Neal hopes Silver is right about the benefits of communal grieving. He and Harris will both attend Monday's service, along with an array of current and retired luminaries from around the league. "I've never seen nothing like this before," O'Neal, the Hall of Fame center turned Turner Sports analyst, said last week when we crossed All Star paths. "All the greats I grew up watching, I got to see them grow old. "Dr. J is a good friend of mine," O'Neal continued, referring to the legendary former Nets and Philadelphia 76ers highflier Julius Erving. Of Wilt Chamberlain, O'Neal added: "I only met Wilt once, but I met him. "These are things," O'Neal said of Bryant's sudden death, "that you never imagine happening." Bryant was just 4 when Harris met him in Houston while serving as the last N.B.A. coach for Kobe's father, Joe Bryant. Since the crash, Harris has found himself consuming all sorts of Kobe video footage, from his last game at Lower Merion High School outside of Philadelphia to a talk show sit down last November with Kelly Clarkson. "He was doing so much good," Harris said. "It's one thing to have plans. He had plans that were already working, whether it was the books he was writing, education programs, the Mamba Academy. The things he could have done and would have done, that's what we will miss." O'Neal is a prankster by nature, but his season has been filled with sorrow. In October, his sister Ayesha Harrison Jax, 40, died of cancer. News of Bryant's death then toppled O'Neal again, as seen on Jan. 28 when he wept openly in a TNT special about his former teammate. "People who know me know I'm hurting," O'Neal said. "In a million years, I never thought my younger sister would pass before me. And I never thought any of my teammates would go out before me especially the way Kobe went out." They were Hollywood co stars for eight unforgettable seasons. It was always a tenuous pairing, marked by three championships, too many feuds to list and the unshakable sense that they could have won more titles had they just stayed together. "We're forever going to be linked," O'Neal said. Tensions gradually faded after they shared the All Star most valuable player award in 2009, but the realization that he and Bryant last spoke in February 2018 for a TNT conversation has bothered O'Neal ever since the accident. Bryant maintained more frequent communication with some of O'Neal's children all the way up to a direct message he sent to O'Neal's eldest son, Shareef, via Instagram on the morning of the accident. O'Neal, though, hasn't even tried to hide his regret. "He was good at always looking out for my boys, telling them to come work out at the Mamba gym, but I wish I would have communicated with him more," O'Neal said. "People in our lives, if we think about them, we should communicate a little bit more. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
When it's time to kick back and put your feet up at the end of the day, one piece of furniture is essential: the footstool. But the usefulness of a footstool, sometimes called an ottoman or pouffe, doesn't end there. It's a versatile piece of furniture that supports any number of activities. "They're very multifunctional," said Renee DiSanto, a founder of Park Oak, a Chicago based interior design firm. "You could use it for seating, as a little coffee table or end table, or it could just be decorative." Some footstools even have compartments inside to provide extra storage. And much like a throw pillow, a footstool is small enough that it's an ideal way to introduce an eye catching material, shape or fabric to a room. "You can add color, texture and pattern, without it being too overwhelming," Ms. DiSanto said, as it might be "if you put it on a sofa." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
"American Utopia" began as an album released in March 2018, and the tour traveled to 27 countries last year. The stage show, which features a dozen musicians including Mr. Byrne, has songs from the album but also solo songs, tracks from the Talking Heads and even a Janelle Monae song. Mr. Byrne declined to explain "American Utopia," saying, "I'm not going to tell you what I think it's about. That's for you to see. My feeling is that what it is about comes across as an experience, and you understand it viscerally." But he did say that, for some audience members, "it tells them that something is possible in this world, and this country, that maybe they didn't think was possible." He said he was looking forward to performing in a relatively small venue. "That intimacy is exciting," he said. "You feel a connection to the audience as a group of people, as opposed to an abstract mass." Mr. Byrne said he had seen Bruce Springsteen's show on Broadway and that, although it was quite different from his own show, he was impressed by "the way he disarmed any audience expectations that this was going to be a concert in the first five minutes, they got what this was going to be." "American Utopia" is not a play or a musical it will be presented on Broadway as a special event. But Mr. Byrne has written two musicals "Here Lies Love," about Imelda Marcos, and "Joan of Arc: Into the Fire." He said he wasn't sure whether he would write another show, but noted that he is continuing to revise "Joan of Arc," saying "it might have been too complicated," and that "I still look at that to see if there's another way to do it more about the songs than about the intricacies of the story." And he said there remains a possibility that "Here Lies Love" would come to Broadway: "There's interest in bringing it back. But who knows?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
MOUNT TREMPER, N.Y. As the artistic director of Mount Tremper Arts, Mathew Pokoik is also, more informally, the head chef. One evening last month at this rural performance center, he could be found hauling pans of smoked brisket and creamed corn from the farmhouse to the lawn, which overlooks an undulating stretch of the Catskills. For that night's party and performance, a prelude to the center's seventh annual summer festival, which begins on July 11, he had prepared dinner for 72. That number in itself was cause for celebration. "It's so exciting to have a full audience here," Mr. Pokoik said the next morning, sitting by the vegetable garden that supplies him with fresh ingredients. "It was only about a year and a half ago that I could say: 'You know what? We'll be open a year from now.' " Mr. Pokoik, who commutes between the mountains and his Brooklyn studio he is also a photographer often jokes about the absurdity of starting a center for experimental performance in what he calls "the middle of nowhere." (Mount Tremper, 10 miles west of Woodstock, has a population of about 1,100.) During the festival's first few seasons, attendance on a given night sometimes peaked at three people. But in the 12 years since he and his wife and co founder, Aynsley Vandenbroucke, a New York City choreographer, bought 114 acres along an idyllic country road, Mount Tremper Arts has become a quietly thriving offshoot of the city's contemporary performance world: a magnet for adventurous urban artists and a devoted local audience. Though best known for its summer festival which this year includes the critically acclaimed choreographer Pam Tanowitz, the downtown theater darlings 600 Highwaymen and the wildly inventive musicians of International Contemporary Ensemble Mount Tremper Arts is active year round, hosting residencies in the off season. It sprang from the founders' desire to support independent artists like themselves, mainly from New York City, in the creation of new work, to help sustain artistic careers at a time when the city's economic climate more often hinders them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
There are few theatrical venues more Off Broadway than a 15th floor room inside the federal courthouse on Pearl Street in Manhattan. But lawyers discussed with a judge a Monday whether that may be the venue where Aaron Sorkin's anticipated new production of "To Kill a Mockingbird" is first performed. The executor of the estate of Harper Lee, who wrote the beloved novel, has complained that Mr. Sorkin's adaptation is not faithful to the spirit of the book, as the producers of the upcoming Broadway show had promised it would be. One part of the legal dispute was before Judge Analisa Torres of Federal District Court in Manhattan who on Monday set a date of June 4 for a trial that could determine whether the producers have broken their pledge. Afterward, lawyers for both sides discussed with a magistrate judge, Stewart Aaron, whether a performance for a jury might be employed in the proceedings over the dispute, which is being waged simultaneously in New York and Alabama. The executor of Ms. Lee's estate filed a suit in Alabama in March, seeking a finding that the script has strayed too far from the novel. But the play's producers asked for that suit to be dismissed, then sued the executor and the estate in New York this month, saying the Alabama suit had threatened the future of the production. The only way to avert a catastrophic loss, they said, and rescue the play would be for a trial in New York to quickly resolve the dispute. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
As partisans on both sides of the abortion divide contemplate a Supreme Court with two Trump appointees, one thing is certain: America even without legal abortion would be very different from America before abortion was legal. The moment Justice Anthony M. Kennedy announced his retirement, speculation swirled that Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that legalized abortion, would be overturned. Most legal experts say that day is years away, if it arrives at all. A more likely scenario, they predict, is that a rightward shifting court would uphold efforts to restrict abortion, which would encourage some states to further limit access. Even then, a full fledged return to an era of back alley, coat hanger abortions seems improbable. In the decades since Roe was decided, a burst of scientific innovation has produced more effective, simpler and safer ways to prevent pregnancies and to stop them after conception advances that have contributed to an abortion rate that has already plunged by half since the 1980s. "We're in a new world now," said Aziza Ahmed, a law professor at Northeastern University who writes about reproductive rights law. "The majority of American women are on some form of contraception. We take it for granted that we can control when and how we want to reproduce. We see pregnancy as within the realm that we can control." Women have powerful tools at hand: improved intrauterine devices and hormonal implants that can prevent pregnancy for years at a time; inexpensive home pregnancy tests able to detect pregnancy very early; and morning after pills, some even available over the counter, which can prevent pregnancy if taken up to five days after unprotected sex. Medication abortions enable women up to 10 weeks pregnant to take two pills, the first supervised by a doctor and the second at home, to terminate a pregnancy without surgery. In 2013, nearly a quarter of abortions were accomplished with medication, up from 10 percent in 2004. Even in countries that have banned virtually all abortions, including some in Latin America, women have managed to get these drugs from websites and abortion rights organizations that ship them. And the Affordable Care Act, which has so far defied repeated repeal attempts, has made birth control available to poor and working class women, and also to those with private coverage through employers, with its requirement that most insurers cover the full cost of contraception. Apps and telemedicine services are making birth control pills and other methods available without even a visit to a doctor. Still, legal changes that make abortion less available would have profound effects on millions of women, disproportionately affecting African Americans, Latinas and women struggling economically. And access to contraception can be problematic for low income single women in the 19 states, including Texas and Florida, that have still not expanded Medicaid coverage for poor single adults. A report this year by a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found that three quarters of women who have abortions are poor or low income, and 61 percent are women of color. Such women bear the brunt of state laws that restrict abortion, including those requiring multiple appointments or waiting periods or that limit which providers can perform abortions. Such hurdles and delays could eventually threaten the consistently high level of safety in abortion procedures, experts said. "We found that more and more regulations on abortion and abortion procedures reduced the quality of care," said the committee's co chairwoman, Dr. Helene Gayle, president and chief executive of the Chicago Community Trust. "The people most impacted are the immigrant women already under siege, low income women, women of color, transgender and queer women," said Jessica Gonzalez Rojas, executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, which works with women in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. "Having a Supreme Court friendly to these restrictive laws makes it a de facto ban on that kind of health care, abortion and contraception. Legal access without real access is not access at all." In some states, though, the impact of anti abortion laws can be hard to measure. A recent report on 2014 data by the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, found that while the national abortion rate had reached its lowest since the Roe v. Wade decision, the rate rose modestly in six states five of which had introduced restrictive abortion laws. The report also found that in states where the number of abortion clinics had increased, women were not necessarily having more abortions. New Jersey went from having 24 clinics in 2011 to 41 in 2014, but abortions declined from about 47,000 to about 44,000 during that time. Overall, abortion rates have declined almost steadily since 1981, when the rate was 29.3 per 1,000 women. In 2014, there were an estimated 926,200 abortions a rate of 14.6 per 1,000 women, ages 15 to 44. The so called Comstock obscenity laws, passed from 1873 through the early 1900s, made it illegal to give, sell, mail or transport any item used for contraception or abortion. After that, "Margaret Sanger built a movement by compromising," Dr. Gordon said. "They would campaign for legalization of contraception but not abortion." Even after the birth control pill went on the market in 1960, contraceptives were only provided to women who were married. "When I was in college, there was a wedding ring that was shared among young women when they wanted to see a doctor to get contraception," Dr. Gordon said. Abortions were often arranged through networks of clergy or women who helped people find, travel to and pay for providers. Johanna Schoen, a professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., who specializes in the history of women's reproductive health, said the fate and rate of abortion will be intertwined with the availability of contraception, and whether anti abortion political forces also take aim at birth control. Professor Schoen said many European countries have low abortion rates because birth control and sex education are widely available. "But in the United States, the same people who are trying to restrict abortions have tried to restrict contraception, too." Carol Sanger, who teaches reproductive rights at Columbia Law School, predicts that the Supreme Court won't overrule Roe v. Wade anytime soon. Developing a case that would be a direct assault takes years, she said. "You don't say, 'Kennedy's out, Roe's overturned,'" Ms. Sanger said. The doctrine of precedent, known as stare decisis, "to stand by things decided," is sturdy. Circumstances must be extraordinary, a law unworkable, for a court to overrule itself, Ms. Sanger said. "It stands for the idea that the substance of our law doesn't blow back and forth just because we get a new administration." Another reason Roe v. Wade may not be struck down? "You can do a heck of a lot of damage without overturning it," she said. Among such initiatives, said Susan Swayze Liebel of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti abortion organization, "fetal pain" laws have become a "top priority." Some 20 states have enacted these laws, which assert that a fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks after conception a claim refuted by most medical experts. Roe barred most legal restrictions on abortions until fetuses were considered able to survive outside the womb, believed then to be 24 weeks after a woman's last menstrual period (about 22 weeks after conception). These laws seek to shorten abortion deadlines by two weeks, and while more than 90 percent of abortions occur much earlier, in the first trimester, fetal pain laws serve as potent political rallying cries. Numerous lawsuits about abortion restrictions are currently in state and federal courts, primed to wound Roe with a thousand cuts. Like the fetal pain laws, the intention of one such category is to roll back viability dates, which goes to the heart of Roe. Iowa just enacted a law banning most abortions after six weeks, when a fetal heartbeat can be detected. Mississippi recently passed a ban on abortions after 15 weeks. Abortion providers swiftly sued after the laws were passed. Legislators who sponsored the laws said they relished such court clashes, hoping to reach the Supreme Court. Another category is TRAP laws: targeted regulation of abortion providers. An Arkansas law, for example, requires providers of medication abortions to have a contract with an obstetrician/gynecologist with hospital admitting privileges. The Supreme Court declined to consider an appeal by the plaintiffs, Planned Parenthood of Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma, of an appellate court ruling that upheld the law. The clinics say finding such doctors who will work with them has been impossible. The case is back in federal court, where a judge has blocked the law until July 2. If the law takes effect, Arkansas will likely lose two of its three clinics. Another cluster of laws aims to limit abortions based on possible reasons for having them, including sex selection and fetal diagnoses of conditions such as Down syndrome. Indiana's version, signed by then Governor Mike Pence in 2016, was recently struck down by the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, 2 1. As abortion court battles unfold, both sides say they will redouble their political efforts. Noting that the Senate this year did not pass a 20 week abortion ban, Mrs. Liebel of Susan B. Anthony's List said, "The focus for our political activity is to go door to door in seven states and flip some key Senate seats to be pro life." And Nancy Northup, president and chief executive of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which focuses on laws concerning reproductive freedom, noted that some eight states have enshrined the right to abortion, should Roe fall. "So we are also looking at advocacy alternatives, such as friendlier state laws and federal legislation to protect women's health," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
"Well, at least they don't have a lot of old people down there. Or at least, thanks to their governor, they won't in about three weeks." STEPHEN COLBERT "As one G.O.P. representative put it, 'Everybody just assumes no one is going.' Yeah, even the R.S.V.P.s say, 'Check one: "Not attending," "What? No!," or "I'm ready, Jesus."'" STEPHEN COLBERT "I don't blame any of these people for not going. Not only is Florida the new epicenter, but in addition, 'Party officials were considering docking cruise ships in the city's port to provide extra lodging.' So, you're in Florida, spending all day in an auditorium full of screaming people who won't wear masks, then you go home to sleep on a floating petri dish. The only way it would be more infectious is if the dinner was an all you can bob lasagna buffet." STEPHEN COLBERT "Yeah, the president is now holding a three day outdoor event in Florida in August. It will be worth watching just to see Trump lap up glasses of water like a thirsty golden retriever. And poor Mike Pence is going to be sweating like he's sitting through a 'Drag Race' marathon." JIMMY FALLON "Yeah, Trump decided to move the convention outside after meeting with his most trusted advisers, Chuck Woolery and the My Pillow guy." JIMMY FALLON | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Silas Farley, a dancer with New York City Ballet, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Making choreography here is beyond anything I could have hoped," he said. Silas Farley is as comfortable in the Assyrian Court at the Metropolitan Museum as he is on the stage of New York City Ballet. How is this possible? When he was 14 and a new student at the City Ballet affiliated School of American Ballet, a patron "a woman who's like my fairy godmother," he said gave him a museum membership. Mr. Farley, now 24 and a member of City Ballet, has been exploring the galleries and corridors of the Met ever since. He doesn't ignore the traveling exhibitions, but he prizes, above all, the museum's permanent collection. "Making choreography here is beyond anything I could have hoped," Mr. Farley said. But starting Friday afternoon his site specific ballet, "Songs From the Spirit," a MetLiveArts commission, will take over three of its galleries. As his work for seven dancers moves from darkness (the staid and somber Assyrian Court) to tranquillity (the meditative Chinese Garden Court) and finally lightness (a bright court in the American Wing), Mr. Farley takes the audience on a journey laced with history and spirituality. "Songs From the Spirit" also poses a question: What does freedom mean? The dance, a collaboration with the Radiotopia podcast Ear Hustle, a nuanced look at prison life, features spirituals and new music created by incarcerated men at San Quentin State Prison in California. The idea to collaborate with the podcast came from Limor Tomer, the general manager of MetLiveArts, who commissioned the work. "I thought if you're talking about spirituals and being separated from community and finding grace," Ms. Tomer said, "then we have that right now." Last summer, Ms. Tomer, Mr. Farley and his wife, Cassia Farley, who is dancing in the work, visited San Quentin to meet with inmates and with the podcast's hosts: Earlonne Woods, an inmate who has since been released; and Nigel Poor, a visual artist. The men had prepared musical selections modern spirituals in a variety of genres, including rap, folk, spoken word and hip hop to perform for the visitors, who chose pieces to use for the dance. Mr. Farley, who is religious, likened the experience to being in church. "Almost every man who contributed music to the ballet experienced some kind of spiritual transformation," he said. "They're these very raw, very vulnerable, very revelatory songs." (Their music will be played on recordings; the soprano Kelly Griffin and the tenor Robert May will also perform spirituals live.) For some of the men involved, Mr. Farley was surprising. "Not too many people of color come in to San Quentin trying to help us," LeMar Harrison, known as Maverick, said. "He was the first dude who actually looked like me, and he kind of reminded me of all the kinds of things I wanted to be as a kid." (Mr. Harrison, who was recently released after serving 22 years, 2 months and 2 days, will attend the Met performances, along with two other recently released men.) Even for a ballet dancer, Mr. Farley, nearly 6 feet 6 inches tall, is statuesque. He has legs for days, hands that dance elegantly in the air and a beaming smile. His impressive presence has to do with more than his physicality; it has a spiritual side too. As he sees it, his faith is intertwined with ballet. "I was first introduced to dance in the context of worship," he said. "The first time I saw a ballet was when a company from Mississippi came to perform at our church. I was 6." The original seed of "Songs From the Spirit" was planted at Redeemer Presbyterian Church West Side in Manhattan, where Mr. Farley performed a liturgical dance during the offertory portion of a Sunday service. This work "was always worship before it was a performance," Mr. Farley said. "It was about, 'I've been entrusted with this gift, and I'm offering it.'" On a recent morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mr. Farley stood in the gallery of the Assyrian Court of Ashurnasirpal II and gestured at the reliefs taken from one of his palaces. "Some of these stances you see are in the choreography," he said. "These very substantial male figures that are very delicately holding these little bowls. It's such a contrast between the sensitivity and the strength. And that's so much like the male ballet dancer. It's power and poetry." The gallery has a heaviness to it; it's dark and enclosed, almost like a prison cell. "That's really the spirit that the ballet begins in," Mr. Farley said. "We're literally covering the history of the world in its geography, in its art we're traveling from the court of Ashurnasirpal all the way to 19th century American sculpture to music that's been written in the past few months by these guys. It is both ancient and imminent." The dancers, Mr. Farley said, will wear white clothing and sneakers to look "like seraphic track stars a bit artist and a bit athlete and a bit angel." As they lead the way to the Asian art wing, they will perform a procession set to a percussive, soulful song, "Blinded by the Light," by Calvin Johnson, who has since been released from San Quentin. The dancers glide forward in crisp footwork and sleek swirling turns before dashing away. At a recent rehearsal, one of the dancers, Claire Kretzschmar a City Ballet soloist aimed her arms as if she were about to shoot a bow and arrow. "Oh," Mr. Farley said happily. "Do a little Diana!" He was referring to the Augustus Saint Gaudens sculpture of Diana that graces the final gallery of "Songs From the Spirit." Once in that setting, Mr. Farley said, he is aiming to uplift. He finds it fitting that ballet is his vehicle to do so. He sees the art form as "a historically transcendent community of presence: People put their bodies in the same shapes, and they were formed by that practice." Mr. Farley said he saw a connection between a dancer's training and the spiritual transformation that some men have experienced at San Quentin. "You're yielding to a force beyond yourself," he said, "and the idea that you're becoming freer and freer in what could seem a very confining context." One man told him that he was grateful for being imprisoned because it was at San Quentin that he became free: He found religion and turned his life around. "That counterintuitive but undeniably true reality is something that a dancer goes, 'oh, of course,'" Mr. Farley said. "It's through the submission to this rigorous discipline that you're actually set free on the stage to express, to be a vehicle of whatever the idea of the choreography is and whatever the music is expressing. You've allowed yourself to be formed." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Colbert introduced a drolly titled new segment: What Have We Become? With Stephen Colbert. "Tonight on What Have We Become?, if I had told you five years ago that we would be champing at the bit to get stories about Donald Trump's naked, sweaty body wreaking havoc on a hotel duvet, you would have said, 'No way. Now let's watch "Sharknado." They're only going to make one of these.' Yes, back then it was a time of primal innocence, and we took it for granted. Now all of America lives behind the beaded curtain at a video store. And it don't smell so good. That being said, give me them stanky, stanky anecdotes. I'm a superfreak and it feels good to be bad." STEPHEN COLBERT James Corden isn't interested in hearing the details, either. "I don't need the details. Her gag order may be over, but once she describes the affair, our gagging is just beginning." JAMES CORDEN 'Men With Nukes Putting Up Their Dukes' Trump's planned talks with the North Korean leader Kim Jong un continue to make headlines, and Colbert got into the spirit of the news. "Everyone is talking about Donald Trump's potentially epic summit with Kim Jong un. It's the dispute of the ill fitting suits! The men with nukes putting up their dukes! 'In this corner, weighing in at 239 pounds, ha ha, with the terrible haircut, a man child who had everything handed to him by his father. And in the other corner: the exact same thing!'" STEPHEN COLBERT James Corden skewered Trump for saying that if the meeting was not going well, he would simply cut it off. "He says if it's not going well, he's just going to get up and leave which is also Trump's philosophy on marriage. You know, come to think of it, his presidency really isn't going well maybe Trump can just get up and leave that too." JAMES CORDEN | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
By turns raffish and intimate, boisterous and quaint, Greenwich Village below Washington Square Park and West Fourth Street has such a distinct local feel that it might best be described with one self referential word: "Villagey." The Beats are gone, and so are many of the coffeehouses and beloved food shops of this once largely Italian immigrant quarter, like Le Figaro Cafe and the recently shuttered Joe's Dairy. But somehow the area maintains a singular identity. "The ghosts of Bohemia are still here," said Hugh Gran, an artist who lives and works in the 1,800 a month rent stabilized loft on LaGuardia Place where he grew up in the 1970s. "Though of course it's become commercialized, the bohemian aspect doesn't just disappear." Less rough edged than the East Village, and decidedly less chichi than the meatpacking district and most of SoHo, the Village south of Washington Square retains a personal, down to earth element that can still be felt at venerable haunts like the Olive Tree Cafe, with its chalkboard tables and Charlie Chaplin films, and at old school music spots like the Bitter End and the Back Fence. "It still feels personal, honest and sincere, almost like you're going to see a local rock or folk band play," Mr. Gran said of the music scene. "There's a little bit of that mixed in with the drunken college kids." These kids, of course, are students at New York University, whose buildings dominate the streetscape around the revamped Washington Square Park and east of LaGuardia Place. And more N.Y.U. structures are on the way. Last year the City Council granted final approval to a huge university expansion plan that would add four buildings, totaling a skyscraper's worth of new square footage, to two sprawling apartment complexes north of Houston Street. The plan, which had been unanimously opposed by Community Board 2, will significantly alter the open, tower in the park aesthetic of the complexes, Washington Square Village and Silver Towers. The planned expansion faces a legal challenge from a consortium of faculty, community and preservation groups. All this notwithstanding, Genc Jakupi, a resident of the area since 2005, has increased his commitment to its future. In 2011 he left his Thompson Street studio co op, which he now rents out, and moved into the space above Miss Lily's, the hopping Jamaican diner he co owns on Houston. Later, when he and his partners learned that a Subway restaurant might open next door, they persuaded the landlord to lease them the space for a hip variety store, a bake shop and Melvin's Juice Box. "You might as well invest in a place you enjoy living," Mr. Jakupi said. "Everything I need is within a three or four block radius." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Without a hint of irony, Justice Clarence Thomas, addressing gay marriage in an opinion joined by Justice Samuel Alito, wrote that "those with sincerely held religious beliefs concerning marriage will find it increasingly difficult to participate in society." The justices ignore the history of marginalization of L.G.B.T.Q. people in this country in every area of life from marriage equality to adoption to health care benefits. Their concern that those who oppose gay marriage will be perceived as bigots without acknowledgment of the history of deadly bias against those in the L.G.B.T.Q. community is stunning. These justices' inability to comprehend that those with religious beliefs can practice for themselves without taking away rights from other individuals indicates a deficit of both empathy as well as an inability to appreciate the rights of others outside their worldview. You are the ones stigmatizing people of faith. Since when does religious freedom apply only to a subset of Christians? I am a religious Jew, but I don't expect others to be prohibited from eating cheeseburgers or working on Jewish holidays. Likewise, no one is forcing Christians to have abortions or get married to someone of the same sex. They even have the benefit of Christmas being a national holiday. The Supreme Court is responsible for protecting the constitutional rights of all Americans, even the ones who do not share the personal faith of its justices. Please don't abandon the rest of us. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
More positive tests for the coronavirus. A hurricane possibly forcing a game to be moved. A top matchup delayed indefinitely. Several prominent players out with major injuries. The news has not been good over the last few weeks for the N.F.L., and while the on field product has remained strong, the growing list of issues is certainly a concern. For now, the league is pressing ahead, with a few adjustments to this week's schedule announced so far, including the delay of a game between Denver and New England. With an acknowledgment that things could change even more based on news developments, here is a look at N.F.L. Week 5, with all picks made against the point spread. Add in the fact that both teams' defenses have at best been marked "present" in every game this season, and that Seattle potentially will be without safety Jamal Adams, cornerback Quinton Dunbar and linebacker Jordyn Brooks, and this one might be a prime time matchup in which the winner is the first team to 50. There will be no fans at CenturyLink Field, so Seattle's typical noise advantage won't be an issue. And while Wilson should be expected to win against just about anyone, there is every reason to believe that Minnesota can score enough to make this a close game rather than a blowout. Pick: Vikings 7 After allowing 27 points against Jacksonville in Week 1, the Colts (3 1) have allowed a total of 29 points over the last three weeks. They have their offense right where they want it, with a heavy focus on running the ball, and Philip Rivers has been a nice addition at quarterback. That run of good fortune may go on hiatus this week against the Browns (3 1), who are underdogs at home despite coming off three consecutive wins in which their offense has generated an average of 39.3 points. The Colts certainly have the defensive personnel to slow any team down, but even with running back Nick Chubb out for several weeks with a knee injury, Cleveland should still have a great chance of improving to 4 1 for the first time since 1994. Pick: Browns 1.5 The Chiefs (4 0) are starting to feel like a team capable of beating the best teams with ease, but one that often shows a total lack of concentration and urgency when playing against lesser competition. Needing overtime to beat the Chargers was bad enough, but playing three quarters of totally uninspired football against the decimated Patriots in Week 4 the score was 6 3 at halftime, and 13 3 after three quarters was even worse. The offense did finally wake up, cruising to a 26 10 win, but if the Chiefs are not going to take the entire game seriously, making them two touchdown favorites against the Raiders (2 2), who run and pass the ball fairly well, doesn't seem right. Pick: Raiders 13 The Steelers (3 0) are playing at home with an extra week of rest (as a result of their Week 4 game against Tennessee being delayed) against the Eagles (1 2 1), who despite being the nominal division leaders in the N.F.C. East are beat up and wildly inconsistent. Despite everything, Philadelphia's defense has played above average football and the team shouldn't get blown out too often. But this doesn't seem like it will be a pretty week for them, and their reign as a division leader should be short lived. Pick: Steelers 7 If the Falcons (0 4) have a desperation mode, this is the time to engage it. Coach Dan Quinn almost has to be on the hot seat after a winless start and multiple dramatic collapses, and a game against the Panthers (2 2) is a challenge even at home. Carolina has played well in the last two weeks, spreading the ball around and beating two decent teams, the Chargers and the Cardinals. Atlanta doesn't have its typical home field advantage because of the reduced capacity at Mercedes Benz Stadium, so the Panthers might be able to get above .500 after starting the season 0 2. Pick: Panthers 2.5 In his last three games, Dak Prescott of the Cowboys (1 3) has thrown for 450, 472 and 502 yards passing. It's an unprecedented run of 450 yard games, and the only thing stopping him from getting to four is the likelihood that Dallas will get off to a big lead against the Giants (0 4) and will not need to keep throwing the ball. The point spread is a little aggressive in this game, and the Giants made Las Vegas look foolish last week by playing the Rams much closer than was predicted, but Prescott might want to prove a point against a division rival. Pick: Cowboys 9.5 Coach Ron Rivera believes the Footballers (1 3) have a shot at the playoffs thanks to their presence in the putrid N.F.C. East. "At one point you want to build and you want to build, and now you're looking at the opportunity to potentially win this," Rivera told reporters. "You start thinking along those lines and start thinking, 'You know what, maybe we need to do that.'" His big solution for getting his team past division leading Philadelphia (pause for chuckling) is to start Kyle Allen at quarterback rather than Dwayne Haskins when facing the Rams (3 1), a team that is more than capable of hanging 30 plus points on Washington's defense. Maybe Alex Smith will see the field? Pick: Rams 7.5 During the prime time broadcast of San Francisco's game against Philadelphia in Week 4, the announcers somewhat shockingly discussed whether there was a quarterback controversy for the 49ers (2 2). The conjecture followed a few exciting plays from backup quarterback Nick Mullens, but by the end of the game, Mullens (200 yards, two interceptions) had been replaced by C.J. Beathard, and San Francisco had lost to the lowly Eagles. So based on that, the team is probably going to stick with Jimmy Garoppolo, who guided them to the Super Bowl last season, once he's healthy. That might not come this week, but as the 49ers' roster continues to get healthier, a home game against the Dolphins (1 3) is winnable. Pick: 49ers On Oct. 4, it was reported that Bill O'Brien, the coach and general manager of the Texans (0 4) would add play calling to his duties. On Oct. 5, it was announced that O'Brien would no longer have any duties at all. It seems as if the team finally noticed that quarterback Deshaun Watson's prime years were being entirely wasted, though that realization happened after O'Brien, in his G.M. role, had largely gutted the team. The good news for Romeo Crennel, who will take over the team on an interim basis, is that his team has an excellent chance to start off a new era with a win thanks to the visiting Jaguars (1 3) being the type of team that Watson should absolutely shred. Pick: Texans 6 The Cardinals (2 2) are suddenly reeling, having followed up a 2 0 start with consecutive losses, the second of which involved quarterback Kyler Murray averaging a meager 4.3 yards per passing attempt a statistic that was quite likely heavily influenced by an ankle injury to wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins. It certainly isn't where Coach Kliff Kingsbury wants the Cardinals to be, but the Jets (0 4) have done an excellent job making other teams feel good about themselves this season, and even as a full touchdown underdog at home, it's hard to believe they'll be competitive. The Jets, on top of being winless, had a scare on Friday when one of their players had a false positive test for the coronavirus, which forced the team to cancel all activities for the day. But hey, last week LeBron James tweeted about Sam Darnold (who is not expected to play in this game because of a shoulder strain). So they have that going for them. Pick: Cardinals 7 Will this game be played? That's the big question after the Titans (3 0) had multiple players test positive for the coronavirus this week, forcing the game, originally scheduled for Sunday, to be pushed to Tuesday. That change will force Buffalo's Week 6 game, originally scheduled for Thursday of next week, to be pushed to Sunday, Oct. 18. If Tennessee has even more issues, things could get truly messy. Whenever this game it played, it should be a good one. The Bills (4 0) have been absolutely dominant on offense, and would have a field day against Tennessee's shoddy defense. The Titans, provided they don't come in with too much rust from a long layoff, could, in turn, be expected to score quite a bit against Buffalo's struggling defense. The Bills should be favored if there is a game, but that is a big if. Pick: Bills Originally scheduled for Sunday, this game was initially delayed to Monday after the Patriots, who already had quarterback Cam Newton on the Covid 19 list, also had cornerback Stephon Gilmore test positive. Early Sunday morning, the league went even farther, suspending the game indefinitely and giving both teams a Week 5 bye. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
With the goal of resuming tournament play next month in Texas, PGA Tour officials on Wednesday outlined safety procedures they intend to implement, including layers of coronavirus testing for players, caddies and support personnel. The tour's plan would restrict the movement of players during events, which will be conducted without live spectators, and encourage golfers to isolate themselves from the public when off the golf course. Despite the provisions, which were laid out in a conference call with reporters, tour officials, who have not hosted a tournament in two months, indicated that they were also prepared and willing to reverse course. "Just to be perfectly clear, we're not going to play if we can't do it in a safe and healthy environment for all our constituencies," Tyler Dennis, the tour's senior vice president and chief of operations, said. The Charles Schwab Challenge, which will begin on June 11 at the Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, is the first of four events on the revised schedule announced by the PGA Tour last month. Each of the events will be played without spectators. The tour has arranged for players to be shuttled to tournaments, although it conceded there might not be enough room on those flights for an entire field. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Mark Zuckerberg: Privacy issues have always been incredibly important to people. One of our biggest responsibilities is to protect data. If you think about what our services are, at their most basic level, you put some content into a service, whether it's a photo or a video or a text message whether it's Facebook or WhatsApp or Instagram and you're trusting that that content is going to be shared with the people you want to share it with. Whenever there's an issue where someone's data gets passed to someone who the rules of the system shouldn't have allowed it to, that's rightfully a big issue and deserves to be a big uproar. Frenkel: It took quite a few days for your response to come out. Is that because you were weighing these three action points that you noted in your post? Zuckerberg: The first thing is, I really wanted to make sure we had a full and accurate understanding of everything that happened. I know that there was a lot of pressure to speak sooner, but my assessment was that it was more important that what we said was fully accurate. The second thing is, the most important thing is that we fix this system so that issues like this don't happen again. It's not like there aren't going to be other different kind of things we'll also have to fix. But when there's a certain problem, we have a responsibility to at least make sure we resolve that problem. So the actions here that we're going to do involve first, dramatically reducing the amount of data that developers have access to, so that apps and developers can't do what Kogan did here. The most important actions there we actually took three or four years ago, in 2014. But when we examined the systems this week, there were certainly other things we felt we should lock down, too. So we're going ahead and doing that. Even if you solve the problem going forward, there's still this issue of: Are there other Cambridge Analyticas out there, or other Kogans who, when the platform worked a certain way in the past, were there apps which could have gotten access to more information, and potentially sold it without us knowing, or done something that violated people's trust? We also need to make sure we get that under control. That's why we spent a lot of time figuring out, O.K. here's what it's going to take to do a full investigation of every app that got access to a large amount of information before we changed the platform policies to dramatically reduce the data access that developers had. For any app that we uncover that has any suspicious activity, we're going to go do a full forensic audit, and make sure we have the capacity to do that, to make sure that other developers aren't doing what Kogan did here. The third thing is, it's really important that people know what apps they've authorized. A lot of people have been on Facebook now for five or 10 years, and sometimes you signed into an app a long time ago and you may have forgotten about that. So one of the steps we're taking is making it so apps can no longer access data after you haven't used them for three months. But it's also just really important to put in front of people a tool of, here are all the apps you've connected to and authorized, here's an easy way to deauthorize them, to revoke their permission to get access to your activity. Kevin Roose: Is Facebook planning to notify the 50 million users whose data was shared with Cambridge Analytica? Zuckerberg: Yes. We're going to tell anyone whose data may have been shared. Now, there's a question of whether we have the exact record in our systems today of who your friends were on that day when there was access three and a half or four years ago, so we're going to be conservative on that and try to tell anyone whose data may have been affected, even if we don't know for certain that they were. It's likely that we'll build a tool like we did with the Russian misinformation investigation, that anyone can go to it and see if their data was affected by this. Roose: Do you have a preliminary estimate of how many apps you'll be investigating? Zuckerberg: It will be in the thousands. Frenkel: Were those app developers notified that you'll be investigating this yet? Zuckerberg: Just when I posted. And we'll be reaching out in the near term. Frenkel: Are you going to be hiring people to help conduct those investigations? Zuckerberg: Yes, I would imagine we're going to have to grow the team to work on this. Roose: You mentioned a contract that developers will have to sign in order to ask anyone for access to broader profile information. What will be the terms of that contract, and what will be the penalties for violating it? Zuckerberg: So, the important thing there is that it's a high touch process. The specific point we were trying to make is that it's not going to be some terms of service that a developer can sign up for just on their computer when developing something. I guess technically, that would be a contract as well. The point of what we're trying to do here is to create a situation where we have a real person to person relationship with any developer who is asking for the most sensitive data. That doesn't mean that if you're a developer and you want to put Facebook Login on your website, you can do that. If you want to get access to ask people for their religious affiliation, or their sexual orientation, for data that could be very sensitive, we want to make sure we have a clear relationship with those people. Frenkel: We understood that Cambridge Analytica had reached out to Facebook and asked that its ban on the platform be reconsidered. Are you giving any thought to allowing Cambridge Analytica back in? Zuckerberg: The first thing we need to do is conduct this full forensic audit of the firm, that they don't have any people's data from our community and that they've deleted anything, including derivative data, that they might have. We're working with the regulator in the U.K. on this, so our forensic audit was actually paused in the near term to cede the way for the ICO there to do their own government investigation. We're certainly not going to consider letting them back onto the platform until we have full confirmation that there's no wrongdoing here. Roose: There were reports as far back as 2015 that Cambridge Analytica had access to this data set. Why didn't you suspend them then? We took action immediately at that point. We banned Kogan's app from the platform, we demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica and a couple other parties that Kogan had shared the data with would legally certify that they didn't have the data, and weren't using it in any of their operations. They gave us that formal certification. At the time, they told us they never had gotten access to raw Facebook data, so we made that decision. Frenkel: In retrospect, do you wish you had demanded proof that the data had been deleted? Zuckerberg: Yes. They gave us a formal and legal certification, and it seems at this point that that was false. Again, we haven't done our full investigation and audit yet so I can't say definitively that they actually have data. I've just read all the same reports that you have, including in The New York Times, that says that journalists have seen evidence that they have the data, which is a strong enough signal for us to go on, and take action here. That's the basic driver behind us now needing to go and do a full investigation into any app that had access to a large amount of data before we locked down the platform policies in 2014. Just having folks tell us that they were using the data correctly, I think, does not satisfy our responsibility to our community to protect their data. Frenkel: Are you actively looking at some of these dark web data brokers that have been in news reports recently, that say that other independent researchers are potentially trading in this data? Zuckerberg: Yes, we're investigating that too. Roose: Are you worried about the DeleteFacebook campaign that's been going around? Have you seen meaningful numbers of people deleting their accounts, and are you worried that will be a trend? Zuckerberg: I don't think we've seen a meaningful number of people act on that, but, you know, it's not good. I think it's a clear signal that this is a major trust issue for people, and I understand that. And whether people delete their app over it or just don't feel good about using Facebook, that's a big issue that I think we have a responsibility to rectify. Frenkel: We're now heading into the 2018 midterms. Could you speak about what Facebook is going to do ahead of the 2018 midterms to make people feel more confident that the platform won't be used this way again? Zuckerberg: This is an incredibly important point. There's no doubt that in 2016, there were a number of issues including foreign interference and false news that we did not have as much of a handle on as we feel a responsibility to for our community. Now, the good news here is that these problems aren't necessarily rocket science. They're hard, but they're things that if you invest and work on making it harder for adversaries to do what they're trying to do, you can really reduce the amount of false news, make it harder for foreign governments to interfere. One of the things that gives me confidence is that we've seen a number of elections at this point where this has gone a lot better. In the months after the 2016 election, there was the French election. The new A.I. tools we built after the 2016 elections found, I think, more than 30,000 fake accounts that we believe were linked to Russian sources who were trying to do the same kind of tactics they did in the U.S. in the 2016 election. We were able to disable them and prevent that from happening on a large scale in France. In last year, in 2017 with the special election in Alabama, we deployed some new A.I. tools to identify fake accounts and false news, and we found a significant number of Macedonian accounts that were trying to spread false news, and were able to eliminate those. And that, actually, is something I haven't talked about publicly before, so you're the first people I'm telling about that. I feel a lot better about the systems now. At the same time, I think Russia and other governments are going to get more sophisticated in what they do, too. So we need to make sure that we up our game. This is a massive focus for us to make sure we're dialed in for not only the 2018 elections in the U.S., but the Indian elections, the Brazilian elections, and a number of other elections that are going on this year that are really important. Frenkel: The Times reported that Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos will be leaving toward the end of this year. Is there a broader plan for how Facebook is going to structure security on its platform ahead of all these important elections? Zuckerberg: Sure. One of the important things we've done is, we want to unify all of our security efforts. And you reported on a reorg around Alex Stamos, and I'll say something about him in a second. He's been a very valuable contributor here and was a really central figure in helping us identify the foreign interference with Russia. And I think he has done very good work, and I'm hopeful he'll be engaged for a while here on that. One of the big things we needed to do is coordinate our efforts a lot better across the whole company. It's not all A.I., right? There's certainly a lot that A.I. can do, we can train classifiers to identify content, but most of what we do is identify things that people should look at. So we're going to double the amount of people working on security this year. We'll have more than 20,000 people working on security and community operations by the end of the year, I think we have about 15,000 now. So it's really the technical systems we have working with the people in our operations functions that make the biggest deal. The last thing I'd add on this. Take things like false news. You know, a lot of it is really spam, if you think about it. It's the same people who might have been sending you Viagra emails in the '90s, now they're trying to come up with sensational content and push it into Facebook and other apps in order to get you to click on it and see ads. There are some pretty basic policy decisions we've made, like O.K., if you're anywhere close to being a fake news site, you can't put Facebook ads on your site, right? So then suddenly, it becomes harder for them to make money. If you make it hard enough for them to make money, they just kind of go and do something else. Roose: Is the basic economic model of Facebook, in which users provide data that Facebook uses to help advertisers and developers to better target potential customers and users do you feel like that works, given what we now know about the risks? Zuckerberg: Yeah, so this is a really important question. The thing about the ad model that is really important that aligns with our mission is that our mission is to build a community for everyone in the world and to bring the world closer together. And a really important part of that is making a service that people can afford. A lot of the people, once you get past the first billion people, can't afford to pay a lot. Therefore, having it be free and have a business model that is ad supported ends up being really important and aligned. Now, over time, might there be ways for people who can afford it to pay a different way? That's certainly something we've thought about over time. But I don't think the ad model is going to go away, because I think fundamentally, it's important to have a service like this that everyone in the world can use, and the only way to do that is to have it be very cheap or free. Roose: Adam Mosseri, Facebook's head of News Feed, recently said he had lost some sleep over Facebook's role in the violence in Myanmar. You've said you're "outraged" about what happened with Cambridge Analytica, but when you think about the many things that are happening with Facebook all over the world, are you losing any sleep? Do you feel any guilt about the role Facebook is playing in the world? Zuckerberg: That's a good question. I think, you know, we're doing something here which is unprecedented, in terms of building a community for people all over the world to be able to share what matters to them, and connect across boundaries. I think what we're seeing is, there are new challenges that I don't think anyone had anticipated before. If you had asked me, when I got started with Facebook, if one of the central things I'd need to work on now is preventing governments from interfering in each other's elections, there's no way I thought that's what I'd be doing, if we talked in 2004 in my dorm room. I don't know that it's possible to know every issue that you're going to face down the road. But we have a real responsibility to take all these issues seriously as they come up, and work with experts and people around the world to make sure we solve them, and do a good job for our community. It's certainly true that, over the course of Facebook, I've made all kinds of different mistakes, whether that's technical mistakes or business mistakes or hiring mistakes. We've launched product after product that didn't work. I spend most of my time looking forward, trying to figure out how to solve the issues that people are having today, because I think that's what people in our community would want. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Want to Live in Grey Gardens? It Can Be Yours for 20 Million EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. On a recent afternoon, Sally Quinn walked through Grey Gardens, her fabled summer home, one that has been the subject of both a documentary film and a Broadway musical, and passed by a glass menagerie of tiny kittens. The figurines had once belonged to Edith Bouvier Beale, better known as Little Edie, a woman of many cats, who for years lived in the house with her mother, known as Big Edie. Both were former socialites and relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The figurines were among the many artifacts that Ms. Quinn, the journalist and author, kept when she bought the house from the younger Ms. Beale in 1979, paying 220,000 for what was then a place of almost unimaginable squalor. Restoring the home was not for the faint of heart, but Ms. Quinn was undeterred. In fact, she was smitten. "'It's yours,'" Ms. Quinn recalled Little Edie saying to her. "She did a little pirouette in the hall and said, 'All it needs is a coat of paint.'" Ms. Quinn recently put a price on parting with Grey Gardens: It is listed for 19.995 million. During her recent visit to East Hampton, Ms. Quinn walked from room to room, pointing out wicker furniture, chaise longues and a set of china with a floral pattern; all were among the treasures she discovered in the attic that first year and lugged down to preserve. "I had quit smoking a decade ago," she said of that first trip to the attic, "but I had to have a cigarette. It was the most thrilling project." Her husband, Benjamin C. Bradlee, had not been as enthusiastic about the idea of the restoration. Mr. Bradlee, then the executive editor of The Washington Post, where the two had met, took one look at the home, turned to his wife and promptly told her she was out of her mind. He eventually warmed up to the idea. By the time Grey Gardens was restored, the couple were two of the most powerful people in Washington. They treated it as a retreat where famous friends, including Lauren Bacall, Lorne Michaels and Jack Nicholson, would visit during the month of August. During one party, the producer Norman Lear paid a group of violinists to pop out of the foliage and surprise the guests. Their frequent clambakes were just as memorable: Ms. Quinn, Mr. Bradlee and their friends once poured rose into soda bottles, trying to avoid the beach police like a bunch of rich teenagers. "When people would walk into the house," Ms. Quinn said, "you almost felt like fairy dust had been sprinkled all over us." But as time wore on, the parties slowed. The death of the writer Nora Ephron, a close friend who lived across the street, in 2012 took some of the magic away, and it all but left when Mr. Bradlee died in 2014. After his death, Ms. Quinn said, the decision to sell wasn't difficult. Whoever buys Grey Gardens will be taking on a home with a nearly mythic history. Completed in 1897, the home became infamous under the care (or lack thereof) of Little Edie and her mother, Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale, the first cousin and aunt of Mrs. Onassis. Their plight generated headlines when the Suffolk County health department raided the house in 1971; the authorities cited every known housing code violation. Mrs. Onassis ended up footing the bill for a cleanup. The women became the subject of "Grey Gardens," Albert and David Maysles's 1975 documentary, and the brothers, who wore flea collars while filming, captured a relationship defined by financial downfall and unhealthy emotional dependence. Over the years, the Edies have morphed into something of a cult sensation, inspiring, among other projects, a 2009 HBO movie starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore. Today movie posters are hung up around the home. "That's part of the fun of owning the house," Ms. Quinn said. In a home where there is much to be sentimental about, Ms. Quinn has been focused on choosing the right person to sell it: Since listing the house, she has replaced one real estate agent with another. Michael Schultz of Corcoran Real Estate followed close behind on this day, and was careful when explaining why the house would be a "specific" sale. For one, he said, the house is old. In this area, it is common for the superwealthy to buy homes just to raze them and start over. "People think they want an old house," Mr. Schultz said. "People want a new house that looks old." Grey Gardens is close to the ocean, but it isn't technically a mansion, at least not by East Hampton standards. There are 10 bedrooms, sure, but no in home movie theater. (How could anyone survive?) Mr. Schultz emphasized that the home, with its gray shingles, tennis court and pool, not to mention its legacy, is not priced to be torn down. Whether the person who buys the home agrees will be a different story. "This home will not be attractive to a Russian oligarch," Ms. Quinn said dryly. Renters who appreciate the old home's charm and lush gardens have paid upward of 150,000 a month to rent Grey Gardens. The maternity designer Liz Lange spent the summer there in 2015. She was willing to overlook the fact that the bathrooms weren't the size of living rooms, and that the lights, powered by an aging electrical system, tended to flicker during summer storms. "Actually, this has turned me into sort of a preservationist," Ms. Lange, who grew up spending summers in East Hampton, said in an interview. "If I had 20 million, and another 10 million to restore it, I would kill to own it." Grey Gardens has long been a tourist destination, but visitors seem to be more passionate about the two Edies than about Ms. Quinn and Mr. Bradlee, whose relationship and social connections helped define how modern Washington operates. Ms. Quinn wrote about, then became a vital part of, the city's social scene. Mr. Bradlee, who had been a friend of President John F. Kennedy's, oversaw The Post's coverage of Watergate, a scandal that brought down President Richard M. Nixon. With its McMansions, traffic problems and very rich residents, East Hampton now looks different from what Ms. Quinn remembers. But she still knows how Washington works, and journalists call her regularly to get a better sense of the mood in the capital. She is busy finishing her book, "Finding Magic," which she calls a spiritual memoir. A book about her life in Washington is up next. Ms. Quinn is part of a different era in the city's social scene, a contrast made stark by President Trump's administration. She said that President Barack Obama and his administration declined to attend parties and dinners, but that this level of "estrangement" was a first. The tense state of relations, she said, is more of a passing fascination than an outrage. Ms. Quinn said she had seen Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, around town at social functions, and expected to see Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner out and about. People seem particularly intent on getting a closer look at Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump's senior adviser, in part because there is not much hope the president will be out much. "I think that Donald Trump, clearly, is much more comfortable in Mar a Lago," Ms. Quinn said. "That's his idea of the perfect social setting, where he can kind of be like the maitre d'." With the summer still months away, Ms. Quinn is not planning to return to East Hampton, at least not for an extended period. She will go to the south of France, or maybe Greece. "You want the best for your child," she said of her decision to sell. "But at some point, you've given it up." Besides, she reasons, Washington is where the story is. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
A Seaside Villa on the Northern Coast of Crete This seven bedroom, four bathroom home is in Plaka, a fishing village on the northwestern coast of Crete, the largest and most populous of the Greek islands. The property, known as Villa Ioanna, sits on a sloping, 1.23 acre lot near several olive groves and overlooks Souda Bay and the Mediterranean Sea. Built in 1994 and clad in whitewashed concrete, the 2,690 square foot, two story house offers traditional Greek design, with archways throughout. It was originally a two family home, with communal spaces at street level and bedrooms below. A renovation six years ago reconfigured the upper level into one large, marble floored entertaining space. The kitchen was enlarged, and the bathrooms were redone. "We wanted it to be more modern," said Penelope Vlamaki, the owner's daughter and the manager of the property, which is frequently rented. At the end of an asphalt driveway, beyond an arched colonnade, are two separate front doors. One leads past a hall closet and bathroom, through an archway, to the intersection of the dining and living spaces, which connect with the kitchen in the open floor plan. The other leads past a bedroom and a hall bathroom, through another archway, to the living space. Three sets of sliding glass doors in the rear of the living area open to a broad balcony outfitted with a hammock, a dining table and a lounge area for savoring western sunsets over the bay. The house, which is decorated in blue and white, is being sold fully furnished. Twin curved staircases lead down to the lower level, with three bedrooms and a hall bathroom on either side, and laminated wood floors throughout. "You can be all together, and you can be separate," Ms. Vlamaki said. "Families like to be together and also separate from their friends." The gray tiled bathroom on one side of the lower level has a Jacuzzi tub; on the other side, the matching bath has a shower. Two master bedrooms, one with a canopied double bed, have sliding glass doors that open to a covered terrace and heated pool overlooking the water. Chaises longues and a canopied double sun bed face the water. The remaining bedrooms have doors leading outside. One has a private, shaded patio; another opens to a seating area. A washing machine is in a downstairs bathroom, and clothes are hung outside to dry. "We have sun most of the time," Ms. Vlamaki said. The house has freshwater tanks and rooftop solar panels to provide electricity for hot water, internet and satellite television. There is parking for three cars. The mountainous island of Crete is about 160 miles south of Athens, with around 630,000 residents. Villa Ioanna is half a mile from the main Plaka square, where there are restaurants, cafes and mini markets. Sandy and pebbled beaches, shops, cafes, bars and a supermarket are less than a mile away, in the resort village of Almyrida. The nearest marina for small yachts and ferries is in Kalyves, a 15 minute drive. Of the three airports on Crete, Chania International Airport, a 45 minute drive, is the closest. After a nine year, 42 percent slump during the national debt crisis, the Greek housing market is on the mend, industry professionals said. In 2018, real estate investment increased by 20 percent and prices by almost 2 percent, according to the Bank of Greece, and the volume of building permits, which had fallen for seven straight years, rose more than 10 percent. The turnaround coincided with the end, in August 2018, of Greece's 360 billion bailout by the International Monetary Fund. "For a long time there was not much going on," said Claudia Marenbach Fountoulaki, an owner of Crete Island Estates, which has this listing. "With the crisis, there was a time we didn't have anybody coming. Prices were rock bottom." Besides an improved economy, an uptick in tourism is helping, said Kostas Taralas, the chief executive of Greek Exclusive Properties. Earlier this year, Crete was named the fourth best destination in the world by TripAdvisor, because of its physical beauty and archaeological treasures. Crete's real estate market is "one of the strongest in Greece," Mr. Taralas said. Thanks to its warm, sunny climate and long summer season, "many international buyers have Crete as first choice to buy their second home," he said, adding that the market is similar to those of other Greek islands, including Corfu, Paros and Rhodes. Crete is seeing "intensive construction of villas and two to three bedroom residences within a complex with a shared swimming pool," said Vladimir Papounidis, the vice president of Grekodom Development. And seven "five star" hotels have been built on the island in recent years, he said. Prices for villas with a "nice sea view and short distance to the sea" range from about 500,000 to 1.3 million euros ( 550,000 to 1.4 million), Mr. Taralas said. Seafront villas, with direct access to the water, go for 2.5 million to 4 million euros ( 2.7 million to 4.4 million). A historic home in need of restoration can be bought for about 100,000 euros ( 110,000), but "it will cost 150 percent more to renovate," Ms. Marenbach Fountoulaki said. "They are all inland in a village, but have great character." Luxury seafront properties like Villa Ioanna held their value during the financial crisis, with "stable prices the last 10 years, considering inflation," said Savvas Savvaidis, the managing director of Greece Sotheby's International Realty. Many of Crete's foreign buyers come from Belgium, France, Germany, Israel and Scandinavia, Ms. Marenbach Fountoulaki said, as well as the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Mr. Savvaidis said he has also seen buyers from Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. One reason they are drawn to Crete, Ms. Marenbach Fountoulaki said, is that homes there are a bargain compared with those on the popular island of Mykonos. Foreigners also choose Crete because the "towns are more authentic" and the locals are "hospitable and very friendly," she said. Greece's golden visa program offers noncitizens a renewable five year residency visa in exchange for investing 250,000 in a home. The program "is very appealing for Chinese and Russian" buyers, Mr. Savvaidis said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Want more basketball in your inbox? Sign up for Marc Stein's weekly N.B.A. newsletter here. LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. Before these N.B.A. playoffs began, Luka Doncic stopped for a brief chat to look ahead to the Dallas Mavericks' first round series with the Los Angeles Clippers. He struggled with one question in particular. When was the last time you remember feeling nervous before a game? "I don't know," Doncic said. "Probably my first N.B.A. game I was a little nervous then, obviously. But I just enjoy playing games." The nonchalance, even in his second N.B.A. season and first postseason, is no facade. Tuesday night's Game 5 against the Clippers was disastrous for the Mavericks, but Doncic responded to a 154 111 rout with as much poise as he could reasonably muster especially after a play early in the third quarter that raised many questions about whether the Clippers' Marcus Morris intentionally stepped on Doncic's injured left ankle. Morris said he did not. "Bounce back!" Doncic said on Twitter after the game, betraying little concern even after the Clippers, in emphatically seizing a 3 2 series lead, appeared to finally play to their considerable potential. A rebound from the Mavericks seems unlikely, given how overmatched the cast around Doncic looked in Game 5, and with Kristaps Porzingis sidelined by knee soreness for the second straight game. Yet it's likewise true that the level Doncic found in the first four games of the series won't soon be forgotten. By Sunday, when Dallas overcame Porzingis's absence and a 21 point deficit to even the series at 2 2, Doncic, 21, already had as many 40 point games in his playoff career (two) as luminaries like Moses Malone, Elvin Hayes and Patrick Ewing, as well as the current Portland Trail Blazers star Damian Lillard. Doncic's performance Sunday on an injured left ankle was so special 43 points, 17 rebounds, 13 assists and capped by a 3 pointer at the overtime buzzer that he quickly made his old national team coach look like a sage. Igor Kokoskov, the former Phoenix Suns head coach, coached Doncic and Goran Dragic to a wholly unexpected EuroBasket title with Slovenia in 2017. He assured me last week that Doncic "will play even better in the playoffs" than he did in the regular season because he "likes the big stage." More bad days like Tuesday night and full blown playoff failures are surely in Doncic's future no N.B.A. star can avoid them. It nonetheless remains completely appropriate to swoon over what he has done for an opening act, even though Dallas was always far more likely to lose this series than win it. Downgrade the damage Doncic has done if you wish, since it's undeniably true that there are no fans inside the game venues to transmit tension onto the players, nor are any teams dealing with a travel grind since the league is operating at a single site amid the pandemic. Just don't forget that Doncic wasn't even cleared to play in Game 4 until shortly before tipoff because of the left ankle he badly twisted in Game 3. Don't forget, furthermore, that Doncic didn't seem to lose any of his uncanny ability to bounce off or outright dodge the Clippers' array of vaunted physical defenders (Kawhi Leonard, Paul George, Morris) despite playing hurt. As the Nets' Spencer Dinwiddie said on Twitter, Doncic's ability to so deftly mix acceleration with deceleration, combined with beyond his years court awareness, makes him hard for even the Clippers to corral. "Change of pace has always been more effective than pace in general," Dinwiddie said. "If I see something every time, eventually I can stop it. If the rhythm/cadence is constantly changing, what are you supposed to dance to?" More bubble buzz from the N.B.A. restart: Jamal Crawford scored 51 points in his final game with the Phoenix Suns in April 2019, waited more than a year for his next N.B.A. opportunity, then, after turning 40 in March, appeared in only one game in the N.B.A. bubble with the Nets because of a hamstring injury. "I have no regrets at all," Crawford said Monday night after returning to his home in the Seattle area. Five points in six minutes of playing time in a surprising Aug. 4 victory over Milwaukee is all Crawford has to show, statistically, for his stint with the extremely short handed Nets. Yet he expressed gratitude for being able to "experience a historic moment in real time." "We were able to bring much attention to the social injustices going on," Crawford said, "and give people some sort of comfort from being able to turn on the TV and watch games." Crawford made it clear he "would love to play again next season." Kevin Durant strongly suggested in a recent interview that he would relish seeing Crawford return to the Nets in 2020 21. "With a whole, healthy roster," Crawford said, "anyone would love that opportunity." One of the buzzier tales at the N.B.A. bubble involves a team no longer here: New Orleans. David Griffin, the executive vice president of basketball operations for the New Orleans Pelicans, was spotted before the Pelicans' exit visiting with the Clippers' in demand assistant coach Tyronn Lue. Griffin and Lue have a history, as the former general manager and coach of the title winning Cleveland Cavaliers in 2016, so the sight of former work colleagues spending time together on a campus that housed 22 N.B.A. teams is not notable in itself. But Lue is poised to become the hottest name on the N.B.A. coaching carousel when the Clippers' season ends and the Pelicans do now have an opening. New Orleans fired Alvin Gentry with one year and nearly 6 million remaining on his contract on Aug. 15, with Lue and the Los Angeles Lakers' assistant coach Jason Kidd almost immediately surfacing as two prime candidates for the post. Lue, of course, has also been mentioned for months as a top candidate in the Nets' looming coaching search. The latest rumbles in N.B.A. coaching circles suggest that the Nets or the Philadelphia 76ers are more likely landing spots for Lue than New Orleans despite his Griffin ties. The Sixers, as expected, fired Brett Brown on Monday after seven seasons, unmoved by the fact that Ben Simmons, one of Brown's two best players, sustained what turned out to be a season ending knee injury Aug. 5. Brown's demise stemmed not only from Philadelphia's four game sweep in its first round series with Boston without Simmons, but also his strong behind the scenes support last summer for a roster makeover that hasn't worked at all. With Jimmy Butler filling a major role, Philadelphia came within one rim assisted Kawhi Leonard shot of a spot in last season's Eastern Conference finals. The Sixers then moved off their initial intent to re sign Butler fueled at least in part by Brown's concerns about coaching the headstrong Butler to spend big instead on signing Al Horford away from Boston and re signing Tobias Harris. The franchise has faced considerable criticism about the lack of shooting and playmaking on the roster ever since. Butler wound up joining the Miami Heat in a sign and trade deal and just led the Heat to a first round sweep of Indiana. Luka Doncic is not the only pressing issue for Doc Rivers. Stopping his son in law has also been a problem for Los Angeles Clippers Coach Doc Rivers. Dallas's Seth Curry averaged 16.5 points on 65 percent shooting from the field and 56.3 percent shooting from 3 point range through the first four games of the series until Curry, like virtually every Maverick, struggled mightily in Game 5 against the most sustained intensity at both ends that the Clippers have delivered all season. Curry, who married Rivers's daughter, Callie, in September 2019, entered Tuesday's play averaging more than four points above his 12.4 points per game for the Mavericks during the regular season. Curry had insisted going into the series that the family ties would make a Mavericks Clippers matchup "no weirder." "It can't get any tougher than playing against Steph last year," Curry said of his Western Conference finals showdown with Portland last season against his older brother, Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors. My wife gave me only one bubble assignment, but I failed her. I did not manage to arrange a meeting with Philadelphia's Shake Milton to discuss Owasso High School in Owasso, Okla., which both Milton and Mrs. Stein attended. In my defense: I covered the Sixers only once during their eight seeding games, resulting in the Joel Embiid interview that led my article on Friday about the rash of injuries that has plagued so many first round series. The fallback plan, to catch up with Milton in the playoffs, didn't work out so well when Philadelphia, without the injured Ben Simmons, was broomed out of the bubble by Boston in four games. The ice cream sundae station in the media meal room on Sunday is officially a thing. It was in operation over the weekend for the second Sunday in a row and, to uphold transparency standards, I did have a single scoop of unadorned chocolate ice cream again. I have a flight back to Dallas locked in now. My New York Times colleague Scott Cacciola arrives on Sunday to begin his seven day quarantine. So my departure from the bubble, after nearly 55 days, will take place late next week, enabling Cacciola to take over as our bubble representative. So he will soon inherit my microwave and my kettle, and I will get to learn what it's like to cover the rest of the N.B.A. postseason from afar for the first time since my first season in 1993 94 when both the Clippers (my beat for The Los Angeles Daily News) and the Lakers missed the playoffs. You ask; I answer. Every week, I'll field three questions sent in to marcstein newsletter nytimes.com. Please include your first and last name, as well as your city, and make sure "Corner Three" is in the subject line. Q: I think you forgot Bill Russell when you said last week that Wilt Chamberlain's "shot blocking numbers presumably would have been the most prolific in league history" had the statistic been tracked during their playing days. I think we can all agree that Russell was the better defender and better shot blocker. Ben Krinsky (Teaneck, N.J.). Stein: I most certainly did not forget Bill Russell. He's on the short list to be recognized as the greatest defender that this game has ever seen, while simultaneously residing at the front of the line to be declared the biggest winner in league history. He's also left handed. You should know by now what that means around here: Russell will forever figure in this newsletter's consciousness. But Chamberlain was the unquestioned king of gaudy statistics, and various media accounts from that era support the idea that Chamberlain would have averaged more blocks per game had the statistic been tracked when both he and Russell were playing. That was well before my time, but Chamberlain had a reputation for trying to emphatically block any shot he could get near. Russell was more calculated. "What I did is absolutely nothing," James said. "There's nothing to do here besides play basketball." The N.B.A. finals, remember, are scheduled to begin Sept. 30 which is still 36 days away. Q: The bubble diary section of the newsletter has been great. I don't feel as bad about my texting and walking after reading that you punch out articles on your BlackBerry while you walk. But what is a French Dip? How does a dip cost 21? Tom Sheldrick (Adelaide, Australia) Stein: Australia is a country that I thought I knew a fair bit about, as a longtime tennis fan who has been following the Australian Open since the early 1980s and having followed the Australian basketball scene since the mid 1990s. I even covered the Sydney Olympics in 2000. But you're throwing me off here, Tom. Your question would suggest that the French Dip sandwich also known as the world's greatest sandwich does not exist Down Under. Is that what you're trying to tell me? Or was this just a joke that duped me? The Lakers acquired Bryant's draft rights and signed O'Neal away from Orlando as a free agent in a span of 22 days in the summer of 1996. From December 2006 through November 2013, after O'Neal and Bryant had won three titles in a row together, Bryant's presence led to a run of 320 consecutive sellouts (regular season and playoffs) over seven years at Staples Center. Philadelphia Coach Brett Brown became the league's third prominent figure to lose his job after his team's poor showing at the N.B.A. restart. The 76ers fired Brown on Monday after getting swept in a first round series by Boston. The move was preceded by New Orleans dismissing Alvin Gentry as coach and Vlade Divac stepping down as general manager of the Sacramento Kings. A coaching change can fix only so much in Philadelphia because the Sixers have four players on a flawed roster who are owed at least 27.5 million next season. They are Al Horford ( 27.5 million), Ben Simmons ( 28.8 million), Joel Embiid ( 29.5 million) and Tobias Harris ( 34.4 million). After Horford and Harris signed huge contracts last summer and then made a minimal impact in the Boston series, they are increasingly regarded as two of the hardest to trade players in the league. Interesting trend spotted yet again by Justin Kubatko ( jkubatko on Twitter): Coming into this postseason, the N.B.A.'s single day playoff record for 3 pointers made was 94 in four games on April 21, 2019. Teams combined to make more than 100 3 pointers in each of the first eight days of the 2020 playoffs. Hit me up anytime on Twitter ( TheSteinLine) or Facebook ( MarcSteinNBA) or Instagram ( thesteinline). Send any other feedback to marcstein newsletter nytimes.com. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Re "At the Front of the Test Line: A Lot of A Listers" (front page, March 19): When my daughter returned home from college for spring break, she immediately signed up for a shift as a volunteer E.M.T. She treated and transported a patient who was diagnosed four days later with the Covid 19. Even though my daughter had an elevated temperature, she was advised to self quarantine and wait because there are not enough test kits and her symptom was mild. Reading the news that the rich, the famous and the politicians are getting tested and treated many without symptoms is infuriating and disturbing. Our first responders are putting their lives at risk. As a nation, we need to get our priorities right. In this war against the coronavirus, it is our first responders and health professionals who will help us win. They are the most important warriors. In addition to testing health care professionals and those with symptoms, shouldn't we be doing some number of randomized tests, like a "virus poll"? This would give a sense of the prevalence of the virus in the general, asymptomatic population. The science of random sampling is well developed. Four or five thousand randomized tests should give us a reasonable feel for the percentage of the population currently infected. I would think that would be a valuable number to have. Now that we are starting to have test kits available in significant quantities, we should divert a few to provide a broader picture of the spread. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
LONDON The Irish playwright Conor McPherson has gone a wanderin' in a Minnesota of the mind, a bleak and soulful place conjured by the songs of Bob Dylan. As portrayed in "Girl From the North Country" the truly sui generis new work written and directed by Mr. McPherson, with a multitude of songs by Mr. Dylan this cold corner of the United States is a place where it is all too easy to lose your way. That's certainly true for the angry and bewildered characters in this strange theatrical hybrid of soaring music and thudding dialogue, which opened on Wednesday night at the Old Vic Theater here. As for Mr. McPherson, one of the greatest dramatists working, he, too, seems to be traveling through the dark without a compass. Such helplessness has always been the natural state of the people who inhabit Mr. McPherson's plays, which include the unsettling masterworks "The Weir" and "Shining City." These folks are a haunted breed, mortally lonely yet dimly aware of a connection to some indefinable otherworld. Song often becomes their conduit to that unmapped place, and I shall never forget the fleeting transcendence achieved in his "The Night Alive" by four whacked out wastrels dancing to Marvin Gaye. That same subliminal beauty, as rousing as it is heartbreaking, shimmers through "Girl From the North Country" whenever its performers raise their voices in songs (culled from every phase of Mr. Dylan's long career), finding a holy rhythm that reality denies their characters. "Girl" is a boardinghouse drama, a gathering of archetypes genre that was popular in the first half of the 20th century. (Its upscale equivalent is a movie like "Grand Hotel.") This particular boardinghouse is in Mr. Dylan's hometown, Duluth, Minn., and it is a wintry autumn in 1934 during the Great Depression. That's seven years before Mr. Dylan was born, and roughly two decades before he began composing the songs that would win him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. (Mr. McPherson had been approached by representatives of Mr. Dylan about the possibility of using his songbook in an original production.) Mr. Dylan may be forever associated with the folk protest movement of the 1960s. But his work's populist melancholy and anger (and acoustic guitar friendly melodies) fit smoothly into the abject American prairiescape of the mid 1930s, especially with the enhancement of Simon Hale's glorious retrofitted orchestrations. Embodied by a fine cast led by Ciaran Hinds, the denizens of "Girl" definitely feel well, you know like they're on their own. With no direction home. Like complete unknowns. These rolling stones (referring to one of Mr. Dylan's best known songs, memorably performed here by Shirley Henderson) gather no moss but accumulate lots of regrets. They are assembled for one thankless Thanksgiving under the roof of Nick Laine (Mr. Hinds); his demented wife, Elizabeth (Ms. Henderson, in a compellingly visceral performance); their alcoholic, literary son, Gene (Sam Reid); and their adopted daughter, Marianne (a mesmerizing Sheila Atim), who may or may not be pregnant. Their roomers are a shady man of the cloth (Michael Shaeffer), a former boxing champion (Arinze Kene), a comely widow (Debbie Kurup) and a once prosperous couple (Stanley Townsend and Bronagh Gallagher) and their son (Jack Shalloo), a strapping man with the mind of a child. Visitors include an old shoemaker (the Tony Award winning McPherson veteran Jim Norton), who seeks Marianne's hand in marriage, and the town doctor (Ron Cook), who stills his anxieties with morphine and delivers cosmic commentary directly to the audience. These nomadic folks have scarcely a dollar among them, but their secrets are dark and manifold. If you know classic American theater, you've met them before. With its mix of down home coziness and violent desperation, "Girl" brings to mind a fraught collaboration by Thornton Wilder and Eugene O'Neill, with a dash of William Saroyan's whimsy. As they stumble into collision, the members of this provisional family of losers bear a crippling burden of lost loves, past crimes and concealed identities. Like most of Mr. McPherson's characters, they are ravenous for intimacy and mortally alone. But in expressing these feelings, they seem to be simultaneously and clumsily translating from another, more graceful language. Here's Nick on his financial state: "I don't find that money, the banker gonna take everything. We'll be like dust in the wind here." Or one character saying to another why their having sex isn't a good idea: "We'd be like two lonely beasts in the field." Now compare those sentences to a line like this: "Freedom just around the corner for you, but with the truth so far off, what good will it do?" Not so different, eh? Except that it wasn't written by Mr. McPherson; it's from Mr. Dylan's "Jokerman." It sounds a lot better set to music. And I have the feeling that Mr. McPherson, in writing his dialogue, may have been overly infected by Mr. Dylan's lyrics, which are far more credible sung than spoken. Not surprisingly, then, it's when the characters sing that "Girl" acquires the numinous glow associated with Mr. McPherson's plays. These numbers from vintage ("I Want You," "Forever Young") to recent ("Duquesne Whistle") occur with merciful frequency, and Mr. McPherson doesn't try to link them directly to the plot, in the style of the musical "Mamma Mia!" Instead, without conventional segues, the performers pick up instruments, gather around microphones and move with the blessed synchronicity of people ineffably tuned into one another. Standing in their weathered period costumes against Rae Smith's wide open space of a set (starkly lighted by Mark Henderson), they belong both to a very particular time and place and to a wondering eternity. They're not just singing Bob Dylan songs. They are giving eloquence to wounded, inarticulate souls from a lost era that, for the moment, feels achingly like the present. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
KAREN BERNARD at Douglas Dunn Studio (Feb. 6 8, 8 p.m.). A longtime creator of interdisciplinary dance, Bernard follows up last year's "Poolside" with a new work called "Lakeside," a continuation on the theme of memory within the darker context of trauma. "Lakeside" is ostensibly a duet between Bernard and the dancer Lisa Parra, but there's another presence that feels like a third character: a yellow and black costume from Bernard's past. The two continually exchange the garment as they navigate a haunting scenario that casts them each as witness, victim and perpetrator of a murder. The minimalist movement, paired with video by Bernard, coalesces to comment on violence against women. douglasdunndance.com COMPANHIA DE DANCA DEBORAH COLKER at the Joyce Theater (Feb. 4 5, 7:30 p.m.; Feb. 6 8, 8 p.m.; through Feb. 9). This Brazilian troupe returns to the Joyce after a long hiatus with a work that takes its name and themes from Joao Cabral de Melo Neto's poem "Cao Sem Plumas" ("Dog Without Feathers"). It examines life along the Capibaribe River and the nearby drylands of northeast Brazil. In Colker's interpretation, vigorous dancers covered in dust are meant to embody the region's impoverished residents. Extraordinary film of the landscape serves as a backdrop to the choreography, which combines contemporary dance with ritualistic gestures, acrobatic partnering and striking ensemble tableaus. 212 242 0800, joyce.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
By choosing to wear all black, the women of Hollywood aren't taking fashion off the table. They are putting it at the very center of the table. Remember, back in 2015, the AskHerMore campaign, in which red carpet hosts were urged to treat the actresses they interviewed as women of substance, and that was defined as focusing not on what they wore, but on what they did? The premise being that what they wore was a mere decorative trifle superficial, frivolous, not thought through hence not really worthy of discussion, and to talk about it was to demean the purpose of the woman inside. We've had these discussions at The Times. After all, it's impossible to be someone who thinks about the messaging of what we all wear and not have been drowned occasionally under a chorus of furious social media commentary that can be summed up as: Who cares what fill in the blank wore? Think about their actions, not their outfits! Yet in so many of those instances, the outfit is actually an expression, or a reflection, of the action. To ignore it is to miss part of the point. It's not rising above, it's turning a blind eye. And hasn't that, in this case, been the problem all along? By choosing to wear all black, the women of Hollywood (and now men, though to be fair, men announcing their solidarity by wearing black tuxedos, or even black tuxedos with black shirts, most recently a style chosen to denote the hipness of the wearer, is a little like a tree falling in the woods) aren't taking fashion off the table. They are putting it at the very center of the table. Whatever you think of the choice of color or the fact the actresses are wearing effectively the same gowns sparkly, lacy, mermaid y, princess y they wore before, just in a darker shade; and whether or not you approve of it as a gesture, the fact is women in Hollywood have finally woken up to a reality activists have know for years. That is: Clothes speak as loudly as many words, and they can be weaponized accordingly. They have finally seized control (or at least semi control) of their own image making. And that means now is exactly when we should be paying attention to what they wear which is not the same thing as crowing about who made it, or rating it on a scale of one to 10. That's just advertising and insecurity. It also means we should be paying attention to what actresses wear next: at the series of awards shows that follow the Globes and culminate with the Oscars. Publicists have already started whispering that there aren't enough black dresses in all of fashion to make this statement more than once, and it's a Globes thing: a way to start the year, at what has traditionally been a more flexible event than the more formal bids that come later. But if the women and men involved are serious about this if they want it to be read as more than a gesture, and convincingly seem like the start of something new it has to have follow through. Maybe they all wear red to the SAG Aftra awards (that could be a little "Handmaid's Tale"). Maybe the women all wear pantsuits. Maybe they wear short dresses instead of gowns. Maybe the men wear the skirts. It's up to them. The point is, having begun to ask more of their clothes, they need to keep doing it. Then, on the red carpet or off, we can ask more, too. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
With the prospect that a coronavirus vaccine will become available for emergency use as soon as next month, states and cities are warning that distributing the shots to an anxious public could be hindered by inadequate technology, severe funding shortfalls and a lack of trained personnel. While the Trump administration has showered billions of dollars on the companies developing the vaccines, it has left the logistics of inoculating and tracking as many as 20 million people by year's end and many tens of millions more next year largely to local governments without providing enough money, officials in several localities and public health experts involved in the preparations said in interviews. Public health departments, already strained by a pandemic that has overrun hospitals and drained budgets, are racing to expand online systems to track and share information about who has been vaccinated; to recruit and train hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses and pharmacists to give people the shot and collect data about everyone who gets it; to find safe locations for mass vaccination events; and to convince the public of the importance of getting immunized. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have sent 200 million to the states for the effort, with another 140 million promised in December, but state and local officials said that was billions of dollars short of what would be needed to carry out their complex plans. "We absolutely do not have enough to pull this off successfully," said Dr. Thomas E. Dobbs III, the state health officer of Mississippi. "This is going to be a phenomenal logistical feat, to vaccinate everybody in the country. We absolutely have zero margin for failure. We really have to get this right." Health departments have asked Congress for at least 8.4 billion more for "a timely, comprehensive, and equitable vaccine distribution campaign"; the C.D.C. director, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, has said that at least 6 billion is needed. But negotiations for further funding are caught up in the stalemate between House Democrats and the Trump administration over the coronavirus stimulus bill. A new federal platform, called the Immunization Gateway, aims to connect state vaccine registries so they can share information with one another for example, if someone gets an initial coronavirus vaccine in New York and then goes to Florida for the winter, a doctor there can look up that person's first dose information in order to give the correct second dose. But most registries have not yet connected to the platform. Between that and another new federal platform to track vaccines, public health officials are haunted by the spectacular crash of HealthCare.gov, the federal online insurance marketplace set up under the Affordable Care Act, when it went live in 2013 after being finished in a rush. "A month before the vaccine is about to become available is not the time to think about making systems across 3,000 health departments in 50 states interoperable," said Lori Freeman, chief executive of the National Association of County and City Health Officials. "It just doesn't work." Addressing Americans' wariness toward the vaccine recent polls show that between a third and half of Americans would be reluctant to get it is also hard, some state officials said, given that none has been approved yet and comprehensive safety data from the ongoing clinical trials has not been released. "We don't really have the safety studies available to quote from," said Dr. Jennifer Dillaha, the Arkansas state epidemiologist and medical director for immunizations. "What we're trying to do is develop relationships with people and organizations that can help us with messaging when the time comes." Other unknowns include how many doses of vaccine each state will initially receive, which groups will the C.D.C. will recommend to get it first and even whether states need to worry about building the ultracold storage capacity needed for the Pfizer vaccine. The C.D.C. has told states and localities not to buy ultracold freezers for now, since the Pfizer vaccine will be shipped in coolers with dry ice that can keep it viable for up to 15 days with re icing; it can then last five additional days in a conventional freezer. But many academic medical centers and other hospitals that can afford it are acquiring colder freezers anyway, setting up a have and have not scenario. Record keeping requirements will also be an overwhelming task, officials said. The C.D.C. wants to track, in real time, the age, sex, race and ethnicity of everyone who is vaccinated states usually provide such data quarterly, at best so it can analyze how well the vaccination campaign is going among different demographic groups day by day and make adjustments if certain populations or regions have low vaccination rates. The C.D.C., which holds frequent planning calls with state and local health officials, is also still working on persuading states to hand over the personal data of their citizens. The agency has requested each vaccine recipient's name, date of birth, address, race, ethnicity and certain medical history. As soon as the F.D.A. approves a vaccine, the C.D.C.'s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices will meet to issue recommendations, already in the works, on how it should be distributed. It will almost certainly say that health care workers should be the group with the highest priority for vaccination, followed by essential service workers, people with high risk medical conditions and those older than 65. But states will be allowed flexibility within those guidelines; Maryland, for example, plans to include its prison and jail populations in its "Phase 1" priority group. State officials also have to figure out whom to focus on within priority populations if they get less vaccine than they need. During the C.D.C. advisory committee's meeting last month, some members said they wanted to ensure that information about any safety problems would be made public quickly. Until now, the F.D.A. and the C.D.C. have maintained one data system for patients or providers to report bad reactions to vaccines. They plan to supplement that system with a smartphone based tool that checks in with individuals who have been vaccinated to see whether they have had any health problems. The C.D.C. advisory group has also stressed the importance of a campaign to persuade the public to take the vaccine, noting that messages were likely to be more effective if they came from community leaders than from the federal government. North Carolina says its campaign will use "photos, video, and personal testimony of celebrities, leaders of historically marginalized populations, and other trusted messengers receiving vaccine as early adopters." To ease the burden on health departments, the federal government is contracting with CVS and Walgreens pharmacies to vaccinate residents of nursing homes and other long term care centers around the country. But it could be difficult to reach those in isolated regions, and some might opt out of the program. Last week, the administration announced the federal government would contract with pharmacies to provide the vaccine generally, as they do with flu shots, once supplies of it increase next year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
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