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The pastoral tone is established visually by Ms. Lobel's dappled decors. Her main backdrop is a semiabstract green and white landscape with hatched lines, flecked with red in ways that suggest both bloom and bloodstains. Subsequent gauzes add layers of scenic suggestion and Cezanne colors. The main look is that of an idyll, recalling Leon Bakst's scenery for Nijinsky's "L'Apres Midi d'un Faune." Mr. Mizrahi's costumes, in a lighter green (with the same red flecks), fit in like camouflage. Though the chorus is in the orchestra pit, the solo singers share the stage with Mr. Morris's dancers; and here problems arise. Since Mr. Morris seldom has all his dancers moving in unison, it's disappointing that Mr. Mizrahi has costumed all the male dancers (bare chested, in sarongs) and female dancers (in sleeveless chitons) in the same uniform colors. Worse, his costumes for Acis, Galatea and Acis's friend Damon, again using the same fabric, expose the singers' physiques in ways that make them look ungainly beside the dancers. Why is the singing Galatea the only woman in a dress that reveals her legs? Why does Acis wear a tucked in pajama outfit? They look as if they had commissioned cheap outfits that might make them appear not out of place at the Morris party; and this makes them seem only more out of place. This is alleviated by the wonderful stage manners of the Morris dancers, who keep integrating the singers into the stage world as best they can. Mr. Morris is not one of those directors who make all singers look like natural stage animals. He gives them strictly choreographed actions, and in the cases of the soprano Sherezade Panthaki (Galatea) and the tenors Thomas Cooley (Acis) and Zach Finkelstein (Damon), you can see them tensely waiting to move on musical cues. Things are better with the bass baritone Douglas Williams as the giant Polyphemus. The jacketed suit that Mr. Mizrahi gives him works effectively, and anyway, Mr. Williams is a lively mover, kicking the air as he first vaults onto the stage, lifted by others. Mr. Williams is also the most completely satisfying singer here. Though Ms. Panthaki's gleaming tone makes a strong impression, her consonants are often inaudible and her lower notes weak; Mr. Cooley and Mr. Finkelstein have excellent diction, though Mr. Cooley's topmost notes are approximate and Mr. Finkelstein's timbre is not flattered by coloratura passages. Even in the singers' best moments, it's evident that Mr. Morris is only completely at home here when using his own dancers. They explain why he has used Mozart's version of the score, with its greater density of musical incident. Arias, choruses and orchestral passages all become dance scenes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Buying Your First Home? Save, and Save Some More One couple in Queens pulled thousands out of their retirement savings. The parents of a Manhattan couple offered up their home equity line of credit. And a mother on Long Island chose to work seven days a week. As housing prices continue to outpace wage growth, it has become harder for first time buyers to save up for the biggest purchase of their lives especially those who want to buy in New York City, where the down payment alone can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. "People will go to extreme measures to buy here," said Jason Haber, a broker at Warburg Realty, a luxury agency in Manhattan. There are the cutbacks. Eating out? Nope. Shopping? Definitely not. Student loan debt needs to be paid down first or refinanced. Sometimes a couple will set aside one person's entire income for the down payment, Mr. Haber said. Other buyers can manage it only with multiple gifts from family members. "It's almost like a GoFundMe," he said. According to an analysis by Social Explorer, a research company, first time buyers in New York City much like those in other large metropolitan areas differ markedly from buyers in the rest of the country. Many are well educated, six figure earners: 21 percent of first time homeowners in New York City surveyed by the census in 2013 had earned a master's degree or higher compared with 11 percent nationwide, and 40 percent earned more than 100,000, nearly double the percentage nationally. And once they buy, they tend to stay put. More than 70 percent of the homeowners surveyed in New York City were living in the first home they ever bought, and more than half of those moved in before 2000. Heather Gallagher, 36, a fund raiser at a performing arts center in Manhattan, and her husband, Will Gallagher, 34, who provides technical support and on boarding at an education software company, started hunting in 2016 for a one bedroom in Jackson Heights, the Queens neighborhood where they had rented for 10 years. After being outbid on four properties, they found an estate sale in a co op outside the neighborhood's historic district, for 185,000. The kitchen was in its original condition from the 1950s, including the oven, Ms. Gallagher said: "I was pretty sure it was going to kill us both." They also discovered that the refrigerator was missing. But the price was right. They found a first time home buyer program at HSBC that offered to pay up to 7,000 in closing costs, and pieced together a down payment using their savings and 5,000 from a Roth I.R.A., withdrawn without penalties. Their bid of 187,000 was accepted, but when the appraisal came in at just 178,000, they negotiated the price down to 185,000. "So at that point, our parents gave us a gift," Ms. Gallagher said, which they used to pump up their savings account ahead of the co op board application. They repaid their parents after closing in March 2017. "I wanted more freedom as a homeowner," she said. She made about 30,000 in profit after selling her co op, a fraction of what it would cost to buy a house. But in 2016, a four and a half month overseas assignment in Haiti, where she was born, helped Ms. Cadet save far more. With housing provided and food relatively inexpensive, she kept to a budget of about 100 a month. Encouraged by how much she was able to save, she said, when she returned to the United States, "I pretty much changed my way of life." She started cooking more and brought her lunch to work every day. She also cut back on eating out with friends, traveling and shopping for things like shoes and designer bags, past purchases "which I totally regret," she said. "But you learn, you live and you learn." Soon she had saved up tens of thousands of dollars and was ready to buy, focusing her search on New York City. In 2017, she paid 355,000 for a two bedroom, two bathroom house in St. Albans, where property taxes were lower than those on Long Island, and the commute to work was shorter. "People don't need that much just the basics to live," she said. "The money we spend on things clothes, shoes it's unnecessary." About 70 percent of New York City's residents are renters. And a recent StreetEasy survey of 2,550 New Yorkers across all five boroughs found that 66 percent of renters plan to continue renting. One of the top reasons: They can't afford to buy. "If you look at the housing market seven years ago, or eight years ago, qualifying for a mortgage was something more top of mind, because credit was so tight," said Cheryl Young, a senior economist at Trulia. But recently, saving for a down payment has become a more primary concern. According to a recent national survey by Trulia, 56 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 34 said saving enough for a down payment was the biggest barrier to homeownership, followed by rising home prices. Other top concerns included poor credit history and student loan debt, both of which can make it difficult to get a mortgage. These problems have helped push the median age of home buyers to 46, the oldest age ever recorded by the National Association of Realtors. When the organization started collecting this data in 1981, the median age was 31. But millennials ranging in age from 25 to 34 make up the largest share of home buyers, and the median age for first time buyers has remained around 30 to 32 for over 20 years. "The best advice I give younger New York City residents is to try and make money like a New York City professional, but spend like you're still a college student," said Robert Stromberg, who works with six figure earners in their 30s and 40s at his financial planning firm, Mountain River Financial, near Philadelphia. "If you don't want to adjust your spending, well, then you're left with just earning more." For first time buyers Mark Hildreth, a construction manager, and his wife, Caitlin Saloka, a global account supervisor for an advertising firm, both 28, their debt made it difficult to save for a home. "We blew most of what we had on a wedding in 2014," Mr. Hildreth said. They spent the next year paying it off while also trying to pay down student debt. Mr. Hildreth's parents used their home equity line of credit to help Ms. Saloka refinance her loans, reducing her interest rate to 3.5 percent from 12. Mr. Hildreth, who recently began pursuing a master's degree at Columbia, had several school bills of his own. He found a better paying job in 2017 and skipped retirement savings to save for a down payment. Ms. Saloka also got a raise that year, and they continued to live in the 1,350 a month rent stabilized apartment in the Fort George neighborhood of Washington Heights that Ms. Saloka found about seven years ago. "Anytime we would get money that we weren't expecting, whether it's a 100 birthday gift or a relative passing away or a bonus at work, we would invest that money," Mr. Hildreth said. By the time they were ready to buy, they had paid down about 70,000 of their 100,000 in loans and graduate school expenses. Their broker showed them a renovated one bedroom apartment, with an open floor plan, that hadn't yet hit the market, right across the street from where they had been renting. "This place kind of fell in our lap," Ms. Saloka said. They negotiated the 409,000 asking price down to 400,000. Mr. Hildreth's parents agreed to cover half of the 20 percent down payment. For the other half, "we were grabbing every bit of money that we had lying around," Mr. Hildreth said, including a stack of savings bonds from his grandparents worth just under 3,000. They closed in February of last year. First time buyers have also had success building their savings through investments, thanks to the bull market of the last 10 years. George Parson, 31, a process engineer at a snack food company in New York City, became the first in his immediate family to own a home after giving 50,000 of his savings to a financial planner who nearly doubled it in four and a half years. He considered using the money to travel, one of his passions. But he decided to buy a one bedroom apartment in Washington Heights instead. Mr. Parson grew up in the Bronx, where his mother rented "her whole life," he said. "If I decide to have children, I want to give them something better than what I had. I figured it was one of the last pieces of Manhattan where I could afford to live comfortably." As of January, the median home price in Manhattan was just under 1 million, about four times the national median. And the amount needed for a down payment is especially high for New York City buyers, in part because much of the housing stock is co ops that require at least 20 percent down, eliminating the possibility of using low down payment loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration or the Department of Veterans Affairs. In the third quarter of 2018, the median down payment in New York City was 177,000, according to ATTOM Data Solutions, a real estate data company. By contrast, the typical first time home buyer in the United States put down 15,878 in 2018, said Guy Cecala, the chief executive of Inside Mortgage Finance. But one bright spot for New York buyers, especially those in Manhattan: Inventory keeps climbing and staying on the market for longer periods of time, making it easier to negotiate. At a recent StreetEasy event that drew hundreds of first time home buyers from around New York City, Ms. Wu told the audience that Manhattan home prices fell 4 percent between January 2018 and January 2019. And in Brooklyn, price growth has remained fairly stagnant for the past year. Alex Novack, 37, a real estate broker at Sotheby's, and his husband, Fernando Gonzalez, 36, who works at a private bank, used that to their advantage when they began hunting for their "forever home" last summer. Neither of them were first time buyers, having each bought apartments in Chelsea before they met. When they married in 2014, they were renting a two bedroom, two bathroom apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. "You get to a certain point where, no matter how much you love your space, you want to make little changes," Mr. Novack said. But if you're making improvements to a rental, he added, "you feel like you're throwing money out the door." Although the men both work in lucrative industries, they weren't immune to the lifestyle changes often necessitated by a big purchase. Several years ago they downsized, forgoing water views and nearly 1,500 square feet in Brooklyn for a one bedroom in the West Village, which saved them about 2,000 a month on rent. They also cut back on other spending. "We didn't live a monk like lifestyle," Mr. Novack said, but they limited dinners out to once or twice a week and dialed back on their shopping. "You just try to be smarter," said Mr. Gonzalez, who has a weakness for Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman. "You don't have to buy everything full price at the top of the trend." The rest of their savings for the down payment came from bonus and commission money. Within four years, they had saved more than half a million dollars. Last year, they came across what Mr. Novack described as a "totally charming" two bedroom, two bathroom co op in NoMad, the area immediately north of Madison Square Park, with a small balcony and open exposures facing east and south. The apartment was listed for 1.599 million. They negotiated the price down to 1.46 million. "This is really our most meaningful real purchase together, for sure," Mr. Novack said. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. For the topics new parents are talking about sign up now to get NYT Parenting in your inbox. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
I never expected to be a house flipper. But I turned into one when we had to gut and renovate our 1920s house after an epic flood last summer while we were in the middle of selling it. One sunny afternoon last July, I opened the back door to discover it was raining inside. Water was pouring out of light fixtures, cascading down freshly painted walls, pooling on the brand new carpet in the basement playroom. We had just accepted an offer on the house, and now it looked like a crime scene. We had painted almost every room, replaced part of the kitchen, put in new flooring and more to get the house on the market, and all that work was ruined. Strangely, this was the second time we had nearly sold the house, and we had the sense that it was clinging to us, like a boyfriend you keep breaking up with who begs you to take him back and then self destructs so horrifyingly that you cannot dump him. Selling a house, dealing with a disaster and going through a whole house renovation can all be stressful. We signed up for only the first, but quickly found ourselves swept into all three at once. In the spring of 2018, our third child was about to graduate from high school, and my husband, Joe, and I decided to downsize from our four bedroom house in Montclair, N.J. When our neighbors sold theirs for over 900,000, we asked their broker to work her magic on our house. New boiler, new deck, a swimming pool we thought she'd love it. But she took a quick tour and listed the reasons our house was inferior to the one that had just sold: Our kitchen was dated; there was no first floor powder room; we didn't have central air conditioning. Probably a few hundred thousand dollars inferior. A pair of interior designers swept through to stage the house, turning our sunroom into a jungle with animal skin rugs, zebra pillows and fake plants. We got white comforters and shaggy fur pillows, like giant pets that had to be groomed every time we made the beds. We tiptoed through the rooms as if we were in a museum, afraid to sit on the fragile chairs and stashing the coffee maker in the basement after we used it each morning, to keep the new countertops pristine. We had given away a lot of our furniture and were able to move some of the things we planned to keep into an apartment we had rented as a transitional space while we figured out our next chapter. After a draining month of packing and painting and primping, we put the house on the market. The open houses were on the weekend of Mother's Day, and by Tuesday night we had three offers. That's when we got the first sign that the house wasn't ready to let us go. The prospective buyers had a baby soon after they made their offer and asked to extend the inspection period. Then they presented a list of items that were nearly impossible to fix, like the fact that part of the garage wall touched the ground. We fixed the reasonable things the inspection had raised and held a second open house at the end of June, and again we got multiple offers. The closing was planned for mid August, and we moved into the airy two bedroom apartment a few minutes away. All set, until our lawyer noticed one mundane detail: an outstanding town permit for sealing up a hole in the basement wall for a chimney liner that had been installed when we replaced our boiler the previous year. The chimney contractor came back one morning to patch the hole with cement and resolve it. As the contractor was leaving, he mentioned that he'd had to squeeze behind the boiler and had bumped a valve and spilled some water. He had cleaned it up, but told my husband to check the water level in the boiler. Fixed. Or so we thought. The next afternoon, I popped by to water the plants and feed the fish. That was when I opened the door to the horror show of destruction. Water spewed from pipes on the third floor like fountains, pouring down through every room in the house. The newly carpeted basement was ankle deep in dirty water. The floorboards were waterlogged and would swell and buckle within days. Water streamed through all of the appliances. The stagers' fluffy pillows looked like puppies after a bath. Fortunately, no one was hurt, and irreplaceable items like computers and family photos were safe at our new apartment. But for the second time, the house seemed to be trying to tell us something . The deal was off. Within hours, we would learn that the Chubb homeowners' insurance we had been dutifully paying for years was the best investment of our lives. Chubb immediately sent a flood damage remediation company to tear out drenched carpet and soaked walls, and bring in industrial strength dehumidifiers. All the building materials that had been carted into the house to primp it for sale were carted back out and thrown away. It took more than a month to dry out the house and then a few more weeks until the town's inspectors could issue permits to begin the renovation. Don't worry, everyone assured us, it can be rebuilt exactly as it was. Years ago, we had installed a big window at the back of the kitchen overlooking the pool, but cabinets had partially blocked the view. With the kitchen gutted, though, you could see straight through the house. It had a certain ruined beauty. Instead of rebuilding it as it had been, could we make it better? If we could stay within the insurance company's renovation budget, the answer was yes. We met with a kitchen designer who made a radical suggestion: Close up the window over the kitchen sink. It was brilliant. The stove went where the window used to be, with its gleaming hood becoming what she called "the hearth of the room." The designers who had staged the house helped make choices intended to appeal to the market mainly young couples and we kept it clean and simple, with a few unexpected touches like a plummy paint color in the sunroom. And Chubb suggested that we install a leak detection system called Leak Defense that would shut off all the water in the house if anything went wrong again. While the four month restoration was underway, I stopped by every few days to rake leaves and pick up fallen branches, so the house wouldn't look abandoned. But going inside felt like revisiting a trauma site . I knew it was irrational, but the house felt fragile; I was terrified that some misstep could set off another cascade and destroy everything all over again. On New Year's Day, we admired the new kitchen, sunlight streaming in at angles it never had before, flashing off surfaces that had never been there. But weeks later, as I drove to the broker's office to sign the papers to put the house back on the market, Joe called to say that the leak detection alarm had gone off. Could I stop by to see if the house was flooding? I tried not to hyperventilate. False alarm: It turned out that the third floor toilet had been running, which triggered the system to perceive a leak and shut off the water in the house. But the system had worked, and the house felt less fragile. We put our transformed house back on the market, and sure enough, there were again multiple bids within days. The best, for around 1 million, was from a couple who wrote a letter saying they had recently learned they were expecting their first child. And by the time we sold it in March, the house that had seemed cursed had flipped in our minds: Now it made two families feel lucky. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
EXPEDITION UNKNOWN 8 p.m. on Discovery Channel. Josh Gates has explored many exciting places as the host of this travel series: He's visited an archaeological dig site in Egypt, a sinkhole in Siberia and Australia's Shipwreck Coast in his mission to investigate historical mysteries. In the first episode of the new season, debuting Wednesday, he'll be in Normandy, where he follows historians studying D Day and tours a newly discovered World War II bunker. Don't expect him to stay there long, though: By the end of the season, he'll be in the Bermuda Triangle. McMILLIONS Stream on HBO platforms. The life and death of a scam in six parts, this new documentary series revisits an elaborate real life scheme that involved a former police officer defrauding McDonald's out of 24 million. The first episode aired on HBO on Monday; it's available to stream for those who want to catch up before next week's episode. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
At 68, Bobby Goldman has found herself in the unexpected position of recommending adult toys to strangers. She has written the book for the new musical, "Curvy Widow," based on her experiences in the post bereavement dating pool, at the Westside Theater. In it, the character of Bobby grapples with being single in her 60s (incognito trips to buy condoms) in today's landscape (casually sent graphic photos). The play's frank talk about sex during one's later years invites audience members to share their own laughs and frustrations, as Ms. Goldman explained during a trip to Babeland, a sex toy shop in Manhattan, last month. "I thought I was writing a funny little sex show. I had no idea people were going to come to me with tears in their eyes," she said. To one woman who confessed her fear of sex, Ms. Goldman recounted telling her, "You need a good gynecologist, and you need a vibrator." Eyeing one apparatus at the store that looked like a spineless cactus, she said, "It's going to fall out or do something peculiar." Ms. Goldman was married to the playwright and screenwriter James Goldman, who won an Oscar for "The Lion in Winter." His death in 1998 flattened Ms. Goldman. Her therapist's advice? Have sex, as his character recommends in the show. After a frustrating year on Match.com "The type of man who's on it and of a certain age shouldn't be on anything," Ms. Goldman said she stumbled upon Ashley Madison, the site specializing in extramarital encounters. Her profile, with the handle "Curvy Widow," netted over a hundred responses on the first night. A friend at Random House urged her to chronicle her adventures. "They said, 'What are you doing since Jim is dead?' and I said, 'I'm dating a lot of wealthy, successful, married men from a sex site.' They thought it was funny, and next thing I know I'm writing it," she said. During the talkback following that afternoon's matinee, the audience was largely older and female. "I liked the message that it's O.K. to be independent," one woman said. "I had a construction company; my clients were mostly men," Ms. Goldman replied. "Since 'Curvy,' I've developed girlfriends. For the first time, I have girl lunches and girl brunches. It's been terrific. I love men deeply, but they're simple folk." "Women are strategic," Ms. Goldman went on."We will stay up, watch them breathe and look for kitchen knives." Drew Brody, who wrote the music and lyrics for "Curvy Widow," recalled in an interview that he had been looking for new collaborators when he heard about Ms. Goldman. "Aaron Lustbader, who's now the general manager of the show, said to me, 'I have someone interesting for you to meet,' which was the understatement of the century," Mr. Brody said. "For the first time in musical theater history, we had to make a character smaller for the stage," he added. Ms. Goldman sent Mr. Brody a manuscript of "Curvy Widow" as a writing sample. "I called her and said, 'You know this is a musical, right?'" he said. "She hung up on me." Eventually he convinced her. "These stories are not being told, about older women being allowed to have a sexual appetite." Nancy Opel, who plays Bobby in the show bedding the male ensemble, wrestling with a hormone ring and singing a ballad from a bathroom floor said by phone that she was drawn to the idea of "a woman of a certain age who's actually embarking on romance." "Nobody writes shows about 50 , 60 year old women, unless they're crazy or terrible or drunk," Ms. Opel said. As in the musical, Ms. Goldman sold the penthouse she shared with Mr. Goldman and moved to a Midtown loft. In her previous life, she prepared six formal dinners a week for the likes of Audrey Hepburn and Sean Connery. "This morning I had Cheetos," she said. The rare night she's not at the theater or with a date, she watches MSNBC, "Law Order" or anything with Vin Diesel in it. These days, Ms. Goldman is dating six men, five married, one separated. "It's a nice number," she said in a cab downtown after the talkback. "They can't see you very often. It works out to about one date a week." These relationships are not just about sex, she clarified. "I was injured nine months ago, and I couldn't walk. Every single one of them showed up to my house and made sure there was food in the refrigerator. Men want to take care." While she does occasionally date single men, widowers are too eager for old patterns. "They don't want to be alone, and they don't know how to do laundry. I tell them I don't know how to do laundry either." She sipped a Campari and soda. "I don't want to give up what I have," she continued. "A lot of women in their 50s and 60s don't want to remarry, and part of that is men don't share. I think I was a great wife because I did everything in the world for him. I lost myself completely." Now she does not shrink from being center stage in her own life. "Men can be very fragile, and they like to be important," she had said earlier that afternoon. Once, in Peter Luger's, a restaurant she frequents, the wait staff sent over a bottle of Champagne. "My date looked at me and said, 'You certainly don't need me,' and walked out. If you're going out with me, you have to enjoy me." The waiter at Nomo Kitchen brought a flatbread, the cacio e pepe being too dainty a portion. "I'm at a point where it's confidence," she said of having sex now with several partners. "I expect to have a good time, and I usually do." And to any and all who might listen, she added, "And stop telling me I can't have it after 50." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Our guide to pop and rock shows and the best of live jazz happening this weekend and in the week ahead, plus a Times Talks event. MICK JENKINS at Public Arts (Oct. 15, 7 p.m.). When he first started releasing mixtapes online in 2012, this Chicago based rapper set about subverting several hip hop norms almost immediately. His catchphrase is "Drink more water" meant to be taken literally and as a metaphor for consuming anything that might make you smarter or healthier and his best known song is called "Jazz." After three full length releases, Jenkins has established his place on the more eclectic side of the same Chicago scene that produced Chance the Rapper; this show, where fans hope he'll be sharing new music, is one of four he's performing in the United States this fall. The show is sold out, but tickets are available on the resale market. 212 735 6000, publichotels.com/culture/calendar LITTLE DRAGON at Elsewhere (Oct. 15 16, 8 p.m.). This Swedish indie pop band exists where electronic music, R B and jazz meet, as is exemplified by their roster of collaborators, which includes Gorillaz, the producer Kaytranada and Big Boi. Over a decade after hitting the television soundtrack lottery with the 2007 ballad "Twice," which appeared on "Grey's Anatomy" and "90210," the group still has a devoted following among those who prefer their synths and drum machines with a side of soul. Both shows are sold out, but tickets are available through resellers. elsewherebrooklyn.com NINE INCH NAILS at Radio City Music Hall (Oct. 13 14, 7 p.m.) and Kings Theater (Oct. 16 17, 7 p.m.). Trent Reznor's still got it, if this summer's Nine Inch Nails release "Bad Witch" is any indication. Full of the memorably punchy song titles ("Play the Goddamned Part") and the raw, industrial rock that NIN are best known for, the succinct album shows they're as relevant as ever. On their current North American tour, they have been drawing from both "Bad Witch" and long dormant parts of their catalog for their set lists alongside, of course, all their impossible not to sing along to hits. 212 465 6225, radiocity.com 718 856 5464, kingstheatre.com STEELY DAN at the Beacon Theater (Oct. 17 18, 8 p.m.; through Oct. 30). For the first time since Walter Becker's passing in 2017, Donald Fagen and Steely Dan will be performing several of the band's most beloved albums in their entirety during their semiregular residency at the Beacon. "Aja" (on Thursday and Oct. 27) and Fagen's solo effort "The Nightfly" (on Oct. 20 and 29) get two nights each, while "The Royal Scam" (on Wednesday), "Countdown to Ecstasy" (on Oct. 24) and "Gaucho" (on Oct. 26) will each be performed for one night only. Another show, called "By Popular Demand" (on Oct. 21), will be devoted to fan favorites, and the finale (on Oct. 30) will be, fittingly, composed of the band's greatest hits. 212 465 6000, beacontheatre.com TOWER OF POWER at City Winery (Oct. 15 16, 8 p.m.). A half century later, they're still asking "What Is Hip?" This seminal funk group from Oakland, Calif., is celebrating their 50th anniversary in style, with a national tour, a new album (this summer's "Soul Side of Town") and a series of reissues. Still led by a core of original members that includes the saxophonists Emilio Castillo and Stephen Kupka, the crowd pleasing band has been integral to the sound of American pop music both through their own catalog and their horn section, which has backed artists from Aaron Neville to Aerosmith. 212 608 0555, citywinery.com KALI UCHIS at Terminal 5 (Oct. 12 13, 8 p.m.). A purveyor of the kind of beachy, seductive R B more often heard from Southern California artists like the Internet and SZA, this Virginia native puts her own spin on the genre by including delicate dembow and dub beats. But Uchis' music is about much more than setting a mood or starting a party (though it's capable of doing both): Underneath the reverb and nostalgic arrangements, she sings acerbic lyrics that recall the plain spoken melancholy of Amy Winehouse and Lana Del Rey. 212 582 6600, terminal5nyc.com NATALIE WEINER JOEL HARRISON at Cornelia Street Cafe (through Oct. 12, 8:30 and 10 p.m.). A guitarist by turns meditative and acerbic, Harrison recently released "Angel Band," the third in a series of albums devoted to works from the American folk and country songbooks. The result is sunny, gently sailing music informed by the guitarists Bill Frisell and Pat Metheny, as well as the free jazz pioneers Charlie Haden and Ornette Coleman (who explored folk roots in their own work). Harrison performs music from the record on Friday with an all star outfit: Jon Irabagon on tenor saxophone, Uri Caine on piano, Stephan Crump on bass and Brian Blade on drums. 212 989 9319, corneliastreetcafe.com JOHNNY O'NEAL at Smoke (Oct. 12 14, 7, 9 and 10:30 p.m.). O'Neal sings classic blues and soul numbers in an open, crowd pleasing style that blurs the line between camp and sincerity. He also happens to be one of jazz's most riveting pianists a largely self taught master of stride piano, with a lightning fast right hand. For years he played a late night set on Saturday nights at Smoke; this weekend he returns to the club as the featured performer, leading a quintet in a tribute to Thelonious Monk. The band includes Antonio Hart on alto saxophone, Steve Davis on trombone, Luke Sellick on bass and Itay Morchi on drums. 212 864 6662, smokejazz.com DANILO PEREZ, AVISHAI COHEN AND CHRIS POTTER at Jazz Standard (through Oct. 13, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). This run unveils a new quintet, collectively led by three jazz heavyweights from across the globe: Perez, a Panamanian pianist best known for his work with Wayne Shorter; Cohen, an Israeli trumpeter; and Potter, an American tenor saxophonist. The group is debuting a new set of original music, composed by all three leaders, inspired by female artists and writers, including the activist Angela Davis and the Israeli poet Zelda. The rhythm section is filled out by the bassist Larry Grenadier and the drummer Nate Smith. 212 576 2232, jazzstandard.com MARA ROSENBLOOM'S FLYWAYS at iBeam Brooklyn (Oct. 17, 8 p.m.). Rosenbloom is a pianist of thoughtful restraint and, elsewhere, effusive bluster. Her 2016 album was "Prairie Burn," a rumination on the mighty American plains with her longstanding trio. At iBeam she presents Flyways, a newer trio featuring Anais Maviel on vocals and surdo drum, and Adam Lane on bass. Their style of collective improvisation has a different ecological inspiration: the flow of birds in migration. Here the group will perform "I Know What I Dreamed," a new work pulling lyrics from the love poetry of Adrienne Rich. ibeambrooklyn.com SOFT MACHINE at the Iridium (Oct. 12 13, 8 and 10 p.m.; Oct. 14, 8 p.m.). It's been 50 years since Soft Machine released its first album alchemizing intrepid, jazz influenced improvisation with rock 'n' roll fantasy, thus creating something like a blueprint for progressive rock. The group has never held a constant lineup for very long, but a number of famous musicians have passed through the ranks: the founding drummer, Robert Wyatt, and the guitarists Andy Summers and Allan Holdsworth, to name a few. Soft Machine now features three members who joined in the 1970s John Marshall on drums, Roy Babbington on bass and John Etheridge on guitar as well as a more recent addition, Theo Travis, on saxophone, keyboard and flute. They recently put out "Hidden Details," a studio album of new material, and they celebrate the disc's release here. 212 582 2121, theiridium.com MATT WILSON at Dizzy's Club Coca Cola (Oct. 12 14, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). A widely acclaimed drummer with a mix of artful restraint and joyful abandon, Wilson last year released "Honey and Salt," an album setting Carl Sandberg's gnomic poetry to original music. On Friday and Saturday, he'll play that music with the core band featured on the album: the cornetist Ron Miles, the saxophonist Jeff Lederer, the bassist Martin Wind and the guitarist and vocalist Dawn Thomson. Wilson finishes his run on Sunday with a slightly different band Chris Lightcap replacing Wind on bass, and the vibraphonist Steve Nelson taking Thomson's place. 212 258 9595, jazz.org/dizzys GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO THEE OH SEES at Warsaw (Oct. 17 18, 8 p.m.). This deliciously quirky quintet from San Francisco is a pure All American rock 'n' roll mutt. Threads from a spectrum of sounds from a spectrum of scenes particularly the West Coast, with echoes of Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Sun City Girls and Helios Creed, to name just a few weave through their songs and gang up with the others to create music that's groovy and singular. Headed by the guitarist and vocalist John Dwyer, the group distills the best garage band posturing, psychedelic freakouts and prog rock adventures of the 1960s and '70s and, with a modern spin, twirls those components like some trippy pinwheel. More important, their music allows you to rock out, limbs akimbo, forming hilarious contortions of catharsis. mercuryeastpresents.com/warsawconcerts DANIELLE DOWLING CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD AND KANYE WEST at the Town Hall (Oct. 17, 7 p.m.). Moderated by Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The New York Times, this discussion between hip hop heavyweights will center on how to break free from your fears and anxiety in order to reach the next level of success. Since childhood, Charlmagne has struggled with anxiety, which is the main topic of his book "Shook One: Anxiety Playing Tricks on Me," which will be released on Oct. 23. timestalks.com | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The Weather Channel app deceptively collected, shared and profited from the location information of millions of American consumers, the city attorney of Los Angeles said in a lawsuit filed on Thursday. One of the most popular online weather services in the United States, the Weather Channel app has been downloaded more than 100 million times and has 45 million active users monthly. The government said the Weather Company, the business behind the app, unfairly manipulated users into turning on location tracking by implying that the information would be used only to localize weather reports. Yet the company, which is owned by IBM, also used the data for unrelated commercial purposes, like targeted marketing and analysis for hedge funds, according to the lawsuit. The city's lawsuit cited an article last month in The New York Times that detailed a sprawling industry of companies that profit from continuously snooping on users' precise whereabouts. The companies collect location data from smartphone apps to cater to advertisers, stores and investors seeking insights into consumer behavior. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
He is also played by David Oyelowo, which turns out to be a mixed blessing. Mr. Oyelowo is without a doubt the best thing in "Gringo," supplying the only grace notes in a cacophony of secondhand attitude and facetious overacting. But the deck is stacked against him, much as it is against Harold, who as the designated nice guy is assumed to be the least interesting person in the movie. The attention is lavished on his foils and tormentors, who are cut from gaudy, worn out cardboard and set in motion like furious windup toys. Ms. Theron vamps and sneers, Joel Edgerton struts and blusters, and everyone works hard to sustain a mood of jokey, wised up menace. It is possible to sit through it all without feeling completely miserable, and to remember a time when these comic grotesque shenanigans might have seemed fresh. The mid 90s, roughly, when this kind of knockoff of early Tarantino, middle period Coen brothers and jaunty Elmore Leonardism enjoyed something of a vogue. If you're tempted by "Gringo," you might be better off streaming something from that era. By the time the violence escalates from the amputation of a toe happy birthday, "The Big Lebowski" to gunshots to the head, "Gringo" has long since blown out its own meager brains. You keep rooting for Harold, of course, because he's a decent fellow who has done nothing whatsoever to deserve any of this. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
CLEVELAND Sound the trumpets, peal the bells! The Cleveland Orchestra, which many consider one of the finest ensembles in the nation and the world, turns 100 this year. But don't necessarily expect the orchestra, which plays two soberly sensible programs at Carnegie Hall this week, to join the clamor. There is no major commissioning project, such as you might see from other orchestras; no nationally televised gala. "It's kind of an understated celebration," said Gary Hanson, the ensemble's executive director from 2004 to 2015, "and that is absolutely true to the Cleveland Orchestra's character. It would rather not make noise. The quality of the performances is always supposed to be the loudest voice." Franz Welser Most, music director since 2002, elaborated: "We shouldn't be celebrating ourselves. We should be celebrating the city and the community." To anchor the season, Mr. Welser Most devised the "Prometheus Project," an exploration of Beethoven's music. It included an educational venture involving some 250 students of the Cleveland School of the Arts. Orchestra members worked with students of dance, painting, photography and the like for six months, and 11 young musicians from the school were coached to join the ensemble in the season opening performance of Beethoven's overture to "The Creatures of Prometheus." More grandly, the orchestra has embarked on a slightly expanded series of international tours; a trip to Vienna last October, with an innovative production of Janacek's "The Cunning Little Vixen," said to have been the first opera staging in the history of the fabled Musikverein; and a return to Vienna in May with all nine Beethoven symphonies, followed in June by a repeat of that cycle in Tokyo. The Carnegie repertory this week is substantial but low key: on Tuesday, Mahler's Ninth Symphony and the New York premiere of a work commissioned for the occasion, "Stromab," by the Austrian composer Johannes Maria Staud; and on Wednesday Haydn's oratorio "The Seasons," with the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus. The orchestra has long been renowned for its sound precise, lithe and transparent, yet not lacking in power or color and its disciplined work ethic, both honed by a series of strong maestros in the modern era. Much of the credit invariably goes to George Szell, the legendarily authoritarian music director from 1946 to his death in 1970. Christoph von Dohnanyi, Szell's elegant and punctilious successor from 1984 to 2002, liked to say, "We give a great performance, and George Szell gets a great review." (Pierre Boulez was the orchestra's musical adviser from 1970 to 1972; Lorin Maazel, its music director from 1972 to 1982.) In truth, Szell's legacy, at least when it came to sound, was mixed. In search of a dry, clear, immediate acoustic, he had the great Skinner organ in Severance Hall, the orchestra's classic Art Deco home of 1931, walled off by an acoustical shell filled with sand. The hall, magnificently restored, reopened in 2000 (complete with organ) and it continues to shape the orchestra's sound. "In general, people are on the same page," said Mark Kosower, the principal cellist (one of eight principal players hired by Mr. Welser Most, of 17 total). Mr. Kosower describes a self regenerating tradition in which "the musicians check their egos at the door and give what's best for the orchestra." Where other symphony orchestra may complain about rehearsals that run too long or conductors who talk too much, Cleveland players tend to complain if they feel they have not had enough rehearsal or enough direction from the maestro. Two incidents leading up to the Carnegie concerts spoke volumes about the ensemble's seriousness and adaptability. On Jan. 13, after performances of Mahler's Ninth Symphony on the two nights before, Mr. Welser Most led the orchestra in a superb third reading. If it did not have the warmth of, say, the Bruno Walter recording that long ago introduced me to the work, it was superbly played and full of the requisite tension. I detected no need for further rehearsal. Mr. Welser Most and the players felt differently. Some requested more work on the second movement. So half an hour of intensive work on that movement was wedged into a rehearsal on Friday earmarked for a Beethoven concert that night. This was no small matter. Players needed for the Mahler but not the Beethoven, who would otherwise have had the morning off, had to report for duty, and the orchestra's contract requires that any such change be approved by a secret ballot of all members. The vote was taken, and permission was granted. And last Thursday, the first presentation of "The Seasons" foundered when two of the three vocal soloists fell ill just hours beforehand. Replacements could not quickly be found. Mr. Welser Most decided in the late afternoon that the performance would go on in a much abridged form (75 minutes of the two hour piece), featuring the chorus and the last soloist standing, the brilliant South African soprano Golda Schultz. Ordinarily, the orchestra's librarians would have put scores on the musicians' stands detailing cuts and the order of play, but there was no time for that. Instead, Mr. Welser Most himself hastily drew up a road map to be placed on each stand, with notes like "No. 29 (up to measure 32 then cut to measure 55, letter B)." "In this orchestra," he said later, "everyone takes responsibility for what they do." Mr. Welser Most, no fan of the early music movement, led a robust, full bodied account of what remained. And between movements, he delivered amusing commentary off the cuff. The orchestral introduction to "Winter," he said, characterized "the weather here in Cleveland in November." It was all a model of professionalism, leaving the audience obviously entertained and feeling in no way shortchanged. The tenor and bass baritone soloists sang in the second performance, on Saturday, and are expected to appear on Wednesday. Despite the shortened rehearsal time, the Beethoven concert on Friday was excellent, as was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. celebration the Sunday before. Skeptics say that touring orchestras are steeled and on their mettle when they visit Carnegie Hall, adding, "They don't play that way every week at home." The Cleveland Orchestra, as I learned during a season (1988 89) spent as its program annotator and editor, plays that way every week, no matter what or where. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Now Lives Ms. Dunham splits her time between a rowhouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and a studio in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. She also has a ceramics studio in Austin, Tex. Claim to Fame Ms. Dunham is an emerging multimedia artist known for her fluid art installations as well as for her alter ego, QT, a pop singer. For a 2014 performance art project, QT released a single, "Hey QT," that promoted a fictional energy drink called DrinkQT. The bubbly pop song reached No. 14 on Pitchfork's Best Tracks of 2014 and No. 4 on Spin's list of the 101 Best Songs of 2014. Big Break After showing at the New Museum and MoMA PS1, Ms. Dunham was included in a three person show, "Everythings," at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in Chelsea last year. For the show, she created a chemical called Gel that took the form of a white liquid, a solid and a gas the latter of which was pumped through the gallery's air vents. In January, the gallery announced that it was representing the artist. "For any age, Hayden Dunham is one of the most unique, talented and innovative individuals I have engaged with," Andrea Rosen said in a statement. Latest Project The curator Neville Wakefield chose Ms. Dunham for the two part exhibition "Bio:Dip," which is at Red Bull Studios New York in Chelsea through April 17. For her project, Ms. Dunham visited sites in China, Iceland and Texas that generate energy, and created her own energy systems cum sculptures by tapping into the building's HVAC system. An ice sculpture melts into a vapor, while water in a black pool starts as a liquid and turns into an inhalable substance. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Fears that the current Ebola epidemic, the deadliest in history, was caused by a more lethal, fast moving or easily transmissible virus than in previous outbreaks appear to be unfounded, according to a new study. The study, a genetic analysis published in the journal Science on Thursday, is based on data that indicate that the virus has mutated over time in a way that is similar to that of previous, smaller outbreaks. Researchers say studies of more cases and more recent ones are still needed to confirm these findings. But the new analysis offers encouraging evidence that tests used to diagnose Ebola patients, and vaccines and drugs being developed to prevent and treat the disease, can continue to be based on the typical mutation rate. It also means worries about doomsday situations, like the virus's becoming transmissible by air, seem unlikely, experts say. Essentially, the study indicates, while this outbreak has infected 24,000 people and killed about 10,000, its scale has to do with where the epidemic erupted at the intersection of three vulnerable countries rather than with any unusual characteristics of the virus itself. The scientists evaluated change in the virus over time by comparing genetic sequencing data from a small number of cases in Mali in October and November with data from patients infected in Guinea in March 2014 and Sierra Leone in June. They found that the number of mutations was about the same as in viruses in previous outbreaks, suggesting that the virus was not mutating faster. And they reported that the genetic changes they identified were not significant enough to make the virus more transmissible or deadlier. "It doesn't suggest that the virus is getting any worse," said Dr. Thomas Ksiazek, an Ebola expert at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, who was not involved in the study. That supports the use and development of virus specific lab tests and drugs calibrated according to the mutation rate seen in previous outbreaks. "You would not predict from what they've published that we're going to have trouble with the diagnostics and vaccines and therapeutics" being developed, said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which partly financed the research. The cases analyzed in the study involved people who became infected in Guinea and traveled to Mali a 2 year old girl taken to Mali by relatives in October and an imam who went to Mali in November and whose illness spread to six other people before it was contained. Dr. Heinz Feldmann, chief of the institute's Laboratory of Virology and an author of the study, said the team obtained complete genomes from the blood samples of the 2 year old and three patients in the November cluster. Ebola virus isolated in November 2014 from patient blood samples obtained in Mali. Data from the March and June samples came from two previous studies by other researchers. One of those, using the June samples, reported a mutation rate "roughly twice as high within the 2014 outbreak as between outbreaks," and said that "because many of the mutations alter protein sequences and other biologically meaningful targets, they should be monitored for impact on diagnostics, vaccines and therapies critical to outbreak response." The authors of that study did not raise alarms about a fast changing virus, but Dr. Fauci said some misinterpreted it to suggest that there might be problems with lab tests or drugs in development. The Mali study's results allay those fears, he said. The study of June samples was larger, with 99 genomes from 78 patients. But since those patients became ill earlier in the outbreak, the later Mali cases make it possible to document change over time. "We go five months longer into the outbreak, and we do not find that this virus has a higher evolution rate," Dr. Feldmann said. His team used a different algorithm from that of the June team, and Dr. Feldmann said that when they applied their algorithm to the June samples, the resulting mutation rate was similar to previous outbreaks. Dr. Pardis Sabeti, a Harvard geneticist and an author of the study on the June samples, said the new study was "consistent" with her team's analysis, which she said found a similar number of mutations. She added: "There is no way to tell if the particular mutations change the biology of the virus without experimental studies. We shouldn't be alarmist, and we shouldn't be complacent." Dr. Feldmann said the next step was to analyze a batch of samples from Liberia from August to the present. The studies to date, including his team's, "are snapshots," he said. "The analysis will get much better if we can look at the entire outbreak." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
MUMBAI, India When Lord Ram a was exiled from Ayodhya and his entire kingdom began to follow him into the forest, he told his disciples: "Men and women, please wipe your tears and go away." So they left. Still, a group of people stayed behind , at the edge of the forest, because they were neither men nor women. They were hijras, which in Urdu means something like eunuchs. Those people waited in the woods for 14 years until Lord Rama returned, which won them a special place in Hindu mythology. There's a bit of a mystery about the story's origin scholars say it's not in the early versions of ancient Hindu texts but in the past century this folk tale about the hijras' loyalty has become an important piece of their identity. Hijras figure prominently in India's Muslim history as well, serving as the sexless watchdogs of Mughal harems. Today hijras, who include transgender and intersex people, are hard to miss. Dressed in glittering saris, their faces heavily coated in cheap makeup, they sashay through crowded intersections knocking on car windows with the edge of a coin and offering blessings. They dance at temples. They crash fancy weddings and birth ceremonies, singing bawdy songs and leaving with fistfuls of rupees. Many Indians believe hijras have the power to bless or curse, and hijras trade off this uneasy ambivalence. Gurvinder Kalra, a psychiatrist who has studied the hijra community, recalled the time when a troupe showed up uninvited at his nephew's birth. "The first thing people said was, 'Oh my God, the hijras are here.'" Then there was a nervous pause, he said. Then laughter. "There is this mixture of negativity and positivity, a laughter, a fear, this sense they are oddities," Dr. Kalra said. Radhika, a hijra living near a railway station in Mumbai, didn't think of herself as different until she started school, a chapter of her life that did not last long. After being teased by other children, she realized she wasn't exactly a girl, but she wasn't a boy either. Her mother told her not to dwell on it. It hasn't been easy for Radhika . Her parents split up when she was young, and her mother died soon afterward. None of her relatives wanted to take care of her. After she was essentially abandoned , an older prostitute discovered her and put her to work in a garbage strewn park selling sex. She was 8. A decade and a half later, Radhika is still a sex worker. She wears dark saris, chipped purple nail polish, a gold ring in her left nostril and her hair down the middle of her back. When asked how she feels each evening as she heads off to work, to stand in a line of other prostitutes along the railway tracks, waiting for customers, she shrugged. "Ever since I was a little girl, I learned the world runs on money," she said. "I learned that if I don't have money, I don't exist.'' In many ways, Radhika's story is no rougher, lonelier or more desperate than those of many other hijras. Many are engaged in sex work, locked into service for a guru who takes most of their earnings. Radhika wouldn't utter her guru's name. She seemed scared to talk about her. Within the hijra world, gurus fulfill the hybrid role of den mother, godfather, spiritual leader and pimp. The gurus are hijras as well, usually in their 40s or 50s. There is a bit of a pyramid sales scheme within the hijra community. Younger "chelas," or disciples, are managed by midranking hijras who report up to gurus, who are often steered by their own elder mentors. For every hijra, the idea is to get as many chelas working for you as possible. The money flows up; the protection from abusive customers or police officers flows down. But one guru opened up. She lives on the second floor of a slum house in Mumbai, up a narrow metal ladder, like on a ship. Different from Radhika and most hijras, who spend their years in small, airless shanties with the smell of feces wafting through cracks in the walls, this guru, who calls herself Chandini, rents a relatively large apartment. She sat on a cleanly swept floor, slumped against a Whirlpool fridge. "These days, it's so much easier to be a hijra," Chandini said. "Now there are doctors. When I had my sex change, we had to do it ourselves." In the past, she said with a sigh, countless young men died from sloppy castrations. They were often performed by people with no medical training. India has come a long way from that. In some states, such as Kerala, in the south, a person can now get a sex change at a government hospital. A few years ago, India officially recognized transgender as a third gender, eligible for welfare and other government benefits. Not all transgender people are hijras or members of guru families. Puja, a 28 year old hijra, said she felt a "sisterhood" with the other hijras in her house. Puja seemed a lighter spirit, happy in her own skin. She lives with three other transgender women and they cover their rent by dancing at temples and begging on the street. "Personally, I don't want to beg. Nobody wants to beg," Puja said. "And the situation is worse now for begging. The police harass us. They don't let us beg anymore on trains. But we aren't given any other opportunity, and now you ask us not to beg? This is not fair. This is not justice." At end of interview, Puja looked at me and asked very earnestly: "What do transgenders do in your country? Do they do sex work?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
MILAN The blond singer with a lot of cleavage on display leaned into the microphone and began crooning in a low, breathy voice: "Happy birthday to you...Happy birthday to you...Happy birthday dear '' No, this was not Marilyn and J.F.K. redux. This was Melody Gardot, the blues singer, and she was singing happy birthday to Bottega Veneta at a dinner for 150 in the vaulted halls of the Accademia di Brera, Milan's fine arts academy. Francois Henri Pinault, chief executive of the Kering Group, the brand's parent company, held the event among the plaster nudes and glimmering oil paintings in honor of both the 50 years of the brand and the 15th anniversary of its creative director, Tomas Maier. Well, landmarks are a big thing in fashion: chronological or actual, no matter. The song was a present for Mr. Maier, a normally contained man, who it turned out was something of a Gardot groupie, and he leapt out of his chair to give the chantuse a hug when the set was done. This put him right in line with the rest of the room, which was full of Bottega groupies. Karen Elson, the former model, who had walked down his runway earlier in the day in a tangerine leather skirt with a paper bag waist and a thin knit top that matched her cherry hair, was wearing vintage Bottega. The actress Marisa Tomei, in washed blue floor length Bottega, knelt by Mr. Maier's chair to chat and then drew curving lines under her eyes with a finger to indicate tears and said, "I feel so touched by this whole thing." She has known Mr. Maier for pretty much the entire time he has been at the brand ("We met in Miami," she said, where he used to live; he now lives in New York), and had been at the show. Later she moved her arms through the air in squiggles to illustrate how their lives had intersected over the years. And Lauren Hutton, who, at 72 had been the star of the Bottega catwalk, held court at Mr. Pinault's table and discussed her first Bottega memory and what it was like to walk in her first show. (That would be this one.) The brand had been calling and calling her agent, she said, wanting her to come to Milan, and she couldn't figure out why (and wasn't that interested, frankly). But then she remembered "this amazing woven red bag that I had carried in 'Gigolo' " meaning "American Gigolo," the 1980 movie that made her a film star. "I carried it in the scene where I went to see the gigolo" that would be Richard Gere "so it must have been full of money," she said. "Anyway, at the end of filming they let me keep my whole wardrobe, but I couldn't remember what had become of the bag." So she came to find out. And when she arrived to take her catwalk turn: "There it was! They had it!" In any case, while she rediscovered the bag, she was discovering the runway: in her modeling heyday, the 1960s and '70s, print models and runway models worked separately, and she had been a print girl. "It was such a beautiful experience," she said of her debut show strut. "And fun! But did you see the shoes? They were art, but it was like being subjected to Chinese foot binding. After one lap of the room, I said to them, 'I am really not sure I can do another for the finale.' And I have never said no to anything that involved work in my life. But I really didn't think I could do it. Then they said, 'Well, Gigi can help you.'" "Gigi" being Gigi Hadid, who has turned into something of a superhero in Milan. "So she did. And sometimes she was supporting me, and sometimes I was supporting her." Now, she said, she was supporting Mr. Maier. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
His main goal when making "Ancestral Recall" was to remind listeners that musical traditions centered on rhythm (African and Native American traditions in particular) have as much nuance and complexity as those built primarily around harmony (read: European). Across the album, Mr. Scott lets rhythms from West Africa and the Caribbean and New Orleans from the pre Columbian era, the 19th century and today lace in and out of one another. At key moments, the poet Saul Williams interjects with lines of imagistic poetry, wandering from speech to rap to song in a style similar to that of Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def). On the title track, he intones: Up from the water I was drowned. The bullet exits the body. The organs seal themselves. The planes appear out of fire. The people are praying right there where we left them. While he is saying this, Mr. Scott surrounds him in beaming trumpet lines declarative though unresolved as if heralding the arrival of a new regime. There have been two major stages of Mr. Scott's career among the most high profile in jazz today. From 2007 to '12, he released three studio records that wriggled smartly away from genre concerns. Thanks in part to their drummers, Marcus Gilmore and Jamire Williams each of whom had his own way of reconstituting the influence of Tony Williams the songs on "Anthem," "Yesterday You Said Tomorrow" and "Christian aTunde Adjuah" tumbled into your ear with the writhing, essential force of a feeling, or a mass of people on the move. Since 2015 he has placed a new emphasis on patterned, polyrhythmic drumming, using a tightened up approach and more explicitly melding the sounds of modern hip hop with ancient, diasporic rhythms. His output of the past five plus years have been defined by Mr. Scott's interplay with the flute of Elena Pinderhughes and the latticework drumming of Corey Fonville both of whom first joined the band on 2015's "Stretch Music" (a highlight), and who appear on "Ancestral Recall" as much as by its conceptual aspirations. The new album unifies the winning elements of Mr. Scott's past work: the historical syncretism, the tensile band energy, the powerful physicality. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
ERIC CLAPTON: LIFE IN 12 BARS (2017) 9 p.m. on Showtime. Upon hearing the blues for the first time as a young child grappling with a confusing home life, Eric Clapton was stunned. "Something about it got me," he says in this intimate portrait. "Something stirred me. Without me even being aware of it, it took all the pain away." Music's ability to heal is the recurring theme in this documentary. Directed by Lili Fini Zanuck, the film chronicles Mr. Clapton's rise as a rock 'n' roll trailblazer (he is the only musician to have been inducted into the Rock Roll Hall of Fame three times), yet doesn't shy away from his demons. The 72 year old guitarist opens up about his painful childhood, his battles with alcohol and drug addiction and the loss of his 4 year old son. ROOTS 12 p.m. on SundanceTV. As part of a celebration of Black History Month there's a marathon of this groundbreaking 1977 mini series. Adapted from the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Alex Haley, "Roots" retraces the author's family history, beginning with his 18th century ancestor's enslavement. It remains one of the most viewed television series of all time, and a remake was broadcast on History, A E and Lifetime last year. "Roots" was a "prime time national reckoning for more than 100 million viewers," James Poniewozik wrote in The New York Times. "As a television drama, it was excellent. But as a television broadcast, it was epochal." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Regardless of all the honors classes and A.P. courses they took in high school, or the science, technology and engineering classes they cram into their college curriculum, students today will not be fully prepared to compete in an increasingly global business environment. The problem and the solution is not intellectual. It's emotional. American teenagers are in psychological trouble. For the first time, college students today are facing more stress than their parents, according to a recent report by the American Psychological Association. The evidence is all around us. American teenagers attempt suicide more often than youths in most other countries, and they are among the world leaders in violence, binge drinking, marijuana use, obesity and unhappiness, according to a Temple University professor, Laurence Steinberg. A survey of more than 123,000 students at 153 colleges by the American College Health Association in 2013 found that more than half experienced overwhelming anxiety and about a third felt deep depression during the academic year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Soon after my Alaska Airlines flight had safely touched down at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, I noticed I felt a bit off. It was 10:30 p.m. but the sun was still hanging above the horizon and it looked like midmorning. My old Peace Corps friend Isaac and I stood in a parking lot overlooking Cook Inlet, where the famed captain had arrived in 1778 in search of the Northwest Passage. Purple and blue light reflected off the snowcapped corona of mountains that surround Anchorage Mount Susitna, or the "Sleeping Lady"; Mount Gerdine; and Mount Torbert. Looming in the distance, over 100 miles away and barely visible, was Denali, the highest peak in North America. "The long days get a little crazy," he said. Isaac lives in Anchorage with his wife and two children. "You find yourself wanting to garden, or go for a run, and it's 11 p.m." I began feeling it too a messing with your circadian rhythms that felt like a slight mania or internal buzzing. But I soon found that energy made exploring Anchorage and the surrounding area all the more fun. As one might expect, it's a city with hiking, biking, wildlife and an abundance of natural beauty that borders on the embarrassing. But it also has one of the more diverse census tracts in the country: Groups like Native Alaskans, as well as a substantial Asian and Pacific Islander population, give the city, its dining and its institutions a multicultural feel unlike any in the "Lower 48." (That's how Alaskans, only slightly derisively, refer to us mainlanders. What that means for Hawaii, I'm not sure.) And, if you know where to look, Anchorage is a great frugal destination, even though you should expect to pay a premium on certain things, like food. (The avocados and citrus you're enjoying need to be shipped quite a ways.) For residents, some of that is offset by the Permanent Fund, which in 2015 paid out 2,072 to every adult in Alaska simply for choosing to live there. The rest of us have to get creative and take advantage of the open accessibility of the state's incredible natural resources. Isaac took me out for a late dinner of tacos filled with tender, blackened cod ( 12.95) from Bear Tooth, a combination restaurant and movie theater in the Spenard neighborhood. One of the things Isaac relished about Anchorage, he said, was the feeling that you could make a real, immediate impact with your work, and that you had access to those in positions of power. "Alaska is one of those places where, if you wanted to, you could call the governor and talk to him," he said. Deborah Williams, former executive director of the Alaskan Conservation Foundation, expressed a similar sentiment when discussing controversial conservation efforts in the late '70s and early '80s. We chatted over a crab omelet ( 17) and sausage scramble ( 13) at Snow City Cafe, a cute diner downtown. "It was an immense amount of work," she said. "But I'm proud of what we accomplished: preserving the land for everyone to enjoy." Currently, less than 1 percent of Alaskan land is privately owned. She said I should talk to "Jimmy" about Alaskan conservation it took me a minute to figure out she was talking about President Carter. "You really should," she said. "He would love that." Accessibility is a theme in Anchorage, and its surrounding public land and parks the clearest extension of that. Isaac and I took a long hike up Flattop Mountain, a 3,550 foot high peak in Chugach State Park that's extremely popular with locals. After paying the 5 parking fee, we began the winding, slushy hike through melting snow and ice. It was very warm 72 degrees the same temperature that day as in Los Angeles. "You do realize that, if you don't make it to the top, your trip here will be a failure," Isaac ribbed me as I lagged behind on the steep, narrow path. The 90 minute hike was trying at points, but not too arduous. Tougher was stomaching the packs of 13 and 14 year schoolkids flying past us in shorts and T shirts. The panoramic view from the top was breathtaking the entire city lay before us, and Denali was clearly visible. We descended by glissading leaping down the mountain and sliding down the snow on your feet (and, in my case, my butt). Anchorage residents play hard, and there's plenty of great food to fuel their active lives. Seafood is a given, and one of my favorite meals came at a casual restaurant called Arctic Roadrunner, which has been around since 1964. My salmon burger ( 8.50), made from wild Alaskan salmon, was very satisfying, with fresh chunks of tender meat. The accompaniment was nearly as good thick fingers of onion, each a few inches long, battered and deep fried ( 2.85). I also visited Cherie Clonginger, who runs a small food cart on the corner of West Fifth Avenue and G Street downtown. Her business, Mon Cherie, offers a simple, delicious poutine of cheese curds and brown gravy over French fries served hot from a mini deep fryer she has installed in her cart. She also sells reindeer hot dogs. If you're able to exorcise images of Rudolph and friends from your mind, give them a try: The one I had, which resembled a pork sausage, was quite tasty, and not particularly gamey. The diversity of Anchorage's population, though, is what gives depth to its dining scene. I enjoyed some great dim sum at Charlie's Bakery and Chinese Cuisine the shumai dumplings were particularly good ( 3.75) as well as dishes like yuxiang qiezi, a pungent, garlicky eggplant dish ( 10.95). I also enjoyed a donor kebab sandwich from a new Turkish restaurant called Turkish Delight. While a bit expensive at 15, it contained a generous portion of beef and lamb meat in soft flatbread, along with a tangy tzatziki sauce. Kazandibi, a thick milk pudding with the consistency of a jiggly creme brulee, was an outstanding end to the meal. Getting around Anchorage is simple, and there are many options for transportation. I rented a car (Avis, 23 per day) because I knew I would be exploring the Kenai Peninsula farther downstate. Public transportation is an option, too: the People Mover bus system does an admirable job covering the sprawl of the city. (The city limits of Anchorage technically encircle 1,961 square miles nearly four times the area of Los Angeles.) Seeing Anchorage by bike is another option: Pablo's Bicycle Rentals offers a three hour rental for 20 and a full day rental for 40, helmet and lock included. One popular bike friendly destination: the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail, which runs about 10 miles and hugs Cook Inlet around to Kincaid Park. My favorite way of getting around, though, was on foot. Downtown Anchorage is very walkable, with most of the action running roughly from Third Avenue down to Ninth Avenue. Another friend, Kate, took me along Fifth Avenue, past Town Square Park, and past a beautiful old theater on Fourth Avenue (whose future is unfortunately uncertain). There were, of course, plenty of stores selling Alaska souvenirs, including Native goods arts and crafts from indigenous Alaskan cultures like the Inupiat, Aleut and Athabaskan peoples. A lot of what was there, though, looked a little kitschy and tourist oriented. So where to go to get the real stuff? "You have to go to the hospital," said Julia O'Malley, an Anchorage native and fellow James Beard award nominee (we were both nominated in 2015). We had just picked up a coffee ( 2.50) from Fire Island Rustic Bakeshop and were walking around Margaret Eagan Sullivan Park in South Addition, a cute neighborhood just southwest of downtown. "If you want really good jewelry and crafts, you have to go to the Native hospital." The Alaska Native Medical Center provides care to the area's Native and indigenous populations. It also happens to be the best place in the city to buy Native crafts, clothing, art and jewelry. The ANMC Auxiliary Craft Shop is easy enough to find within the hospital, but catching it during business hours can be tricky. It's open only from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. during the week, then every other Saturday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. They take only cash or personal checks. A sign on the door warns that crafts made from whalebone or baleen Native artists can work, in a very monitored capacity, in these media may not be taken out of the country. Though I didn't settle on a purchase, I had a great time just window shopping. A helpful employee recommended I take a look at the different displays of Native crafts throughout the hospital. "That way, you'll get a sense of what it is you might be looking for," she said. I went up to the fifth floor and wound my way down, looking at beautifully curated exhibits of clothing, dolls, baskets and other examples of Native craftsmanship on each floor as good as any I'd seen in a museum. (I visited two during my stay, incidentally: the Anchorage Museum and the Alaska Native Heritage Center; 15 and 24.95 admission, respectively, though I bought a combo ticket to both for 29.95). As pretty as those crafts where, though, it was the natural environs that inspired awe many times a day the monolithic mountains of the Chugach range force themselves into every aspect of your time in Anchorage. It's both jarring and strangely comforting. Animals also run wild around the city moose, in particular, regularly make appearances on residents' front lawns. A controlled way to both assist and view wild animals not just moose, but elk, tundra wolves and bears is the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center, created in response to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill that wreaked havoc on coastal wildlife. Zoos often have a slightly depressing quality, but I found this one to be an exception. For 15, visitors can observe the center's population of animals, most of which were orphaned or injured and are being rehabilitated. I saw red foxes, elk, moose and even a bald eagle. Most striking, though, were the brown bears. I watched Joe Boxer and Patron, lumbering and quite intimidating, from an open, winding boardwalk above the bears' habitat. It's safe the bears can't get you but thrilling, too, since there's very little separating you from the animals. I managed to snap a pretty decent photo of one of them, but it didn't do justice to the excitement of seeing these huge animals up close. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
We usually think of "erosion" as a geological term a way of describing a gradual sloughing of earth. But the word has an older and slightly more ominous meaning, coming from the Latin erodere, which refers to the idea of gnawing, scraping and scratching until something is consumed. What disappears isn't necessarily geological. Live long enough and you'll witness many forms of erosion: of belief, trust, safety and youth, of culture and democracy and yes, of the earth's surface and sheltering climate. It is in this spacious, all encompassing spirit that Terry Tempest Williams imagines erosion in her new book, as a process that also weathers the body, mind and spirit. Malignant forms for example, the effect of self serving political policies may be imperceptible in the short run, or even during a lifetime, yet still be massively destructive over a longer span of time. Most of the pieces here focus on Williams's political and environmental resistance to such marauding, including her acts of civil disobedience, their fallout, and her sustained grief and anger over the despoiling of the natural world. In one feral moment, she stands outside, throws back her head and howls like a coyote. She writes: "This is how I survive. With a family name like Tempest, I can only contain myself for so long until an eruption occurs: anger, joy, irreverence, love. These essays are my howl." Williams divides her time between Cambridge (where she is the writer in residence at Harvard Divinity School) and Utah, a place of wild beauty, where Bears Ears National Monument has been in the cross hairs of the Trump administration even though its protected wilderness contains land that is sacred to the Navajo, Hopi, Ute, Mountain Ute and Zuni Nations. In 2017, Trump decided to eviscerate its 1.35 million acres of red rock desert by 85 percent and open the rest to drilling and development. The case is currently in the courts. If his mission is successful, Trump will be the first president to abolish a national monument. Williams makes a poignant connection between the political and the personal: "Like the red rock desert before me, I too am eroding. Nothing fixed. Nothing static. Only a steady state of flux." She writes honestly and simply about her brother Dan's mental illness and suicide: "My brother's suicide is a noose around my neck and it is tightening. The questions left will never be answered" including a detailed description of his cremation. While it was in progress, Williams politely asked if she could light a candle, only to be told by a man in a black suit (who happened to be an acquaintance from high school), "'I'm sorry, Terry, no candles can be lit as it is against the fire code.' | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
What You Need to Know About Traveling to Australia During This Fire Season As one of the worst fire seasons in Australia's history continues to engulf parts of the country, authorities asked thousands of residents and tourists to evacuate affected areas, and the government announced the large scale use of military assets to try and tame the fires, leaving some people stranded and those with upcoming trips to the country unsure of whether to visit or not. Currently, fires are largely burning across the states of Victoria, where Melbourne is; New South Wales, where Sydney is; and South Australia, where Adelaide is. Military ships and aircraft have been deployed to deliver water, food and fuel to towns cut off by the fires, as well as to rescue those who are stranded. The Australian writer Richard Flanagan wrote last week that the amount of land the fires have burned is almost "as large as West Virginia, more than triple the area destroyed by the 2018 fires in California and six times the size of the 2019 fires in Amazonia." Here is what we know about the fires and how they could affect upcoming trips to parts of Australia. Where exactly are the fires and how bad are they? Since September, the fires have burned millions of acres across the country. The state of New South Wales has been the most affected. There have also been blazing fires in the state of Victoria. So far, at least 23 people have died, more than 1,500 homes destroyed and millions of animals killed. Both Victoria and New South Wales declared a state of emergency this week; on Friday officials said that conditions will worsen this weekend and pleaded with people to evacuate. "If you are holidaying on the South Coast, particularly the general area from Batemans Bay to the Victorian border, you need to leave before this Saturday," the New South Wales Rural Fire Service said on Thursday. The South Australian Country Fire Service is advising anyone traveling to Kangaroo Island, which lies off the coast of South Australia, and where there have been extensive fires, to check with their accommodation or travel providers. The island is a popular destination for Australian and foreign tourists alike. The fires and the conditions that cause them, including heat and drought, aren't new to Australians, but this season's extreme highs are. High temperatures and strong winds, combined with the long drought and low moisture in the soil, have kept fires blazing. Australia had its hottest day on record, with average highs of 107.4 degrees Fahrenheit, or 41.9 degrees Celsius, in December. The extreme heat came after the driest spring on record. In November, the state issued a "catastrophic" fire danger rating for the first time in the decade that the current warning system has been in place. Former New South Wales Fire and Rescue chief Greg Mullins said that beginning in April he and 22 other former fire and rescue workers tried to warn Prime Minister Scott Morrison that this fire season would be an especially difficult one and it would be wise to get more water bombers. The fire chiefs were not able to get a meeting with the prime minister, Mr. Mullins said. Last week, angry residents of the Bega Valley township of Cobargo confronted Mr. Morrison when he visited. Are major cities, including Sydney and Melbourne, safe from fires? Although the fires haven't ravaged Sydney or Melbourne, and have mostly been in rural areas, smoke and ash have reached coastal suburbs more than 50 miles away, causing the air quality to severely decline. The bush fires have created toxic pollution and choking smoke, causing the air quality index in Victoria to rise to more than 999 the worst in the world on Thursday. Any air quality index over 200 is considered hazardous to health. In Sydney heavy smoke has discolored the sky on many days, and the air quality there has at times been among the worst in the world. In Canberra, the nation's capital, the air quality rating was over 340, leading some businesses to remain closed on Monday. Beijing's rating was 170. The Australian Medical Association warned people who are sensitive to smoke, and those with pre existing heart and lung conditions, to take extra care during the fires. In Melbourne, people rushed to buy P2 and N95 smoke masks. People traveling to Australia should consider bringing their own. What should I do if I'm planning to visit one of the affected areas in the next few weeks? U.S. Embassy officials said on Thursday that tourists on the South Coast of New South Wales should leave because of "extreme fire danger." "Whilst bushfires continue to impact parts of Australia, many areas are unaffected and most tourism businesses are still open," said Phillipa Harrison, the managing director of Tourism Australia, the country's tourism agency. "It is more important than ever that we rally around our communities and the tourism sector who may have been impacted." It's worth remembering that Australia is a large country, with many parts that are unaffected by the current wildfires. Even in New South Wales and Victoria, for many people it's still business as usual, with the fires happening far away. People don't have to cancel trips entirely and those who are already there don't have to leave the country. There are currently no fires in the Northern Territory, where Uluru is, but there are some fires in Tasmania and in Western Australia, where Perth is, but all three areas are still considered largely safe. If I want to cancel my trip, will airlines and cruise companies give me a refund? If you are traveling to an area affected by the fires, you will likely be able to get a refund or have the option of rescheduling. However, if you are hoping to cancel a trip to a part of the country where there are no fires or where evacuations haven't been announced, then it's best to call your airline and talk to a representative. Airlines including Qantas, Virgin Australia Air New Zealand and Hawaiian Airlines are keeping a close eye on the fires, they said, but for now flights are running as usual. "We are monitoring the situation closely and will continue to address traveler concerns on a case by case basis," a media representative for Hawaii Airlines wrote in an email. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
When the choreographer Merce Cunningham was asked in 1991 what his vivid new piece, "Neighbors," was about, he replied, "Three neighborhood couples, probably from the suburbs." To the next question, "Is that all?," he answered, "Isn't that enough?" Alexei Ratmansky could say much the same about "Odessa," his peculiar and marvelous new creation for New York City Ballet, except that his characters aren't suburban: They're outgoing, intense, sophisticated up to a point, but thoroughly provincial. Mr. Ratmansky doesn't condescend to them or to the six couples of the corps de ballet. They're all dressed up to go dancing, and dance they do. The ballet's particular spell, however, concerns the overlap of their social interaction with their inner lives. While you see how these men and women behave with one another there are moments of personal violence here and there, you also glimpse their souls. Odessa is a city on the Black Sea. Even if this ballet didn't bear its name, you could guess that it was set today, somewhere in the farther reaches of what used to be the Soviet Union. The costumes, by Keso Dekker, have a very specific kind of strenuous semi elegance: the women in individually patterned mini dresses, the men in uniform striped shirts. And the music, "Sketches to Sunset," by Leonid Desyatnikov (Mr. Ratmansky has choreographed two previous scores by this composer), commutes between the psychological and the social. Now there are piercing, Stravinskian melodies for solo violin (accompanied by piano), now stomping orchestral tangos (gutsy Russian ones, like those in Shostakovich's ballet "The Golden Age"). "Odessa" was the closing item of City Ballet's spring gala at the David H. Koch Theater on Thursday night, and I watched it in constant suspense, twice coming close to tears, and loving its rich mixture of emotion. The way it opens up the larger psychological climate within a social situation feels new for both this choreographer and this art. Will repeated viewings deepen the experience? (It's repeated on Saturday and Sunday.) I had no problems adjusting to the world that Mr. Ratmansky creates here, but the charms of its Desyatnikov score and Dekker attire are finite. "Odessa," though arresting and varied, feels like minor fiction. Each of the three central relationships shows a different aspect of love, yet these six individuals have other emotions, too. Love isn't quite enough, especially for the women. The most poignant pair are Sterling Hyltin and Joaquin De Luz, who begin by not beginning. He ardently offers her his hands, but she's reluctant, maybe too brokenhearted, to accept. Ms. Hyltin beautifully combines fragility with purposefulness. Her powerful vacillations of feeling her uncertainty about their relationship (when she slaps him at one moment, you see it from her point of view) do much to shape the ballet. The corps de ballet six women, six men have their own exuberant ensembles; they also amplify the sections for the leads. Not only do the men lift Ms. Hyltin in marvelous parabolas at crucial moments during her scenes with Mr. de Luz, but they lift him, too; these choral moments help us to feel the characters' larger souls. All six leads have highly individual solos. The one for Tiler Peck (flanked by the female corps), with repeated turns into a sideways leg extension, is the ballet's most outgoing; Ms. Peck also becomes, arrestingly but reasonably, its angriest character. Taylor Stanley plays her aggressively assertive consort; one duet ends with her being lifted offstage while shaking her head in a mixture of protest and perplexity. The ballet's most dreamlike moment expansive but self contradictory comes with Sara Mearns's slow dance soliloquy. Just how this fits into the rest of the ballet isn't yet clear; it will be good to see how the many different parts of "Odessa" coalesce in days to come. Her partner is Amar Ramasar, and in one passage, amid the ensemble, they move on the floor, close to each other and yet in separate states another of the ballet's remarkable psychological openings. The gala's other three items featured the company's three senior ballerinas: Megan Fairchild in Peter Martins's "Jeu de Cartes" (1992, Stravinsky); Ashley Bouder in George Balanchine's "Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux" (1960); and Maria Kowroski in the duet from Christopher Wheeldon's "After the Rain" (2005). After a too knowing and effect laden start, Ms. Bouder's great moment was in her fearless jumps into Andrew Veyette's arms. Ms. Kowroski's grand beauty is too soft spoken to stop "After the Rain" from becoming another string of effects. Amid the busily changing structures of "Jeu," Ms. Fairchild's dizzy perkiness was fun; you want someone to give her a really comically silly role, a la Gracie Allen. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Zaro Bates operates and lives on a 5,000 square foot farm on Staten Island, which may make her the city's only commercial farmer in residence. But instead of a shingled farmhouse surrounded by acres of fields, Ms. Bates lives in a second floor studio in a midrise apartment complex built on the site of a former naval base overlooking New York Bay. The farm itself sits in a courtyard between two buildings at Urby, a development with 571 rental apartments that opened in Stapleton last year. Ms. Bates draws a modest salary and gets free housing, which sounds like a good deal until you discover how much work she has to put in. The 26 year old oversees a weekly farmstand on the complex premises from May through November and donates to food banks. In her repertory? Some 50 types of produce greens, summer vegetables, flowers, herbs and roots. She does this with help from her business partner and husband, Asher Landes, 29. "A lot of people instinctively call it a garden, but we really try to manage it for a commercial market," Ms. Bates said. "It's funny that people have different kinds of notions of what a farm is. Some people think it needs to have animals, that it needs to have acreage. We intensively crop this space so that we can produce for market, and that's why we call it a farm." Farming, of course, is a New York tradition. In the late 1800s, loam and livestock were predominant north of Central Park and in what is now the East 50s. In "Win Win Ecology," Michael L. Rosenzweig argues that ecological science has rooted itself in the common ground of development and conservation: the use of rich natural resources in places where we work and live. Farms like Ms. Bates's, in addition to more traditional farmland, have been around for quite some time. Thomas Whitlow, an associate professor of horticulture who specializes in urban plants at Cornell University, Ms. Bates's alma mater, said that in the 1940s some 40 percent of fresh market produce in New York was grown in victory gardens. "Certainly, urban populations in general are very adaptable as conditions change," Dr. Whitlow said. "They can change within the space of a year. Just a hundred years ago we were almost a hunter gatherer society and did indeed have farming in major metropolitan areas." Ms. Bates had hardly seen farmland as a child. Her parents, who moved to Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, in the early 1990s, rarely took the family upstate. They had the backyard of their home, but no green thumbs between them. The yard was a play space. After graduating from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell, where she studied developmental sociology, Ms. Bates volunteered as a groundskeeper at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Stockbridge, Mass. "That was the first time that I drove a tractor, did wood chipping, shoveled heaps of snow in the Berkshires winter, then planted in the springtime and just worked outside with a team of people through the seasons," she said. "That was my first experience with that type of work and really falling in love with that." Afterward she intended to travel, maybe visit South America. Her plans were postponed by an apprenticeship at Brooklyn Grange, a rooftop and urban farming consultancy group, where Ms. Bates farmed under the tutelage of the chief operating officer, Gwen Schantz. "We love designing and installing green spaces for clients, but it's equally exciting to see others taking this work up, especially young, savvy farmers like Zaro," Ms. Schantz said. The group played an advisory role in two fundamental aspects of Ms. Bates's life. First by helping her start her own consultancy, Empress Green, and by providing the pretenses under which she met Mr. Landes. The two now live at Urby and work on the farm during the spring, summer and autumn growing seasons, traveling abroad in the winter. The couple had consulted for Ironstate Development, the developer of Urby, ahead of the farm project, and are now consulting with it on a future residential farm project in New Jersey. While Ms. Bates is the affable and gregarious face of Empress Green, Mr. Landes caters to the bees in 20 colorful hand painted hives on the roofs at the Stapleton development. By his estimate, there are nearly two million bees, and each hive produces 50 to 80 pounds of honey a season. "In the spring this will be brimming with hemlock and filled with flowers and all the trees will be filled with flowers," Mr. Landes said of the farm. The bees will "be able to fly about nine miles to find good food. You stand up here and it's just like a highway. It's amazing." The honey, herbs and produce from the farm are sold at a stand for the community. "What we did was similar to other farmers' markets in the city," Ms. Bates said. "But because it was enclosed in a space that invites hanging out for a while, we really invited people to make it more of a Saturday afternoon activity. That was not just for Urby residents, but also anyone from the general public." Ms. Bates and Mr. Landes try to plant according to requests from local residents. The proceeds go to the couple's company, supplementing the annual salary they each receive from Urby. (Urby and Ms. Bates declined to disclose the amount.) They also host workshops and a book club. "The priority is to residents," Ms. Bates said, "but also to build community." She has considered offering a community supported agricultural association in which residents enroll to receive a regular supply of produce, but that would limit her client base. Her current all are welcome approach has Ms. Bates seeking other methods of distribution because, while there is a steady growth in demand, she produces more than she can sell even while supporting Urby's communal kitchen, where Urby's chef in residence hosts classes for tenants. Ideas include a subscription based meal delivery service. Even so, she is focused on expansion. Urby is developing another farm plot in the same complex, where now there is just a slab of concrete. Ms. Bates also hopes to offer more educational opportunities as the farm's output increases. Residents "want to contribute in some way, or they just feel like their kids should know what a tomato looks like growing in the ground," she said. "A lot of New Yorkers don't grow up seeing that." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
This is not your standard focus group approved politician fare; it's an honest, in the moment, firsthand account of a disappointed mother's foray into local politics. When her opponent and/or his volunteers plant his lawn signs directly in front of hers, Martini complains to her husband, wondering if she should "go all Lebowski y" before deciding that she's already invested enough time in lawn sign logistics. Martini tells it like it is, doling out levelheaded instruction while condemning Trump enablers with fiery scorn. ("Yes, yes, I find Trump himself distasteful, but it's the grifters around him who really burn my biscuits.") As she navigates the costs of print fliers and public service, Martini acknowledges the comfortable lifestyle that allows her to overcome political roadblocks with relative success and ease. Only in the wake of Trump's presidency does Martini realize the fallacy of America's equal playing field; she admits she has been "slow on the uptake" and she's sorry about that. ("Truly I am. But I've got the memo now.") When knocking on doors, Martini wonders what the experience would be like if she were not a middle aged white lady. Once on the board, she points out that she is in the enviable position of being able to work part time at her "actual job" in SUNY Oneonta's alumni office because she can rely on her partner's paycheck. She uses this privilege to make change: In an effort to diversify the board, half of Martini's initial platform is to change the meeting times so that citizens not yet old enough to collect Social Security can engage without compromising their livelihoods. Martini shows how critical issues of local government mirror the ones facing the nation. These include the opioid epidemic, affordable housing, fracking, transgender wellness, access to broadband and balancing the budget. She interviews a range of recently elected officials, including a mother who wonders if her marriage was the price she paid for her seat. These perspectives enrich Martini's narrative, but what really blew my mind was her exploration of the history of corruption in the coroner's office, which is as disturbing as it is fascinating. "Somebody's Gotta Do It" isn't sexy or scandal ridden and that's the point. Martini shows how "running for a local office takes a small amount of cash and a lot of time and moxie," and confesses that her time in government thus far "is simultaneously the most fascinating and the most tedious thing I have ever done." The reader becomes Martini's running partner on a route that is disproportionately uphill in the pursuit of a more perfect union. The challenge is worth the effort because, as Martini puts it, "Running very slowly while crying is still moving forward." I have yet to read a better summary of public service. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Jade eggs, sound baths, IV drips, bone broth in other words, all Gwyneth Paltrow's wellness secrets are coming soon to a newsstand near you. Starting in September, Goop, Ms. Paltrow's digital lifestyle brand, and Conde Nast, which recently closed the print version of Self, its health and fitness publication, are teaming up to create a quarterly print magazine entitled you guessed it Goop. By extending its digital operation into the physical realm, Goop, which calls itself a "contextual commerce platform" that "allows readers to shop with meaning," is taking a page from the book of e tailers, seemingly acknowledging the power of touch. Examples include Amazon, which has pop up shops in malls across the country; Moda Operandi, which opened a by appointment showroom last year; and Glossier, which now has a permanent space in Manhattan where customers can test and purchase anything that's online. The move also attempts to position Ms. Paltrow as the Oprah Winfrey of wellness. "I've long known Gwyneth to have wonderful taste and vision but with Goop she has built something remarkable, a thoroughly modern take on how we live today," Anna Wintour, Conde Nast artistic director and editor in chief of Vogue, said in a statement. "Goop and Conde Nast are natural partners and I'm excited she's bringing her point of view to the company." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
"Fox" evokes the cruelty of a dog eat dog world. A major scene is set in Marrakesh, where Fox has taken Eugen on vacation. The two men pick up a Moroccan (El Hedi Ben Salem, the male lead in Fassbinder's "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul") and take him back to their luxury hotel only to be informed that Arabs are not allowed. Of course, after the Moroccan is escorted out, the desk clerk offers to send a hotel employee to their room. Love is a commodity; social class is absolute. The idea that West Germany might also be a sort of colony is introduced by the presence of two American soldiers whom Fox vainly attempts to hustle. Despite its outrageously downbeat ending, "Fox" was promoted at the 1975 New York Film Festival as a daring display of "homosexuality without tears" presumably because the movie is so matter of fact in representing its gay milieu. Four decades ago, "Fox" was something of a novelty, as was Fassbinder, perhaps the first openly gay or bisexual filmmaker of note since Jean Cocteau. The New York Times critic Vincent Canby, an important supporter of Fassbinder's work, chose not to review "Fox," first shown as "Fist Right of Freedom"; the movie was dismissed in The Times by Richard Eder as "a 'Blue Angel' done in drag." When "Fox" opened commercially in New York it was at the Waverly (the same Greenwich Village theater where, two months later, "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" appeared), with the word "homosexual" prominently used in its ads. P ositioned as a niche film, "Fox" caus ed controversy. Some critics and activists took offense at Fassbinder's depiction of gay life or, more precisely, his use of a gay milieu to make fresh a familiar story of sexual exploitation. Discussing "Fox" before it went into production, Fassbinder made no mention of his main characters' sexual orientation, blandly describing it as the story of "a young entrepreneur whose company is on the verge of bankruptcy, and who manages to trick money out of someone to save the firm." When "Fox" had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, he maintained that "homosexuality is shown as completely normal," adding that the "problem" is social inequality and it's "something quite different." Hollywood movies like "The Killing of Sister George" or "The Boys in the Band," are told from an outsider's perspective. "Fox" is not. Fassbinder's on camera presence in virtually every scene gives the film a confessional aspect. Still, if "Fox" is a psychodrama, Fassbinder is playing a role. That he did not see himself as the character Fox may be gleaned from the movie's dedication to his real life lover, Armin Meier, and "the others." A few years later, Fassbinder and Meier, who soon after committed suicide, played themselves, as bully and abject partner, in Fassbinder's contribution to the 1978 anthology film "Germany in Autumn." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The New York Times Company announced on Wednesday that Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. will retire as the chairman and as an active member of its board of directors on Dec. 31, completing a generational shift at a newspaper that has been in the same family for more than 120 years. He will be succeeded as the board's chairman by his son, A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher. Mr. Sulzberger, 69, served as publisher of The Times from 1992 to 2017. He made sweeping changes during his tenure, taking the print newspaper from black and white to color starting in 1993 a move viewed with suspicion by some traditionalists and later transforming it into a digital publication. He became chairman in 1997 and will assume the title of chairman emeritus. His retirement concludes a changing of the guard, coming nearly three years after his son became the publisher and weeks after Meredith Kopit Levien, previously the chief operating officer, replaced Mark Thompson as the chief executive and president. Mr. Thompson, who held the chief executive job for eight years, was appointed to that role by the elder Mr. Sulzberger. "Serving this essential institution and working alongside so many gifted journalists over the years has been the privilege of my life," Mr. Sulzberger said. "There's an old saying, 'Laurels are nice to wear, but never to rest upon.' I know A. G. will not rest in his drive to empower our journalists and expand the scope of The Times's ambitions. And with a dynamic new C.E.O. and the best executive editor in the business, I depart knowing the best is yet to come." The Times has been run by the Ochs Sulzberger family since 1896, when its patriarch, Adolph S. Ochs, bought the paper in a bankruptcy sale. Arthur Sulzberger was the fifth publisher in its history. He assumed the job of publisher when George H.W. Bush was president and Max Frankel was the newspaper's executive editor. To prepare, he served in a variety of jobs at The Times, including as a correspondent in Washington and the night production manager overseeing the newspaper's printing presses at its former location on West 43rd Street. He also put in a two year stint as a reporter at the London bureau of The Associated Press. With Mr. Sulzberger in control, The Times weathered not only the rocky early days of its digital transformation, but an economic recession that claimed dozens of newspapers nationwide. A fan of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" who spent time away from work rock climbing in the Shawangunk Mountains, Mr. Sulzberger led The Times to 61 Pulitzer Prizes during his time as publisher. In 1996, he moved The Times to the internet. In 2011, he instituted a pay wall that was seen as a risk at the time, but has since become the centerpiece of the company's business. The next year, he gave the chief executive job to Mr. Thompson, who had been director general of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Brian McAndrews, the presiding director of the Times Company board, said of Mr. Sulzberger, "He was unafraid to take risks and make big bets from taking The Times global to introducing the digital pay model and he did it all while never veering from his commitment to continual investment in Times journalism in order to keep it strong and independent." Mr. McAndrews, Ms. Kopit Levien and A. G. Sulzberger all sit on the Times Company board. Mr. Sulzberger's time in charge was not without its missteps and moments of office turmoil. In 2003, he parted ways with Howell Raines, who had been the newspaper's executive editor for less than two years, after it was revealed that a staff reporter, Jayson Blair, had committed dozens of acts of journalistic fraud in his work for The Times. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Another dramatic moment came in 2014, when Mr. Sulzberger dismissed Jill Abramson as the executive editor because of what he characterized as "an issue with management in the newsroom." Ms. Abramson was the first woman to serve as the executive editor of The Times when Mr. Sulzberger appointed her to the job in 2011. He replaced her with Dean Baquet, the newspaper's first Black executive editor, who has led the newsroom since her departure. Much of his tenure as publisher coincided with a time of crisis in the news media industry, when newspapers across the country were dying off, unable to survive the one two punch of the transition to digital and the 2008 financial crisis. Mr. Sulzberger continued the family's commitment to journalism, keeping bureaus open around the world and adding journalists to its newsroom. When he left as publisher at the end of 2017, The Times had 3.5 million subscribers, 2.5 million of them digital only. Since A. G. Sulzberger succeeded his father in that role, the growth in subscriptions has accelerated. At the end of the second quarter of 2020, the paper had 6.5 million total subscribers, a figure that included 5.7 million digital only subscriptions. This year, for the first time, the Times Company earned more from its digital products than the print newspaper in a quarter. "As publisher and chairman, Arthur brought more change to The Times than anyone since Adolph Ochs," A. G. Sulzberger said. "His tenure stretched from the first front page color photo to experiments in augmented reality, from the heyday of print advertising to digital revenue eclipsing print." He added, "Our success today is directly attributable to his singular focus on the long term, his embrace of innovation and his sustained investment in quality, original journalism." A. G. Sulzberger became the leader of the Times Company, on Jan. 1, 2018, partly on the strength of his "innovation report," a 2014 document that was critical of the newspaper's failure to adapt quickly enough to sound digital media practices while also laying out a plan for its online future. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
This past winter, Sarah Fader, a 37 year old social media consultant in Brooklyn who has generalized anxiety disorder, texted a friend in Oregon about an impending visit, and when a quick response failed to materialize, she posted on Twitter to her 16,000 plus followers. "I don't hear from my friend for a day my thought, they don't want to be my friend anymore," she wrote, appending the hashtag ThisIsWhatAnxietyFeelsLike. Thousands of people were soon offering up their own examples under the hashtag; some were retweeted more than 1,000 times. You might say Ms. Fader struck a nerve. "If you're a human being living in 2017 and you're not anxious," she said on the telephone, "there's something wrong with you." It was 70 years ago that the poet W. H. Auden published "The Age of Anxiety," a six part verse framing modern humankind's condition over the course of more than 100 pages, and now it seems we are too rattled to even sit down and read something that long (or as the internet would say, tl;dr). Anxiety has become our everyday argot, our thrumming lifeblood: not just on Twitter (the ur anxious medium, with its constant updates), but also in blogger diaries, celebrity confessionals (Et tu, Beyonce?), a hit Broadway show ("Dear Evan Hansen"), a magazine start up (Anxy, a mental health publication based in Berkeley, Calif.), buzzed about television series (like "Maniac," a coming Netflix series by Cary Fukunaga, the lauded "True Detective" director) and, defying our abbreviated attention spans, on bookshelves. With two new volumes analyzing the condition ("On Edge: A Journey Through Anxiety," by Andrea Petersen, and "Hi, Anxiety," by Kat Kinsman) following recent best sellers by Scott Stossel ("My Age of Anxiety") and Daniel Smith ("Monkey Mind"), the anxiety memoir has become a literary subgenre to rival the depression memoir, firmly established since William Styron's "Darkness Visible" and Elizabeth Wurtzel's "Prozac Nation" in the 1990s and continuing today with Daphne Merkin's "This Close to Happy." While to epidemiologists both disorders are medical conditions, anxiety is starting to seem like a sociological condition, too: a shared cultural experience that feeds on alarmist CNN graphics and metastasizes through social media. As depression was to the 1990s summoned forth by Kurt Cobain, "Listening to Prozac," Seattle fog and Temple of the Dog dirges on MTV, viewed from under a flannel blanket so it seems we have entered a new Age of Anxiety. Monitoring our heart rates. Swiping ceaselessly at our iPhones. Filling meditation studios in an effort to calm our racing thoughts. Consider the fidget spinner: endlessly whirring between the fingertips of "Generation Alpha," annoying teachers, baffling parents. Originally marketed as a therapeutic device to chill out children with anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or autism, these colorful daisy shaped gizmos have suddenly found an unlikely off label use as an explosively popular toy, perhaps this generation's Rubik's Cube. But the Cube was fundamentally a cerebral, calm pursuit, perfect for the latchkey children of the 1980s to while away their lonely, Xbox free hours. The fidget spinner is nothing but nervous energy rendered in plastic and steel, a perfect metaphor for the overscheduled, overstimulated children of today as they search for a way to unplug between jujitsu lessons, clarinet practice and Advanced Placement tutoring. To Kai Wright, the host of the politically themed podcast "The United States of Anxiety" from WNYC, which debuted this past fall, such numbers are all too explicable. "We've been at war since 2003, we've seen two recessions," Mr. Wright said. "Just digital life alone has been a massive change. Work life has changed. Everything we consider to be normal has changed. And nobody seems to trust the people in charge to tell them where they fit into the future." For "On Edge," Ms. Petersen, a longtime reporter for The Wall Street Journal, traveled back to her alma mater, the University of Michigan, to talk to students about stress. One student, who has A.D.H.D., anxiety and depression, said the pressure began building in middle school when she realized she had to be at the top of her class to get into high school honors classes, which she needed to get into Advanced Placement classes, which she needed to get into college. "In sixth grade," she said, "kids were freaking out." This was not the stereotypical experience of Generation X. Urban Dictionary defines a slacker as "someone who while being intelligent, doesn't really feel like doing anything," and that certainly captures the ripped jean torpor of 1990s Xers. Their sense of tragic superiority was portrayed by Ethan Hawke's sullen, ironic Troy in "Reality Bites," who asserted that life is a "a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes," so one must take pleasure in the little things: a Quarter Pounder With Cheese, a pack of Camel straights. For these youths of the 1990s, Nirvana's "Lithium" was an anthem; coffee was a constant and Ms. Wurtzel's "Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America," about an anhedonic Harvard graduate from a broken home, dressed as if she could have played bass in Hole, was a bible. The millennial equivalent of Ms. Wurtzel is, of course, Lena Dunham, who recently told an audience at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, "I don't remember a time not being anxious." Having suffered debilitating anxiety since age 4, the creator, writer and star of the anxiety ridden "Girls" recalled how she "missed 74 days of 10th grade" because she was afraid to leave her house. This was around the time that the largest act of terrorism in United States history unfolded near the TriBeCa loft where she grew up. But monitored by helicopter parents, showered with participation awards and then smacked with the Great Recession, Generation Y has also suffered from the low level anxiety that comes from failing to meet expectations. Thus the invention of terms like "quarter life crisis" and "FOMO" ("fear of missing out," as it is fueled by social media apps like Instagram). Thus cannabis, the quintessential chill out drug, is turned into a 6.7 billion industry. Sexual hedonism no longer offers escape; it's now filtered through the stress of Tinder. "If someone rejects you, there's no, 'Well, maybe there just wasn't chemistry ...,'" Jacob Geers, a 22 year old in New York who works in digital sales, said. "It's like you're afraid that through the app you'll finally look into the mirror and realize that you're butt ugly," he added. In its more benign form, only a few beats from ambition, anxiety is, in part, what made Mr. Trump as a businessman. In his real estate career, enough was never enough. "Controlled neurosis" is the common characteristic of most "highly successful entrepreneurs," according to Mr. Trump (or Tony Schwartz, his ghostwriter) in the 1987 book "The Art of the Deal." "I don't say that this trait leads to a happier life, or a better life," he adds, "but it's great when it comes to getting what you want." Everything had to be bigger, bolder, gold er. And it made him as a politician, spinning nightmare tales on the stump about an America under siege from Mexican immigrants and Muslim terrorists. But if Mr. Trump became president because voters were anxious, as a recent Atlantic article would have readers believe, other voters have become more anxious because he became president. Even those not distressed by the content of his messages might find the manner in which they are dispensed jarring. "In addition to the normal chaos of being a human being, there is what almost feels like weaponized uncertainty thrown at us on a daily basis," said Kat Kinsman, the "Hi, Anxiety" author. "It's coming so quickly and messily, some of it straight from the president's own fingers." Indeed, Mr. Trump is the first politician in world history whose preferred mode of communication is the 3 a.m. tweet evidence of a sleepless body, a restless mind, a worrier. Some have suggested Twitter is a sort of crowdsourced poetry, but how many millions of miles is it from Auden: a cacophony of voices, endlessly shouting over each other, splintering what's left of a "national discussion" into millions of tiny shards. "We live in a country where we can't even agree on a basic set of facts," said Dan Harris, an ABC news correspondent and "Nightline" anchor who found a side career as an anti anxiety guru with the publication of his 2014 best seller, "10% Happier." Mr. Harris now also offers a meditation app, a weekly email newsletter and a podcast that has been downloaded some 3.5 million times in the past year. The political mess has been "a topic of conversation and a source of anxiety in nearly every clinical case that I have worked with since the presidential election," said Robert Duff, a psychologist in California. He wrote a 2014 book, "Hardcore Self Help," whose subtitle proposes to conquer anxiety in the coarse language that has also defined a generation. The Cold War, starring China, North Korea and Russia, is back, inspiring headline induced visions of mushroom clouds not seen in our collective nightmares since that Sunday evening in 1983 when everyone watched "The Day After" on ABC. And television was, as Marshall McLuhan famously wrote, a cool medium. Our devices are literally hot, warming our laps and our palms. "In our always on culture, checking your phone is the last thing you do before you go to sleep, and the first thing you do if you wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom," Mr. Harris said. "Just today, I got an alert on my phone about the collapsing Arctic ice shelf. That's scary as hell." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The University of Michigan said Wednesday that it was investigating whether one of its doctors had assaulted patients across several decades, becoming at least the third Big Ten university to reckon with allegations of sexual misconduct by longtime members of its medical staff. In a statement, Michigan said that "several individuals" had described sexual misconduct by Dr. Robert E. Anderson, who worked for the university for more than 30 years and died in 2008. Although Michigan did not detail the allegations, which it said included episodes as far back as the 1970s, the university's president, Mark Schlissel, said that the accusations were "disturbing and very serious." Michigan said its campus police department had opened an inquiry last summer, after Warde Manuel, the athletic director, received a message from a former student who said that Anderson had engaged in abuse during medical exams in the '70s. During the investigation, Michigan said, other people described "sexual misconduct and unnecessary medical exams," including at least one allegation that wrongdoing had occurred in the '90s. Local prosecutors decided recently that they would not bring any charges in connection to the allegations against Anderson, in part because of the state's statute of limitations, which is generally six years. Steven Hiller, the chief assistant prosecuting attorney for Washtenaw County, Mich., said in an interview on Wednesday that "nothing in the report" from university authorities showed evidence of any crimes that could prompt charges against anyone who is still alive. But the university, which issued its statement after The Detroit News approached Michigan for comment about allegations involving Anderson, said it was still asking others who may have been abused to speak with investigators from a law firm in Washington. "As part of our commitment to understanding what happened and inform any changes we might need to make, we now are taking the next step to reach out to determine who else might be affected or have additional information to share," Schlissel said. "Every person in our community should expect to feel safe and supported." Anderson was a fixture of the university's campus in Ann Arbor. He earned his medical degree from Michigan in 1953, according to an obituary published in an alumni magazine that described him as "a pioneer in the field of sports medicine." He worked under four football coaches Bump Elliott, Bo Schembechler, Gary Moeller and Lloyd Carr and was the director of the university's student health service. He retired in 2003. Until Wednesday, Michigan's inquiry had been unfolding behind closed doors while Michigan State and Ohio State publicly grappled with abuses committed by team doctors. Ohio State said last year that Dr. Richard H. Strauss, whose roles in Columbus included serving as a doctor for the athletic department, had abused at least 177 men in the 1970s, '80s and '90s. Critics of the university, including some involved in litigation against the school, assert that Strauss, who died by suicide in 2005, abused scores more people. In August, a review panel said that medical regulators had unearthed evidence of abuse during Strauss's life but that "systemic failures" at the university and the state's medical board had for years "prevented any tangible administrative or criminal consequences." And at Michigan State, there has been sustained fallout from the case of Lawrence G. Nassar, the former team doctor for the school and for U.S.A. Gymnastics who sexually abused many girls and young women. Nassar, who pleaded guilty to an array of charges, was effectively sentenced to life in prison, but prosecutors have also pursued others in connection with the investigation into his abuses. Kathie Klages, a former gymnastics coach at Michigan State, was found guilty last week of lying to investigators when she told them she did not remember whether two teenagers had told her that they had been sexually abused by Nassar. Lou Anna Simon, who was Michigan State's president until 2018, has also been charged with lying to investigators. She is awaiting trial. There have also been hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements and settlement offers, including one last month from U.S.A. Gymnastics, which said it was willing to pay 215 million to hundreds of plaintiffs, including Olympic gymnasts, who said that Nassar had abused them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Credit...Beth Coller for The New York Times 'Do Not Touch the Flowers!' One Family's Eco Adventure in the American Southwest As of March 16, the Anza Borrego Desert State Park visitor center is temporarily closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. The park will remain open. Check the website for further updates. We sustained our first cactus injury right after we got out of the car. My 10 year old daughter was skipping around the garden of indigenous plants at the Anza Borrego Desert State Park Visitor Center in Southern California and then, a minute later, "MOMMMMY!" from somewhere behind a catclaw acacia. It was not a promising beginning. We had come to Anza Borrego to 1) see the desert as it explodes into the colorful bloom for which the park is famous, and 2) camp. Like, outside. In a tent. The first time in my life I had pitched a tent was the night before in my living room, holding a glass of wine while my husband did most of the work. I love hiking and picnics and walking in the woods as much as the next city dweller, but I don't care for dirt, insects or proximity to animals that make noise. A park of almost 1,000 square miles, which is empty even when it's "crowded," seems like one of the last good places to spend a few days in the midst of coronavirus fears. In fact, as travel plans slow to a near halt around the country and around the world, camping seems more and more attractive, even to the camping averse. So we borrowed a tent from our neighbors and sleeping bags from our other neighbors, left our home in Los Angeles, and headed 150 miles southeast, to the largest state park in the United States. But just because we were ready doesn't mean the desert was. And Anza Borrego was the superest of the super blooms last year. But with great blooms, come great crowds. And great responsibility. "It's one of the things that comes along with spectacular events: We love them to death," Professor Faulstich had told me before our trip. "It's the wildflower paradox: People are so eager to experience the bloom that they trample the flowers and destroy the ecology. It's a very troubling paradox. So what do you do? People should educate themselves. Don't just visit and snap selfies. Engage, learn about the social and ecological communities. We need to love this environment in order to protect it." This year is not expected to be a super bloom year. And on our trip in February, the desert was predictably dusty and muted, but the flowers were everywhere less of a carpet, more a series of throw rugs. There were the sharp red spiky ones (chuparosas) and the tiny snowflake looking ones (rock daisies), the stunning lavender ones (wild heliotrope) and the optimistic yellow ones (checker fiddlenecks). And the bloom had barely begun. They will be even more spectacular in the weeks ahead the blooms typically peak in March (although experts are quick to point out that climate change precludes the idea of typical anything). Not going in a super bloom year means less traffic and fewer people. It means the gawkers who piled into Anza Borrego last year and trampled the flowers, shot selfies and turned the whole place into a traffic jam won't be coming back. My son, Finn, had the same thought. "Mama, I think it's better to come to the desert when you can still see the flowers, but there aren't a lot of people," he said. But first we had a cactus injury to tend to. "A few weeks ago, we had a hiker who fell into a beavertail cactus. Her whole side body was covered in spines," Ms. Theriault told us. "I gave her a bottle of Elmer's Glue and a Popsicle stick. She covered her skin in the glue, and once it was dry, she could peel the spines right off." Once the cactus trauma abated, we joined Ms. Theriault and a dozen visitors at a place called Yaqui Well for a flat, gentle hike the kind that wraps around small, sloping hills, abuts a shallow canyon, and rewards its guests with an otherworldly view of the desert at the finale. But before we begin our hike, Ms. Theriault reminded us of a few ground rules. "Nothing comes into the park, nothing goes out," she said. "And no ground fires." Finn is someone you can count on to be contrarian, and true to form, asked, "What if you start a campfire in a fire pit but you leave ashes behind?" Ms. Theriault was ready for him: "You have to take your ashes with you. And you cannot leave any firewood. Even a piece of wood will bring in different microorganisms, which could be damaging." Our group ranged in age from 5 to more than 70 years old a thoughtful, slow moving army of sun hats, neck flaps, cargo shorts and sensible hiking shoes. We were a vision of greige. "Today, we are looking for signs of life and death," Ms. Theriault said as we embarked on our journey. The hike was only two miles but would take roughly two hours since we would be stopping every few minutes to learn about the local flora. Ms. Theriault was an erudite teacher. From somewhere in the front of the group: "Are the barrel cholla related to the saguaro cacti?" "Oooh," Ms. Theriault said. She stopped walking. "Now that is an interesting question. I wonder if they might be the same genus." I had apparently and unwittingly wandered into AP Botany: The Study of Anza Borrego. I was better equipped for an audit. I hung back and started chatting with a fellow hiker named Alice, who was there with her husband and two young boys. They were visiting from Orange County in hopes of seeing a modest bloom. Ms. Theriault pointed out plants as we passed: Agave ("very painful"), Gander's cholla ("the most populous in this desert"), and beavertail cactus ("he looks friendly, but each dot is a cluster of spines" Frankie looked at me; we had learned that one the hard way). "The Teddy Bear cholla is known as the jumping cholla because it has a way of attaching to people who swear they didn't touch it," Ms. Theriault said. That's absurd. Who could brush up against a cactus without knowing it? I looked down and saw two cactus balls latched on to my sneaker and affixed to my sock. The desert was reminding me in whose backyard we were playing. Respect. "What pollinates the flowers?" Finn had worked his way to the front of the line. "If you get stuck in the desert, what's the best thing to eat?" This was Frankie. I looked at my kids, eager and enthused, delighting in their exploration of the desert. Teacher's pets, I thought. "A rabbit," said Ms. Theriault to their horror. "Or the beans of a mesquite plant." We had arrived at the culmination of the hike all of the Anza Borrego desert unfurled before us, rocky and craggy and unforgiving. It was like discovering Mars. Finding a spot to sleep at last It was late afternoon. Thanks to the mountainous horizon, the sun goes down fast in the Anza Borrego desert. I could see concern morphing into deep concern on my husband's face. It's one thing to put up a tent in your living room with a glass of wine. It's entirely another to do it in a desert. We had to find a spot, pitch a tent and feed two hungry children before dark. At Ms. Theriault's suggestion, we headed to a sweetly named place called Plum Canyon, which was apparently perfect for camping: quiet, flat, with a potential smattering of wildflowers. I can't confirm any of that because, in our haste to beat the sun, we took at least one wrong turn and ended up in the less comfortable sounding Grapevine Canyon. We found a spot, emptied the car, unrolled the tent, set up the cook stove and unpacked the cooler. Finn noticed that we were near one of the few highways in Anza Borrego. Alas, we repacked the cooler, closed up the cook stove, rerolled the tent, filled up the car and kept on. A short while later, we found a clearing big enough for a tent, a place for dinner and a modest game of soccer. Our little patch of Anza Borrego even came pre decorated with a yellow brittlebush and pretty red chuparosas. The tent was pitched, the quesadillas were cooked and the air mattresses and sleeping bags were rolled out. Once the stars so, so many stars and shooting stars! blinked to life, we settled into our sleeping bags, and Devin read "The Hobbit" to the children. At last, we were camping. No one camps in a desert to get a good night's sleep and ours felt more like trying to rest on a pile of rubble during a windstorm. Nevertheless, 5 a.m. eventually came, and with it, this question from my husband: "Did you forget to inflate the air mattresses?" Generously, my camping skills are a C minus. Hiking, on the other hand, was a different story. After pancakes (that tasted vaguely like quesadillas) and instant coffee, we were on our way to Hellhole Canyon. It's a nearly six mile, out and back hike that will reward you with blooms, views and ultimately, a real desert oasis. We shook off our fatigue and a layer of sand and we were ready. Do not touch the flowers! The desert, as so many BBC specials espouse, is alive. It might look barren and sound like the inside of a whistle, but there are all kinds of creatures in an endless loop of living, growing and dying. And Hellhole Canyon was the place to see it. As we made our way through the snaking incline toward the mountains, the kids were tempted, more than once, to take fallen flowers as souvenirs. But I had Professor Faulstich and Sally Theriault in my head. Stay on the trail! Do not touch the flowers! Take only pictures! Leave only footprints! "The danger of going off the path is that you will disrupt seedlings, damage the soil, break off stems," Professor Faulstich had told me. "You may even be bringing in non native seeds, which could do a lot of damage." The trail was about two and a half miles (one way) of mild, and occasionally moderate, hiking, rock climbing and flower identifying. It was easy to forget that this was late February: cloudless, shadeless, blazing hot. But just when you are about to consider heading back to the car, you turn into the canyon and head up into the crease of the mountain. Sand turns to actual grass, cactuses turn to unlikely palm trees, and monotones turn to rewardingly verdant color. That's how you know you're at the oasis, a kind of permanent, year round super bloom. The children took off their hats and dunked them in the stream. They took off their shoes and sat in the grass. Finally, unfortunately, it was time to leave. On the way back down, we passed other hikers on their way up. Frankie saw two children looking at a cluster of beavertails and warned them. She knew her cactuses. After all, she's been comfortable in nature from a young age. Danielle Pergament, based in Los Angeles, is a frequent contributor to the Travel section. Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places list. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Researchers set up a muon telescope in front of the Great Pyramid of Giza's north face. Borrowing a technique from particle physics, they discovered a 100 foot "void" inside the pyramid. The Great Pyramid of Giza has towered over Egypt for more than 4,500 years. Built during the reign of Pharaoh Khufu, the monument was a testament to the ruler's architectural prowess and is thought to have been a home for his mummified remains. For centuries, archaeologists have ventured into the Pyramid of Khufu, as it is also known, and marveled at the King's chamber, the Queen's chamber and the Grand Gallery. Now, using a technique from the field of particle physics, an international team of researchers has harnessed cosmic ray collisions to peek inside and uncover a hidden "void" within the pyramid's stones that is roughly 100 feet long, similar to the Statue of Liberty from her heel to her head. "We don't know if it's a chamber, a tunnel, a big gallery or things like that," said Mehdi Tayoubi, co director of the ScanPyramids project, which published the finding Thursday in the journal Nature. "We have chosen the word 'void' and nothing else because we don't know what this void is." Many archaeologists questioned whether the study offered any new information about the ancient Egyptians, and were quick to note that the team had most likely not found a hidden room filled with the pharaoh's riches. They said the so called void was probably empty space designed by the pyramid's architects to lessen the weight on its chambers and prevent them from collapsing, an example of features that were already documented in the construction of the ancient monuments. Khufu, also known by his Greek name Cheops, is thought to have ruled from 2509 B.C. to 2483 B.C., during Egypt's fourth dynasty. Though he constructed the largest pyramid Egypt has ever seen, the only intact three dimensional figure of him that archaeologists have found measures a mere three inches tall. Very little is known about him, so his pyramid offers one of the few looks into his life and reign. The site at Giza where his pyramid was built also contains two other major pyramids and the Sphinx. Since 2015, Dr. Tayoubi and his colleagues, now consisting of three separate teams of physicists and engineers, have investigated the pyramid using a particle physics technique known as muon tomography to see through to its core. "We tried to do for the pyramid what a doctor can do with X rays," Dr. Tayoubi said. Instead of X rays, the team used muons, the heavy cousins of electrons that form when cosmic rays from outer space collide with particles in Earth's atmosphere. The fallout from the collisions creates a constant bombardment of harmless particles that can penetrate deep into the planet. As the muons pass through matter they lose energy and decay, so if the team detected a small number of muons, that means they were passing through matter. But if they detected more muons, it suggests the particles were passing through empty space or less dense material. The technology was previously used by Luis Alvarez, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, to investigate whether there were hidden chambers in the Pyramid of Khafre in the 1960s. As muon detector resolution has greatly improved over the decades, it has since been used to see the inner structures of volcanoes as well as the irradiated Fukushima nuclear reactor. In 2016, Dr. Tayoubi's colleagues stood in the Queen's chamber and used muon detectors capable of making improved measurements to study particles as they passed through the pyramid. When they analyzed their data from a region above the Grand Gallery, a long inclined passageway that leads to the King's Chamber, they found something strange: an unexpected excess of muons. The first measurements were made by researchers from Nagoya University in Japan who were a part of the project. Then two more teams associated with ScanPyramids, one from France and another from Japan, also confirmed the anomaly with muon tomography, even from outside the pyramid. The discovery comes on the footsteps of the team's previous work, which detected a small void behind the north face of the pyramid in 2016. Christopher Morris, a physicist who conducts research using muon tomography at Los Alamos National Laboratory and was not involved in the study, called the findings "pretty amazing," adding that all the team needed to do was set up their muon detectors and reap the rewards. "All the other physicists who could have done it, and didn't, are jealous," he said. Arturo Menchaca Rocha, a physicist from the National Autonomous University of Mexico who has used muon detection to investigate the Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico, echoed Dr. Morris's sentiments and said the project's physics supported its claims. But archaeologists were more critical of the work. Mark Lehner, an Egyptologist from Ancient Egypt Research Associates, said that previous work had shown that the ancient Egyptians most likely constructed gaps in their pyramids and that the voids the team found are nothing special, or new. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Facebook's troubled cryptocurrency initiative, Libra, suffered new blows on Friday as the departures of key partners became an exodus. Stripe, Mastercard, Visa and eBay said they were all pulling out of Libra, a week after PayPal became the first company to drop out. While they continue to support the idea of Libra, the companies said, they will no longer be part of the coalition that is backing the effort. "EBay has made the decision to not move forward as a founding member," a company spokesman said. Mastercard said it was focused on its own strategy "and our own significant efforts to enable financial inclusion around the world," and Visa said its future participation would depend, in part, on Libra's "ability to fully satisfy all requisite regulatory expectations." A spokesman for Stripe said, "We will follow its progress closely and remain open to working with the Libra Association at a later stage." Also on Friday, federal regulators obtained a temporary restraining order against the encrypted messaging company Telegram, moving to shut down its Gram cryptocurrency. The twin developments illustrated the continued fluidity around digital currencies, which are unregulated and are being closely scrutinized for how they might affect established financial systems. Simon Taylor, a co founder of 11:FS, a consulting firm that advises companies on blockchain adoption, said Facebook's and Telegram's difficulties "show just how important it is to have a clear position with regulators before launching at scale." "Getting to a position of being regulated takes years of due diligence and hard work," he said. "This stuff isn't easy." Libra has been met with doubts and questions almost from the moment that Facebook unveiled the effort in June. At the time, the social network positioned Libra as the potential foundation for a new financial system that would not be directed by Wall Street or central banks. The cryptocurrency could be freely traded inside Facebook's properties, like Messenger and WhatsApp, and be used for international exchange, Facebook added. As part of that, the social network said, it had more than 27 corporate partners including PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and companies like Uber that had pledged to support the project. The partners are important because Libra will be controlled not by the social network but by a broad network of corporations, Facebook said. Yet many world leaders, regulators and central bankers including President Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin immediately criticized Libra and the idea of an unregulated currency. And they questioned whether Facebook, which is grappling with other regulatory issues around privacy and antitrust, should be heading up such an initiative. In July, David Marcus, the Facebook executive leading Libra, faced two days of questioning in Congress about Libra. Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, is scheduled to testify at a congressional hearing about Libra on Oct. 23. Facebook declined to comment on Friday and referred questions to the Libra Association, a Swiss organization that the company created to oversee the project. The Libra Association is "focused on moving forward and continuing to build a strong association," said Dante Disparte, its head of policy and communication. Even if the members change, he added, its underlying principles "will remain resilient." The group plans to hold a meeting on Monday in Geneva to formalize its membership. Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio on the Senate's banking committee, applauded the withdrawals of some of Facebook's partners from Libra. "Large payment companies are wise to avoid legitimizing Facebook's private, global currency," Mr. Brown said. "Facebook is too big and too powerful, and it is unconscionable for financial companies to aid it in monopolizing our economic infrastructure. I trust others will see the wisdom of avoiding this ill conceived undertaking." The Libra coalition has been fraying for months. After Facebook announced the initiative, some of the partners began having second thoughts. Many were wary that Facebook's regulatory issues and the uncertain legality of cryptocurrencies might hurt Libra. Some of the companies, particularly payments providers, rely on good relationships with financial regulators. The partners had signed nonbinding agreements, so backing out would be fairly easy, executives at seven of the partner companies told The New York Times in June. They also weren't obliged to use or promote the digital token. "We will not do anything that we think doesn't meet our own personal standards, as well as the standards of regulators that we respect around the world," Al Kelly, Visa's chief executive, told CNBC this year. In recent months, as skepticism around Libra was mounting, some of the partners realized the amount of resources they would have to commit to the effort was growing, said one person with knowledge of the situation, who declined to be named because the discussions were confidential. PayPal, which Mr. Marcus used to lead, said last week that it would leave the Libra initiative so it could instead "continue to focus on advancing our existing mission and business priorities." On Friday, Mr. Marcus thanked Visa and Mastercard "for sticking it out until the 11th hour" and pointed to how intense the regulatory pressure had been. In posts on Twitter, he said people should not read too much into the withdrawals. "Of course, it's not great news in the short term, but in a way it's liberating," he tweeted. "Stay tuned for more very soon. Change of this magnitude is hard. You know you're on to something when so much pressure builds up." Telegram, whose messaging platform is used by around 300 million people around the world, had also been making a push around its Gram cryptocurrency. The company began raising money for the project in late 2017. Its aim was to create a currency that could be sent anywhere in the world. "A whole new economy saturated with goods and services sold for cryptocurrency will be born," the company said in a document sent to potential investors in 2017. Unlike Libra, the Gram was supposed to operate without any central association or foundation, similar to Bitcoin. That structure gave many investors confidence that it could operate without the same regulatory restrictions as ordinary investments. As a result, some of Silicon Valley's biggest venture capital firms, including Benchmark, Lightspeed and Sequoia Capital, invested in the Gram. In total, Telegram took in 1.7 billion for it. Telegram committed to delivering the Grams to investors by Oct. 31. But the Securities and Exchange Commission said on Friday that it was suing Telegram before it sent out the Grams to investors and asked for a restraining order. The agency's lawsuit said the Gram should have been registered as an investment contract or security. Because it was not, the agency said, investors did not receive the proper disclosures and financial information. In the suit, the S.E.C. said Telegram should give back its "ill gotten gains" and pay civil penalties. "Our emergency action today is intended to prevent Telegram from flooding the U.S. markets with digital tokens that we allege were unlawfully sold," Stephanie Avakian, a co director of the S.E.C.'s Division of Enforcement, said in a statement. A spokesman for Telegram did not respond to requests for comment. Telegram has, in the past, ignored orders from the Russian and Iranian governments to shut down. It will now face the question of whether it wants to go forward despite the measures taken by the S.E.C. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Five weeks ago, I received a call from Milton Glaser. We'd never met, but he was kindly answering an email I'd sent his studio a few hours prior. At best, I expected a response from his assistant. Instead, I got a FaceTime Audio call from the 90 year old graphic designer. The result was a conversation that ranged from the confounding nature of his success to the motivation for his latest project. It would be one of his last interviews before his death on Friday, his 91st birthday. Only a few weeks before our conversation, New York had hit its Covid 19 apex. The infection and death rates were slowing, but the city's future remained in question. My prompt to Mr. Glaser, and the impetus for my initial email, was simple: In this moment of despair, could some form of artistic expression similar to his 1977 "I NY" logo, scratched out in the back of a taxicab help galvanize an ailing city? Mr. Glaser was already grappling with some version of the same question. In between dialysis, he had been working on a project he hoped to distribute to public school students across the city, and ultimately the country. It was a graphical treatment of the word "Together." "There was no business plan," said Ignacio Serrano, Mr. Glaser's graphic designer and studio manager. "It was about connecting people through art. He would use the example of, 'If you like Mozart and I like Mozart, we already have something in common. We have a bridge.'" First, how have you been managing throughout the pandemic? Well, I'm in dialysis three days a week. I'm at a facility that basically takes care of all your needs and excludes the world. It's as though you're suspended in space. But I realize that the whole world is now suspended in space, so it's not so unusual. At the same time, I'm trying to acquire a new studio next door to a new apartment we bought. So that is the height of optimism, to buy a new apartment at the age of 90. Is it hard to do culturally relevant work, the type you're focusing on, while "being excluded from the world"? You still have the same issues as any design, which is effectiveness. And you still have to invent stuff out of your own psyche, and assume that people will be equally moved or challenged by the idea. I'm actually developing something I haven't shown to anyone, which is simply a treatment of the word "Together." What gave you the idea for "Together"? When you watch television now it's so depressing. This sense of inertia, of not being able to determine your own future, it's very eroding. All we can do is have this sense that we are not alone. "We're all in this together" has been reiterated a thousand times, but you can create the symbolic equivalent of that phrase by just using the word "together," and then making those letters look as though they are all different, but all related. So if you want to use the word "together" it evokes the entire phrase and the idea that we have something in common. What's absent from "Together" is an overt reference to New York, the city that's been the focus of much of your previous work. I did that in order for it to be universal in the same way that "I NY" was. I want this identity to be adapted by others who are not New Yorkers. This is of course a world problem, not a New York problem. You developed the iconic "I NY" logo in 1977, and revisited it after the attacks of Sept. 11 with "I NY More Than Ever." Could "Together" have a similar impact? Well, I've done a lot of work in my life, but nothing was as durable as "I NY." For some reason, and it's a great mystery, that idea went all around the world. It hasn't disappeared into the pit of advertising material or sloganism, it's still all around. Particularly in advertising, we're in a cycle of a month per idea, and it's gone, and then there's something else to replace it. After all these years, I don't understand what it is that makes an idea compelling enough to move a person to a different perception. You're skeptical that your current project can have an impact, but you're still doing it? There must be some sense that it can break through. I have no idea. Actually, I'm surprised by how these pieces of art can affect people, and can affect their mood or attitude. Design starts with a desire to change an existing condition, but as I said, the shift is something you hope for, and most of the time don't get it. The "I NY" logo started with a city commissioner coming together with an advertising agency. Would you like to see Mayor de Blasio or Governor Cuomo do more to engage the artistic community in this moment? Well, I think they don't understand the power of these ideas. And what they do is they hire perfectly competent people and agencies that specialize in professional work. And to some degree, this is not professional. It's quite the opposite. Professional work guarantees results, and this has no guarantee, but we hope it opens the heart. And so it's very hard to quantify and it's certainly very hard for a government to select people that it's comfortable with, who are also extraordinary. You need people who go beyond what is objective and what is logical. I suppose you have to call them artists. You're a lifelong New Yorker. Is there something inherent in this city that will enable it to recover from the devastation of the pandemic? New York is full of diversity and complexity, and it's very hard to analyze because of that. New York is a mind set, and we're all arrogantly proud of what that represents. The word they've used is toughness, but it's also a combination of cynicism and generosity. It's unprecedented anywhere in the world. So it really cannot be characterized as just another city, somewhere. It's a kind of self contained universe, and by virtue of that, it makes decisions that other places don't. What advice would you give younger creatives, especially those who have been particularly active and engaged during this time? There's an odd combination of intuition and intelligence that has to be mustered to do this work. The part that is logical is only half the job. The other half is truly intuitive and comes out of some part of the brain that you can't control. It's the reconciliation of those two aspects that make things happen. But since the brain is an instrument that holds everything in the universe, it's there somewhere. Do you have any predictions as to how we come out of this moment? I have no faith in my own prediction. I don't think there's any way of telling what's going to happen. I know this pandemic is a cosmic change and that nothing will ever be the same again. But I do know that if there's a collective consciousness, if we realize we are all related and we need one another, that would be the best thing that could happen. Jeremy Elias is a New York based writer and an executive creative director at The Atlantic. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Back in 1996, Michael Cioffi and his fellow kindergartners took an apple picking field trip to Stuart's Fruit Farm, in Somers, N.Y. Little did he know that 22 years later, he and his wife, Emily Cioffi, would purchase their first house together just a half mile from the farm. The Cioffis he is 28, she 27 work as electrical engineers at Indian Point Energy Center, in Buchanan. Shortly after their engagement, they started house hunting in nearby towns. Their two year search led them to Somers, a 33 square mile town in Westchester County that borders Putnam County to the north. Last April, the Cioffis closed on a 2,331 square foot, four bedroom colonial, built in 1967 on 0.93 acres. In a highest and best competition with two other bidders, they paid 560,000, 10,000 over asking. While it was the house that lured them, the reputation of Somers's schools clinched the decision. Those schools were also the reason Amanda Casabona Cohen and Lawrence Cohen moved to Somers in early 2015 with their two sons, now ages 12 and 14. Mr. Cohen, 48, is the creative director at a Manhattan law firm; Ms. Casabona Cohen, 47, is a preschool teacher and the owner of Little People's of Somers, a local preschool that she bought in June. She grew up in Somers and returned in 2005, when her children were babies, after the couple sold their Upper East Side apartment and bought a house. But that house, in the northeast corner of the town, was zoned for schools in North Salem, about 10 miles east, and as her sons got older, Ms. Casabona Cohen felt the pull of the larger Somers school district. "We thought it had more to offer our boys, from sports programs to academic support to a wonderful, strong sense of community," she said. "We fit in here," Ms. Casabona Cohen said. "This is home." Roughly 22,000 people call Somers home. The town is predominantly residential, dotted with developments bearing names like The Preserve, Green Briar and Twin Knolls. It sits almost entirely within the Croton Watershed, whose reservoirs provide a portion of New York City's drinking water. "That limits development," said Somers's supervisor, Rick Morrissey, "and what development there is has to be more environmentally conscious." Still, development proceeds, with several housing subdivisions under construction. Until recently, PepsiCo and IBM occupied large properties in town (PepsiCo vacated in 201 6, IBM in 2017). Currently, commercial tenants are filling PepsiCo's former offices, and a proposal is under consideration for a STEAM boarding school in the erstwhile, I.M. Pei designed IBM buildings. Yet much of Somers retains an unspoiled character, with rolling hills, lakes, the sprawling Amawalk Reservoir and 1,000 acres of protected land. "We are very proud of our open space," Mr. Morrissey said. Somers is more densely populated to the north, where modest homes cluster around small lakes to form the once summer only, now year round enclaves of Lake Shenorock, Lake Lincolndale, Lake Purdys and Deans Pond. Farther south, properties tend to be more expansive. Mr. Morrissey said that Somers has 5,203 single family homes and 90 multifamily homes. There are 2,600 condominiums, all in the 1,100 acre Heritage Hills complex; another 66 townhomes are set to open this summer in the new Somers Crossing. As for rentals, there are 37 buildings with 387 apartments, including 235 affordable units, most designated for seniors. "We are meeting the housing needs of the whole spectrum," Mr. Morrissey said. Price wise, there is also a spectrum. "We have homes from 200,000 up to 2 million," said Joan Mancini, an associate broker and co owner of Mancini Realty. That range attracts diverse buyers, among them "young families and first time home buyers, empty nesters wanting to downsize and people looking for bigger homes and larger lots," Ms. Mancini said. Linda Crispinelli, an associate broker with Houlihan Lawrence, said that Somers's high end market has softened over the past year, due in part to rising interest rates and uncertainty over new property tax laws: "Homes listed at 800,000 and above are experiencing fewer showings and longer days on the market." Data from the Hudson Gateway Multiple Listing Service showed that on Dec. 21, there were 76 single family homes on the market. They ranged from a one bedroom, 1,266 square foot ranch, built in 1965 on 4.99 acres, for 274,900, to a five bedroom, 5,286 square foot colonial, built in 2000 on 1.7 acres, for 1,545,000. There were 37 condominiums for sale, ranging from a one bedroom for 255,000 to a three bedroom for 939,000, and there were 14 rentals, priced from 1,950 to 3,250 a month. The median sales price for single family homes during the 12 month period ending Dec. 21 was 527,000, down from 552,500 the previous 12 months. For condominiums, the median sales price was 410,000, unchanged from the previous 12 months. The median rental was 2,650, also unchanged from the previous year. Mr. Morrissey described Somers as a close knit community "with a small town feel." Residents enjoy summertime block parties, well attended high school football games, Veterans and Memorial Day parades and the annual Celebrate Somers festival. They gather at the 82 acre Reis Park, one of six town parks and site of ball fields, tennis courts, nature trails and the Somers Library. The high school, a 2018 National Blue Ribbon School, offers the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program. (In 2020, the middle school is slated to introduce the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program.) Mean SAT scores for the 2018 graduating class were 613 in English and 610 in math; statewide equivalents were 563 and 574. Commuters to nearby cities like White Plains, N.Y., and Danbury, Conn., have easy access to Interstate 684. Commuters to Manhattan, about 45 miles southwest, can drive a few miles east to catch Metro North Railroad's Harlem line at Katonah, Goldens Bridge, Purdys or Croton Falls. Rush hour trains to and from Grand Central Terminal take between 58 and 84 minutes. Monthly fare from Goldens Bridge and Katonah is 369; from Croton Falls and Purdys it is 422. Early in the 1800s, Hachaliah Bailey, a Somers farmer and drover, purchased an elephant, purportedly to help in his fields. But he quickly realized he had acquired a more lucrative attraction: a fantastical creature people would pay money to see. He called her Old Bet. Old Bet's arrival marked the start of the traveling menagerie business, as Mr. Bailey and his neighbors toured the region with monkeys, giraffes and other exotic animals. Somers became the epicenter of an emerging national industry, a precursor to circus animal acts. (James Anthony Bailey, who was adopted into the family years later, would launch the Barnum Bailey Circus, with P.T. Barnum, in 1881.) In 1816, Old Bet was killed by a disgruntled farmer in Maine. Nine years later, Mr. Bailey built the Elephant Hotel in her honor. There, in 1835, a group of menagerie owners formed the Zoological Institute to consolidate their interests. Today, the brick building houses Somers's town hall; it was named a National Historic Landmark in 2005. Outside, a sculpture of Old Bet perches atop an obelisk, a replica of the monument Mr. Bailey erected for her. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
THE DAUGHTERS OF YALTA The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Family, Love, and War By Catherine Grace Katz In the opening weeks of 1945, with their armies racing to Berlin, the three Allied leaders recognized that the war had reached a critical juncture and called for another strategy session to resolve difficult questions about the defeat of Germany and the future organization of Europe. Weary and coping increasingly with the frailties of age, Britain's prime minister, Winston Churchill, dreaded the prospect of traveling all the way to the Crimea, as far west as Stalin was willing to go. He harbored grave concerns about holding the meeting on the Black Sea coast, and complained that if the planners had been given 10 years to research a possible rendezvous site, they could not have found a more inconvenient venue. But eager to secure Soviet cooperation to guarantee victory in the Pacific, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, despite his own deteriorating health, accepted Stalin's proposal for a summit in Yalta. Churchill, who had suffered a serious bout of pneumonia on the way home from the last meeting of the "Big Three," in Tehran, grudgingly agreed to make the arduous journey, but warned his daughter, Sarah, that this time he knew he was "in for something." According to "The Daughters of Yalta," Catherine Grace Katz's detailed behind the scenes account of the conference, Churchill's trip did not get off to a promising start. Between the blizzard that chased them east and his percolating anxiety, by the time Churchill arrived at Malta on Jan. 30 for a preliminary huddle with Roosevelt, he was feverish and filled with trepidation about the upcoming negotiations. He was also sweating the state of the British American friendship, which was not as close as it had been in the early days of the war. It was essential that he find a way to settle Britain's differences with America, or it would portend badly for postwar cooperation. As he paced and fretted, it fell to 30 year old Sarah, a former actress who had enlisted in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, to take on the delicate role of supporting Winston that her mother, Clementine, had gratefully ceded. Sarah could manage her mercurial father, ease his worries and temper the linguistic torrents when he vented his spleen. Eager to redeem herself in his eyes now that she had forsaken her stage career and her much older husband, from both of which Churchill had tried to dissuade her, she wanted nothing more than to be allowed to serve as his chosen "second mate." Roosevelt, filled with his own misgivings about the 6,000 mile trek, decided to ask his timid 38 year old daughter, Anna, a mother of three, to be his aide de camp at Yalta. Suffering from congestive heart failure, the president struggled to conceal his weakened condition, though his pallor and hollow cheeks were obviously those of a very sick man. Anna, who had long wished to be closer to her father, had begged to accompany him in the past, but he had always spurned her in favor of one of his sons. Desperate for affirmation, she seized the opportunity to be by his side at the conference, sensing it might be her last chance to prove her worth to him. In 1944, after her husband joined the Army, she had moved back to the White House and quickly ingratiated herself, frequently standing in as surrogate first lady when her mother, Eleanor, was away, and eventually displacing his special adviser Harry Hopkins, who was battling cancer, as the president's closest confidante and fiercest protector. Roosevelt, Katz writes, had his own rationale for preferring his quiet daughter to his wife or usual advisers: "F.D.R. was able to thoroughly relax in Anna's presence because he felt that, as a woman, she had 'no ax to grind.' ... She existed to serve her family, especially the men, and to keep them tranquil and content." Katz spares little sympathy for Eleanor, who reportedly had never been a nurturing person, and for all her good intentions did not help alleviate his stress. "Could he be blamed for trying to ensure that a grueling trip be as peaceful as possible?" "The Daughters of Yalta" is Katz's first book, and she skillfully marshals diaries, letters, oral histories and memoirs to support her thesis that the pressures of wartime had warped normal familial bonds, so that the Western leaders' relationships with their daughters had become more like those between business partners than between parent and child. Loyalty and discretion were prized above all. The busy American ambassador to the Soviet Union, W. Averell Harriman, happily deputized his 27 year old daughter, Kathleen, to serve as his hostess and chief protocol officer, relying on her to supervise the final arrangements before the battalion size American delegation arrived at Yalta, and to engage in a little "soft diplomacy" on his behalf. (His second wife, Marie, pleaded poor eyesight and remained ensconced at home in New York.) As the younger daughter of the fourth richest man in America, Kathy was accustomed to taking charge from an early age she had helped manage her father's Sun Valley resort but nothing could have prepared her for the task of turning the ransacked 116 room Livadia Palace, the former summer home of the dead czar, into a suitable headquarters for the handicapped president and his entourage. The glamour of the imperial setting belied the mundane job of coping with the myriad housekeeping and hospitality problems, from an acute shortage of bathrooms and infestation of lice and bedbugs to something as trivial as a mistyped place card, which could offend a delegate's ego and have unforeseen consequences. In Katz's telling, these are daughters Lear would envy their devotion to their fathers seemingly knew no end. When assigned to the Soviet Embassy in the autumn of 1943, Harriman wrote to Kathy from Washington and asked her to break off his affair with Churchill's insatiable daughter in law, Pamela, who was all of 21 and unhappily married to his alcoholic son, Randolph. "Help Pam straighten herself out poor child," he instructed, then advised her to burn the note or lock it away. No fool, Kathy did as she was told and kept her mouth shut. There was, Katz says, an element of self interest. "She looked at the situation with pragmatic, transactional detachment an ability she no doubt inherited from Averell." If she did not keep his secret, she risked being sent home. Covering for her father's affair was a convenient way to earn his trust, and a ticket to Moscow. Roosevelt similarly enlisted his daughter to help hide renewed visits from his former mistress, Lucy Mercer, despite knowing how much this betrayal would wound her mother. Anna placated her ailing father, and shared the burden of guilt. "As the vault for his secrets," Katz writes, "Anna had made herself indispensable." Light on political drama, this entertaining history is nevertheless packed with vivid personalities, jockeying aides and insider observations about a pivotal moment in history. Barred from the plenary sessions and meetings, the "Little Three," as Sarah, Anna and Kathy were dubbed, had access only to "droppings," and had to glean the progress of the talks from the faces of the dignitaries as they emerged for dinner. Midway through the conference, the pickings begin to seem increasingly lean, much to the frustration of the women and the reader. More important, all three daughters, distracted by sightseeing excursions, underestimated Roosevelt's reserves of strength and gamesmanship in the high stakes negotiations. He effectively played up to Stalin by distancing himself from Churchill and concealed the atom bomb from the Soviets, all the while trying to win their participation in a new global security organization that he believed was vital to preserving long term peace. When the Soviet dictator raised his glass to the ladies who graced the final gathering, it struck me as an empty gesture. By the time the last banquet table was cleared, I could not help wondering what three such intelligent, enterprising young women might have achieved had they been allowed to do more than babysit for their famous fathers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
After multiple renovations, the first of which was supervised in 1959 by Ms. Bassman and Mr. Himmel, who later became a psychotherapist, the three story, 7,000 square foot brick structure at 117 East 83rd Street has most recently been reconfigured as two distinct residences with four distinct living levels under the same roof. In size and scope, and with the exposed structural elements in many of its rooms, it was, in essence, a loft ahead of its time: Ms. Bassman bought the carriage house because she envisioned it as a perfect raw space in which to make and display art, raise two children, and nurture a 73 year marriage. Ms. Bassman and her husband, who died in 2009, lived upstairs in a sun splashed duplex studded by black and white tile patios of their own design and brightened by oversized skylights; their unit has four bedrooms and three bathrooms, with a great room that doubled as studio. The white cabinetry in the kitchen is vintage 1959. Ms. Bassman preferred rooms painted white and floors tiled in white, though Mr. Himmel was allowed to paint his study in shades of brown. Most of the home's white glazed brick walls date to 1900, as do the polished concrete floors on the lower level. After Ms. Frankenthaler decamped around 1992, the downstairs studio and darkroom space was converted in 1997 into a duplex residence for Mr. Himmel, his wife, Caroline Miller, at the time the editor of New York magazine and currently the editorial director of Childmind.org, and their three children. D. D. Allen of the architecture firm Pierce Allen did the renovation, transforming a stark white space with 13 foot ceilings into a Mediterranean style retreat enhanced by a sprawling eat in kitchen that opens onto a garden and a master bedroom suite with blue carriage doors that reveal a glass roofed solarium. Originally designed and built by S. G. Slocum for John Boulton Simpson, the president of the Estey Piano Company, who used it as a garage and stable, the carriage house features a Romanesque Revival facade and retains a ground level garage large enough to accommodate a sport utility vehicle. An integral element of the studio, the garage offered easy access to whatever horse (for a famous shoot with the model Suzy Parker) or zebra (for an advertisement) that Ms. Bassman invited in. The garage caught Madonna's eye when she was shopping for a town house in the neighborhood: "Everybody with a private garage got a leaflet that said something like, 'Desperately Seeking Townhouse With Garage,' " Lizzie Himmel said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Enjoying this newsletter every week? Forward it to a friend and tell them to sign up at nytimes.com/rory. A few hours after Danny Drinkwater joined Aston Villa in the first week of January, a friend asked if he wanted to go watch his new club in action. Aston Villa was playing at Leicester City in the semifinals of the Carabao Cup, English soccer's midweek afterthought, the night after Drinkwater's move was confirmed. There was a space for him in an executive box at the King Power Stadium: Drinkwater could come along, pretty much incognito, and cast an eye over the Villa players who were, now, his teammates. Politely, he declined the invitation. It is not especially hard to discern why. Leicester was, of course, where Drinkwater spent the happiest, most productive years of his career: a central cog in the team that first won promotion to the Premier League in 2014 and then, as is still occasionally pointed out whenever Leicester is mentioned, won the English title two years later. It was at Leicester where Drinkwater grew into one of the most highly regarded midfielders in England. He won the Premier League. He made it to the quarterfinals of the Champions League. He played for England. He was good enough that Chelsea, the team that had succeeded Leicester as champion, paid 45 million to acquire him in 2017. A few days after that deal went through, Chelsea, in one of those quirks that soccer throws up so frequently that you wonder if the whole thing is scripted, visited Leicester. Ngolo Kante, a player who had left Leicester for Chelsea a year earlier, was given a rousing reception by his former fans. Drinkwater, named as a substitute, a little less so. The BBC described his welcome as "mixed." It is a fairly transparent euphemism. Perhaps that memory gave Drinkwater pause as he contemplated the idea of walking into the King Power, a few months short of three years on, to watch a game. Or, perhaps, it is something a little deeper. Perhaps he sensed that returning to Leicester, where his career topped out, would simply serve to remind him that he had fallen. He started this season on loan at Burnley, and hampered by injury he played once in the Carabao Cup and once in the Premier League. In January, frustrated by his lack of minutes, he canceled that loan and joined Villa instead. His first game was last weekend, a baptism of fire against Manchester City. Villa lost, 6 1. Drinkwater, clearly struggling to keep up, was held culpable for at least two of the goals. When he was substituted, it felt like an act of mercy. Elite sports is a brutal environment, even among those who do no more than watch it. Drinkwater's display made him something of a figure of fun: the fact he had been exposed so surgically by Kevin De Bruyne; and the fact his last three games in the Premier League have all been defeats to Manchester City, in the shirts of three different clubs. But his story is better understood, really, as less a three year punch line and more a cautionary tale, highlighting just how precarious a soccer career can be, the fragility of success and the damage that can be inflicted by one bad choice. In Drinkwater's case, it all turned on leaving Leicester. Chelsea as a club wanted to sign him; Conte, it has to be said, was a little more lukewarm. When his new midfielder was presented in 2017, Conte would only say that he had "specific characteristics" that he had been looking for. When Conte left the next year, even that gossamer protection was removed. Drinkwater lost all hope under Sarri. Those who know him say his love for the game dwindled and died. He had the sense that whatever he tried would not be enough and so, after a while, he stopped trying. He felt isolated, angry, besieged. The rejoinder here, of course, is the same as it always is: money. Drinkwater went to Chelsea for more money, and he has spent much of the last two years being paid a six figure sum every week not to do very much. Sympathy, in those circumstances, tends to be in short supply, even if the explanation for it he had the sort of childhood that contains so little money that you understand its importance all the more should carry some weight. Six months ago, he changed his agent, proof that he knows he has, at the very least, been poorly advised. He cannot change, now, the choices he made. But you wonder if over the next couple of weeks of the transfer window a few players might do well to reflect on what happened to Drinkwater not just how far he fell, but how fast, and all because of one wrong step. Drinkwater will be 30 in March. He has lost his peak years. He is undertaking extra fitness training, and more gym sessions, to make up for the time he has lost. He is trying to rediscover, as cliched as it sounds, his appetite for his work, his affection for the game. He knows that one choice, three years ago, has brought him here, to his last chance saloon. End of an Era? Maybe. Probably Not. But Maybe. Barcelona, it was revealed this week, is now the richest soccer club in the world, in terms of revenue: according to the financial analysts Deloitte, it raked in 936 million last season, putting the Spanish champion ahead of Real Madrid and Manchester United for the first time. That news emerged at roughly the same time as it was becoming clear that Barcelona is most definitely not the best run club in the world. Its dismissal of its unloved coach, Ernesto Valverde, this week proved that rather neatly. The world knew Valverde had been fired about eight hours before Barcelona confirmed it. The club owed him better. Amid all the self immolation, one detail stood out: Lionel Messi has a clause in his contract that allows him to leave this summer. The clause, similar to one enjoyed by Xavi Hernandez and Andres Iniesta previously, was included at the player's behest, and in theory exists so Messi, 32, can assess his physical condition. In reality, it is a happiness clause: If Messi is unhappy, then he can walk. It is unlikely that he would do so, of course: he has always said his loyalty to Barcelona outstrips any contract. But it is curious to wonder not only where he would go How many clubs can afford him? Would he want to uproot his family? What sort of offer would appeal? but whether, perhaps, he ought to. Messi wants to win another Champions League title. That is his priority as he enters his twilight years. His presence alone means that could be with Barcelona; he can, after all, turn any game at all in his team's favor, almost by himself. But as the chaotic firing of Valverde proves, he is not at a club with a cogent vision for its future. Might there not be some small temptation, for all his loyalty, to move somewhere he would not have to cover up everyone else's mistakes? It sounds, on the surface, like an easy task. Tottenham Hotspur needs to sign a striker to act as backup to Harry Kane: someone to relieve the burden from the club's totem, a little, and to stand in for him when he is injured, as he is now, until April at the earliest. There are plenty of candidates: Krzysztof Piatek of A.C. Milan, a team that desperately needs to raise funds to invest elsewhere; Edinson Cavani, out in the cold at Paris St. Germain since the arrival of Mauro Icardi; Arkadiusz Milik, never quite settled at Napoli. There are plenty of strikers good enough to be Kane's backup. That is not the problem, though. The problem is that all of those players will know exactly how the pecking order works at Tottenham: If Kane is fit, he plays. Even if Kane is not fully fit, as the Champions League final last year proved, there is a pretty good chance that he plays. Spurs effectively have to persuade a player to come to north London with the pitch: "We want you to be our plan B." Naturally, that limits a club's options. Some problems in soccer can be solved by money, of course, but not all of them. If a player wants regular game time, or has international aspirations, or just plain has too much ego to accept a backup role, they will not find that prospect compelling. It is easy to say Tottenham needs to sign a supporting cast for Kane. It is much, much more difficult to find someone to take on the job. James Armstrong has a suggestion for reviving the F.A. Cup. "The top three in the Premier League plus the F.A. Cup winner should go to the Champions League, increasing the value of the trophy," he wrote. "Teams that are effectively out of the running in the league have a possible large payoff; the race in the Premier League becomes for the top three, not the top four, making it a little tighter." My objection to this idea has always been that it in some way discredits the Champions League: What if a team in the top three wins the F.A. Cup, and then some no marks get a spot in Europe's most exclusive competition as runners up? James has a solution: In that instance, the team that finishes fourth in the league gets the final spot. There is merit in this, but I think it is unlikely ever to come to fruition. We may have to make do with cosmetic changes the end of replays, for example, and changing when the tournament is played first. That's all for this week. Thanks for all the correspondence, as ever. I'm on Twitter for two hours per day, according to my phone: it's a problem, and I freely admit that. Emails are always welcome to askrory nytimes.com. And you can tell everyone you know about how nice it is to get an email every Friday here. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Precious Achiuwa's road to the N.B.A. has had many stops and a pandemic detour but, as one of his coaches said, he "had this willingness to do whatever it was going to take." Precious Achiuwa has never been in the same place for long. He tends to be on the move from Nigeria to New York to Memphis. Stationed in Long Island City, Queens, for the past seven months as he prepares for the N.B.A. draft on Nov. 18, Achiuwa has been coping with a rare period of extended monotony. A projected first round pick who spent last season at the University of Memphis, Achiuwa, 21, works out with his trainer. He does "a whole bunch of Zoom calls" with front office personnel. He takes unscripted naps. He visits with his older brother God'sgift Achiuwa, 30, who lives not far from him in Queens. But it has been a fairly solitary and stationary existence, a change of pace for a 6 foot 9 forward with drive. "Seven months of doing the same thing," he said, "over and over." He misses competition, he said. Games of five on five have been off limits during the coronavirus pandemic. He has tried to fill the void in creative ways. His first love growing up in Nigeria was soccer, and he has a ball at his apartment that he juggles with his feet every day. "I set goals for myself," he said. "I'll be like: 'You know what? I did 25 in a row yesterday. Today, I'm going to try to get 30.'" But the wait is nearly over. Training camps are tentatively set to open Dec. 1, just 13 days after the draft. For prospective first year players like Achiuwa, it will be a quick transition. No summer league. No long runway to acclimate to the league. And no time to waste. Achiuwa is eager to learn where he will wind up next. His life, in many ways, has been a nomadic one. One of six siblings, he grew up in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where his parents, Donatus and Eunice, were Pentecostal ministers. In Port Harcourt, over 350 miles southeast of Lagos by car, soccer was the game of choice. Basketball was not that alluring to Achiuwa not when he was very young, anyway. "We had a basketball around the house, and I'd pick it up and dribble it once or twice," he said. "Then I'd put it back down and go back to kicking the soccer ball." As a teenager, God'sgift attended a basketball camp in Nigeria where he was scouted by Alex Nwora, the longtime coach at Erie Community College in Buffalo. Nwora eventually offered a scholarship, and God'sgift a 6 foot 8 forward jumped at the chance. "I think any time a kid from Africa has the opportunity to come to the U.S. to play basketball and get an education, it's a no brainer," God'sgift Achiuwa said. God'sgift later transferred to St. John's, where he played for two seasons before graduating in 2014. By then, Precious was 14 and showing promise of his own as a basketball player. So much promise, in fact, that God'sgift wanted his brother to live with him in Queens so that he could attend high school in the city. God'sgift approached several coaches to gauge their interest. "Some of them were actually demanding video of him playing," God'sgift said. "And I told them: 'Listen, he's going to at least be as tall and as big as I am. It runs in the family.'" He secured a scholarship for Precious to attend Our Saviour Lutheran School in the Bronx, starting as an eighth grader. Their parents were on board with the plan. "Knowing that I would be getting an education made it a lot easier for them to let go of me at a really, really young age," Precious said. On one of his first days in the United States, God'sgift introduced his brother to a staple of New York City life: the subway. "There was nobody on the street," Precious said. "And then all of a sudden there were just so many people coming out from the underground. And I'm looking at my brother, like, 'Yo, what's going on?'" Before long, Precious was commuting to school in the Bronx a four hour round trip that required the use of both the subway and public buses. He quickly established himself as one of the top freshman players in the country. His brother had been entrusted by their parents to keep an eye on him. But Precious seemed uniquely focused. "I didn't have to go to any meetings or sit in front of any principals," God'sgift said. "He's a really good kid." As Precious's talents became more obvious, he sought better competition by transferring to St. Benedict's Prep in Newark, N.J., where he lived with a teammate's family, and later to Montverde Academy, near Orlando, Fla., where he was a McDonald's all American as a senior. Cody Toppert, one of Hardaway's assistants, said Achiuwa was not a guaranteed "one and done" player when he arrived at Memphis before the start of last season. But the coaching staff could sense that he had come with purpose: to maximize his time. For example, he stayed late after most practices to refine his 3 point shot, which he knew would be a prerequisite for a player his size in the N.B.A. "He basically had this willingness to do whatever it was going to take to make sure he wasn't coming back for a second year," Toppert said. The spotlight found Achiuwa early in the season after James Wiseman, the team's center and one of the top prospects in the draft, ran into eligibility problems and left school after playing in three games. In Wiseman's absence, Hardaway went with a smaller lineup. Achiuwa ran the court, defended multiple positions and proved to be an energetic leader. "It kind of happened by accident because James left," Toppert said. "But there's no doubt that it created an opportunity for Precious to show an extreme level of versatility." After averaging 15.8 points and 10.8 rebounds while shooting 49.3 percent from the field, Achiuwa was named the American Athletic Conference's player of the year as a freshman. When the season was cut short by the pandemic, he declared for the draft and returned to Queens to prepare for the next phase of his life. His basketball dreams have involved sacrifice. His father recently died, and he has not seen his mother in about three years. But he talks with her on the phone nearly every day, he said, and there is a chance that she will be able to travel to New York this month to watch the draft with him. It would mark the end of one journey and the beginning of another. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
College nowadays requires so much more than laptops and textbooks. You'll also need smartphones, tablets and webcams. A thousand pieces of tech that ping and ding and distract and amuse you. Or, if you're looking to persuade your parents to pay for all this, it's the technology you can't pass the school year without. In a desperate rush to get from one side of campus to the other? don't actually have rockets, but these electric, wheeled boots will get you there quickly (assuming you master the tricks of balancing, turning and, most important, stopping in them). The skates strap over your existing shoes, have a top speed of 12 miles an hour and can run for up to 45 minutes or over six miles on a charge. Wheels for your feet come at a price: 500 and up. The Apple Watch is a tiny chunk of high tech that makes a great conversation piece. Starting at 350, the watch works as a companion to an iPhone, with I.M. updates, fitness apps to help thwart the freshman 15, and the opportunity to engage in social media subtly that is, without having to whip out your phone. Budget conscious students can tap the wearable tech vibe for as little as 88. The Pebble smartwatch is not as highly polished as the Apple Watch or Moto 360, but it has many of the same frills, a battery life of a week and a wrist borne alert system giving you a permanent connection to your digital life. A swish (and more expensive) upgrade is now available via the Pebble Time, which, like the Apple Watch, lets you make calls from your wrist. Photographs and video from a drone you wear on, and launch from, your arm. Yes! Read that again. It's the description for possibly the strangest camera ever. Nixie is an easy to fly drone that can add a whole new dimension to selfies. It's even designed to fly back after you've snapped your exploits (boomerang mode), or to follow you. Images upload directly to your phone. Tempted? You'll need to wait. The Nixie team promises it's "coming soon"; sign up for information on pre orders, price and development at flynixie.com. Photos You Can Actually Hold Whether you're snapping frat party shenanigans or study break selfies, you're likely to be taking hundreds of digital photographs at college. Which is where Polaroid's Zip Instant Photoprinter comes in. About the size of a smartphone but thicker, the printer is battery powered and wireless and spits out tiny color photos, each with an adhesive back so retro cool. Stick them on stuff. The Zip costs 130, with a free app on iOS and Android. Stickers cost around 25 for 50 sheets, no ink required. Besides delivering temptations like Tinder, your smartphone or tablet can actually help you study. Any.do is a seemingly boring to do list app, but among interesting features, it offers social sharing so you can arrange events and work with your study group, and even add multimedia to entries. And if you habitually forget Chemistry 101, it has alerts to get you to the lab on time. Any.do is easy to master; voice entry simplifies the job of managing lists. It's free to try on iOS, Android and on a laptop. But getting the most out of its services can cost up to 60 a year. If style is important in your to do lists, Clear is a list manager app with svelte minimalist looks and all the gestural controls you could dream of. From shopping to assignment lists and beyond, you can add items and dismiss them as "done" with hardly any effort. This sort of low friction interface, and alarms to keep you on schedule, can help even the most list averse students manage their time. Clear is 5 on iOS. Yik Yak, where water cooler gossip meets public notice board, is hugely popular on campus. Share jokes, gossip, news, alerts about events and so on, viewable by any user within a certain radius. The experience is immediate and fun. Helicoptering parents have blogged about spying on campus goings on via this social networking app. But there's a dark side: Yik Yak postings are anonymous, and vicious and abusive "yaks" have led some campuses to block access to the app on their wireless networks. Use responsibly. It's free on iOS and Android. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Market activity since Sandy reflects the gap between the appeal of a seaside enclave and anxiety about its vulnerability, on a strip of land between Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic. On the one hand, brokers report interest, as people want to live near the beach. "We're selling everything we get right now," said Lisa Jackson, who owns Rockaway Properties, adding that her agency had closed on 19 houses since January. On the other, some shoppers seeking a piece of paradise worry that the cost of flood insurance will rise once the Federal Emergency Management Agency completes a review based on surveys done after Sandy, a process that officials say could take a couple of years. Dan Repetti, a salesman for a school photography firm who lives in Bergen Beach, Brooklyn, wants to buy in Belle Harbor despite cost concerns. "It's beautiful," said Mr. Repetti, who recently married. "Once you pass over the Marine Parkway bridge, it's a whole new world." Yet he acknowledged that a sharp increase in insurance costs could strain his finances and make it hard ever to sell the property. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The choreographer Camille A. Brown often talks about the struggles she faced with body image as a young dancer, when teachers told her that she didn't have the "ideal" dancer's physique. I hope those people have been following her career, because she has been proving them wrong for about two decades, and continued to do so on Tuesday at the Joyce Theater with the New York premiere of "ink." The conclusion of her trilogy on African American identity, with "Mr. TOL E. RAncE" (2012) and "BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play" (2015), "ink" flies by, a rousing and incisive final statement. While she has branched out into Broadway and television in recent years choreographing "Choir Boy," "Once on This Island" and NBC's "Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert" Ms. Brown appears as dedicated as ever to her own company, Camille A. Brown Dancers, both as a performer and lead creator. Building on "BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play," which depicted everyday activities of black American girlhood, "ink" mines its movement from gestures and rituals of the African diaspora a broad palette that Ms. Brown, who grew up in Jamaica, Queens, blends with precision and (what looks like) ease. Featuring a propulsive percussion ensemble led by Allison Miller, the show begins with the sound of a single drum and distant chant, a call to the Yoruba deity Elegba who, as Ms. Brown notes in the program, "opens and clears the space as guardian, protector and communicator." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
This four bedroom, five bath Spanish colonial is in Escazu, about five miles west of San Jose, the capital city of Costa Rica. This sprawling, suburban area in the hills has cooler temperatures than elsewhere in the region. It is also one of the country's most affluent areas, with upscale restaurants and shops, and a few foreign embassies and consulates. The three level, 8,772 square foot house, designed by Ronald Zurcher, a local architect, was built about 15 years ago on nearly three quarters of an acre in a quiet neighborhood. "It's a very calm area you don't get a lot of traffic," said the listing agent, Eva Murillo of Costa Rica Sotheby's International Real Estate. "But the house is minutes away from just about everything. It's close to the airport. There's a hospital nearby, a big shopping mall and schools." The owners, who are downsizing, incorporated many natural materials into the construction. The large wooden front door was imported from India and is surrounded by a stone archway from a Guatemalan church. Other stone, brick and wood accents can be found throughout the home. Inside, on the main floor, is a spacious tile foyer that leads to the living room, which has a wood burning fireplace; to the brick ceilinged dining room; and to a breakfast area and a kitchen with stainless steel appliances and granite counters. These rooms all have hardwood floors and wood beamed ceilings, and connect to an expansive terrace that overlooks lush tropical gardens. Separate maid's quarters are off the kitchen, and there is also a wine cellar. The ground floor has a large recreation room with glass doors that open to the landscaped yard, which has a pool and a wooden yoga deck with seating. There is a two car garage and an attached carport that can shelter four additional vehicles. The four bedrooms are on the top floor. The en suite master has a walk in closet and a balcony offering city views in the distance. Two other bedrooms share a bathroom, while another has its own. All furnishings are available for purchase separately. "The social areas are great for entertaining," Ms. Murillo said, "but the bedroom area is very private." Escazu, officially San Miguel de Escazu, is part of the canton, or subdivision, of Escazu (population, around 60,000) in the province of San Jose. It is about 12 miles from Juan Santamaria International Airport in San Jose. The nearest beaches, on the Pacific side, are around 90 minutes away by car. But the area makes up for that in big city conveniences: It is home to the giant shopping complex Multiplaza Escazu and close to one of the country's best private medical facilities, Hospital Cima. Costa Rica's housing market was booming for nearly a decade, but activity stalled after the 2008 global financial crisis. In the last couple of years, business has started picking up again, although "prices are still fairly affordable compared to what they were before 2008," said Saul Rasminsky, the owner of Dominical Real Estate, in the town of Dominical. "We've seen more buyers and a lot of deals," Mr. Rasminsky said. "People are also developing land again there are new condos being built. There's more confidence in the market." Demand for houses in Escazu remains generally healthy, too, Ms. Murillo said, because the area "is close to downtown for people who work, and close to Highway 27, which takes you to the beach." Prices in Escazu range from about 150,000 for a small house at a low elevation, Ms. Murillo said, to around 6 million for an estate high up in the hills. But prices are now flat, she added, with some of the more expensive houses lingering on the market. Americans dominate the second home market, thanks in part to an abundance of direct flights to Costa Rica from many major cities in the United States. There is also strong interest from Canadian and European buyers, agents say. The majority of foreign buyers prefer the country's numerous beach communities along the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea. "They come here to vacation, fall in love and want to buy," said Rodolfo Herrera, a real estate lawyer and licensed notary based in San Isidro, San Jose. Buyers in the province of San Jose, and particularly in Escazu which Mr. Herrera likens to a cosmopolitan American city such as Miami are mostly people who have business in the capital, along with retirees or people close to retiring who are looking to move to a temperate climate. "The people who buy in Escazu want to have modern conveniences near the city," Mr. Rasminsky said. "They want to live in an area where the temperatures are cooler and where they have mountain views." International home buyers in Costa Rica face few restrictions, Mr. Herrera said, but local financing is harder to come by and at less attractive terms than in the United States. Nonresident buyers, he said, should be prepared to pay in cash or obtain loans elsewhere. Buyers typically make a deposit (usually around 10 percent of the purchase price) into an escrow account. A period of due diligence follows to allow for a title search and a check for liens or encumbrances, among other things. Costa Rica has a reliable national property registry that tracks these records, and includes information on the owners, Mr. Herrera said. Agents recommend hiring an experienced real estate lawyer who is also a notary. The notary handles the all important transfer of the deed to the property. (In Costa Rica, all licensed notaries are lawyers, but not all lawyers are notaries.) A common practice among foreign buyers is to form a corporation to purchase property. Purchases can also be made through a retirement fund like an individual retirement account, or I.R.A. The seller usually pays the brokerage commission, which ranges from around 5 to 8 percent of the purchase price. The buyer typically pays most of the closing costs, Mr. Herrera said, which amount to at least 4 percent of the purchase price; costs include notary fees, title transfer tax and government stamps. Property taxes in Costa Rica are generally very low, around 0.25 percent of the registered property value. The municipal taxes on this house are about 2,000 a year, Ms. Murillo said, in addition to an annual luxury tax of around 2,000. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Gabriel Jimenez hated the Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro. But he loved cryptocurrency. When he built the regime a digital coin, he nearly paid with his life. Just after midnight one Tuesday in early 2018, the vice president of Venezuela commandeered the nation's TV airwaves. Looking composed despite the hour, in a blue suit and red tie, he announced that the government was about to make history by becoming the first on Earth to sell its own cryptocurrency. It would be known as the Petro. Three blocks away, in the vice president's sprawling offices, Gabriel Jimenez was sitting blearily at an enormous glass conference table, pounding away at a laptop. Powerful air conditioners chilled the air to a crisp. Lanky, with big black glasses set between a scruffy beard and a receding hairline, Mr. Jimenez had spent months designing and coding every detail of the Petro. Now, alongside his lead programmer, he was racing to make it operational, despite the fact that basic decisions had still not been made. Just after the vice president signed off the air, his chief of staff burst into the office, furious. Mr. Jimenez couldn't understand something about typos on a website, an embarrassment to the nation. The chief brought in two guards, armed with military rifles, and told Mr. Jimenez and his programmer that they were forbidden to leave. If they made any attempt to communicate with the outside world, they would be on their way to El Helicoide. It was a distinctly Venezuelan symbol of terror: a futuristic mall project, with car ramps between stores, converted into a political prison and center of torture. Mr. Jimenez was finally released just before sunrise. When he made it to his apartment, he burst into sobs. Before he had time to collect himself, he got a call. The president himself, Nicolas Maduro, requested his presence. Mr. Jimenez walked to the presidential palace, pushing his way through the crowds outside with a sense of exhaustion and dread. A few months earlier, the idea that Mr. Jimenez would be called before the tyrant who ruled Venezuela would have been unimaginable. Mr. Jimenez was just 27, ran a tiny start up, and had spent years protesting the dictator. Mr. Maduro had not just mismanaged his country into financial crisis he had detained, tortured and murdered those who challenged his power. But whatever Mr. Jimenez felt about the regime, he felt just as strongly about the potential of cryptocurrency. When the Maduro administration approached him about creating a digital coin, Mr. Jimenez saw an opportunity to change his country from within. If a national cryptocurrency was done right, Mr. Jimenez believed, he could give the government what it wanted a way to fight hyperinflation while also stealthily introducing technology that would give Venezuelans a measure of freedom from a government that dictated every detail of daily life. His friends and family warned him that working with the regime could only end badly. The person overseeing the effort, Vice President Tareck El Aissami, had been called a "drug kingpin" by the U.S. government and would soon be named to a federal "Most Wanted" list. Mr. Jimenez acknowledged the danger, but he talked about the Petro as a Trojan horse that would sneak in the kind of reforms that he and the opposition had been dreaming about for years. Mr. Jimenez has been identified as the author of the Petro before, but he has never told his story. This account is based on hundreds of pages of confidential emails, text messages and government documents, as well as interviews with more than a dozen people who were involved with the project. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity because they still live in Venezuela, where openly criticizing the government can quickly lead to prison or death. A country in need of desperate ideas Mr. Jimenez was eight years old, living in the small city of El Tigre, when the military strongman Hugo Chavez came to power in 1998. A Marxist, Mr. Chavez used Venezuela's vast oil reserves to pay for social services for the poor, but he also made the country increasingly authoritarian, built around his own cult of personality. Mr. Jimenez was part of an educated class that was naturally drawn to the opposition. After college in Caracas, Mr. Jimenez spent a few years in the United States studying, getting married and doing what he could to oppose Mr. Chavez and his successor, Mr. Maduro. He also interned for a Republican congresswoman from Miami who regularly criticized the Venezuelan regime. When reformers won parliamentary elections in 2015, Mr. Jimenez felt compelled to return to his country to take part in the political opening. Here are more fascinating tales you can't help but read all the way to the end. None Getting Personal With Iman. The supermodel talks about life after David Bowie, their Catskills refuge and the perfume inspired by their love. A Resilient Team for a Broken Nation. With the Taliban in control, what, and whom, is Afghanistan's national soccer team playing for? The Fight of This Old Boxer's Life Was With His Own Family. A battle among Marvin Stein's family over his fortune broke out, and he suddenly found himself powerless to fight for himself. Mr. Jimenez and his wife landed in Caracas in early 2016 and found a nation on the brink. Oil prices had plunged, sending Mr. Maduro into a money printing frenzy. As bolivars became worthless, medicine disappeared, refugees drowned and children starved. Mr. Jimenez was fairly insulated. He had founded a start up, The Social Us, that connected Venezuelan programmers and designers with American companies looking for cheap labor. Like many wealthier Venezuelans, Mr. Jimenez kept almost all his money in dollars, but this made transactions a headache. He had to illegally swap currency every few days, and a taxi ride would require a stack of bolivars so thick that most drivers accepted only wire transfers. The situation rekindled Mr. Jimenez's long running interest in cryptocurrencies. He began paying his employees in a digital coin; even with the crazy volatility of the crypto markets, it was more stable than a Venezuelan bank account, and it wasn't subject to the Maduro regime's diktats. The staff at The Social Us began touting cryptocurrency as a way for ordinary Venezuelans growing numbers of whom were buying Bitcoin on the street to deal with practical problems. One project they designed was a payment terminal that bypassed government limits on spending. Initially, the Maduro regime saw Bitcoin as a threat. The technology, after all, used a decentralized network to create and move money, and no authority was in charge. But then some members of the government noticed that this cut both ways. Cryptocurrency could also be a way for Venezuela to escape sanctions levied by the United States and international organizations. In September 2017, an official loyal to Mr. Maduro floated the idea of a digital currency backed by Venezuela's oil reserves. This was unorthodox: One of the tenets of Bitcoin is that its value does not derive from a natural resource or government fiat, only the laws of mathematics. But the distinction faded in the face of Venezuela's desperation. The official, Carlos Vargas, read about Mr. Jimenez's crypto work in a local publication and asked for a meeting. Soon the hulking form of Mr. Vargas arrived at the office of The Social Us. As he consumed an entire bag of potato chips, Mr. Vargas flattered the young digital workers, saying they were among the only people in Venezuela capable of creating what he had proposed. The idea was exactly what Mr. Jimenez had hoped to hear. The goal was to create a new Venezuelan currency that would move freely over an open network, like Bitcoin. The government would be unable to control or bungle it. Mr. Vargas wanted to call it the Petro Global Coin, but Mr. Jimenez suggested something simpler: the Petro. The Social Us put together a short pitch deck for the Petro project. But Venezuela is filled with people proposing crazy schemes, and Mr. Jimenez didn't put too much stock in it. Then, in early December, when Mr. Jimenez was at a conference in Colombia, he got an urgent text. Mr. Maduro had just announced a national cryptocurrency called the Petro. Mr. Jimenez threw open his laptop and found a video of the president, in his usual workman's shirt, telling a whooping crowd, "This is something momentous." Mr. Jimenez dashed off a message to Mr. Vargas: "Did they just steal our project?" Mr. Vargas replied, "This is the project. They just approved it. Come back right away." Mr. Jimenez landed in Caracas late at night, and soon found himself on the phone with some government officials and Mr. El Aissami. The vice president had a reputation as the second most brutal man in Venezuela. But as he began questioning Mr. Jimenez, it seemed that some strange power reversal had happened. The vice president was friendly and curious, and suggested that this was Mr. Jimenez's project they were just there to learn from him. Mr. El Aissami wanted to know how many Petros there would be, and whether new ones could be mined like Bitcoin. Mr. Jimenez thought that the officials didn't have a particularly clear idea of how cryptocurrencies worked. After the call, Mr. Jimenez emailed his employees to be at the office for an early meeting. When everyone had gathered, he stood on a desk and said they should drop all other projects and focus on the Petro. People were free to leave, he said, but if they did this right, it was a once in a lifetime chance to change Venezuela. "We will liberate people from government controls," he said. One of Mr. Jimenez's employees quit on the spot, saying he could not tolerate working for a dictator. Beyond their office, the idea of a state backed cryptocurrency nearly an oxymoron had already become the subject of derision among longtime advocates of a technology designed to avoid state power. As the group dispersed, one of Mr. Jimenez's closest friends, the creative director Daniel Certain, pulled him down for a conversation on the bright beanbags that were strewn around the office. "Don't do this it's a bad idea," Mr. Certain told him. "You are going to make us work for them, and they are going to take the project out of your hands when they find you are not useful anymore." As Mr. Certain recalled, Mr. Jimenez laughed with characteristic hubris and said, "Nobody else in Venezuela would even know how to do this." The air conditioner above the door was buzzing. The president asked the vice president if he would fix it. In his Adidas track suit, he stood on the couch and whacked the unit a few times. For Mr. Jimenez, there was a certain comfort in seeing the lack of luxury, given the privation in the rest of Venezuela. Mr. Maduro told the group with a laugh that his announcement of the Petro had inspired cryptocurrency investors everywhere, and helped push Bitcoin to an all time high of 20,000. It was unclear if he was joking, and everyone just chuckled. When the president gave Mr. Jimenez the floor, he went over the basics of the Petro, including an initial issuance of 200 million. Then the finance minister spoke up, and for the first time, Mr. Jimenez's plans were challenged. The minister took out a manila folder with a map of the Orinoco Belt and said he wanted the Petro to be backed on an ongoing basis by certain oil reserves there, which were worth orders of magnitude more many billions of dollars. Mr. Jimenez pushed back: It was one thing to tie the Petro's initial price to oil, but if it couldn't trade freely after that at whatever price investors felt it was worth then it wouldn't be a revolutionary product. A Petro whose price always reflected oil reserves would essentially be a bond, and recent sanctions made it illegal for Americans to buy those. The president didn't seem to follow the debate all that closely. As the group dispersed, Mr. Spanos did not have a good feeling about Mr. Jimenez's future. "I thought he would become the scapegoat," he said later. "I didn't think I'd see this kid again." Before leaving Caracas, Mr. Spanos remembers telling Mr. Jimenez: "I wish I had a magic carpet to get you out of here." 'You cannot contradict the word of the president' Mr. Maduro ratcheted up his public campaign for the Petro. He didn't have many other tricks up his sleeve to combat hyperinflation, which in just four months had destroyed 90 percent of the value of the bolivar. Members of the opposition were openly calling for a coup. As Mr. Jimenez watched Mr. Maduro's televised talks, he was astonished by how much of what he had said at La Roca had gotten through to the president. Mr. Maduro mentioned Ethereum, white papers and transparency. But the speeches also made it clear to Mr. Jimenez that he was no longer in control of the Petro. Mr. Maduro announced that the currency would, in fact, be tied to a specific block of the Orinoco Belt exactly what Mr. Jimenez had argued against. He complained to Mr. Vargas, but was shot down: "You cannot contradict the word of the president." Mr. Vargas told Mr. Jimenez to rewrite the Petro's white paper to reflect Mr. Maduro's decision and to do it quickly. He and the vice president were about to travel to Turkey and Qatar to begin selling the Petro to investors. Things deteriorated rapidly. The president's excitement turned the Petro into a project that everyone wanted to get in on, and in mid January 2018 a series of meetings at the ministry of finance turned contentious. The department's top economic adviser wanted the Petro to have a stable value, controlled by the government, with an option to trade it in for actual oil. Mr. Jimenez managed to push back, winning an agreement that oil could be used to create a minimum value the state would promise to honor, but that the price would also be allowed to fluctuate on open markets. He also made sure the Petro would exist on an open network of computers, tied to Ether, that would fundamentally limit the government's power to interfere. Eventually, Mr. Jimenez became convinced that he'd lose control of the project to the finance ministry. When he tried to resist sharing a digital copy of the white paper, he said, the minister told him by phone: "You have to understand that this is now a project of the state. If you don't hand over the file, I won't be responsible for what happens to you." Some of the staff at The Social Us worried that Mr. Jimenez's bullheaded desire to make the Petro happen put them all in danger. During another confrontation, Mr. Vargas had showed Mr. Jimenez blue folders containing intelligence dossiers compiled on the employees; after yet another dispute, triggered in part by the fact that the start up had not been paid anything, the vice president sent word to Mr. Jimenez that he now considered him a traitor. It would have been reasonable at that point to assume that he was headed to prison, and that his role in the Petro was over. And yet Mr. Jimenez was pulled back into the program in a shambolic series of events. The government told his team that they would need to compete to have a role in the Petro's launch against a Russian group of murky origin. Mr. Jimenez's employees could find no evidence that they had any significant cryptocurrency experience; Time magazine later advanced a theory that they represented a Kremlin effort to control the Petro. 'I didn't know who my enemies were' At the palace, Miraflores, Mr. Jimenez was shown into the biggest ceremonial room, where the entire cabinet was waiting with Mr. Maduro. The president greeted him warmly, directed him to sit in the chair next to him and asked him how things had gone since their meeting at La Roca. Mr. Jimenez was aware of everyone else in the room, and the cameras capturing it all, so he didn't make reference to the events of the previous night, or any of the other funny business he just tried to emphasize that his team had a version of the Petro ready to go. "I didn't know who my enemies were in there," he said later, recalling the event. "I was the guy with no power." After some chitchat, the president led everyone into a hall that had been converted to a Petro themed television studio. With a crowd looking on, an M.C. called to the stage the Russians, and then Mr. Jimenez. He was presented with a pen and a contract. It was an agreement he had been refusing to sign for weeks which limited him to a role as a sales agent for the Petro a censure for his small acts of rebellion against the regime. On live television, Mr. Jimenez saw no way out. He scribbled his signature and gave a forced grin as photographers moved in. Mr. Jimenez took a seat and wondered what he had just done. The president said that Venezuela had already collected 725 million from investors. He thanked Mr. Jimenez by name, as well as The Social Us. "It's a company founded and run by young geniuses from Venezuela," the president said. "You stay crazy." The Petro never really got off the ground. On March 19, President Trump signed an executive order barring Americans from using it. The same day, an Associated Press article about Mr. Jimenez noted that he had helped create the Petro for Mr. Maduro only a few years after interning for an anti Maduro member of the House of Representatives. The congresswoman, Ileana Ros Lehtinen, immediately wrote a letter asking the Treasury Department to investigate "whether Venezuelan national Gabriel Jimenez meets the criteria to be sanctioned under the appropriate authorities." Improbably, several countries had begun following Venezuela's lead and talking about launching their own government sponsored digital currencies. China took the lead, and the European Central Bank said it was moving in the same direction. Venezuela relaunched the Petro a number of times, eventually coming out with a token given to pensioners that had none of the open properties from Mr. Jimenez's original design. In October, Mr. Jimenez heard that he got his American work papers. He wept tears of joy. Then he got started on a new project; it involves using cryptocurrencies to help Venezuelans avoid the bolivar. Mr. Jimenez still had essentially no money, but a crypto start up in the San Francisco Bay Area allowed him to work out of its offices, eat from the fridge and stay on a couch in the chief executive's apartment. Recently, we met at a restaurant nearby. He pulled out a black notebook, in which he was writing letters of apology to the friends he had lost. "I always thought that I could find a solution, to be able to compensate for my mistakes," Mr. Jimenez had written to one of his best friends. "I know that some apologies are not enough. I know I even deserve some pain, but believe me that life has taken care of giving them to me." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
TOKYO Olympus, the Japanese camera maker whose executives have admitted to covering up 1.7 billion in losses, said Tuesday that its auditors, KPMG Azsa and Ernst Young ShinNihon, had not been complicit in the false accounting though those firms remain under investigation by the Japanese authorities over possible roles in the scandal. A decision to clear the auditing firms could strengthen Olympus's chances of staying listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, helping the company maintain access to equity capital. Any action to dismiss or sue Ernst Young ShinNihon, its current auditor, could leave the company without a firm willing to audit its finances, jeopardizing Olympus's compliance with the exchange's listing requirements. Still, experts have asked how Olympus could have perpetrated such a scheme without at least tacit knowledge by its auditors. KPMG audited Olympus until 2009 before handing it off to Ernst Young. The two firms still face possible sanction by Japan's Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission. Just how much Olympus's auditors knew about the manufacturer's scheme, going back decades, to hide losses has emerged as an important aspect of the continuing investigations into its finances. The two firms signed off on the accounts before Olympus's president and chief executive, Michael C. Woodford, blew the whistle on the fraudulent accounting in October, just after he was fired by Olympus's board. "It's hard to believe that Olympus could have kept such a large scale cover up secret from its auditors, who study its finances intimately," said Shinji Hatta, a professor of auditing at the Graduate School of Professional Accountancy at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. In a report released last month, an investigative panel appointed by Olympus, which makes digital cameras and the medical optical devices like endoscopes, had been critical of the auditors' role, saying the firms had not done enough to expose wrongdoing. But a separate panel of lawyers hired by Olympus to investigate the roles of the two auditors found that the firms had not violated their fiduciary duties, Olympus said in a statement. That report, released Tuesday, said that Olympus's executives had so cleverly buried the losses that external auditors could not have uncovered them. The report instead blamed five former and current Olympus internal auditors for allowing the company to misstate its finances. The five internal auditors are responsible for a total of 8.4 billion yen ( 109 million) in costs related to the cover up, Olympus said. Minoru Ota, a former internal auditor who had headed the company's accounting unit, is to blame for almost half of that cost, the statement said. "The masterminds in this case hid their illegal acts through artful manipulation of expert opinion," the report said. Olympus did not make Mr. Ota available for comment, and calls to a registered number under that name in Tokyo went unanswered. The company said later Tuesday that it had filed a lawsuit against all five of the internal auditors, demanding 500 million yen from each. Olympus has admitted that a handful of former and current executives set up a scheme to obscure losses by illicitly keeping unprofitable assets off its books. The company later tried to settle those losses in payments masked as merger and acquisition fees. Last week, the company sued 19 current and former executives, including the current president, Shuichi Takayama, over their roles in concealing the losses. The scandal has led to investigations by the authorities on three continents, and Olympus shares remain on watch for possible delisting on the Tokyo exchange. But a person with close knowledge of various investigations relating to Olympus said that not only was Olympus adept at hiding its losses, but that the company might have received help from its banks misstate its financial position. KPMG received confirmation statements from Societe Generale and Commerzbank that, with hindsight, were clearly misleading, the person said on condition of anonymity, saying he was not authorized to speak to the media. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Twitter Has Good News for Once: Its First Quarterly Profit SAN FRANCISCO Twitter often feels like the digital equivalent of a swamp. The Russians used the platform to disrupt the 2016 election. Famous people buy fake followers to make themselves seem more famous. Prominent members of the chattering class have been signing off for good. Sometimes it seems as if no one loves the service except for the president of the United States. As a business, however, Twitter might finally be starting to work. On Thursday, it reported a profit in the fourth quarter, the first black ink since going public in 2013. The news pushed its shares up 12 percent to 30.18 their highest level in more than two years. "We did what we said we were going to do," an exultant Jack Dorsey, Twitter's chief executive, said on Twitter. "Our focus and self discipline continues to improve." What counts, however, is that those cranks and critics are there in the first place. The number of people who use the service monthly rose 4 percent to 330 million, which while not a big increase is something. Those who use the social media service every day grew 12 percent from the fourth quarter of 2016, the fifth consecutive quarter of double digit gains. "The user growth is kind of astounding," said Rich Greenfield, a media and tech analyst at the research firm BTIG, who has been recommending the stock for a year. "They were barely growing two years ago." Twitter originally showed tweets in reverse chronological order the latest posts, however mundane, were on top. Now it is using algorithms to try to show the most important tweets first, making the site more engaging. "If you show the right tweets to the right person at the right time, it creates user happiness," Mr. Greenfield said. "That means more time spent on the site, which means more opportunities for advertising." This has been a good week for social media companies that are not Facebook. On Tuesday, Snap reported much better revenue than expected, and a slightly narrower loss. Its shares also soared on the news. In contrast, Facebook said last week that it had made changes that reduced the hours its two billion users were spending on its pages. Over all, Twitter reported a profit of 91 million in the final three months of 2017, compared with a loss of 167 million a year earlier. Margins were much better, expenses were lower and stock based compensation decreased sharply. Other numbers were not as impressive. Revenue rose 2 percent to 732 million in the quarter. Revenue from advertising, which makes up the bulk of its revenue, increased 1 percent. In general, Twitter exceeded low expectations. "A solid result across the board and builds upon the momentum" from the third quarter, analysts at UBS wrote in a research note. One quarter is not much of a streak, and Twitter has often been unable to keep it up. Jim Cridlin, the global head of innovation at Mindshare, a unit of the advertising giant WPP, said that while Twitter's momentum continued into the fourth quarter, the company still faced "significant headwinds." Leadership is one issue. Mr. Dorsey splits his time between Twitter and his other company, the digital payments firm Square. Last month, Anthony Noto, Twitter's chief operating officer and one of Mr. Dorsey's most trusted deputies, left the company to become chief executive of the embattled online lender Social Finance. Twitter also faces criticism as federal and state authorities scrutinize companies that sold millions of fake followers on social media platforms. More than one million followers of entertainers, athletes and others have disappeared after an article by The New York Times detailed the business practices of a company called Devumi. Twitter previously said it would take action against Devumi's practices. For the current quarter, UBS calculated that Twitter would generate 583 million of revenue, 11 million more than analysts were predicting. That might keep the party going. What really is helping Twitter is that there are only three American social media companies that count. Facebook is by far the largest, but is under pressure from all quarters precisely because of its size and influence. It is trying to moderate the latter without hurting the former, which is going to be tricky. Snap is a singular effort forging its own direction as a communications platform. That leaves Twitter, troubled as it might be. "Advertisers have a huge desire to be on mobile devices more, but there are not a lot of ways to reach people on applications worthy of your home screen," said Mr. Greenfield. "Twitter is on your home screen." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Channing Dungey will replace the longtime executive Peter Roth to become the chairwoman of the Warner Bros. television studio early next year, WarnerMedia announced on Monday. Ms. Dungey, who became the first Black executive to run an entertainment division at a major network when she joined ABC in 2016, departing in 2018, will take control of one of the biggest television studios in the industry. The Warner Bros. television studio makes hit programs shown on many networks, including "The Bachelor" (ABC), "Riverdale" (a show that aired on the CW and became more popular when it started streaming on Netflix) and "Young Sheldon" (CBS). Under Ms. Dungey, Warner Bros. is also expected to be a big supplier to Warner Media's five month old streaming platform, HBO Max. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Julie de Libran, the artistic director for Sonia Rykiel, has a knack for knowing what the cool girls want. Her designs have been quite the hit with the international set, an aesthetic that may have been informed by her transcontinental upbringing. Ms. de Libran, 44, was born in Aix en Provence, France, but moved to the United States when she was 8. She now lives in Paris. Below, she shares the beauty products and services she will be relying on before the Rykiel spring 2017 show on Oct. 3. I've been told you shouldn't use soap in the morning. It's too aggressive. Obviously, when I take my shower, I put my head in the water, but I don't use soap. After the shower, I use a tonic by my epidermist, Joelle Ciocco. Her products are really good and quite natural, and the smell is fantastic. You get hooked. I've been going to her at least since I moved back to Paris, so since 2008. Then I use the Complexe Vitamine serum. It's fantastic. It's a little bit shiny, but it absorbs and nourishes your skin in depth. I've been told I have very thin skin and quite delicate, too. I need to keep it moisturized. I put a cream on top of that. At night, I use one of her cleansers, which are really, really light. I've tried many, many things. In New York, I tried peels. And when I was in Korea, I tried all the beauty products there, which are quite forward thinking. But this is what suits me. I get spots or redness in some places, so having something not so strong works. One thing I've learned recently is that taking different vitamins helps nourish the skin. You can go to the French pharmacies here and find a beauty supplement. I find that if I take it regularly, my skin is moisturized from the inside, and it looks as if I've gone on holiday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
As the chairman of Ferragamo USA, Massimo Ferragamo, 59, the youngest son of the founder of the fashion house Salvatore Ferragamo, has strong roots in fashion, but recently, he's unexpectedly found a second career in the world of hospitality. In 2003, Mr. Ferragamo, prompted by his penchant for Tuscan wine, purchased Castiglion del Bosco an 800 year old, 5,000 acre estate in Montalcino, Tuscany and spent five years transforming the property into an upscale resort. Mr. Ferragamo spends several months a year in Tuscany and spoke to The New York Times recently about his love of the region. Below are edited excerpts from the interview. What gave you the idea you to turn Castiglion del Bosco into a resort? I wanted to get involved in producing wine in Tuscany because I have always loved Tuscan wines, especially Brunellos, and a friend of mine heard that the property was for sale and took me to see it. It was a massive estate that was somewhat run down, and the vineyards were only 150 acres out of 5,000. The best use of the land was to turn it into a resort, so that's what I ended up doing. Tuscany is a well traversed destination. What are some hidden gems? Definitely Punta Ala, a town set on the Tyrrhenian Sea. I grew up going there in the summers with my family, and it has incredible sailing and a nice beach. Then, in the countryside, there are the most charming villages around Monte Amiata, which are untouched by time, like Abbadia San Salvatore and Piancastagnaio. And around the villages you have pristine pastureland that's rich with chestnut trees. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Judy Wood is a real life lawyer who after moving to California and getting a job with an immigration law firm discovered a passion that, by this film's telling, led her to a case that changed asylum policies in the United States. Directed by Sean Hanish from a script by Dmitry Portnoy, "Saint Judy" begins by underscoring the title character's resourcefulness, then playing up her pluckiness and single mom status. These latter components recall "Erin Brockovich," the acclaimed fact based drama of 2000 that starred Julia Roberts. Judy also has a crusty boss, Ray Hernandez (Alfred Molina), a soured one time idealist unimpressed with Judy's enthusiasm for a particular subject: Asefa, an Afghan woman in a detention center, who is so drugged up by her keepers as to be practically catatonic. Judy (Michelle Monaghan) wants to wean Asefa off her meds, learn her story and make a case for asylum. Ray just wants papers processed and bills paid, so he fires Judy. Judy starts her own firm, stumbles upon an intern who happens to own a Porsche (good for fast rides to and from detention centers) and gets busy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The coronavirus vaccine made by Moderna moved closer to authorization on Thursday, a significant step that would expand the reach of the nation's vaccination campaign to rural areas and many more hospitals. As the nation buckled from uncontrolled spread of the disease, with 3,611 deaths on Wednesday setting yet another horrific record, a panel of independent experts recommended,by a vote of 20 in favor and one abstention, that the Food and Drug Administration authorize the Moderna vaccine for emergency use. The formal decision, expected on Friday, would clear the way for some 5.9 million doses to be shipped around the country starting this weekend. Moderna would be the second company allowed to begin inoculating the public, giving millions more Americans access to desperately needed vaccine. The first, made by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, received authorization last week. The Moderna vaccine can be distributed more widely because it can be stored at normal freezer temperatures and, unlike the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, does not require ultracold storage. It also comes in much smaller batches, making it easier for hospitals in less populated areas to use quickly. "Moderna can go to more places," Dr. Mandy Cohen, North Carolina's secretary of health and human services, said this week. "We hope to be in all 100 counties with some amount of vaccine small allocations at first by the end of next week, assuming Moderna gets approved this week and we get our allocations delivered over the course of next week." The two vaccines, and an ambitious rollout by the federal government, states and businesses to deploy them, are the first signs of hope for an end to the pandemic that has killed more than 300,000 Americans, closed schools and businesses and left people afraid to go near friends, neighbors and relatives, especially at the height of the holiday season. Moderna developed its vaccine in collaboration with scientists from the National Institutes of Health. A second vaccine couldn't come soon enough. State health officials complained this week after they learned the second shipment of the Pfizer vaccine would be smaller than the first one, prompting questions about whether the federal government would meet its goal of giving 20 million people an initial dose of the two shot vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna before the end of the year. The smaller shipment, which appeared to be the result of a scheduling hiccup, ignited tensions between Pfizer and the federal government, who are negotiating over how many vaccine doses Pfizer will sell to the United States in the first half of next year. The vaccines are in short supply, and the initial batches are being given to people at high risk of infection or serious illness: frontline health care workers and the residents and staff of nursing homes and other long term care facilities. On Saturday, an independent panel of experts will decide whether to recommend that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention allow distribution of the Moderna vaccine. And on Sunday, the same panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, will decide which "priority group" should be next in line for the vaccine. A subcommittee of the group last month proposed that it be essential workers some 80 million teachers, law enforcement officers, bus drivers, restaurant workers and others whose jobs involve close contact with other people. Each state would then decide which essential workers to prioritize, as there will not be nearly enough vaccine in the short term to cover them all. The subcommittee said next in line should be people 65 and older, as well as people with conditions that put them at high risk for Covid, like diabetes or obesity. It will be up to the larger group to make a final decision on Sunday, which the C.D.C.'s director, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, will have to approve. At the meeting on Thursday, the F.D.A.'s expert panel heard from Moderna, agency scientists and the public. In large clinical trials, both vaccines were about 95 percent effective at preventing Covid 19, and Moderna's vaccine offered persuasive evidence that it could prevent severe cases of the disease, which is crucial for keeping people out of the hospital and reducing deaths. Dr. Rachel Zhang, a researcher in the F.D.A.'s office of vaccines research and review, said that the agency found the vaccine worked equally well in different groups of volunteers defined by race or ethnicity, gender or age. She also said that the data from the trial hinted that protection from the vaccine starts to emerge soon after people get the first dose. However, she cautioned that there wasn't enough data to come to a clear conclusion. The panel grappled with questions about the potential for allergic reactions after a few cases occurred among people who received the first doses of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine. The Pfizer BioNTech shots have been linked to three cases of a severe and potentially life threatening reaction, anaphylaxis two in Britain, and one in the United States, in a health care worker in Alaska. A second person at the same Alaska hospital also had a serious allergic reaction, though not anaphylaxis. All have recovered or are recovering. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Neither Moderna nor Pfizer BioNTech reported serious problems with allergic reactions during their clinical studies, but when drugs or vaccines move out of trials and into broader distribution, rare side effects can emerge. The two vaccines are similar, but not identical. Both consist of genetic material, mRNA, encased in a bubble of lipids. The exact composition is not the same, so it is not clear that an allergic reaction to one means the same thing would occur with the other. But the possibility is a concern. Anaphylactic reactions to vaccines in the United States have been rare, with fewer than one in a million cases a year. At the meeting on Thursday, Dr. Doran L. Fink of the F.D.A. said that the agency and the C.D.C. were investigating the reactions. "We anticipate that there may be additional reports which we will rapidly investigate," Dr. Fink said, adding that robust surveillance systems were in place to detect these rare cases. Moderna is developing eight other vaccines that use mRNA. The company has tested them in animals and in 1,700 people, and has not had cases of anaphylaxis or other severe allergic reactions linked to the vaccine, Dr. Jacqueline Miller of Moderna said. One anaphylaxis case occurred two months after vaccination, in a person with a soy allergy. Anaphylactic reactions to vaccines generally occur within minutes or even seconds after the shots are administered. Other side effects fever, chills, fatigue, headache, muscle and joint pain are much more common after getting the Moderna vaccine, especially after the second shot. Although the reported side effects are not dangerous they can be unpleasant, lasting one to three days. Doctors say the symptoms are comparable to those experienced by many people after getting Shingrix, the vaccine to prevent shingles. People should be prepared to feel under the weather for a day or two after each shot, they said, and may need to take a day off work. Moderna's study found that 91.6 percent of recipients had sore arms, 68.5 percent had fatigue, 63 percent headaches, 59.6 percent had muscle pain, 44.8 percent had joint pain and 43.4 percent had chills. Some participants also had swollen lymph nodes in the armpit on the side where they received the injection. Company scientists emphasized on Thursday that the vaccine does not alter a person's genes or interact with DNA, and that the mRNA is quickly broken down and does not linger long in the body. Both the Moderna and Pfizer BioNTech studies reported a small number of cases of a temporary facial paralysis called Bell's palsy. Moderna found three cases in the vaccine group and one in the placebo group, and Pfizer had four cases, all in the vaccine group. F.D.A. reviewers did not think the disorder was related to the vaccine. On Thursday, Moderna said the company would monitor for the condition. Shipping of the vaccine will be managed by the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed, but each state will decide where its doses go. Tennessee, for example, plans to disperse most of its anticipated allocation of 115,000 initial doses next week among all 195 of its local health departments, which will inoculate first responders, and to every hospital in the state that did not receive a Pfizer shipment this week. In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear told reporters that he expected close to 80,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine in the state's initial shipment, adding, "We're going to ensure we have some allocation for every acute care hospital across the commonwealth." And in Massachusetts, Gov. Charlie Baker said Tuesday that 110,000 of the state's expected 120,000 Moderna doses would go to smaller hospitals and outpatient clinics, including community health centers. Some states will be handing over part of their Moderna allocation to CVS and Walgreens, which have contracts with the federal government to immunize residents and staff in nursing homes starting next week. Dr. Jasmine Marcelin, an infectious disease physician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, was one of several clinicians who called into the F.D.A. panel's meeting. She mentioned the disproportionate effect of the pandemic on people of color, and urged her colleagues to listen to their concerns and include trusted professionals from their communities. "The health care profession has previously betrayed these communities through centuries of structural racism," she said. Iletta Norris, a certified medical assistant at the Medical University of South Carolina, said she planned to get vaccinated but would like to wait six months. "I just want to see a little more research done," Ms. Norris said. Living at home with her parents and siblings, Ms. Norris said she and her family were a little nervous about how well side effects had been documented, and would feel more comfortable receiving the shots later. But once Ms. Norris is vaccinated, she said, "I will be a spokesperson. I will let everyone know about my positive experience." Moderna has requested authorization to vaccinate adults, based on its clinical trial in 30,000 people 18 and older. Pfizer included some younger volunteers in its study, and was authorized for use in people 16 and older. But neither vaccine was tested in pregnant or breastfeeding women. Many vaccines and drugs are studied in other groups before their safety is assessed in pregnant women. But researchers did not observe any harmful effects of the Moderna vaccine in 13 women who became pregnant during the trial. An estimated 330,000 health care workers are expected to be pregnant or breastfeeding as the vaccines are rolled out. With no evidence of harm, and given the high risk of Covid 19 in these women, the F.D.A. did not exclude pregnant or breastfeeding women from its authorization. An advisory group to the C.D.C. recommended last week that women who are either pregnant or breastfeeding, or in the planning stages, consult with their doctors before choosing to take the Pfizer vaccine. The committee is expected to make a similar recommendation for the Moderna vaccine this weekend. Apoorva Mandavilli and Katie Thomas contributed to this article. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Mary F. Roberts, the Martin complex's executive director, said her team has spent years requesting the windows' return from the university and from many other institutions. Many panes and other architectural components were removed during the Martin property's decades of mid 20th century neglect and then surfaced on the market. The University of Victoria's Legacy Art Galleries will put the Martin windows on view for two months starting July 15, in an exhibition, "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright." After that, experts will reinstall the panes at the house. Two of the windows in the university collection had been already copied for the Martin building, and those copies are now being donated to the university galleries. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. Movie potentates were peppered across the Tower Bar here as usual on Friday night. Over in one dimly lit corner sat a martini drinking movie star and his manager. And the restaurant's lively owner, Jeff Klein, worked the room as he normally does, pausing to schmooze here and shake an important hand there. At each banquette, as starlets of yesteryear gazed from their photographs on the walnut walls, he found himself in the same discussion. "All night long," Mr. Klein said, "it seemed like there was only one topic: Harvey Weinstein. It's all anyone wanted to talk about." On Thursday, The New York Times published an investigation that found at least eight settlements paid over several decades to women who said Mr. Weinstein, high powered film producer, had sexually harassed them. It was the equivalent of a neutron bomb going off in Hollywood, which came to a virtual standstill as stars, agents, producers, studio executives and publicists discussed almost nothing else. Some people were disgusted by the accusations. Others, perhaps recalling being on the receiving end of Mr. Weinstein's notorious temper, gleefully passed around a link to a pop up website selling R.I.P. Harvey clothes. And that was before Mr. Weinstein was fired by his film company on Sunday. But few in this spotlight seeking town spoke publicly. Welcome to Hollywood, where people love to wag self righteous fingers over the past year, awards shows have become a platform for industry bigwigs to rail against the Trump administration but run for cover whenever the topic casts show business in an unflattering light. From Thursday to Saturday, I called more than 40 entertainment industry players, and almost all refused to speak for the record. Some said it was because their companies (or publicists) needed to approve anything they would say, while others gave reasons that painted a picture of a community hobbled by fear, self interest and hypocrisy. "Ladies of Hollywood," Rose McGowan, one of the actresses who settled with Mr. Weinstein, wrote on Twitter on Friday, "your silence is deafening." A publicist for an A list actress said there was no "upside" for her client to comment, especially since she did not have a movie to promote. One producer wanted to know who else was on the record so he would be "quoted in good company." An agent said he was repulsed by the silence and quoted a Latin phrase meaning, "He who sits quietly gives consent." Then he refused to talk. Along with Ms. McGowan, some other famous voices took to Twitter, including Lena Dunham and Brie Larson. But they were the exceptions. Of course, almost no one gets ahead in Hollywood by being a boy scout. In this image conscious land, where publicists sometimes seem to outnumber people to publicize, the rule is to avoid being linked with controversy by any means necessary, lest you risk having your brand being tarnished or any of your own untoward behavior exposed. Matthew Belloni, editor of The Hollywood Reporter, pointed to culpability as an explanation executives, agents and celebrities who knew or had heard that Mr. Weinstein was behaving this way toward women and did nothing. "It's embarrassment that they didn't say anything," Mr. Belloni said. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. Mr. Weinstein, who acknowledged in a statement that his behavior had "caused a lot of pain," announced an "indefinite" leave from his company to seek therapy before being fired on Sunday. At the same time, his major business partners have stood silent. Amazon Studios, which has two television series in the works with the Weinstein Company, did not respond to a query. The Viacom owned Paramount Network, as well as A E and Showtime, declined to comment. Kevin Costner, who is producing and starring in a planned Weinstein made series called "Yellowstone," was "not available due to his filming schedule," his spokesman emailed. Not everyone has developed a sudden case of laryngitis. "It took enormous courage for these women to come forward, and I applaud them," Amy Pascal, a producer and former studio chief, said in an interview. She was speaking of actresses like Ashley Judd, who told The Times that she had been sexually harassed by Mr. Weinstein. The actor Seth Rogen wrote on Twitter on Saturday, after a lawyer advising Mr. Weinstein resigned, "I believe all the women coming forward about Harvey Weinstein's sexual harassment. It takes bravery to do so." But bold condemnation of Mr. Weinstein remained sparse on Sunday, especially by celebrities, many of whom seized on social media to harshly criticize President Trump for the "Access Hollywood" tape, made public a year ago this weekend, in which he boasted about kissing and grabbing women. Hollywood also denounced Roger Ailes, the former Fox News chief, and Bill O'Reilly, the former Fox News host, when women came forward with sexual harassment accusations against them. "Fox watchers turn a blind eye to predators; no morality at all," Bette Midler wrote on Twitter at the time, with celebrities like Rosie O'Donnell, Chelsea Handler and Cher also offering biting rebukes. Many people online have noticed, in particular, conservatives. "Thoughts on Harvey Weinstein?" Donald Trump Jr., the eldest son of President Trump, asked Jimmy Kimmel on Twitter on Saturday. Mr. Kimmel, who has become an outspoken critic of the administration and, like most of his fellow late night talk show hosts, had not yet said anything on the air about Mr. Weinstein, responded, "It's disgusting." That led some fans to thank him. "Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Rogen thank you for addressing the Harvey Weinstein situation," wrote a Twitter user named Margaret. "Silence from most celebrities is gross." Some people in Hollywood contend that Mr. Weinstein is different from Mr. O'Reilly and Mr. Trump, because, to a degree, he fessed up. While the volcanic Mr. Weinstein is reviled privately by wide swaths of the entertainment industry, he also has a lot of friends. One producer who has worked repeatedly with Mr. Weinstein said that he wasn't speaking out because "I happen to think the world of the guy." Mr. Weinstein made a lot of careers, starting at Miramax in the 1990s and then at the Weinstein Company, which was founded in 2005. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck might not be stars without "Good Will Hunting," released by Miramax in 1997. Quentin Tarantino can credit Mr. Weinstein with getting "Pulp Fiction" and "Kill Bill" into theaters. Gwyneth Paltrow thanked Mr. Weinstein and Miramax for "their undying support of me," when she accepted the best actress trophy for "Shakespeare in Love" at the 1999 Academy Awards. But silence works both ways, Ms. Eller pointed out. "It's striking that nobody has come to Harvey's defense, either," she said. Especially considering that Mr. Weinstein has tried to rally support. According to two people briefed on the matter, who naturally spoke on the condition of anonymity, he reached out to top agents at William Morris Endeavor and Creative Artists Agency and asked them to sign a letter of support and release it publicly. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
One pretty good forecasting rule for the coronavirus era has been to take whatever Trump administration officials are saying and assume that the opposite will happen. When President Trump declared in February that the number of cases would soon go close to zero, you knew that a huge pandemic was coming. When Vice President Mike Pence insisted in mid June that "there isn't a coronavirus 'second wave,'" a giant surge in new cases and deaths was clearly imminent. And when Larry Kudlow, the administration's chief economist, declared just last week that a "V shaped recovery" was still on track, it was predictable that the economy would stall. On Friday, we'll get an official employment report for July. But a variety of private indicators, like the monthly report from the data processing firm ADP, already suggest that the rapid employment gains of May and June were a dead cat bounce and that job growth has at best slowed to a crawl. ADP's number was at least positive some other indicators suggest that employment is actually falling. But even if the small reported job gains were right, at this rate we won't be back to precoronavirus employment until ... 2027. Also, both ADP and the forthcoming official report will be old news basically snapshots of the economy in the second week of July. Since then much of the country has either paused or reversed economic reopening, and there are indications that many workers rehired during the abortive recovery of May and June have been laid off again. But things could get much worse. In fact, they probably will get much worse unless Republicans get serious about another economic relief package, and do it very soon. I'm not sure how many people realize just how much deeper the coronavirus recession of 2020 could have been. Obviously it was terrible: Employment plunged, and real G.D.P. fell by around 10 percent. Almost all of that, however, reflected the direct effects of the pandemic, which forced much of the economy into lockdown. What didn't happen was a major second round of job losses driven by plunging consumer demand. Millions of workers lost their regular incomes; without federal aid, they would have been forced to slash spending, causing millions more to lose their jobs. Luckily Congress stepped up to the plate with special aid to the unemployed, which sustained consumer spending and kept the nonquarantined parts of the economy afloat. Now that aid has expired. Democrats offered a plan months ago to maintain benefits, but Republicans can't even agree among themselves on a counteroffer. Even if an agreement is hammered out and there's no sign that this is imminent it will be weeks before the money is flowing again. The suffering among cut off families will be immense, but there will also be broad damage to the economy as a whole. How big will this damage be? I've been doing the math, and it's terrifying. Unlike affluent Americans, the mostly low wage workers whose benefits have just been terminated can't blunt the impact by drawing on savings or borrowing against assets. So their spending will fall by a lot. Evidence on the initial effects of emergency aid suggests that the end of benefits will push overall consumer spending the main driver of the economy down by more than 4 percent. Furthermore, evidence from austerity policies a decade ago suggests a substantial "multiplier" effect, as spending cuts lead to falling incomes, leading to further spending cuts. Put it all together and the expiration of emergency aid could produce a 4 percent to 5 percent fall in G.D.P. But wait, there's more. States and cities are in dire straits and are already planning harsh spending cuts; but Republicans refuse to provide aid, with Trump insisting, falsely, that local fiscal crises have nothing to do with Covid 19. Bear in mind that the coronavirus itself a shock that came out of the blue, though the United States mishandled it terribly reduced G.D.P. by "only" around 10 percent. What we're looking at now may be another shock, a sort of economic second wave, almost as severe in monetary terms as the first. And unlike the pandemic, this shock will be entirely self generated, brought on by the fecklessness of President Trump and let's give credit where it's due Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader. The question is, how can this be happening? The 2008 financial crisis and the sluggish recovery that followed weren't that long ago, and they taught us valuable lessons directly relevant to our current plight. Above all, experience in that slump demonstrated both that economic depressions are no time to obsess over debt and that slashing spending in the face of mass unemployment is a terrible mistake. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
A roundup of motoring news from the web: The economy may not be in the best shape, but sales of high end luxury cars have been strong. Lamborghini reported 2,121 sales worldwide in 2013, Rolls Royce moved 3,630 units, Bentley sold 10,120, Aston Martin about 4,200 and Maserati 15,400. But with other luxury marques enjoying strong sales, Ferrari sold 6,922 cars worldwide in 2013, about 5 percent fewer than in 2012. (CNN Money) DMAX Ltd., a joint venture between General Motors and Isuzu Motors that builds diesel engines for heavy duty trucks in the United States, will benefit from a 60 million investment from the two companies, G.M. said Wednesday. The money will go toward design changes that will keep the engines ahead of the emissions regulatory curve, as well as keep 500 people employed at the DMAX plant in Moraine, Ohio. (Reuters) Prompted by President Obama's call in his State of the Union address last week for a more efficient truck fleet in the United States, the Consumer Federation of America calculated that aggressive regulations could save American consumers as much as 29.5 billion per year. To reach that number, the federation said, fuel use in trucking would have to be cut in half, but the savings would amount to 250 per household annually. (Autoblog Green) Nissan began rolling out on Tuesday the new Datsun Go, a small hatchback for under 6,400, at its plant in Chennai, India. The automaker said it planned to unveil two more entry level Datsun models by 2016. (Economic Times) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
A new census of the American nuclear arsenal shows that the Obama administration last year dismantled its smallest number of warheads since taking office. The new figures, released by the Pentagon, also highlight a trend that the current administration has reduced the nuclear stockpile less than any other post Cold War presidency. On Thursday, the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington that strongly supports arms control, issued an analysis of the new figures on its Strategic Security blog. The annual Pentagon release did not appear to be linked to President Obama's visit Friday to Hiroshima, Japan, which was destroyed by an American atomic bomb almost 71 years ago. Still, the new figures and private analysis underscored the striking gap between Mr. Obama's soaring vision of a world without nuclear arms, which he laid out during the first months of his presidency, and the tough geopolitical and bureaucratic realities of actually getting rid of those weapons. The lack of recent progress in both arms control and warhead dismantlement also seems to coincide with the administration's push for sweeping nuclear modernizations that include improved weapons, bombers, missiles and submarines. Those upgrades are estimated to cost up to 1 trillion over the next three decades. The new census is an annual public release that the Pentagon has done in recent years detailing how many weapons remain in the nation's nuclear arsenal and how many retired weapons have been disassembled. The census, which updates the numbers to include 2015, was posted this month on the Department of Defense's open government website under the heading "Declassification of Formerly Restricted Data." The site noted that the figures were current through Sept. 30, 2015, the end of the government's fiscal year. Supporters of Mr. Obama say the slowdowns are understandable given the rising level of hostility and intransigence of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, as well as the inherent difficulties involved in arms control and complex technical projects. The new figures show that in 2015 the Obama administration dismantled 109 warheads, the fewest of his presidency and down from a peak of 356 in 2009, his first year in office. The slowdown came despite Secretary of State John Kerry's telling global arms controllers in April 2015 that "President Obama has decided that the United States will seek to accelerate the dismantlement of retired nuclear warheads by 20 percent." In March, in its annual report to Congress, the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the nation's nuclear arsenal, laid responsibility for the slowdown to "safety reviews, unusually high lightning events, and a worker strike at Pantex," a sprawling dismantlement plant in Texas. Lightning strikes at the plant can set off the high explosives used in destroying nuclear arms. On Thursday, Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the federation, questioned the administration's logic. "Although 2015 was unusually low," he wrote on his blog of the annual disassembly figure, "the Obama administration's dismantlement record clearly shows a trendline of fewer and fewer warheads dismantled." At the Obama administration's low rate, Mr. Kristensen added, the nation's backlog in nuclear arms dismantlement will persist "at least until 2024." On Thursday, the federation's blog also updated a nuclear issue that Mr. Kristensen first raised in 2014 that Mr. Obama has reduced the size of the nation's nuclear stockpile at a far slower rate than did any of his three immediate predecessors, including George Bush and George W. Bush. The new Pentagon census shows that the nation's nuclear arsenal in 2015 stood at 4,571 warheads down from 5,273 warheads in 2008, the last nuclear census of the administration of George W. Bush. The total reduction of 702 warheads, or 13.3 percent, Mr. Kristensen noted, "is no small number," but nonetheless represented "the smallest reduction of the stockpile achieved by any previous post Cold War administration." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Ackmann's "These Fevered Days" peoples the poet's world more thoroughly than do previous accounts. The author's gaze widens from the claustrophobic family constellation Dickinson's parents, Edward and Emily; her siblings, Vinnie and Austin; Austin's wife, Sue, and mistress, Mabel that dominates most biographies. We meet the Amherst professor Ebenezer Snell, who meticulously records the weather each day, and his daughter Sabra, who takes over the task at his death; the Rev. Aaron Colton, whose sermons Dickinson admires as a teenager; the community choristers she joins at Mr. Woodman's Sunday evening singing school. When Ackmann chronicles the day in February 1848 on which the 17 year old Dickinson, away at school, turns aside her headmistress's invitation to pledge her life to Christ, instead remaining a "no hoper" in the school's lexicon, we learn a good deal about Mount Holyoke Female Seminary's indomitable headmistress, Mary Lyon; the nosy wife of a trustee; and, most helpfully, the seminary's students and recent graduates. Ackmann lets us know that two thirds of Dickinson's classmates were either "professors of religion" or hopefuls, and she details the future plans their professions of faith permitted them to entertain. By placing Dickinson, an outstanding scholar, amid a cluster of other young academic stars Sarah Worcester, Louisa Plimpton, Celia Wright and Fidelia Fiske all of whom nurtured dreams of missionary work in China, Persia or on Native lands in the United States, Ackmann underscores Dickinson's singularity, and allows the reader to feel the companionship the young poet enjoyed, from which she would gradually retreat. Ackmann's 10 episodes include the first publication of a poem by Dickinson; a consequential meeting with her friend and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson; and the day of the poet's death. But not all are so eventful unless you consider intellection to be active, as Ackmann and many Dickinson scholars reasonably do. Ackmann reads Dickinson's letters closely for signs of the motion of thought; her aim is to "crack open" the poet's "interior world, recreating a landscape of Dickinson's consciousness." Here is where the confounding aspect of her book begins. With the same confidence as when she's closely paraphrasing Dickinson's letters, Ackmann dares to tell us what Dickinson thinks, or even, occasionally, does, when these thoughts or actions can't be known. Ackmann's summary of a letter in which Dickinson recalls her first, indelible impression of a friend who'd arrived at school with dandelions twined in her hair, concludes with Ackmann's supposition, phrased as a certainty: "One image could change everything, she thought." Perhaps emboldened by her familiarity with Dickinson's surroundings, Ackmann recreates for us the day on which Dickinson first assembles one of her now famous fascicles, the hand sewn pamphlets in which she gathered many of her poems, when that day can only be imagined. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Top Antitrust Official Is Said to Recuse Himself From Google Inquiry None Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times WASHINGTON Makan Delrahim, the head of the antitrust division at the Department of Justice, has recused himself from investigating Google, even as the agency's examination of the largest tech companies ramps up. Mr. Delrahim, 50, recently removed himself from looking into allegations of anticompetitive practices at Google because of a potential conflict of interest related to his past work for the internet search company, two people with knowledge of the decision said. In 2007, Mr. Delrahim, who was in private law practice at the time, had a contract to lobby for Google's acquisition of the ad technology company DoubleClick, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details are confidential. "As the technology review progressed, Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim revisited potential conflicts with previous work with the Department of Justice's ethics office," a Justice Department spokesman said. "He and the ethics office have decided that he should now recuse himself from a matter within the tech review in an abundance of caution." Mr. Delrahim is recusing himself as the Justice Department has embarked on the most high profile antitrust investigations of technology companies in years. The agency opened investigations into Google, Amazon and Facebook last summer as questions over the dominance of the tech giants increased. The Justice Department has since called in dozens of rivals across media, retail and tech to gather evidence of anticompetitive business practices by the tech companies. The Federal Trade Commission and dozens of state attorneys general have also started antitrust investigations into Facebook, Amazon and Google. A congressional committee has opened a similar investigation into big tech companies. It was unclear why Mr. Delrahim's recusal was taking place now, given that the Justice Department's investigation into Google has been in process for months. But he has faced increased criticism for potential conflicts of interest. Last year, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said Mr. Delrahim should recuse himself from tech investigations because of his history of consulting for Google and Apple while he was an attorney last decade. Calling his lobbying work for Google and Apple "extensive and lucrative," Ms. Warren said in a letter to Mr. Delrahim last June that "any reasonable person would surely question your impartiality in antitrust matters involving Google." In December, text messages between Mr. Delrahim and the top executives involved in a blockbuster wireless merger of T Mobile and Sprint emerged in court after state attorneys general challenged the deal. In the text messages, Mr. Delrahim appeared to facilitate negotiations between the companies and to help the deal win approval by the Federal Communications Commission. Mr. Delrahim's recusal raises questions about the Justice Department's oversight of the Google investigation. In a statement, the agency said Ryan Shores, an associate deputy attorney general, and Alex Okuliar, a deputy assistant attorney general who joined the Justice Department last week, would oversee the tech review. The tech investigations have drawn unusual interest from Attorney General William P. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen. Mr. Barr, a former official for Verizon, and Mr. Rosen, a former antitrust attorney, have given public speeches on their concerns about the power of big tech firms and their interest in examining whether the companies have broken antitrust laws. Mr. Delrahim has been a divisive figure in antitrust circles. He opposed the merger of AT T with Time Warner in November 2017, but the deal eventually went ahead. Months later, he approved the merger of T Mobile and Sprint. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The coronavirus is striking, and felling, more Italian men than women, and some experts are warning that being male may be a risk factor for the illness, just as older age is. The Italian trend mirrors one seen in China, where men were more likely than women to die of Covid 19. In Italy, more men than women have been infected, and a higher proportion of infected men have died. Some 8 percent of male patients died, compared with 5 percent of female patients, according to a Higher Health Institute of Rome analysis of 25,058 cases. "Being male is as much a risk factor for the coronavirus as being old," said Sabra Klein, a scientist who studies sex difference in viral infections at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "People need to be aware that there is this pattern. Just like being old means you're at higher risk, so does being male. It's a risk factor." She said the vulnerability could be biological or behavioral. Women have more robust immune systems, Dr. Klein said. And more men smoke in higher numbers, and they are less likely to wash their hands, studies show. "We don't always understand why something is a risk factor, and we're probably not going to be able to pinpoint one thing," Dr. Klein said. "But it's remarkable that we're seeing this across such socially and culturally distinct countries as Italy and China. More needs to be made of this fact." On Friday, Dr. Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator for the White House, mentioned the gender disparity in deaths in Italy, but said the gender gap was "twice" as high in men at all ages. In fact, the report mentioned no deaths in people under 30 and very few deaths among men and women in their 40s and 50s. The heightened risk to men becomes apparent in their 50s, with the gender gap tapering off somewhat only at 90, probably because there are fewer men in this age group. Over all, men represented 58 percent of 25,058 coronavirus cases in Italy, and 70 percent of the 1,697 deaths described in the report. In China, the death rate for men was 2.8 percent, compared to 1.7 percent for women, according to the largest analysis of cases by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Men also were disproportionately affected during the SARS and MERS outbreaks, which were caused by coronaviruses. More women than men were infected by SARS in Hong Kong in 2003, but the death rate among men was 50 percent higher, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Some 32 percent of men infected with Middle East Respiratory Syndrome died, compared with 25.8 percent of women. Young adult men also died at higher rates than female peers during the influenza epidemic of 1918. Women appear to have stronger immune systems than men. The female sex hormone estrogen appears to play a role in immunity, as does the X chromosome, which contains immune related genes. Women carry two X chromosomes; men only one. But women also develop more autoimmune diseases such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, in which the immune system attacks the body's own organs and tissues. Other health and behavioral factors may also be contributing to men's vulnerability. Men develop cardiovascular disease and hypertension at younger ages than women, and both of these conditions increase the potential for severe disease, said Kathryn Sandberg, director of the Center for the Study of Sex Differences in Health, Aging and Disease at Georgetown University. Men also smoke at higher rates than women. In China, more than half of all men smoke, compared with less than 3 percent of women; in Italy nearly 30 percent of men smoke, compared with 19 percent of women. In the United States, the smoking gap is smaller, with 17.5 percent of men smoking compared with 13.5 percent of women. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
As the seaplane soared more than 1,000 feet in the air, I scoured the crystalline waters below, hoping for a glimpse of dolphin squadrons, manatees, perhaps sharks. They might be visible even at this altitude, I'd been told. I saw none. Yet among several seemingly motionless sailboats, a shadowy yet distinct shape stood out. It was the shipwreck of the Arbutus, a treasure hunting vessel that sank in 1983. The haunting, rather morose, image was set against an otherwise celestial landscape. It was a fitting entry point to Dry Tortugas National Park, a remote archipelago about 100 miles north of Havana. It is among the least visited parks in the United States National Park Service, drawing about 70,000 visitors last year, nearly a tenth of the number who visited the Grand Canyon in June alone. Whenever I mentioned that I was going there, I was met with blank stares, or envy at what was assumed to be a luxurious Caribbean getaway. That is understandable they are far off the beaten path. But the Dry Tortugas are significant. Their unusual location in an eastern pocket of the Gulf of Mexico makes them what is known as an "indicator park" for climate change. All threats are measured: warmer temperatures; the intensity and frequency of tropical cyclones; and rising sea waters, which, along with rampant development over the past 20 years, have affected the Everglades, just 100 miles away. They are home to otherworldly, intact constellations of coral reef, as well as many fish species like angelfish and blue tang. I had come for a bit of adventure and escape, and to see the nature that doubled as data points for the shifting environment. The Dry Tortugas's ecological bounty can be surveyed from Fort Jefferson, whose construction from 1846 to 1875 produced a striking hexagonal structure that was never completed. It remains perhaps the most ambitious fortification project ever undertaken in North America. Before gliding on to the water and banking on Garden Key, the seaplane pilot circled the fort for a magical and indulgent view from all angles. I got a closer look at the fortress later that day, walking the perimeter alongside its moat while keeping an eye out for the lone meandering, shy American crocodile that inhabits the area, sidestepping ghost crabs. Most of the colors I saw that evening were presented in more vibrant form underwater the next day. Snorkeling gear in tow, I joined several park rangers on a boat to Loggerhead Key, where they monitor sea turtle nesting and hatching rates. We weren't alone several visitors had actually kayaked the three miles from Garden Key to reach Loggerhead, a decision they may have regretted later when they made a return trip against strong currents and a headwind. It was worth it, though: I saw large brain and fan corals and fish every shade of the spectrum, and when I occasionally looked up, I would see dozens of brown pelicans bouncing on the waves and paddling about. All that nature can obscure the singular history of the place. Fort Jefferson got its start when the Navy began scouting for locations to set up a station to guard against pirates in the Gulf. United States Navy Commodore David Porter initially dismissed it in 1824 as a poor location because of the shallow waters, none of it fresh (hence the name "Dry"), and sandy land that could hardly support a stone fortress. But when Commodore John Rodgers came to take a look five years later, he saw plenty of possibility in the 11 keys, their banks and reefs, especially the ability to have many ships ride among them. After 17 years of architectural design setbacks, civilian laborers and slaves got to work constructing the fortress in the face of storms, disease and shifting political sands. During the Civil War, there was enough space to house Union prisoners, mostly for desertion, and four men implicated in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Then, misfortune followed catastrophe: A yellow fever outbreak in 1867 killed 138 people on the island, and then in 1873, a powerful hurricane struck. The fort reopened in 1886 to quarantine smallpox and cholera patients. The fort was named a National Monument in 1935, and Congress established Dry Tortugas National Park in 1992. The park functions as a habitat for all manner of animals. Along with several guests from the camping site, I followed Michael Wydysh, a park interpreter, while he wove in and out of the fortress's archways with a flashlight to cut through the darkness. We were searching for Florida bark scorpions that glow neon green when sensing a predator us approaching. Michael whipped his flashlight into crevices on the ground and within the fort's arches, spotting a dozen of the small creatures. One of them looked as if it were striking a yoga pose, thrilled by the spotlight. That blend natural and man made continued at the last stop of the tour: a memorial dedicated to Brevet Major Joseph Sim Smith, assistant surgeon in the American Army, who died of yellow fever in 1867 at Fort Jefferson. After his death, a prisoner there named Dr. Samuel Mudd took over the main hospital. Dr. Mudd had been held for treating John Wilkes Booth after Booth shot Lincoln. But he redeemed himself in his care of the imprisoned. (He was pardoned in 1869.) The tomb of Dr. Smith and the scorpions, all under a velvet silent sky pulsing with thousands of stars, was definitely spectral. The next tomb was a watery one. I joined Glenn Simpson, the park's manager, and one of his diving rangers and a University of Miami researcher on a motorboat to the southwest of Loggerhead Key, where they would be inspecting an early 20th century shipwreck for debris and damage. The Avanti, one of the more than 200 shipwrecks, strandings and founderings to have littered the Dry Tortugas's waters across the centuries, met its violent fate on Jan. 21 and 22, 1907, 32 years to the day after its launch. Navigators for centuries had warned sailors of the reefs around the Gulf's shipping lanes what they called a "ship trap." But the Avanti was a fast and durable vessel known as a windjammer, with what was in 1875 a state of the art iron hull. All of the 19 men aboard survived. So, too, has the wreckage, the park's most complete. Part of the mast protrudes from the sea, and after jumping into the water from the boat, I snorkeled toward it, catching sight of schools of tarpon and several barracuda drifting near the ocean bed and a few dozen feet ahead, as if guiding the way. Throughout the wreck, I could also clearly see vibrant gardens of intricate brain coral and plum colored fan coral, looking as if they'd been beautifully designed and arranged within the ship's hulls and rudder. Before heading back to Garden Key, Glenn swung the boat northward to East Key, where he offered me the chance to see more of the park's preservation work. He gently steered the boat to shore, and I leapt to the beach along with Michael Timm, the researcher. We first walked several hundred feet in the surf to the other side of East Key, which is so small that from anywhere on it, you can see the other beach, and we skirted a small interior pond. All about, too, were white pipes, each about a foot long, protruding from the ground. They marked a hole in the ground and, upon closer inspection, makeshift trails leading to the water. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Depression in older people tends to be more severe, last longer and be less likely to remit than the same disease in younger people, a new study concludes. The reason remains unknown, but it is apparently unconnected to known risk factors like social isolation or the chronic diseases of old age. In a study published in Lancet Psychiatry, Dutch researchers followed 1,042 people ages 18 to 88 with diagnoses of major depression. They tracked four indicators of disease over two years: the likelihood of still having the diagnosis at the end of the study, how persistent symptoms were over time, the likelihood of reaching remission and the degree of improvement in depression severity. By all four measures, depression worsened steadily with age, and people over 70 had worse outcomes than any other age group. Factors other than age loneliness, social support and network size, pain, number of chronic diseases, functional impairment, antidepressant use explained only part of the effect. Old age by itself remained a significant risk factor. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER Dispatches From the Border By Francisco Cantu 250 pp. Riverhead Books. 26 "I'm tired of reading about the border in books," Francisco Cantu says one Christmas Eve to his mother, who is trying to talk him out of joining the Border Patrol. "I know it might be ugly, I know it might be dangerous, but I don't see any better way to truly understand the place." She is dubious. She was a ranger at Guadalupe Mountains National Park, east of El Paso, and tells him there are a hundred other ways for the grandson of a Mexican immigrant to comprehend the border than joining a paramilitary bureaucracy. He is adamant: "Maybe it's the desert, maybe it's the closeness of life and death, maybe it's the tension between the two cultures we carry inside us. Whatever it is, I'll never understand it unless I'm close to it." So away he goes, down to America's most potent metaphor, its 2,000 mile partisan fault line. His mother recedes to the story's margins, returning now and then to prick his conscience, to tell him to mind his soul. "The Line Becomes a River," Cantu's account of four years as a border cop in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, arrives at a dire moment. The national head is spinning with fever visions of brown skinned alien rapists and beheaders and terror gangs, and of a mythical wall that the president says will protect "us" from "them." The very idea of an American "us" that includes the foreign born seems lost to a distant time, to a less terrified country that some of us are struggling to remember. As Cantu tells us what he learned, he bolsters his point that it's hard to comprehend the border from books. This one challenges the reader to find the meaning, or some sense, in its loosely strung episodes, fragmentary encounters with border crossers and agents, clippings from books Cantu has read and the surreal dreams that haunt his fretful nights. Cantu finds out that border agents are not so much college boys like him, but former cops and soldiers, migrants from cold climates and crappy jobs. Some new arrivals have no idea what's going on at the border, but all are primed at the academy for narco warfare, with lurid PowerPoints of people killed by Mexican cartels: heads in an ice chest, bodies stacked in a cattle truck. 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. This is what you're up against, this is what's coming, the instructor says. Except it isn't. The job is often boring, chasing footprints, staring at monitors, shuffling paper. "You don't want to bring in any bodies with your dope if you can help it," Cantu is told. "Suspects mean you have a smuggling case on your hands, and that's a hell of a lot of paperwork." The aliens we encounter are not narco bosses and murderous kidnappers but their victims: bewildered, disoriented, helpless migrants. Some are dead. They don't fit the terror profile. A weeping woman tells the agents arresting her that it's her 23rd birthday. She wants to be like Selena, and sings "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom" on her way to detention. A man found in the fetal position has been drinking his urine for four days. A fat teenager lies sobbing in a mesquite thicket; the group left him behind. Each migrant has a wrenching story, but to agents these are just "wets," or "POWs," "plain old wets." Salvadorans are "el sals." "Quitters" are just that. Cantu finds two of them huddling in a church, a man and a woman. They had been lost for days, surviving on filthy water from cattle tanks. She is six months pregnant. Cantu gives them water bottles and asks their names, which he soon forgets. In case you think compassion is the rule, Cantu makes a confession. "It's true that we slash their bottles and drain their water into the dry earth, that we dump their backpacks and pile their food and clothes to be crushed and pissed on and stepped over, strewn across the desert and set ablaze. And Christ, it sounds terrible, and maybe it is." "But the idea is that when they come out from their hiding places, when they regroup and return to find their stockpiles ransacked and stripped, they'll realize their situation," he adds, is hopeless. "And they'll quit right then and there, they'll save themselves." That, says Cantu, is "the sense in it all." Robbing migrants of water in 115 degree Sonoran heat to save them sounds like exquisitely tortured rationalizing. Recent news accounts and videos of agents destroying water caches suggest that Cantu's account is accurate, though the Border Patrol has also said it does not condone life threatening vandalism. So whose logic governs? Who is lying, who has gone rogue Cantu and his buddies, or the agency itself? Later Cantu tips us to a secret he couldn't tell his own family that he and his brother agents ran like a mob of teenage vandals: "I wanted to tell my uncle that I had known men to engage in senseless acts of defilement, depositing car seats and furniture on far off hillsides and in remote washes, decorating cacti with women's undergarments, hanging twisted bike frames from the towering arms of saguaros, dislodging massive boulders to tumble down sloping mountainsides, and setting fire to anything that would burn abandoned automobiles and trash piles and proud desert plants left to smoke and smolder through the night." They sound like poorly trained men with not enough to do. Yet this is a glancing admission, slipped passively into the narrative without elaboration. Cantu recounts moments of tender connection with frightened, injured border crossers. But he seems unwilling to look too closely at his complicity in despicable behavior, leaving a reader to worry about the fate of that close up quest for enlightenment he told his mother he was after. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
SAN FRANCISCO One of the poorest kept secrets in Silicon Valley has been the huge salaries and bonuses that experts in artificial intelligence can command. Now, a little noticed tax filing by a research lab called OpenAI has made some of those eye popping figures public. OpenAI paid its top researcher, Ilya Sutskever, more than 1.9 million in 2016. It paid another leading researcher, Ian Goodfellow, more than 800,000 even though he was not hired until March of that year. Both were recruited from Google. A third big name in the field, the roboticist Pieter Abbeel, made 425,000, though he did not join until June 2016, after taking a leave from his job as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Those figures all include signing bonuses. The figures listed on the tax forms, which OpenAI is required to release publicly because it is a nonprofit, provide new insight into what organizations around the world are paying for A.I. talent. But there is a caveat: The compensation at OpenAI may be underselling what these researchers can make, since as a nonprofit it can't offer stock options. Salaries for top A.I. researchers have skyrocketed because there are not many people who understand the technology and thousands of companies want to work with it. Element AI, an independent lab in Canada, estimates that 22,000 people worldwide have the skills needed to do serious A.I. research about double from a year ago. "There is a mountain of demand and a trickle of supply," said Chris Nicholson, the chief executive and founder of Skymind, a start up working on A.I. That raises significant issues for universities and governments. They also need A.I. expertise, both to teach the next generation of researchers and to put these technologies into practice in everything from the military to drug discovery. But they could never match the salaries being paid in the private sector. In 2015, Elon Musk, the chief executive of the electric car maker Tesla, and other well known figures in the tech industry created OpenAI and moved it into offices just north of Silicon Valley in San Francisco. They recruited several researchers with experience at Google and Facebook, two of the companies leading an industrywide push into artificial intelligence. In addition to salaries and signing bonuses, the internet giants typically compensate employees with sizable stock options something that OpenAI does not do. But it has a recruiting message that appeals to idealists: It will share much of its work with the outside world, and it will consciously avoid creating technology that could be a danger to people. "I turned down offers for multiple times the dollar amount I accepted at OpenAI," Mr. Sutskever said. "Others did the same." He said he expected salaries at OpenAI to increase as the organization pursued its "mission of ensuring powerful A.I. benefits all of humanity." OpenAI spent about 11 million in its first year, with more than 7 million going to salaries and other employee benefits. It employed 52 people in 2016. People who work at major tech companies or have entertained job offers from them have told The New York Times that A.I. specialists with little or no industry experience can make between 300,000 and 500,000 a year in salary and stock. Top names can receive compensation packages that extend into the millions. "The amount of money was borderline crazy," Wojciech Zaremba, a researcher who joined OpenAI after internships at Google and Facebook, told Wired. While he would not reveal exact numbers, Mr. Zaremba said big tech companies were offering him two or three times what he believed his real market value was. At DeepMind, a London A.I. lab now owned by Google, costs for 400 employees totaled 138 million in 2016, according to the company's annual financial filings in Britain. That translates to 345,000 per employee, including researchers and other staff. Researchers like Mr. Sutskever specialize in what are called neural networks, complex algorithms that learn tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data. They are used in everything from digital assistants in smartphones to self driving cars. Some researchers may command higher pay because their names carry weight across the A.I. community and they can help recruit other researchers. Mr. Sutskever was part of a three researcher team at the University of Toronto that created key so called computer vision technology. Mr. Goodfellow invented a technique that allows machines to create fake digital photos that are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. "When you hire a star, you are not just hiring a star," Mr. Nicholson of the start up Skymind said. "You are hiring everyone they attract. And you are paying for all the publicity they will attract." Other researchers at OpenAI, including Greg Brockman, who leads the lab alongside Mr. Sutskever, did not receive such high salaries during the lab's first year. In 2016, according to the tax forms, Mr. Brockman, who had served as chief technology officer at the financial technology start up Stripe, made 175,000. As one of the founders of the organization, however, he most likely took a salary below market value. Two other researchers with more experience in the field though still very young made between 275,000 and 300,000 in salary alone in 2016, according to the forms. Though the pool of available A.I. researchers is growing, it is not growing fast enough. "If anything, demand for that talent is growing faster than the supply of new researchers, because A.I. is moving from early adopters to wider use," Mr. Nicholson said. That means it can be hard for companies to hold on to their talent. Last year, after only 11 months at OpenAI, Mr. Goodfellow returned to Google. Mr. Abbeel and two other researchers left the lab to create a robotics start up, Embodied Intelligence. (Mr. Abbeel has since signed back on as a part time adviser to OpenAI.) And another researcher, Andrej Karpathy, left to become the head of A.I. at Tesla, which is also building autonomous driving technology. In essence, Mr. Musk was poaching his own talent. Since then, he has stepped down from the OpenAI board, with the lab saying this would allow him to "eliminate a potential future conflict." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
When Fairchild arrived on the West Coast, he learned that the boat he and Lathrop were to board had already left, so they hopped on another train and began the two week journey to catch another boat in New Orleans, stopping in Santa Barbara to meet Dr. Francesco Franceschi, "who cut for his visitor a slice of a curious squash 'zucchini,' he called it." This distant age of wonder an era in which worldliness was hard earned and Barbour Lathrop circled the globe many times was full of innocence and promise. In a Washington, D.C., boardinghouse, Fairchild roomed with a former colleague from the Department of Agriculture named Wallace Swingle; together, they brainstormed about building a team that would travel to foreign countries and "administer the introduction of plants." As Stone explains, they "fancied their title as 'agricultural explorer' a term so whimsical, so obvious, that it came out of their mouths at the same time." Soon enough there was a sign on a door and a new government agency: the Office of Seed and Plant Introduction. The results were tremendous. Avocados, soybeans, nectarines and kale, Meyer lemons, hops, seedless grapes and watermelons were all either introduced or improved by Fairchild and his team. This isn't another chapter in that old story about how we ate badly until fill in the blank came along and revolutionized American dining. This is a story about a world in which there were no avocados until David Fairchild mailed some home, about a strange and meager period in our past in which no one had eaten a zucchini. Stone doesn't editorialize about the consequences. "In 1908," he writes, "few people had seen a soybean," adding that within 100 years, "the evolved descendants of soybeans that Meyer shipped back would cover the Midwest of the United States like a rug. Soybeans would be applied to more diverse uses than any other crop in history." Although Stone wisely keeps himself out of the argument, it's a safe bet that most of his readers will hear the alarm. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
By analyzing the genomes of the shipworm along with its bacteria, as well as the enzymes it contained, Dr. Distel concluded that shipworms first ate wood, but acquired bacteria over millions of years of evolution that allowed it to mix an energy cocktail from chemicals in the seawater, mainly hydrogen sulfide from decaying wood, instead of eating the wood directly. A similar symbiotic relationship exists in a giant deep sea mussel that is thought to have grown so big off energy from chemicals instead of organic matter. It's kind of like how plants use sunlight, water and carbon dioxide in photosynthesis. This special relationship also has implications for medicine: "If you or I have bacteria living inside our cells, we're sick," Dr. Distel said. But either the bacteria evades the shipworm's immune system, or the shipworm recognizes the bacteria as safe. "Understanding how an animal can live with bacteria inside their cells and not get sick and die could help inform our understanding of infection," he added. Dr. Distel's team believes many more mysteries may be unlocked by further study of this shipworm and its bacterial partner. "Whenever you find something so weird and so unusual, there's often going to be unexpected discoveries that come from it," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
"An artist's duty, as far as I am concerned, is to reflect the times." That was Nina Simone, in the vintage video shot that opened Gareth Pugh's new multidisciplinary documentary released during London Fashion Week. Entitled "The Reconstruction," it was an hourlong making of video about the creation of a visual album though not exactly the Beyonce kind (even if it comes with a Spotify playlist). More the photographic kind. One that comes with a fast forward through the news events that got us to here: Australian bush fires, the Trump impeachment, Covid 19, George Floyd. And combines that with business confessional, craftsmanship, C.G.I. burning vehicles, wastelands, random smokestacks and 13 garments enshrined in video shorts by Nick Knight that suggest, variously, the sphinx, eagles, aliens and warrior queens. One that was unsettling, personal, chaotic and mostly unwearable. (All that imagery will later be digitized onto T shirts made to order and sold to benefit Refuge, which works to combat domestic violence.) But not at all unwatchable. Because it was also one that made you think: Hell, yes. That's exactly these times. Down to the fact that many of us, grounded by pandemic restrictions, are experiencing it on TV. Or YouTube, anyway. As the Emmys, which took place over the weekend just as London Fashion Week got into full swing, argued, it's the connective tissue of the moment; our shared unreal reality. In fashion, as in life. Still, the forced videofication of these particular "shows" has been unfurling with mixed results. What works on film and what works in the flesh are entirely different forms. But since it's not that hard to imagine that at some point, if the current situation persists or the splintering of the fashion calendar really takes hold, videos will become part of the fabric of the regular fashion cycle, then coming to terms with what works onscreen is important. And it's not simply a group of women, or men, strutting down a runway. There's nothing wrong with that, from an informational point of view and oftentimes, as with Molly Goddard's subversive rainbow fripperies and Victoria Beckham's slouchy power plays, the collections look very good but the videos lack texture, any sense of raw emotion and mess. (It's also very easy, after about three minutes, to look away.) And given that the anti sweatpants movement that began in New York reached a new level of intensity, and creativity, in London, attaching the clothes to the visceral, stomach churning weirdness of now to characters, as opposed to the robotic strut of the catwalk model is what makes for really good fashion TV. See, for example, Erdem Moralioglu's Emma Hamilton fantasy, filmed in Epping Forest and inspired by his lockdown reading (Susan Sontag's "The Volcano Lover"), featuring the heroine forever walking through the woods toward her lover? future? in empire waist florals, puff sleeve, jet beaded pink moire, and olive green suiting dripping in black grosgrain ribbon. She never quite arrives, but she sure looks dreamy getting there. Or see the JW Anderson mini shopping a logue, featuring two friends ("The Crown's" Emma Corrin, a.k.a. Princess Diana, and her stylist, Henry Lambert) trying on stuff in his store, a promise, dangling in an empty street, of what we once had and may one day have again. (The actual collection is apparently coming separately in a few days.) That kind of naked intimacy is also what gave Christopher Kane's short, "Home Alone," its power. Inviting viewers into his atelier, he revealed not clothes (at least not at first), but stacks and stacks of glue and glitter paintings made in his back garden during lockdown. There were piles of portraits segueing into giant canvases covering every bit of space in his studio. They came, he explains on screen, from "fear of the unknown." It made him not "want to create clothes," he says. "I wanted to do something else." The scene in the showroom is like a glimpse into some sort of creative self care spiral, but its final expression is also exhilarating. Those paintings become prints, which get digitized onto a handful of tops and skirts and dresses, not to mention Tyvek pieces that Mr. Kane customized by further hand painting them with glitter. They're collectibles: elegantly original, and with a very human back story. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The choreographer Alonzo King, left, and the composer and jazz pianist Jason Moran, during a rehearsal for their yet to be titled new work, which will premiere at the Vail Dance Festival. When the Vail International Dance Festival proposed to Alonzo King that he choreograph a new work featuring four members of his San Francisco company, Lines Ballet, and four from New York City Ballet, he knew just what he needed: a partner. "The music is the thing, isn't it?" he said. "A composer whose music you treasure and that you've worked with before and are going to work with again." For Mr. King, that had to be the jazz pianist Jason Moran. This summer, as part of the Vail festival, which opens on July 26, the pair will present the premiere of their latest collaboration. So far, it doesn't have a title. "It's hard for me to name the baby," Mr. King explained, "until it's really born." The two will be putting finishing touches on the work in Colorado ahead of its premiere on Aug. 3. It's the fourth collaboration between Mr. King and Mr. Moran, who have relished working together from the start. Their first artistic venture, "Refraction," debuted in 2009, and their fifth, which includes the jazz musician Charles Lloyd, will happen this fall with Lines. The success of their artistic connection, Mr. King said, is rooted in how they are able to create space, allowing a dialogue to happen between the music and the dance. "Who is going to lead here?" Mr. King said. "Who will be the principal instrument here? Will it be the dancer, will it be the sound? With Jason, it was just immediate that he could serve the dance. And it's inevitable that he's going to make great music." For Damian Woetzel, the artistic director of Vail, who commissioned the piece, part of what inspired it was the reaction particularly by City Ballet dancers to a Lines performance last summer there. "Some of the dancers were gobsmacked," Mr. Woetzel said. "That started a conversation: Wouldn't it be amazing to have Alonzo do a new piece for the festival? And what if it was his dancers with City Ballet dancers? Alonzo quickly proposed Jason Moran, and I said, Oh my God." "We're just in this beautiful opportunity," he added, "for people to learn from each other and make something together on a different level." In considering collaborations, Mr. King said, he enjoyed them when they seemed "tricky or potentially perilous." And there is a prickly side to this one: Mr. King, after all, walked into the first rehearsal knowing only half of his cast: Adji Cissoko, Madeline DeVries , Shuaib Elhassan and Michael Montgomery, from Lines. Mr. Woetzel selected the dancers from City Ballet: Miriam Miller, Unity Phelan, Christopher Grant and Roman Mejia. "That was really cool, because it was trust," Mr. Kin g said. "I had no say in it, and that was fine with me, and it turned out that Damian chose amazing people." Most important, the City Ballet performers were open and receptive. Mr. King said that he had walked into big companies in which a leading dancer might not want to veer from what was comfortable. "So when you have dancers who are willing to try new things," he said, "and who aren't narrowed down by a small definition of 'I do this' or 'I do that,' but think of themselves as an artist capable of anything, that's fun." Mr. Moran laughed. "I'm not a choreographer," he continued. "I only know about how my body feels when I play it. So I think in all collaborations, you're not necessarily looking for people who simply give you what's on the top of your head. We want to dig deep together, and that's what this allows." While, to his regret, Mr. Moran wasn't trained as a dancer, he is profoundly affected by movement and that includes his own. "If I'm not moving while I'm playing, " he said, "I know the music is bad. That means something is stuck." Mr. Moran said that he had to make sure that he did not think of a sound as done once he had played the note, but "that it is still moving in the air and running into people's bodies," he said. "I guess in working with Alonzo and dancers, you really are allowed to see it or what it triggers." The new work's score is spare and poignant, building toward a powerful finale to which the dancers move in unison. Here, Mr. King is continuing to explore a theme that has been at the root of his recent series of ballets. "It's this idea of communal harmony and unspoken contracts," he said. "There's something about chemistry and the manipulation of energies and how they're placed. You're building an architecture, and it's based on the building materials, which are the dancers. You're really creating something that's living and formed out of who they are, and what the ideas are in the room." Mr. King's dancers are both free and precise; they possess an uninhibited consciousness of their bodies in space. As Ms. Phelan, of City Ballet, said, "They're not afraid to try anything." Mr. King's approach to ballet technique has a philosophical side: His clear understanding of anatomy is a given, but on top of that is his transcendent way of discussing the motivation and mechanics behind a step. While working with the dancers last month, he focused on the tendu, a basic yet integral ballet step that involves stretching the foot out while keeping it in contact with the floor. "You want to get as many angles as you can in the spectrum," Mr. King said, as he opened his arms to show that the action wasn't limited solely to the leg. "Where do I tendu from?" he said. "Navel to finger. Navel to shoulder. So you radiate. You want to see rays." Pyrotechnics and self aware displays of skill don't hold much weight for Mr. King, whose movement is characterized by an ever expanding fluidity. He is drawn to finding balance between the heart and the mind "when there is a keen intelligence, but it's balanced by the heart of a mother," he said. "I often ask the dancers, regardless of sex, where is the mother in you?" To the willowy Ms. Miller, he said: "I would love to see you do too much. What you think 'too much' is. You're always the nice girl. I want to see your full power. Scare me." For Ms. Phelan, the experience has been a gift. "You want to give him everything, but he's not expecting the world from you," she said. "He just wants your best. He kept saying, 'You're just trying to be beautiful I want you to be a beast, I want people to be afraid of you.'" "I wrote that down," she added. "I wrote down a lot of the things that he said so I'll have them to look at when I need inspiration." As Mr. King sees it, dancing and collaboration is about ceaseless exploration. "There are so many ways to view something, to interpret something, to participate in something," he said. "To ask yourself: What is my motive? What does it mean in terms of science? What does it mean in terms of emotion and feeling? A lyricist needs a great singer, a great interpreter. The choreographer is the lyricist, and the dancer is the singer." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The saxophonist and scholar Andrew White at his home in Washington in 2015. "I've always been interested in exploiting all aspects of what I do," he once said. "I wouldn't be able to do that with any record company, because their thing is to pigeonhole." Andrew White, a profusely talented and proudly eccentric musician and scholar best known in jazz circles for transcribing more than 800 of John Coltrane's saxophone solos, died on Nov. 11 at an assisted living facility in Silver Spring, Md. He was 78. The cause was complications of two strokes he had recently suffered, said Nasar Abadey, Mr. White's longtime drummer. Mr. White rightly described himself as a man of "various artistic gifts of excess." To even gesture at the breadth of his career would require a half dozen labels: saxophonist, multi instrumentalist, composer, author, business owner, teacher. He leaves behind one of the largest troves of self released recordings, books and musical transcriptions by a single musician in jazz history. In the 1960s and '70s, Mr. White played electric bass for Stevie Wonder and the 5th Dimension; English horn with Weather Report; oboe in the American Ballet Theater Orchestra; and saxophone in bands led by McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, both former members of Coltrane's quartet. But eventually, settling down in his native Washington, Mr. White focused his inexhaustible energies on his own projects. On Coltrane's birthday in 1971, convinced that the music industry had neither an interest in his talents nor the ability to contain them, Mr. White started Andrew's Musical Enterprises Incorporated, a label and publishing house that he ran with the help of his wife, Jocelyne White, an elementary school teacher. Over an uninterrupted 49 year period, Andrew's Music published more than 1,000 transcriptions; more than 40 LPs of his own music, running from jazz to funk to classical; and numerous books, including "Trane 'n Me" (1981), a well regarded musicological treatise on Coltrane that was translated into German, and "Everybody Loves the Sugar" (2001), an 800 page autobiography. In "Trane 'n Me," Mr. White feigned humility, then cut playfully to the chase: "I have been dubbed 'the world's leading authority on the music of John Coltrane.' They call me that, but I'm too modest to make any such claim; however, if you want to pay me, you can call me anything you please except late for dinner." The covers of his books and records were typically titled in stark black or gold lettering over a white background. Book text was typewritten. But the content bridled with energy and humor. Mr. White was known to treat concerts as physical endurance tests, and at least one show at the Top O'Foolery in Washington lasted for 12 hours straight, wearing out multiple rhythm sections in the process. He released most of that performance as a live set, stretched across nine LPs. Appreciating his music required some fortitude on the listener's part, too: His improvisations were brilliantly sophisticated but sonically severe, with rapid fire notes coming out in a caustic, bellowing tone. He knew this made him unappealing to record labels but he didn't mourn the loss of opportunity. "I've always been interested in exploiting all aspects of what I do," he told The Washington City Paper in 1996. "I wouldn't be able to do that with any record company, because their thing is to pigeonhole." And he welcomed the chance to stay weird. All of his work was touched by a ribald sense of humor and a taste for absurdity, and he teased the divide between self promotion and self parody. He rarely stood for a photograph with his tongue in his mouth. As he got older, the suits he wore only grew more flamboyant. In the promotional materials (self penned, of course) for "Everybody Loves the Sugar," Mr. White promised a book full of "my perennial, suggestive prurience, total political incorrectness and fiendishly pious irreverence." His home office, which he delighted in displaying to guests, was plastered from floor to ceiling with photos of topless women. On the request of a buyer whose girlfriend had a particular kink, Mr. White said, he created a nearly hourlong album consisting entirely of flatulence. Andrew Nathaniel White III was born in Washington on Sept. 6, 1942, but grew up in Nashville, where his father was a minister in the A.M.E. Church and a civil rights activist who went on to serve as president of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. At 8, Mr. White started on the soprano saxophone, a notoriously difficult horn, which caused him to develop his "iron embouchure," as he told JazzTimes in 2001. Before long he was teaching himself to transcribe from recordings of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and others and writing his own music. When he started Andrew's Music in the early 1970s, his Coltrane transcriptions were among the first things he published. The first five volumes, totaling more than 600 solos, came out in 1973; a copy of them is now housed at the library of Syracuse University. The group established a Monday night residency at Bohemian Caverns, the city's premier jazz club, where the audience often included jazz luminaries traveling through Washington. Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, a member of Coltrane's group at the time, became fans. Cannonball Adderley was so impressed that he helped the quintet get a recording contract with Riverside Records, which released the group's only two albums, "New Jazz Frontiers From Washington" (1961) and "Young Ideas" (1962). As musical director, Mr. White's arrangements on those records are a master class in the standard hard bop sound of the day, influenced especially by the Clifford Brown Max Roach Quintet and the Miles Davis Quintet. But when he fires up a solo, things go askew. He unlooses high and wobbly notes in sprees, and the tonal center is thrown off. Critics compared Mr. White's playing to that of Dolphy, another outre alto saxophonist and multi reedist, but Mr. White saw it differently. "I don't have any Eric Dolphy influence," he told JazzTimes. "We were doing what we were doing about the same time." "I was listening to him talk while he was explaining this scale and his approach to using this intervallic concept, and my eyes started bulging," he continued, remembering a conversation they had at Bohemian Caverns. "What I was thinking while listening to him is that I was working from the exact same scale at the same time. To me it was a coincidence; I've told this story to other people, and they say it's mystical." After college, seeing no commercial future as a straight ahead jazz musician, Mr. White studied oboe at the Paris Conservatory for a year on a John Hay Whitney Foundation grant, then spent two years at the Center of Creative and Performing Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo (now the University at Buffalo). He lived in New York in the late 1960s and early '70s as his work as a side musician picked up, then returned to Washington after marrying Jocelyne Uhl in 1970. They were married for 41 years, until her death in 2011. Mr. White leaves no immediate survivors just a few thousand published artifacts, spilling with spirit. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
An original perspective picture of the Great Gateway and Nakano cho in the Shin Yoshiwara, (1730s 1740s), by Okumura Masanobu. The work is part of "A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints," at the Japan Society. A figure in a translucent kimono coyly holds a fan. Another arranges an iris in a vase. Are they men or women? As a mind bending exhibition that opened Friday at the Japan Society illustrates, they are what scholars call a third gender adolescent males seen as the height of beauty in early modern Japan who were sexually available to both men and women. Known as wakashu, they are one of several examples in the show that reveal how elastic the ideas of gender were before Japan adopted Western sexual mores in the late 1800s. The show, "A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints," arrives at a time of ferment about gender roles in the United States and abroad. Bathroom rights for transgender people have become a cultural flash point. The notion of "gender fluidity" that it's not necessary to identify as either male or female, that gender can be expressed as a continuum is roiling traditional definitions. She said that like other societies in the past and present the hijra in India; the "two spirit people" in some American indigenous cultures the diversity in gender definitions and sexual practices in Edo Japan challenges modern notions that male and female are clear either or identities. The art on display shows how many permutations were acceptable in Edo society: men or women in liaisons with the adolescent wakashu; female geisha dressing like wakashu and engaging in rough sex; male prostitutes cross dressing as women; men impersonating women on the Kabuki stage, a tradition that lasts to this day; and even a male Kabuki actor impersonating a woman who pretends at one point to be a man. The wakashu are a case in point. The term describes the time a male reaches puberty and his head is partly shaved, with a triangle shaped cut above the forelocks that is a telltale way to identify wakashu. During this stage of life only, before full fledged adulthood, it was socially permissible to have sex with either men or women. In the prints, the wakashu are presented as beautiful and desirable, sometimes practicing what were seen at the time as feminine arts like flower arranging or playing the samisen. Like unmarried women, wakashu who belonged to the samurai class could wear the long sleeved kimono known as furisode. In several prints, you have to look closely to find the shaved triangle in the hair, or spot a sword tucked in a samurai wakashu's sash (or, in the erotic woodblocks, to see the genitals on display), to differentiate between the wakashu and the women pictured near them. In some cases, there are sly literary allusions that deliberately transpose gender. These prints depict episodes from classical literature, or Buddhist and Confucian traditions, but flip the genders of the main characters, or recast the men as wakashu. The art in the exhibition ranges from lively snapshots of daily life to uninhibited portrayals of desire. A screen shows several wakashu surrounding a Buddhist monk, teasingly holding down his hands, plying him with alcohol and tickling his feet, suggesting foreplay before male male sex. A young woman passes a love note to her wakashu lover behind the back of an older artist who is signing his name to a painting. A wakashu dreams of sex with a famous prostitute, while another woman tenderly covers him with a jacket. Several prints reflect Edo society's strict hierarchy of class and age, one reason the curators caution it is misleading to compare gender norms directly to the present day. The Edo period was one of relative peace in Japan, following many years of war between competing samurai. It was also marked by nearly complete isolation from the West. That is one reason it may have offered space for sexual experimentation, but only within certain bounds. Any hint of adult male male sex was confined to outcast groups such as Kabuki actors, said Michael Chagnon, the curator of exhibit interpretation at the Japan Society, although homosexuality was practiced among samurai for centuries and commercialized during the Edo period. Men are usually in charge, both in pursuit of sexual partners and in sexual positions, except for experienced women who pursue younger wakashu. There is virtually no depiction of lesbianism, since women were not granted the sexual freedoms men were. The only print showing two naked women is ambiguous, with art historians uncertain whether it suggests mutual desire. Older men have sex with younger wakashu. The exhibition raises and confronts questions of pederasty or exploitation, given that wakashu were sexually available after puberty, younger than would now be considered the age of consent. The curators consulted social workers and lawyers during the original exhibit, held at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, to make sure the work was not considered child pornography. Mr. Chagnon said marriages and sexual liaisons took place at an earlier age than the present day, partly because people died so much younger, often by their late 30s. The notion of age of consent did not exist in Edo Japan, he said, and was imported later. The Edo period ended after Japan was humiliated by demands from a militarily superior West the black ships of Commodore Perry wrested concessions from a country that had once confined Western traders to offshore islands. And it was then in the late 1860s, as Japan rushed to adopt Western technology and forms of government, that it also imported more rigid Western notions of gender and permissible sexual expression. The tradition of wakashu ended. Homosexuality was outlawed for a time. Same sex marriage is not legal in Japan today, although it was debated in the legislature in 2015 and some cities have allowed partnership certificates for same sex couples. A gay subculture flourishes, with many artists playfully shifting and layering identities, mainly through the internet. But gay men are generally expected to marry women and produce children, fulfilling social expectations while conducting their sexual lives discreetly. In an uncanny echo of the past, some Japanese men today, known as "genderless danshi," are once again blurring lines, dressing androgynously, using makeup or wearing clothes typically seen as feminine. "Even though we have this rich tradition of gender, prints like these are not found in our textbooks," said Professor Ikeda, who grew up in Japan. "We don't do these kinds of exhibitions in Japan." It is one of the many reflections on contemporary society that this provocative exhibition raises. Walking through it is a reckoning with categories, definitions and how they resonate in societies still uncertain about whether lines between genders should be bent or blurred. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
True to form, an autocratic executive wrapping up a real estate deal is trying to wiggle out of paying contractors. The project, a gleaming, fortified executive residence and business headquarters, is a veritable castle in the sky. His idea was to get all his subordinates including his aggrieved wife, obsequious family members and a dirty trickster under one roof so he can better control them as he continues enhancing his dominion and power. Not so fast. It's actually the gist of Wagner's "Ring" cycle, which the Metropolitan Opera is presenting in a retooled revival of Robert Lepage's intensely debated production of the four opera epic through May 11. Since the first complete "Ring" production inaugurated the Bayreuth Festival in Germany in 1876, Wagner's saga has been milked for its perceived politics. Early audiences saw echoes of revolutionary currents that had swept 19th century Europe. The work was soon seized upon to support various ideological agendas: a Marxist narrative of class struggle; an allegory of environmental degradation at the hands of rapacious industrialists; a multigenerational drama about a dysfunctional royal family. The "Ring" has also been viewed as a cautionary tale of a power hungry ruler or mogul who goes too far. Modern stagings that present Wagner's flawed hero, the god Wotan, as if he were the chief executive of the Valhalla Corporation have become almost commonplace. In this divisive moment in American politics, the "Ring" may feel newly relevant, epitomized by Michael Cohen, the former lawyer for President Trump, pointing to himself during recent congressional hearings, warning of what can happen when you are dazzled by power. For one, the "Ring" depicts a world that functions through a codified system of checks and balances and agreed upon norms. Wotan, though the head god and patriarch, is not all powerful. He must contend with a sort of cabinet of sub gods with their own areas of authority. But he has stacked his regime with cronies and has brazenly flouted the standards and protocols meant to rein in executive overreach. It's a crucial plot element, and not simply a costume accouterment, that Wotan carries with him at all times a staff that has the runes (the codes of his realm, like the articles of a constitution) carved into the wood a symbol, and perhaps the source, of his power. Of course, this imperious ruler cites a particular rune when it serves him and simply ignores those that prove inconvenient. Another strand of the myth that may leap out today concerns the way the personal becomes the political in the life of a ruler like Wotan. The "Ring" has been interpreted as an allegory about the relationship between power and love, and the difficulty of obtaining both in one's life. That's the way I see it. It's crucial that the secret to the magic gold the three Rhinemaidens keep safe in the depths of the river involves a choice, in effect, between power and love: Anyone who renounces love and takes the gold can fashion a ring from it and become master of the universe. Wotan craves both power and love, a tension that plays out poignantly in his relationship with Fricka, his exasperated (and childless) wife. But it's Alberich the dwarf who acts first. There are eerie resonances, too, in how Wotan and Alberich, opposing characters, become obsessed with the ring. Alberich literally stumbles upon the magic gold when he makes advances at the Rhinemaidens, who find him laughably hideous. Rebuffed and humiliated, he steals the gold in an I'll show you all act of vengeance. But Wotan, who has heard of the gold and its power, was content to leave it be, until the moment when we meet him in "Das Rheingold." Now he needs to pay his contractors. And beyond that, once he learns what Alberich has done, Wotan feels threatened. He must get his hands on that ring, on that power whatever the cost to his governing legitimacy and personal life. You may also find one other theme uncomfortably familiar: heads of state near and far granting governing authority to family members. Having made a hash of things and violated the very codes he had sworn to uphold, Wotan must somehow make corrections. Knowing that his own hands are tied, he fathers children hoping that one of his descendants (perhaps the hero who has been prophesied) might take over his domain and, exercising free will, right his wrongs, while still maintaining power. But it doesn't look good. His narcissistic greed and power grabs have caused havoc in the world. The ring (now in possession of the giant Fafner) is cursed; the natural order has been disrupted; the only hope of averting the inevitable global calamity (which brings to mind climate change) is for the ring to be returned to the river. Since Wotan also craves knowledge knowledge is power, after all he pursues Erda, the all knowing earth goddess, who comes to warn him about what will ensue if he keeps on his heedless and destructive path. They end up having nine daughters together, and he raises the girls as Valkyrie warriors to do his bidding. But only Brunnhilde, his favorite, seems to know his mind. "Who am I if not your will?" she asks in an intimate moment when Wotan seems troubled. What follows is the rare confessional scene among numerous tales of fearsome, all powerful fathers, when Wotan tells Brunnhilde the woeful story of how he has broken the covenants and mismanaged his life. This aspect of the "Ring" always reminds me of the scene in "The Godfather" in which the ailing Vito Corleone confides in Michael, his trusted son. "I never wanted this for you," Vito says. He had hoped that, after lawlessly building an empire, by this point he would have given the family business a legitimate veneer and groomed an heir who could prevail within the establishment. Senator Corleone? Governor Corleone? "We'll get there, Pop," Michael replies. By the end of the "Ring" cycle, the immutable forces have won out, just as Erda foretold. The game is up and Wotan must face the inevitable. We learn that he has piled branches from the world tree around his crumbling castle, where he glumly awaits the end. Sure enough, as if doing her father's bidding, Brunnhilde, who has been through hell, sparks a self immolating fire that consumes the castle and its godly inhabitants. The cautionary moral seems clear: If you blaze a path to power, the flames may well consume you. The river floods the ashes and reclaims the ring. For better or worse, humans will have to go forward without the gods. The governing codes of conduct that were shattered will be restored. Or will they? That very question is roiling Washington as the "Ring" plays out at the Met. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and I shared a gondola in Venice during the 500th anniversary of the Ghetto in 2016. I was filming the "Merchant of Venice" segment of the PBS "Shakespeare Uncovered" series, and when her boat broke down, I invited her to share mine. She stood no higher than my shoulder, which startled me, and even now in my memory, our first meeting is one of surprise, because her quiet, assured stillness projected something much bigger and stopped me cold. I imagine it affected everyone the same way; it was calming. Her bodyguard was just about twice her size, and my sense of him was that he was so proud to be her protector. She and I sat next to each other in the ride to her hotel, and I invited her to act with me in the trial scene from "The Merchant of Venice"; I'd been scheduled to appear in a mock trial appeal of Shylock's verdict. She instantly agreed, and it's on tape somewhere. After we did the Shakespeare scene, there was an imaginary argument of Shylock's appeal between real life international lawyers and scholars, with Ruth as chief justice. They then retired to chambers for half an hour, and when they returned, Chief Justice Ginsburg found for Shylock on several grounds, one of which was that counsel for the defense, Portia, did not have a license to practice law, but also that Shylock, if he had known of the deadly consequences of his actions, would have never insisted on the pound of flesh. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Brie Larson is bringing Captain Marvel to the big screen in the latest film from Marvel Studios. Her adventure is set in the 1990s, but the exploits of Captain Marvel date to 1939, when Billy Batson followed a stranger into a subway and was granted powers by a wizard to transform himself into the mighty hero. Since then, many men and women have borne the name Captain Marvel, as well as a sexually fluid alien. Here is a colorful selection. Superman welcomed Captain Marvel to the DC Comics family in 1972. In 1939, Billy Batson, an orphaned newspaper boy, turned into the Fawcett Comics hero Captain Marvel with one magic word Shazam! No villains could stop him, but a later lawsuit nearly did. National Comics (the forerunner of DC Comics) thought Captain Marvel, who was strong and could fly and sometimes outsold "Superman," was too close to the Man of Steel and cried copyright infringement. Fawcett retired the character in 1953, but nearly 20 years later, DC licensed him for new comics. Still, the series could not be called Captain Marvel, because Marvel had grabbed the trademark for its own hero in 1966. These days, Batson goes by Shazam (he cannot say his own name lest he transform) and will get his own film, starring Zachary Levi, next month. Meet the cats who played Goose in "Captain Marvel." Can the movie solve Marvel Studios' woman problem Bursting on to the scene in 1966, Mar Vell started out as a spy for the alien Kree race before siding with Earth. This version of the hero was originally a silver haired hunk, but editors feared his hair color made him look old. He was given a spiffy new costume and later a dye job, leaving him with his better known golden tresses. Sadly, he lost his battle with cancer in 1982. More shockingly, Mar Vell has remained dead, despite comics' love of resurrections. His genetically engineered son, Genis Vell, burst onto the scene as Legacy but later took the name Captain Marvel, bearing it until he was killed in 2006. Spoiler: Mar Vell has an unexpected role in the new film. In 1967, Carol Danvers was introduced as an Air Force officer who encountered the alien Captain Marvel. In 1976, Danvers became Ms. Marvel, whose costume was a variation of Mar Vell's, albeit more revealing. She later lost her memories and powers, and alien experiments transformed her to Binary, who gets in a spectacular revenge punch against the woman behind her earlier woes. Danvers then became Warbird, joined the Avengers and struggled with alcoholism, before finally taking on the mantle of Captain Marvel (with an appropriate military inspired uniform). Introduced in 1982, Monica Rambeau worked for the New Orleans harbor patrol. An encounter with cosmic energy infused her with the ability to convert her body into any form of energy. She joined the Avengers to better understand her abilities and excelled, eventually mastering her powers and becoming chairwoman of the team for a time. Rambeau was Captain Marvel for 14 years. She ceded the name to Mar Vell's son and became Photon (and, later, Pulsar and Spectrum). The "Captain Marvel" film includes a character named Maria Rambeau (played by Lashana Lynch), an Air Force pilot whose call sign is Photon and who has a young daughter named Monica. This alien hero crash landed on Earth in 2000 and quickly found himself at odds with Doctor Midas, who was obsessed with the energy that gave the Fantastic Four their powers, and Hexus, a corporation that became sentient (and evil). Noh Varr joined the Avengers as Captain Marvel and later became known as the Protector. As a space faring Kree, the triple jointed Nor Varr has a fluid view of sexuality. "We consider these things carefully," he once told his Young Avengers teammates. "I was aboard an exploratory vessel, after all. Exploratory does have multiple meanings. The Kree are efficient like that." When her series began in 2014, Kamala Khan was a Muslim teenager living in Jersey City and a big fan of the Carol Danvers version of Captain Marvel. When Khan's powers activated, she became the local hero Ms. Marvel, telling her idol in a feverish dream: "I want to be you. Except I would wear the classic, politically incorrect costume and kick butt in giant wedge heels." Since then, Khan has expanded her reach globally with the Champions, a squad of teenage superheroes, and seems likely to be promoted to Captain one day. In the meantime, maybe fans will get a big screen cameo? At a news conference last month, Brie Larson was asked which hero she would like to meet in a sequel. "My dream would be that Ms. Marvel gets to come into play," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
"We love the things we love for what they are," Robert Frost declares at the end of "Hyla Brook." But as Frost knew, that's only half the truth. We also love the things we love because of how they make us feel about ourselves, which is itself often a function of how we think they make us appear to others. Or so roughly 97 percent of social media postings, particularly those involving boats, would suggest. This fact has a special relevance for poets, because while our culture generally has little interest in poems as such, there is still cachet in being seen as a Person Who Reads Poetry. A writer who aspires to recognition beyond the thorny borders of the poetry world accordingly faces two countervailing challenges: On one hand, she'll need to produce something that "looks like poetry" to the audience she hopes for (usually readers of literary fiction); on the other hand, what looks like poetry to that audience is partly defined by its unfamiliarity. In order to satisfy, then, the work must somehow be both readily identifiable and mystifying. This peculiar phenomenon helps explain the oddity of Karen Solie's new book, "The Caiplie Caves." This is Solie's fifth collection of new work; her previous efforts have won an array of honors and awards, including Canada's lucrative Griffin Prize (Solie is from Saskatchewan). Indeed, Solie is "now considered one of Canada's best poets," according to the back of her 2009 collection "Pigeon." Her American debut, "The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out," appeared in 2015; on its cover the critic Michael Hofmann declared, "Solie's work should be read wherever English is read" high praise for sure, even if that "should" seems a little poignant. So Solie has reached the point at which, as a poet, you begin to notice you're being noticed, and to wonder if the attention means you should try something different. "The Caiplie Caves" is certainly that. For one thing, it's Solie's first project book. In the poetry world, this vague sounding description has a very specific meaning; it refers to collections in which many or all of the poems, rather than being about the usual variety of poetic stimuli (trees, exes, dead relatives), instead relate to a unitary subject, which will typically be a hefty political or historical matter rather than, for instance, laundry or houseplants. The advantage to the project book is that its contents are easy to describe ("readily identifiable") even if the individual poems are filled with airy poeticisms ("mystifying"). If it sounds as if project books are usually tedious, that's not the case some are quite good. But in an era in which poets often need to produce collections in order to remain employed, it's reasonable to look skeptically on a form that can resemble a paint by numbers kit. In the non Ethernan poems, Solie sticks with the approach that has worked for her in previous books. That approach depends on associative leaps, rapid changes in register (from, for example, "it's just okay" to "the eradication of desire" in four lines) and diction plucked from every nook in the dictionary ("Aleve," "histoplasmotic," "griskin"). Compression, stillness and plainness are largely absent; quick shifts, volubility and references to Barthes are fully present (there are four pages of endnotes for the 105 pages of poetry here). You might suppose this would result in a little too much self conscious literariness, but Solie tempers her lines with good humor and an attractive populism. If she's going to write about the nature of truth, she's going to involve an "AEG 365 washer/dryer"; if she's going to write about solitude, she's also going to talk about "short term RVers" trying to park to see Leonard Knight's gloriously weird Salvation Mountain in the California desert. You can see the best of Solie in a shorter poem like "A Lesson." Here's the first stanza: The tide rises, a crowd returning from a stadium, abstract sound of innumerable specifics reentering the shoreline's boroughs. Wheels clatter on the rocks of your driveway, headlamps light the wall. A door opens in the place in you joy leaps to. The awkwardness of that last line echoes the vulnerable openness of its sentiment. Solie continues the tide metaphor ("the nightmare rocks and fingery weed beds banished") for another seven lines, and concludes: "Nothing exists in darkness that doesn't in the light. / Once, this comforted you." It's a focused, intentionally ambiguous ending that feels unforced but inevitable, as if it were arriving on a wave itself. The quiet assurance is astonishing. This is unfortunately not the case for quite a bit of the rest of "The Caiplie Caves." There are two primary difficulties here. The first is that ventriloquizing a hermit who lived over a thousand years ago and left no written record means inventing a voice, and Solie in some ways to her credit can't quite commit to the notion that she's writing as someone other than herself. So her Ethernan swings back and forth between, on one hand, saying things like "and as my colleagues grew incapable / of speaking off brand" and comparing an island to a car "idling at the curb in a cloud of exhaust"; and on the other hand, offering up grandiose announcements that probably wouldn't make it into a poem if not licensed by a persona ("in this foggy, dispute ridden landscape / thus begins my apprenticeship to cowardice"). There are many reasons one might use a hybrid voice, of course; none of them change the fact that this particular voice gets old fast. The second difficulty is that while Solie's speed can be a virtue, it can also lead to lines that look hurried and unhelpfully baroque. This has been true of her earlier collections, though not debilitatingly so. For example, the first poem in "Pigeon" begins, "Oligotrophic: of lakes and rivers. The heat / an inanimate slur, wool gathering, hanging / like a bad suit." It's easy to be so distracted by "oligotrophic" that you don't notice that "an inanimate slur" makes no sense (are there animate slurs?), or that the idea of heat "hanging like a bad suit" becomes less satisfying the more you think about it (Is the heat baggy? Is it mauve?). The project form seems to have aggravated this tendency. In the book's last poem, "Clarity," for example, the speaker has just noticed a dead bird: "When did my sixth receiver / register the hydrostatic pressure / of fluid newly at rest / between subject and object?" "My sixth receiver"? Or in another poem, trying to warm up a cold house: "I tried to convince the storage heaters / to take our relationship to the next level." How about just, "I turned on the heater"? "The Caiplie Caves" has its moments "White Strangers" is a shivery take on what it feels like to be a woman at home alone at night when two men knock on your door and Solie is much more capable than the average reading circuit regular. But this feels like the work of a poet who has set out to write poetry, rather than of a writer who has turned out to have written some poems. This will get applauded; people like poetry that looks the way it's supposed to. But it would be good to see this talented writer disappoint such readers in the future. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Bret Stephens: We're in a new and frightening world, Gail. Every time I get a news alert on my phone, I hear James Earl Jones's voice in my head, saying, "Mother of God." And every time I listen to Donald Trump's voice, I hear Slim Pickens's voice from "Dr. Strangelove." How are you riding out the crisis? Gail Collins: I'm trying to look upon this as a social experiment on what happens if you require the whole country to stay at home and then deprive them of all sports programming. While you were reading Camus, my husband and I went to our favorite restaurant for what I guess will be the last meal out for a long time. No need to worry about keeping adequate space between diners there was hardly anybody there. Just a lot of staff worrying about their next paycheck. Bret: The economic consequences are going to be devastating for people who are already living paycheck to paycheck, to say nothing of tip to tip. I don't fear a recession. I fear a full scale depression. It is hard to overstate how bad this could get if it goes on for months. Andrew Yang's suggestion of a universal basic income is suddenly looking extremely smart and potentially essential. Gail: And Sunday night we watched the Biden Sanders debate. Never thought I'd regard an argument between two elderly politicians as entertainment, but any distraction is welcome. What was your take? Bret: I watched the first 90 minutes, concluded that Bernie had laid no mortal blows and that Biden could still hold his own. Joe's line that "people are looking for results, not revolution" seemed to nicely capture his core message. And his insistence that we need to deal with the emergency before us, rather than tear down and reinvent the system, seems particularly relevant now. Gail: And Biden promised a female vice presidential nominee. Something we all figured he'd do, but the sudden commitment seemed to take Bernie off guard. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." Bret: Among the thousand and one surprises of this astonishing primary season is that Democrats are acting like Republicans used to rallying around the original presumptive front runner. Now do you think he can go the distance and beat Trump? Gail: Lord, I hope so, Bret. But trying to imagine what the country will be like in the fall is sort of like leaping into science fiction. If the virus threat drops off reasonably soon and the country struggles back to normal, maybe Trump will find some way of taking credit for it. Bret: If it turns out we have a low case fatality rate and, by the way, I'm amazed by all the new terminology I'm learning on account of this pandemic, including "social distancing" and "shelf stable ingredient" then Trump will call the coronavirus an even bigger liberal hoax than his impeachment was, never mind that he's the guy who declared a national emergency. Either that, or he'll say that he, alone, stopped it. Gail: Although in the real world I think we can agree he's been a disaster. Bret: As Obama said in a different context: Yes. We. Can. Gail: There was the speech from the Oval Office where he got everything wrong, and then the news conference where he shook about 50 hands and then spent much of the rest of his time introducing captains of industry he claimed were being the heroes of the hour. Bret: Including more false claims about Google. You know that Pinocchio tracker that our friends at The Washington Post use? I think the nose grew so long keeping track of Trump's falsehoods last week that it hit the ground. Gail: And for the Democrats, right now it's sure looking like Biden. But we have learned not to take the future for granted, haven't we? Bret: Well, exactly. The three likeliest people to be elected (or re elected) president in November are all far more vulnerable to the diseases caused by the coronavirus than younger Americans. Is that why Tulsi Gabbard won't quit? I'm still not counting Sanders out completely given how fluid things are, but I find the thought of Biden as the presumptive nominee immensely reassuring. I also think he should name his running mate sooner rather than later. How do you like the sound of "Biden Klobuchar"? Gail: Well, I know you like the sound. And it's fine by me. I've passed the point of pickiness. Right now my standards are rock bottom. Don't even care if the next president reforms the tax system as long as he knows how to handle a pandemic. Bret: I'll be sure to pass this tidbit along to Mitch McConnell. To adapt another Obama era line, never let a pandemic go to waste! Gail: So, tell me what's happening in your house? Besides reading "The Plague," what's everybody doing to pass the time? Bret: The change has been as sudden as it is stunning. Manhattan feels ghostly. All of my usual routines going to the gym; dining out; going to a concert are out. So is all travel for business or pleasure, foreign and domestic. We've decided to buy a car (we're a low carbon footprint family) partly on the theory that we will be doing a lot of nature walks in the Catskills pretty soon. The kids are home from school and it isn't at all clear when they'll be back in a classroom; we are going to have to figure out distance learning for them which puts me in mind of suggesting to Apple and every other laptop maker in the United States to offer to make a computer available for free to every American child who needs one. Bret: I worry mostly about my elderly relatives and friends, and the price they are already paying in isolation and fear. On the other hand, if there's a silver lining in any of this it's that it is forcing me to slow down for the first time in years and take stock of what matters most in life. How about you? Gail: Today we got our Amazon shipment that includes a Monopoly game. If all else fails my husband and I will spend this evening trying to bankrupt one another. Bret: So you can know how it feels to be Donald Trump! Gail: At night, when we're missing the late night comedians, we've been killing time watching episodes from the original "Star Trek." Just got to one that involves an ambitious woman who desperately wants to command a starship. But in the 1960s version of the 23rd century, women can't do that. So she uses a machine that switches her consciousness into Captain Kirk's body. The crew quickly figures out something is wrong when their leader begins filing his nails and bursts into hysterics at the least little thing. I know that doesn't have much bearing on the coronavirus, but it is nice, once in a while, to contemplate the fact that I've seen some amazing social changes in my life. For the good. The news wasn't always terrible. We've just got to work together and ignore the crazy people. One of whom, alas, happens to be the president of the United States. Bret, we'll keep talking about how your kids and everyone else's kids are being affected by all this. When I was growing up, we were constantly being assured by the government that Russia wanted to blow us up (duck and cover!) and in our Catholic schools the nuns were warning that God might be preparing us for the end of the world. You'd figure all that would make us timid about taking chances, but in fact it made a lot of us wildly distrustful of authority, with interesting consequences for the world. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Finally, Duc Bayer Boatwright gets his moment in the sun. Don't get too excited; it's not that he has a psychological breakthrough or stops being a jerk or even has a particularly substantial story line in this week's episode of "Here and Now." For the second week in a row, he's gritting his teeth through a colitis flare up and Ramon's poop jokes aren't helping. Duc's big scene takes place during a hike with his love interest, Carmen. Doubled over in pain, he gets so frantic about finding a place to relieve himself that he falls down a hill and exits the date in an ambulance. Duc is, in other words, as hapless as ever in Episode 8. But that makes him the ideal avatar for this week's theme, as revealed in Greg's lecture. As an introduction to a lesson on "The Myth of Sisyphus," Albert Camus's essay on embracing the absurdity of a meaningless life over suicide, Professor Boatwright alarms his students by pressing a gun to his chin and demanding a reason not to pull the trigger. By persisting, he explains, "We become the absurdist hero, seeking meaning we know is not there, living life to its fullest in the face of a consistent and continuous struggle and inevitable failure." When the stunt ends in an involuntary six month leave, the irony is that Greg's message to students was actually pretty life affirming, for once. Sisyphus, a character from Greek mythology, was condemned to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a hill, only to watch it fall each time to the bottom. Grim as that fate may seem, Camus reframes Sisyphus as an absurdist hero, scrambling fruitlessly but nobly to make meaning for as long as he can keep the rock that is his life rolling. "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart," Camus writes in the essay's famous conclusion. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Considering that few afflictions scream absurdity like a benign yet incurable bout of diarrhea, I assume there's some symbolism in Duc's tumble down the hill. Usually, Ramon and Audrey are the show's great rock pushers, fighting tirelessly for empathy in a world that keeps knocking it down in favor of fear. But this week, both characters take some time off from their respective forms of martyrdom. Audrey, who is always there to comfort and nag her husband and children, skips a family dinner to consummate her flirtation with Steve. (She can thank Ashley for giving her the sexy heels that catch his eye.) Arriving at home next morning, she takes pleasure in informing a gloomy Greg of her conquest. Ramon, for his part, hasn't been the same since his hallucination at the video game expo. After blowing up at Farid, he flees his parents' house for his own apartment and buries his sorrows over his deteriorating mental health (and perhaps his uncertain future as a game designer) in casual sex. "I feel fire," Carmen, who comes across as a sort of New Age palm reader, tells him in their first session. She also mentions that he's heading for "big changes" and prods him about a mysterious near death experience. When her intuition comes up short, she assures Ramon, "The answers are in you." Whether she knows it or not, she's likely referring to his game and his therapy with Farid neither of which look especially promising by the end of the episode. Farid seems to be approaching a breaking point. His dreams are haunted by butterflies. He's seeing 11:11 everywhere. Out to dinner with Layla, he flies into a rage when the host asks her to remove her head scarf. And he's become so desperate for insight into his psychic connection with Ramon that he violates doctor patient confidentiality by appealing to Audrey for help. Still convinced that her son is schizophrenic, she decides that Farid has come unglued and orders him to stay away from Ramon. Later in the episode, there's an awkward encounter at the store his uncle Amir used to own. Propelled by a dream involving the store, Farid stops by for the first time in quite a while. The shop's new owner recognizes him and saddles him with a box of things Amir left behind. Inside, Farid finds an answering machine that he remembers from childhood, along with a tape. When he plays it, he hears what we can assume is his mother's voice. This is huge: Decades before, she had tried to contact him, but Amir lied to keep him from picking up the phone. Ramon's and Farid's mothers, who are prominent in their visions, clearly play a significant role in whatever connection the characters have to each other. So, if Farid manages to find some answers about his mom, those revelations could have major implications for both men and for the show's supernatural plot, which is still creeping along at a frustratingly slow pace. At least we've got Kristen and Navid, whose quest to get even with Madison results in some satisfying mean girl screams and a triumphant kiss between the two masked avengers. Like Ramon, they are among the show's best characters because their story lines revolve around who they are as individuals, rather than their identity markers. (Pity Ashley, whose slightly unbelievable confrontation with a middle aged, white, male Black Lives Matter activist drives her to the gun range.) I love that Navid is attracted to girls, despite being drawn to women's clothing and makeup, and that his quiet iconoclasm seems to electrify the chronically bored Kristen. With only two episodes left in the season, "Here and Now" is going to have to cover a lot of ground to provide a satisfying finale. The future of Greg and Audrey's marriage remains uncertain; Farid and Layla's relationship is also starting to look pretty fragile. The story of Ramon and Henry feels unfinished. Ashley and Duc have yet to become fully fleshed out characters. Wonderful as they are together, Navid and Kristen are fighting a war with Madison that comes straight out of a teen comedy and isn't really connected yet with the rest of the show. Most of all, even if we don't get a full explanation of the connection between Ramon and Farid, we've got to have something more than just these dreams and hallucinations, which are becoming redundant. We need the show to stop throwing philosophical theories at us and start sketching out a distinctive point of view. Greg's lecture suggests that it is possible to find some fleeting semblance of meaning in an indifferent universe. "Here and Now" may not have a cure for our modern ailments, but it could at least give us a reason to keep pushing that boulder up the hill. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The It bag may be more like an old hat these days at least when it comes to fashion's front row. But exclusivity is not exactly out of style; it's just no longer symbolized by something you can swing from your arm. In 2020, partying with Prada is what counts. And it's an experience money can't buy. This week Prada Mode, the Milanese luxury label's roving private member's club, has hit Paris. Introduced in 2018, the club already landed in Miami and Hong Kong during Art Basel, and in London for Frieze. Now its fourth edition was to open for two days, Sunday and Monday, during the couture shows in the French capital, taking over the Art Nouveau restaurant Maxim's on rue Royale, where the likes of Aristotle Onassis and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor once dined. "My interests often take me to think about projects beyond fashion," Miuccia Prada wrote in a recent email. "Mode is one of these events, offering a familiar place to extend the art experience into the social; a place where people are welcome to think freely and discuss, not forget to have fun." Gaining entree to this mythical zone is not as straightforward as donning one of the label's frumpy chic coats. For the Paris iteration, about a thousand invitees were handpicked by the label, and include such names as Adele Exarchopoulos, the French actress; Jake Chapman, the British artist; Gigi Hadid, the American model; and Alex Kapranos, the singer with the Scottish rock band Franz Ferdinand. It's a way for the brand to dip its sling backs into the haute couture crowd in a city where Prada isn't on the runway. "They want to present themselves as a junction, not necessarily between art and fashion but a new zone," said Francesco Bonami, the Italian curator who popped by Prada Mode during its London stop in October. "It's a different level, and hard to define." Once in, Prada Mode Paris members could hit the club any time over its two day run (open from 9:30 a.m. to 2 a.m.), to experience site specific artworks; join parties featuring live performances from the avant garde composer William Basinski and the experimental musician Josiah Wise, who records as serpentwithfeet; and sample specialty dining from the French chef Bertrand Grebaut of the Paris restaurant Septime. Also scheduled are panel discussions with leading theorists and practitioners focused on the history of facial recognition, concerns about government and corporate surveillance, and how artists and creators are responding to such programs. "What does it mean when your face becomes your passport? When it becomes analyzed and tracked?" Ms. Crawford said in a recent interview. She noted that the Prada Mode event would have particular significance at a time when France was poised to become the first European country to incorporate facial recognition technology into a mandatory digital identity for its citizens. Another question might be: Why would a fashion brand suddenly want to become a gatekeeper of self invented creative communities? "Creating experiences that surround a brand through the customer journey acts as an antidote to commoditization and declining loyalty," Caroline Bremner, head of travel at Euromonitor International, wrote in the market research company's 2017 report "Experience More." Another 2017 Euromonitor report said: "Consumer's expenses with experiences should increase from 5.8 trillion in 2016 to 8 trillion in 2030," with experiences encompassing categories like leisure, recreation, travel and food services. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Over the years, scientists have come up with a lot of ideas about why we sleep. Some have argued that it's a way to save energy. Others have suggested that slumber provides an opportunity to clear away the brain's cellular waste. Still others have proposed that sleep simply forces animals to lie still, letting them hide from predators. A pair of papers published on Thursday in the journal Science offer evidence for another notion: We sleep to forget some of the things we learn each day. In order to learn, we have to grow connections, or synapses, between the neurons in our brains. These connections enable neurons to send signals to one another quickly and efficiently. We store new memories in these networks. In 2003, Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli, biologists at the University of Wisconsin Madison, proposed that synapses grew so exuberantly during the day that our brain circuits got "noisy." When we sleep, the scientists argued, our brains pare back the connections to lift the signal over the noise. In the years since, Dr. Tononi and Dr. Cirelli, along with other researchers, have found a great deal of indirect evidence to support the so called synaptic homeostasis hypothesis. It turns out, for example, that neurons can prune their synapses at least in a dish. In laboratory experiments on clumps of neurons, scientists can give them a drug that spurs them to grow extra synapses. Afterward, the neurons pare back some of the growth. Other evidence comes from the electric waves released by the brain. During deep sleep, the waves slow down. Dr. Tononi and Dr. Cirelli have argued that shrinking synapses produce this change. Four years ago, Dr. Tononi and Dr. Cirelli got a chance to test their theory by looking at the synapses themselves. They acquired a kind of deli slicer for brain tissue, which they used to shave ultrathin sheets from a mouse's brain. The synapses in the brains of sleeping mice, they found, were 18 percent smaller than in awake ones. "That there's such a big change over all is surprising," Dr. Tononi said. The second study was led by Graham H. Diering, a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Diering and his colleagues set out to explore the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis by studying the proteins in mouse brains. "I'm really coming at it from this nuts and bolts place," Dr. Diering said. In one experiment, Dr. Diering and his colleagues created a tiny window through which they could peer into mouse brains. Then he and his colleagues added a chemical that lit up a surface protein on brain synapses. Looking through the window, they found that the number of surface proteins dropped during sleep. That decline is what you would expect if the synapses were shrinking. Tired of tossing and turning? There are some strategies you could try to improve your hours in bed. None Four out of five people say that they suffer from sleep problems at least once a week and wake up feeling exhausted. Here's a guide to becoming a more successful sleeper. Stretching and meditative movement like yoga before bed can improve the quality of your sleep and the amount you sleep. Try this short and calming routine of 11 stretches and exercises. Nearly 40 percent of people surveyed in a recent study reported having more or much more trouble than usual during the pandemic. Follow these seven simple steps for improving your shut eye. When it comes to gadgets that claim to solve your sleep problems, newer doesn't always mean better. Here are nine tools for better, longer sleep. Dr. Diering and his colleagues then searched for the molecular trigger for this change. They found that hundreds of proteins increase or decrease inside of synapses during the night. But one protein in particular, called Homer1A, stood out. In earlier experiments on neurons in a dish, Homer1A proved to be important for paring back synapses. Dr. Diering wondered if it was important in sleep, too. To find out, he and his colleagues studied mice genetically engineered so that they couldn't make Homer1A proteins. These mice slept like ordinary mice, but their synapses didn't change their proteins like the ones in ordinary mice. Dr. Diering's research suggests that sleepiness triggers neurons to make Homer1A and ship it into their synapses. When sleep arrives, Homer1A turns on the pruning machinery. To see how this pruning machinery affects learning, the scientists gave regular mice a memory test. They put the animals in a room where they got a mild electric shock if they walked over one section of the floor. That night, the scientists injected a chemical into the brains of some of the mice. The chemical had been shown to block neurons in dishes from pruning their synapses. The next day, the scientists put all the mice back in the chamber they had been in before. Both groups of mice spent much of the time frozen, fearfully recalling the shock. But when the researchers put the mice in a different chamber, they saw a big difference. The ordinary mice sniffed around curiously. The mice that had been prevented from pruning their brain synapses during sleep, on the other hand, froze once again. Dr. Diering thinks that the injected mice couldn't narrow their memories down to the particular chamber where they had gotten the shock. Without nighttime pruning, their memories ended up fuzzy. In their own experiment, Dr. Tononi and his colleagues found that the pruning didn't strike every neuron. A fifth of the synapses were unchanged. It's possible that these synapses encode well established memories that shouldn't be tampered with. "You can forget in a smart way," Dr. Tononi said. Other researchers cautioned that the new findings weren't definitive proof of the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis. Marcos G. Frank, a sleep researcher at Washington State University in Spokane, said that it could be hard to tell whether changes to the brain at night were caused by sleep or by the biological clock. "It's a general problem in the field," he said. Markus H. Schmidt, of the Ohio Sleep Medicine Institute, said that while the brain might prune synapses during sleep, he questioned whether this was the main explanation for why sleep exists. "The work is great," he said of the new studies, "but the question is, is this a function of sleep or is it the function?" Many organs, not just the brain, seem to function differently during sleep, Dr. Schmidt pointed out. The gut appears to make many new cells, for example. Dr. Tononi said that the new findings should prompt a look at what current sleeping drugs do in the brain. While they may be good at making people sleepy, it's also possible that they may interfere with the pruning required for forming memories. "You may actually work against yourself," Dr. Tononi said. In the future, sleep medicines might precisely target the molecules involved in sleep, ensuring that synapses get properly pruned. "Once you know a little bit of what happens at the ground truth level, you can get a better idea of what to do for therapy," Dr. Tononi said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Couples migrated to Times Square this week for the annual Times Square Valentine Heart celebration. Some got married, others made surprise proposals or renewed their vows. The event, in its 11th year, started in 2009 with a giant heart sculpture, and now includes a design competition. This year's winner was Reddymade, founded by Suchi Reddy. The firm created an 18 foot tall "X" that is on display until Feb. 28 at Duffy Square, at 46th Street and Broadway. The very first installation was a giant heart by Gage/Clemenceau Architects. "The Valentine's Day sculpture was originally an attempt to have an alternative to the Rockefeller Christmas tree," said Tim Tompkins, the president of the Times Square Alliance. "The focus was really Times Square as a place of design. We also wanted to draw attention to it being a great place to have a date." Once the sculpture was showcased, alliance staffers spotted people kissing or getting married in front of it. Others saw wedding photos taken on the nearby ruby red stairs. In 2012, the event was expanded, and selected couples were offered a Times Square wedding, with some expenses paid by the Times Square Alliance. Soon, surprise proposals followed, then group vow renewals entered the mix. As of today, according to the alliance, 33 couples have been married in Times Square since its Valentine's Day event began, and there have been 22 marriage proposals. "Some want quiet weddings, others want the whole world to share, record and transmit these moments to our millions of Facebook followers," Mr. Tompkins said. "Fifteen years ago there wasn't this instant transmission of these intimate things. People's tolerance for publicly sharing their love is very much of our time. This is a mixture of intimacy, privacy, love, exhibition and sharing." Planning for a Cupid experience starts two days after the ball drops on New Year's Eve. Within the first two weeks of January, a link goes up on the alliance's website, inviting submissions from those who want to win a wedding or proposal spot. (This year the alliance said it received 10 to 20 for each of the two categories.) "We look to see what's special about a couple's relationship and what's their compelling connection to Times Square," said Joe Papa, the events manager at the alliance. "We get a lot of first dates were here, or they saw a show or had a chance encounter." The two met in 1982 at a local rally for worker's rights in New Brunswick, N.J. Mr. Alston, a student at Rutgers University at the time, said he saw Ms. Torres and thought, "I'm going to marry this woman." And he did: The pair wedded in 1991. After two decades, however, they called it quits, and divorced in 2013. Then life took a turn for both, and they decided to reconcile. "We've both had some health issues and we lived together during the divorce," Mr. Alston said. "We realized we have something special. We have always loved each other. We are soul mates who offer unconditional, transformative and healing love. So we decided to get married again to unify our relationship." Ms. Torres entered the contest and the couple were selected to be the second marriage of the day. "It's a dream come true," Mr. Alston said. "This Valentine's Day is not just a card, or flowers or candy. Having our wedding here is part of the magic of our love in the most unique and fantastic way. This is a second chance." "We came here in 2013 it was our first trip to New York, and our first trip together," Mr. Macias said. "Both of us were in awe of Times Square. The lights and people and vibe was incredible. I never expected to be picked, and when you are, you just want it to be perfect." Although Ms. Camacho knew something big was planned, she was in the dark about the specifics. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'ANASTASIA' at the Broadhurst Theater (in previews; opens on April 24). Darko Tresnjak directs Terrence McNally's adaptation of a 1956 dramatic film and a 1997 animated one about a plucky young woman who just might be a lost Romanov heir. Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty supply new songs for a cast including Christy Altomare as the possible duchess, Mary Beth Peil as a dowager empress and Ramin Karimloo as the baddie. Will Broadway hold the key to its heart? 212 239 6200, anastasiabroadway.com 'THE ANTIPODES' at the Pershing Square Signature Center (in previews; opens on April 23). The Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Annie Baker situates most of her antic, awkward, strangely moving plays in the Northeast, but perhaps she'll head farther south in this new work, directed by Lila Neugebauer. Josh Charles, Josh Hamilton and Phillip James Brannon star in this "play about people telling stories about telling stories." 212 244 7529, signaturetheatre.org 'BANDSTAND' at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater (in previews; opens on April 26). A new musical, directed and choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler ("Hamilton"), is jitterbugging onto Broadway. Set in 1945, it stars Corey Cott as an ambitious bandleader and Laura Osnes as a war widow with a golden voice, with songs by Richard Oberacker and Robert Taylor. 212 239 6200, bandstandbroadway.com 'DERREN BROWN: SECRET' at the Linda Gross Theater (previews start on April 21; opens on May 16). At a moment in which email, phone records and now internet searches can be so easily surveilled, can a mind reading act survive? The English mentalist Derren Brown thinks so. He arrives in New York with a new show, written with Andrew O'Connor and Andy Nyman, devised to demonstrate his command of psychological magic. 866 811 4111, atlantictheater.org 'CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY' at the Lunt Fontanne Theater (in previews; opens on April 23). Pop an Everlasting Gobstopper and settle in for this Broadway adaptation of Roald Dahl's beloved children's book about a boy, a genius confectioner and an orange work force. Jack O'Brien directs this musical, with songs by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman and a book by David Greig, starring Christian Borle as the top hatted candy man. 877 250 2929, charlieonbroadway.com 'A DOLL'S HOUSE, PART 2' at the Golden Theater (in previews; opens on April 27). When we last saw Henrik Ibsen's Nora, she had left her husband and young children in pursuit of personal freedom. Lucas Hnath's sequel, set 15 years after the original, observes her return. Sam Gold steps away from his "Glass Menagerie" to direct a cast including Laurie Metcalf as the older Nora, as well as Chris Cooper, Jayne Houdyshell and Condola Rashad. 212 239 6200, dollshousepart2.com 'HAPPY DAYS' at Polonsky Shakespeare Center (previews start on April 23; opens on May 4). Who would want to bury an actress as patently likable as Dianne Wiest? In James Bundy's production for Theater for a New Audience, Ms. Wiest plays Winnie, a woman half interred in some sunny and potentially post apocalyptic place. Jarlath Conroy is her more mobile husband in this Samuel Beckett play day at the beach. 866 811 4111, tfana.org 'MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA' at Abrons Arts Center (previews start on April 26; opens on May 3). Target Margin Theater's yearslong encounter with Eugene O'Neill reaches its climax. David Herskovits, the artistic director of the company, directs this trilogy, an American homage to Greek tragedy, in a six hour production that includes two intermissions and a meal served between catastrophes. Satya Bhabha, Stephanie Weeks and Eunice Wong star. 212 352 3101, targetmargin.org 'SEVEN SPOTS ON THE SUN' at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater (previews start on April 26; opens on May 10). Take a deep breath. Following his forceful gun control play, "On the Exhale," the playwright Martin Zimmerman returns with a drama about a small town in the midst of a civil war. In this Rattlestick Playwrights Theater production, in collaboration with the Sol Project, a laundress, a miner, a doctor, a nurse and a priest face tests of strength and forgiveness. 866 811 4111, rattlestick.org 'SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION' at the Barrymore Theater (in previews; opens on April 25). Get connected to this 1990 John Guare drama, revived on Broadway by the director Trip Cullman. Allison Janney and John Benjamin Hickey star as a wealthy Upper East Side couple, duped by Corey Hawkins's plausible young man, in this meditation on intimacy, desire and deception. 212 239 6200, sixdegreesbroadway.com 'SOJOURNERS' and 'Her Portmanteau' at New York Theater Workshop (previews start on April 22; opens on May 16). These Mfoniso Udofia dramas, part of a nine play cycle, track a Nigerian family across generations. In "Sojourners," first staged at the Playwrights Realm, Abasiama, a woman studying in America, becomes estranged from her husband. "Her Portmanteau" drops is on Abasiama many years later. Ed Sylvanus Iskandar directs. 212 279 4200, nytw.org 'VENUS' at the Pershing Square Signature Center (previews start on April 25; opens on May 15). Suzan Lori Parks's Signature season continues with this 1996 play, directed by Lear deBessonet, about the so called Hottentot Venus, a South African woman exhibited on the freak show circuit in 19th century Europe. Zainab Jah, who gave a ferocious performance in "Eclipsed," stars as Saartje Baartman, a woman exploited in life and death. 212 244 7529, signaturetheatre.org 'COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA' and 'Picnic' at the Gym at Judson (closes on April 23). The Transport Group offers an unusually intimate revival of two William Inge plays, directed by Jack Cummings III. Elisabeth Vincentelli wrote that Inge's work "burst with generous humanity and possessed a sure grasp on the power of intimacy something these productions skillfully bring to the fore." 866 811 4111, judson.org 'THE HAIRY APE' at the Park Avenue Armory (closes on April 22). Yank the Stoker puts down his shovel as this revival of Eugene O'Neill's expressionist drama plays its final performance. Ben Brantley praised the production design and wrote that Bobby Cannavale's "emphatically flesh and blood presence makes him the perfect odd man out in a dehumanizing world of machines, literal and otherwise." 212 933 5812, armoryonpark.org 'IF I FORGET' at the Laura Pels Theater at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater (closes on April 30). Steven Levenson's passionate and provoking drama about the Fischers, an outspoken Jewish American family, concludes its run. A play both brainy in its arguments and visceral in its emotions, it's a gift to its actors (Larry Bryggman, Kate Walsh and Jeremy Shamos among them) and the best example yet of Mr. Levenson's funny, bruising, searching voice. 212 719 1300, roundabouttheatre.org 'LATIN HISTORY FOR MORONS' at the Public Theater (closes on April 28). John Leguizamo steps away from the blackboard when this educative solo show finishes its run. Inspired by his son's school project, Mr. Leguizamo leads a lesson in Latino history in a piece Ben Brantley described as "harshly funny, surprisingly poignant." 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'SIGNIFICANT OTHER' at the Booth Theater (closes on April 23). Joshua Harmon's melancholy comedy of friendship and marriage will toss its final bouquet. Directed by Trip Cullman and starring Gideon Glick, it describes the increasingly lonesome social life of Jordan, a single man left behind by his marrying pals, a company Ben Brantley described as "a thoroughly engaging and interdependent ensemble." 212 239 6200, significantotherbroadway.com 'THE STRANGE UNDOING OF PRUDENCIA HART' at the McKittrick Hotel (closes on April 23). This immersive, pub set production from the National Theater of Scotland sings its final border ballad. A story of an academic accidentally captured by the Devil, the show was described by Ben Brantley as shifting "seamlessly from robust silliness to sensual dreaminess, as the mind tends to through the course of successive whiskies." 866 811 4111, mckittrickhotel.com 'SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE' at the Hudson Theater (closes on April 23). Georges finally finishes his hat when this revival of James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim's musical, directed by Sarna Lapine, Mr. Lapine's niece, and starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford, concludes its run. Ben Brantley wrote that "this interpretation comes across with more personal, in the moment intimacy than any I've seen." 212 239 6200, thehudsonbroadway.com | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The Best Books of 2020: View our full list. TO SHARE IS HUMAN Brandon Stanton apologized for being 10 minutes late for a recent phone interview "I was outside playing with my daughter and I forgot about this call!" and then explained that he was moving from room to room to escape "commotion" in his house: "There's someone here working on the roof." Yes, the creator of the Humans of New York photoblog that spawned four books and a television series is, in fact, human. He speaks with a drawl reminiscent of Owen Wilson's circa "You, Me and Dupree" and has an elocution coach's way of enunciating every letter in a word, including both t's in "important." And now the Georgia native is back on the hardcover nonfiction list with "Humans," a collection of photographs of and conversations with strangers on the street in more than 40 countries. Starting in Iran in 2012, Stanton worked with over 200 interpreters to collect stories from every corner of the globe. He says, "On the streets of New York, an interview takes over an hour. Through an interpreter, everything takes twice as long." Finding the right translators was a challenge at first; Stanton says he learned that proficiency in English was "actually a secondary skill set" to empathy. "You need to love people," he explains. "The person needs to feel that you care about what they're saying, and if they are telling you about something they went through, that you are moved by it." Stanton doesn't have a standard list of interview questions. Instead, he has "entries" intended to spark meaningful discussion for instance, "What is your biggest challenge right now?" or "How is your life different than you expected it to be?" He says, "If you find the burden someone is carrying, you find the thing they can speak to with the most power and weight. That's where their story is." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Tweets that claim the vaccines intentionally cause harm, or conspiracies about the dangers of vaccines, will be removed according to Twitter's new policy. Facebook and YouTube have already said they would remove false claims about the vaccines. "In the context of a global pandemic, vaccine misinformation presents a significant and growing public health challenge," Twitter said in a blog post. While Twitter already labels misinformation about the coronavirus, such as claims that masks, social distancing and other best health practices are not effective, the new policy specifically addresses vaccines. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Rain on your wedding day is said to be good luck, but how much does the trick? Danya Skolkin and Josh Tillis didn't pause to consider the ratio of precipitation to luck when skies turned ominous in the days just before their wedding last fall. But on Aug. 25, as Ms. Skolkin and Mr. Tillis were finalizing the details of their Sept. 3 wedding in downtown Houston, Hurricane Harvey made landfall, ripping into that city and reaching its peak just before the college sweethearts and their more than 300 guests were about to celebrate. At first they crossed their fingers, hoping the wedding would go on. But with six days to go and meteorologists in slickers deployed across the city issuing warnings about the devastation to come, Ms. Skolkin and Mr. Tillis, both 28, made the decision to postpone. But she knew that what others faced in Houston was far more grave. Hundreds of thousands of Texas and Louisiana residents were displaced because of flooding. So, with nothing to do but read the fine print on vendors' cancellation policies and watch Harvey's waters continue to rise, inspiration struck. After the roads cleared, the couple went to Aishel House, a Jewish nonprofit organization that offers shelter and warm meals to Houston hospital patients and their families. "We didn't even call, we just showed up, knowing they would be busy in this state of crisis," Ms. Skolkin said. Ms. Skolkin and Mr. Tillis had planned to host a dinner for about 100 out of town guests at Aishel House that day. Instead of feeding their guests, they fed a three course meal to 100 displaced local residents. That particular event space is a special one for Ms. Skolkin and her family. Holly Harwood Skolkin, Ms. Skolkin's mother, was a founder of Aishel House. Ms. Harwood Skolkin was not able to see her daughter's selflessness. In 2012, she died of breast cancer after a 15 year struggle with a stage 4 diagnosis. But Ms. Skolkin felt her presence. "It was almost like she was there with me," she said, "encouraging me to not feel sorry for myself and remember how bad other people had it." Within minutes, they were deboning and breading chicken breasts by the dozens. Rochel Lazaroff, a co director of the house, said Aishel House had already pre ordered enough chicken breasts, brisket, salads, salmon and desserts to cater the couple's Shabbat welcome dinner for their long distance wedding guests. The food, fortuitously, had arrived the week before. "It brought tears to our eyes," Ms. Skolkin said after she and Mr. Tillis realized how their postponed wedding plans would able to help their community in need. Ms. Skolkin's father, Dr. Mark Skolkin, a Houston radiologist who remarried two years ago, said his daughter is a "mini me of her mom. They look alike, they're silly alike. And she believes the same thing her mom did, which is that the way to heal pain is through helping other people." Just three months after Ms. Harwood Skolkin died, Mr. Tillis's father, Barry Tillis, died of lung cancer. Neither is sure they would have gotten engaged if their personal tragedies hadn't overlapped. "I would almost say it's the reason we're together," said Mr. Tillis, a Houston real estate developer who grew up in Denver. "We already had a serious relationship going by the time our parents were seriously ill, but being able to talk about it really connected us. You can't replace that experience with someone who doesn't know exactly what you're going through." Mr. Tillis got to know Ms. Harwood Skolkin before she died, and Ms. Skolkin got to know Barry Tillis. The elder Mr. Tillis was an emotional father who never missed a youth sports event and cried at every one. "People in our hometown still remember that about him," Mr. Tillis said. Memories of Ms. Harwood Skolkin are etched as deeply in her hometown, Houston, especially around Aishel House. "To see people respond when they find out I'm marrying Holly Harwood's daughter is truly incredible," Mr. Tillis said. "Their mouths drop, their eyes tear up. She was a celebrity in this community. So many people considered her their best friend." If Ms. Skolkin and Mr. Tillis have done their share of crying together, they have also been partners in plenty of fun, much of it the goofy kind. They met at a mixer at the start of Ms. Skolkin's freshman year at the University of Texas in Austin, when Mr. Tillis was a sophomore there, and took things slowly. "The first couple years it was just dating, we weren't really acting like boyfriend and girlfriend," Ms. Skolkin said. But she was enchanted by his clean cut good looks and easy charm. "He's witty and fun. People have always been attracted to him and want to be around him." Mr. Tillis fell for Ms. Skolkin's good heartedness and elegance. He also loves that she became, at his near insistence, a Denver Broncos football fan. By the time both graduated from the University of Texas and moved into a Houston high rise together in 2015, they had established their own football tradition. Mr. Tillis, a lifelong fan, is a demonstrative touchdown celebrator. "I jump up and do a dance, I yell at the TV, I express my emotions physically," he said. "I can't contain myself." Ms. Skolkin has taken to capturing his joyous displays covertly on camera. She has amassed a band of Snapchat followers who look forward to watching Mr. Tillis's outpourings of Broncos ebullience. On Sept. 25, 2016, the day Mr. Tillis decided to propose, he made sure the Broncos were on. "She was sitting on the couch, just a normal Sunday, she's got no makeup on and we're just about to click on the TV," Mr. Tillis recalled. "After the first big play I started running around the apartment like I usually do, and before she could grab her phone I went and grabbed a jersey I had bought her." The jersey said Tillis on the back. Mr. Tillis got down on one knee and asked if she would be his wife. Ms. Skolkin accepted the ring she recognized as her mother's Dr. Skolkin had given it to Mr. Tillis in advance. She instantly accepted. "I didn't see it coming, which is exactly what he wanted," she said. "I was crying and so happy. To be able to wear that ring every day is so special." "On what should have been the days leading up to your wedding, using the food that was supposed to be part of your wedding weekend, there you were, volunteering for those who were in desperate need," he told the bride and groom. "You put in the time necessary to help make a difference. It is clear that your parents have taught you well, to live by the values of our Jewish tradition, making the best of a very difficult situation." In their vows, which the couple read to each other before the traditional breaking of the glass, both remembered their late parents. "You have shown me that even life's hardest, most confusing times can result in the most beautiful clarity," Ms. Skolkin said as two maids of honor, a best man, 10 bridesmaids, 11 groomsmen and five ushers stood by them. In his vows, Mr. Tillis said his father used to pepper him with questions about what he was looking for in a woman, and he would give his answers: "Smart, funny, pretty, strong Jewish identity." His father thought these were good qualities, but told the younger Mr. Tillis that most important in a partner is a good heart. He saw just that when Ms. Skolkin fed, bathed and clothed her mother, and kept her spirits up. Ms. Harwood Skolkin, in the late stages of her illness, once grabbed Mr. Tillis by the arm and told him Ms. Skolkin was her "berakah" Hebrew for blessing. "That's when I knew for certain what kind of heart Dayna has," Mr. Tillis said. "The kind my dad told me I needed to find in a girl." Come rain or come shine, both knew how lucky they were on their second planned wedding day to have found each other. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Can collaboration be seen as a feminist platform? The dance duo robbinschilds formed in 2003 by Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs is giving that idea a shot by branching out, choreographically speaking, to include six dancers in the creation of "Hex," the pair's latest work. It's a female collective, but is it feminist? In the end, the fight against artistic hierarchy is more noble than effective. Topping the lengthy list of what "Hex" is missing is a point of view. Conceived and directed by Ms. Robbins and Ms. Childs, "Hex," performed at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, is not about casting a harmful spell, but rather uses the word to hint at the witchy notion of shape shifting, in which dance movements are transferred from one body to the next. While Vanessa Anspaugh was part of the creative process, she does not appear in the final work, making what might have been a hexagon into more of a pentagon. The dancers in the flesh are Aretha Aoki, Anna Azrieli, Eleanor Smith, Bessie McDonough Thayer and Mariana Valencia. In preparation, each artist created a short solo, which was then developed by members of the cast before becoming part of the work's rambling framework. Still, there is a system at work, which is indicated by six videos projected along the back of the stage featuring the dancers executing movement phrases that repeat and trickle throughout the piece. Ms. Azrieli, cupping her hands behind her head, executes a headstand, with her legs separated in a V. Ms. Smith squats while brushing the backs of her hands on the floor. Ms. Valencia takes methodical steps and claps her hands. Clipped footwork, demi point turns, lashing arms, chopping feet and random guttural utterances by Ms. Azrieli and for me, a moan is usually one too many in a dance build to little in this listless piece. Perhaps there is a curse in "Hex," which manages to sap the individuality from five capable and usually evocative dancers; the intermittent buzz of street traffic and the resort vibe costuming, credited to the designer Rachel Comey, is no help in lifting this work out of its conventional, derivative binding. There's nothing wrong with a collective voice. The requirement you can't skip out on is imagination. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
In the world of crossword enthusiasts, a new puzzle presents a fresh challenge each day. But what if the puzzle was plagiarized from one that appeared years ago? A database created by a software engineer has raised questions over whether old New York Times crossword puzzles were copied in other publications. The puzzles in question appeared in USA Today as well as Universal Crossword, a syndicated service, according to the website FiveThirtyEight, which said it conducted an investigation using the database. The USA Today and Universal Crossword puzzles are both edited by Timothy Parker, according to Mr. Parker's biography for Universal Uclick. More than 60 crossword puzzles edited by Mr. Parker copied elements from New York Times puzzles, FiveThirtyEight reported. Other similarities were found between puzzles from USA Today or Universal Crossword and puzzles published in The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune. "The puzzles in question repeated themes, answers, grids and clues from Times puzzles published years earlier," FiveThirtyEight reported. The site also suggested that Mr. Parker had helped repurpose material he had already edited: "Hundreds more of the puzzles edited by Parker are nearly verbatim copies of previous puzzles that Parker also edited. Most of those have been republished under fake author names." Saul Pwanson, the engineer from Seattle who created the database, described himself as an amateur crossword puzzle maker who collected the data to learn more about the construction of the word games. "I was really surprised to see duplicate crosswords," Mr. Pwanson said. Of particular focus was the repurposing of crossword themes, the central phrases that form the heart of many puzzles. Sixty five puzzles edited by Mr. Parker contained the same themes as New York Times puzzles, according to FiveThirtyEight. Will Shortz, who has been The New York Times's crossword puzzle editor since 1993, says that crossword ideas and elements are occasionally repeated by accident. But the similarities highlighted by FiveThirtyEight made it "clear it's plagiarism," he said. "When the same theme answers appear in the same order from one publication to the next, that makes you look closer. When they appear with the same clues, that looks suspicious. And when it happens repeatedly, then you know it's plagiarism," he said. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for The New York Times, said The Times was looking into the matter. A representative from USA Today did not return an emailed request for comment. Universal Uclick did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mr. Parker. But in an interview with FiveThirtyEight, Mr. Parker dismissed the concerns, pointing to the number of crossword puzzles he had worked on over the years. "Out of 15,000, I'm not surprised at all," he told FiveThirtyEight. "I would expect it to be a couple of hundred." Ben Tausig, the editor of the crossword subscription service American Values Club, said a puzzle of his that ran in USA Today in 2004 had been tweaked and published under a pseudonym by Universal in 2008. "It's not illegal," Mr. Tausig said, noting that he had signed away his rights to the puzzle when he sold it for 65. "I would call it shoddy." Mr. Shortz said he could not think of another instance of plagiarism accusations surfacing in the world of crossword puzzles. "There was no way to track this before," he said. "This is something new." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
TWO years ago when Arthur Cropsey's wife died, it became clear to his family that Mr. Cropsey, now 91, could no longer live on his own in his California home. So his sister, Anna Mae Franklin, 83, of Colonie, N.Y., and her daughter, Linda Lyons, 61, flew out to get Mr. Cropsey and bring him back to New York State. Soon after came two frightening realizations, Ms. Franklin said. First, Mr. Cropsey was in much worse shape than she had imagined. He suffered from severe memory loss and mood swings. During much of the day he was disoriented and at night he would pace from room to room in her small trailer home. Second, Ms. Franklin thought that Ms. Lyons, with the help of her boyfriend, David Watson, 43, a lawyer, had gained control of a good portion of Mr. Cropsey's money, which totaled more than 2 million in cash and investments. It looked to Ms. Franklin as if the couple were spending Mr. Cropsey's money on themselves. She and her daughter fought bitterly and ended up in court, each side accusing the other of mishandling Mr. Cropsey's affairs. Eventually the judge ruled against the daughter and her boyfriend. "The court notes that the actions by Linda Lyons and David Watson are inappropriate, and demonstrate a distinct intent to take advantage of Mr. Cropsey," Acting Justice Kimberly A. O'Connor wrote for the state Supreme Court, adding that the pair had treated his money as their own and "spent it in excessive ways that were often for their benefit." Sadly, such family conflicts commonly arise from caring for the elderly and often end up in court. In this case, the daughter still disputes the court's ruling and much of her mother's version of events. Mr. Watson declined to comment, and the couple's lawyer did not respond to messages seeking comment. In general, financial manipulation is one of the fastest growing areas of elder abuse, said Bob Blancato, national coordinator of the Elder Justice Coalition. It includes things like telephone investment swindles and caregivers, including family members, stealing money from vulnerable seniors. The annual loss by elder financial abuse victims is close to 3 billion, according to a 2010 survey by the MetLife Mature Market Institute, a 12 percent increase from 2008. Thirty four percent of that abuse is attributed to family, friends, neighbors and paid caregivers, according to the survey. Those numbers don't begin to reflect the actual incidence of abuse, said Sandra Timmermann, executive director of the institute. For every case that is reported, an estimated four or five are not, she said. In Mr. Cropsey's case, the court, having found him mentally incapacitated, decided to appoint an independent trustee as guardian of his finances, while keeping Ms. Franklin in charge of his care. Ms. Lyons and Mr. Watson returned close to 42,000 of Mr. Cropsey's money, the ruling noted. He moved into an assisted living facility. As a story of family disunity amid the challenges of elder care, the case offers little uplift. The judge's ruling, issued in October 2011, found that Mr. Watson had Mr. Cropsey sign documents to give Ms. Lyons power of attorney; Ms. Franklin previously had that power. And Mr. Watson had Mr. Cropsey sign a will leaving his entire estate to Ms. Lyons, according to the ruling. Mr. Cropsey did not have a will at the time, so under New York State law much of his estate would have gone to Ms. Franklin. Justice O'Connor referred to that action as "egregious" given that Mr. Cropsey's mental capacity was questionable and, referring to Mr. Watson, said that "the canons of ethics by which a lawyer must abide and conduct himself or herself require examination in this instance." Ms. Lyons declined to comment on Mr. Cropsey's will, but did offer an account of her and Mr. Watson's spending that differed from her mother's. According to Ms. Franklin, her daughter had offered to take care of her uncle's bills once Mr. Cropsey moved. Ms. Franklin had set up an account for Mr. Cropsey at a local credit union. "Just put me on the account, Mom, so I can write a check if you aren't around," Ms. Franklin said her daughter told her at the time. "Or better yet, get me a debit card on the account." Exhausted from caring for Mr. Cropsey, Ms. Franklin readily agreed. "She's my daughter of course I trusted her," she said. When Ms. Franklin saw copies of the statements, however, there were charges that Mr. Cropsey could not have made, for restaurants, hotels and other expenses, she said. "My mom knew ahead of time about all of those expenses," Ms. Lyons said in response. Many were for a trip to California to pack and move Mr. Cropsey's belongings, she explained. During that trip, Ms. Lyons and Mr. Watson stayed at a hotel and took family members out to dinner. Ms. Lyons said that most of the money she returned was money that she and her mother had agreed that Ms. Lyons needed to spend to update a property that she owned where her mother and Mr. Cropsey could live. Things began to deteriorate, said Ms. Lyons, when Ms. Franklin felt she could no longer care for her brother. "She wanted to rush and put him in a nursing home and take charge of his money," Ms. Lyons said. "I feel after what she did to me, she doesn't deserve to be my mother," Ms. Lyons said. "We did not steal Art's money. This whole thing is geared more towards the money than caring or worrying about Art." Ms. Franklin hasn't talked to Ms. Lyons since the hearing. "I've lost a daughter," she said, breaking into tears. What can others do to prevent such situations? "It's important that seniors and their loved ones know what to look for," said Georgia Anetzberger, president of the National Committee for the Prevention of Elder Abuse. Here are some steps to take to guard against fraud and abuse: ORGANIZE YOUR AFFAIRS NOW Everyone, no matter what age, should have a durable power of attorney so a trusted person can have control of their finances if needed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
SHE SAID Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement By Tell the truth: Do you really need to hear more about Harvey Weinstein? The open bathrobe, the hotel hot tubs, the syringes of erectile dysfunction drugs delivered by cowed assistants, the transparent requests for "a massage," the ejaculatory exhibitions it's not just indictable, it's ... ick, simultaneously pathological and pathetic. Which explains the reluctance I felt sitting down to read "She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement," wherein the New York Times reporters revisit at book length their investigative reporting on Weinstein, promising a "substantial amount" of new information. New information? More than 80 women have come forward to recount their encounters with the Oscar award monopolizer and patron of progressive causes turned Tinseltown's uber ogre, the beast whose fleshy unshaven headshot every famous Hollywood beauty knows to hate, and whose trial has now been rescheduled for January to allow for additional testimony against him. What new gruesome details do we need? But "She Said" isn't retailing extra helpings of warmed over salacity. The authors' new information is less about the man and more about his surround sound "complicity machine" of board members and lawyers, human resource officers and P.R. flaks, tabloid publishers and entertainment reporters who kept him rampaging with impunity years after his behavior had become an open secret. Kantor and Twohey instinctively understand the dangers of the Harvey as Monster story line and the importance of refocusing our attention on structures of power. When they at last confront Weinstein, in a Times conference room and later on speakerphone, he's the mouse that roared, the Great and Powerful Oz turned puny humbug, swerving from incoherent rants to self pitying whimpers ("I'm already dead") to sycophantic claims of just being one of them. ("If I wasn't making movies, I would've been a journalist.") He's loathsome and self serving, but his psychology is not the story they want to tell. The drama they chronicle instead is more complex and subtle, a narrative in which they are ultimately not mere observers but, essential to its moral message, protagonists themselves. This book was one of our most anticipated titles of September. See the full list. Kantor and Twohey broke the Weinstein story. Their 3,300 word Times article on Oct. 5, 2017, aired allegations against him that had been piling up as whispers and rumors for 30 years. That report, and the ones to follow, were grounded in scores of interviews with actresses and current and former employees, supplemented by legal filings, corporate records and internal company communications that documented a thick web of cover ups, bullying tactics and confidential settlements. It was bravura journalism. "We watched with astonishment as a dam wall broke," Kantor and Twohey write of the response to that first article. A day after it was published, so many women phoned The Times to report allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Weinstein that the paper had to assign additional reporters to handle the calls. On Oct. 10, another round of women, including marquee names like Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Rosanna Arquette, went public in a second article in The Times. Three weeks later, a third article detailed still more accounts of sexual abuse by Weinstein, spanning the globe and dating back to the 1970s. "This has haunted me my entire life," said 62 year old Hope Exiner d'Amore, who recounted being raped by Weinstein when she was in her early 20s. This series of articles in many ways ignited the MeToo movement, already smoldering in the atmosphere of frustration after reports of Donald Trump's alleged sexual predations (a story that Twohey broke with another reporter) and the release of the "Access Hollywood" tape failed to slow the reality star's march to the White House. Their reporting, Kantor and Twohey recall in "She Said," seemed to operate as a "solvent for secrecy, pushing women all over the world to speak up about similar experiences." And a solvent for the structures that enforced that secrecy. A day after the first story came out, a third of the (all male) board of the Weinstein Company resigned and the remaining members put Weinstein on leave. Two days later, he was fired. Within a year, his corporation declared bankruptcy and, as part of the Chapter 11 filing, released employees from nondisclosure agreements. What explains the company's decades of inaction? Answering that question, and parsing the ways that such entities and their centurions functioned as Weinstein's shield, is the prime focus of "She Said." The guardians the authors unmask aren't only the obvious ones. Yes, Weinstein's board members looked the other way long after they knew; yes, The National Enquirer and Black Cube security snoops deep sixed damaging accounts and shut down whistle blowers. Yes, Weinstein's brother, Bob, the company's co founder, kept mum beyond all reason even after Harvey had punched him in the face. But there was also the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which often kept its settlements secret. And David Boies, the lawyer admired for championing gay marriage before the Supreme Court, who served as Weinstein's personal consigliere and tried to squash every threat of bad press. And Linda Fairstein, the celebrated Manhattan sex crimes prosecutor, who, after an Italian model reported to the New York City police that Weinstein had groped her, brokered connections between Weinstein's legal team and the lead prosecutor and tried to discredit the woman's allegation to Twohey. "She Said" names some of the people who helped Harvey Weinstein evade scrutiny. And then there was Gloria Allred, the crusading feminist lawyer, whose law firm, in 2004, negotiated a nondisclosure agreement for one of Weinstein's victims; the firm pocketed 40 percent of the settlement. "While the attorney cultivated a reputation for giving female victims a voice," Kantor and Twohey write, "some of her work and revenue was in negotiating secret settlements that silenced them and buried allegations of sexual harassment and assault." Allred went on to do the same with women who had been abused by the Fox News host Bill O'Reilly and the Olympics gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. In 2017, after a group of lawyers in California persuaded a state legislator to consider a bill that would ban confidentiality clauses muzzling sexual harassment victims, Allred denounced the move and threatened to go on the attack. The legislator, Connie Leyva, quickly shelved the idea. (A year later, Leyva introduced such a bill and it was signed into law.) Maybe the most appalling figure in this constellation of collaborators and enablers is Lisa Bloom, Allred's daughter. A lawyer likewise known for winning sexual harassment settlements with nondisclosure agreements, Bloom was retained by Weinstein (who had also bought the movie rights to her book). In a jaw dropping memo to Weinstein, Bloom itemized her game plan: Initiate "counterops online campaigns," place articles in the press painting one of his accusers as a "pathological liar," start a Weinstein Foundation "on gender equality" and hire a "reputation management company" to suppress negative articles on Google. Oh, and this gem: "You and I come out publicly in a pre emptive interview where you talk about evolving on women's issues, prompted by death of your mother, Trump pussy grab tape and, maybe, nasty unfounded hurtful rumors about you. ... You should be the hero of the story, not the villain. This is very doable." "She Said" contains a second story of what's doable against great odds: how two reporters with no connections in Hollywood and with almost no one willing to go on the record were able to penetrate this omerta and expose what lay behind it to public scrutiny. This is the book's deeper level, the story of getting a story, signaled in the choice of chapter titles like "The First Phone Call" and "'Who Else Is on the Record?'" Kantor and Twohey have crafted their news dispatches into a seamless and suspenseful account of their reportorial journey, a gripping blow by blow of how they managed, "working in the blank spaces between the words," to corroborate allegations that had been chased and abandoned by multiple journalists before them. "She Said" reads a bit like a feminist "All the President's Men." Kantor and Twohey take us through the time consuming, meticulous and often go nowhere grunt work that's intrinsic to gathering evidence, winning the trust of gun shy victims and maneuvering past barricades that block the path to a publishable article. Along the way, we witness how much institutional support such a protracted effort requires. Kantor and Twohey make a point throughout the book of stressing their reliance on a multilayered editorial team, from rigorous young research assistants like Grace Ashford, who combs through government employment data and tracks down a key former assistant from the late 1980s at Miramax, Weinstein's film production company, to seasoned elder hands like the Times investigative editor Rebecca Corbett. "Sixtysomething, skeptical, scrupulous and allergic to flashiness or exaggeration," Kantor and Twohey write of her, "but so low profile that she barely surfaced in Google search results. Her ambition was journalistic, not personal." The night before the first article ran, Corbett remained in the newsroom until dawn, weighing and reweighing every word. In this way, "She Said" is a dead on description of what makes so called "legacy" journalism so powerful. Ironically, the MeToo movement that Kantor and Twohey's articles about Weinstein helped launch promulgates an opposite message: that the best way to bring injustice to light is to get rid of the "gatekeepers" and let rip on Twitter, that we'll only get to the "truth" when the Establishment is brought down and no one is in charge. Read: "I'm Harvey Weinstein you know what I can do." It may be, as the political writer Lee Smith argued in The Weekly Standard, that some journalists had protected Weinstein partly out of a craven illusion that the Hollywood rainmaker would someday make rain for them, buying their articles for high grossing films. And no doubt the MeToo movement has prompted the mainstream media to take these stories more seriously. Would Vanity Fair's editor today omit allegations of sexual assault from a profile of Jeffrey Epstein, as happened in 2003? Nonetheless, the big league sexual predators who have been brought to justice in the MeToo era have been brought there not by internet whisper campaigns but by good old fashioned reporting: O'Reilly by The Times, Nassar by The Indianapolis Star, Epstein by The Miami Herald, Roy Moore by The Washington Post, Weinstein by The Times and The New Yorker. "The Weinstein story had impact," the authors note, "in part because it had achieved something that, in 2018, seemed rare and precious: broad consensus on the facts." There's an implication here: The answer to institutionally protected predation isn't the anti institutionalism of social media and viral tweets, but a powerful counter institution capable of mounting a rigorous investigation, run by, yes, gatekeepers. Not spelled out but amply evident in Kantor and Twohey's reckoning is the importance that those gatekeepers be female as well as male. In 2013, Jill Abramson, then The Times's executive editor, promoted Corbett and another woman to the paper's senior editorial staff, making the masthead 50 percent female for the first time in history. What happens when you get that kind of sisterhood is familiar to any spectator of the Women's World Cup. Watching Kantor and Twohey pursue their goal while guarding each other's back is as exhilarating as watching Megan Rapinoe and Crystal Dunn on the pitch. Toward the end of the book, Kantor and Twohey devote two chapters to Christine Blasey Ford and her decision to air her sexual assault allegations against the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. This, and the book's finale, "The Gathering," seem appended, an anticlimactic climax. In "The Gathering," the reporters assemble 12 of the sexual abuse victims they interviewed (including a McDonald's worker, Kim Lawson, who helped organize a nationwide strike over the fast food franchise's failure to address sexual harassment) at Gwyneth Paltrow's Brentwood mansion to talk, over gourmet Japanese cuisine, about what they've endured since going public with their charges. The testimonials inevitably descend into platitudes about personal "growth" and getting "some sense of myself back." At one point, Paltrow starts crying over the way Weinstein had invoked his support for her career to get women to submit to his advances, and Lawson's friend (a McDonald's labor organizer who came with her so she wouldn't feel alone in a room full of movie stars) hands the actress a box of tissues. These therapeutic scenes paste a pat conclusion onto a book that otherwise keeps the focus not on individual behavior or personal feelings but on the apparatuses of politics and power. At the least, though, the contrast throws into relief how un pat, instructive and necessary "She Said" is. It turns out we did need to hear more about Weinstein and the "more" that Kantor and Twohey give us draws an important distinction between the trendy ethic of hashtag justice and the disciplined professionalism and institutional heft that actually got the job done. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
A.I.M. AND MOVEMENT OF THE PEOPLE DANCE COMPANY at Rumsey Playfield (Aug. 1, 8 p.m.). As part of SummerStage, this shared program features Joya Powell's Movement of the People Dance Company, which is committed to exploring historic and current injustices through dance, and Kyle Abraham's contemporary group. Mr. Abraham, who will make his choreographic debut at New York City Ballet in the fall, presents a varied program, including "Strict Love," "The Quiet Dance" and "Drive." The performance is preceded by a preshow discussion between Mr. Abraham and the dance writer Eva Yaa Asantewaa; admission to the talk requires an R.S.V.P. And on Tuesday at 11 a.m., also at Rumsey Playfield, Mr. Abraham hosts a special youth matinee. 212 360 1399, cityparksfoundation.org/summerstage BOMBAZO DANCE CO. AND THE SABROSURA EFFECT at St. Mary's Park (July 27, 8 p.m.). SummerStage teams up with the Bronx organization Pepatian to present two groups: Bombazo, the Bronx based drum and dance group led by Milteri Tucker, specializes in traditional Afro Puerto Rican bomba and Afro Caribbean music and dance, while the Sabrosura Effect is a Latin fusion dance company founded by Beatrice Capote and Miguel Aparicio that melds Cuban folkloric material with New York style salsa and contemporary movement. A community workshop featuring Alvin Ailey's "Revelations" will be held before the show at 7 p.m. 212 360 1399, cityparksfoundation.org/summerstage JANIS CLAXTON DANCE at Lincoln Center Plaza (Aug. 1 5 at various times). In "Pop Up Duets (Fragments of Love)," this Scotland based choreographer presents a series that explores romantic interludes as part of Lincoln Center Out of Doors. At select times in Hearst Plaza and Josie Robertson Plaza, pairs of dancers will part from the crowd to converge in seemingly spontaneous duets that explore different facets of love. The dancers are Joanne Pirrie, Albert Garcia, Amy Hollinshead and Valerio Di Giovanni. lcoutofdoors.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
MET ORCHESTRA at Carnegie Hall (May 18, 8 p.m.). Valery Gergiev leads the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera in the first of three concerts at Carnegie over the next several weeks. The program is simple enough, with Schubert's Symphony No. 9 following Schumann's Piano Concerto. Daniil Trifonov is at the keyboard. 212 247 7800, carnegiehall.org 'MURASAKI'S MOON' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (May 17, 4 and 6:30 p.m.; May 18, 2 and 6 p.m.; May 19, 11 a.m. and 3 p.m.). On Site Opera will give the premiere of a new work by the composer Michi Wiancko, with a libretto by Deborah Brevoort, based on the life of Lady Murasaki and the creation of her novel "The Tale of Genji." Directed by Eric Einhorn and conducted by Geoffrey McDonald with a cast that includes Kristen Choi in the lead, the performances will be held in the Astor Chinese Garden Court. Standing room tickets are still available for Saturday evening's and Sunday's performances; try for returns to Friday's and Saturday afternoon's shows. 212 570 3750, metmuseum.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
It was a year of watching obsessively yet indiscriminately, a year of small and smaller screens. On one lost day not long ago, I spent a horrifying (embarrassing!) 11 hours and 15 minutes on my phone. I read the news, doomscrolled Twitter, did puzzles, checked my email and kept scrolling. It's no wonder that my eyes had begun to regularly ache and sometimes sting, prompting me to worry that I needed a new prescription for my glasses. I didn't, I just needed to stop watching, but I couldn't put down my phone, which tethered me to the larger world that I greatly missed. The point of a top 10 list is to share our preferred movies. But in thinking about my favorites of the year and all the many new and old titles I've seen, I also thought a lot about how I watched movies and, well, just watched. A big screen fundamentalist, I love going out to the movies, to first and second run cinemas as well as to art houses, museums and cinematheques. I know which theater and studio in Los Angeles (where I live) has the biggest screen, the best sound, sightlines and seats me, I like to sit in the middle of the theater, perfectly centered. When movie theaters closed in Los Angeles in March, I cried. (They're still closed.) The tears of critics are tiny, but moviegoing is who I am. I grew up in New York in the 1970s watching as many films as I could, including on TV. But going to the movies was one of my first adventures in sovereignty, one of the first ways that I experienced navigating ordinary life without parental supervision. Moviegoing was my thing, a way of seeing and of being. Up until March, it was also instrumental to how I understand time, its shape, texture and demands: moviegoing dictated what I did day and night, including the many hours I clocked driving to and from screenings. Like a lot of people, I have felt unmoored this year partly because of how I now experience time. I've long worked from home, but to review movies, I go to theaters. So I found it challenging learning to watch the movies I was reviewing at home, how to respect the focus they required and deserved, how to sit and keep sitting on the sofa and not hit the pause button, not check Twitter. It didn't help that we have a lot of windows, which made it impossible to replicate a dark screening room, even with the shades drawn. So, staying classy, I hung sheets over the shades and even taped Trader Joe's shopping bags over one small window, which was as ridiculous as it sounds. I finally figured out how to really watch the movies I was reviewing at home when I categorically separated them from the other images I was soaking up, the stream of faces, shapes and moments that also defined my year: Sarah Cooper's devastating Trump performances; Doggface skateboarding to Fleetwood Mac; the Scottish sports announcer Andrew Cotter and his dogs Olive and Mabel; the sometimes shocking science videos demonstrating how far sneezes and coughs can travel (27 feet!); and the friends and strangers whose lives I've watched as they made bread, settled into new homes, marched for Black lives and, at times, mourned the deaths of loved ones. This stream has been alternately sad and joyous, devastating and enlivening. I have grown fond of people I have never met, and become invested in their well being. Occasionally, the stream can feel like an inundation, as it did on my shameful day of 11 hours plus on my phone. And I know, yes, the arguments against spending too much time on social media, in particular. But all these streaming images are entirely different from the discrete pleasures of movies not just in terms of how they look the integrity of their images, where the camera is but also how movies begin and how they end, the specific rhythms, shape and sense of time they create. The seemingly endless, indistinguishable months of the pandemic have been perfect for the undifferentiated streaming flow of baking shows, crime dramas, TikTok videos, fleeting Instagram stories and five second GIFs. Streaming companies know how to do flow: they often bypass credits and start up the next episode before you're finished watching the current one. Streaming blurs time and before you know it you've watched four episodes of "The Crown" back to back. This is of a different order of how we experience time when we go out to the movies, which give us two or more hours' respite from the clock and capitalism determined flow of everyday life. Every so often, someone asks what I think will happen to movies. I haven't a clue, beyond my conviction that good, bad and indifferent ones will continue to be produced, distributed and exhibited. How and what we watch, though, is much less certain. What we do know is that the American movie industry has weathered and profited from a succession of cataclysmic crises from its monopolistic foundation to the coming of sound, the end of the old studio system and the introduction of television and of home video. The advent of streaming has added another chapter in a history that will continue to morph and outlive any one company or crisis. Time will tell, and so will we. Would I call this the best movie of 2020, from the standpoint of cinematic art? Look, I don't know. It's been a weird year. But I would insist that this sequel to a cringey, pranky, 14 year old classic is undeniably the most 2020 movie of all time. This is partly because Sacha Baron Cohen and his collaborators including Maria Bakalova, the phenomenal Bulgarian actress who plays Borat's daughter, Tutar worked through the first months of the pandemic and the start of the presidential campaign, giving their antics a present tense flavor that went beyond mere relevance. But this new Borat adventure also captured the feeling of its moment with dismaying accuracy. Once again, Cohen's friendly, idiotic alter ego arrived on our shores from Kazakhstan to show Americans as we really are. Which is appallingly bigoted, ignorant and paranoid, but also disarmingly polite and kind to strangers. There is something touching about the part of the movie in which Borat quarantines with a pair of QAnon believers who later help him find Tutar at an anti mask MAGA rally. And a welcome dose of noncomedic humanity arrives in the person of Jeanise Jones, who patiently tries to free Tutar's mind from its patriarchal prison. Not that "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm" offers much in the way of comfort. When satire and documentary converge, it's a sign that both have reached a dead end. The truth won't necessarily set you free. Laughter might not be any medicine at all. There is admirable rigor both in the ways Cohen constructs his gags and in his understanding of their limits. The movie is extremely funny, but it won't cheer you up. Reality, in any case, went beyond even Cohen's scabrous imagination. He and Bakalova might have contrived to embarrass President Trump's personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, in a New York hotel room, but Cohen can only envy whatever comic deity organized that postelection press event in a Philadelphia parking lot, next door to a sex shop and across the street from a crematory. Not even Borat would go there. Borat's ultimate embrace of I'm the father of a daughter feminism is sweet, and it tempers the bitterness of the film's ending. This moviefilm, like the first episode, is the tale of two countries, a fantasy Kazakhstan and an actual "U.S. and A." At the end of this chapter, one of those countries stands as an example to the world, a place of progress, enlightenment, responsible journalism and respect for science. The other, once glorious, has descended into brutishness and superstition. I won't spoil it by telling you which is which. (Watch on Amazon.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The title of the Netflix mini series "Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker" indicates that the facts of the life of Sarah Walker, a pioneering African American businesswoman, will not be strictly adhered to. Then there's the other meaning: that we are to be inspired by Walker's story. And inspiration is what the show is peddling, the way Walker sold shampoos and pomades. It does its job with some of the shrewdness and panache Walker demonstrated in building her hair care empire. And it employs a fine cast in telling her amazing story, beginning with Octavia Spencer as Walker, the girl born (as Sarah Breedlove) to former slaves just after emancipation and who became the richest self made American woman of her time. What it doesn't do, across four episodes and 190 minutes (available Friday), is give a very strong idea of who Walker was or how she accomplished what she did. "Self Made" sticks to Walker's adult life, beginning in St. Louis in 1908, where the stress of working as a washerwoman and living with an angry drunk who hits her and calls her a mangy dog makes her hair start to fall out. When the gorgeous Addie Munroe (Carmen Ejogo) comes to Walker's door selling her line of hair products, Walker sees a way out and goes to work for Munroe. Soon she's replicating Munroe's formula and starting her own company, which will eventually be called the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Co. after her third husband (played by Blair Underwood). The cultural and symbolic weight of black women's hair is touched on, but not dwelt on, in "Self Made." (A dizzying array of hair and hairdos are on display, overseen by the hair director, Etheline Joseph.) What the writers Nicole Jefferson Asher and Elle Johnson (working from a biography by Walker's great great granddaughter A'Lelia Bundles) and the directors Kasi Lemmons and DeMane Davis have gone for is good old fashioned entertainment, with a few tears when Walker's fortunes turn down and a few cheers when her uncommon determination carries the day. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
There's a spark of energy that shows no sign of slowing down in Nashville's Wedgewood Houston neighborhood. Situated a few blocks south of the city's downtown, the area was long a run down part of town with warehouses, factories and garages. Today, artists, musicians and other creative types are moving into shiny modern condominiums and homes. Just as local real estate developers have been attracted by the inexpensive land and prime location, entrepreneurs have been lured in for these same reasons, too, and are opening restaurants, distilleries, art galleries and other businesses that draw crowds from all over town. Once a jam factory, now a bar and restaurant: the front area of this airy, two year old space is home to a bar cum lounge with mismatched couches and chairs with deep cushions. The cocktails are innovative, the spirit list is long, and an oversize plate of decadent nachos is the sole dining option. Hidden behind a sliding, metal door, however, is an intimate 24 seat restaurant where diners choose from a grid style menu to design their dream five course dinner; entrees change weekly but emphasize local ingredients in eclectic New American dishes. One of the city's pricier restaurants, a meal is a splurge but delicious and the vibe is worth it. Alcoholic drinks at the bar start at 12, a dinner for two with a glass of wine each is about 18 0. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Nicolas Cage's singing voic e might not be the worst thing about the revenge thriller "A Score to Settle," but it's right up there with Clint Eastwood's woodland warblings in "Paint Your Wagon" (1969). I could happily have gone to the grave without hearing either. Which is exactly where Frank Carver (Cage), the onetime enforcer for an Oregon crime syndicate, is headed. A diagnosis of sporadic fatal insomnia has earned him early release from prison after serving 19 years for a murder he didn't commit. Now he has two goals: to make amends to his troubled son, Joey (a colorless Noah Le Gros), and to track down and punish the surviving members of his former crew. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Loose pieces of DNA course through our veins. As cells in our body die, they cast off fragments of genes, some of which end up in the bloodstream, saliva and urine. Cell free DNA is like a message in a bottle, delivering secrets about what's happening inside our bodies. Pregnant women, for example, carry cell free DNA from their fetuses. A test that analyzes fetal DNA has proved to be more accurate in screening for Down syndrome than standard blood tests. In 2012, Jay Shendure, a geneticist at the University of Washington, and his colleagues were able to reconstruct the entire genome of a fetus from cell free DNA in a pregnant woman's saliva. A team of Stanford University researchers collected DNA fragments from the blood of patients who had received heart transplants and managed to find DNA from their donated hearts. (Tellingly, levels were highest in patients who were rejecting their hearts.) These days, scientists are especially excited by the prospect of using cell free DNA to test for cancer. Instead of relying on invasive biopsies, they hope to find blood borne fragments that carry distinctive cancer mutations. Unfortunately, the genetic sequence of a piece of cell free DNA doesn't tell researchers where in the body it originated a valuable clue for doctors looking for diseases. "Knowing the origin of circulating DNA is of great importance," said Alain R. Thierry, director of research at France's National Institute of Health and Medical Research. All the cells in our body typically descend from a single fertilized egg, and they inherit all the same genes. The reason we aren't uniform sacs of protoplasm is that our cells turn those same genes on and off in distinctive patterns, thereby developing into different tissues. They're like musicians at a piano recital: They sit at the same keyboard, but they play different songs. But in a study published on Thursday in the journal Cell, Dr. Shendure and his colleagues took some important steps toward identifying the origins of free floating DNA. To do so, they took advantage of a way that cells control their genes. DNA is wound around millions of protein clusters, resembling beads on a string. Some genes sit on stretches of DNA unencumbered by these clusters, called nucleosomes, but other genes are tucked deep inside them. By hiding genes, nucleosomes can silence them. As it turns out, different types of cells squirrel away different stretches of DNA in nucleosomes. One of Dr. Shendure's graduate students, Matthew W. Snyder, wondered what happened to those nucleosomes in dying cells. A cell ending its useful life is shredded by enzymes. But nucleosomes, Mr. Snyder suggested, might shield the DNA they've hidden. If so, then much of the cell free DNA that scientists collect from blood samples should have come from nucleosomes. They could reveal the pattern of nucleosomes in the cells they came from and thus tell researchers which kind of cell produced it. Mr. Snyder and his colleagues put the idea to the test. They searched the blood of healthy individuals for cell free DNA, and then searched a map of the human genome to figure out where each fragment came from. Much of the cell free DNA came from regions in or around nucleosomes, just as Mr. Snyder had suggested. The scientists then looked at the patterns of nucleosomes in different types of cells. They found that all the healthy subjects produced cell free DNA that mainly came from nucleosomes found in blood cells. But when they looked at cell free DNA from people with advanced cancer, the picture was different. In a patient with lung cancer, for example, the team found that the cell free DNA fit a different pattern one belonging to a type of lung cancer cell. The researchers went on to match cell free DNA in other cancer patients to the types of cancer they had. Dr. Thierry, who was not involved in the research, said the findings might eventually make it possible to use cell free DNA to find important clues about diseases. Doctors might be able to use it to figure out the location of hard to find cancers, for example. It could provide clues to diseases other than cancers as well. Free floating genes shed by the heart, for example, might reveal damage from a heart attack. Cell free DNA from neurons might signal a stroke. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
LONDON Taste is changing. When private collectors and public museums acquire works of art, these acquisitions are being made in a very different cultural climate from that which prevailed in the late 20th century, let alone the late 19th. The market for contemporary art is, for example, being transformed by some curators' desire to rehabilitate underrepresented names, particularly female and African American artists. Similar imperatives are driving museum purchases of pre 20th century works. This month, the National Gallery in London announced that it had bought Artemisia Gentileschi's "Self Portrait as St. Catherine of Alexandria" for 3.6 million pounds, or about 4.8 million. Artemisia, though, is hardly an unknown talent. Hailed in her own lifetime as a "prodigy of painting, easier to envy than to imitate," the most renowned female artist of the Italian Baroque was the subject of solo exhibitions in Milan in 2011 and Rome in 2016. Her extraordinary life story has become a set text of feminist art history. In 1611, Artemisia, aged 17, was raped by Agostino Tassi, an artist collaborating with her painter father, Orazio Gentileschi. Tassi was subsequently charged and found guilty, but only after his victim had been forced to endure testimony under thumbscrew torture and accusations of immorality. The condemned rapist never served his sentence of exile. The self portrait, painted in Florence around 1615 1618, shows the artist leaning against a wheel studded with iron spikes. "It's tempting to read the painting biographically," Letizia Treves, the curator of Italian, Spanish, and French 17th century paintings at the National Gallery, said in an email. "Artemisia had long been identified as an artist whose works are missing from our collection," Ms. Treves added. "She's an artist we wanted to represent primarily for her artistic achievement, in addition to the fact that she is a celebrated female artist." The acquisition brought the number of works by women among the 2,300 owned by the National Gallery to 21. The transaction was a coup for the London based dealers Marco Voena and Fabrizio Moretti, who had bought the newly discovered painting in partnership in December at a Paris auction for 2.4 million euros with fees, or about 2.8 million, an auction high for the artist. "You have to think differently today," said Mr. Voena. "The taste of the connoisseur is over." "You have to ask what the image you are buying means to people," he added. He said Artemisia's self portrait was "a picture of a heroine, the sort of image you see on Instagram." The popularity of exhibitions devoted to female artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo (whose "Making Her Self Up" show is currently drawing crowds at the Victoria Albert museum in London) are signs of our cultural times, according to Mr. Voena. "Museums want to sell tickets," he said. Visitors should, however, be able to view the Artemisia self portrait without charge when it goes on display next year, after conservation. But with visitor numbers down 17 percent last year, the National Gallery is aware of the need to show old art that appeals to new sensibilities. If those sensibilities are making the market for old masters more selective than ever, where does that leave the academic painting and sculpture of the 19th century, the art produced when industrial Europe was exploiting its colonies and its visual culture was dominated by what college art history departments call the "male gaze"? On Wednesday, Sotheby's held a 120 lot auction of technically proficient 19th and early 20th century figurative sculpture. Teetering on the edge of kitsch, these white marble female nudes and bronzes of noble Africans have fallen out of fashion with Western collectors. An audience of fewer than 10 people turned up to the sale. But the art market is a global business these days. Despite the near deserted room, 70 percent of the works found buyers, with most of the successful lots attracting telephone bids and bidding online. "The Chinese are getting rich and they want to invest in Western culture," said Natalie Lo, a Chinese collector who was in the salesroom with her adviser. "There's a lot of potential, and we want to anticipate it," added Ms. Lo, who, among several purchases, bought a circa 1920 marble bust of Beethoven by the Italian sculptor Alfredo Pina for PS10,000. Coming from a collecting culture inundated with fakes, Ms. Lo said the dependable authenticity of 19th and early 20th century European sculpture was "very important." But with interest from Western collectors contracted, and Asian buying in its early stages, academic sculpture has become a niche market. Sotheby's latest biannual sale of this material mustered a modest PS1.9 million, 24 percent down on the equivalent auction last year. "So much of this period of art is based on the male point of view. People have called it 19th century eroticism," said Robert Bowman, a London dealer in sculpture, whose gallery is currently hosting a selling exhibition on the late Victorian New Sculpture movement. "There's a sensitivity to political correctness, which is right, but sometimes it can go too far," Mr. Bowman added, referring to the squeamishness that today's art world feels about certain subjects. For many, it went too far in January, when the Manchester Art Gallery removed from public display John William Waterhouse's 1896 Pre Raphaelite painting, "Hylas and the Nymphs," showing a young warrior being lured into a pond by seven semi submerged naked girls. The removal, undertaken as a performance by the artist Sonia Boyce, had been informed by the MeToo campaign, according to Clare Gannaway, the museum's curator of contemporary art. After a backlash, the painting was put back on display in February. "I do not believe this work is a significant or exceptional example of a (heteronormative) male colonialist gaze in this work, certainly less so than, for example, in Picasso's 'Demoiselles d'Avignon,' " Tim Barringer, professor of the history of art at Yale University, said in an email. Mr. Barringer added that while he admired Ms. Boyce's work, " in this case she, and the curators at Manchester Art Gallery, in my view got it wrong." . Mr. Barringer might also have referenced Picasso's 1905 painting of a naked teenage girl, "Fillette a la Corbeille Fleurie," which drew just one bid albeit of 115 million at Christie's Rockefeller collection sale in May. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Summer is usually the season of sun worship, but this weekend that star will be eclipsed at least in many hearts by the moon. Saturday brings the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, the first mission to send astronauts to the lunar surface, and festivals, exhibitions, screenings and even stand up comedy will commemorate the landing. (Outdoor activities are weather dependent.) Here are selected highlights. Tranquility is not a word normally associated with this neighborhood, but that will change with this free event, which intends to transform Duffy Square into Tranquility Base, site of the lunar landing. Presented by the Aldrin Family Foundation as in Buzz Aldrin in partnership with "The People's Moon," an online project by the British artist Helen Marshall, the festival will turn the pavement into a giant mosaic featuring Neil Armstrong's lunar boot print overlaid with photos collected from spaceflight enthusiasts around the world. Children can meet two former NASA astronauts and see robotics and other educational demonstrations take place on giant maps of the moon and Mars. Or you can just relive Apollo 11 with the help of enormous overhead screens, which will show footage of the launch and the landing. Why not celebrate the space program where much of it began? This Long Island museum has an extensive collection of artifacts from the Apollo missions, whose lunar modules were designed and built at what was then the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation in Bethpage, N.Y. The daytime festival will offer opportunities to explore Apollo 11 in virtual reality, look through solar telescopes, drive lunar rovers around an obstacle course, meet two former shuttle astronauts and see "Apollo 11: First Steps Edition," the Imax version of Todd Douglas Miller's recent documentary. The evening party will recreate a 1969 living room, where guests can watch Apollo 11 footage, dance to a band playing the era's hits and count down to that first step. (Wear your '60s best.) Apollo at 50 Moon Fest (Saturday from 9:30 a.m. 5 p.m.) and Apollo at Countdown Celebration (Saturday from 7 11 p.m.), Charles Lindbergh Boulevard, Garden City, N.Y.; 516 572 4066, cradleofaviation.org. Even the music will have a space theme at these festivities. The Amateur Astronomers Association of New York will bring telescopes for stargazing, and the museum, which will also show "Apollo 11: First Steps Edition," will offer model rocket and robotics activities for children. If you're interested in the spaceflights of the future, try Escape the Planet!, an escape room adventure devised by the theater director Andrew Scoville and the astronomer Moiya McTier, who will both attend the celebration, along with other scientists and designers. "Above and Beyond: The Ultimate Flight Exhibition," on view through Sept. 8, includes a mock ascent to space and an augmented reality experience evoking the challenges of flying to Mars. These are rare free opportunities to see both the real Buzz Aldrin (onscreen) and the actor Bryan Cranston portraying him. Each day will include two showings of the first 52 minutes of the moon walk, from Neil Armstrong's first step to the placement of the American flag . The 1979 NBC special "The Day They Landed: July 20, 1969" includes interviews with all three Apollo 11 astronauts, and the 1979 ABC special "Infinite Horizons: Space Beyond Apollo" presents a look at the future hosted by the author Ray Bradbury. The center will also screen a segment of HBO's Emmy winning 1998 mini series "From the Earth to the Moon," in which Mr. Cranston blasts off . The Intrepid focuses on both actual spaceflight and flights of fancy. Its "Apollo 11: Media, the Moon and Beyond," an installation through Sept. 3, features period televisions showing archived mission news reports. Friday evening, a free Astronomy Night, will offer stargazing; an outdoor screening of "First Man," Damien Chazelle's feature starring Ryan Gosling as an enigmatic Neil Armstrong; and a talk by Noah Petro, a NASA scientist. On both Friday and Saturday, members of the space enabled research group of the M.I.T. Media Lab will present "Earthrise: A 50 Year Contemplation," a pop up installation intended to inspire the same awe struck response astronauts had to the famous image of Earth captured during Apollo 8. "Giant Leaps," a planetarium show on Saturday, will trace technological progress. The celebration ends with "To the Moon With the Upright Citizens Brigade Touring Company," an evening show of history and humor for adults, with guests including the comedian Lauren Adams and the former astronaut Mike Massimino. Friday and Saturday at various times, Pier 86, West 46th Street and 12th Avenue, Manhattan; 877 957 7447, intrepidmuseum.org. How can you not be intrigued by a museum that has a director of astrovisualization? Or by a festival whose astrovisualizers include the performance artist Laurie Anderson? This daylong event will include the United States premiere of "To the Moon," a 15 minute virtual reality experience in which Ms. Anderson and the artist Hsin Chien Huang chart a lunar journey that draws on Greek mythology, literature, science, film and even politics. (Although "To the Moon," which continues through July 28, is close to sold out, the museum will make additional slots available each day, first come first served. Spaces remain on Sunday for a discussion about the work that will feature Ms. Anderson.) At SpaceFest, Carter Emmart, who has that exciting astrovisualization job title, will use data visualization software from NASA to present a complete model of Apollo 11's journey. You can also experience the sun in an immersive video installation, watch demonstrations of extraterrestrial volcanoe s and embark on virtual reality explorations of NASA spacecraft and models. Young space enthusiasts can look forward to children's book readings, portable planetarium shows and themed performances by the Story Pirates. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
THE DNA OF MURDER WITH PAUL HOLES 7 p.m. on Oxygen. After spending more than two decades trying to catch the Golden State Killer, Paul Holes, an investigator with the Contra Costa County district attorney's office, finally got a break in the case when he thought to combine DNA collected at the crime scenes with genealogy websites. The innovative scheme, which involved creating an undercover profile on GEDmatch under a pseudonym, led to the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo. Holes has since retired, but he's gone on to use his expertise to help with existing cold cases as a co host on the podcast "The Murder Squad," and now with his own TV show. On "The DNA of Murder," Holes gives true crime fans a behind the scenes look at how he approaches cases, aiding law enforcement agencies with unsolved crimes. On the series premiere, he'll look into a bludgeoning murder at an Iowa Holiday Inn from 1980. THE COLLEGE ADMISSIONS SCANDAL 8 p.m. on Lifetime. This made for TV movie takes a dramatized look at the college admissions scandal that swept up famous actresses and business leaders earlier this year. It follows two wealthy mothers, played by Penelope Ann Miller and Mia Kirshner, willing to do whatever it takes to get their kids into prestigious universities, with a little help from a charismatic admissions consultant named Rick Singer (Michael Shanks). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Location, location, location. In real estate, place determines value. Sometimes it can for art too. El Museo del Barrio originated in 1969 in classrooms, storefronts and a repurposed fire station in what was then the predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood of East Harlem. The museum was a product of pride and necessity. In local public schools, young artist activists, often working free, taught children the virtues of cultural self expression and communal self sufficiency. And they taught from experience. At the time, no mainstream art institution in the city would show their art. They needed a museum of their own and, collectively, they created one. In 1977, El Museo del Barrio moved to its present address in a city owned building on Fifth Avenue at 104th Street. The relocation gave the institution more space and greater visibility. But it also took it physically out of the heart of the Barrio, and set the stage for a potential change of character. A territorial tug of war began between supporters who wanted the institution to remain community identified, and others who were pushing it to become a broadband showcase for Latino and Latin American art. The tension has stayed high since, and in the past few years, turned ugly. After the museum's first non Puerto Rican director, Julian Zugazagoitia, left in 2010, his successor, Margarita Aguilar, was fired just 18 months after her appointment. Ms. Aguilar's successor, Jorge Daniel Veneciano, abruptly quit as executive director after two years. Now a new director, Patrick Charpenel, formerly of the contemporary Museo Jumex in Mexico City, is in place. The exhibition title comes from the best selling 1967 autobiography of Piri Thomas, a community organizer of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent who grew up in what was then called Spanish Harlem. Five of the show's 10 photographers Frank Espada (1930 2014), Perla de Leon, Hiram Maristany, Winston Vargas and Camilo Jose Vergara took that neighborhood, or Latino sections of Washington Heights, the South Bronx, and Brownsville in Brooklyn, as their beat. Mr. Maristany, who in 1969 became a founding member and official photographer of the Young Lords, a leftist Latino activist organization, still lives in East Harlem. (An exhibition in his honor was organized there by Hunter East Harlem Gallery in 2015.) Like street photographers in Newark, Los Angeles and other American cities with large, close knit Latino populations, Mr. Maristany works in a genre that blends documentary and portraiture. He sees what's wrong in the immediate world he lives in the poverty, the crowding but also sees the creativity encouraged by having to make do, and the warmth generated by bodies living in close, affectionate proximity. The result, at least in this determinedly positive show organized by E. Carmen Ramos, deputy chief curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum is advocacy art in the form of a kind of extended family album. (Perla de Leon's views of a leveled South Bronx are exceptions.) This view by no means represents the full, complex story of a time and place; no art can. But it's a needed alternative to a poverty porn that has long filled the popular media, and that made the sight of a United States president jocosely tossing rolls of paper towels to hurricane devastated Puerto Ricans in San Juan last year unacceptable to some eyes. The second show, "Liliana Porter: Other Situations," organized by the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Ga., couldn't be more different in look and tone. Born in Argentina in 1941, Ms. Porter arrived in New York City at age 22 and has made it her primary home ever since. In the early 1960s with two other Latin American artists Jose Guillermo Castillo (1938 1999) and Luis Camnitzer, to whom she was married she founded the experimental New York Graphic Workshop, after which her art took an increasingly Conceptualist direction. Despite the early work's formal economy, Pop Art was a big inspiration. In the 1980s and '90s, Ms. Porter began assembling and photographing groups of toys and figurines found in flea markets and antique shops. In one example, "The Intruder," images of Mao Zedong, George Washington, Pinocchio, the East Asian goddess Guanyin, Lassie, and the Venezuelan physician saint Jose Gregorio Hernandez rub shoulders. Who, exactly, might qualify as an intruder in so multicultural a crowd is hard to say. Visual puzzles, triggered by a hallucinatory use of scale, are this artist's specialty. A great wash of cobalt paint covering a gallery wall appears to have its source in a minute statue of a man holding a paint brush. In a series called "Forced Labor," an inches high figure of a knitting woman generates an oceanic pile of pink fabric. And what looks from afar like a smudgy, multipanel abstract painting proves to be a sculptural depiction of a military disaster. Up close you see that the smudges are clusters of toy figures tipped over carts, fallen horses soldiers stuck to the canvas surface with engulfing gouts of pigment. Cruelty and loss are at the bottom of Ms. Porter's work. Her video, "Matinee," which she directed with Ana Tiscornia, to a tender score by Sylvia Meyer, is a succession of tabletop tableaus enacted by dolls and figurines. The scenes are winsome and funny till disaster strikes: A ceramic child is abruptly beheaded by a hammer; in a segment called "Chicken Salad," a sudden avalanche of greenery buries a windup toy bird. Hers is a very adult art that brings us back to childhood: We project ourselves on these toys, find responsive presences in them. And, in an off handed way, she links us up with lived history. "Matinee" opens on a weirdly ominous note as the camera pans a porcelain souvenir image of John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy seated in their fateful open roofed Dallas limousine. The Kennedy assassination was still very much in the air when Ms. Porter moved to the United States in 1964, so it is part of her history. And as a New Yorker, so is El Museo and its history, even though she was downtown, not in East Harlem during the museum's formative years. At the same time, she has said that she still considers herself Argentine, and returns there regularly. In short, Ms. Porter's art, which is not declaratively Latin American or Latina, fits comfortably within the mission of a museum that describes itself broadly as "a Latino and Latin American cultural institution." The expansiveness is valid. Much has changed, culturally, in the past half century. The ethnic demographics of the now gentrifying East Harlem have changed. The dimensions of "Latino" as an identity have changed. So have the needs of cultural institutions to attract audiences, local and global. What if the Studio Museum in Harlem restricted itself to black artists who lived, or had roots, in Harlem? That would be unhealthy for the museum, and the artists who showed there, and probably be fiscally unsustainable. But some things have not changed. The political disenfranchisement of Puerto Rico continues, evident in the United State's government's shameful post hurricane treatment of the island. In the United States itself, class and economic barriers based on ethnicity stand firm. And cultural accomplishment, achieved against high odds, is often ignored or forgotten. El Museo begins its self description in press material with these words: "founded by a coalition of Puerto Rican educators, artists and activists." And that reality should be honored and preserved in the institution itself. El Museo began as a platform for cultural expression and communal activism, and should remain that. Yet, how could it not be useful now for that local activism to share a larger Latin American/Latino/Latina/Latinx context, a wider global stage? Common ground is a powerful place to be. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Insurance covers more mental health care than many people may realize, and more people will soon have the kind of health insurance that does so. But coverage goes only so far when there aren't enough practitioners who accept it or there aren't any nearby, or they aren't taking any new patients. In the days after the Newtown, Conn., school shooting, parents and politicians took to the airwaves to make broad based proclamations about the sorry state of mental health care in America. But a closer look reveals a more nuanced view, with a great deal of recent legislative progress as well as plenty of infuriating coverage gaps. The stakes in any census of mental health insurance coverage are high given how many people are suffering. Twenty six percent of adults experience a diagnosable mental disorder in any given year, and 6 percent of all adults experience a seriously debilitating mental illness, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Twenty one percent of teenagers experience a severe emotional disturbance between the ages of 13 and 18. According to this year's Society for Human Resource Management survey of 550 employers of all sizes, including nonprofits and government entities, 85 percent offer at least some mental health insurance coverage. A 2009 Mercer survey found that 84 percent of employers with more than 500 employees covered both in network and out of network mental health and substance abuse treatments. For now, some people who have no health insurance or who buy it on their own may avoid purchasing mental health coverage too, or may avoid seeking treatment for things like addiction or depression. This happens for many of the same reasons that there has historically been less mental health coverage than there has been for other illnesses. The earliest objections among insurance providers and employers had to do with whether mental disorders existed at all, according to Howard Goldman, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Maryland school of medicine. Then there were questions about whether treatment actually worked. Next, concerns arose over cost and how often people would avail themselves of costly mental health treatments. But a subset of adults who have good insurance coverage still avoid treatment for mental illness to this day, according to Edward A. Kaplan, senior vice president and national practice leader for the Segal Company, a benefits consultant that works with many unions. "Culturally, a lot of people driving trucks don't believe in it and suffer through," he said. "And a lot of transport unions don't trust employers and think they will look at it and use it to retaliate against the workers." For many of the people who do have mental health coverage, there is now a bit more of it at a lower cost than there might have been five years ago, even if mental health insurance over all remains much less generous than it was many years ago when employees did not pay as much out of pocket. That's because a 2008 federal law requires employers with more than 50 employees that do offer mental health coverage to have no more restrictions than there are for physical injuries or surgery, and no higher costs. This so called parity bill now applies to a crucial provision of President Obama's Affordable Care Act. Insurance plans in the exchanges that will offer health coverage to millions of uninsured individuals starting in 2014 must cover many items and services, including mental health disorders and substance abuse. The combination of parity and expanded care is crucial, according to Anthony Wright, the executive director of Health Access, a consumer advocacy organization in California. After all, parity doesn't do much good if the mental health coverage need only be equivalent to a meager health insurance plan that covers very little. Then again, what good is parity in mental health insurance if you can't get the treatment you need? Plenty of psychiatrists in private practice accept no insurance at all, though it is not clear how many; their professional organizations claim to have no recent or decent data on the percentage of people in private practice who take cash on the barrelhead, write people a receipt and send them off to their insurance company to request out of network reimbursement if they have any at all. According to a 2008 American Psychological Association survey, 85 percent of the 2,200 respondents who said they worked at least part time in private practice received at least some third party payments for their services. That doesn't mean they take your insurance, though. Nor does it guarantee that they or other mental health practitioners are anywhere near you or have any imminent openings for appointments. This can be a challenge for people who live far from major cities or big medical centers and need treatment for mental illnesses like severe depression or schizophrenia or disorders like autism. But it is a particular problem for parents of autistic children who need specialized treatment that is relatively new or that not many people are trained to do. Amanda Griffiths, who lives in Carlisle, Pa., and is the mother of two autistic boys, called 17 providers within two hours of her home before finding one who was qualified to evaluate her younger son and was accepting new patients his age. "No amount of insurance is going to magically make a provider appear," she said. And it remains a struggle to persuade insurance companies and employers to cover treatment that is new or expensive, even if it's likely to be effective. Ira Burnim, legal director of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, points to something called assertive community treatment, a team based approach that has proved useful for adults with severe mental illness and holds promise for children, too. There, the challenge is to define what kinds of interaction with a patient outside of an office setting is billable and write rules for coverage. Autistic children can benefit from an intensive treatment called applied behavior analysis, but many insurance companies haven't wanted to cover what can be a 60,000 or 70,000 annual cost. They claim that the treatment, which can include intensive one on one interaction and assistance with both basic and more complex skills, is either too experimental or an educational service that schools should provide. This can be a tricky area for parents to navigate, because it isn't always clear which part of an overall health insurance policy ought to cover various possible treatments. A law school professor named Lorri Unumb faced a bill that big several years ago when her son Ryan was found to be autistic and she discovered that her insurance would not pay for treatment. After moving to South Carolina and meeting families there who had not been able to afford the therapy, she spent two years persuading state legislators to pass a law that forced insurance companies to pay for the treatment. "I did not really know how to write a bill," she said. "I had watched 'Schoolhouse Rock' before, and that was kind of my inspiration and guidance." Autism Speaks, a national advocacy organization, saw what she accomplished and hired her to barnstorm the country in an effort to get similar laws passed. There are now 32 states that have them, though there's a crucial catch: they don't apply to the many large employers who pool their own resources in so called self funded insurance plans. If you work in such a company, it may be up to you to lobby your human resources department to cover applied behavioral analysis or whatever mental health therapy you or your child may need. Sometimes a personal appeal will succeed; Mr. Kaplan, the benefits consultant, noted that when a parent called about a child, an employer might be particularly sensitive. But a part of Ms. Unumb's job these days is to assist parents with appeals where employers have said no or appear likely to. She has accompanied parents to meetings with their human resources departments all over the country to request that the employer expand coverage for everyone. She has a 115 page presentation that she draws on, pointing out that at its core, autism is a medical condition diagnosed by a doctor, the very thing health insurance is supposed to cover. At 60,000 or more annually for children with particularly acute treatment needs, the coverage does not come cheaply. But Autism Speaks estimates that that expense, spread over thousands of employees, raises premium costs 31 cents a month. Ms. Unumb notes that for many autistic children, intensive early intervention can allow them to function in mainstream classrooms and prevent a host of problems there and once they finish school. "You pay for it now or you pay for it later," she said. "And you pay for it a lot more if you choose later, in more ways than just financial." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
This is the essay is part of The Big Ideas, a special section of The Times's philosophy series, The Stone, in which more than a dozen artists, writers and thinkers answer the question, "Why does art matter?" The entire series can be found here. When I agreed to write this essay, little did I know that when I finally sat down to tackle it all my favorite museums would be closed to the public, along with every library, theater, concert hall and movie house and, of course, the galleries I own. It's a bit like our world faded abruptly and unexpectedly from vivid color to black and white. But it dawned on me that there could hardly be a better moment to reflect upon the importance of art or, better still, culture itself than in the face of its almost complete physical absence. This total loss of actual, palpable experiences with art is like a kind of withdrawal for me. The experience and appreciation the need for culture feels like it's hard wired into my existence and, I'd like to believe, hard wired into our species. Art is not something that happens at the periphery of our lives. It's actually the thing that's right there in the center, a veritable engine. It's like my mother once said: "Die Kunst ist unsere Daseinsberechtigung." Art is how we justify our existence. We've been creating art for much longer than recorded history. The earliest surviving visual art, as in the cave paintings of Sulawesi in Indonesia and El Castillo in Spain, date back to roughly 40,000 years ago. I have to assume there's earlier work that we don't yet know about. Our great rivals in the evolutionary race, the Neanderthals, were stronger, bigger and had larger skulls than us, but left behind no sophisticated tools and very little in the way of artifacts. One argument holds that the Neanderthal imagination was limited, and that Homo sapiens' more complex and adventurous way of thinking our creativity is what moved us to the forefront among the human species. For me, art is not just sensory stimulation. I believe it's most gratifying as an intellectual pursuit. Great art is, by definition, complex, and it expects work from us when we engage with it. There is this wonderful moment, one that I have missed so much lately, when you stand before a work of art and, suddenly, the work is speaking back to you. Great works carry with them so many messages and meanings. And often those messages survive for centuries. Or even more mysteriously they change as the years and decades pass, leaving their power and import somehow undiminished. Velazquez's "Las Meninas" comes to mind, as does the intense pleasure I've experienced every time I've seen it, at different stages of my life, at the Prado museum in Madrid. Thinking about "Las Meninas" today, amid the new reality of a pandemic, reminds me how much I look forward to seeing works of art in their physical spaces again. There is no substitute for the artwork's materiality, which ultimately and invariably relates to our senses, our bodies and our analytical prowess and intellectual curiosity. The appreciation of art is, more often than not, a communal experience. It brings us together when we go to museums, to openings, to concerts, to movies or to the ballet or theater. And we argue, and sometimes we fight, but we certainly don't wage war over artistic expression. I would contend that art and culture are the most important vehicles by which we come to understand one another. They make us curious about that which is different or unfamiliar, and ultimately allow us to accept it, even embrace it. Isn't it telling that those societies most afraid of "the other" the Nazis, Stalin's Soviet Union, the Chinese under Mao were not able to bring forth any significant cultural artifacts? Yet an abundance of work created in resistance to such ideologies can still dominate our cultural discourse. Lately, a discussion has raged about how art and culture stack up against the hard sciences. More ominously, the question is weighing on the colleges and universities of the United States, where the humanities are playing an ever smaller role. That's a dangerous proposition. While the sciences have brought into this world so many wonderful things, they are also implicated when it comes to our most sinister achievements nuclear warfare, genetic manipulation and the degradation of nature. While art can reach into the darkest places of the human psyche, it does so to help us understand and hopefully transcend. Art lifts us up. In the end, I think its mission is simply to make us better people. The machines have proven to be absolutely amazing during a pandemic, connecting us, informing us and entertaining us, but in the end they are limited. They're born of science and they have no imaginations. We have to imagine for them. Who knows what the future will bring? If we Homo sapiens are challenged again, it will not be by the Neanderthal nor by any other species but by the machines we invented ourselves. Winning that battle can't be done without firing up the most important engines we possess culture and creativity because reason is born out of our cultural experiences. Works of art carry with them the wisdom of the world. This difficult period we have been in recently will pass, and the exchanges I've had with visual artists have given me some of my most hopeful moments. I've reached many in their studios, while they were working. They certainly seemed happy to hear from me, and our conversations have been perfectly polite; still, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was interrupting them. They had more important things to do than talk to me. They were making art. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
There are signs that a child is born to dance. In Kyle Marshall's case, it was clear early on: He performed in the living room to an audience of stuffed animals. "There's photo documentation," he said recently, with the hint of a smile. Dance classes came next. "My parents were both athletes, and I come from a family of runners," Mr. Marshall said. "My father was in the '84 Olympics. So I grew up in a family of high achievers. They encouraged me to dance. They encouraged me to take it seriously." Not only has Mr. Marshall, 29, taken his career seriously but the contemporary dance world has taken it seriously, too. His company's engagement at BAM Fisher, Wednesday through Saturday, carries weight: He is the only local choreographer included in the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival under its new artistic director, David Binder. For Mr. Marshall, that expectation includes presenting and representing both New York City dance and black dance. He's in a strong position to do so. In 2018, he was awarded the Juried Bessie Award its main aim is to support choreographers with touring and residency opportunities for making work that looks at "ideas around race and sexuality." At the same time, Mr. Marshall is an admired member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company. (He will continue with the company through June, he said, then he'll focus on his own work .) At the Next Wave Festival, Mr. Marshall will present his acclaimed "Colored," which explores ideas about blackness, including what it's like to work in primarily white realm s ; and the premiere of "A.D.," about the influence of Christianity on the black body. "A.D." was created in collaboration with a tight knit group of fellow graduates from Rutgers University Oluwadamilare Ayorinde (called Dare) , Bria Bacon, Miriam Gabriel and Myssi Robinson. The production, which includes quotes from the Bible a recent rehearsal had the cast chanting variations on "until the flood came and took them all away" is arresting for its formalism and expressive, full bodied movement that is layered with religious iconography. Charmaine Warren, an associate producer at BAM and an early supporter of Mr. Marshall, admires his committed approach. "He's delving into his heart and his culture," she said. "That makes me feel good there's so much to be said, and not enough of these artists who say they're making work about the black tradition in dance are really bringing it fully forward. I think he's sticking to this trajectory." Growing up in New Jersey, Mr. Marshall attended a Presbyterian church that was on the conservative side. "My father's family grew up in a Pentecostal church, kind of more shouting and a bit more physical exultation," he said. " It wasn't controlling the rules of his house, but it did create the culture." Mr. Marshall does not attend church services now, but, he said, "we need more space to think of ourselves as being elevated." "I think we need to think that there's something better than these elections or this world that is literally burning and flooding," he added. "If I were to believe in the Bible, I would say these are biblical times." In an interview, Mr. Marshall spoke about examining his religious upbringing , performing the dances of a postmodern master while choreographing his own works and developing a close knit dance family. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. Is there a connection between "Colored" and "A.D."? "Colored" was an exploration of blackness and its spectrum, and one of the final sections of is a section that we call "Gospel," which kind of references black church culture. I started to think a bit more about my own experience of growing up in a black church. I became curious about how I related to this thing as I was getting older. I'm looking at how I was influenced by those experiences, both positively and negatively. What are the ways that Christianity shaped my morality? You've talked about how in religious imagery angels are depicted as white and demons are black. Do you relate that to the way the black body is viewed in society? If we want to undo some of the white supremacy that's within religion, we have to shift how we understand some of those images. There are all these stereotypes that people associate with this body. Especially in America, we see the black body as something that feels almost superhuman in strength or agility and is hypersexual. Those things are idolized people want to do all those things that people assume black bodies can do and seen as negative. Has "A.D." affected your view of Christianity? It's reminded me that religion is not just ideology; it's culture. So when I visit my grandparents in Jamaica, I could say, "I'm not going to go to church with you on Sunday," but that feels like it's against the culture. It's definitely made me see the importance of spiritual thinking. It's not just the physical form, but there's another form that exists: You feel it when you leave a black church and you have a rush, or the music gives you chills. I like to think that in building "A.D." the audience can become a congregation. It can become a space where people can reflect. So it's not just audience performer. I think this work is calling for a different kind of attention. It's so interesting that while your work explores issues of race and religion, you also perform Trisha Brown's dances, which are more austere explorations of space and time. How did you end up there? I auditioned. I was really into the work and her ideas, but I didn't know anyone in the company. I was really shocked. What is it like for you as a choreographer to be living inside the dances of a master? I'm learning a lot about how she made her works and her values and her ideas. There are some things about the experience that feel very different than my process and how I would like to work. I am interested in the people in the room. Trisha's work, because it's so abstract, is interested in other things. I consider the person in the material their impulses, their questions. My space is definitely more collaborative. I don't like to use the term "dancers." "Collaborators" or "performers." "Dancer," "choreographer" creates too much hierarchy. It's not helpful. And they are all artists in their own right. That's important if we want to undo some of the power dynamics that are in the dance field. With the five of us, it's a softer way of working. One thing that's unusual is how close your company is: You and Myssi have lived together since college, and Dare, Bria and Mimi live together as well. How do you navigate that and also remain in charge? It's definitely me directing the room. How we work is a lot more sensitive to them. These relationships aren't just because of housing. These are close friendships. I like to think of my work as a container, a history of time. That's really starting to come into focus. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
HOUSTON Chesapeake Energy, a pioneer in extracting natural gas from shale rock across the country, filed for bankruptcy protection on Sunday, unable to overcome a mountain of debt that became unsustainable after a decade of stubbornly low gas prices. The company helped convert the United States from a natural gas importer into a major exporter under the swashbuckling leadership of Aubrey McClendon, a company co founder and former chief executive. But Mr. McClendon overextended the company and amassed over 20 billion in debt before he was forced out in 2013, and Chesapeake, based in Oklahoma City, never fully recovered. Chesapeake lost 8.3 billion in the first quarter of this year, and had just 82 million in cash at the end of March. With 9.5 billion in debt at the end of last year, it has bond payments of 192 million due in August. In a statement, Chesapeake said it was filing for Chapter 11 protection to facilitate a complete restructuring. As part of its agreement with lenders, the company said it had secured 925 million in financing under a revolving credit facility, and eliminated roughly 7 billion of debt. It also secured a 600 million future commitment of new equity. "We are fundamentally resetting Chesapeake's capital structure and business to address our legacy financial weaknesses," said Doug Lawler, Chesapeake's president and chief executive. "Chesapeake will be uniquely positioned to emerge from the Chapter 11 process as a stronger and more competitive enterprise." It is the latest heavily indebted oil and gas business to seek bankruptcy protection since the coronavirus pandemic crippled demand for energy. Under its former chief executive Mr. McClendon, the company drilled across Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio, Wyoming and Louisiana. Mr. McClendon was audacious as he aggressively outbid competitors on land leases and explored widely in the early 2000s, although he also drilled many wells that disappointed investors. By 2011, he and others who followed in his footsteps had produced a glut of natural gas that sent Chesapeake and other companies to the brink of collapse. To find a use for all that natural gas, Mr. McClendon went on a campaign to promote compressed natural gas vehicles, but the effort went nowhere. He tried to make alliances with environmentalists, arguing that gas could replace coal and be a bridge fuel to a cleaner energy future. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
There were many reasons for a 16 year old boy to love the noisy, brooding music known as grunge, but here's a personal one: The bushy bearded, drowsy eyed guitarist for Soundgarden, Kim Thayil, looked like my uncle George. My father's younger brother had been a sporadically employed welder and pot smoker who wore a ponytail, which was a mild embarrassment to the family. He was still those things, but now, in 1992, he also resembled a rock star whose face I saw on MTV. More than its fresh sound a fusing of metal with punk more than articulating a generation's disillusionment with capitalist culture, the appeal of grunge, for me, was this: It reflected and ennobled the blue collar world I knew. The Pacific Northwest may have been 2,600 miles and virtually an entire continent from my home in central Pennsylvania, but to go by Seattle's musicians, the regions were strikingly similar. Chris Cornell's lace up Dr. Martens, worn on stage at Lollapalooza '92, were a version of the work boots my father wore to his job as an engine mechanic. And when Rolling Stone described Kurt Cobain's hometown, Aberdeen, Wash., as "a depressed logging town" where "pervasive unemployment" and "a gray climate" have led to "rampant alcoholism," I thought: replace timber with the railroad and it sounds like home! The male rock stars who immediately preceded these grunge heroes were glamorous creatures in zebra print spandex, like Bret Michaels, the Poison frontman. Mr. Michaels was actually another blue collar boy (from central Pennsylvania, no less), but he had ditched the heartland for West Hollywood, and now he had his hair professionally peroxided. The ugly cardigans and ratty Army jackets of grunge were a costume, too, of course, but it could be gotten cheaply at a thrift store. The dour face came even cheaper free with adolescence. It was strange indeed to ultimately see upper income suburban kids and runway models dressed like lumberjacks and truckers, as seen on the latter in the Perry Ellis Spring 1993 collection and the December '92 pages of Vogue. It was the first (and only) time my relatives and neighbors were objects of class envy . There had been working class idols before grunge, too. Merle Haggard. Bob Seger. Bruce Springsteen. But the cover of "Born in the U.S.A.," an iconic image of Mr. Springsteen in bluejeans and a crisp white T shirt with an American flag behind him, looked like a Madison Avenue version of a hunky factory worker. Grunge, with its heavy, murky sound and sallow musicians, got at something darker about living in a fractured land. Where many Springsteen songs were enlivened by hope, this music captured the deadbeat side of America. If grunge songs didn't directly address the concerns of working people, it was nevertheless recessionary music, made by underemployed slackers. You heard songs like "Down in a Hole" (Alice in Chains) or "Something in the Way" (Nirvana) and you pictured idle 20 somethings passing a rainy afternoon in a crappy apartment, getting high. Before becoming the so called voice of his generation and a rich rock star, Kurt Cobain was a child of divorce and a high school dropout who worked as a janitor. Layne Staley, the singer of Alice in Chains, battled depression and used heroin, the anti good time drug, the drug of self obliteration. As someone growing up in a community hollowed out by dying industry, I'd been in those apartments; I knew those guys. And seeing recognizable versions of them on MTV made my friends and me feel proud. Here were people I could relate to, and I wonder if some of that same sense of your own life suddenly writ large suffused kids in south Los Angeles when, also in 1992, Dr. Dre's album "The Chronic" gave shout outs to South Central and the Slauson Swap Meet. Those songs also emerged from an economically depressed area and put it on the cultural map. Fandom takes you to other places than pride, of course. For me they included a grunge inspired "photo shoot" for which a friend and I posed in front of an abandoned house and channeled all our teen angst; a favorite Salvation Army flannel that was three sizes too big and stained with a stranger's body odor. There were, too, notebooks of overwrought lyrics. Those are now kept safely locked in storage, like radioactive material. Some things don't have to be revisited. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Fox News's elections guru will play his cello on Tuesday morning, "to clear my head and get ready to do math." CNN is staging more than a dozen rehearsals with a 25 person on air team. George Stephanopoulos of ABC News spent his weekend running drills in a studio, practicing swing state calls with a former intern standing in for the pollster Nate Silver. But as television news gears up for 2016's big finale, an intense public distrust in the media is threatening the networks' traditional role as election night scorekeeper. There is a divided electorate, big segments of which are poised to question the veracity of Tuesday's results. Donald J. Trump has refused to say if he will concede in the event of a projected defeat. And new digital competitors plan to break the usual election night rules and issue real time predictions long before polls close. The era of Tim Russert's famed whiteboard when network anchors could serve as the ultimate authority on election results has faded. And scrutiny on big media organizations on Tuesday, when 70 million people might tune in, is likely to be harsher than ever. "We're surrounded by so much false information and aggressive misinformation," said James Goldston, the president of ABC News, who will oversee coverage from a Times Square studio built for the occasion. "The pain of getting it wrong in this environment would be very long lasting." In interviews, network executives said that credibility was their first concern, and that they hoped to tune out competing chatter and focus on what they can control: getting it right. "We're editors, in a way," said Mr. Stephanopoulos, as he sped up Madison Avenue in a yellow taxi after rehearsing on Sunday. "People are going to be coming to us, but they're also going to be following this on their phones all day and getting all kinds of information. Part of our job is to sort through that and only give out what we can be sure of, in any given moment." To ensure independence, network statisticians are typically quarantined in an undisclosed location; some have their smartphones taken away. And despite the competitive pressures, network executives say they are willing to be patient. "There's no question that there's added scrutiny this year of the entire system," said Steve Capus, executive editor of CBS News. "If anything, I think that means we're going to take our time to get it right." Still, troublingly for the networks, making correct calls in swing states and the Electoral College count is, in this partisan political climate, no guarantee of praise. Some supporters of Mr. Trump who has warned of a "rigged" election for months and viciously disparaged journalists are already sowing doubt about Tuesday's coverage. "Prepare for the media to position their exit pollsters in the most Dem heavy districts they can find," Bill Mitchell, a pro Trump radio host with a large following, posted on Twitter on Sunday, adding, "You know they will." By Monday, his comment had been reposted about 900 times. The specter of the 2000 election, and the networks' botched calls of the Florida count, still haunts television newsrooms. But there is little reason to doubt the networks' calculations, in part because they rely on the same sources of information. Networks rely on "decision desks," which often employ dozens of statisticians and pollsters and receive election returns from The Associated Press, which gathers data directly from state and local officials. The desks also subscribe to exit polls from Edison Research, which provide a glimpse of the numbers and are often used to characterize voters' concerns, demographics and reasons for supporting a candidate. 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. Each desk uses a proprietary model to project state by state winners. Fundamentally, network officials say, the goal is not to mess up. "Running the decision desk is basically like taking a math test," said Arnon Mishkin, director of Fox News's decision desk (and the cellist). "If you don't get a good grade, 300 million people are going to know." This is not the first year that network projections may enter the realm of partisanship. In 2012, Mr. Mishkin made a memorable appearance after Karl Rove, the Republican strategist, raised doubts about Fox News calling Ohio for Barack Obama; the anchor Megyn Kelly walked to Mr. Mishkin's office for a live interview about why he stood by the call. But some new players in vote counting see the network model in which decisions are handed down Moses style by an invisible group of experts as outmoded. "Saying 'trust us' isn't enough," said Ben Smith, editor in chief of BuzzFeed News. "You have to demystify it." On Tuesday, BuzzFeed will call races in collaboration with Decision Desk HQ, a grass roots website that uses volunteers to collect voting data independently from The Associated Press and the news networks. The goal, Mr. Smith said, is to put a second set of eyes on an often opaque process, and to offer real time commentary on why different news outlets may make different calls. Mr. Smith sees full transparency as the best way to build trust with modern viewers. "I've never covered an Election Day where there weren't intense claims of misbehavior on both sides, and profound wishful thinking about the results on the losing side," Mr. Smith said. "I think this cycle, everybody expects it to be worse than ever." VoteCastr, a Silicon Valley backed start up, is taking a more radical approach: publishing projections before polls close. Using a team of observers in dozens of swing state precincts, VoteCastr plans to check live turnout data against its own surveys and historical models to generate an hour by hour estimate on Election Day of where the vote stands. Their findings will be published by Slate, along with prominent caveats as to what the data say and does not say. The goal, said Sasha Issenberg, a journalist and a member of the VoteCastr team, is not to project an ultimate winner, but to offer readers an informed snapshot of the race during the hours when, in the absence of official numbers, social media tends to rely on rumors. Still, speculating on results while Americans are still voting has long been considered a journalistic taboo: in 1964, CBS News was criticized after calling the California Republican primary for Barry Goldwater before polls closed in San Francisco. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
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