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When Kirstin and Jason Frazell head to their weekend house in the western Catskills, they don't leave their city friends behind anymore. They don't have to. Since they bought their Sullivan County home in 2014, the Frazells have convinced five other families or couples in their social circle including their next door neighbors to follow suit. The pair never intended to start a minor migration, said Ms. Frazell, 37, who works at a big technology company, as does Mr. Frazell, 41, who also has an executive coaching business. "This just organically happened." But the Frazells' enthusiasm for Narrowsburg, N.Y., the tiny hamlet where they settled, and the prospect of having a built in community, convinced their friends to investigate the area. And while each family was looking for something different one longed for a large piece of land, another for a solid investment and a third for an inexpensive fixer upper they all found something that satisfied them. "No lie, we are busier up here than we were in the city," said Katie Carpenter, 32, who works for an ad software company and bought a house in 2015 with her husband, Matt, 34, near the Frazells' place. Getting together in the city, she added, is "a pain with the subway, with work now we're all within five to 15 minutes of each other." For a second home to really feel like a home and not just a place where you hole up for the weekend, owners need a sense of community. Importing a subset of your city circle may seem like cheating, but it can also ease the transition to a new area and provide a base from which to build additional connections. The couple made an offer on their house before they even saw downtown Narrowsburg. "It happened to be in the most perfect town for us," Ms. Frazell said. Tucked into an elbow of the Delaware River, where it forms the border between New York and Pennsylvania, the hamlet has only about 340 residents, according to census estimates. But it punches far above its size in creative and commercial terms. In just a few square blocks, Narrowsburg has a rustic chic coffee shop, the Tusten Cup, and a bookstore, One Grand Books, owned by a former editor in chief of Out magazine, where each shelf represents the tastes of a well known person; Ta Nehisi Coates and Rene Redzepi are among those featured at the moment. There are two destination restaurants: The Laundrette, a wood fired pizza place overlooking the river, and The Heron, where Marla Puccetti and Paul Nanni serve buttermilk fried chicken and roasted bone marrow. And Sunrise Ruffalo, the actress married to Mark Ruffalo, owns a housewares and gifts boutique there called Sunny's Pop. "It's kind of an enigma," said Joan Santo, the owner of Narrowsburg Proper, the hamlet's "not so general general store," which stocks a range of things, from Italian specialty foods to men's clothing. Ms. Santo and her husband, Ron, both 52, moved to the area full time 12 years ago. Five years later, he opened Narrowsburg Fine Wines Spirits; she opened her shop next door in 2017. "If you were looking to open a business there and looked at the demographics, you'd say, 'Don't do it!'" she said. "But it's country with a city neighborhood vibe." Homes in Narrowsburg are a relative bargain. The average sale price is around 139,000, said Barry Becker, a real estate agent who represented several of the families in the Frazells' group and also owns an art gallery and home store in Narrowsburg. By comparison, in Rhinebeck, a better known town in the Hudson Valley, the current median listing price of a single family home is 559,000, according to the real estate website Zillow. One of the most expensive homes on the market in Narrowsburg at the moment is a four bedroom log and stone house set on 13 acres, listed for 1.3 million. One of the least expensive, a 1,300 square foot house on a third of an acre, is priced just under 60,000. Renovations are also relatively cheap, compared to what you would pay in New York City, Mr. Becker said. "Everybody comes up here and thinks a new bathroom is going to be 20,000," he said. "If you're not buying Ann Sacks tile at 50 a square foot, you can do a bathroom for 5,000, easy." When the Frazells bought their house a new but traditional looking two bedroom cottage on five acres, which they later enlarged Ms. Frazell mentioned it to a friend at work, Christy Liu. Ms. Liu, 37, lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and she and her boyfriend had been looking in the Hudson Valley for a home that would double as a weekend retreat and an investment property. "We had that sort of dream of getting an old barn or something like that and renovating it," Ms. Liu said. "We quickly realized that we didn't have the know how or the time, and that it would end up costing us a lot." Ms. Frazell's excitement inspired Ms. Liu to visit Narrowsburg. "You could just feel that something fantastic was going to happen there," she said. "The area is sort of more up and coming, so from an economic standpoint it's an easier entry into purchasing." By late 2014, Ms. Liu, her boyfriend, her sister and a friend had pooled their money to buy a three bedroom, midcentury modern ranch on five acres for around 375,000. Around the same time, Matt and Katie Carpenter were pondering a move from Washington Heights to the suburbs; Ms. Frazell suggested they check out Narrowsburg first. The Carpenters made their first visit in January 2015, and by April were under contract to buy a home there. "We definitely came up here with the intent of buying a fixer upper, because of budget and to have a creative outlet," Ms. Carpenter said. Their 1931 Sears kit house cost 90,000, and they have spent four years renovating it, doing much of the work themselves. Next came Erin and Marcus Smith, who were among the Frazells' first overnight guests in Narrowsburg. Before they visited, they knew nothing about the area, said Mr. Smith, 37, who works in finance technology. (Ms. Smith, 35, is an attorney.) But they enjoyed it so much that they started hankering for a home of their own there. After briefly exploring other parts of the Hudson Valley, they returned to Sullivan County. "You could get more land," Mr. Smith said of the area. "It was something that we could grow with, as opposed to stepping into a place that had already maybe reached its peak in city dwellers." In July 2015, they bought a new barn style house on 30 acres and now spend most weekends there. Julie and Doug Eisenstein, a speech pathologist and attorney with two young sons, were next. The couple own the apartment next door to the Frazells in Brooklyn Heights; the families share a wall. The Eisensteins had also considered moving to the suburbs, but weren't ready to commit to commuting. When the Frazells bought a house, they started thinking about a second home instead. "They were always going up to Narrowsburg," Ms. Eisenstein, 48, said. "But I wasn't sold on it." For one thing, the hamlet was very small. And as a native of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., she longed to be on the beach. The Frazells encouraged the couple to borrow their house and explore the area, and Mr. Eisenstein, 48, quickly warmed to it. Eventually, Ms. Eisenstein did, too. "I turned around and looked at the Delaware River and said, 'O.K., if we can find a place on the river I'll do it,'" she said. They found a four bedroom waterfront house in August 2015. Built in the 1980s, it needed a lot of work, but over the next two years they fixed it up, bought kayaks and a canoe, and installed suburban amenities, including an indoor playground. A basketball hoop is coming this spring. Some events coincide with local happenings in the case of the pig roast, with the Narrowsburg Honey Bee Festival to help support the hamlet. The friends say that far from being treated like interlopers, they've been embraced by the locals. Their Facebook group has expanded to include dozens of full time residents. Those who settle in Narrowsburg tend to be "an eclectic group of people who respect the area," Ms. Santo said, "and want the area to thrive and want it to become vital and sustainable." She is encouraged that more people seem to be relocating full time to Narrowsburg among them the Carpenters, who made the move late last year, when Mr. Carpenter took a job with a local nonprofit. Around the same time, a fifth set of friends bought a home in the nearby hamlet of Eldred. And yet another couple recently made an offer on 15 acres a mile away from the Frazells. "There will be more, we're assuming," Ms. Frazell said. "The only downside is, we probably do less relaxing than we should. We're constantly going to parties." 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 |
Carole Baskin, the animal rights activist who gained national attention while sparring with exotic tiger keepers on the popular Netflix documentary "Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness," is getting her own show. The new show will star Ms. Baskin and her husband, Howard Baskin, of Big Cat Rescue in Tampa, Fla., according to a statement on Thursday from ITV America's Thinkfactory Media, the production company that is developing the show. The new show, unscripted and as yet unnamed, will follow the couple "as they work to expose, like never before, those who abuse and take advantage of various animals," and spotlight history, lawsuits and animal rights violations, Thinkfactory Media said in a statement. "This is a chance for us to use our new platform to battle the everyday evils facing big cats and so many other animals," the Baskins said in the statement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Alan Cumming actor, author, irrepressible provocateur rarely shies away from expressing his desires, whether in choosing his roles (the pansexual M.C. in "Cabaret," the fluidly dallying husband in "The Anniversary Party") or identifying as bisexual (once married to a woman, he is now married to a man). And he hopes his latest character will be just as bold. In the new CBS series "Instinct," making its debut March 18, Mr. Cumming stars as Dr. Dylan Reinhart, a former C.I.A. operative turned psychology professor who just happens to be gay and married to a man. Then the New York detective Lizzie Needham (Bojana Novakovic) encounters a killer ripped from the pages of "Freaks," the professor's best selling treatise on abnormal behavior, and lures him and his natty tweeds from the ivory tower at the University of Pennsylvania onto the gritty city streets. His recruitment adds some zing to both their lives. "Instinct," created by Michael Rauch from the crime novel by James Patterson and Howard Roughan, is the first hourlong network drama with a gay lead and a bit of a risk for CBS. "What's fascinating is that I am taking a story with a gay person at the center and also showing a same sex relationship to many millions of people who probably have never seen that before," Mr. Cumming said. "And that to me is a very, very exciting point. It's a mass way of confronting homophobia." With the first 13 episodes of "Instinct" wrapped, he was recently back to jet setting: shooting a secret project in the south of England, joining his mother to celebrate her birthday in his native Scotland and being ogled at London Fashion Week. In a phone interview from the road, Mr. Cumming, 53 who lives in the East Village with his husband, the artist Grant Shaffer, not far from his bar, Club Cumming talked about his return to a network series after seven seasons as the political operative Eli Gold on "The Good Wife"; his hopes for his new character (he'd like to flirt with his female co star) and his cabaret show that sets his frustrations with America to song. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. Dylan seems like a natural fit. Did it take much coercing to get you onboard? It's so unusual to have someone who's a fuddy duddy professor oops but he's also a C.I.A. agent oops, and he's a writer and he drives a motorbike and he's gay. Just all these seemingly confounding characteristics drew me in, because when you think about doing something for a long time, you say, "Am I going to be bored? Is there enough here for me to play with?" And I was very keen to do the first ever gay lead character on a network drama. The fact that has taken so long is awful. But the character's gayness is like the fifth most interesting thing about him, and the way it's handled is very non sensational. And I thought that was a very positive step in terms of the way gay characters are portrayed on television, especially network television in America. Are you worried about the demands of being the lead? By the time it came to do the show, I had gone back to being a peripatetic actor flying around the world. And it turns out I'm a homebody. I knew it would be kicking into a different gear because I would be No. 1 on the call sheet and not just popping in now and again to do some fabulous Eli scene. Why has it taken so long for network television to catch up to cable? I joke that what we do on a network drama is basically fill the gaps between commercials. Therefore, when you have a winning formula, why change it? I think that's why most of the risk is usually taken on cable. That's a sweeping generalization, of course. But a network is about such large audiences and large amounts of money that shows don't really get a chance to fail. It's scary because obviously we're going into the unknown. I truly believe that when there are preconceptions that are faced and dealt with that people are not scared anymore. And then the world becomes a better place. I don't know what CBS is thinking. I do know they've been accused over the last couple of years of being not very diverse, with a lot of white men leading their shows. And I think they're going to start using this show as an example of increased diversity . It's not just that they've got a gay lead and a gay couple, but the mayor of New York is an Indian woman, and there's an African American woman who's the boss of the precinct. I mean, yeah, possibly some people won't like it, but hopefully there will be more people who do. But we live in a funny time. People voted in Trump. They could do anything. Cop shows thrive on the will they won't they tension between partners. What's standing in for that here? He's a rule breaker and she's very much by the book. He's idiosyncratic and she's very ordered. So there's that straight lines and curvy lines kind of conflict. We did talk about how wouldn't it be funny if in the future an ex girlfriend of mine appears and Lizzie will be, "Oh, I thought you were gay." And I go, "Oh, well, you know college." That changes the whole idea that our sexuality is black and white. And that's another thing hopefully we can present to America. It would be hilarious if they made out at the office party. You're a vocal supporter of L.G.B.T. causes, you've volunteered for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and now you're going to bat for gun regulations and wider health care by supporting an upstate New York candidate. I have a home in the Catskills and I've changed my vote from New York City so I can help swing that district. I don't think the Democratic Party has done the thing that most political organizations do after a crushing defeat and reinvented itself. I did an ad for Bernie Sanders that Spike Lee made. I said I come from Scotland, it's a small, relatively poor country, nowhere as affluent as America, yet we have free further education and free health care. Why is it possible for Scotland to do it and not possible for America? And we've got to re educate people that just because you want some gun control does not mean you want to take away the right to bear arms. It's got nothing to do with the Second Amendment. You'll be tackling another hot button topic in a new cabaret show, "Alan Cumming: Legal Immigrant." The word "immigrant" now has a negative connotation. As a recent immigrant to America, I feel slighted. You have to say you're a legal immigrant and people don't even hear the prefix. They just see us as one thing, rather than actually listening to what it means. I know I'm white and a man and affluent. But were it not for those three characteristics I would not be welcome here possibly. And can you summon all that heartache and frustration in song? I find it quite easy to be funny and tender and provocative all at the same time. That's what you should be as an actor. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
But the overall approach is lighter and poppier, appropriate to the tropical setting. Glover's co star, Rihanna, narrates the opening sequence, an animated history of the island framed as a folk legend and bedtime story, with a dash of fairy tale: she explains how young Deni (Glover) would come to her window every night to sing to her, as if she were some kind of Caribbean Rapunzel. Now a struggling musician, Deni dreams of writing a song that will unite his people, though they seem a fairly close knit community already it's the kind of place where everyone bids him a cheerful good morning as he hustles to the first of his many jobs, singing jingles on the radio. But it's not all a fairy tale; the ruthless Red Cargo (Nonso Anozie, from "Game of Thrones") rules the island with an iron fist, and machine gun slinging men patrol his factory floors. The plot of "Guava Island" is as thin as the Judy Garland Mickey Rooney musicals of its distant heritage: Deni has planned a secret all night music festival (not unlike, say, a secret musical film), but its attendees would consequently not work on Sunday, which is deeply unacceptable to Red Cargo. He offers Deni 10,000 to cancel the event, explaining, "I'm in charge of the people of this island. I have to do what's best for everyone." No prizes for guessing whether the show goes on, though the consequences of that decision carry more weight than usual. Thus, it's one of those stories where the musical numbers are "realistic" (kinda, sorta) because the protagonist is a musician, and Murai takes thankful pains to work the songs into the fabric of the narrative. Yet there's not as much music as one might expect, considering the pedigrees of its stars. Aside from Deni's radio songs, there are only a handful of musical numbers, most of them reworking existing Gambino tracks. (Rihanna, even more surprisingly, doesn't sing at all.) But there's real juice to those sequences, which include a lovely, beachside rendering of "Summertime Magic" and a concert performance of "Saturday" that manages to stage the kind of joy that's spontaneously captured in the best concert documentaries, like "Wattstax" and "Dave Chappelle's Block Party." Onstage, Deni frames his event as "a celebration of life I want everyone here to feel as free as you possibly can tonight," and above all else, "Guava Island" is a paean to the pleasures of taking it easy. "We live in paradise," Deni fumes, "but none of us have time or means to actually live here!" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
PARIS It has been only a month since the French government, concerned about the country's declining competitiveness, began its "Say Oui to France" advertising campaign to attract foreign investment. But ArcelorMittal, the Luxembourg based company with Indian roots that is the world's biggest steel maker, has been hearing a distinctly harsher message. "We don't want Mittal in France because they haven't respected France," the industry minister, Arnaud Montebourg, said in an interview published this week in the daily Les Echos, unable to conceal his frustration over the company's plan to scale back one of its three major French factories and eliminate hundreds of jobs. He called for the "temporary nationalization" and resale of the steel plant, at Florange, in the eastern region of Lorraine. The ugly dispute pits the French state, in its traditional role as defender of industry, against a company that is trying to reduce capacity in line with the slowdown in the European economy and to cut its 23 billion of debt after Moody's cut its credit rating to junk. The company wants to close two mothballed blast furnaces at the Florange plant, cutting 629 jobs, while continuing to operate a part of the facility that processes steel for the car industry. Currently the facility as a whole employs 2,700 people. In all, ArcelorMittal employs about 20,000 people in France. With unemployment hovering above 10 percent, the Socialist government of President Francois Hollande is desperate to avoid more layoffs by name brand companies. Several big employers, including PSA Peugeot Citroen, Air France and Sanofi, have announced big job cuts this year. But some analysts say that by taking such a strongly interventionist stand to protect steel workers, France risks sending the wrong signal to multinational companies, whose investment the economy needs if it is to stave off long term decline. Mr. Hollande and Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian born billionaire who serves as chairman and chief executive of ArcelorMittal, met Tuesday evening at the Elysee Palace in Paris, but did not resolve the dispute. Afterward, Mr. Hollande's office issued a communique saying the president had "reaffirmed his desire to insure the sustainability of jobs at the site and presented the different possible options." The statement said the discussions would continue. Giles Read, a spokesman for ArcelorMittal, also said the discussions would continue, but declined to comment further. To promote France as a destination for foreign investors, the government recently hired the French advertising giant Publicis to create the international "Say Oui to France" campaign, which is running in the United States, Canada, China, India and Brazil. But in fact, France is hemorrhaging industrial jobs to such an extent 750,000 in the past decade that in a government commissioned report made public this month, Louis Gallois, a prominent businessman, called for "a competitiveness shock" to stanch the bleeding. That is why critics say Mr. Montebourg's hard line against ArcelorMittal is the wrong message at the wrong time. "The image France is projecting is disastrous," said Nina Mitz, a public relations consultant in Paris with deep ties to past Socialist governments in France. While she conceded the Florange factory case presented a political thicket for the Hollande government, Ms. Mitz said such bold talk of nationalization even if served up mainly for domestic consumption "sends a frightening message, particularly to investors from other countries." Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. The government's stance has invited ridicule from some opportunistic critics. Boris Johnson, the outspoken mayor of London, alluded to the Montebourg threat on Tuesday, telling Indian business leaders they should not "wait to be persecuted by the sans culottes in Paris," but should rather bring their business to London. Mr. Montebourg has since moderated his remarks, saying his objection was to "Mittal's methods," which he described as "failure to keep promises, blackmail and threats." ArcelorMittal has agreed to give the government until Saturday to find a buyer for the furnaces, offering it for a symbolic single euro, despite skepticism that a buyer would be interested in anything less than the entire factory. Indeed, Mr. Montebourg now insists that the company agree to sell the entire plant. He says that two companies are interested, but has declined to identify them. Mr. Mittal, who built ArcelorMittal from the 2006 merger of his Mittal Steel with Arcelor, then the largest European steel maker, promised at the time to help modernize the European steel sector, but the company says that the Florange facility was already slated for closure under Arcelor, its previous owner. This week he has countered the Montebourg threat with a warning of his own, saying in a statement that any sale of the entire Florange plant "would jeopardize the viability" of the rest of ArcelorMittal's operations in France. Initially dismissed as rhetorical arm twisting by Mr. Hollande's Socialist government, Mr. Montebourg's talk of nationalization has now garnered support from across the French political spectrum. On Tuesday, Henri Guaino, a close political associate of Mr. Hollande's predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, revealed in an interview with the business newspaper Les Echos that Mr. Sarkozy had himself grappled with the question of whether to temporarily nationalize another ArcelorMittal facility, in the eastern city of Gandrange, in 2008. The Sarkozy government ultimately failed to find a suitable private investor to take over the Gandrange plant and ArcelorMittal closed the site a year later, resulting in the loss of nearly 600 jobs and no small amount of political face for Mr. Sarkozy. In the interview, Mr. Guaino said the steel maker had acted in bad faith, adding: "One can ask the question of whether we were right to have trusted Mittal." There are precedents for nationalization, including the late Socialist President Francois Mitterrand's takeover of most of the banking sector in 1982, fulfilling a longstanding Socialist policy goal, and analysts said there was no legal impediment to such a move. Asked in 2011, as ArcelorMittal was discussing the closure of a plant in Liege, Belgium, if European Union treaties prohibited nationalization, the European competition commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, said that the rules required only that the state act as a private enterprise would in the market, paying the owner the full value of the nationalized property and seeking to make a profit. The most likely obstacles might be financial: At a time when France is raising taxes and freezing spending to meet budget targets, an open ended commitment to a potential financial sinkhole would seem to be a risky proposition. Whatever the outcome of the dispute over Florange, no one doubts the gravity of the problems faced by ArcelorMittal. Since the company's creation in the easy credit days of 2006, it has been beset by the financial crisis and now the current slump in Europe. Its steel shipments fell 8.3 percent in the third quarter of this year from the previous three months, and it reported an operating loss of EUR643 million for the first nine months of 2012. Analysts do not expect any significant improvement in European steel demand before 2014. ArcelorMittal, which accounts for about 6 percent of world steel production, is trying to return to profitability by shutting down excess capacity. The Florange site, it argues, is too far from sea transport and too costly to supply under current conditions. The company says it would supply slab steel from its plant in Dunkirk, on the English Channel, for processing at Florange. Workers at the Dunkirk plant, for their part, are already complaining that one of the plant's three blast furnaces has been shut down longer than the company had said, and expressing concern that what happened to Florange will be their lot next. "The state can't remain indifferent to the loss of the steel industry," Mr. Guaino said in the newspaper interview. "It's a strategic sector where we have a considerable technological advantage." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Measles is far more dangerous than most people realize, new research shows. The disease itself can cause a severe and sometimes deadly illness, but two new studies published on Thursday found that even when patients recover, the virus can inflict lasting harm on their immune systems. The weakened immunity leaves a child vulnerable for several years to other dangerous infections like flu and pneumonia. The damage occurs because the virus kills cells that make antibodies, which are crucial to fighting off infections. Scientists call the effect "immune amnesia." During childhood, as colds, flu, stomach bugs and other illnesses come and go, the immune system forms something akin to a memory that it uses to attack those germs if they try to invade again. The measles virus erases that memory, leaving the patient prone to catching the diseases all over again. The findings make the need for measles vaccination even more urgent, because it protects children against much more than measles, the researchers said. "When parents say no to getting a measles vaccine, you're not just taking a risk of your kid getting measles, you're causing them to lose this amazing resource of defenses they've built up over the years before measles, and that puts them at risk of catching other infections," said Dr. Michael J. Mina of the Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital, the lead author of one of the new studies, published in the journal Science. "You've got to watch your kid's back for a few more years." In fact if a person who has received vaccinations for other diseases contracts measles, it may wipe out the protection those vaccines had provided. Revaccination could help restore the child's immunity, the researchers said. The second study, by a different team, was published in Science Immunology. "This is wonderful science," said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University, who was not involved in the research. "These are two wonderfully complementary studies that have provided a basic immunologic understanding of a phenomenon that has been recognized for a long time, mainly that measles infection causes immune suppression." The studies arrive at a time of heightened concern about measles, as outbreaks flare up in the United States and other developed countries where vaccines had largely eradicated the disease, but where a growing number of parents have begun to refuse vaccination. Some claim religious reasons, and some mistakenly fear a link to autism, based on research that has been discredited as fraudulent. Globally, the measles vaccine is estimated to have saved 21 million lives between 2000 and 2017. But there are still more than 7 million cases and 100,000 deaths a year, many in developing countries where people lack access to the vaccine. Most who die are children younger than five years. Vaccination involves two injections, usually given when children are one year old and then four years old. The same shots (commonly referred to as MMR) include vaccines against mumps and rubella, and a newer version also protects against chickenpox. An ongoing measles epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo has killed more people than that country's current Ebola outbreak. Since January, there have been more than 203,000 measles cases and about 4,100 deaths, mostly in young children, according to Unicef. The two new reports are based on studies of 77 children from Orthodox Protestant schools in the Netherlands who, for religious reasons, were not vaccinated. The researchers took blood samples to test their immune systems before and then about two months after they caught measles during a 2013 outbreak. To profile each person's past exposures to infectious disease, the authors of the Science study used VirScan, a tool that can detect antibodies to hundreds of viruses and many types of bacteria. The tool was developed by Stephen J. Elledge, the study's senior author and a geneticist at the Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital. Comparing the before and after samples, the test found that measles wiped out 11 percent to 73 percent of a child's antibodies against an array of viruses and bacteria. Dr. Elledge called the depletions shocking, and said that the biggest drops tended to occur in children with the severest cases of measles. Dr. Mina said that the decreases occurred because the virus killed "long lived memory cells," which reside in the bone marrow and can live for decades. He called the cells "precious factories" that churn out antibodies. He and Dr. Elledge said that children could rebuild the immunity they had lost, but only by being exposed to infections again, or being vaccinated. To study the effects of measles infection for longer than they had in the Dutch children, the team tested four macaque monkeys before and after infecting them with measles. The animals lost 40 percent to 60 percent of their antibodies, and the loss persisted for at least five months. The study was paid for by the Value of Vaccination Research Network, the Gates Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and several European research organizations. The second study, led by Velislava N. Petrova from the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Britain, tested samples from 26 of the same unvaccinated children from the Netherlands. The researchers used genetic sequencing to study the immune system's B cells, which are involved in making antibodies. They found that key players, memory cells that had formed to fight specific diseases, went missing. Another type of B cell was also depleted, leaving the immune system in what the scientists called an immature state. That research was paid for by Wellcome as well as research organizations from Indonesia and Germany. "These elegant studies provide insights into immunological deficits following measles infections that have intrigued scientists for over 100 years," said Dr. Ian W. Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. "I agree that the findings also enhance the strength of the argument for vaccination," he said but added, "I don't think it's going to change vaccination rates, because those decisions are irrational." Researchers first noticed a century ago that measles seemed to suppress the immune system, but they didn't know how. Dr. Clemens von Pirquet, an Austrian scientist, reported in 1908 that a child who'd had a positive skin test for tuberculosis an immune reaction indicating past exposure tested negative after contracting measles. Dr. Mina said there were scattered reports in medical journals over the years that psoriasis, a skin disorder caused by an immune reaction, cleared up in children after a bout with measles. He was an author of a 2015 article in Science that looked at disease patterns in several countries following measles epidemics before vaccines were developed, and found that illnesses and deaths from other infectious diseases increased for as long as five years after the outbreaks . That study suggested that the measles virus may have been linked to up to 50 percent of childhood deaths from infectious diseases, mostly illnesses other than measles itself. "This emphasizes again what a nasty infection measles is," Dr. Schaffner said. "We know that in and of itself it can lead to ear infections, pneumonia and encephalitis. It remains in the developing world a leading cause of death among children. This makes it clear that measles has detrimental effects beyond measles itself. If we wanted, if we needed even more reason to protect our children with measles vaccine, here's some more information you ought to think about." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
NICOSIA, Cyprus As the European Central Bank threatened to shut off crucial financing for banks in Cyprus without a rapid accord on an international bailout, members of Parliament put off a vote on Thursday on yet another revamped formula. The vote was rescheduled for Friday. The mood in the streets turned increasingly dark. Police officers clashed with protesters as about 200 gathered outside Parliament. Those involved in the scuffles included employees of Cyprus Popular Bank, the country's second largest bank, who had turned out amid rumors that it could be shut down within hours. The central bank issued a denial but warned that Cyprus Popular Bank risked an immediate default if Parliament did not pass the bailout measure. After the government said banks would remain closed until Tuesday to allow time for a bailout deal to be reached, residents flocked to cash machines in growing numbers. Lines of three dozen people or more, withdrawing as much money as possible, were common sights. With anger growing, President Nicos Anastasiades presented Parliament on Thursday with a plan that scrapped a controversial tax on bank deposits. Experts warned, however, that the deposit tax plan might need to be revisited unless the government found other means to reach the goal of 5.8 billion euros, or 7.5 billion, needed to satisfy international negotiators. The central bank said the new package included "consolidation measures" to enable Cyprus Popular Bank, also known as Laiki Bank, to continue operating. As the country's most troubled lender, it would be reorganized by placing underperforming loans and questionable assets into a so called bad bank and transferring healthy assets to the Bank of Cyprus, the nation's largest financial institution. By effectively shutting down one of the banks needing support, the government would lower the large tab for supporting the banking system. But the central bank warned that if Parliament failed to pass the measure, "Laiki will default immediately, causing major consequences to its employees and its clients." Lawmakers will also vote on restrictions on taking cash out of banks and out of the country, known as capital controls, when the banks reopen. The bill would limit cash withdrawals, prohibit or restrict check cashing and bar "premature" account closings and any other transaction that authorities deemed unwarranted. The central bank said on Thursday that Cyprus had until Monday to reach an agreement with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund if the government wanted its banks to continue to receive the low interest loans essential to keeping them afloat. After a hastily convened evening meeting to assess the situation, the group of 17 finance ministers whose countries use the euro issued a statement declaring themselves "conditionally satisfied" with most of the new proposal, which the so called troika of lenders the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission is to assess on Friday after the Parliament vote. "We now need to move into top gear and work intensively with the Cypriot government and our troika partners to design a viable alternative solution that can be acceptable to all euro area member states," Simon O'Connor, a spokesman for the European commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, Olli Rehn, said in a statement. The plan sent to Parliament on Thursday would nationalize pension funds from state run companies and conduct an emergency bond sale to help raise the 5.8 billion euros Cyprus needs to secure a 10 billion euro bailout. Gone was any reference to a deposit tax, which Parliament had roundly rejected in a vote two nights earlier. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. At branches of Laiki Bank and the Bank of Cyprus in the Cypriot capital, Nicosia, where lines had virtually disappeared over the last three days, there was an air of exasperation, anger and anxiety on Thursday as people hoped that money would still be in the machines by the time it was their turn to make a withdrawal. Only one of two cash machines at each bank branch was working. "Time is up we want our cash," said Maria Melitou, an accountant. "Our friends in Europe brought us to this point," she added. "We expected more." Irena Margilou, the 13th person in an 18 person line at a Laiki Bank cash machine, said bitterly, "We don't know what the future holds." Ms. Margilou criticized what she said was German insistence that the Cypriot government skim money from people's bank accounts to secure the bailout. "It's like you're telling us to just leave our money in our mattress," she said. "What is happening to European solidarity?" In Limassol, a coastal city about an hour's drive southwest of Nicosia that is crowded with Russian residents, lines of 25 to 30 people snaked in front of every A.T.M. that still had cash. Many of the wealthiest citizens of Russia, which is not in the euro currency union, have bank accounts in Cyprus one reason that euro zone finance ministers have taken such a hard line. In Moscow, President Vladimir V. Putin discussed the Cyprus situation on Thursday in a one on one meeting with the European Commission president, Jose Manuel Barroso, who was in Russia for an annual meeting of senior officials. A delegation of Cypriot officials led by the finance minister, Michalis Sarris, also remained in Moscow to press their case for additional aid, but there were no reports of progress, and the officials stayed out of sight. For months, Cyprus had been discussing the possibility of changing the terms of a loan of 2.5 billion euros that Russia provided in late 2011, to lower the interest rate and defer the repayment deadline. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
The art dealer Alberto Mugrabi paid 18,583,062.50 for a pair of ground floor triplex "mansions" at the Schumacher, a printing plant turned boutique condominium in NoHo that offers soaring ceilings and ample wall space ideal for displaying pricey artwork. The transaction was the most expensive closed sale of the week, according to city records. The sponsor units, known as Mansions 2 and 3, at 36 Bleecker Street, encompass 8,719 square feet of combined space that was sold as a "white box," without interior walls or finishes, according to John Gomes, the listing broker, along with Fredrik Eklund, both of Douglas Elliman Real Estate. They also represented the buyer in the purchase. "The buyer really loved the space because of its 15 foot tall ceilings and thought it had a lot of potential," Mr. Gomes said. "He wanted to bring on his own design team. So it's basically a raw space." The Schumacher has two other triplex mansions, and includes a vertical courtyard garden, with lush plantings and ribbons of greenery, that was created by the landscape architect Ken Smith, who also designed the Museum of Modern Art rooftop garden. The original red brick building was constructed in 1885 to house the Schumacher and Ettlinger lithographic printing business. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The only two things Mark Alan Stamaty's inventive MACDOODLE ST. (New York Review Comics, 24.95) takes seriously are its own seriality and New York City. "MacDoodle St." originally appeared in 1978 in the country's first alternative weekly newspaper, The Village Voice, which was founded in 1955 and sadly ceased print publication last year. The Voice was a major counterculture vehicle, and Stamaty gained fame through his "MacDoodle St." installments and later, his even more experimental strip "Carrrttooonn." At a Voice Christmas party, Stamaty confessed to his hero, the pioneering Voice cartoonist Jules Feiffer, "I feel like I'm ruining my career," to which Feiffer responded, "That's how you should feel every time you sit down to your drawing board!" Feiffer contributed the introduction to the collected "MacDoodle St.," reissued here from its original 1980 edition with a new 20 page autobiographical story by Stamaty. "It takes some getting used to," Feiffer deadpans. MacDoodle St. a play on "Macdougal Street," where Stamaty lived is as delightfully weird as it is important. It can be difficult, both narratively and visually. It has a meandering, if amusing, fantastical conspiracy theory plot that seems beside the point. Each black and white installment teems with a wild assortment of characters and oozes with the details of city streets. The ornamentation proliferates, including dense borders that often compete with, or meld into, the story at hand. The linework can evoke Saul Steinberg's eccentric grace. Stamaty had previously produced several children's books in his crowded, panoramic style, predating "Where's Waldo?" and often with the same visual effect. With "MacDoodle St.," he aimed to create adult comics, and from the first viewed the episodes as a graphic novel in the making. Cerebral and goofy at once, the story line stars Malcolm Frazzle, a young poet who defends a bohemian cafe (where beards, like dinner jackets, are required and rentable) against a takeover group, the Conservative Liberation Front, characterized by its love of ties and Wayne Newton; eventually, he saves society at large from a villain (his former math teacher) who has created a race of monkeys genetically primed to wash dishes. Frazzle composes poems exclusively for the publication Dishwasher Monthly. "MacDoodle St." is a spoof Malcolm's verses are literally about dishwashing, and he is often shown trying to generate rhymes for words like "sink." In one hilarious episode, he lies on the ground covered in dishes for inspiration. Yet despite the silliness, Stamaty actually values dishwashing as a metaphor for the creative process. You put in the work, get your hands dirty (or inky) and commit yourself to the rhythms of daily toil, the work of the serial cartoonist. Ultimately, then, "MacDoodle St." welds its New York City one characterized by creative opportunities everywhere, from mundane to high flown spaces to its own comics grammar. To take in Stamaty's New York is to wander: the streets, the subway, the delis, bars, cafes, galleries and parks. And the strip displays the delirious energy of the city by doing its own wandering, both thematically and formally. The comic strip itself is a character, with multiple faces on its edges and a pair of legs sticking out, that sometimes gets drunk and has to be reined back in by its creator. In every installment, the strip's mood is named in a subtitle (I'm fond of "the crammed, complicated, barely decipherable comic strip"). Sometimes the strip becomes the star in an episode, like the one in which it gets into a fight with a classified ad. We see this too in the intricate, pulsing graphic elements of "MacDoodle St." The panel border often looks as if it's about to walk off the page. Jaime Hernandez's IS THIS HOW YOU SEE ME? (Fantagraphics, 19.99) is also a portrait of 1970s counterculture, but has about as different a look from "MacDoodle St." as you could get. While Stamaty's pages are scratchy, seething and dense, Hernandez's are clean and high contrast, breathing effortlessly, their white spaces punctuated by dramatic patches of solid black. Hernandez plunges readers into an ongoing work of Los Angeles realism. As the cartoonist Adrian Tomine once told me, about discovering his work as a teenager, "I really felt that I had more of a personal connection and investment in the lives of those fictional characters than in the people in my real life." Hernandez and his brothers Gilbert and Mario began collaborating on their comic book series "Love and Rockets" in 1980, and almost four decades later, they're still plumbing the depths of their central characters, who have aged along with the strip. In "Is This How You See Me?," a story line from the series issued here as a stand alone graphic novel, Hernandez confronts the aging of the punk counterculture that once sustained his heroines Maggie Chascarillo and Hopey (Esperanza) Glass best friends, former lovers, always troublemakers who are now settled with other partners: Hopey, once a bass player in a punk band, with her wife, Sadaf, and their child; Maggie with a man, Ray Dominguez, a sympathetic "Love and Rockets" mainstay. In the new book, they attend a punk reunion show taking place in their hometown and former stomping grounds, the fictional Huerta, outside of Los Angeles. Like Chris Ware's "Building Stories," this is an aching graphic novel about regret and growing older, and the ability or inability to confront the past. The comics form sets up poignant juxtapositions in "Is This How You See Me?" The book is structured episodically, with present day sequences in which the two women, in their early 50s, return home, full of self consciousness intercut with scenes from the past. While in the table of contents these sections are marked out by year 1979, 1980 the story itself seamlessly slides into the past without announcement or warning. "Love and Rockets" focuses sharply on style, and we see how the characters shift fashions, grow older, change bodies. But other juxtapositions float throughout: the as obnoxious as they used to be young queer couple whom Maggie and Hopey encounter at the art house movie theater; their friend Daffy and her punked out daughter standing side by side at the reunion for the local band Ape Sex. (The mom has some good advice: "I told her you never wear the shirt of the band you're going to see.") Crucially, the book and its characters consider their youth and the scene that formed them from a contemporary vantage point that reveals its seediness. Without pronouncement, "Is This How You See Me?" offers a dark view that mixes with the nostalgia for Los Angeles's early era of D.I.Y. punk. Maggie and Hopey, as young teenagers, connect at Del Chimney's house, nicknamed the "Island of Lost Souls," a space of permissibility, chock full of comics and records, for the weird and dispossessed kids Del even calls the young punks who collect there his "children." But Del, a corpulent, longhaired drug dealer (who gets murdered in 1983), harassed young women. When he meets Maggie, at age 14, he insists on French kissing her as a rite of initiation into his "castle"; later we see him naked in the bathtub with a young girl. In the present tense, the battles aren't all won, either: "Is This How You See Me?" also takes pains to show that the streets of Huerta can still be a dangerous space, especially for queer women in public. Both Stamaty's and Hernandez's work brims with affection for the urban landscapes, and denizens, of the cities where they are set. And for Hernandez, as reflected in the beautiful economy of his stylish and distilled panels, this affection is about remaining cleareyed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. From Boston to Seattle, cities across the country are vying to create technology hubs, spurring real estate developments to attract start ups and young entrepreneurs. To the south, this smaller but thriving city is seeing returns on its effort to do the same. Chattanooga has leveraged its lightning fast broadband connections to develop a tech scene in its recently designed innovation district, a 140 acre section of its compact central business district. At the district's core, the Edney Innovation Center draws young entrepreneurs who pace across the polished concrete floors and talk business from couches and beanbag chairs that give the 90,000 square foot office building the feel of a college study hall. The Edney Center is a crucible for advancing their ideas. Purchased and renovated for 4.4 million by Talon Partners, a group of local developers, the 10 story building opened in October at Market and 11th Streets. It is seen by Chattanooga's civic leaders as the gateway to the city's commanding new business enterprise using the six year old ultra high speed broadband network to attract and assist high tech start ups in becoming mature, homegrown companies. Tenants in the Edney Center include a nonprofit start up incubator, a business developer for the technology sector and over a dozen entrepreneurial internet, information technology, design and app development companies that are owned and managed by young entrepreneurs. "What we're generating here is an ecosystem for business development," said Andy Berke, the city's first term Democratic mayor. "We are promoting access to state of the art broadband and recruiting entrepreneurs with the skills to use it." Chattanooga's development strategy, focused in the innovation district and its internet, which is as fast as 10 gigabits per second, is creating results. More than 700 million in new retail, office and residential space is under construction or about to start in the district, according to the River City Company, an economic development nonprofit organization. Several of the innovation district projects are directed at young entrepreneurs. The Lamp Post Group, a private investment firm that provides business development and venture capital to high tech start ups, also owns and manages Lamp Post Properties, a real estate development division that started in January. The division focuses on developing historic properties for entrepreneurs that the parent company incubates in its downtown office. The real estate division is moving quickly. It is close to finishing the 8 million renovation of the 35,000 square foot, 128 year old Ross Hotel into 39 residential units, and three ground floor retail spaces in the Tomorrow Building. The fully furnished apartments range from 280 to 500 square feet and are priced at about 950 to 1,200 a month. They are aligned around communal kitchens and dining areas on the two upper floors, and a second floor common area fitted with high speed broadband. Tiffanie Robinson, 31, the president of Lamp Post Properties, said the market for the co living project is young entrepreneurs who can spend time in Chattanooga to see if it suits them. "There is a really big need for smart real estate investment within the innovation district," Ms. Robinson said. "The point is to create density for start ups and technology companies in our community. We want to show how real estate can mold a city and mold next generation companies." A few blocks away, Lamp Post is renovating the Mayfield Annex, a 28,000 square foot, 109 year old building that was once an Elks lodge and offices for Hamilton County. It is being turned into a 3.2 million office building for new media companies and is scheduled to open next spring. Another of Lamp Post's downtown projects is converting the 45,000 square foot Newton Chevrolet dealership, which operated for 68 years before closing in 2007. It will become a distillery for Tennessee Stillhouse, the maker of Chattanooga Whiskey. The 6 million project is scheduled to open in March. Almost a dozen other residential, retail and office projects are under construction, many of them designed for the high tech business market or to coax young tech entrepreneurs to live and work downtown. AMCA, a Virginia developer, is spending 31 million to renovate the 10 story Chattanooga Bank and Trust building on Broad Street. The 89 year old building will be turned into a 162 room Aloft Hotel with two ground floor restaurants. On the other side of Broad Street, Heritage Land and Development, a Memphis company, is renovating the 92 year old Maclellan Building. The 100,000 square foot space once housed an insurer and has been empty for 11 years. It will be converted into 90 apartment units for 13.5 million. The district's newest large development project, announced in July by DeFoor Brothers Development, a local builder, is an 88 million plan to convert the landmark Gold Building into a Westin Hotel with about 260 rooms. The plan also calls for transforming smaller buildings in a three block section nearby into a pedestrian friendly neighborhood of restaurants, residences and offices. Many of Chattanooga's city leaders and business development executives anticipated the growing popularity of the downtown area. In the late 1960s, the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency declared Chattanooga the most polluted city in the nation. Three decades of investment cleared pollutants from the Tennessee River and the air, replaced old riverfront plants with parks and trails, strengthened the 11,000 student University of Tennessee at Chattanooga campus and constructed attractions, like a freshwater aquarium that opened in 1992. In 2009, Chattanooga and EPB, the city owned utility, installed a 330 million fiber electric metering network that provided some of the fastest internet speeds in the world. At the time, it was unmatched globally among small cities. Chattanooga started to market itself to young entrepreneurs and attracted some well known brands. For instance, the online reservation service OpenTable bought Quickcue, a local workflow app developer, for 11.5 million in 2013. OpenTable, based in San Francisco, also opened a Chattanooga office in a newly renovated innovation district building at Cherry and Seventh Streets. "I can't think of another place that has made this kind of infrastructure investment to promote job growth and real estate development," said R. Byron Carlock Jr., the national real estate practice leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers. "Typically, it's creating venture capital or grant funds." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Reynold's character is like Deadpool filtered through Elon Musk, if Elon Musk were cool, or "cool." But his performance feels a little disinterested. Hardly matters. The movie opens with a high speed car chase during which one of the team has bullet extraction surgery in the back seat. And that's almost 20 minutes right there. Engineering a coup in a geopolitical hot spot so vaguely rendered it could be Middle Eastern or South Asian, the gang performs a "Penthouse Extraction" (sounds like what 1970s teen boys did with the magazines their dads hid in the garage). This involves compromising the integrity of an infinity pool with extreme prejudice and then, parkour, parkour, parkour. When it comes to turning up action to 11, Bay is incorrigible. Not just with sound and fury; there are genuinely eccentric innovations here. There's certainly not a whole lot of recognizable humanity, but hey, that's why there's "It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood." Rated R for blood, gouged eyeballs, and much more gore. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
BERLIN Not long after 4 a.m. on a recent Sunday, Kerstin Egert (a.k.a. Tama Sumo), a resident D.J. of the revered techno club Berghain, was playing to a raucous, packed dance floor in the club's upstairs Panorama Bar. As is usual at that hour, the line outside was long and getting longer, in this case for a lineup that included the Dutch born producer Steffi; the Munich bred D.J. Virginia; and Avalon Emerson, an American techno producer who has emerged as one of the most sought after D.J.s on the international touring circuit. All across the city, women were on the decks, from About:Blank, where the Italian D.J. Madalba was playing a closing set, to Tresor, one of the city's oldest techno clubs, where the resident D.J. Barbara Preisinger was headlining her own monthly event. Women have long been active as D.J.s in Berlin, arguably the world capital of underground electronic music, but they have surged in prominence and visibility in the past few years. A growing network of booking agencies and community groups run by women have helped bring female artists out of the shadows, dispelling the boy's club atmosphere of the past. All male club lineups are largely gone, while influential music publications like Pitchfork, Mixmag and Fader are rich with praise for female artists based in Berlin. And with international tours, those artists, in turn, are helping to diversify festival lineups and club scenes throughout the world. "Now a woman on a main stage is normal, but when I started it was, like, no one," said Nina Kraviz, the eclectic Russian techno producer who perhaps more than anyone embodies the increased status of women in Berlin's electronic music scene. She's been busy lately, with projects like a remix album for the American artist St. Vincent and new releases on two labels she founded. Ms. Kraviz grew up in the eastern Siberian city of Irkutsk, then moved to Moscow, where she worked as a dentist before breaking into dance music in the mid 2000s. Her early solo efforts were well received, and her 2011 release, "Ghetto Kraviz," a sultry, vogue tinged electro track featuring her own vocals, became an underground club staple. She moved to Berlin, and her career flourished, but as is common with many female artists, Ms. Kraviz's gender and appearance have been a frequent focus of media attention at times obscuring her formidable creative output and thrusting her into the center of several public controversies around sexism and sexuality. After she appeared in a 2013 documentary in a hotel bathtub under a full coverage heap of bubbles, Ms. Kraviz was heavily criticized online, including by Eric Estornel, an American music producer who goes by the stage name Maceo Plex. Mr. Estornel lamented that "sexuality and superficiality" had become more important than hard work. (Ms. Kraviz clapped back in a 500 word Facebook post, and Mr. Estornel ultimately apologized.) Since then, Ms. Kraviz has founded two labels, put out several critically acclaimed records and played the world's top stages, from Ibiza super clubs to festival headline slots to a set in May atop the Great Wall of China. At the end of 2017, Ms. Kraviz was chosen by the prominent dance music publication Mixmag as its D.J. of the year. "I've seen the level of respect for women change," said Melissa Taylor, who in 2006 founded Tailored Communication, a public relations firm that represents many prominent women in electronic music. In Berlin, she added, "there are a lot more women running things independently." Several D.J.s have started labels in recent years like Paula Temple, a British born techno artist whose Noise Manifesto label focuses on projects by women and queer artists. But Berlin has also spawned a crop of artist agencies run by young women with female heavy rosters, like Poly Artists, Futura and Odd Fantastic. "Now a lot more agencies represent women, but this wasn't the case a few years ago," said Keira Sinclair, a co founder of Poly Artists, which also works with several men who will play only on diverse lineups. "I feel something different when I see a woman D.J.ing," Ms. Sinclair said. "I get this extra sense of 'Wow, this looks like me, this could be me.' " As public appetite has grown, projects like Creamcake, a label and event series that holds D.J. workshops and diversity focused panel discussions, and the party collective Room 4 Resistance have helped draw attention to women who struggled until recently to make an impact. "It's not as if the women weren't there; they were just being ignored by the media," Ms. Taylor said, citing 1990s era trailblazers like the D.J. Ellen Allien, and Gudrun Gut, the West German electronic music artist who was part of the influential industrial band Einsturzende Neubauten, before going on to found the label Monika Enterprise. But as the internet and social media have become more important, Ms. Taylor said, "a lot of women have been able to control their image better and gain visibility without relying on these male media gatekeepers." At the same time, the gatekeepers are becoming more diverse. Publications like Mixmag, which less than a decade ago routinely put scantily clad "club girl" models on its cover, now often feature female D.J.s and producers. Resident Advisor, the influential online magazine and listings service, recently made the decision to discontinue its annual readers' poll to decide the world's top 100 D.J.s. because, the editors said in a statement, the results "didn't represent the diversity of the scene." Ms. Egert, a.k.a. Tama Sumo, is a respected figure in Berlin's club scene who spent a decade as a Tresor resident and was one of the original D.J.s to play at Berghain. She said in an interview that she often hears in discussions of gender the argument that quality must be the first consideration. "But quality only comes up in this conversation," she said. "There are a lot of great male artists, but there are also a lot of successful male D.J.s where I would question the quality." She added that she "would love to have this discussion in general, not only when it's about diversity." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
"The Chi" was built around a series of shootings, and the way their repercussions rippled out through the lives of its large cast. But its best material was casual and observational. The testy relationships of the aspiring chef Brandon (Jason Mitchell) with his live in girlfriend, Jerrika (Tiffany Boone), and his entrepreneurial frenemy Hannibal (Chris Lee) felt fresh. Even more original and entertaining were the story lines involving the middle schoolers Kevin (Alex Hibbert), Papa (Shamon Brown Jr.) and Maisha (Genesis Denise Hale), whose hilariously passive aggressive pursuit of the mild mannered Kevin was the show's single best idea. That first season can be streamed on Showtime's website or through Amazon Prime Video. It's necessary if you're going to understand what's going on in Season 2, and maybe it's sufficient. Because through five episodes of the new season, a lot of the shine is gone from "The Chi." The story lines are largely continuous: the fallout from the killing of Brandon's younger brother by the tortured Ronnie (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine); the strife between the player Emmett (Jacob Latimore) and Tiffany (Hannaha Hall), the mother of his child; Brandon's constantly stymied efforts to get his food truck business off the ground. But the urgency has faded from them, partly because of a sense that the bones of Season 1 are being gnawed over for too long, but mostly because the show's sensitivity and unpredictability are, at almost every moment, shading over into conventional melodrama and self conscious point making. As characters make speeches about fatherhood and police corruption, and we sit through stiff, sentimental flashbacks to Ronnie's stressful return from military duty in the Middle East, the show starts to feel like an earlier Showtime drama set in Chicago, the buppie soap opera "Soul Food." The middle schoolers are still used for comic relief selling candy bars to parishioners as they break a fast, engaging in a food fight on school picture day but the situations have more of a tinny sitcom quality, and the young actors' performances are correspondingly less joyful. (Hale still makes the most of every minute onscreen, though.) Mitchell and Latimore feel stuck, too, with Brandon's and Emmett's stories taking on a flattened, didactic tone they didn't have in Season 1. The major new twist to the plot, a mystery element apparently involving gentrification, is playing out slowly but already feels forced into what's been a distinctively organic narrative. The cast turnover between seasons was small, though Sonja Sohn, as Brandon's hard edge mother, and Steven Williams, as an old school gangbanger, are missed. The one big change was the replacement of the showrunner Elwood Reid by Ayanna Floyd Davis. Their producing and writing credits aren't dissimilar "The Bridge" and "Cold Case" for Reid, "Empire" and "Hannibal" for Davis and it's never a good idea to place too much credit or blame on one person in the ecosystem of a TV series. But chemistry matters, and in Season 2 the formula's off. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The Metropolitan Opera has offered to start paying many employees who have been furloughed without pay since April up to 1,500 a week in exchange for new union contracts that include long term pay cuts, the company's general manager said in a meeting with staff on Friday. Two months after announcing that the curtains would not part again until fall 2021, the Met's general manager, Peter Gelb, said in a video call with Met employees that the company was willing to cut a deal with unions that would mean its members would receive partial paychecks for the duration of the pandemic. The catch: Employees would have to agree to a 30 percent cut in pay, half of which would be restored once the Met's box office returned to pre pandemic levels. Mr. Gelb predicted that even after the pandemic subsided, ticket sales would be depressed for several years, citing a recent study that said New York City was not likely to reach its pre pandemic tourism levels until 2025. Another factor that he cited is that the Met's audience leans older, meaning they may be more reluctant to return to the 3,800 seat opera house. "For the Met to get back on its feet, we're all going to have to make financial concessions and sacrifices," Mr. Gelb said in the Zoom call, which was viewed live by more than 500 people. Roughly 1,000 full time Met employees, including its orchestra and chorus, have been furloughed without pay since April. For many, it will be tempting to start receiving paychecks again, which would amount to 70 percent of their base salaries and would be capped at 1,500 a week. But the unions would have to agree to new contracts that would reduce their workers' take home pay, which is often significantly more than their base salaries, by 30 percent, mostly through a series of changes to work rules. The unions that work with the Met are against making such significant concessions that could affect workers long after the most severe impacts of the pandemic subside, and have accused management of taking advantage of the outbreak in order to get them to agree to cost cutting measures. "The Met's opportunistic approach seeks to permanently gut our contract way beyond the end of this crisis," said Len Egert, the executive director of the American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents the company's choristers, stage directors, and dancers, in a statement on Friday. Mr. Egert said that his union members "have no interest in selling out their future for short term relief." The pandemic has severely strained arts institutions across the country, and even the Met, the nation's largest performing arts organization, has not been spared. The Met's finances were perilous even before the virus struck: its annual budget is 300 million a year, and it earns less than a third of that through box office sales, leaving it heavily reliant on donors. The company has lost more than 150 million because of the shutdown, and its announcement in September that it was canceling its entire 2020 21 season signaled that the losses were only just beginning. A Met spokeswoman declined to say what kind of changes to work rules were under discussion because the company is in the middle of union negotiations. Part of union opposition to the requested concessions is that half of the salary cuts will only be restored when the box office recovers, which could easily take years. The Met's box office was projected to make 88 million in the 2019 20 season before it was cut short by the pandemic, Mr. Gelb said, and the company projects that its next season starting in the fall of 2021 will only take in about 49 million. Under his proposal, even when the box office sales recover, employees would still be paid 15 percent less than they were before the pandemic struck. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
This is not truly a saga of highway construction, as Rutkow spends little of his time on the front lines with the earthmovers. He is more interested in the difficult political road of Pan Americanism, the romantic notion of hemispheric unity that lives on in the name of the defunct airline Pan Am; the fading country medallions on New York's Sixth Avenue, which nobody ever calls "The Avenue of the Americas"; a little visited marble building on the Mall in Washington, D.C.; a proto United Nations body called the Organization of American States and the 19,000 mile highway that still bears the faint stamp of Simon Bolivar's original vision of a common army and parliament for the New World. The story begins at sea with the nausea of Hinton Rowan Helper, the United States consul to Argentina, who endured a miserable voyage back to New York City in 1866 and wondered "why not by rail?" He devoted the next several years to promoting the then fantastical concept of an overland rail link between the United States and Latin America. After initially floundering in Congress, the scheme became a choice morsel to be seized in the chaos capitalism typical of the early railroading era. Jay Gould, Collis P. Huntington and William Palmer all vied to be the first to lay tracks from the Rio Grande to Mexico City, an ambition that carried the endorsement in 1880 of the former president Ulysses S. Grant, who had fought in the Mexican American War as a young officer and, as Rutkow puts it, "loved Mexico almost as much as he loved cigars, horses and whiskey." The extensions of the Pan American Railway into Central America became mainly a tool of the powerful mercantilist company United Fruit, known to its critics as El Pulpo, or "The Octopus." By the 1920s, however, the automobile was king, and Washington had embraced the doctrines of the Good Roads movement that sought to bring all weather macadam and concrete to every muddy corner of the country, and into Central America. Within a decade, Franklin Roosevelt would become one of Pan Americanism's greatest champions, and his posture toward the highway is a reminder of how freely ideas and cash flowed during the New Deal. Rutkow paints convincing portrayals of technocrat heroes like Logan Page and Thomas MacDonald at the federal road office, who handled their jobs with efficiency and prudence even while commanding staggering amounts of money. At times, the book reads like an executive summary of the various conferences organized to promote the highway, while potentially colorful episodes are brushed over. Rutkow is a superb fact hunter, having raided archives from San Jose, Costa Rica, to Laramie, Wyo., to find letters, minutes and articles that may not have seen daylight since the years they were written. Yet not every quotation about the highway feels necessary to the story, and there's a paucity of description of the road itself or its surrounding landscape. And for such a well researched book about a bicontinental project, there's another strange omission. The route through South America receives precious little attention, with almost all the focus trained on United States policy toward road building in Central America. Rutkow is a graceful writer with a penchant for well placed classical allusions, yet he possesses a distracting literary tic: a heavy reliance on the adverb "finally," which occasionally occurs twice on the same page. He uses it to describe such perfunctory matters as Mexico's control of its own rail system, the opening of a tunnel under the Hudson River, the nationalizing of American railroads during World War I, a power transfer in Guatemala, the disbanding of a committee, a proposal for federal funding of canals, the appearance of a Treasury Department report, a vetoed bill in Congress, a call to form a lobbying organization, the emergence of rural free mail, the popularity of good roads, the use of science in road building, a job offer and the desire among Latin Americans to buy cars. This conclusory word is a curious one when overused in connection with a project whose essence is incompletion. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Brownstones on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. New York's homeowners could suffer disproportionately from changes in deductions for state and local taxes. The tax bill approved by the Senate is many things, offering a huge tax cut for corporations, lower rates for the wealthy, and a big victory for Republicans and the White House. It is also an economic dagger aimed at high tax, high cost and generally Democratic leaning areas most notably New York City and its neighbors. The bill, if enacted into law, could send home prices tumbling 10 percent or more in parts of the New York area, according to one economic analysis. It could increase the regional tax burden, complicating companies' efforts to attract skilled workers. It could make it harder for state and local governments to pay for upgrades to the transit system and other infrastructure. And it could force cuts in federal programs that help immigrants, the elderly and other low income residents afford the region's high cost of living. Most significantly, the bill would eliminate the deduction for state and local income taxes, and would cap the deduction for property taxes at 10,000. "We're worried and we're wondering what are we going to tell our kids," said Cynthia Metcalf, who lives with her husband and the youngest of their four children in Mount Kisco, an affluent commuter town. "I just feel like it's an attack deliberately set against people from the Northeast or from other blue states." Ms. Metcalf, who teaches history at Westchester Community College, said she had tried to use TurboTax software to estimate how their tax returns would be affected. Currently, they can deduct the more than 20,000 a year they pay in school and town taxes, and the 7 percent of their income that goes to state taxes. Losing those deductions means the family could wind up paying considerably more, Ms. Metcalf said. That prospect has the Metcalfs rethinking their financial future. Ms. Metcalf said she dreaded the prospect of telling her youngest child, Genevieve, a high school senior, that the college of her choice was beyond their means. And she said she and her husband might have to accelerate plans to relocate once all their children have left home. Then again, she added, selling their home could become more difficult. "Now I'm starting to think, who's going to want to buy our house here in New York?" Ms. Metcalf said. "The whole game has shifted." Indeed it has, and not just for homeowners. The tax plan would probably cut taxes for most New Yorkers, at least in the short term. But it has several provisions that local leaders said could pose long term problems for New York and other urban areas. Mayor Bill de Blasio, in an interview on Monday, estimated that 700,000 New Yorkers would pay more in taxes in the near term. "The human impact is huge," Mr. de Blasio said, referring both to the higher taxes some residents would pay and to the services that could be cut as a result of the tax plan. He said his administration had tried for four years to make one of the world's most expensive cities more affordable by providing public prekindergarten and paid sick leave. "And then along comes the federal government and makes the situation worse," he said. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, who joined Gov. Jerry Brown of California and New Jersey's governor elect, Philip D. Murphy, on a call with reporters on Monday, called the bill "a targeted assault" on their states. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. The versions of the bill passed by the House and the Senate have significant differences, which will have to be resolved in a conference committee before the bill can land on President Trump's desk. The House bill has several provisions that could be especially bad for New York, including the elimination of a kind of tax exempt bonds that many cities have used for affordable housing projects. The Senate bill doesn't include that change, but it does partly maintain the alternative minimum tax, which is aimed at limiting deductions for high earners and therefore disproportionately affects the New York area. Parts of the bills could be good for New York. Most significantly, the corporate tax cuts contained in both the House and Senate versions would most likely be a boon to New York's financial sector. That could mean higher returns for investors and bigger bonuses for Wall Street traders which, in turn, could mean more spending at shops and restaurants and more sales tax revenue for the city and state. "It's not going to be good, I think that's clear," said Michael P. Jacobson, who leads the Institute for State and Local Governance at the City University of New York. "And it might well be devastating." The most damaging elements could take years to play out. The bill would add more than 1 trillion to the deficit over a decade, according to Congress's official scorekeeper. Under a 2010 law, the increased deficit would force automatic spending cuts to Medicare and other programs, many of which New York and other cities rely on to help their poorest residents. The most immediate threat could be to the region's housing market. The tax bill would eliminate or make less valuable the tax breaks that encourage homeownership. That would probably have a minor impact on home prices nationally, but potentially a big one in the New York area, with its expensive homes and high property taxes. An analysis of the Senate bill by Moody's Analytics concluded that home prices in Manhattan could fall nearly 10 percent in the coming years because of the bill. Some New York and New Jersey suburbs could be even more vulnerable because property tax rates are higher there and prices are still recovering from the bursting of the housing bubble. Three decades ago, New Yorkers defeated a similar effort to repeal the state and local tax deduction by rallying opposition from local officials across the country, said Jay Kriegel, who helped lead that lobbying effort on behalf of local business leaders. The breakneck pace of the latest tax bill left little time for a similar approach. "Perhaps the biggest difference between '85 and 2017 is the speed at which these people have worked," Mr. Kriegel said. "There has not been time to have a serious discussion." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
HONG KONG The Bank of Japan slashed its economic growth forecast Thursday in the aftermath of the natural disasters that hit the country last month but refrained from announcing fresh steps to stimulate the economy a sign that the central bank expects rebuilding activity to lead to solid growth again later this year. The bank said it now expected the Japanese economy, the world's third largest, after those of the United States and China, to expand only 0.6 percent in the current business year, which ends March 31, 2012. That is down from the rate of 1.6 percent the bank had forecast in January. "As a result of the disaster, the economy will inevitably continue to face strong downward pressure for the time being," the bank said. Corporate profits are likely to fall significantly, and private consumption and business investment will remain weak for some time, the bank added. Bleak data published separately Thursday underlined the economic weakness created by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and the nuclear crisis and supply chain disruptions that followed. Industrial output in March fell a record 15.3 percent from the previous month, according to the trade ministry. "Today's data releases provide another powerful reminder of the devastating effect of Japan's recent disaster," Frederic Neumann, a regional economist at HSBC in Hong Kong, commented in a research note. "While data will look better from here on, the Bank of Japan will still need to announce additional monetary easing measures this quarter to abet the recovery." In a bid to calm a near panic in the financial markets immediately after the earthquake, the Bank of Japan flooded the markets with liquidity and expanded a program to purchase government and corporate bonds. This month, the bank announced a loan program totaling Y 1 trillion, or 12.2 billion, to help financial institutions in the disaster area extend reconstruction related loans. On Thursday, the central bank left its key interest rate at zero to 0.1 percent, as had been widely expected, in a bid to help the recovery. But it announced no additional measures, saying it wanted to assess the effect of its previous steps before taking more action. "The B.O.J. took the decisive step of increasing asset buying in March, and actual purchases have only just begun," Masaaki Shirakawa, the central bank governor, said, according to Reuters. "It's important to examine the effects of the move for the time being." The bank also struck a positive note on the prospects for recovery later this year and raised its forecasts for growth during the financial year that starts in April 2012 to 2.9 percent, from an earlier forecast of 2 percent. Like other forecasters, the bank expects the Japanese economy to rebound once rebuilding gets under way in earnest and power supplies and the flow of components and spare parts in the manufacturing sector get back to normal. Unlike the situation during the global financial crisis, economies elsewhere are growing, meaning that international demand for Japanese goods remains solid. "From the beginning of autumn 2011, supply side constraints are likely to ease," the central bank wrote. "Moreover, efforts to restore capital stock damaged by the earthquake disaster are projected to gradually provide a boost to Japan's economy." Still, the government and the central bank will need to provide support to affected areas, and the Japanese economy as a whole, for months to come. Hampered by an aging population, high government debt and intermittent deflation, the Japanese economy is unlikely to expand much more than 1 percent per year in the medium term, even as the effects of the March disasters wane, the ratings agency Standard Poor's said Wednesday. That makes Japan one of the slowest growing developed countries in the world. Japan is also a laggard within Asia, where developing nations like China and India are expanding at rates not far off 10 percent a year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
The chief executive of Novartis on Wednesday defended the company's decision to delay telling the Food and Drug Administration about manipulated data involving its 2.1 million gene therapy treatment, saying that it "thoroughly, aggressively" investigated the issue and that patient safety was never threatened. V as Narasimhan , the chief executive, also indicated in a call with investors that the company was forcing out a small number of scientists who were involved in the manipulated data. The F.D.A. on Tuesday issued an unusual public rebuke of Novartis for failing to report the falsified data before its gene therapy treatment, Zolgensma, was approved in May, even though the company had known about the issue since March. The agency said that it was continuing to investigate and that the company could face civil or criminal penalties. Novartis and the F.D.A. have said the falsified data did not affect the safety, quality or efficacy of Zolgensma, a therapy that treats a rare genetic disease known as spinal muscular atrophy. The product will remain on the market; about 400 babies a year are born with the disorder in the United States. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Earlier this week, a reporter for the website Breitbart News said that she had been dragged down by the arm as she was asking Donald Trump a question at a campaign event at the Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Fla. Another reporter present said that the Breitbart reporter, Michelle Fields, had been grabbed by Corey Lewandowski, Mr. Trump's campaign manager. The Trump campaign disputed her account, and there have since been a flurry of allegations and counterallegations across social media and on other news sites. Mr. Trump's campaign has continued to vehemently deny that Mr. Lewandowski grabbed Ms. Fields. The campaign has been criticized for suggesting that she exaggerated other such incidents in the past. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The song got another burst of attention in 1987 when it was played by the disc jockey portrayed by Robin Williams in the movie "Good Morning, Vietnam." "Professionally he was a bit of a genius," the singer Peter Noone said of his friend Mr. Fontana in a phone interview. (Mr. Noone had success of his own in the British Invasion as the frontman of Herman's Hermits.) He added, "There are only two great singers in the northwest of England, and he was one of them." The other, he said, is Allan Clarke of the Hollies. But Mr. Fontana grew frustrated as the group's other singles flopped in 1965; at one point he stormed off the stage in the middle of a concert in October. "We did well, but we had disagreements about the kind of music we were recording; it happens when you're young and in a band," Mr. Fontana said in an interview in 2017. "One night onstage, I decided to sing 'Save the Last Dance for Me,' and I could hear the band mumbling, 'Why are we always doing the slow ones?'" When Mr. Fontana departed for his solo career, his remaining bandmates, Bob Lang, Ric Rothwell and Eric Stewart, made the band a trio. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Two celestial events will take place on Friday night: a lunar eclipse and the passing of a comet. While both sound significant, neither will be much of a spectacle for the casual skygazer. The eclipse will be a penumbral lunar eclipse, meaning that only a portion of Earth's shadow will cover the moon. Unlike a total lunar eclipse, where the entire moon takes on a reddish color from being engulfed by the Earth's shadow, the moon will appear only slightly darker than usual during Friday's eclipse. "These things are very subtle," said Noah Petro, a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "If it's a cloudy night you might not even notice it." The best time to try and see the eclipse is around 7:44 p.m. Eastern time. That's when part of the moon's top will most noticeably appear gray. The next event, the passing of Comet 45P/Honda Mrkos Pajdusakova, will also not be very eye catching for most people. Comet 45P circles the sun about every five years. On Friday night and early Saturday morning, it will be about seven million miles away from Earth, the closest it comes during its orbit. That's about 30 times the distance between Earth and the moon. Because it's still relatively far, it will be very hard to see without binoculars or a telescope. If you are able to get one of those tools, the comet should appear as a green dot in the sky because of its chemical components. The best time to try to see it will be in the early hours of Saturday morning, around 3 a.m. Eastern time, but don't get your hopes up. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Clockwise from top left, Fernanda Calfat/Getty Images; Firstview; Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Marc Jacobs; Firstview; Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times; Laura Cavanaugh/Getty Images | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Violins, cameras, school desks, computer mouses, can openers these are just a few items that demonstrate how routinely disadvantaged left handers are in this world. One notable exception may be sports. Whether it's Lou Gehrig in baseball, Wayne Gretzky in ice hockey, Martina Navratilova in tennis or Oscar De La Hoya in boxing, some of the best athletes in history have been portsiders. But even in this realm, the southpaw advantage may vary, being more pronounced in sports where a player has less time to react to an opponent, like table tennis, according to Florian Loffing, a sports scientist at the University of Oldenburg in Germany and author of a study published Wednesday in Biology Letters. In such games, he found a higher proportion of lefties than in those with longer intervals between players' actions. Including an analysis of the pressures of time shows "that there is an additional effect" in left sider sports dynamics, said Kirsten Legerlotz, a professor of sport sciences at the Humboldt University of Berlin who was not involved in the research. Dr. Loffing's "conclusion appears convincing," she added, although it would need to be examined in other sports and verified with lab experiments. Dr. Loffing chose to analyze baseball, cricket, table tennis, badminton, tennis and squash, because they lent themselves to a standardized measure of time pressure, he said. For baseball and cricket, this involved the average time that elapsed between ball release and bat ball contact in professional games. For the racket sports, he considered the intervals between racket ball contact made by players in professional matches. He then tallied the number of lefties among each sport's top 100 players, or pitchers and bowlers in the case of baseball and cricket, from 2009 to 2014. None Week 11 Takeaways: Here is what we learned this week. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Jets Lose Again: Falling to the Miami Dolphins, the Jets receiver Elijah Moore offered consolation. What Will the Giants Do With Daniel Jones? The team must evaluate the quarterback ahead of a contract decision. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. Comparing all six sports against one another, he found the proportion of southpaws increased as the time available for players to act decreased. Nine percent of the top players were left dominant in the slowest contest, squash, while 30 percent of the best pitchers were lefties in the fastest, baseball. Over all, left handedness was 2.6 times more likely in the sports with higher time constraints (baseball, cricket and table tennis) than in ones with lower time pressure (badminton, tennis and squash). His results are couched in a broader "nature" versus "nurture" discussion of why left dominance may be an asset in sports. The "nature" hypothesis posits that left handers may innately be better athletes, perhaps benefiting, for instance, from the fact that the right brain hemisphere is in charge of both their dominant hand and visual spatial awareness. The "nurture" explanation suggests that left handers' relative rarity gives them a competitive edge because opponents are worse at anticipating their movements or are even used to employing strategies that play directly to lefties' strengths (hitting balls toward the right in racket sports, for instance). This "nurture" idea is supported by studies that have found a higher incidence of left handers in professional interactive sports compared with the general population, but not in non interactive ones like darts, bowling or golf. Beyond sports, this explanation could account for why lefties have made up just 10 percent or so of the human population for thousands of years. "From a Darwinian perspective, there seems to be something wrong with being left handed," Dr. Loffing said. "But the question is, why doesn't it wash out? Why isn't the world only right handed?" In 1996, a team of French researchers proposed that lefties have a fitness advantage in duel like situations. The same group showed that more violent and warlike traditional societies have a much higher incidence of left handers than more pacifist societies. Dr. Loffing believes most of the lefties in sports trend can be explained by this so called fighting hypothesis. His latest research suggests that the benefits portsiders derive from the element of unfamiliarity become greater when their opponents have less time to calculate. "We know that things like anticipation and decision making are more difficult under time pressure," he said. In previous studies, Dr. Loffing and collaborators have shown that athletes can counter or even neutralize the left sider advantage through training. Next, it would be interesting to combine these two findings and see if there is some time pressure threshold beyond which it would be exceedingly difficult for players to train against the southpaw edge some threshold "beyond which being rare really pays off," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
In late April, Amy Smilovic began streaming live from the Instagram account of her fashion label, Tibi. About once a week, she and Dione Davis, her styling director, would put on Tibi outfits and talk easily, authoritatively about how the clothes made them feel. "When you feel good about the outfit that you've put on, your confidence just can go through the roof," Ms. Smilovic said in one early episode, after Ms. Davis modeled a pair of tailored bloomers. In the same session she wryly compared her pandemic state to a "walking pharmaceutical commercial" whose list of symptoms included crying in the shower and sending emails at 4 a.m. Ms. Smilovic believed a good outfit could help with that too. Tibi designs clothing for "creative pragmatists," a term Ms. Smilovic, 52, coined late last year to describe a style she had long struggled to describe. The look is about balance being modern but not edgy, she says, and chill but not bohemian. As she once advised on Instagram, where she also occasionally ribs Lululemon moms, Bravo stars and yogurt straining yogis: "when u dress interesting u will feel interesting." From a design perspective, this usually means adding unusual twists to familiar closet staples: an oversize blazer with slits at the elbows; jeans that look as if they're being worn backward; a crew neck sweater with rounded shoulder pads. Ms. Davis called the weird accents "Tibi Easter eggs." As the summer continued, the styling sessions evolved. Instagram Live had become a popular feature in the pandemic as people (or brands, mostly) sought new ways to connect with homebound followers. At the beginning, Ms. Smilovic and Ms. Davis streamed from their homes, splitting the screen in half. When they were allowed to return to their SoHo storefront and Wall Street office, the live sessions became more polished (but not too polished), eventually overseen by a filmmaker on staff. By September, viewership had grown from about 5,000 to 20,000. Some of the products featured were selling out online within days, they said. Elaine Chang, the president of Tibi, had a theory about why the videos were resonating: "When all of us were consumed by 24/7 fight or flight mode, being able to share in Amy's conversations about fashion and what it means for people reminded us of human potential," she said. "There is a light at the end of the tunnel." The good news was that Tibi's customer base was growing, with Instagram now driving 10 to 15 percent of all sales, the company said. The bad news was that the world was still a catastrophe. There was no tiptoeing into this summer of hell a season marked by widespread illness and staggering death tolls, police brutality and mass protests. Unemployment spiked. Industries collapsed. Sales at clothing and accessories stores dropped more than 50 percent. One day Ms. Smilovic was jetting off to Paris Fashion Week, her label on track to pull in 55 to 60 million in sales in 2020. Three weeks later, she was laying off 44 people more than half of her company and cutting salaries for the rest. "I describe this time right now for all of us as 'baptism by fire,'" Ms. Smilovic told her remaining employees in an email this spring, calling the pandemic "a crash course in economics." But it wasn't clear then, or even now, when the fire might stop. Ms. Smilovic founded Tibi in 1997 after moving from New York to Hong Kong with her husband, Frank. She had previously been a marketing manager at American Express (where she met Frank). With no training in fashion, she and a friend started out making clothing for fellow expats. In 2000, the Smilovics moved back to the United States and established Tibi in Manhattan. They are the sole owners of their company; in addition to the SoHo store, they have an outlet and warehouse in coastal Georgia, where Ms. Smilovic was raised, and where her mother works part time. "She gets in the dressing room with them, tucking and untucking and scrunching up sleeves," Ms. McMullen said. "She does it with such ease that women feel connected to her, like they know her." Beginning in late March, weeks went by without payments from some of Tibi's stores, Ms. Smilovic said. When the layoffs came, the only team Tibi kept intact was finance, which scrambled to secure government support, renegotiate bills and rent Ms. Smilovic's single biggest source of stress at the time and rigidly monitor cash flow amid the wave of bankruptcies and order cancellations. She spent April crunching numbers, "gripped with fear," she said. In May, when some stores and offices reopened, that fear ebbed slightly. She'd signed a fashion industry open letter calling for a more sensible seasonal shopping calendar. She felt good that Tibi had donated 1,300 pieces of clothing to front line workers. She was also inspired to work on Tibi's internal stylebook, articulating the rules for the creative pragmatist's wardrobe, which she'd been sharing during the live styling sessions and on her own blunt Instagram account. Like: The best pieces can adapt from work to home to evening to weekend. A good outfit has three textures. Don't match your shoes to your top. Don't wear skinny jeans with stilettos. "It's showing people who we are," she said on a Zoom call in May. "I don't know where or how it will pay off, but it feels like the right thing to do." Then, on May 25, George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, catalyzing Black Lives Matter protests across the country. Some of those reopened stores closed again, boarding up windows to prevent vandalism. On social media, Ms. Smilovic is far more candid than most creative directors in fashion. But during that first weekend of protests, she hesitated. She felt traumatized by what she was seeing on TV, she said, and wanted to wait until Monday, when she could talk to her team. Nine of Tibi's 43 employees are Black. Then, early that Monday, Ms. Smilovic learned the Tibi store had been robbed while a protest unfolded near SoHo, its front window smashed in with a crowbar. She left her home in Greenwich, Conn., to survey the damage. "I thought that when I drove up, I would be filled with rage or anger," she said. Instead, it felt more surreal and sad. She posted a picture of the window to Instagram with the words "I'm processing." The immediate comments were largely sympathetic, which made Ms. Smilovic feel uncomfortable. "I was the last person in the world that needed to be consoled," she said. A handful of people left critical comments, too, about how Black lives mattered more than clothing. Ms. Smilovic deleted the photo. In a statement she made after gathering her thoughts and talking to Black colleagues and friends in fashion, including Ms. McMullen, she promised to devote space in Tibi's SoHo store to a rotation of young Black designers. "The supply side is hurt. The demand side is hurt. My God, the last week and a half on top of it. At least before, there was an enemy that we could all acknowledge and fight. The enemy right now is just breaking people apart." Though far from bubbly, Ms. Smilovic isn't a pessimist, and as the summer dragged on, she began seeing some silver linings in Tibi's sales. A pair of 395 nylon joggers developed a cult following, selling out during the first run of 110 pieces, she said. Sellouts were happening with some regularity, now that factory production had been reduced cut in half at the start of the pandemic and the live styling sessions were catching on. August's online sales were 30 percent higher than the same month last year. "To be honest, I think people are understanding our brand better," Ms. Smilovic said. It was a feeling she'd been chasing for a decade. Tibi had a different look in its first 13 years, one largely built around pretty party dresses with no strange accents or androgynous silhouettes. Ms. Smilovic grew to hate those looks. "I was so sick and tired of not being proud of my brand," she said. So in 2010 she decided Tibi would modernize to align with her own taste. A few employees weren't on board and left. But the biggest skeptics were the retailers selling the line, like department stores that had decided Tibi was their "prints brand." The new (mostly printless) Tibi was harder to categorize. It didn't help that the brand had never been embraced by the fashion guard, which Ms. Smilovic has often attributed to fashion's warped gender dynamics. In a business dominated by women, she said, there aren't very many women designers at the top, and even fewer praised in the pages of Vogue. "If you were a woman, it seems you either have to be a socialite Rosetta Getty, Gabriela Hearst, Tory Burch, with a serious last name or maybe a movie star," she said. "I don't say that to take away from the Olsens. I really like the Row. But are any of the top male designers in America socialites or movie stars? No, they all kind of made it on their own." One unforeseen consequence of the pandemic is that Tibi has been freed from some of its more toxic wholesale relationships, like with stores that ghosted on payments, or with companies that proposed paying the money they owed via payment plans as long as one year. (Ms. Smilovic said no.) And don't get her started on "exclusive styles," which is when a store requests tweaks to existing items, like a skirt with a shorter hem. Sometimes the end result wouldn't look like Tibi at all. Ms. Smilovic gritted her teeth and made them anyway. "I would take the money, but it would tug at me," she said. Not anymore. When orders like those are produced and then canceled, it doesn't mean just a potential six figure loss. It means being stuck with clothing she didn't like and didn't want to sell on her own site not after working so hard to refine Tibi's aesthetic. "It turns into this weird David and Goliath situation, where the stores are really just threatening the solvency of your business," she said. Cutting corners has helped. Recently Ms. Smilovic hosted a summer camp themed photo shoot for the spring 2021 campaign at her house, complete with a D.I.Y. set and her home cooking as catering. Frank, her husband, has been "sweeping up crumbs," she said, like disconnecting unused company phone lines belonging to laid off employees, saving thousands. But there is tension, she said, when one third of the company (finance) is devoted to making sure the other two thirds (product and sales) don't spend money. Full salaries have yet to be restored. Tibi will likely end the year 2 million to 3 million away from breaking even, making this the first year Ms. Smilovic has had a loss, she said. But there is still a sense of hope that she can get Tibi back on track. A new track the old one isn't an option anymore. "She's in a position today to pull back and do what she believes," said Robert Burke, whose luxury consultancy firm helped with Tibi's rebrand years ago. "She probably will have a more profitable 10 million business than her old 30 million business." In August, sitting in her somewhat disorderly office, Ms. Smilovic was musing on what she wanted to wear in the future: pieces that act like attachments, turning existing garments into something entirely new, like a giant asymmetrical collar layered over a sweatshirt. The ability to transform something quickly has never been more important to her. "I feel so much better," she said. "Before, you were so focused on pulling yourself back up so you could bring back the team and be what you were. And now there's no notion of that in our heads. This is what we are now." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
"I used to listen to Donny Hathaway records, and I would cry," Lalah Hathaway said in a recent interview, and the reason wasn't hard to discern her father died in 1979, when he was 33 years old and she was just 10. What was mysterious to her was how his symphonic soul music and crushed velvet voice touched other people: "I would see someone listening to them and think, 'What are you crying about?'" A chance encounter 25 years ago with the singer Mary J. Blige in the parking lot of the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles helped her understand: "Your father meant so much to me. I could feel so much of his joy and pain," Blige told her . It underscored how Donny Hathaway had a legacy beyond his own family as a duet partner with Roberta Flack, as a major talent whose career was cut short by mental illness, as a pioneer of polychromatic R B music. Lalah Hathaway, a successful singer in her own right and the elder of Hathaway's two daughters, has sporadically covered songs by her father. She won a Grammy in 2016 for "Little Ghetto Boy," her version of his 1972 single; she keeps it in her home next to his 2019 lifetime achievement Grammy. On Wednesday, however, she will perform an entire concert of Donny Hathaway's music for the first time, opening the summer season of Lincoln Center Out of Doors, at Damrosch Park in Manhattan. Born October 1, 1945, Donny Hathaway was raised in St. Louis by his grandmother . He started playing piano at age 4 and toured the local gospel circuit with her as a child. His sister Jacqueline Bethany said that he was very active in their local Baptist church he spent his teenage years making vocal arrangements for the choir and playing piano during services. "The other musicians in the church would stand around him and watch his hands, because the boy could play," Bethany said in an interview. Even at a young age, Hathaway blended his classical training with gospel and jazz. Hathaway's musical talents earned him a scholarship at Howard University, where he was famed for singing with the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and gigging off campus with a jazz trio. Eulaulah Vann, a fellow music major, recalled in an interview that Hathaway aced his classes: "He even had a professor who told him, 'If you can take my test without coming to class, you're welcome to do it.' So a couple of times he did." Vann and Hathaway would marry in 1967, after he dropped out of Howard to pursue his musical career. The Hathaways moved to Chicago so Donny could work for Curtis Mayfield's Curtom label as a producer and an A R man. He became well known as an arranger, doing sessions with singers such as Willie Nelson, Jerry Butler and Lena Horne. Bethany sometimes sat in the corner of the studio and watched. An encounter with the saxophonist King Curtis in an elevator led to a record contract with Atlantic Curtis was impressed by how Hathaway demonstrated his perfect pitch, humming at the same frequency as the elevator motor, and recommended him to the label. Ed Howard, who would go on to work as the general manager of Donny Hathaway Enterprises and collaborated with the singer, was awe struck when he first heard Hathaway's music, on his 1970 debut album, "Everything Is Everything." "It had a Ray Charles feel," he said in an interview. "There weren't that many people putting that much orchestration into a record like that. There's so much going on, it took a while to really pick up what's happening rhythmically." Hathaway's "This Christmas" would eventually become a seasonal standard, but fizzled on its initial 1970 release. Hathaway didn't have any real chart success until he partnered with Roberta Flack in 1971; the two vocalists, who had attended Howard together, had hit versions of "You've Got a Friend," "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin,'" and "Where Is the Love," singing with the trust and intimacy of two trapeze artists who knew exactly when to catch each other and when to let go. Hathaway followed up the duets with "Live," a concert album documenting two 1971 shows, where he not only demonstrated his total command of a crowd, but also took other people's songs, like Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On," and fearlessly made them his own. "Every record company I've ever been at, I've wanted to make a record like a Donny Hathaway live record," Lalah Hathaway said. "Having grown up with that record and listened to the people in the audience, I've tried to figure out what they look like, where they were sitting. These ladies talking to my dad at the show, I have imagined them hundreds of times." Howard said Hathaway would do three sets a night. "Donny never played a set the same way, because when people came for the 7 o'clock show, they wanted to stay for the 9 o'clock show," he said. "Between sets, he would write a different arrangement for the whole set. He had such a tremendous gift." But as his career took off Hathaway started acting erratically. "I saw something was not right," Eulaulah Hathaway said. She called her husband's management office and was told they had also noticed disturbing behavior, such as his randomly screaming at secretaries. "Well, when were you going to tell me?" she asked dryly. Donny Hathaway was hospitalized in both New York and Chicago for paranoid schizophrenia. "He was 26 when it really came down upon him," she said. He was released and given a heavy medication regimen, 14 pills a day. "I'd get the pills ready for him and sit them on the counter," she said. "He was probably figuring out a way not to take them." Donny Hathaway didn't release any music for five years. "He just kind of dropped out of existence," Howard said. But in 1978, he hit No. 2 on the pop charts with "The Closer I Get to You," a comeback duet with Flack. They started working on another album together in New York, but were hindered by Hathaway's mental health issues. "Donny kept leaving the studio and going to the bathroom," Howard said. When they found him on the floor of the bathroom, sobbing, saying that someone had tried to kill him, they stopped the sessions. That evening Jan. 13, 1979 Hathaway, Howard and the manager David Franklin retreated to Flack's home. "She cooked dinner for us, a Jamaican dish with spoonbread and rice and fish," Howard said. "Donny drew a picture of a gun on some music manuscript paper and asked me, 'What if somebody came up to you and said "Bang!"?' I took it away and X ed the gun out, trying to keep him calm." Howard and Hathaway went to the Essex House, the hotel where they were staying, and retired to their separate rooms. Hathaway slid the plate glass out of his window, neatly laid it under a table, and, still wearing his overcoat, fell to his death from the 15th floor. It was ruled a suicide, although his widow always believed it was an accident; she didn't think he meant to harm himself, but knew that his mental illness often made him careless. "I wasn't really surprised," she said. "I knew he was a sick person. He didn't really need to be working at that point anyway. I had expressed that to his partners, but people don't care." Forty years after her father's death, Lalah Hathaway said: "Grief is a process. Art is a process. Me stepping into that light and allowing him to come through is all a process. It may sound cheesy, but it's an esoteric spiritual journey." She connects particularly deeply with "A Song for You," written by Leon Russell but performed by Donny Hathaway as a hymn of heartbreak. Sometimes she performs it a cappella so she can feel more deeply connected to her father. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
AFTER a thorough revamping of its perennially hot selling Civic for 2012, Honda may return to the drawing board to address complaints that the redesigned car is too dull and too cheaply built. Among the options under consideration is speeding up the usual midcycle model freshening, perhaps as soon as the 2013 model year. "We are looking at doing an earlier minor model change on the Civic," said Chris Martin, a company spokesman, echoing comments by John Mendel, executive vice president of American Honda, to Automotive News. Typically, automakers make small interior and exterior changes some two to three years after a car is redesigned, to hold consumers' interest in the model. Altering this update schedule is "not necessarily an unusual thing, though it is a little unusual for us to be discussing it right after we've done a full model change," Mr. Martin said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
The rapid growth of Latino and other immigrant populations in Chicago's suburbs is outstripping the ability of public schools to provide bilingual programs mandated by Illinois, and government financing for the programs is shrinking, state records show. Of the 58 suburban school districts visited by state monitors in the past three years, none met all of Illinois's tough education requirements for students learning English, and 22 failed to provide a bilingual program for all of the students who qualified for it, according to a Catalyst Chicago analysis of Illinois State Board of Education records from fiscal year 2009 to October 2011. Compliance problems included bilingual courses taught by teachers who lacked required language or subject matter certification, classes with substandard content, and failure to make yearly assessments of how well students are learning English. English language learners, about 80 percent of whom speak Spanish as their native language, are struggling academically in many suburban districts. A majority of the state's Latinos 52 percent now live in Chicago's suburbs, the 2010 Census showed, while 38 percent live in the city. Since 2005, about 25 percent of suburban school districts have seen the number of English language learners double in Plainfield School District 202, they have more than tripled, to about 2,082 in 2011 from about 674 in 2005. Statewide, the number of English language learners increased 10 percent to about 182,600 students from 2009 to 2011. "There is a lot of hardship on some districts to comply where there are newer populations" of English language learners, said Reyna Hernandez, assistant superintendent of the Center for Language and Early Childhood Development at the Illinois State Board of Education. Carmen Avalos, who moved to Plainfield from Bolingbrook five years ago, said her son, Jesus, 11, struggled before his school started a bilingual program. But when it began, "his grades went up," she said through an interpreter. "For me, the program is complete because when my daughter goes to the Spanish classroom, she is taught the same" material as the English speaking students, Ms. Avalos said. A Catalyst Chicago analysis of 2011 scores on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test showed that in 4 of the 10 suburban districts with the highest percentages of non English speaking students, reading scores of eighth grade Latinos lagged far behind scores of white students, with achievement gaps of 17 to 23 percentage points. Five of the other districts had smaller gaps, of 2 to 11 percentage points. Latinos outscored white students in one district, where Latinos are 96 percent of the population. In Chicago, the difference in reading scores of white and Latino eighth graders was eight percentage points. The gaps may widen in suburban high schools as students tackle more complex subjects. At Aurora East District 131, for example, there was a 45 point gap between the percentage of white and Latino students who met state standards on the reading section of the Prairie State exam. Part of the problem is the shortage of certified bilingual teachers. Roger Prosise, the superintendent of Diamond Lake School District in Mundelein, said his district struggled to hire enough of them as the percentage of English language learners in the district doubled to 32 percent over the past decade. At one point, Mr. Prosise sent staff members to Spain to recruit teachers. When that did not work, he had teachers switch to a so called sheltered model, which limits instruction in Spanish and makes academic instructions in English understandable to English language learners. Many districts have turned to sheltered instruction because teachers do not have to be bilingual, and some research suggests it can improve student learning. But the strategy requires greater planning by teachers, especially as the students get older and the academic content becomes difficult. The scarcity of bilingual teachers has also limited the adoption of dual language programs, which experts consider to be a bright spot. Intensive training is needed, and relatively few teachers are sufficiently fluent in two languages to be comfortable teaching in both. "Wherever you have dual language programs, the kids are doing really well," said Judy Yturriago, president of the Illinois Association for Multilingual Multicultural Education and former chief of the bilingual program in Evanston schools. Dual language instruction aims to build students' literacy in their native language as well as in English. In three suburban districts with dual language programs Evanston District 65, North Shore District 112 in Highland Park, and School District 54 in Schaumburg at least 80 percent of Latino eighth grade students met state reading standards on the 2011 Illinois Standards Achievement Test. Illinois has high standards for English language learners. It is one of only five states that require bilingual education, according to a May 2007 Education Week analysis, and is one of the few states that require extensive native language instruction taught by certified bilingual teachers. Noncompliance with state requirements could result in school districts' being stripped of money for bilingual education, but administrators are given multiple chances to correct problems. Money for bilingual education fell by 16 percent from 2009 to 2011, to 63.4 million from 75.7 million, according to state data. State officials recently recommended increasing bilingual financing to 70.4 million for fiscal year 2013. A state appointed task force has recommended changes that would allow some schools to provide far less native language instruction. In Elgin, where the Latino population has increased to nearly half of residents in 2010 from a third in 2000, the superintendent of District U 46, Jose Torres, has begun a dual language program for kindergarteners and first and second grade students. As the students get older, the program will add one grade level per year. In kindergarten, 80 percent of instructional time is in Spanish, and the percentage declines each year until it reaches 50 percent in third through eighth grade. The intention is to shore up the literacy skills of native Spanish speaking students and create a stronger foundation for learning advanced subjects, since they are taught basic concepts in their first language. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Vacheron Constantin has announced the Les Cabinotiers Celestia Astronomical Grand Complication 3600 with 23 complications, the most complicated wristwatch the company has ever made. The custom timepiece took five years to develop and follows the 57260 pocket watch introduced by the brand last year. It had 57 complications and has been acknowledged as the most complicated timepiece ever made. As the name suggests, the Celestia's complications have an astronomical focus. It shows civil, solar and sidereal time or, respectively, standard time, time based on the trajectory of the sun (which can vary by as much as 14 additional to 16 fewer minutes a day), and time measured against the position of the stars. Further complications include a perpetual calendar that won't need adjusting for 400 years; a moon phase accurate to one day every 122 years; a tourbillon; an equation of time, sunset and sunrise times; displays showing the length of day and night; a tide level indicator; and indication of the seasons, solstices, equinoxes and zodiac signs. The watch also has a three week power reserve with a power reserve indicator, delivered by six barrels. (Conventional mechanical watches offer about 40 hours.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
On Tuesday night, the rapper, designer and presidential candidate Kanye West passionately defended his longtime friend and former creative partner Virgil Abloh on Twitter. "Virgil can do whatever he wants," he wrote. "Do you know how hard it's been for us to be recognized?" The intended audience of Mr. West's posts: Walter Van Beirendonck, 63, a veteran Belgian designer who had accused Mr. Abloh of copying his work for his latest Louis Vuitton men's collection, presented live in Shanghai on Aug. 6. On Aug. 7, Mr. Van Beirendonck, who is the head of the fashion department at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, posted an image of one of his own designs, a shirt with the words "I HATE FASHION COPYCATS" appliqued on the front. Designers claiming that other designers have cribbed their work is nearly as old as fashion itself, a point Mr. Van Beirendonck acknowledged in an Aug. 7 interview with the Belgian magazine Knack Weekend. "Copying is nothing new. It's part of fashion. But not like this. Not on that level, with their budgets, their teams, their possibilities," he said, referring to Louis Vuitton, which is the world's top luxury brand, valued at 32 billion in 2019. "That's what is shocking to me." "It's very clear that Virgil Abloh is not a designer," Mr. Van Beirendonck continued. "He has no language of his own, no vision. He can't create something of his own season after season and that is painful." Mr. Van Beirendonck did not respond to interview requests. In a statement provided by his personal publicist, Mr. Abloh said, "Walter Van Beirendonck's claims are completely false. They are a hate filled attempt to discredit my work. The inspiration for my collection comes from the DNA of Louis Vuitton, specifically the 2005 Louis Vuitton menswear show, and it was clearly outlined in the notes distributed to the press when the show began. This is yet another instance of false equivalence to try to discredit me as a designer." Since 2018, Mr. Abloh, 39, has been the lead men's wear designer for Louis Vuitton, the flagship brand of LVMH. He has one of the most powerful jobs in the industry, and his tenure has been successful. "He's standing at the pinnacle, and therefore he casts a long shadow, and he's a target for everyone," said Susan Scafidi, the president of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham Law School. Mr. Abloh, one of the first Black men to lead a global luxury brand, has degrees in civil engineering and architecture and a background in streetwear, including his own brands, Off White and Pyrex Vision, and as creative director of Mr. West's company Donda. "There is a little bit of snobbery about the fact that Virgil didn't train as a designer and 'pay his dues' to the industry in that way," Ms. Scafidi said. Mr. West has long claimed that the fashion industry was racially biased against him. He seemed to be referring to this same dynamic in his defense of Mr. Abloh, by accusing Mr. Van Beirendonck of using plagiarism claims as a way of gate keeping the fashion industry. "It's not just, 'My design was copied,' it's, 'That guy isn't a designer,'" said Ms. Scafidi, characterizing Mr. Van Beirendonck's claims. Mr. Abloh has long been a lightning rod for pointed conversations about originality. In 2017, one of his fashion heroes, the Belgian designer Raf Simons, told GQ that he wasn't excited by Mr. Abloh's work because he is, rather, "inspired by people who bring something that I think has not been seen, that is original." A month later, Mr. Abloh presented an Off White collection titled "Nothing New," widely interpreted as a response to Mr. Simons. Printing unattributed phrases in quotation marks on clothing is one of Mr. Abloh's signatures, a cheeky nod to ideas of reference and authorship. In a 2019 interview, Mr. Abloh told The New York Times that he believes his talent lies not in the creation of wholly unique designs, but rather in making something new by altering existing objects by as little as 3 percent. In 2018, Diet Prada, the plagiarism watchdog Instagram page run by Tony Liu and Lindsey Schuyler, accused him of copying Paul McCobb, the renowned maker of midcentury modern furniture, for a chair Mr. Abloh designed for Ikea. A year later, the account also claimed he'd copied a brand called Colrs. (The account has not yet addressed Mr. Van Beirendonck's accusations, which led to the Belgian designer scoffing that the account was in the tank for Louis Vuitton. Mr. West, in turn, posted an image of himself and Mr. Abloh embracing, and wrote, "Hi diet Prada hi Walter ... come for us all!!!") Mr. Abloh has suggested that Belgian design is perceived as bastion of authenticity, an idea that has something of a figurehead in Mr. Van Beirendonck. The designer was a member of the Antwerp Six, a collective that transformed the city into an avant garde fashion destination in the 1980s. He's spent the following three decades cultivating a reputation for iconoclastic originality; his brash, colorful designs often toy with masculinity and reference forms of play. His work influenced 1990s rave culture and also Mr. Simons, who interned for him in 1989. While Mr. Van Beirendonck has received critical acclaim throughout his career, he does not enjoy the same degree of commercial success as Mr. Abloh. His work has long involved cartoonish characters, like Puk Puk, the cheerful alien mascot who adorned many of the designs he created in the 1990s for his brand Wild Lethal Trash. Mr. Abloh's recent Louis Vuitton show, inspired by a cartoon he made titled "The Adventures of Zooom with Friends," also featured clothes festooned with humans and animal figures; on Instagram, Mr. Van Beirendonck reposted an image made by a fan page which pointed out similarities between his own work and Mr. Abloh's designs. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
"Thank you to all of the other incredible women in this category," Zendaya said. "I admire you so much." "Euphoria," a drama series created by Sam Levinson about high school students who navigate love, sex, drugs and identity conundrums, premiered on HBO in June 2019. It received six nominations this year, though Zendaya's was the only one for acting. HBO announced last year that the series had been renewed for a second season. The actress said she was inspired by others her age who were working to make a difference in the world. "I just want to say that there is hope in the young people out there," she said. "And I just want to say to all our peers out there doing the work in the streets: I see you, I admire you, I thank you." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Stuart J. Thompson, a Tony Award winning producer and manager of Broadway shows who brought a contemplative, low key style to an industry known for its razzmatazz, and helped mount hits like "The Book of Mormon," died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 62. The cause was complications of esophageal cancer, a spokesman, Chris Boneau, said in an email. Mr. Thompson was a respected leader in the theater community, not only as a producer but also as a general manager of more than 70 Broadway, Off Broadway and national touring productions. In an industry filled with larger than life figures who reveled in the spotlight, he preferred to stay behind the scenes, but his sharp intellect, good taste and dedication made him an influential force, his admirers said. "Stuart Thompson was the most dignified, generous man in the business. He elevated me," the actress Patti LuPone, a friend of Mr. Thompson's who worked with him on productions of "Master Class" and "The Old Neighborhood," said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Every year, increasing numbers of children eat or inhale the contents of brightly colored packets of laundry detergent that they mistake for candy or teething toys. On Tuesday, the first safety standard for packaging and labeling so called laundry pods was approved by A.S.T.M. International, an organization that helps establish product standards. The recommendations were negotiated over the past year by a group of industry representatives, consumer and medical groups and officials from the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission. Richard Sedlak, the executive vice president of technical affairs at the American Cleaning Institute, an industry group, said the recommendations would greatly reduce the frequency of childhood poisonings by laundry pods. But adherence to the new packaging standard is not mandatory, and it was not immediately clear when manufacturers would begin to redesign their products. "I don't know if it will stop children from being poisoned by these products," said Elliot F. Kaye, chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Still, he added, "The creation of a standard that has these elements is better than the lack of one, no doubt about that." In 2014, 11,862 children younger than 6 ingested or inhaled the contents of laundry packets, up from 10,273 in 2013, according to the American Association of Poison Control Centers. The tally for the first eight months of 2015 was 8,428, roughly 500 more than during the same period last year. At that pace, the number of accidents this year will be the highest on record. In July, Consumer Reports stopped recommending laundry pods or packets "until the adoption of tougher safety measures leads to a meaningful drop in injuries." The new standard approved by A.S.T.M., the American Society for Testing and Materials, calls for manufacturers to add a bitter taste to the soluble film encasing the detergent to deter children from putting the pods in their mouths, and to make the film take longer to dissolve once wet. The recommendations also include options for making containers harder for curious toddlers to open for example, closures that require dexterity or strength. The standards group also urged manufacturers to use opaque containers (some companies already do) so children cannot see the pods, with warning labels placed on the front and back. Dr. Frederick M. Henretig, an emergency medicine doctor and the senior toxicologist at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said the idea of giving the pods a bitter taste was "ludicrous." "Kids bite into these things almost instantly as they pop them into their mouths," he said. But he endorsed the use of packages with a truly child resistant closure. "The game is won in keeping it out of the kid's mouth," he said. "Once it goes in, it's game over." The new packaging standard does not tell manufacturers to reformulate their products to make them less toxic to children, and does not suggest that manufacturers tone down the pods' colorful appearance. "If you are going to go through the process of making the outer container opaque, why not make the pod itself opaque?" said Dr. Steven M. Marcus, the executive and medical director at the New Jersey Poison Information Education System. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The handsome red brick warehouses that cluster north of downtown Minneapolis near the Mississippi River speak to peak 19th century commercial traffic on the waterway and nearby rail lines. Many have more recently been reclaimed by some of the city's most buzzed about restaurants (including the Bachelor Farmer) and stylish shops (MartinPatrick3). Now the Hewing Hotel, opened in 2016 in a prominent warehouse that once stored farm equipment, pays homage to one of those trades logging in six stories of wood framing, flooring and paneling. Channeling the spirit of an urban lumberjack, massive, rough hewed posts picket the sunny lobby filled with low slung leather couches. Patterned wallpaper featuring fish and moose and retro accessories on library shelves including vintage hockey gloves mirror Minnesota's affinity for the outdoors. Minnesotans have returned the love, crowding the hotel's ground floor restaurant and bar Tullibee, which champions the bounty of the region with a Scandinavian accent. Fittingly, there's a sizable sauna and outdoor hot tub on the rooftop, as well as a bar. The Hewing resides in the gentrifying North Loop neighborhood, part of the Minneapolis Warehouse Historic District. Target Field, home to the Minnesota Twins, is within a few blocks. The Guthrie Theater, just over a mile downriver, is a quick Uber ride away. The MetroTransit Blue Line nearby links the neighborhood to the airport and the Mall of America beyond. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
SAN FRANCISCO Uber denied claims from Waymo, the self driving car company spun out of Google's parent company last year, that it is using driverless car technology stolen by a former Google employee. In a federal court filing on Friday, Uber said it started designing a key component for its own autonomous vehicle before hiring Anthony Levandowski, Uber's head of self driving cars whose departure from Google is at the heart of an intellectual property lawsuit between the two companies. The component is called lidar, for light detection and ranging sensors, and it helps a self driving car navigate. Uber said its lidar system is significantly different from Waymo's. For example, Uber said it uses four lenses while Waymo has a single lens design. Uber was responding to a motion filed last month by Waymo asking the court to halt work on Uber's self driving car efforts with an injunction. At the time, Waymo said the injunction was warranted because Mr. Levandowski colluded with Uber and systematically stole 14,000 files of proprietary company documents before leaving Google to start his own self driving truck company, Otto, in February 2016. He sold Otto to Uber for 680 million six months later. Uber also said a temporary injunction was not justified because there was no urgency to Waymo's claim, noting that Waymo did not ask for the injunction until last month despite knowing about the file downloads in October. "Waymo's injunction motion is a misfire," Angela Padilla, Uber's associate general counsel, said in a statement. "If Waymo genuinely thought that Uber was using its secrets, it would not have waited more than five months to seek an injunction. Waymo doesn't meet the high bar for an injunction, which would stifle our independent innovation probably Waymo's goal in the first place." A temporary injunction could be damaging to Uber, because it is rushing to catch up to Waymo and others in the rapidly shifting world of self driving cars. Technology companies like Google and Apple are devoting extensive resources to putting self driving cars on the road, while traditional automakers like Ford and General Motors are snapping up talent in the hopes of preventing technology companies from moving onto their turf. Uber's lawyers have said they cannot find evidence that the files are in Uber's possession. But there is a complication: Mr. Levandowski is not cooperating with Uber's document search. He is invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination, because there is, according to his lawyer in a hearing last month, "potential for a criminal action." Uber said it couldn't explain his actions, because Mr. Levandowski, who is not a named defendant in the suit, was pleading the Fifth. In its initial lawsuit, Waymo said that a supplier, on email, inadvertently copied it on blueprints of Uber's circuit board design for its lidar. Waymo said that Uber's designs bore "a striking resemblance" to its secret designs and that part of the documents it claims Mr. Levandowski stole pertain to its lidar designs. Uber said, however, that design is different than what it is actually developing. "Uber never possessed and never used any information Mr. Levandowski allegedly took from Waymo," Uber said in its filing. Judge William Alsup in United States District Court in San Francisco said in a hearing earlier this week that since neither Uber nor Mr. Levandowski were denying that the documents were stolen, the fact that the documents had not been found in Uber's possession was not enough to stave off an injunction. "Uber's assertion that they've never touched the 14,000 stolen files is disingenuous at best, given their refusal to look in the most obvious place: the computers and devices owned by the head of their self driving program," Johnny Luu, a Waymo spokesman, said in a statement. He said Waymo had "clear evidence" that Uber was using or planned to use Waymo technology, "as seen in both circuit board blueprints and filings in the State of Nevada." Uber said it should not have to stop work on self driving cars because its lidar is still in development and is based on a 2015 design from one of its employees, while the one on Uber's current self driving car is an off the shelf version from a supplier. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every week for new suggestions on what to watch. This Weekend I Have ... an Hour, and I Know About Tea 'RuPaul's Drag Race U.K.' When to watch: Friday at 8 p.m., on Logo. Sashay your way to the new iteration of "Drag Race," which takes the festivities to England and kicks things off with a Queen Elizabeth II challenge. As always, the talent and creativity on display is a cheery respite from drab realities, and Andrew Garfield brings an impressive depth of knowledge to his guest judging on the premiere. Episodes air in the United States eight days after they debut in Britain, so Google carefully to avoid spoilers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
LONDON The high profile American architectural practice Diller Scofidio Renfro has been chosen to design the Center for Music, a future home for the London Symphony Orchestra and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. It will be the first major project in Britain for the practice, which has been responsible for the High Line in New York, the Broad Museum in Los Angeles and Zaryadye Park in Moscow, among other projects, and is working on the renovation of New York's Museum of Modern Art and the design of The Shed, a new arts center on the west side of Manhattan designed in collaboration with Rockwell Group. The New York based practice, founded in 1981 by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, was on a shortlist that also included Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry and the Norwegian studio Snohetta. In a statement, the architect selection panel for the project said that "of the six excellent submissions, Diller Scofidio Renfro's visionary ideas offered the exciting potential to create a Center for Music fit for the future that offers access and engagement for all." The Center for Music, which will include a concert hall with up to 2,000 seats, facilities for education and training, and commercial spaces, is planned for the site of the Museum of London, close to the Barbican Center, the current home of the London Symphony Orchestra. Simon Rattle, the orchestra's new music director, has championed the project, earlier this year describing the Barbican as unsuitable for about 20 percent of the repertoire he would like to cover. The Museum of London is moving to another nearby site, a set of vacant Victorian market buildings. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
With Covid 19 hospitalizations spiking again in many parts of the country, public health officials have expressed concerns about a perennial source of strain on the health care system: seasonal flu. As threats of a "twindemic" loom, health care workers have stressed the need for vaccination and other preventive measures to slow the spread of flu. One insurance company is going further to try to mitigate the effects of flu season: UnitedHealthcare, the country's largest health insurance company, plans to provide at risk patients with 200,000 kits that include Tamiflu, the prescription antiviral treatment; a digital thermometer; and a coronavirus P.C.R. diagnostic test. People can take the test at home and then mail it in for laboratory analysis, helping patients and doctors determine the cause of their symptoms, which is particularly important because the coronavirus and flu have similar symptoms but differ in treatment. "These viruses have proven themselves highly capable of putting strain on our health care system alone," said Dr. Kelly Moore, an associate director of the Immunization Action Coalition. "Their combined impact is really worrisome." In late September, UnitedHealthcare began inviting its Medicare Advantage members to sign up for the kits either online or by phone, starting with a focus on those at highest risk of complications from Covid 19 and the flu based on their age and health status. Since then, 120,000 people have enrolled, and the company has begun shipping the kits. The company has more than five million Medicare Advantage members. The company said supplying people with Tamiflu in advance could help to mitigate the severity of flu infections because the antiviral medication gets less effective with every hour that passes from onset of symptoms and is virtually ineffective after 48 hours. Tamiflu on average shortens the duration of illness by one to two days if taken rapidly, according to Dr. Moore. It can also help prevent illness in someone at high risk of complications who has been exposed to the flu, but is not routinely recommended for preventive use in most populations. All members signing up for the flu kits had to confirm the state where they live so that the Tamiflu prescription could be dispensed by a physician in their state. They had to attest, either over the phone or through an online form, that they would wait to take the prescription drug or the coronavirus test until after receiving direction from a physician through a telemedicine appointment, though there is no additional system for verifying this process once they receive their kits. Members also had to agree not to give the medication to others. "We thought, 'Imagine if you start getting sick and already had a mini pharmacy at home,'" said Dr. Deneen Vojta, executive vice president for research and development at UnitedHealthcare. The goal, she added, is to decrease the number of emergency room visits, hospitalizations and deaths resulting from seasonal flu. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. There is no charge for the Tamiflu or the coronavirus test, as long as people receive advice from a doctor via telemedicine. A company spokesman said that the kits could produce savings by reducing hospitalizations through preventive care. Flu kit recipients will be directed to schedule virtual doctor's appointments if they experience viral symptoms. The initiative has become possible largely because of the public's increased acceptance of telemedicine amid the pandemic. A national survey from Deloitte released in August found that the proportion of health care consumers using virtual doctor's visits rose to 28 percent in April 2020 from 15 percent in 2019, as patients have avoided in person visits to clinics where they are at increased risk of coronavirus exposure. UnitedHealthcare's initiative targeted Medicare patients because the elderly are more at risk of severe infection from both the coronavirus and the flu. Covid 19 patients who are over the age of 80 are hundreds of times more likely to die from the disease than those under 40. They are also more likely to die from the flu between 70 and 85 percent of flu related deaths occur in people 65 or older, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. UnitedHealthcare also plans to collect data on co infection with the coronavirus and flu. Analysis from Public Health England showed that people infected with both viruses were more than twice as likely to die, and most cases of co infection were in elderly populations. While no other insurance company has said it plans to send out prescription antiviral drugs, Aetna announced it would send its 2.7 million Medicare members kits containing a thermometer, hand sanitizer and face masks. Anthem has partnered with community organizations to create 500 local pop up clinics administering free flu vaccines. There is some cause for optimism about efforts to mitigate the spread of the flu this year, according to Dr. Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at Harvard. Australia reported a 99 percent decrease in reported flu infections this year compared with 2019, partly as a result of widespread social distancing. Americans should still be making every effort to prevent flu infection through vaccination. "If there's an overlapping demand from the two viruses, it will compound the problem of delivering health care," Dr. Lipsitch said. "Our health systems are already usually stretched by flu season, and could be even more stretched by Covid." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The region most associated with Dracula one of Gothic horror's most famous villains Transylvania is well worth discovering in its own right. This swath of central and western Romania is mountainous and beautiful, its ancient towns lively and well preserved and its ethnic and political history rich and complex. But yes, there's also that medieval clock tower in the well preserved center of the town of Sighisoara with a torture chamber beneath across the street from the house where Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler of Walachia (a region that later became part of Romania) is said to have been born in 1431. He is believed by many to have inspired the fictional character of Dracula, though some dispute that. There's also Bran Castle, which is probably the most touristy spot in Transylvania thanks to its dubious connections with both the fictional and historic Dracula. In Transylvania, a Count Invites You to His Castle This picturesque town on England's Yorkshire coast can also stake claim to being the home of Dracula, though in a different way. Bram Stoker spent just a month in Whitby, but those four weeks in July and August 1890 were pivotal in the creation of his most famous book, "Dracula," which was published in 1897. Whitby celebrated the 125th anniversary of Stoker's visit in 2015, but this year you can see the skeletal remains of Whitby Abbey illuminated throughout the final week of October. Where Dracula Was Born, and It's Not Transylvania | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
On the rooftops above the office canyons of Midtown Manhattan, there is a corporate life for bees where new colonies pollinate green roofs and produce honey for the lucky tenants working below. At One Bryant Park last summer, Richard Kohlbrecher, who is allergic to bee venom, first saw hundreds of honeybees darting in and out of the sprawling sedum ground cover on the green roofs he was inspecting. He turned his initial alarm into a housing plan for the secret tenants. "I had never seen that before and it got me thinking: if there are that many bees in Midtown, maybe it makes sense to put up some hives," said Mr. Kohlbrecher, vice president for operations for The Durst Organization, which owns the company's 51 story tower at 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue. The skyscraper houses the corporate and investment businesses of the Bank of America as well as Durst's offices. And so, unbeknown to the busy office workers and the tourists sunning themselves in Bryant Park, above them on the seventh floor rooftop are now some 100,000 European honeybees brought in with two main hives earlier this summer. And beekeeping has a long tradition in New York, now including such lofty perches as the terraces of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel and the Whitney Museum of Art. In fact, beehives are becoming increasingly common across the city, said James Fischer, the director of education at TheHoneybeeConservancy.org, an advocacy group. That has accelerated in the last three years, since a ban on beekeeping instituted during the Giuliani administration was lifted. And while there is no publicly available list of beehives' locations in the city, a select number of private companies have begun employing them. It is costly to plant a lot of sedum and it can take a season or two before it naturally fills out; bees are an inexpensive way to hasten this process. "They don't like to make their beehives public because of some people's fears," Mr. Fischer said. Beekeeping has also been catching on atop buildings outside of New York. Earlier this summer, bee hives were added to the green roofs of the Minneapolis City Hall building, and similar environs have been encouraged in other urban areas with green roof habitats. In London, the number of urban beehives has exploded in recent years, to the point there was concern that the city had an insufficient supply of bee friendly plants to feed the growing populations. In New York, where bees have yet to face any food shortages, anyone can keep a beehive as long as it is registered with the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and there is a water source, something as simple as a bucket filled with water. On the green roof at One Bryant Park, the bees' natural pollination process helps maintain the area's nearly 6,000 square feet, where the sedum was planted to help to reduce urban heat energy and runoff. "Putting honeybees in a location supercharges the normal pollination process," said Chase Emmons, a managing partner and the apiary director at Brooklyn Grange. The company, with locations in Long Island City and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, sold the Durst Organization its two beehives in June and is helping the company maintain them and harvest the honey. The honeybees are a Russian variety, known for their hardiness and ability to survive cold Northeastern winters. That could come in handy because bees have been plagued in recent years by colony collapse disorder, a mysterious malady that has wiped out as much as 50 percent of the country's commercial beehives in the last year alone. Beekeeping is a relatively cheap endeavor. It can cost just 125 to buy a package of bees, and there is no real maintenance involved. Bees are typically bred in the south and shipped north in April, sent to beekeepers in a cage the size of a lunch box that can be mailed through the United States Postal Service. To buy a mature hive that is already producing honey, like the ones the Durst Organization has, can cost 300 to as high as 1,000. The Durst Organization is using Langstroth hives, invented by the Rev. Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth in Philadelphia, and patented in 1852. These hives resemble a filing cabinet with 10 frames inside that hang like files, covered in honeycomb. As the hive grows, additional cabinets can be stacked one atop another. Bees naturally tend to keep any excess honey in the top box. The Langstroth hives are especially easy to inspect for disease and to harvest; beekeepers simply remove the top from the cabinet and pull out a frame. To harvest the honey, the beekeepers place the frames in a centrifuge that resembles a cotton candy spinner. "By spinning it, the centrifugal force sucks out the honey but doesn't damage the wax honeycomb, so we can just put that back into the frames and the bees can get back to filling it with honey again," Mr. Emmons said. The Durst Organization plans to hand out the honey to its tenants as holiday gifts. While the bees' pollination efforts can help maintain the health of green roofs, they are not commonly used for this purpose, mostly because of the fear of stings. Yet honeybees are inherently docile creatures, and in fact, they die after stinging. "So for evolutionary reasons, for a hive to expend the energy to defend itself, there has to be a clear or present danger," Mr. Emmons said. But, he noted, "you wouldn't want the Time Warner guy coming up to the roof to install a cable and accidentally stumbling onto a hive, so it is important to know who will be accessing the area." So far, the bees at One Bryant Park have been so successful that next spring, the Durst Organization is hoping to add to its bee collection by buying several mason bee houses. Mason bees differ from honeybees in that they do not produce honey or beeswax, and do not live in hives. They live solitarily in tubes and holes. Also unlike the honeybee, they are indigenous to America. Buying the mason bees "is part of our philosophy of sustaining local flora and fauna and native pollinators," said Jordan D. Barowitz, the director of external affairs at the Durst Organization. As for Mr. Kohlbrecher, he said that he had gotten used to the idea of the hives. "It took me a long time to go within 10 feet of bees," he said, but "you have to embrace your fears." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Welcome to the hot stove science league. On Thursday, with great fanfare, officials from the U.S. National Science Foundation and U.K. Research and Innovation announced a 30 million project to double the sensitivity of the antennas for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, or LIGO, which stunned the world three years ago by detecting space time ripples from colliding black holes. Only the day before, NASA had announced the selection of its newest astronomy mission: a satellite that will map the entire sky, including millions of galaxies, stars and planets, in three dimensions and 96 colors. The two year mission, called SPHEREx (short for, hold on, the Spectro Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) will look for clues to the as yet unknown forces that propelled the Big Bang. Neither announcement would be big news by itself. New projects are springing up all the time. The same week, NASA also announced the formation of a cross disciplinary research network, the Prebiotic Chemistry and Early Earth Environments Consortium, to help guide future searches for life on other worlds. And last year, with serious fanfare, Congress passed and President Trump signed the National Quantum Initiative, designed to provide more money and organization into harnessing the most arcane science of quantum mechanics for computing and cryptography. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. The upgraded LIGO Advanced LIGO Plus won't kick in until 2024 or so, although classic Advanced LIGO will be back online sometime this spring, on the prowl for whatever is out there. And NASA's SPHEREx won't be launched until 2023 or later. But the close timing of the announcements is a reminder of an aspect of science that gets scant attention. Especially at Nobel Prize time, we applaud a few heroic Einsteins for their moments of inspiration and discovery. But much of the real action in science occurs on the sidelines, often years before any wizardry in the lab. Some of is performed by armies of people whose names are mostly unknown. Others are well known politicians, like President John F. Kennedy declaring the moon shot in 1961, throwing their weight on the levers of history. For many baseball fans, the most exciting part of the game is the so called hot stove league, now in progress. Here the heroes are crafty general managers who wheel and deal, barter and sign and deploy their players like so many chess pieces. There was Branch Rickey, who integrated Major League Baseball by signing Jackie Robinson and putting him on first base for the Dodgers in 1947, but only after provoking him to make sure he would be strong enough to take the expected abuse without striking back. Recently Theo Epstein has become a front office legend by rebuilding the Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs. So, too, in the hot stove science league. Future Nobel Prizes are won in congressional committee hearing rooms and on august panels at the National Academy of Sciences, by budget wielding bureaucrats. Without their efforts, there would be no labs or research grants. This is a point made emphatically by the well known author Michael Lewis ("The Blind Side," "Liar's Poker," "Moneyball") in his latest book, "The Fifth Risk," which tells stories of civil servants in bureaucracies like the Departments of Energy, Commerce and Agriculture working to keep the country's nuclear arsenal and fleets of weather satellites in shape, and their travails under the Trump administration. This summer the world will pay tribute to the Apollo 11 lunar landing 50 years ago, and to the bravery and skill of astronauts such as Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. But the man who did as much as anyone to put them up there was James Webb, NASA's administrator from 1961 to 1968. After a capsule fire killed three astronauts in 1967, Webb took charge of the investigation, setting a standard for the space agency's warts and all frankness, and gave the go ahead for Apollo 8's dramatic moon mission during Christmas in 1968. He stepped down in October 1968 just before Richard Nixon's election, but at least he will have a telescope named for him, the long delayed James Webb Space Telescope, when it finally launches, maybe in 2021. Political, economic, bureaucratic, geographic and historic machinations now at work will determine where the next giant telescope or next big particle collider will be built. Laptop toting physicists have been crisscrossing the oceans between Japan, China and Europe, for the last decade trying to cajole colleagues and their governments into pouring many billions of dollars into the future of physics. By the time particles start zinging around any such machine, many of these scientists will have retired. As Frederick Bordry, CERN's director of accelerators, said last year, "I'm working for the young people." Few people had ever heard of LIGO before February of 2016, when its astronomers announced that they had heard black holes dancing in the dark. The discovery knocked the world on its head, confirming for the first time the existence of gravitational waves, and of those dead pits of space time, black holes. It also garnered a Nobel Prize for its originators and leaders, Rainer Weiss of M.I.T. and Kip Thorne and Barry Barish of the California Institute of Technology. Of course, by then LIGO had been in the works for 30 years, and had already cost the National Science Foundation a billion dollars. Its success was a saga of persistence, ingenuity and just plain bravery in the face of nature and professional skepticism. The twin antennas at Hanford, Wash., and Livingston, La. are basically L shaped tubes of vacuum, empty space. Inside them laser beams monitor the distance between two mirrors 2.5 miles apart, looking for a gravitational wave that will squeeze that distance by less than the diameter of a proton. Convincing anybody that this scheme would work was no small or quick task. The LIGO team owes its Nobel Prize partly to skeptical physicists and astronomers (who didn't like that a physics experiment was being called an "observatory") who fought the project tooth and nail, holding its proponents' feet to the fire in studies and workshops over and over, making them prove that it would work. On Feb. 10, 2016 the world got its answer when LIGO announced they had recorded the collision of a pair of black holes. I sat next to one of those fierce critics, Richard Garwin, a distinguished, influential and well connected physicist based at IBM, when the Nobel Prize announcement was celebrated at Columbia University. He was beaming with pleasure. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
This year's edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, one of the most important destinations in the international art market calendar, has been canceled, with organizers citing the ''sudden and widespread outbreak'' of the coronavirus in China. The fair, held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center, and featuring premier galleries from Asia and beyond, was to run March 17 through March 21. "The decision to cancel Art Basel Hong Kong was an extremely difficult one for us," said Bernd Stadlwieser, chief executive of MCH Group, the Swiss based company behind the fair. "We explored every other possible option, including postponing the fair, and gathered advice and perspectives from many gallerists, partners, and external experts. However, today, we have no other option but to cancel the fair." MCH cited numerous factors including the health and safety of fair workers and visitors, the logistical challenges of mounting the event, and the escalating difficulties of travel to Hong Kong, which reported its first fatality from the virus on Feb. 3. Last week, as Hong Kong shut down museums and schools, and limited flights from the Chinese mainland, participating dealers called for the closure of the fair. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
THE MAGICIANS 9 p.m. on Syfy. Like "Harry Potter," there are young adults studying magic but this series, adapted from the novels by Lev Grossman, is distinct for its American identity (it is set at a New York college) and its unflinching look at heavier themes, such as sexual assault and death. But the show also possesses zippy humor and pop culture references galore, with the characters singing a portion of "Les Miserables" in one episode. "I don't just appreciate it or respect it, I actively enjoy it," Margaret Lyons wrote in The New York Times' Watching column. The third season begins on Wednesday, as Quentin (Jason Ralph) and Julia (Stella Maeve) try to bring magic back to the world. ZOMBIELAND (2009) 7:30 p.m. on Starz. Actors on the cusp of stardom, Jesse Eisenberg and Emma Stone, played survivors of a zombie apocalypse on a road trip for their lives in this comedy horror film. "The movie is strictly a compendium of all the ways to off zombies, which can be downed with guns, of course, as well as baseball bats, gardening tools, a toilet bowl lid, even a piano," Manohla Dargis wrote in her review in The Times. THIRD ANNUAL HOWIE MANDEL STAND UP GALA 8 p.m. on the CW. Cedric the Entertainer, Cristela Alonzo, Ron Funches and more perform from the Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Each week, we review the week's news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here. Hi, I'm Jamie Condliffe. Greetings from London. Here's a look at the week's tech news: Recently, a fake video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi hit the web. It was slowed down and pitch adjusted so she appeared drunk or ill. Despite being fake, it was a totem for many Republicans looking to celebrate their dislike for the politician. Facebook and Twitter left the video up; YouTube took it down. Ms. Pelosi accused Facebook of "lying to the public" by not removing the video. Facebook said it had to balance "encouraging free expression and promoting a safe and authentic community." There were so many takes, from support for Facebook to the proclamation of an "existential threat to American democracy." Polarized reactions are understandable: Though virtually everyone dislikes some disinformation, there's no single correct fix. It's also why nothing much that's effectual is happening to solve the broader problem. Facebook's response is predictable. In an op ed for The Washington Post in March, Mark Zuckerberg, the company's chief executive, asked to have less control over speech. "Regulation could set baselines for what's prohibited and require companies to build systems for keeping harmful content to a bare minimum," he wrote. Essentially: Tell Facebook what to block, and it'll block it. A problem: Despite a newfound taste for tech regulation, lawmakers worry about running afoul of the First Amendment if they limit content. (In fact, the White House is looking in the other direction: It wants people to report incidents believed to be political censorship on social media.) Companies aren't constrained by the First Amendment, and can block content if they want. That's what YouTube did with the Pelosi video, explaining: "Spam, scams and other deceptive practices that take advantage of the YouTube community aren't allowed on YouTube." What if this is the new normal and social networks must choose their own red lines, then let the market decide? Maybe there's an uber libertarian site at one extreme, an inoffensively bland one at the other, and everything else sits in between. Users, vote with your eyeballs! There are so many reasons this wouldn't work. The biggest: Nobody likes bland content. Nothing would change. So instead of tech heavyweights and regulators doing nothing, maybe all of them should do ... something? Rasmus Nielsen, a professor of political communication at Oxford University who studies misinformation, said Facebook could do more when misinformation was spotted without taking stuff down act faster, give better warnings around the material, inform users that have shared it, be transparent about how it made decisions. And Cass Sunstein, a legal scholar writing for Bloomberg Opinion, drafted a proposal for regulation blocking content, based on libel law, that he thinks may not infringe the First Amendment. It would ban videos that showed "people in a false and negative light and so are injurious to their reputations unless reasonable observers would be able to tell that those videos are satires or parodies, or are not real." None of this is perfect: They are embryonic, untested proposals. But that may be better than two sides staring blankly at each other, waiting for each other to act. G.D.P.R. is one year old! On May 25, Europe's General Data Protection Regulation turned one year old. What has it achieved? By the numbers, according to statistics from the European Data Protection Board, there have been: 281,088 total cases based on the regulation, of which 37 percent are still active. 56 million euros, or about 62 million, in fines, of which EUR50 million was a single fine against Google. In Ireland, where most of the major tech companies have European head offices for tax reasons, 19 statutory investigations have been started 11 of which focus on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. The regulation has been cited as inspiration for other data rules globally, including in Japan, Brazil, India and China. And many American lawmakers have cited it as a model on which an American regulation could be based. But there have also been unintended consequences: The G.D.P.R's right to access has put reams of information in the hands of the wrong people, for instance, and its right to be forgotten has stopped people from fully exploring the histories of miscreants. "What's not so clear yet is whether G.D.P.R. has had an effect on privacy and on corporate data practices," said Omer Tene, vice president and chief knowledge officer at the International Association of Privacy Professionals. "Has the underlying business model of the internet changed? Is consumer privacy better? I think those questions are very much still open." This year, Mr. Zuckerberg has pitched his vision for a private Facebook. In theory, that looks like more sharing in private groups, ephemeral content and encryption by default on messaging. As I've said, one thing is missing from the pitch: a business model. This past week, we got a glimpse into Facebook's thinking, though, in a letter from its vice president of United States public policy, Kevin Martin, to Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri and an outspoken critic of Facebook who raised questions about its privacy push. Facebook said it planned to collect less data, keep it for less time and hide message content from itself. But there were some telling responses. Would it make inferences about encrypted messages from metadata? There are "many open questions" there. Share metadata around the company? "Outstanding questions." How about its use of transaction data? "Information about transactions can be used for personalization," Mr. Martin responded. Facebook will squeeze as much insight as it can out of whatever data it gets, so its future business model may not differ too much from its current one. Or as Mr. Hawley said: "I thought they'd swear off the creepier possibilities I raised. But instead, they doubled down." Mr. Zuckerberg was a no show at a Canadian privacy hearing. "You're not even in the top 100" executives, the chair of the committee holding the hearing told the executives who were sent on his behalf. Google's shadow work force is huge and controversial. Contractors outnumber regular workers, but make less money, have different benefits plans and get no paid vacation time in the United States. Some contractors said they were pressured into unpaid overtime. Huawei doubled down on its fight with America. It filed a motion Tuesday to accelerate a lawsuit against the White House ban preventing federal agencies from buying Huawei's hardware. Qualcomm wants its antitrust ruling paused. It asked a federal judge to stay the provisions of her recent ruling while it appeals. Twitch blocked new accounts from live streaming, after a troll attack flooded its service with troubling content. Hollywood is using artificial intelligence to help make movies. Software learns from box office data to see how casting changes could affect a movie's takings. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
MINNEAPOLIS Narayana R. Kocherlakota, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, was once a leading opponent of the Federal Reserve's efforts to stimulate the economy. Today, he has emerged as the only senior official arguing publicly that the Fed should do even more. The Fed's leadership, including Janet L. Yellen, soon to be the chairwoman but then the No. 2, decided in December that the economy was strong enough to start scaling back a long running stimulus campaign. The Fed's policy making committee, which meets Tuesday and Wednesday, is widely expected to announce another 10 billion cut in monthly purchases of Treasury and mortgage backed securities. But Mr. Kocherlakota (pronounced COACH er la ko tah) spent recent months crisscrossing the Midwestern region served by the Minneapolis Fed, telling audiences in Minnesota and Montana and Michigan that persistent unemployment has created "a time of testing" for the Fed comparable to the rise of inflation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. So far, he says, the Fed is falling short. "As this goes on, there's a temptation to think of this problem as being beyond what we as monetary policy makers can address," Mr. Kocherlakota said in an interview in mid January in his office overlooking the Mississippi River. "We shouldn't let the persistence of the problem lead us to the conclusion that we shouldn't do more." Mr. Kocherlakota's outspoken advocacy for stronger action is particularly striking because he spent his first three years at the Minneapolis Fed, after his appointment in 2009, loudly arguing that the Fed should do less. It also represents a sharp break from the Minneapolis Fed's longstanding association with economists who contend that monetary policy lacks the power to reduce unemployment. Now, for the first time since Mr. Kocherlakota publicly changed his mind in September 2012, he begins a one year term as a voting member of the Fed's policy making committee, bringing new attention to his views. Mr. Kocherlakota, a former chairman of the economics department at the University of Minnesota, does not oppose reductions in the Fed's bond purchases, but he wants to compensate by strengthening its plans to suppress short term interest rates. That is a view he ruefully acknowledges has not gained much traction with his colleagues. Mr. Kocherlakota's shift has surprised and dismayed some people at the Minneapolis Fed and economists who supported his appointment because they expected him to be a principled opponent of the Fed's stimulus campaign. Edward C. Prescott, who won the Nobel in economic science in 2004 and is on the Minneapolis Fed's research staff, said Mr. Kocherlakota was misjudging the Fed's abilities. "It is an established scientific fact that monetary policy has had virtually no effect on output and employment in the U.S. since the formation of the Fed," Professor Prescott, also on the faculty of Arizona State University, wrote in an email. Bond buying, he wrote, "is as effective in bringing prosperity as rain dancing is in bringing rain." Mr. Kocherlakota, 50, is the youngest member of the Fed's policy making committee. Like many prominent macroeconomists, he is a quick wit who likes to argue, and he has remained confident in his views even as those views have changed. A football fan, he also likes to read British novels, which he sometimes refers to in speeches. He said he was reading "Brideshead Revisited" for the fourth or fifth time because, "One way to relax is to read things you've read before." Mr. Kocherlakota was born in Baltimore and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba. His name is Indian, reflecting his father's ancestry. He enrolled at Princeton at age 15, where he developed an interest in economics because it married mathematics and public policy. He earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago at age 23, and began a successful academic career with a diverse set of research interests. The financial crisis rekindled his interest in public policy and, in 2009, he joined the Minneapolis Fed as an established critic of the government's efforts to revive the economy. Mr. Kocherlakota said he reacted to new evidence "in the only way that a sensible person can." Tim Gruber for The New York Times As a prominent professor at the University of Minnesota, Mr. Kocherlakota signed an open letter in September 2008 expressing "great concern" about the government's efforts to save financial firms from collapse, and another in January 2009 opposing the Obama administration's fiscal stimulus plan. In August 2011, after joining the Fed, he publicly criticized the central bank's decision to expand its monetary stimulus campaign in an unusual video statement posted on the website of the Minneapolis Fed, which warned in part that the effort was likely to unleash inflation. Mr. Kocherlakota now says that his views had already had begun to change. He had given a speech on Michigan's Upper Peninsula in the summer of 2010 asserting that the Fed largely lacked the power to reduce unemployment because the problem was not a lack of job openings, but a lack of workers qualified to fill those openings. "Monetary stimulus has provided conditions so that manufacturing plants want to hire new workers," Mr. Kocherlakota said back then. "But the Fed does not have a means to transform construction workers into manufacturing workers." Over the next two years, Mr. Kocherlakota said that a wave of research gradually convinced him that he was wrong. Mr. Kocherlakota had speculated, for example, that some workers might be unable to take jobs in other cities because their mortgage debts exceeded the value of their homes. Research by his own staff, however, found little evidence of this "house lock" phenomenon. "It's a little embarrassing to say this, but you make a speech in August of 2010 and it inspires a whole quantity of work where people say, 'This is what Kocherlakota says and we will now show in this paper that Kocherlakota was wrong,' " he said. "There's a number of ways that people can react to that, and I reacted in the only way that a sensible person can, which is to update." In September 2012, shortly after the Fed announced a fresh expansion of its stimulus campaign, Mr. Kocherlakota returned to Michigan's Upper Peninsula to announce that he had changed his mind. Contrary to his prediction, inflation was slowing. That meant the Fed had the opportunity and responsibility to do more. The speech surprised people on both sides of the debate about Fed policy. Proponents of stimulus hailed Mr. Kocherlakota for what they described as intellectual honesty. Some of his former allies saw evidence that he had never shared their understanding of the way the economy works. "Suffice to say that I am very surprised by his current policy views and how he articulates them," Stephen Williamson, a professor of economics at Washington University in Saint Louis, said in an email. "I don't think his views have changed. I think this is just a side of Narayana we didn't know was there." In October, Mr. Kocherlakota fired Patrick J. Kehoe, an economics professor at the University of Minnesota, from his position as a monetary policy adviser at the Minneapolis Fed. Another Fed adviser, Ellen R. McGrattan, was given a new position as a consultant. Both Professor Kehoe and Ms. McGrattan are proponents of the view that monetary policy has little power to lift an economy from recession. Some critics, including Professor Prescott, suggested that Mr. Kocherlakota was limiting internal debate and shifting the focus of the Minneapolis Fed's research. Mr. Kocherlakota declined to comment on the changes directly but said that he sees a "tremendous continuity" in the bank's research agenda. His board issued a statement backing his leadership. Mr. Kocherlakota did not just join the advocates of stimulus; he surpassed them. Most Fed officials have now concluded that the central bank is doing enough. But Mr. Kocherlakota maintains that the Fed should declare its intent to keep short term interest rates near zero at least as long as the unemployment rate is above 5.5 percent. The unemployment rate, 6.7 percent in December, is rapidly approaching the 6.5 percent threshold the Fed established in December 2012. He said, however, that he did not necessarily plan to issue a new round of public dissents if the Fed under Ms. Yellen continues to retreat. And does he think that he is making a difference in the debate? "I try to be helpful," he said. "I find the work as rewarding as can be." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Behind every great fortune, someone once said not quite Balzac, though he often gets the credit lies a great crime. The fortune amassed by Cookie (John Magaro) and King Lu (Orion Lee), partners in a mid 19th century artisanal snack food start up in a rough section of the Oregon Territory, is a modest one: a cloth sack filled with shells, cutup coins and company scrip. The crime that brings them that bounty is correspondingly small scale. Under cover of night, the two men sneak over to a pasture near the cabin they share and milk someone else's cow. (King Lu takes lookout duty in a tree, while Cookie fills the pail.) That patient, inscrutable animal is the title character, and in effect the female lead, of "First Cow," Kelly Reichardt's deceptively simple and wondrously subtle new film. A parable of economics and politics, with shrewd insights into the workings of supply and demand, scarcity and scale and other puzzles of the marketplace, the movie is also keenly attuned to details of history, both human and natural. Even the mud looks like preindustrial, frontier mud, and the motley, multicultural assortment of traders, trappers and prospectors who find themselves spattered by it seem equally untouched by modernity. "History hasn't gotten here yet," King Lu remarks. And yet at the same time, the citizens of this semi wilderness are perfectly recognizable: creatures of will and whim from every corner of the world, driven by ambition and desire, capable of savage cruelty and angelic tenderness, with history clinging like a burr to their clothes. But that's just us. The cow (identified in the end credits as Evie) may be the only bovine in the territory, but she is part of a nonhuman cast that includes at least one owl, an assortment of very good dogs, an apparently tame crow and a typically amoral cat whose mischief kicks the plot toward its climax. The people believe they have dominion over the animals, the land and its products, but their sovereignty is an illusion. We are, for the most part, big talkers with meager destinies, at the mercy of luck, global capitalism (which was a thing even then) and one another. Though it surveys a grim, Hobbesian struggle for survival, "First Cow" has more on its mind and in its viewfinder than the nasty, brutish war of each against all, or the systems of domination intended to keep that war in check. Even in the harshest circumstances, there is still room still a primal need for sweetness, for companionship, for art. Reichardt, who wrote the script with Jon Raymond, her frequent collaborator (his novel "The Half Life" provides the source material), introduces the story with one of William Blake's Proverbs of Hell: "The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship." We build our homes out of fellow feeling, in other words. King Lu and Cookie, roommates as well as business partners, illustrate this wisdom. They meet in the wilderness, while Cookie is miserably employed as the cook and chief forager in a gang of trappers on their way to Fort Tillicum. (His real name is Otis Figowitz). King Lu is hiding out in the woods, running for his life after a murderous bit of trouble with some Russians. They strike up a conversation that carries an unspoken current of curiosity and budding affection. The possibility of violence hovers in the air around them like a damp chill. Cookie's companions can barely exchange words without coming to blows, and the same ethos seems to govern Fort Tillicum. (The actual governor, owner of the titular cow, is a noble rotter known as the Chief Factor, played with suitably repellent panache by Toby Jones.) But what develops between Cookie and King Lu is an exception to this rule of universal antagonism, an instant bond that 19th century American writers might have described as natural sympathy. It can also be called love. Their temperaments are distinct and complementary. Both have traveled far, but King Lu's journeys have an air of cosmopolitan adventure: Born in China, he made his way to Oregon by way of London and other world capitals, and dreams of opening a hotel in San Francisco. Cookie, by contrast, was orphaned early and has endured a life of indentured labor and hard traveling. He is quiet and sensitive, a game if occasionally skeptical audience for his friend's flights of speculation, worldly learning and homespun philosophy. Cookie is also a gifted baker, and this skill, combined with King Lu's entrepreneurial gumption and that pilfered milk, brings about a fateful change of circumstance. Their "oily cakes" nuggets of fried dough garnished with honey and a bit of cinnamon become the Cronuts of Fort Tillicum, drawing lines of eager patrons willing to spend hard won wealth on a morsel of fried dough. The cakes remind one customer of something his mother used to make. For the Chief Factor, they are a taste of England. They are, for the audience, a reminder that luxury can be a necessity, that pleasure is an elemental requirement of the species, as necessary as shelter or bread. And the pleasures of "First Cow" are deep and substantial. Reichardt's style is direct and restrained, sometimes to the point of austerity, but at her best in "Old Joy," "Wendy and Lucy" and in this, perhaps her finest feature so far she finds a rich poetic resonance in plain, unshowy images and words. (The rough, painterly cinematography is by Christopher Blauvelt). And also a flinty vein of humor. The pomposity of the Chief Factor and his circle, who talk of Paris fashions and military discipline, is ridiculous (if also potentially lethal). The occasional mild quarrels that bubble up between Cookie and King Lu have their own charming absurdity, as if Robert Altman were directing an episode of "The Odd Couple" written by Samuel Beckett. Lee and Magaro are easygoing, appealing performers, and they work in relaxed, natural counterpoint. King Lu draws Cookie out of his melancholy diffidence, while Cookie calms some of his friend's restlessness. Because of an introductory scene set many years in their future an implicit link between this movie and "Wendy and Lucy," featuring Alia Shawkat we suspect something terrible will befall them, but this foreboding sharpens both the comedy and the tenderness of the time we spend in their company. It also crystallizes Reichardt and Raymond's ideas about history and politics about how the simplest undertakings ensnare people in complicated relations of power and competition. "First Cow" is fundamentally a western: It takes up questions of civilization, solidarity and barbarism on the American frontier. And like many great westerns it critiques some of the genre's foundational myths with bracing, beautiful rigor, including the myth of heroic individualism. The quote from Blake might be bookended by one from Walt Whitman, who wrote that "whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Sitting in the living room of her family's 19th century colonial home, Lesley Fowks recalled the day in 2002 that her son, Ian Brady, burst in with an announcement: the rusting 1977 Volkswagen camper van sitting in the side yard of a nearby house could be his "for free." The young man, then 13, explained that he'd be doing yard work in exchange for the nonrunning vehicle. Well aware of her son's infatuation with this derelict VW, Ms. Fowks walked with him to the house, a block away, to investigate. The camper had been parked under the same tree since she; her husband, Tom Brady; and Ian moved into the neighborhood in 1991. At the time, Ms. Fowks didn't know anything about the camper's owner, James Rose, who had died that year at 78. Nearly obscured by a curtain of trees, the house on East Ridgewood Avenue was also a mystery. "It looked dilapidated," she said. "We thought it might be abandoned. People called it the 'tree house' because it was built around the trees on the property." She would learn that Rose, who had designed the home, was a pioneer and a leader in the modern American landscape architecture movement. The house, which he built in 1953, exemplified his hallmark of integrating structures with the natural setting. A renovation in 1969 added a rooftop garden and a zendo for meditation. Rose, an avid traveler, bought his camper at a northern New Jersey VW dealership in 1977 and drove it to Mexico that year. A turista sticker remains on a passenger side window. Known formally as the Campmobile, the model was a factory contracted conversion of the Type 2 van, popularly known in the United States as the microbus or just bus. Westfalia, a German company, performed the conversions. More a mobile campsite than a mini R.V., the outfitted van has sleeping for up to four, a sink with a hookup for running water and a 120 volt connection for campgrounds. Through the mid 1980s, Rose drove his camper to schools around the country, lecturing on landscape architecture. Several visits took him to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to address students of Dean Cardasis. Mr. Cardasis, who is now the graduate program director at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., recalled riding in the camper. "Rose loved to travel, but he was very frugal," Mr. Cardasis, whose book about the architect will be published next year, said in a telephone interview. "He didn't buy it as someone who liked to camp, but as a practical vehicle for his travels." Before Rose died, Mr. Cardasis and others helped to establish the James Rose Center for Landscape Architectural Research and Design to preserve the Ridgewood home. The property was gradually improved, and it opened for tours and to support educational programs. The camper, however, sat unused and deteriorating for the next decade. By the time Ms. Fowks's son developed his fixation, it looked forlorn, sitting on four flat tires. Rust spots had broken out over its body, and seedlings were growing in the drip rails that surround the van's roof. "I had seen it when growing up," Ian Brady, who is now 24, said. "There was something about it being parked there for so long. I knew my mom was wondering about it as well." Before the barter deal was struck, Ms. Fowks had asked about buying the VW, an idea that didn't seem far fetched, as camping had long been a part of her life. Mr. Cardasis told her that the camper was not for sale; she felt it needed too much work anyway. "I told my son, 'It's a wreck. The man doesn't want to sell it, and you're only 12,' " she said. Refusing to take "no" for an answer, the boy hounded Mr. Cardasis to sell the camper whenever he saw him at the Rose house. "He so impressed me with his passion for that van," Mr. Cardasis, who became the center's director, said. "From the beginning, I had a sense that there needed to be a way for him to get it. So we made the deal for him to work in trade for it." After completing his day's tasks, Ian would clean the camper. "He spent hours with Windex and mildew remover, and used steel wool for the rust spots," Ms. Fowks said. "It was filthy. You could barely see the plaid pattern on the driver's seat." When Ian had fulfilled his obligation, the camper, which he nicknamed Earl, was towed to his house. A local shop got the engine running, but it took extensive work at a VW specialist, Wagon Works in Englewood, N.J., to make the van roadworthy. At the first opportunity, Ms. Fowks took Ian and his sister, Jesse, now a sophomore in college, camping. With flower magnets covering the rust spots, they hit the road. "Compared to a tent, it was a luxury," Ms. Fowks said. The original engine gave out in 2006 and was replaced. In 2009, Ms. Fowks had the body repaired and repainted for what she called a bargain price. Her bills for the "free" camper eventually tallied 9,000; she now considers it a family treasure. The factory color, called Marino Yellow, appears to be the same shade used for school buses. Ms. Fowks would know. A 1975 graduate of Parsons School of Design in Manhattan, she briefly drove a school bus before starting a 30 year career in fashion and merchandising in New York. Today, she teaches fashion and design at Westwood Regional High School, and the camper sometimes serves as a prop for student projects. The Westfalia camping equipment remains intact. The pop top roof is a highlight, providing stand up room and a fold down double bed. The back seat folds into the somewhat narrower lower bed. A mosquito screen was provided so the rear hatch could be left open. There's a built in ice chest, but this van was not equipped with the optional refrigerator and propane cooktop of the Deluxe model. Ms. Fowks uses a Coleman stove and a hot plate when camping. A wood grain table installs in front of the rear bench seat, and the front passenger seat swivels 180 degrees to face it. The van has no air conditioning, and the heater, typically weak in the old air cooled VW engines, is barely functional because ducts are missing from the engine compartment. Ms. Fowks said she uses the camper only in warm weather. A short ride revealed the van's relaxed manner. The 2 liter, 4 cylinder engine, with just 67 horsepower, labors to push it to 40 m.p.h., but settles into the familiar VW "putta putta putta" once cruising. The ride is fairly comfortable, with some wallowing over bumps. A petite and fit 59 year old, Ms. Fowks wrestles with the unassisted steering, and it's a long reach to shift the 4 speed manual transmission. "There's a trick to getting it into fourth," she said, twirling the gangly shift lever until finding the slot. "Even though it's a lot of work to drive, it's an instant stress reliever for me," she added. "There are no gadgets, not even a radio. You're just watching the road, looking out the windshield." The owner's manual lists a top speed of 75 m.p.h., but Ms. Fowks and her son agreed that for the sake of stability the comfortable limit was considerably lower. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Spencer Davis, the leader of a rock group under his name that had some of the most propulsive and enduring hits of the 1960s, including "Gimme Some Lovin'," "I'm a Man" and "Keep On Running" all sung not by him but by a teenage Steve Winwood died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 81. The cause was pneumonia, said Bob Birk, his booking agent and friend, adding that Mr. Davis had been hospitalized for the last week. Mr. Davis co wrote "Gimme Some Lovin'," his group's biggest hit. He played rhythm guitar in the band and occasionally sang lead vocals, lending his baritone voice mostly to blues oriented material. But it was Mr. Winwood, who was only 15 when Mr. Davis discovered him, who emerged as the group's star, singing lead on its hit singles and later becoming an essential figure in British rock through his work with the bands Traffic and Blind Faith and in a long solo career. After Mr. Winwood abruptly left the Spencer Davis Group in 1967 to form Traffic, Mr. Davis kept the band going through multiple incarnations. In 1968, a new iteration of the Spencer Davis Group enjoyed two Top 40 hits in Britain, "Time Seller" and "Mr. Second Class." The band did not have similar success in the United States, but a song co written by Mr. Davis and recorded by the band that year, "Don't Want You No More," became significant in 1969 when the Allman Brothers recorded a cover version as the opening track on their debut album. Spencer David Nelson Davies was born on July 17, 1939, in Swansea, Wales. He later dropped the "e" in his surname because "Davies" is pronounced "Davis" in Britain but "Daveys" in the United States, where he hoped to expand his career. Mr. Davis grew up during the Blitz. "The bombed city center was my playground as a child," he told the website Music Illuminati in 2016. "I watched the town being absolutely destroyed." His father was a paratrooper during World War II, while his Uncle Herman, who played mandolin, was a musical influence on young Spencer: At age 6 he learned harmonica and accordion. After graduating from the Dynevor School at 16, Mr. Davis moved to London and found clerical work with a bank and the government customs and excise department. Crushed by the dullness of that work, he went back to school at 20, studying German at the University of Birmingham. He also became fluent in French and Spanish, skills that later helped his band become popular throughout Europe. Among musicians, he earned the nickname Professor. In 1963, Mr. Davis discovered a group in a suburban Birmingham club, the Muff Woody Jazz Band, which included the musical prodigy Steve Winwood and his older brother Muff. Mr. Davis immediately recognized the younger brother's extraordinary skills. "There was this kid playing piano like Oscar Peterson and singing like Ray Charles," he told The Guardian in 2014. (Mr. Winwood also played guitar.) Mr. Davis hired Steve Winwood for his band, taking on Muff, who switched from guitar to bass, only because he could drive his underage younger brother to gigs. With Pete York on drums, the group became known as the Rhythm and Blues Quartet and performed R B covers in Birmingham clubs before landing a steady gig at London's high profile Marquee club. The band's name was changed to the Spencer Davis Group in 1964. As the story goes, the other members agreed to the new name because Mr. Davis was willing to do interviews, allowing them to sleep longer. The group's live reputation attracted the attention of the music executive Chris Blackwell, who became its manager and signed it to his fledgling Island label, which was then distributed through the larger Fontana Records. The band's first single was a cover of the blues artist John Lee Hooker's "Dimples," which appeared on its debut album, titled "Their First LP," in 1965. By the start of the next year, the band had a No. 1 hit in Britain with "Keep On Running." Written by the Jamaican artist Jackie Edwards as a skeletal ska piece, the song was transformed by the band into an exuberant, Motown style R B rave up. To get a distinct tone for his lead guitar, Steve Winwood used the same fuzz pedal that Keith Richards had employed on the Rolling Stones hit "Satisfaction." "Keep On Running" reached No. 3 in Britain but only No. 74 on the Billboard chart in the U.S. "The Second Album," which included "Keep On Running," wasn't even released stateside. The Spencer Davis Group's peak arrived in late 1966 and early 1967 with a one two punch, starting with "Gimme Some Lovin'," written by Mr. Davis and the Winwood brothers, which was fired by Muff Winwood's dynamic bass line but was most notable for his brother's surging Hammond organ and ecstatic vocal. It sold more than a million copies and became a touchstone of British R B, as did its follow up, "I'm a Man," written by Steve Winwood and the group's producer, Jimmy Miller. "I'm a Man" was also a million seller and became a hit again in 1969, via a cover by the American horn band Chicago. The members of the Spencer Davis Group appeared as themselves in the 1966 British musical comedy "The Ghost Goes Gear," but the group was unraveling. Yearning to explore a more expansive range of styles, Steve Winwood left to form Traffic in 1967, while his brother became an A R executive at Island Records. Wounded by the departures, the resourceful Mr. Davis rallied, forming a new band with Phil Sawyer on lead guitar and vocals and Eddie Hardin on keyboards and vocals. That band contributed half the tracks to the soundtrack of the 1968 British comedy "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush"; the rest were provided by Traffic. That year the group also released the album "With Their New Face On," whose vigorous, string driven lead single, "Time Seller," anticipated the hit sound of the Electric Light Orchestra. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The Galleries column this week is taking a quick tour of Los Angeles, where several fine shows are now on view. Start at Karma, in the West Adams neighborhood, near the Underground Museum; the others are downtown. The best way into the winningly sordid group show that Taylor Trabulus, associate director at Gavin Brown, put together for Karma's new West Adams location is through Reba Maybury's black and white cardboard cutout. (This branch of the Zurich based Karma is unrelated to the East Village gallery of the same name.) The image, which greets visitors with the defiant sang froid of a swingers' club host, shows Ms. Maybury in nothing but an earring and thigh high boots. But Ms. Maybury, who also works as a dominatrix, has clothed the cutout with a necklace of 16 color photographs, each showing a submissive, naked male client with the Photoshopped face of a different aging white rock star. The same kind of aggressive repurposing of commodified sexuality runs through the show's nearly two dozen other pieces, if not always so explicitly. Janiva Ellis's discreetly blistering oil painting "The Okiest Doke" shows the gloved hand of some cartoon character presenting a communion wafer to a distorted image of a black man's face, and an untitled display rack by the experimental fashion label Rottingdean Bazaar holds 96 Yoko Ono style instructional labels in plastic clamshells. Some of the instructions are too cute, but a few, like "Use the Winnings From a Lottery Scratchcard to Buy a Les Miserables Souvenir T Shirt," cut through our compulsively consumerist mass media culture right to its most bitter depths. The smallest of the three sculptures that comprise this quietly overwhelming show is an untitled ziggurat of blackened cinder blocks, rusted steel and plastic wrapped fiberglass from 1991. The steel, a kind of breastplate bolted together from two separate sheets and once painted green, is the size and shape of a 1920s automobile roof, though Mr. Grosvenor made it himself. The fiberglass, a smaller but similar panel, is held about seven feet above it by a pale gray pole, as if to form a parabolic spiritual antenna. But because each color, shape and texture sits next to another with which it doesn't quite jibe the crumpled, whitish plastic wrap on the horizontal fiberglass, for example, next to the matte gray, vertical pole your eyes can never find purchase long enough to form a singular impression. Instead the piece works, despite its apparently simple construction, as an inexhaustibly interactive visual machine. Two recent works are disarming because of their off kilter resemblance to functional objects. An untitled masonry wall passes for a ready made, thanks to the addition of an aluminum coat rack and two glass mirror balls. A 2016 construction brings to mind a gymnastics rig for extraterrestrials: two 30 foot aluminum poles rest across winged pommel horses behind what looks like a ruined fiberglass trampoline. Even a quick leapfrog across the career of Takesada Matsutani, who was born in Osaka, Japan, and is now based in Paris, reveals tremendous formal variation. From his Gutai period, "A Visual Point A" (1965), a three dimensional, vinyl glue form built onto a golden yellow canvas, contains a disturbing horizontal slit that is simultaneously a toothless mouth, a sexual eclipse and an empty eye socket. "Nagare 8," from 1983, is a 32 foot long paper banner in which two intense graphite stripes frame a row of turpentine aided swooshes and drips. The constant is an almost endlessly fruitful tension between the abstract appeal of a colored plane and the inevitably concrete materiality of its execution. In a few hard edge acrylic abstractions from 1971 and '72, it's a question of color choice graphic shapes in blues, oranges and reds that harmonize more than they contrast make it hard to distinguish where any surface stops or starts. In the graphite only pieces he began making just a few years later, it's a product of the elfish fickleness of the medium itself: A shimmering, silvery column, in "Stream black and white," records each stroke of the artist's hand but only from certain angles. The very best internet art I've seen recently is Ludovica Gioscia's new group of analog objects at the year old Baert Gallery. Ms. Gioscia captures the amorphous fungibility of the digital world not just by breaking down and reworking pieces from her previous shows the spray painted, laser cut letters of "Pan" (2010) now cast a "shadow" of miscellaneous objects, many of them painted a dark eye shadow blue but also by arranging the new pieces so as to almost suggest that they constitute a single installation. A Chromogenic color print is part of Ludovica Gioscia's show at Baert Gallery. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
To understand why you might want the new cellular Apple Watch, put yourself in the shoes of a wealthy person who drives a weekend car. (I promise this is a fun exercise.) In this situation, your iPhone is like your everyday workhorse vehicle, with the muscle to speed through emails, calendar invitations and social media posts. But when it comes time to unwind, you can leave the house with just a cellular Apple Watch the equivalent of the weekend car and still have access to a lightweight phone that can handle calls and text messages. In other words, wearing the Apple Watch Series 3 with cellular connectivity, which Apple will release Friday, is like owning a leisure phone that is excessive but situationally useful. Apple's first wearable to include cellular may come in handy when you are at the gym and want to leave your phone in the locker, or when you go out for a run and want to remain reachable. After testing the cellular watch for a week, I found it to be an excellent smart watch that is a significant improvement over the first Apple Watch, which was slow, confusing to use and deeply flawed. But the cellular version is a luxury that most people probably will not need. The price you pay for those brief moments of respite from your iPhone is steep: at least 399 for the hardware, plus 10 a month for access on your cellphone plan for some carriers. And I seldom found reasons to use the watch without my iPhone to justify the extra cost. There may also be some early kinks for Apple to work out with the new cellular Watch. Some reviewers discovered that the device occasionally lost its cellular connection, for example. Apple said on Wednesday that the issue was related to the watch inadvertently connecting to open Wi Fi networks that lacked internet connectivity, and that it was investigating a software fix. In the end, some people who want a wearable device for things like fitness tracking and a quick glance at mobile notifications will probably be happy with the Series 3 without cellular, which costs 329. Like its predecessors, the Apple Watch Series 3 is a computer worn around the wrist, with a miniature touch screen. The main difference with the cellular Apple Watch is that some important features, like placing calls, texting and streaming music, will work when you are not near your phone; the watch shares the same phone number and cellular plan with your iPhone. To help determine whether the cellular watch is right for you, I abandoned my iPhone to test the watch in a number of common situations. Here's how that went. Over the weekend, my partner and I made plans to go to dinner at a sushi restaurant. I used the Apple Watch to summon a Lyft car to pick us up at home. At the sushi bar, I liked that I didn't have a smartphone constantly buzzing in my pocket, though I got a text that I quickly responded to on the watch using an emoji. My partner and I enjoyed 90 minutes of intimate conversation over omakase with minimal distraction, though I was a bit envious that she could Instagram our gorgeous nigiri. (Alas, the watch does not have a miniature spy camera.) Verdict: I could have had roughly the same experience with just an iPhone put on Do Not Disturb mode and a bit of self discipline. For several days, I wore just the watch while walking my dogs. Not having a phone freed up valuable space in my pockets for other items, like my keys, my wallet, dog treats and bags. I liked that the Apple Watch tracked my steps and walking distance to make dog walking feel more like exercise than a chore. I placed a call to my partner with the watch to tell her where to meet me at a park; she said the call sounded crystal clear. It was also nice that with just the watch, I could still be reachable via phone or text by my colleagues during morning walks but emails took several minutes to show up after they were sent. It turns out that while texts and calls are done directly on the cellular watch, emails still rely on the iPhone's pushing emails to the cloud, which then transmits the message to your watch. Verdict: The watch is good for staying reachable via phone or texts. But in those brief moments when you need to step away from a computer during work hours, a smartphone is still necessary if you rely heavily on email, as I do. I wore the watch and took a pair of AirPods, Apple's wireless earbuds, to a rock climbing gym. Again, I left my iPhone behind. At the gym, I opened the Workout app to track my heart rate and calories burned throughout the workout. During breaks, I used Siri to write a few quick texts to some friends to make plans for the week. I put on the AirPods in the hope of streaming songs on the watch from Apple Music, only to realize that this capability has not yet been released. Apple said music streaming for the cellular watch will come out next month. Verdict: It was nice being able to stay in touch with people at the gym without a phone bulging in my pocket, but I'd be happy unplugging for a while and tracking my workout with a noncellular Apple Watch. As for whether streaming music makes a cellular watch worth owning, I unfortunately can't tell you yet. Here's where leaving my phone behind and relying only on the watch did not make sense: during grocery shopping. The watch doesn't have a web browser, let alone a big enough screen, for looking up recipes. But when it came time to check out, I hit the side button to activate Apple Pay and quickly paid for the groceries. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
COLUMBUS, Ind. Getting around this city, located 45 minutes south of Indianapolis, can take a bit longer than expected. It's not large, with 46,000 people, but the Midwestern friendliness dictates a certain pace. At four way stop signs, drivers wait and wave the others forward with a smile. Even the mayor, James D. Lienhoop, admitted that if he has business to attend to he doesn't walk along the main drag, Washington Street, because it's impossible to avoid conversations that slow him down. But it's a company town with a twist: It has an unusual depth of remarkable modern, postmodern and contemporary architecture, making it one of America's most design sophisticated communities. The Saturday Evening Post once called Columbus "Athens on the prairie" for its dozens of notable buildings, particularly by the Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen (including the strikingly spire topped North Christian Church, 1964) and his father, Eliel Saarinen (the blocky but ethereal First Christian Church, 1942). Later contributions have come from Robert Venturi, I. M. Pei and Richard Meier, among others. A onetime Cummins chief executive, J. Irwin Miller, had a defining role in shaping the cityscape, not least with his own home, Eero Saarinen's Miller House (1957), considered a touchstone of midcentury design. Most lastingly, he established the Cummins Foundation to encourage serious architecture: If you picked from its list of architects, the foundation would pay the design fees. The architect Robert A. M. Stern, a historian of his field who designed the 1995 Columbus Regional Hospital here, said recently that the city had "far and away" the most significant built environment for a town its size. "As Florence is to Italy, Columbus is to Indiana," he added. A recently released movie, "Columbus," even uses the best known buildings so prominently that they are almost characters in the film. One major donor to the 1 million budget of "Exhibit Columbus" is the Heritage Fund, a local foundation that contributed 150,000. "The town has been successful because it's been willing to experiment," said Heritage's president, Tracy Souza. Earlier this month, Columbus was a hive of experimentation as the visiting designers worked on their installations, which range from the playful to the serious, aided by many small companies, from cement producers to equipment makers. Even a group of students from local high schools was getting in on the act with a piece made of plastic string called "Between the Threads." It riffs on the legacy of Alexander Girard, the industrial and textile designer who collaborated with Eero Saarinen on Miller House and once proposed a color scheme for all the Victorian storefronts on Washington Street. A J Mast for The New York Times Some of "Exhibit Columbus" projects refer to the city's famous buildings; others just take the opportunity to dream freely within its architecturally rich framework. Alex Mustonen, a co founder of the droll hybrid art and architecture firm Snarkitecture, took the latter approach with his installation "Playhouse." He arrived from New York for a progress checkup. "It looks so small," was Mr. Mustonen's briefly disappointed first response when he saw a side view of "Playhouse" on the immaculate shop floor of Kramer Furniture and Cabinet Makers, a family run business. The white plastic structure, a platform under a series of arches, appears deep from the entrance, but the top and bottom come together quickly at the far end. The forced perspective means that only children can fully experience it a cheeky Snarkitecture move. It will be installed in an alley adjacent to a children's museum. "We're making moments accessible for people who might not normally engage with architecture and design," Mr. Mustonen said, declaring himself pleased with the structure pending some improvements to its stability. "It's an invitation." The Snarkitecture piece is one of five installations along Washington Street, each budgeted at 10,000. "Pause," by the Copenhagen based married duo known as Pettersen Hein, comprises a series of five pairs of concrete benches, each pair attached by a steel bar, that will be placed centrally to provide a respite from the design onslaught, akin to a straphanger's grab bar in subway cars. "They're conversation pieces," said Magnus Pettersen, who was fabricating the benches at Shelby Materials, a local concrete supplier. "We want to connect people." His hands were messy as he mixed concrete to get the right swirl of green and pink. He and his wife, Lea Hein, were in town for a month, with their children. "The whole city is helping out, and we feel really welcome." Mr. Pettersen added. Another five installations, which were awarded the J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize, will serve as the marquee projects of the exhibition. Landmark Columbus created the prize to honor the family's design legacy, and it provides a beefier budget of 70,000 each. The title refers to a circular lake adjacent to the project site; the 1993 park was designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh and Stanley Saitowitz. "The lake is a perfect mirror, but our circle is rough and diffuse," Mr. Aranda said. Reactions have varied. "I had one guy come by and say, 'May they rest in peace,'" Mr. Aranda said, laughing. "Any time you work with stone, you'll get these graveyard comparisons, and that's O.K." Stonehenge was another popular point of comparison. Kelly Lazzell, a nursing student, came past the partly complete "Another Circle" as she walked her dogs. "At first I thought, another construction project," she said, but she warmed to the concept when she was told that some of the stones were positioned as backrests so that people could sit on the grass and watch movies. That people have vastly different interpretations of art and design was not lost on Mr. Aranda. "One of the most interesting things about doing the project here is that it's deeply divided politically it's purple," he said. "You have to shoot for a universal message, and that's more challenging." The atomization of the elements in "Another Circle" seemed to reflect the trajectory of design and the rest of the culture since the days of soaring, confident, Saarinen style modernism. As Mr. Aranda put it: "The world is broken. What do we do with the pieces?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
AUTOMAKERS from Japan and Detroit have been watching the improvement of Korean automakers with some concern. But here's a bit of cheery news for the worried competition: the new Kia Sorento isn't perfect. The 2011 Sorento, which went on sale in January, is now a Korean American; it is assembled at Kia's new plant in West Point, Ga. The new version also abandons the body on frame construction of a truck in favor of the unibody structure of cars. Orth Hedrick, the director of product planning, said Kia decided a unibody was needed to compete with the Toyota RAV4, Ford Edge, Chevy Equinox and Honda CR V. The change, Kia reasoned, should give the Sorento sharper handling and a better ride but I found the ride highly disappointing. The Sorento comes with either a 4 cylinder engine or a V 6, and either is offered with front drive or all wheel drive. That's good; some automakers reserve all wheel drive for V 6 models only. Or they offer no choice of engines. The standard transmission is a 6 speed automatic, matching the Equinox and the Edge. The CR V and RAV4 offer no more than 5 speeds. The least expensive Sorento is 23,190 with front drive and 4 cylinders. The least expensive V 6 is 26,190. All wheel drive adds 1,700 with either engine. Kia provided two Sorento test models, which I drove during the same week. The first was a front drive EX 4 cylinder; with options like heated front seats, a navigation system and leather upholstery it cost 29,340. The second was an all wheel drive EX with the V 6 and a base price of 29,890. The long options list included the navigation system, an Infinity stereo, leather upholstery, heated front seats and a "panoramic sunroof," which brought the total to 34,840. With a length of 183.9 inches, the Sorento is eight inches shorter than Kia's big body on frame S.U.V., the Borrego, and nine inches longer than the compact Sportage. The Sorento is a few inches longer than the CR V and RAV4, but shorter than the Equinox. The Sorento has a little less second row legroom than its prime competitors. But two 6 foot adults can fit in back, assuming the people in front are willing to compromise a bit on their space. A third row is standard on V 6 versions. But the accommodations in the far back are so tight they are suitable only for small children seeking distant refuge from parental supervision. The third seat is 700 on 4 cylinder models, but there's an expensive footnote: Kia requires the purchase of another option package for 1,000 or 1,500, depending on the model. The Sorento has about 37 cubic feet of cargo space behind the second row. For larger loads, the second row flops down. If you use all three rows, cargo space drops to 9 cubic feet, about the same as some sports cars. So far, then, the Sorento is pretty nice. Then you come to the driving, where Mr. Hedrick, the product planner, said the goal was a sporty feel, including good control of body lean on corners. The body lean is controlled, but unless the road is smooth, the ride is stiff and rough. In addition, the tires suffer from compulsive confrontation syndrome. They whack into tar strips or rumpled surfaces in what amounts to a thunk a thon. Over all, the suspension seems like an homage to truck design, circa 1980. The steering on the 4 cylinder model was pretty good. I was less fond of the steering on the V 6. Just as the steering was turned off center there was some additional resistance as if it were suddenly trying to return to the straight ahead position. I found it annoying. After my test ended, Kia checked over the vehicle and found that it met specifications. And two other contributors to these pages drove the same Sorento and found nothing objectionable. I remain alone, but unbowed, in my annoyance. On any two lane road through the White Mountains, the Sorento's handling with either engine was more acquiescent than sporty. That's pretty much on par for this type of crossover, however. Heavy vehicles capable of carrying five, six or seven passengers just aren't light on their feet. The 2.4 liter 4 cylinder is rated at 175 horsepower and 169 pound feet of torque. Acceleration is generally adequate and the fuel economy is relatively good, with an Environmental Protection Agency rating of 21 m.p.g. in the city and 29 on the highway. The 3.5 liter V 6 is rated at 276 horsepower and 248 pound feet of torque. With one or two adults on board the acceleration was strong, again aided by the impressive automatic. Mileage estimates are 19/25 with all wheel drive. On either vehicle, hard acceleration often resulted in a bit of torque steer a sensation that the front wheels are being tugged sideways as they try to deliver power to the road. This was somewhat surprising, given that the 4 cylinder Sorento isn't wildly powerful and that the V 6 test car's all wheel drive would presumably eliminate any tendency toward torque steer (primarily an issue with front drive cars). Many automakers have done a far better job of taming torque steer. Kia's reliability has been an issue the company was once among the lowest rated automakers selling cars in America but it seems to have improved considerably. In the latest study by J. D. Power Associates, which measured how well 2007 models have held up, Kia ranked just below the industry average. That put it ahead of more seasoned brands, including Jaguar, Nissan, Audi, Mazda, Scion, Chevrolet and Dodge. Along with the improved reliability has come a kind of pricing hubris. Once Kia fought for customers with alluring window stickers, but prices on the Sorento now generally rival those of brands like Honda with better track records and more prestige. Direct comparisons are tricky because of minor variations in standard equipment, but the 4 cylinder front drive Sorento EX I tested had a sticker of 29,340; a Honda CR V EX L, also with a navigation system, lists at 29,275. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
From 89 euros a night, or about 96 at 1.08 to the euro. Barcelona, where lovely apartments are easy to rent at fair prices, also has no shortage of boutique hotels. But a boutique hotel at a fair price is in shorter supply. Enter Praktik, a Spanish minichain, whose locations around the city and in Madrid offer affordable lodging, with style and, sometimes, a gimmick or two. Among the latest is the 74 room Praktik Bakery Hotel, which has the uniquely Wes Anderson y addition of an artisanal bakery on the ground floor with a glass walled view of bakers at work. Day and night, handmade boules and pastries from the local dough maven Anna Bellsola, a third generation baker, and her Baluard Bakery tempt guests passing through. It's enough of an attraction that locals stop in for baguettes and loaves too. Make no attempt to start a diet here: The offerings are far too delicious. On a quiet side street in the upscale Eixample district, the seven story hotel, which opened in April 2014, is steps from designer boutiques, tapas bars, cafes and, as always, a Gaudi building or three. Sunshine yellow awnings hang over the hotel's wide glass front door the better to see the bakery. It's four blocks from a metro stop, a 30 minute stroll to the Parc de La Ciutadella; La Rambla, the tree lined pedestrian strip; and the historic Gothic quarter. Cabs are plentiful on nearby Avenida Diagonal, a central thoroughfare. The hotel is the work of the local designer Lazaro Rosa Violan, and he has made it cheery, even working in small spaces, with bright colors in the hallways and an airy whitewash in the rooms. Our double had two adjoining twin beds, a floor to ceiling window with Juliet balcony, and a flat screen television. It wasn't spacious, but it was entirely suitable. Compartmentalized. It wasn't a separate room, but an area just inside the door, with shower and toilet stalls separated by tinted glass and set off by Moroccan inspired blue tile. The sink was across the way, next to some utilitarian cubby shelves. A hair dryer is provided, but don't expect spalike toiletries, just the basic stuff. Few, unless you count watching the bakers in action (and yes, there's the bakery itself). A narrow terrace with a handful of seats is adjacent to the indoor dining area which is not a full service restaurant but has plenty of tables for patrons and there's a small "Internet lounge" that in its overstuffed cushion styling and signage feels a bit lifted from a '90s dorm, albeit not in a bad way. Did we mention the bakery? A breakfast buffet ham (it is Spain, after all), cheese, tomatoes, coffee, fresh juice and loads of bread is free for guests. But you may want to shell out a few euros for the delectable croissants they have somehow managed to make even a whole wheat version light and fluffy sandwiches and fruit tarts that stack the gleaming cases. Service is quick and pleasant, too. The Hotel Praktik Bakery is not for those short of dietary willpower. But if you're looking for a cheerful, inexpensive room and a lavish, delicious, carbo loaded start or end to your day, this is the place. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
LIKE many homes in the Rego Park section of Queens, the one owned by Steven Kaplan and his wife, Dalia, is made of red brick and has a short driveway that slopes down from the street to a small garage below. On weekends when the roads are dry and not only when the air is warm Mr. Kaplan, a 67 year old social worker, will walk down to his garage, where he parks a rather antique looking car. The peculiar two seat roadster has two wheels up front and only one in back. Officially, this three wheeler is classified as a motorcycle, so Mr. Kaplan will squeeze his head into a carbon fiber motorcycle helmet. He will put on his sunglasses and step into the car, following a carefully orchestrated maneuver. He will fire up the engine mounted between the front wheels and fully exposed, therefore very loud and go for a drive around the big Tudor Revival homes in nearby Forest Hills Gardens. "You're going to think you're in Europe, especially by the train station," he said in a voice that evoked Robert Duvall. "It's a superluxurious area," he said of the neighborhood during a recent drive. "Since I don't have their kind of money, at least I have something that I can show off." Mr. Kaplan, assistant director of B'Above Worldwide Institute, a Head Start agency in Queens, has always been fond of small cars. He once owned a 1934 Austin 7 convertible, a spindly mass market creation from Britain. Among his memories of growing up in Brookline, Mass., after World War II, he said, was seeing Messerschmitts, then one of the more popular three wheel cars, on the road. "Really different," he emphasized. "Anyone could buy an old car that was manufactured in huge numbers." The car he wanted was a three wheel vehicle made by Morgan, a British automaker, starting a century ago and lasting into the 1950s. But a vintage car of that pedigree was beyond his means. (Morgan recently introduced a modern version of the car that sells for more than 40,000.) So Mr. Kaplan researched replica cars, making two trips to England in 2000 1. He eventually found one he liked, a CX3 model made by B.R.A., and had it shipped to Queens. It arrived in an immense wooden crate in July 2002. It was a kit car. The crate contained a frame, made of square steel tubing, fiberglass and aluminum panels, the seats and the wheels (but not the tires, because of federal regulations). The engine, which came from a Honda CX 650 motorcycle, was bought separately. Its V twin design is similar to what Morgans use. "But it wasn't like putting Tab A into Slot B," he said. "No such kit." The assembly manual provided more of an outline than step by step instructions, and the hand drawn illustrations were very basic. The last car Mr. Kaplan built, when he was a young boy, was a scale model. So before the crate of parts arrived, he hung two fluorescent fixtures on the ceiling of the garage and installed a pegboard on one wall, hanging it full of tools. Then he spent the next six years building the car. It required some improvisation. He had to shape the body panels, bending the aluminum sheets into a hood and trunk by hand. Brackets had to be made for the radiator, exhaust pipes and rear suspension. The fuel system, including a fuel pump, regulator and a five gallon tank, had to be pieced together. "And about a year I spent trying to figure out a reverse gear," he said, explaining that most motorcycles don't have a mechanism for backing up. "The reverse was something that I wanted to do, and I could've bought a reverse gearbox that goes in line with the driveshaft," said Mr. Kaplan, who also owns a Chevrolet and a scooter. "It was over 1,000. So I thought, 'I'll do it myself.' After spending more than a year and probably more than 1,000 on unbelievably bad designs none of them worked I gave up." To park the car in his garage, he turns it around by hand in the street before rolling it down the driveway. "It only weighs 900 pounds," he said. "And to push 900 pounds on wheels is not a big deal." Fortunately, other attempts at custom modification were much more successful. He had coolant pipes plated. He replaced the folding Brooklands windscreen that came in the kit with a full width V screen that he said looked more like the original Morgan. He made special brackets for the seat belts. He upholstered the seats and added an electric speedometer. "I put an air horn in because I want people to notice me," he said. He used the wood dashboard included in the kit as a template for a custom cut metal dashboard, which he sent to California to have a jewel pattern milled onto its face. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
That vast expanse. The glorious wonders of the universe. And Brad Pitt or Natalie Portman to take us there. If you work in Hollywood long enough, eventually your star may rise high enough to reach, like, actual stars. For decades, the industry has relied on famous names to send space movies (and hopefully their box office) into the stratosphere. This fall, Disney (by way of its recent acquisitions 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight) is bringing us the star driven space movies "Ad Astra" and "Lucy in the Sky." Here is a look at the tradition of big names in big space movies, and how it worked out for them. The Space Dilemma: Pitt's character's father went out for a mission and didn't come back. The son's been searching for him ever since. The Spectacle: An action sequence involving a fight with moon pirates is breathtaking. The Suit: Looks like he was born to wear it. The Results: A wave of strong reviews and more than 90 million at the box office since opening Sept. 20. The Space Dilemma: Portman plays Lucy Cola (based loosely on Lisa Marie Nowak), an astronaut who is having trouble coping back on planet Earth after a life changing spacewalk. The Spectacle: A visually haunting moment early on shows the character hovering above the earth beatifically. The Suit: She nearly gets lost in it, but ultimately takes command. The Results: To be determined. The film is opening Oct. 4 after premiering, to a mixed reaction, at the Toronto International Film Festival. The Spectacle: Shots inside the spacecraft, shaded in deep blues and reds and yellows, are more mysterious and stunning than the shots of black holes. The Suit: It has a handcrafted, vintage quality that suggests 1940s flight expeditions, not something from the future. The Results: Very odd , indeed. Critics mostly liked it, but it drew about 1.2 million at the box office. Available to rent or own from iTunes, Prime Video, Vudu or Google Play. The Reason: The film's script was on the Black List, a survey of lauded, unproduced screenplays, in 2007. After bouncing around in development, it finally got made when these high wattage rising stars were cast . The Space Dilemma: On a 120 year journey to colonize a new planet, a malfunction means a passenger wakes up too early. He wakes up another one so he won't be alone. Yikes. The Spectacle: Mostly just two very pretty people in space. The Suits: All lit up in "Tron" meets Daft Punk funkiness. The Reason: He'd conquered Earth as a superstar. Why not go to Mars and do the same? The Space Dilemma: In the near future, a crew is exploring Mars when a storm threatens the mission and strands one member. He can't be rescued for years, so he has to figure out how to grow food on a planet where nothing grows. Luckily, he's a botanist. The Spectacle: Damon's character uses smarts, a Mars Pathfinder and some gaffer tape to communicate with Earth. The Suit: Orange and tan neoprene. It resembles a cool combination of wet suit and racing uniform. The Results: Both critical and box office magic, grossing more than 630 million worldwide. Available to rent or own from iTunes, Prime Video, Vudu, Google Play, PlayStation, Microsoft or Fandango Now. The Reason: B oth established actors had reached career turning points, with Hathaway off an Oscar win for "Les Miserables ," and McConaughey off one for "Dallas Buyers Club." They'd had other hits on their own; together they could establish even larger box office cred. The Space Dilemma: Where to begin. Let's just say dust storms and wormholes play a part in the fight for humanity's survival in the near future. The Spectacle: An intense moment when the crew enters the atmosphere of a distant planet. The Suit: No frills NASA numbers, which fit nicely and give both imposingly broad shoulders. The Results: While some audiences may have been a little puzzled, they were still intrigued enough by this Christopher Nolan project to catapult the drama to 677 million worldwide. Available to rent or own from iTunes, Prime Video, Vudu, Google Play, PlayStation, Microsoft, Paramount or Fandango Now. The Reason: After back to back Oscars, who else? The Space Dilemma: They had a problem. The Spectacle: A nine second sequence in which the camera follows the wiring through the craft all the way to its exploding oxygen tank. The Results: A major box office success, with 355 million (about 587 million in today's dollars) and two Oscar wins. Available to rent or own from iTunes, Vudu, Prime Video, Google Play, Microsoft or Fandango Now. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Neanderthals seem stuck with unflattering reputations. The entire species of early human ancestors has long been reduced to a pejorative for describing someone who isn't very bright, despite growing evidence of the sophistication of Homo neanderthalensis. And recent research suggests another overlooked mark of their ingenuity: they made the first glues in the form of tar. Archaeologists first found tar covered stones and black lumps at Neanderthal sites across Europe about two decades ago. The tar was distilled from the bark of birch trees some 200,000 years ago, and seemed to have been used for hafting, or attaching handles to stone tools and weapons. But scientists did not know how Neanderthals produced the dark, sticky substance, more than 100,000 years before Homo sapiens in Africa used tree resin and ocher adhesives. Now, in a study published last Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, a team of archaeologists has used materials available during prehistoric times to demonstrate three possible ways Neanderthals could have deliberately made tar. While the study does not prove that Neanderthals used any of these methods, it aims to demonstrate that they had access to the ingredients and means to produce tar. Mr. Kozowyk and his colleagues spent several days burning birch wood to make tar using the different methods and after each one measured how much of the black stuff they collected. The team's first strategy was known as the "ash mound" method, and it consisted of taking a piece of birch bark, rolling it up and then covering it with ash and glowing embers. Then after about 20 minutes they removed the bark and unrolled it to find drops of tar stuck in between the bark layers, which could be easily scooped out with a stick. As simple as the method was, it yielded only about a pea sized amount of tar. The next method was the "pit roll". They folded a piece of birch bark like a coffee filter an impromptu bowl and placed it in a hole in the ground about the size of a cup. Then they placed a tightly rolled piece of bark in it and covered it in embers. As the bark got hot it created tar that dripped into the birch container. After about 40 minutes the embers burned themselves out, producing about a large coin's worth of tar. The last and most complicated method, the "raised structure", was similar to the pit roll. They dug a hole and used folded bark as a container. But then they put a mesh of willow twigs over the container and rested rolled bark on top. Then they covered the structure in wet soil and clay, like an igloo that they smoothed into a dome. Finally, they built a campfire around the dirt dome, heating it like an oven. This strategy produced a staggering amount of tar, about 15 to 20 times more than the first method, but it took several hours. "They could have used any of these methods because everything that we used they had available," said Geeske Langejans an archaeologist at Leiden University and a co author on the study. Dr. Langejans said that understanding how Neanderthals produced the adhesive may contribute to a better understanding of their intellect. "You have bark but you end up with this black, sticky substance and the two seem completely unrelated," she said, "so the general thinking is that it requires some abstract thought to make these connections." Sabrina Sholts, a research anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, said in an email that the study was "a nice demonstration of how experimental archaeology can be used to test theories and address questions about the ancient past." She added that the next steps would be to see if the researchers could actually haft tools with the tar they produced. Paul Pettitt an archaeologist from Durham University in England who was not involved in the study, said in an email that the experiments helped envisage how Neanderthals could have at first accidentally discovered tar in the remains of their fires, and then adapted the substance for tool use. "It's an important demonstration of the ability of Neanderthals to observe, experiment and learn from their environments," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The artist Zoe Buckman in her apartment, surrounded by part of her collection, including, clockwise from left, a print of Tupac Shakur by Albert Watson; Amy Winehouse from her album "Lioness"; and Ms. Buckman's "Jemima" (2016). Her Hint for Collecting Like an Artist: Use Instagram The artist Zoe Buckman's loft cum studio in Dumbo delivers a sensory overload of paintings, photography and sketches from around the world. Yet Ms. Buckman, born in London, has never thought of herself as a collector. "I'm someone who lives with the work of artists I've been lucky enough to know or trade with," she said on a recent afternoon, as sunlight flooded through the oversized windows overlooking the Manhattan Bridge. Contemporary artists are her favorites, including Toyin Ojih Odutola whose works explore the complexity of identity, and Tony Fitzpatrick, a Chicago artist whose multimedia collages and prints are inspired by sources as varied as children's literature and folk art. Pieces like these are interspersed with representations of Hindu gods that Ms. Buckman picked up on trips to India, and some art by her daughter, Cleo. Much of the art she's acquired a painting in brown tones of a pregnant woman by the Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu, for instance echoes the feminist motifs of her own creations. "The painting was a trade," she said. "I loved it immediately because it represents rebirth and metamorphosis." In exchange, Ms. Mutu got a vintage silk bralette and briefs Ms. Buckman had embroidered with lyrics from the Biggie Smalls song "Dead Wrong." These are edited excerpts from our conversation. Is it common for artists to trade works? Yes, and it's a fun way to grow your collection because the pieces you own are that much more personal. It's an honor to have a work by an artist you admire, and it's an honor to know that they have one of yours. What if you love an artist's work but aren't sure if they like yours? If there's an artist whose work I want to own, I float the idea of a trade and wait for them to follow up. You don't want to push. With Wangechi, she saw my lingerie piece on Instagram and emailed me with a screenshot of it, with a note asking if I would consider a trade. I was thrilled to swap. Do you have any art world mentors? Deb Willis and her son, Hank Willis Thomas, who are both phenomenally talented artists and live in New York. They have nurtured my career so much. Tell me about this quilt made up of football jerseys. It was a trade with Hank Willis Thomas. I work with used textiles, and that's what he's done here. I am not into football, but, in my own work, I am into the intersection of masculine and feminine. Quilting is a typically female craft, and he is using these jerseys to speak about the exploitation of black males within college sports and how these boys are used and spat out. I am drawn to pieces that have some meaning, and I knew the meaning behind this one. But even if I didn't, I appreciate it for its form and bright colors. What is your favorite piece that you've bought? I have two. There's this black and white picture of people walking up a hill from a series that the photographer Sebastiao Salgado did on migrants. Then there's this photo of Tupac that I bought from a gallery in Chelsea. I was obsessed with American hip hop as a teenager. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
were married Aug. 18 in a self uniting ceremony led by Jennifer B. Halperin, a religious educator at the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh, where the ceremony took place. Mrs. Stauber, 29, is a clinical social worker at Vesta, an outpatient clinic in Silver Spring, Md. She graduated from American University and received a Master of Social Work from Catholic University. She is a daughter of Dr. Joan Harvey and Dr. Michael T. Lotze of Pittsburgh. The bride's father, a tumor immunologist and surgical oncologist, is the vice chair for research in the Department of Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh, where her mother, a rheumatologist, is the associate dean for student affairs in the School of Medicine. Mr. Stauber, 30, works in Washington as a training specialist in the information technology department at Chemonics International, a project management company. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
BUCHAREST, Romania In her studio, the Romanian conceptual artist Geta Bratescu was looking at a large drawing she had made in 2012 of a bird dressed as a clown. The 91 year old artist remarked how much younger she was when she made the piece. "What I work with these days is smaller," said Mrs. Bratescu. "This big surface is harder for me to work with now." Mrs. Bratescu is in her studio daily, she said. She had set it up with everything she needs within reach from her chair. Fat markers were lined up in a row to her right; strips of paper cascaded out of pots next to a selection of scissors, and a metal ruler framed a small patch of surface where Mrs. Bratescu draws and makes collages. To her left, a stack of her recent pieces was held in place with a paperweight in the shape of a bird. Mrs. Bratescu's studio is peppered with mementos from her childhood, and a photograph of her mother and a portrait of her father by her hang on the wall. When the show was presented in New York last year it was her first extensive introduction to an American audience. International recognition for Mrs. Bratescu, who represented Romania in the 2017 Venice Biennale, came late in a career spent principally in Romania under communism. Mrs. Bratescu was working on abstract collages made of geometric shapes drawn with chunky marker pens and pieces of paper or found materials glued on top. One of her most recent collages included candy wrappers from some chocolates she had eaten a few days before. "I think of drawing as a dance," Mrs. Bratescu said. "And a dance is a drawing in space. If you don't appreciate dancing, these things aren't possible to create." Mrs. Bratescu's studio has long played an essential role in her creative process. In 1978, she made an experimental black and white film titled "The Studio," and last year an exhibition in London explored how critical the space has been for her. "My family and friends, everyone, understood that the studio was a necessity," Mrs. Bratescu said. "But it's not very complicated; like for many artists, it's a place of my own." Magda Radu, a Bucharest based curator and art historian, said in a telephone interview, "It's space of freedom, delineated from the outside world, but very fertile and productive." Ms. Radu has worked closely with Mrs. Bratescu for a number of years and curated both the Venice exhibition and the show in Los Angeles. "For artists in Eastern Europe, the studio represents a space of autonomy." Interest in Mrs. Bratescu's work centers on a paradox she is reticent to talk about: She worked freely as an artist in a period of political repression. "During communism it was almost mandatory to make political art, so the avant garde had to be political in an unpolitical way," Sebestyen Gyorgy Szekely, an art historian who specializes in female Eastern European artists, said in a telephone interview. "One of Geta Bratescu's escape routes to make unpolitical art was to use mythology, and the other way she did it was in her handling of the process of art, using the act of drawing as a way to discover the world." Born in 1926 in Ploiesti, a town 50 miles north Bucharest, Mrs. Bratescu started drawing in her early childhood. Her father owned a drugstore and she said her parents encouraged her artistic ambitions: "My parents never forced me to become a pharmacist; they saw that I liked to draw and they left me to take my own course." In 1945 she enrolled concurrently at the University of Bucharest, in the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, and also at the Bucharest School of Belle Arte, an art college. Her studies were interrupted in 1949 when she was expelled from university in a purge of the bourgeoisie: Her father was a landowner, and therefore unpalatable to the Communist regime. In 1951, Mrs. Bratescu married Mihai Bratescu, an engineer and photographer with whom she sometimes collaborated, and they had a son, Tudor, in 1954. During the 1950s, Mrs. Bratescu worked as a children's book illustrator; by 1957 the regime had softened somewhat and Mrs. Bratescu became affiliated with the Union of Artists, a state entity that approved exhibitions and granted studios to its artists. As such, the Los Angeles show, centered around Mrs. Bratescu's longstanding interest in Aesop, is perhaps the best way to read any sort of political statement into Mrs. Bratescu's work. Her interest the Greek author has less to do with his fables and instead is focused on the character of Aesop himself. "For her, Aesop is a disrupter, someone that is a fool but plays tricks on authoritarian figures," Ms. Radu said. "He creates mayhem." Given that Mrs. Bratescu's oeuvre combines playfulness and dark humor, it is little surprise that she named her other major influences as Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett and Charlie Chaplin. Clowns, chocolate wrapper collages and childlike drawings are all Mrs. Bratescu's little jokes, but the punch lines remain hazy. "It's a game," Mrs. Bratescu said of her most recent collage. "I like to draw and to work freely, like any other game." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
FUKUOKA, Japan An unending trade war between the United States and China. President Trump's weeklong threat to impose tariffs on Mexico. A potential clash with Europe over cars and agriculture. Trade disputes spurred by the president's affinity for employing tariffs as his diplomatic weapon of choice have cast a pall over the global economy as finance ministers gather in Japan for an annual Group of 20 meeting. The weekend of talks, beginning Friday evening in Fukuoka, is expected to be rife with friction as protectionism threatens to slow growth. "Tension is rising with tariff increases and nontariff measures materializing in many parts of the world," Taro Aso, Japan's finance minister, said at an Institute of International Finance conference in Tokyo on Thursday. A central figure in the discussions will be Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, who will again seek to reassure ministers from other countries about Mr. Trump's trade agenda. All eyes will be on Mr. Mnuchin's scheduled meeting with Yi Gang, the governor of the People's Bank of China. It will be the first meeting between senior officials from the two countries since trade negotiations broke down a month ago. Since then, the United States has raised tariff rates on 200 billion of Chinese imports and is considering imposing duties on an additional 300 billion of goods. The Treasury secretary also has bilateral meetings scheduled with finance ministers and central bank officials from 10 other countries. He is expected to be pressed on the impact Mr. Trump's tariffs are having on markets and supply chains. "During Mnuchin's bilateral meetings, it's going to be very pointed," said Mark Sobel, a former senior Treasury official who is now affiliated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Others will express concerns about the global trading system and what it means for the global economy." Mr. Mnuchin has accumulated a lot of experience defending Mr. Trump's provocative policies at global events. Senior Treasury officials said in a briefing this week that agreeing upon a joint statement, or communique, could be difficult because countries might not share a common view on trade. Ahead of the summit meeting, there was little optimism of a major breakthrough with China, because Mr. Trump has hardened his positions and the United States and China have exchanged accusations about who was at fault for the failed negotiations in May. "As far as China is concerned, China wants to make a deal," Mr. Trump said this week. "But right now, they're paying many billions of dollars to the United States." American importers pay the cost of the tariffs. Mr. Trump and President Xi Jinping of China are expected to meet this month at a G 20 leaders summit meeting in Japan. Senior Treasury officials said this week that Mr. Mnuchin had no plans for a trip to Beijing while he was in Asia. 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. With evidence mounting that the global economy is slowing, Mr. Mnuchin is expected to encourage other countries to cut taxes and roll back regulations to help spur their economies. In Japan, Mr. Aso expressed concern about Mr. Trump's tariffs and has called for a multilateral approach to addressing trade imbalances. Mr. Trump recently gave the Japanese government a reprieve from tariffs on automobiles and put off bilateral trade negotiations until after a parliamentary election in Japan. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has to make a difficult decision of his own. He has long said that he wants to raise Japan's consumption tax this fall. But he might delay the increase because of sluggish growth. This week the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund warned about the prospects of weaker economic growth, and both pointed to trade as a culprit. "There's been a tumble in business confidence, a deepening slowdown in global trade and sluggish investment in emerging and developing economies," said David Malpass, the new World Bank president, who was selected by Mr. Trump. Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the I.M.F., warned on Wednesday that the recently announced tariffs that the United States and China had put on each other's imports could reduce global gross domestic product by about 0.3 percent in 2020. When including the tariffs that were already in place, global G.D.P. could be reduced by 0.5 percent, or 455 billion, next year. "These are self inflicted wounds that must be avoided," Ms. Lagarde wrote in a blog post. "The fact is that protectionist measures are not only hurting growth and jobs, but they are also making tradable consumer goods less affordable and disproportionately harming low income households." The trade wars are also unnerving financial markets. Investors are worried that business investment could stall and that central banks will have to cut interest rates. At the Institute of International Finance conference, banking executives expressed unease about the trade tensions. "If you're a C.E.O., it's pretty hard to be particularly aggressive and ambitious in making M A strategic decisions or capital decisions," said John Waldron, president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs. "You have to be much more cautious and a little bit worried right now." Mr. Waldron said that the swoon in sentiment started in early May when Mr. Trump tweeted that more China tariffs were coming. He predicted that the best case scenario was that Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi would restart negotiations. But Mr. Trump appears to be unfazed by the economic fallout from his confrontational approach with China and others. "Ultimately this is going to be about Washington making a decision about how it's going to proceed," Timothy D. Adams, the president of the institute and a former senior Treasury official, said in an interview. "I think the business community's voice has become somewhat diluted on these issues and I'm not sure the president cares what the business community thinks." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
"I feel I can be a better advocate having my own voice," said Susan Unterberg, who has revealed her identity after anonymously giving 5.5 million to other female artists over the last 22 years. The artist Carrie Mae Weems recalls sitting at her desk in Syracuse in 2014 "feeling very anonymous and misunderstood and trying to figure out how to make some new work" when she got the call. "I was offered this extraordinary gift," she said. "It was important, because I needed the money, but more than anything, I needed the encouragement and the support to keep making, to keep pushing to continue to work in spite of all of the pressures." The gift is part of a grant program that has paid out a total of 5.5 million over the last 22 years to support underrecognized female artists over age 40. It is called Anonymous Was a Woman, in reference to a line in Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own," to pay tribute to female artists in history who signed their paintings "Anonymous" so that their work would be taken seriously. The donor behind the prize wanted to remain unknown. But now she is stepping out from behind the curtain: Susan Unterberg, herself a once underrecognized female artist over 40. In a recent interview at her Upper East Side home, she said she has decided to come forward so that she can more openly argue on behalf of women who are artists, demonstrate the importance of women supporting women and try to inspire other philanthropists. "It's a great time for women to speak up," Ms. Unterberg said. "I feel I can be a better advocate having my own voice." Ms. Unterberg, who turns 77 this weekend and is based in New York, has her photographic work in a few major museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Jewish Museum and she had a career retrospective at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati in 2004. But she said she has experienced firsthand the hurdles faced by female artists all over the world. "They don't get museum shows as often as men, they don't command the same prices in the art world," she said. "And it doesn't seem to be changing." Statistics cited by the National Museum of Women in the Arts show that female artists earn 81 cents for every dollar made by male artists; that work by female artists makes up just 3 percent to 5 percent of major permanent museum collections in the United States and Europe; and that of some 590 major exhibitions by nearly 70 institutions in the United States from 2007 through 2013, only 27 percent were devoted to female artists. "Women continue to be seriously undervalued and underappreciated," Ms. Weems said. "The work is not taken as seriously, and men are still running the game. Men in power support men in power, and they want to see men in power." Just recently, the National Gallery in London acquired an artwork by a female artist for the first time in 27 years (a self portrait by the Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi). And the Ford Foundation was among several organizations that recently received a letter from the curator Helen Molesworth about the possibility of starting a Time's Up for Museums, borrowing the goal of a Hollywood group's push for equality 50/50 by 2020. "Is now the time for a field wide call for gender parity in all aspects of the profession?" Ms. Molesworth writes. "How might we bring the pressure of our current moment into our programming, our presentation of permanent collections, the way we pursue acquisitions, etc.?" Ms. Unterberg said she had chosen to keep her identity secret so that her art would be evaluated on its own terms even her grown grandchildren were unaware she was behind the grant. "I was working really hard to become known as a contemporary artist," Ms. Unterberg said. "And this I felt would have influenced the way people looked at my work or saw me." As the founder and sole patron of the grant program, Ms. Unterberg has supported 220 artists with funds from the foundation she and her sister, Jill Roberts, inherited after their father, Nathan Appleman, an oilman and philanthropist, died in 1992. The artist Carrie Mae Weems, a recipient of a grant from Ms. Unterberg's program, said: "I needed the money, but more than anything, I needed the encouragement and the support to keep making, to keep pushing to continue to work in spite of all of the pressures." Stephanie Diani for The New York Times She was moved to start the program in 1996 when the National Endowment for the Arts ended grants for individuals, as a way to give fellow female artists the kind of support she knew they needed, especially in the middle stage of their careers. She got the idea while brainstorming with Marcia Tucker, the forceful curator and founder of the New Museum. "Since I was a middle aged artist and always wanted to support women I'm a feminist this seemed like the perfect vehicle," Ms. Unterberg said. Past winners many of whom have gone on to present solo exhibitions at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Venice Biennale have included Louise Lawler, Tania Bruguera, Carolee Schneemann and Mickalene Thomas. The artists who have received the 25,000 grant have long wondered about the person or people behind it. "It's such a special form of generosity to do that anonymously," said Nicole Eisenman, who received a grant in 2014. "The lack of ego and the pure altruism in this grant is a beautiful thing." The women are nominated and evaluated by other women in the field curators, art writers and previous winners, who themselves are not identified. The five panelists on the selection committee who have changed over the years deliberate for a full day and are each paid 1,000 for their time. The award is not need based; women simply have to be over 40 (it used to be over 30 but changed early on) and at a crossroads in their practice, which they explain in their applications. "It came right on time," said Amy Sherald, who received the award in 2017 before it was announced that she would be painting Michelle Obama for the National Portrait Gallery. "The time I got the check I actually was at a point where I couldn't pay my rent," she said in a telephone interview. "I had 1,500 left and that's exactly what my rent was. The announcement of the portrait had just come out and I was sitting there flat broke. It saved my life in terms of securing my studio to make that portrait." An assessment of the grant, commissioned from the curator Laura Hoptman, was completed in 2004. After reviewing the testimonies of some 70 recipients, Ms. Hoptman said the psychological benefit had proven as decisive as the financial one, citing "a validation of their standing in the art community, a recognition of their past achievements, as well as a strong vote of confidence in their ability to continue to produce meaningful work." Obvious from the testimonies, Ms. Hoptman added, "is the life changing quality of a well deserved, substantial grant that comes from nowhere." "The terms most often used in this sampling," she said, "were 'lifesaver' and 'miracle.'" Indeed, going public is likely to elicit some messages of gratitude, but Ms. Unterberg said she never awarded the grants for recognition. "It's thanks enough knowing I've helped people's lives when they needed it," she said, adding, "I'll miss the secret pleasure of seeing people benefit from afar without my name being attached." Ms. Unterberg who is also finishing a five year tenure as a chairwoman of the board of Yaddo, the artists' retreat said she will continue to underwrite the award, though no longer as a voting member of the selection panel. The need for this type of support, Ms. Unterberg said, remains as pronounced as it was when she started. "It's still a political moment two decades later," she said, adding that the National Endowment for the Arts "is still under threat and women are still facing challenges in midcareer." "I'm eager for the grant to become better known," she said. "Women have been anonymous for far too long." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
In the latest defeat for organized labor in the South, workers at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee rejected an effort to form a union this week. Of the roughly 1,600 workers who voted, 833 opposed the unionization effort, according to results released late Friday. The United Automobile Workers has been trying to organize the factory, in Chattanooga, for years, recording a narrow defeat in 2014. "Our employees have spoken," the plant's chief executive, Frank Fischer, said in a statement. "We look forward to continuing our close cooperation with elected officials and business leaders in Tennessee." Labor leaders have long focused on the South, which they consider important to securing victories for workers around the country. But despite sustained organizing efforts across the region including at a Nissan plant in Mississippi, a Toyota plant in Kentucky and a Mercedes Benz plant in Alabama the union has repeatedly failed to get a foothold with a foreign car manufacturer there. The possibility that a business or its competitors might move production to sparsely unionized Southern states can put pressure on workers elsewhere to accept lower pay and make other concessions. Wages for Volkswagen production workers in Chattanooga start at 15.50 per hour, which will increase to 16 in July. The plant's top wage of 23.50 is well above the median in Chattanooga, but roughly 20 percent below what experienced workers can make at unionized plants of automakers like General Motors and Ford. No major foreign automakers have unionized plants in the United States. The loss highlighted the difficulty of organizing private sector workers in a political environment that is overtly hostile to labor unions, even as workers have won gains through collective action elsewhere. Tennessee's Republican governor, Bill Lee, who formerly ran a contracting company, opposed the U.A.W. campaign because, he said, the presence of a union would make it harder for the state to attract other businesses. Mr. Lee visited the plant and spoke to workers about his objections. Wilma Liebman, a chairwoman of the National Labor Relations Board under President Barack Obama, said she had never heard of a governor's appearing directly before workers to lobby them to vote against union representation. Mr. Lee's office did not respond to requests for comment. State Representative Robin Smith, a Republican whose district includes the plant, had said a decision to unionize could threaten tens of millions of dollars in future state incentives for the company. "It's much easier to defend incentives, the use of tax dollars, when they're going into an investment that follows our state's philosophy," Ms. Smith said in an interview. Pressure from politicians has been a recurring feature of organizing campaigns in the South. Opposition from Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi helped defeat a U.A.W. organizing campaign at a Nissan plant in 2017, and the antagonism of Gov. Nikki Haley appeared to have a similar effect at Boeing's South Carolina plant in 2015, leading the union to call off a vote. The U.A.W. also blamed its 2014 defeat at the Volkswagen plant on the aggressive opposition of local politicians. Bob Corker, a senator at the time, said a union would make the company less competitive and indicated that executives would add a production line at the plant only if workers voted down a union. Volkswagen also changed its stand toward the union after that campaign. In 2014, the company proclaimed itself neutral and even appeared to encourage the organizing effort. It considered union representation a way to create a "works council," a common feature in Germany through which workers and management collaborate on issues like factory rules and schedules. Almost all of the company's other plants worldwide are unionized. The publication Labor Notes obtained a recording of a recent all hands meeting in which Mr. Fischer, the chief executive, appeared to blame a union for the demise of a Volkswagen plant in Pennsylvania in the 1980s. Mr. Fischer recalled that production at the Pennsylvania plant had started in the first half of 1978 and that by October of that year, there was a strike. "Volkswagen management never was able to really run the plant until it was closed in 1988," he said on the recording. In 2015, a small group of maintenance employees at the Chattanooga plant voted to unionize, but Volkswagen refused to bargain with them, leading to litigation. When the U.A.W. filed for an election with the National Labor Relations Board this year, the company objected on the grounds that the case involving that smaller union was still pending, forcing the union to resubmit its petition for a vote after it withdrew the earlier case. Workers and organizers also took a more conventional approach this time around, emphasizing the benefits of a union on issues like safety and scheduling. "In 2014, there was a strong focus on how unionization was a necessary legal precondition for implementing VW's 'co determination' management system," said Daniel Cornfield, a sociologist who studies labor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. "In 2019, the pro union campaign is much more focused on traditional U.S. organizing issues." Mr. Sexton said he and other workers were becoming increasingly upset because production teams were understaffed, leading to greater stress on workers and more injuries. He said the plant's medical team was often unsympathetic, pronouncing injuries the result of "pre existing conditions" and sending workers back to the line. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Sometimes the arguments take place on the street. More often, they appear to occur in a supermarket. One New Yorker, seemingly blase about social distancing, gets too close. The other flashes a look of opprobrium or makes a snide comment. The situation escalates from there. That was how it happened for the novelist and essayist Sloane Crosley, 41, at 8 a.m. a few weeks back at Sam's Deli, a bodega in the West Village. Three guys paid for their stuff, then lurked by the cash register, just hanging out, Ms. Crosley recalled. Unable to face cooking yet another meal at home and doing yet another set of dishes, Ms. Crosley approached to order a breakfast sandwich. She was wearing a mask. The guys weren't. "I thought, What are you, conscientious objectors?" Ms. Crosley said in an interview. Nevertheless, she figured that the men, finished with their transaction, would exit or at least move to the side. When they didn't, she flashed a look, walked out the door and waited for them to leave. As they did, one turned to her and asked if she had anything to say to his face. "The cliche of life is that you rarely say the things you mean to say when you mean to say it," Ms. Crosley said. "This time, it just rolled right off the tongue." First, she remembers calling him a vulgarism for female genitalia. Then she told him that anyone this inconsiderate in a bodega must be terrible in bed. Jennifer Glaisek Ferguson, 50, a communications strategist in Manhattan, had her war of the words outside a Trader Joe's on West 93rd Street, while picking up groceries with her 5 year old daughter, Coco. Ms. Glaisek Ferguson was done shopping and was loading groceries into her car. A woman approached, asking if she was done with the cart Coco was holding onto. "Yes, just give me a minute," Ms. Glaisek Ferguson remembered saying. But a minute didn't come soon enough. Soon, Ms. Glaisek Ferguson said, the woman was cutting the line of people, half a block long, actually waiting their turns for a cart. A security guard admonished the woman, Ms. Glaisek Ferguson said. "She started screaming that she had an autoimmune disease," Ms. Glaisek Ferguson recalled. "Coco was holding onto the cart, and the woman tried to grab it out of her hands." So Ms. Glaisek Ferguson expressed her frustration. The woman hurled yet another epithet for female genitalia. (Why these are so popular is a conversation for another day.) Ms. Glaisek Ferguson hurled it right back. Ms. Glaisek Ferguson felt slightly ashamed of having used the word then and there, but Coco had on her face the look of a child who arrives at pre pandemic Disneyland and finds out she's finally tall enough to ride Space Mountain. "Mommy," she said, "you always protect me." Until a few weeks ago, New Yorkers living through the coronavirus crisis seemed largely to be embracing the maxim of "together apart." But as sirens blare on, no end in sight (even with a flattening curve), many have entered a more frustrating phase of pandemic living. The short arguments in the supermarket are followed by longer ones at home, where not transferring viral droplets is less of a concern. "It's the spouse you're ready to kill, the stranger you're ready to kill," said Sherry Amatenstein, a clinical social worker and therapist in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens. "Some of it comes from real fear. When you see someone in the supermarket without a mask, the fear is real. When you see spouses not taking proper precautions, it's scary." It can also be a referendum of sorts. "This is the perfect test of whether marriage is viable or not," said T. Byram Karasu, a distinguished professor emeritus at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine with a private psychiatry practice in Manhattan. "Couples either become more intimate or they become bored and irritate each other." Sometimes, tension in a twosome is also about paranoia overtaking rational fear, said Dr. Karasu, who went on to tell the story of a wealthy Park Avenue couple he knows. "Their marriage couldn't survive two weeks of this," he said. "The husband is somewhat hypochondriacal. He ordered a ventilator and announced he was moving to the West Coast. His wife told him she wasn't coming." Dr. Karasu doesn't believe this was the reason the marriage broke up, but it was the precipitating event that allowed her to say "no more." For some parents, the joy of having breakfast with one's kids in the morning has been replaced with "how on earth did their teachers ever put up with them eight hours a day?" That was what prompted Ms. Glaisek Ferguson three weeks ago to post a screen shot of her online activity to Instagram, a joking Google search: "How do I sell my children?" (Besides Coco, there is Phoebe, age 20 months). Objectively, Ms. Glaisek Ferguson knows she is lucky that she has a job that she can do from home without risking her health, and a pair of children who are healthy and usually happy. Days later, she was back to posting catalog ready shots of them to her feed. Still, it's hard for her to romanticize the state of things now, when she can't get through a Zoom meeting without giving Coco and Phoebe an iPad, hoping they'll fall into self hypnosis. "I don't even want to know what they're doing with it," Ms. Glaisek Ferguson said. And, she added, "You think my kids aren't sick of me?" Hearing the daily 7 p.m. cheers for health care workers get louder and louder has been a beautiful expression of what it means to be a New Yorker, but as people rap with ever increasing force on their frying pans, it's easy to wonder if this ritual isn't also serving as a way to expel the frustration that comes with living indefinitely in a state of suspended animation. The rebound of the stock market has served as a painful reminder that for the rich, the crisis is yet another shopping opportunity, a chance to buy things on sale. But its wild oscillations from one day to another and even one hour to the next also mirror our collective, pent up emotionality and uncertainty. It is volatile, and so are we. Keith McCurdy, 34, a star tattoo artist known as "Bang Bang," who owns a shop in SoHo and first became well known after he inked Rihanna, felt his blood begin to boil after reading about the 10 million "small business" loan Danny Meyer and Shake Shack received. The money came through the Paycheck Protection Program, the federal government's 2 billion coronavirus aid attempt for small businesses. "They're a public company!" Mr. McCurdy said, going on to distinguish the difference between Shake Shack (which has more than 200 locations) and his (which has two). "I'm paying my taxes and doing things on the up and up in an industry that usually runs like drug dealing at a bar. When hospitals said they needed more protective gear, we sent them all the masks and gloves we had. When they asked for more, we got them from our supplier." Once again, Mr. McCurdy added, it's the wealthiest who get bailouts. Mr. McCurdy blames the federal leadership for that, but the delayed response of the state to shut down schools and to impose self quarantine makes him nearly as angry. He can't figure out why liquor stores, coffee shops and ice cream parlors are being allowed to remain open as essential businesses. His rage extends to New York's governor, Andrew Cuomo, and New York City's mayor, Bill de Blasio. "We paint rainbows on our windows and clap for hospital workers, but shouldn't we also be screaming at our leaders here as well as in Washington?" Mr. McCurdy said. "I want to have this tingly feeling, I like Governor Cuomo, but enough with the bromance with Chris. I watch the daily briefings, and I've barely heard anything new about what we're really going to do to reopen or what his plans are for actual small businesses. Everything feels like 'wait and see.' Well, my landlord's not waiting to see. My mental health is suffering like everybody else's." Her family had an in person funeral for her father. "My mother had to wear a painter's suit and we had to be 10 feet away from her, because we didn't want her to get sick. She was married to my dad 55 years. Do you think that's fair?" Ms. Smith has been staying off Amazon, after learning that its founder, the world's richest man, was giving his workers a mere 2 an hour extra as hazard pay. Along with donating to the fund of Chris Smalls, a worker who was fired after speaking out against conditions in the company's Staten Island warehouse, she went on the air and urged listeners to make their voices heard by not ordering from the coronavirus season's biggest winner. (Amazon has said that Mr. Smalls was fired for violating social distancing rules.) Going to the supermarket remains a challenge. On a recent afternoon, Ms. Smith walked down one of the aisles and watched two men stocking the shelves gesture to her that she should just pass by. Back at her apartment building, she politely declined to get on an elevator with a neighbor. "Then I passed him in the lobby and he said, 'Is this enough space for you?' I can't recall what I said back." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Credit...Susan Wright for The New York Times The writer was looking for an alpine adventure. Then, she heard something wild a "ski safari," with multi resort ski days and stays in family run inns in the Italian Alps. Every mountain is unique, sure. But, the rhythm of most ski resorts is predictable. So, when I heard about a "ski safari" in the Italian Alps, that involved crisscrossing the scenic towns and valleys of places like Cortina, Civetta, Val Gardena and Arabba, then sleeping at a different alpine inn each night (sadly, no tiger tracking), I was intrigued. On top of appealing to my daredevil nature, there was another selling point: I am a solid intermediate skier. In the United States, hut to hut skiing is a backcountry endeavor designed for experts. Not so in the Dolomites, a UNESCO World Heritage site in northeastern Italy. This territory of jagged limestone peaks, dipping plateaus and terrifyingly steep World Cup descents, I discovered, actually, boasted manageable terrain; 86 percent of the runs are red (intermediate) and blue (the easiest), ideal for nonelite athletes like me whose slope preferences are wide and easy groomers to couloirs, the narrow, hard core gullies for advanced skiers. Even better, the traditional Italian mountain huts called rifugios bore no resemblance to the bare bones huts of North America. They were cozy, family run establishments celebrated for splendid views and cuisine that integrates the heartiness of South Tyrol with the refined flavors of northern Italy. After a fitful first night's sleep (jet lag, wine and altitude are an evil combination), I thought it a good idea to loosen up with a practice run before meeting up with the mountain guide. The Tofana ski area was not difficult, I was told, mostly blues and reds with a few advanced black runs. What could go wrong? That morning, as I ascended the Freccia nel Cielo cable car, a dense fog gripped the mountain. It was a total white out when I stepped out onto Ra Valles, with an altitude of 8,202 feet. The signs that I had anticipated with directions to an easy warm up run did not materialize. There was a sign that I missed, however, which read "piste for expert skiers." I had ended up on run 151 Pista Forcella Rossa, a 6,896 foot long run between gullies with a steep 3,280 foot descent. Thankfully, a sweet Venetian in his mid 30s, took pity on me (rivulets of sweat streaming from my goggles may have tipped him off that I did not belong on this run) and guided me down Cortina's steepest slope, stopping every few turns to make sure I hadn't fallen. Next time I'm in Venice, I must look up Piero Paccagnella and buy him a beer. After lunch, I was exhausted and would have loved to call it a day. Here's the challenge: During a ski safari, you can't turn back when you get tired. First of all, there is no "back." You are moving from resort to resort. And, unless you have booked a private tour, you are with a group following a set itinerary. You'll have to kick back an espresso or two and motor on (though if there were a serious issue, the company would send someone to fetch you). I popped a square of dark chocolate in my mouth (an essential always socked away when skiing) and punched through the fatigue, knowing that I could catch my breath on the upcoming taxi transfer to Cinque Torri. Waking up at dawn, I caught the breathtaking sunrise and, after a quick breakfast, popped on my skis and sailed out the door as fresh powder whispered underfoot. As we skied, the guide pointed out a rustic stone structure partially obscured by the snow. The Cinque Torri, he explained, was a defensive stronghold during World War I where the Italians had hewed bunkers into the mountains to monitor the Austrians and Germans. Thousands died in this "Guerra Bianca," fought on mountain ridges in freezing temperatures. The building we had passed was a World War I bunker, one of many in the area. We transferred over to the resort of Civetta, and after a few runs, I found my groove on the intermediate runs, bookended by snow kissed pine forests. This area was my favorite, its stunning vistas (including fashionable prosecco drinkers perched on sun decks) and old school vibe (enhanced by creaky 1960s era chairlifts) resembled one of the Slim Aarons's glitzy photographs of beautiful people in beautiful settings. We wound our way through the valleys of Alleghe, Selva di Cadore and Palafavera, and then down to the lost in time village of Val di Zoldo on creamy, untracked runs, bathed in splendid views of the Dolomites' most famous peaks, Monte Pelmo and Monte Civetta. A note on Italian ski culture: it's strictly a D.I.Y. venture. The notion of a ski valet, as in the helper to hustle you into your prewarmed boots, bring your skis from storage to the snow and offer you a cup of hot chocolate as you step in from the cold (I'm talking to you, Aspen!) does not exist. The horror. After renting gear in town, you'll be responsible for schlepping it everywhere up to the gondola (there are many gondolas), onto the taxi roof for transfers, into the rifugio ski rooms. There are also no roaming mountain "ambassadors," a mainstay in American resorts, who assist with directions or help you get vertical after a face plant. But this is forgotten on the slopes. Enveloped in the storybook scenery, as lithe ski racers whiz by like birds in exotic Lycra plumage, you're in the thrill of the moment. The third night was spent at Rifugio Fuciade (elevation 6,502 feet), a former priest's retreat in an alpine pasture so remote that it required transport via a military tank like snowcat. From the moment I stepped through the doors, I felt the snug embrace of Ladin style hospitality. What is Ladin, you ask? Until my visit, I hadn't a clue that 30,000 inhabitants of the Dolomites had a distinct dialect and culture with Rhaetic (a pre Roman language that is specific to the Eastern Alps) origins. This identity is expressed in Teutonic influenced decor (think homespun curtains and pillows, lots of blonde wood, wood burning "stube" stove to keep the public rooms toasty) and a homey ambience communicated through a warm welcome from the owners, often attired in lederhosen (paired with a Patagonia jacket) or embroidered dirndl. The vibe extended into my room which was spacious with a cheery duvet, sitting nook and infrared sauna. Just as I started to Tiger Balm my quadriceps, the owner, Emanuela Rossi, invited our group to the basement for cocktails. Down a stairwell oozing with the funk of brined cheese rinds and garlic doused salami (the source: a dry aging room with cheeses nesting in hay and cured hams swinging from hooks) was a serious wine cellar tricked out with elaborately carved doors and wooden beams culled from centuries old homes. Many proseccos and a Ladin Moderne meal later, I dubbed Fuciade best in show for lodging with standout middle of nowhere charm. Lunch, on that fourth day and every day, was an hour and a half feast. Meals kicked off with charcuterie boards laden with speck, Parma ham and soppressata. As dairy is the doyenne of the Dolomites, fragrant wedges of local Stelvio, Piave, Fodom and Bastardo del Grappa (accompanied by housemade jams) were essential to the antipasti course. Though this spread could have easily sufficed as lunch, it's simply a precursor to "piatti tipici" entrees like pine nut and Gorgonzola stuffed gnocchi; artichoke salad layered with walnut, pomegranate and Parmesan; and beef tagliata wrapped in speck. The saving grace of skiing six hours a day was indulgence without guilt. The fourth night was spent at Rifugio Col Pradat ( 6,653 feet ) which, at first blush, did not impress, its lobby doing double duty as a functional cafeteria filled with skiers from the nearby Sella Ronda circuit. At dusk, the cafeteria went dark and the adjoining lounge sprang to life, an alpine chic assemblage of pelt strewn chill out chairs and a roaring fire where I lazed with a glass of Sylvaner. My room had a boutique hotel feel, cuddly blankets for sunset watching on the terrace, a hot water bottle on the duvet and Villeroy Boch fixtures in the sleek slate bathroom. Like the other rifugios, the dinner menu veered hearty. In tagliatelle with venison and smoky speck stuffed "Knodel," the region's Austrian heritage was plain to see. Admission: I have a mild girl crush on the double Olympic gold medalist Mikaela Shiffrin . So, when I realized that the FIS Ladies Ski World Cup in Cortina coincided with my dates, I felt compelled to tweak my itinerary on the last day of the ski safari to watch the 24 year old tear down the Olympia Delle Tofane slope (the same track used in the 1956 Olympics). Happily, the owner of the tour outfit, Agustina Marmol, agreed to the change, but only if she could come along. Getting to the venue in Cortina from Alta Badia was tricky. We woke up at the crack of dawn. Two hours' worth of descents, taxi transfers, lifts and traverses later, we arrived to watch Mikaela crush the Super G. The group spent its final night in the town of San Cassiano to catch early morning flights home. We assembled in the Finnish sauna of Hotel Rosa Alpina, as a sort of sweaty victory lap for our cardio marathon. Grueling at times, the trip had been an exhilarating fusion of recreation and alpine culture. Earlier that day, I had purchased some South Tyrol chocolate to plant in my jacket. On my next ski jaunt, it will be a treat to reach into my pocket and taste the Dolomites. Amy Tara Koch, based in Chicago, writes about travel, style, food and parenting. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Carl Abrams, 90, a retired Air Force colonel in Williamstown, N.J. Mr. Abrams cheerfully agrees he can be stubborn. "He gets very angry and oppositional," said his daughter. To what extent, the researchers asked middle aged adults, do your parents ignore suggestions or advice that would make their lives easier or safer? Insist on doing things their own way, even if that makes their own or others' lives more difficult, inconvenient or unsafe? That's how several studies directed by Allison Heid, a gerontologist consulting at Penn State and Rowan University, measured adult children's perceptions of stubbornness among their aging parents. In an initial study of 189 adult children and their parents, Dr. Heid and her colleagues found that 77 percent of children (average age: 55) reported stubborn behavior by their parents, at least sometimes. But two thirds of the parents (average age: 80) described themselves as stubborn, too. In a later study, the researchers asked 192 middle aged children to keep a seven day diary of parental interactions. Of those who had contact with their parents that week, 31 percent reported "insistent" behaviors and 17 percent reported "risky" behaviors; 11 percent said they encountered both. "The stories are endless," said Dr. Heid, whose interest in the subject was sparked by a grandmother determined to shovel snow, despite her children's protests, into her 80s. Lori Kayne, a geriatric social worker in Bridgewater, N.J., can tell such stories. Her late father, whose poor balance had caused multiple falls but no serious injuries, resisted her pleas to use his walker. "We had a lot of screaming matches," she recalled but she never prevailed. Then last year, her father fell and fractured several vertebrae. "He was in terrible agony for months," Ms. Kayne said but at least he was finally relying on the walker. She figured that at 87, he'd grown more reasonable. Nope. "As soon as he started to feel better, he refused the walker, even though he knew what could happen," Ms. Kayne said, sighing. Laura Perry has seen similar battles. Her father in law, 87, worried about skin cancer. When he needed a ride to a dermatologist's office, Ms. Perry, who lives nearby in Glastonbury, Conn., obliged. During the appointment, she recalled, her father in law indicated which skin lesion he wanted biopsied. The doctor replied that after examining all his patient's lesions, he would decide which, if any, warranted testing. The annoyed patient wouldn't defer, so Ms. Perry drove him home, un biopsied. The standoff recurred three months later. Her father in law still wants a biopsy. "I'm not taking you again," Ms. Perry tells him. The more polite social science term for such skirmishes: mismatched goals. "If the goal is not shared the older adult wants to walk to the grocery store himself and the child says, 'I don't think it's a good idea' that's when conflict can arise," Dr. Heid explained. Such clashes, and related reports of stubbornness, increase when the parent and child live together, she found. Perceived stubbornness also rises when a parent's disability increases. "When a child steps in, most commonly there's a safety issue," Dr. Heid said. "The parent may not share those feelings about their capabilities." These familiar, probably universal, safety versus autonomy debates have led some critics to object that adult children overemphasize the former, when what matters more to their parents is maintaining independence and pursuing what they find meaningful. When parents feel thwarted, does resistance really constitute stubbornness? Perhaps their children, who in these studies were not serving as hands on caregivers, were domineering or intrusive. Stubbornness might actually be a positive trait, Dr. Heid suggested. It shows tenacity, persistence, a sense of control. But stubbornness, it turns out, can also have hurtful consequences. In Dr. Heid's largest study, involving nearly 400 middle aged children, the most common response was avoidance: Children back off and let the contested issue go. "But when they do, they report more depressive symptoms and less positive relationships," Dr. Heid said. "They may be internalizing their distress." Arguing with one's parents has similarly unhappy outcomes. What helps, the study shows, is reasoning. "It allows for a more open exchange of views and more discussion," Dr. Heid said. Reasoning with someone who seems impervious to it sounds, well, challenging. "It's a really hard thing, this mismatch between what we need and what we want and what's good for us," said Marci Gleason, a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Social scientists have learned that older adults who provide support have increased well being and better health. Receiving help, on the other hand, is associated with negative mood. After decades of helping their children, older people understandably balk at becoming dependent on them. "Even if intellectually they accept it, actually receiving help is difficult," Dr. Gleason said. "It can signal that you're not needed, and people want to feel needed." She suggests trying to equalize power in the relationship, allowing the parent to also provide support, even by just listening empathetically to a child's account of her tough week. "It could be beneficial for the relationship to not have it all be one sided," Dr. Gleason said. She's also a fan of incremental progress, a negotiation that leads to a more reciprocal exchange. "Sometimes he would blow up," Tamar Abrams said. "But if you gave him some time and then returned to the discussion, he'd be O.K." Now, Mr. Abrams relies on a bright red, battery powered scooter. "An excellent compromise," he said. "If it wasn't for the scooter, I'd go crazy in the house." Twice weekly, he cruises two miles to have lunch at Applebee's, where the servers all know his name, and picks up a few groceries on his way home. "If he didn't have to cross a major intersection, it would be a lovely ritual," Tamar Abrams said. Nobody (except Mr. Abrams) feels good about his navigating across six lanes on his scooter, even at a traffic light. But she understands. "You're holding on for dear life to who you think you are," she said. So, "we hold our breath and let him do it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
In "Felon," his searing third collection of poems, Reginald Dwayne Betts leads his readers through the underworlds of incarceration and its aftermath, " if prison is where Black / men go to become / Lazarus," it is in the aftermath that the attempt to come back to life is systematically thwarted by a society that desires something like eternal retribution. "There is no name for this thing that you've become," he writes: "Convict, prisoner, inmate, lifer, yardbird, all fail." What does not fail is the language Betts sends prismatically through his experience, rendering the entire spectrum of the prison industrial complex visible. As a 16 year old student who had never been in trouble, Betts hijacked a car at gunpoint, confessed to the crime, was "certified" an adult despite his age, and sentenced to nine years in prison, serving eight years and three months. He spent 14 months in solitary confinement for various infractions against spoken and unspoken rules (such as cursing and touching a guard's arm). One day someone slipped an anthology of poetry under his cell door: "The Black Poets," edited by Dudley Randall, Detroit's first poet laureate. Betts had already been writing, but now began a serious apprenticeship, copying the anthologized poems by hand, breathing the lyric art of Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Langston Hughes and Claude McKay into the sunless, malodorous cellblocks of his confinement. In a moment of premonitory recognition, Betts took as his prison name "Shahid," the Arabic word for "witness." After his release he would attend college and earn a graduate degree in poetry writing, followed by a doctorate in jurisprudence from Yale Law School. He would publish a compelling memoir about his crime and incarceration, and two poetry books preceding this one, both critically acclaimed. It is an improbable trajectory, and no one knows this better than Betts, who deserves now to be recognized more for the brilliance of his lyric art than the vicissitudes of his fate as a youth. Read Reginald Dwayne Betts's essay about his path from prison to law school "Felon" opens with a masterful ghazal a form he learned from another Shahid, the Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali. The poem, with its refrain "after prison," signals that the subject of this book is not the classification of the crime committed, but rather its indelible scar, a mark carried beyond served time into the future lives of former convicts, preventing them from acquiring gainful employment, from voting, seeking admission to college or receiving such basic federal benefits as food stamps. "Name a song," the poem opens, "that tells a man what to expect after prison." In independent but thematically linked couplets, the poet walks the reader through prison's aftermath, holding Virgil's lamp to the various circles of carceral hell. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Who knew that the Mueller report was a comedy? The findings of the special counsel, of course, concern dead serious questions about the integrity of American democracy. The published version is dry as a redacted saltine. Robert Mueller himself has the stoic G man bearing of someone who would laugh by writing "ha ha" on a memo pad. Yet "The Investigation," a star studded dramatic reading of sections of the report, adapted by the playwright Robert Schenkkan and staged at Manhattan's Riverside Church and live streamed Monday night, opens with an episode of drawing room, or rather dining room, farce. It's early 2017, and President Trump (John Lithgow) meets with then F.B.I. director James Comey (Justin Long) over dinner. "You will always get honesty from me," Mr. Long answers, stiffly. If you've followed this case, you've already heard this story not just in the Mueller report, but in newspapers like this one, back in 2017. But something about Mr. Lithgow's bluster and the way he hits "loyalty" a little harder than "honest" nails something essential about his character, and the assembled audience cracks up. You gotta laugh, right? "The Investigation," now available to stream online, is a bizarre creature, both as drama and as civic effort. But the fact of its existence, and the way it gives voice to the dry details of the report, feel somehow perfectly suited to this surreal political moment. "The Investigation" is subtitled "A Search for the Truth in Ten Acts." That "acts" has a double meaning; the 10 segments of the play detail 10 instances of potential obstruction of justice by the president, hewing closely to the report's language. The actors sit at lecterns draped in flag bunting, reading from scripts in binders. It's part old time public recitation, part Hollywood table read, and at points actors stumble over the workmanlike text. Yet the play can we call it that? moves surprisingly briskly through a tight hour and fifteen minutes. The story pingpongs around the stage from a narrator (Annette Bening) to Mr. Mueller (Kevin Kline) to the various actors, who often pick up the narrative midsentence as the point of view shifts, the editing following them nimbly. Their interpretations vary. Michael Shannon and Alfre Woodard give just the facts readings of Don McGahn and Hope Hicks. Joel Grey, on the other hand, adapts an ah do declare drawl as the Alabamian former attorney general Jeff Sessions, the put upon Mr. Cellophane of this story, whose resignation letter becomes a drawn from life running gag. It's Mr. Lithgow who's hit the jackpot here, though. Never averse to chewing a bit of scenery that was asking for it, he's landed a character who is essentially impossible to overact. Laying into Mr. Sessions or launching into a tweet storm ("Sad!"), he builds a raging, red faced, percussive momentum. At some self pitying moments, he tosses in just a splash of Richard Nixon. The peals of laughter he draws, intended or not, show the power of Donald Trump the construct, the public performance even when he's not present. The president's Ubu Roi energy, on stage as in life, shades every event toward farce, even in a constitutional crisis or a showdown with a nuclear rival. "You gotta laugh," in this era, can feel less like equanimity and more like a Pavlovian command. In that sense, the beige tone of Mr. Mueller's report that desiccating bureaucratese denying the events their juice and soundbite ability is something of a radical act in this day and age. But judicious understatement only gets you so big an audience. And what audience was paying attention to "The Investigation"? The drama's online distribution, late announcement and word of mouth publicity suggest it was likely viewed by an interested audience for whom "If it's what you say I love it" is already as well known as a Hamlet soliloquy. You might imagine a performance like this earnest, star spangled and populated with respectable thespians airing to a bigger crowd on cable or public TV as a service. Yes, the report is already available in many forms, print and audio, and Mr. Mueller has reprised its highlights on TV. But a reading, even sticking closely to the ur text, gives it the voice, arc and thrust that humans use to make meaning. Unfortunately these days simply presenting a government report on a matter of national security will be labeled "political," because one partisan half of America prefers the report be put to rest. It only takes opposition from one party to make media outlets nervous about looking like the opposition party. So that leaves it to projects like "The Investigation," which, despite sticking mainly to the letter of the report, has a decidedly nonneutral take. It focuses on the more damning second half, dealing with obstruction. It's structured like an argument to a jury, complete with a description of the impeachment process. This is not a drama that wants you to leave the theater debating the subtext. Most pointedly, it finishes with the company repeating the 10 instances of potential obstruction like the 10 plagues of Passover. ("Act Five: President Trump prevented the public disclosure of evidence.") Ms. Bening ends the litany by rebutting arguments in the president's defense and issuing a call to action: "Robert Mueller did his job. The question is, will we do ours?" But beyond that, performance is inherently subjective. Even if you don't judge a character's politics, you can't bring them to life without having some theory of their nature. And if nothing else, Mr. Lithgow has created a memorable Donald Trump: sputtering, indignant, blasting out rivers of verbiage in the hope of sailing away on them to safety. I doubt this is what Robert Mueller had in mind. But with an assist from Mr. Schenkkan (no stranger to dramatizing the current administration) and Mr. Lithgow, he ended up bringing forth the kind of literary figure who might have come from the keyboard of Tony Kushner: an embattled, thunderous giant, furiously playing the angles in America. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
PLAINFIELD, Ill. The mortgage interest deduction, a beloved tax break bound tightly to the American dream of homeownership, once seemed politically invincible. Then it nearly vanished in middle class neighborhoods across the country, and it appears that hardly anyone noticed. In places like Plainfield, a southwestern outpost in the area known locally as Chicagoland, the housing market is humming. The people selling and buying homes do not seem to care much that President Trump's signature tax overhaul effectively, although indirectly, vaporized a longtime source of government support for homeowners and housing prices. The 2017 law nearly doubled the standard deduction to 24,000 for a couple filing jointly on federal income taxes, giving millions of households an incentive to stop claiming itemized deductions. The benefit, as it remains, is largely for high earners, and more limited than it once was: The 2017 law capped the maximum value of new mortgage debt eligible for the deduction at 750,000, down from 1 million. There has been no audible public outcry, prompting some people in Washington to propose scrapping the tax break entirely. If the deduction's decline should be causing a stir anywhere, it is in towns like Plainfield, where the typical family earns about 100,000 a year and the typical home sells for around 300,000. But housing professionals, home buyers and sellers and detailed statistics about the housing market show no signs that the drop in the use of the tax break is weighing on prices or activity. "From the perspective of selling and trying to buy, I don't see any evidence of that," said Paul Forsythe, who teaches physical education and coaches football at a high school. Mr. Forsythe and his wife, Kylie, are selling their four bedroom, two bath home on a quarter acre lot in one of Plainfield's older developments, which dates to 1997. They are moving with their two daughters to a nearby suburb, closer to the schools where they work. They have owned homes through the ups and downs of the local housing market, which boomed in the early 2000s and crashed in the midst of the financial crisis. "Right now," said Ms. Forsythe, a fourth grade teacher, "people are excited that the market is finally good again." Such reactions challenge a longstanding American political consensus. For decades, the mortgage interest deduction has been alternately hailed as a linchpin of support for homeownership (by the real estate industry) and reviled as a symbol of tax policy gone awry (by economists). What pretty much everyone agreed on, though, was that it was politically untouchable. Nearly 30 million tax filers wrote off a collective 273 billion in mortgage interest in 2018. Repealing the deduction, the conventional wisdom presumed, would effectively mean raising taxes on millions of middle class families spread across every congressional district. And if anyone were tempted to try, an army of real estate brokers, home builders and developers and their lobbyists were ready to rush to the deduction's defense. Now, critics of the deduction feel emboldened. "The rejoinder was always, 'Oh, but you'd never be able to get rid of the mortgage interest deduction,' but I certainly wouldn't say never now," said William G. Gale , an economist at the Brookings Institution and a former adviser to President George H.W. Bush. "It used to be that this was a middle class birthright or something like that, but it's kind of hard to argue that when only 8 percent of households are taking the deduction." Mr. Gale, like most economists on the left and the right, has long argued that the mortgage interest deduction violated every rule of good policymaking. It was regressive, benefiting wealthy families who are more likely to own homes, and to have bigger mortgages more than poorer ones. It distorted the housing market, encouraging Americans to buy the biggest home possible to take maximum advantage of the deduction. Studies repeatedly found that the deduction actually reduced ownership rates by helping to inflate home prices, making homes less affordable to first time buyers. 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. But the real estate industry said that scrapping the deduction could undermine the value of what is, for most American families, their most important asset. In the debate over the tax law in 2017, the industry warned that the legislation could cause house prices to fall 10 percent or more in some parts of the country. Price growth has cooled in many markets, including New York and Seattle, but not nearly as much as the most alarming estimates suggested, and not in a pattern that suggests the loss of the deduction was a primary factor. Places where a large share of middle class taxpayers took the mortgage interest deduction, for example, have not seen any meaningful difference in price increases from less affected areas, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the real estate site Zillow. Skylar Olsen , an economist at Zillow, said that the slowdown in the housing market probably had little to do with the tax law. Home prices have risen much faster than wages in recent years, creating an affordability crisis in many cities that probably made slower growth in prices inevitable . "Housing markets were burning so hot at an unsustainable pace and they had to come down," Ms. Olsen said. The tax law may have had another impact: It capped deductions for state and local taxes at 10,000, which had a particularly large effect in coastal cities and other places where property taxes and real estate values are both high. Those places did see a slowdown in the growth of home prices after the law took effect, although it is not clear whether the two were linked. The national real estate industry argues that the two tax changes have together played a role in weakening the housing market. "Clearly the housing market is underperforming in relation to economic fundamentals of job growth, wage growth and mortgage rates," said Lawrence Yun , chief economist for the National Association of Realtors. Economists like Mr. Yun and Ms. Olsen will probably debate the law's impact for years. It is possible, and even likely, that sophisticated analyses will eventually conclude that limiting the mortgage interest deduction did lead to somewhat slower price growth. But for most home buyers and sellers, those subtle effects will be washed away by forces that have a much bigger impact: changes to mortgage rates, construction costs and supply and demand trends that vary from city to city and from neighborhood to neighborhood. The tax law also rolled back the mortgage interest deduction in a way that minimized the chance that taxpayers would notice its absence. Congress did not take away the tax break; it just changed the law in a way that meant fewer people would benefit from it and buried the change in a much broader overhaul to the tax code. But while Washington think tanks plot the deduction's demise, the real estate industry is still hoping to restore it in some form. Mr. Yun of the National Association for Realtors said that as the housing market weakened, pressure would mount for Congress to restore some of the tax advantages that homeownership has historically enjoyed , although not necessarily in the same form. For now, though, real estate agents and developers do not see the erosion of the mortgage deduction playing much of a role. Plainfield's housing market has been shaped by abrupt changes over the past 30 years. In 1990, a tornado leveled parts of town, killing more than two dozen people and forcing a huge rebuilding effort. At the turn of the millennium, the town had fewer than 10,000 residents. It has since quadrupled, with more growth on the way. During the housing craze of the mid 2000s, developers leveled corn fields and sod farms to make way for cul de sacs. When the crisis hit, activity in many of the new subdivisions froze, said Ellen Williams , a real estate agent with Coldwell Banker in Plainfield who has sold homes in the area for nearly two decades. Only in the past few years has construction restarted in earnest. Ms. Williams helped the Forsythes buy their home several years ago, when the housing crash still weighed on the market and the couple was underwater on a townhouse that had become too small for their growing family. They rent the townhouse out now, which means that they still itemize their deductions, including for mortgage interest. They said the deduction was not a factor in the sale of their home this summer or in their purchase of a new one. Ms. Williams said that has been the case across the market. "I don't know that it's been a huge enough change yet," she said. "People worry about Illinois taxes more." In the Forsythes' ZIP code, housing prices are up 2 percent from the last year, according to data from the online real estate brokerage Redfin . Homes are selling quickly, Ms. Williams said, as she gave a quick tour of a recently listed four bedroom house backing up to a pond in a nearby community. The hardwood floors were well kept, the kitchen hardware dated to the mid 1990s and the home was listed for 267,000. "There's not a lot available in this subdivision," Ms. Williams said, "so I anticipate it selling quickly." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The actress Elizabeth Olsen separated the first egg gracefully. The second? Not so much. And the third was a disaster. "Get it together, Lizard," she muttered to herself as she leaned over a stainless steel bowl. Ms. Olsen Lizard to her mother; Lizzie to her sisters, Mary Kate and Ashley was at City Cooking West End, a demonstration kitchen and event space on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She was learning to make ravioli all'uovo, a large, filled pasta in which a raw egg yolk lolls inside a ricotta mound, glittering like a little jewel. Ideally. Finally, Ms. Olsen slid an intact yolk into its nest of cheese and covered it with a square of pasta. "That's not a square," she said. "It's a trapezoid." Then she trimmed the excess dough, making a shape that wasn't quite a circle. "I'm not one for symmetry," she said. She had been spending about 18 hours a day on media appearances and the preparations they require, and she sometimes couldn't remember the movie she was meant to discuss. "I'll literally be in the middle of an interview and not know which one we're talking about," she said. (It's a relief to be asked about social media rather than the rape of indigenous women.) But she found an hour in between a dress fitting and a SAG Aftra Q. and A. to take a cooking class. Ms. Olsen grew up in Los Angeles and studied theater at New York University, cooking whenever a friend made a kitchen available. "I had a very foodie college experience," she said. Between course work and understudying on Broadway, "I did not party, that's for sure," she said. The rap on Hollywood actresses is that they subsist on green juices and aromatherapy fumes. Not Ms. Olsen. Though ambivalent about self promotion ("The goal was never to be famous," she said. "That's why I went to school for theater"), she has recently been more active on Instagram and likes to post awkward paparazzi shots that capture her devouring a Quest bar or tasting ice cream, with the tag feedmefridays. Whenever she travels for a location shot, she said, she startles T.S.A. agents fits by filling her luggage with a set of spices and a trusted knife block. "I'm so glad you said that," said Stephanie Barlow Sarikaya, the cooking instructor. "It's dangerous to use dull knives." Ms. Olsen nodded and told a story about being afraid that T.S.A. agents would confiscate her Veggetti, a device that makes zucchini noodles. (You could use it to shred an opponent, but only if that person stays very still.) Ms. Sarikaya laughed and then the two of them discussed whether to blanch noodles before saucing them; Ms. Olsen prefers a quick boil, while Ms. Sarikaya worries that it will leave the noddles too watery. Two sauces simmered on the stove, and Ms. Olsen gave them an occasional stir. She declined the apron meant to protect her black silk blouse, black jeans and black boots but happily accepted a glass of prosecco. The wine helped ease the arm soreness from a recent tennis game and the neck pain she'd woken up with, a likely whiplash injury from her "Avengers" stunts. (The next film in the series, "Avengers: Infinity War," will open in 2018. Ms. Olsen plays the Scarlet Witch.) "When you're pretending to get hit, that's when you get it," she said. She risked further injury as she enthusiastically kneaded pasta dough, zested a lemon and shaved a summer truffle. Ms. Sarikaya said they now use dogs to find truffles. "That's so cute," said Ms. Olsen, before learning that many old school truffle hunters are missing fingers from having wrested the tubers away from the pigs. She had a lot of questions, about fast acting yeast, and pepper grinders, and the sage she hopes to plant in the herb garden of the Los Angeles house she is renovating. At one point she teased Ms. Sarikaya about whether she could get away with Kraft Parmesan. (Short answer: No.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Stop Motion Studio is one of the many free or inexpensive apps that give you the tools to make your own Lego movie or animate anything else that comes to mind. Stop motion animation is a great way to bring toys and other objects to life and learn the basics of filmmaking. Stop motion animation has been around since the 1800s and still flourishes in the works of studios like Aardman Animations, the force behind "Wallace Gromit" and other creations. With stop motion, you make an inanimate object "move" by snapping a photo and then stopping to subtly adjust the object's position before taking the next shot. When enough photos of these gradual movements are captured, you run them together as a video that shows the object seeming to propel itself. Creating a stop motion clip can be a great way to jazz up a presentation, dabble in moviemaking basics or keep the children busy with a time consuming project. All you need is something to animate paper cutouts, Lego figures or other toys, for example along with a camera, the right app and patience. Here's how to get rolling. Step 1: Get With the Program To get started, decide on which app you'd like to use. If you plan on using your smartphone camera, there are many options. Stop Motion Studio Pro for Android, iOS, Mac and Windows ( 2 to 10 depending on the system) is a popular option. It has a huge collection of editing features, including a tool to add facial expressions to Lego people. A free version, Stop Motion Studio, is available for Android and iOS, but it does not offer as many audio and visual effects, or the ability to record higher resolution video, unless you pay through in app purchases. For those who prefer working on a computer, other programs, like Dragonframe for Windows, Mac and Linux (around 300 for the full version) and iKITMovie for Windows (prices start at 69), are available, each with free trial versions. Just keep in mind that with those programs, you will need to move your photos from a camera to the computer, instead of doing it all on your smartphone or tablet. Stop motion animation takes time and effort, so you unless you're just messing around, you might want to sketch out your scenes before you begin. If a cheap notebook and pencil seem too rustic, plenty of digital tools can help you visualize your future film, including storyboard and drawing apps, or even a stylus friendly free notes app. If you need inspiration, you can find the storyboards of famous films to study with a quick web search. The objects you're animating are the only things that should be moving in your stop motion production. Keeping the camera steady is essential. A small tabletop tripod for your camera or smartphone can cost as little as 5 online and also keeps your hands free. Don't rely on your hands to keep the camera in the same spot. Depending on the app and device you're using, you may be able to snap the shutter remotely, which minimizes the potential for accidentally knocking the camera around. A Bluetooth remote (like the 8 CamKix remote for smartphones) is one option. Gear you may already have like an Apple Watch or the volume buttons on corded iPhone earbuds might also trip the shutter in some apps. When you have your camera, background and lighting set, start animating. Take a photo, then carefully adjust the object you're using, and then take the next picture. For passably smooth action, you generally need to take 10 to 12 photos for each second of finished video. Some apps like Stop Motion Studio Pro include an on screen grid for positioning and an "onion skin" layer that shows the placement between frames so you can better gauge how far to move the figure in the next shot. Keep taking photos until you have captured all the movement you need for your scene. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
In N.Y.C., the Coronavirus Is Killing Men at Twice the Rate of Women None Victor J. Blue for The New York Times In its inexorable spread across New York City, the coronavirus is exacting a greater toll on men than women. Not only are men infected in greater numbers, new data show, but they are also dying at nearly twice the rate of women. To date, there have been nearly 43 Covid 19 deaths for every 100,000 men in the city, compared with 23 such deaths for every 100,000 women, according to figures reported by the city's health department. And men are being hospitalized with severe disease at higher rates. The data, while disturbing, do not come entirely as a surprise. Similar trends have been observed in China and Italy, where men were both infected with Covid 19 and succumbed to it at higher rates than women. Possible explanations for the disparity have ranged from differences in behavior smoking rates among men exceed those among women in much of the world, for example to biological differences. Women have more robust immune systems, some scientists have noted, that provide an edge in fighting off infections although it also makes them more susceptible to autoimmune disorders. Physicians working at hospitals throughout the city say the gender disparity is stark and impossible to miss. "I'm in the emergency room, and it's remarkable I'd estimate that 80 percent of the patients being brought in are men," said Dr. Hani Sbitany, a reconstructive surgeon at Mount Sinai Health Systems who has been treating Covid 19 patients in Brooklyn. "It's four out of five patients." Most of the patients who are brought in with severe respiratory distress are middle aged, or in their 60s and older, Dr. Sbitany said. Male patients dominate both groups. A spokesman for New York City's health department, Michael Lanza, confirmed that the city was seeing a higher rate of Covid 19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths among men, but said the department could not comment on the reasons at this point. The health department, which updates its website daily, had recorded 68,776 Covid 19 cases in the city as of Monday, including 15,333 patients who had been hospitalized and 2,738 deaths. Both death and hospitalization rates increased with age, rising drastically at age 65 and again at age 75. While there were 712 cases per 100,000 women in the city, there were 932 cases for every 100,000 men. Men were also more likely than women to be hospitalized: 228.7 admissions for every 100,000 men, compared with 140.3 admissions for every 100,000 women. (The figures are crude rates and have not been adjusted for differences in age or other characteristics.) But the greatest sex disparity is seen in death rates: 42.9 deaths per 100,000 men, compared with 23.1 deaths per 100,000 women. "More than two thirds of the intubated patients are men," said Dr. Joseph Lowy, a palliative care and hospice doctor at N.Y.U. Langone Health, referring to patients on ventilators. "I know of no other disease that has that type of predilection for one gender over another," excluding diseases of the reproductive system, he added. Dr. Jennifer Lighter, an infectious disease specialist at N.Y.U. Langone, said that a statistical analysis of Covid 19 patients in the hospital system did not find a higher death rate among male patients. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. But when death rates were adjusted for age and obesity, both of which are higher over all in female patients, the case fatality rate among infected men is higher. A disproportionate effect on men has also been seen in California, which has reported 7,296 Covid 19 cases among infected men and 6,740 among women. In Italy, the case fatality rate was 8 percent for infected men compared with 5 percent for women, according to one analysis of 25,058 Covid 19 cases. (Men represented 70 percent of 1,697 deaths tallied by that study.) In China, one of the largest analyses of Covid 19 cases reported a 2.8 percent case fatality rate among infected men, compared with a 1.7 percent rate among women. Kathryn Sandberg, who directs the Center for the Study of Sex Differences in Health, Aging and Disease at Georgetown University, said she was not surprised by the disparity in death rates, though it appears to be more extreme in Covid 19 than in some other infectious diseases. "It may be something about the way this virus works," said Dr. Sandberg, who studies sex differences in hypertension. "But generally, in humans, it doesn't matter what the infectious agent is," she added. "Women tend to be better at knocking it down, because they have a more robust immune system." Women live longer than men, and they tend to develop hypertension and heart disease both of which increase the risk of severe disease with Covid 19 at later ages than men. The X chromosome women have two, of course, and men only one and the female hormone estrogen are believed to play a role in immunity. One possible explanation for the disparity in Covid 19 may have to do with angiotensin converting enzyme 2, or ACE2, a protein on the surfaces of cells the lungs and other organs that is a key component of the system that regulates blood pressure, Dr. Sandberg said. ACE2 is regulated differently in men and in women, Dr. Sandberg said, and the coronavirus binds to ACE2. Dr. Mangala Narasimhan, a critical care doctor at Northwell Health, said hospitals throughout that system, including those in Queens and on Long Island, also are seeing a gender disparity. Though she did not have precise numbers, Dr. Narasimhan estimated that men represent 65 percent of Northwell's Covid 19 patients. "More of them go on ventilators, and because they have more severe disease, more of them are dying," she said. "We don't know why I don't think anyone does right now." Reporting was contributed by Joseph Goldstein in New York. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
WOOD LAKE, Neb. There are just a handful of psychiatrists in all of western Nebraska, a vast expanse of farmland and cattle ranches. So when Murlene Osburn, a cattle rancher turned psychiatric nurse, finished her graduate degree, she thought starting a practice in this tiny village of tumbleweeds and farm equipment dealerships would be easy. It wasn't. A state law required nurses like her to get a doctor to sign off before they performed the tasks for which they were nationally certified. But the only willing psychiatrist she could find was seven hours away by car and wanted to charge her 500 a month. Discouraged, she set the idea for a practice aside and returned to work on her ranch. "Do you see a psychiatrist around here? I don't!" said Ms. Osburn, who has lived in Wood Lake, population 63, for 11 years. "I am willing to practice here. They aren't. It just gets down to that." But in March the rules changed: Nebraska became the 20th state to adopt a law that makes it possible for nurses in a variety of medical fields with most advanced degrees to practice without a doctor's oversight. Maryland's governor signed a similar bill into law this month, and eight more states are considering such legislation, according to the American Association of Nurse Practitioners. Now nurses in Nebraska with a master's degree or better, known as nurse practitioners, no longer have to get a signed agreement from a doctor to be able to do what their state license allows order and interpret diagnostic tests, prescribe medications and administer treatments. "I was like, 'Oh, my gosh, this is such a wonderful victory,'" said Ms. Osburn, who was delivering a calf when she got the news in a text message. The laws giving nurse practitioners greater autonomy have been particularly important in rural states like Nebraska, which struggle to recruit doctors to remote areas. About a third of Nebraska's 1.8 million people live in rural areas, and many go largely unserved as the nearest mental health professional is often hours away. "The situation could be viewed as an emergency, especially in rural counties," said Jim P. Stimpson, director of the Center for Health Policy at the University of Nebraska, referring to the shortage. Groups representing doctors, including the American Medical Association, are fighting the laws. They say nurses lack the knowledge and skills to diagnose complex illnesses by themselves. Dr. Robert M. Wah, the president of the A.M.A., said nurses practicing independently would "further compartmentalize and fragment health care," which he argued should be collaborative, with "the physician at the head of the team." Nurses say their aim is not to go it alone, which is rarely feasible in the modern age of complex medical care, but to have more freedom to perform the tasks that their licenses allow without getting a permission slip from a doctor a rule that they argue is more about competition than safety. They say advanced practice nurses deliver primary care that is as good as that of doctors, and cite research that they say proves it. What is more, nurses say, they are far less costly to employ and train than doctors and can help provide primary care for the millions of Americans who have become newly insured under the Affordable Care Act in an era of shrinking budgets and shortages of primary care doctors. Three to 14 nurse practitioners can be educated for the same cost as one physician, according to a 2011 report by the Institute of Medicine, a prestigious panel of scientists and other experts that is part of the National Academy of Sciences. In all, nurse practitioners are about a quarter of the primary care work force, according to the institute, which called on states to lift barriers to their full practice. There is evidence that the legal tide is turning. Not only are more states passing laws, but a February decision by the Supreme Court found that North Carolina's dental board did not have the authority to stop dental technicians from whitening teeth in nonclinical settings like shopping malls. The ruling tilted the balance toward more independence for professionals with less training. "The doctors are fighting a losing battle," said Uwe E. Reinhardt, a health economist at Princeton University. "The nurses are like insurgents. They are occasionally beaten back, but they'll win in the long run. They have economics and common sense on their side." Nurses acknowledge they need help. Elizabeth Nelson, a nurse practitioner in northern Nebraska, said she was on her own last year when an obese woman with a dislocated hip showed up in the emergency room of her small town hospital. The hospital's only doctor came from South Dakota once a month to sign paperwork and see patients. "I was thinking, 'I'm not ready for this,' " said Ms. Nelson, 35, who has been practicing for three years. "It was such a lonely feeling." Ms. Osburn, 55, has been on the plains her whole life, first on a sugar beet farm in eastern Montana and more recently in the Sandhills region of Nebraska, a haunting, lonely landscape of yellow grasses dotted with Black Angus cattle. She has been a nurse since 1982, working in nursing homes, hospitals and a state run psychiatric facility. As farming has advanced and required fewer workers, the population has shrunk. In the 1960s, the school in Wood Lake had high school graduating classes. Now it has only four students. Ms. Osburn and her family are the only ones still living on a 14 mile road. Three other farmhouses along it are vacant. The isolation takes a toll on people with mental illness. And the culture on the plains self reliance and fiercely guarded privacy makes it hard to seek help. Ms. Osburn's aunt had schizophrenia, and her best friend, a victim of domestic abuse, committed suicide in 2009. She herself suffered through a deep depression after her son died in a farm accident in the late 1990s, with no psychiatrist within hundreds of miles to help her through it. "The need here is so great," she said, sitting in her kitchen with windows that look out over the plains. She sometimes uses binoculars to see whether her husband is coming home. "Just finding someone who can listen. That's what we are missing." That conviction drove her to apply to a psychiatric nursing program at the University of Nebraska, which she completed in December 2012. She received her national certification in 2013, giving her the right to act as a therapist, and to diagnose and prescribe medication for patients with mental illness. The new state law still requires some supervision at first, but it can be provided by another psychiatric nurse help Ms. Osburn said she would gladly accept. Ms. Nelson, the nurse who treated the obese patient, now works in a different hospital. These days when she is alone on a shift, she has backup. A television monitor beams an emergency medicine doctor and staff into her workstation from an office in Sioux Falls, S.D. They recently helped her insert a breathing tube in a patient. The doctor shortage remains. The hospital, Brown County Hospital in Ainsworth, Neb., has been searching for a doctor since the spring of 2012. "We have no malls and no Walmart," Ms. Nelson said. "Recruitment is nearly impossible." Ms. Osburn is looking for office space. The law will take effect in September, and she wants to be ready. She has already picked a name: Sandhill Behavioral Services. Three nursing homes have requested her services, and there have been inquiries from a prison. "I'm planning on getting in this little car and driving everywhere," she said, smiling, behind the wheel of her 2004 Ford Taurus. "I'm going to drive the wheels off this thing." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
HONG KONG China began service Wednesday morning on the world's longest high speed rail line, covering a distance in eight hours that is about equal to that from New York to Key West, Fla., or from London across Europe to Belgrade, Serbia. Trains traveling 300 kilometers, or 186 miles, an hour, began regular service between Beijing and Guangzhou, the main metropolis in southeastern China. Older trains still in service on a parallel rail line take 21 hours; Amtrak trains from New York to Miami, a shorter distance, still take nearly 30 hours. Completion of the Beijing Guangzhou route roughly 1,200 miles is the latest sign that China has resumed rapid construction on one of the world's largest and most ambitious infrastructure projects, a network of four north south routes and four east west routes that span the country. Lavish spending on the project has helped jump start the Chinese economy twice: in 2009, during the global financial crisis, and again this autumn, after a brief but sharp economic slowdown over the summer. The hiring of as many as 100,000 workers for each line has kept a lid on unemployment as private sector construction has slowed because of limits on real estate speculation. The national network has helped to reduce air pollution in Chinese cities and helped to curb demand for imported diesel fuel by freeing capacity on older rail lines for goods to be carried by freight trains instead of heavily polluting, costlier trucks. But the high speed rail system has also been controversial in China. Debt to finance the construction has reached nearly 4 trillion renminbi, or 640 billion, making it one of the most visible reasons total debt has been surging as a share of economic output in China, and is approaching levels in the West. Each passenger car taken off the older, slower rail lines makes room for three freight cars because passenger trains have to move so quickly that they force freight trains to stop frequently. But although the high speed trains have played a big role in allowing sharp increases in freight shipments, the Ministry of Railways has not yet figured out a way to charge large freight shippers, many of them politically influential state owned enterprises, for part of the cost of the high speed lines, which haul only passengers. The high speed trains are also considerably more expensive than the heavily subsidized older passenger trains. A second class seat on the new bullet trains from Beijing to Guangzhou costs 865 renminbi ( 139) one way, compared with 426 renminbi ( 68) for the cheapest bunk on one of the older trains, which also have narrow, uncomfortable seats for as little as 251 renminbi ( 40). Worries about the high speed network peaked in July 2011, when one high speed train plowed into the back of another near Wenzhou in southeastern China, killing 40 people. A subsequent investigation blamed flawed signaling equipment for the crash. China had been operating high speed trains at 350 kilometers an hour (about 218 m.ph.), and it cut the top speed to the current rate in response to that crash. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. The crash crystallized worries about the haste with which China has built its high speed rail system. The first line, from Beijing to Tianjin, opened a week before the 2008 Olympics; a little more than four years later, the country now has 9,349 kilometers, or 5,809 miles, of high speed lines. China's aviation system has a good international reputation for safety, and its occasional deadly crashes have not attracted nearly as much attention. Transportation safety experts attribute the public's fascination with the Wenzhou crash partly to the novelty of the system and partly to a distrust among many Chinese of what is perceived as a homegrown technology, in contrast with the Boeing and Airbus jets flown by Chinese airlines. Japanese rail executives have complained, however, that the Chinese technology is mostly copied from them, an accusation that Chinese rail executives have strenuously denied. The main alternative to trains for most Chinese lies in the country's roads, which have a grim reputation by international standards. Periodic crashes of intercity buses kill dozens of people at a time, while crashes of private cars are frequent in a country where four fifths of new cars are sold to first time buyers, often with scant driving experience. Flights between Beijing and Guangzhou take about three hours and 15 minutes. But air travelers in China need to arrive at least an hour before a flight, compared with 20 minutes for high speed trains, and the airports tend to be farther from the centers of cities than the high speed train stations. Land acquisition is the toughest part of building high speed rail lines in the West, because the tracks need to be almost perfectly straight, and it has been an issue in China as well. Although local and provincial governments have forced owners to sell land for the tracks themselves, there have been disputes over suddenly valuable land near rail stations, with the result that surprisingly few stores and other commercial venues have sprung up around some high speed stations used by tens of thousands of travelers every day. Zhao Xiangfeng, a farmer in Henan Province, said a plan to build a mini mall on his and six other farmers' land near a station had been shelved indefinitely after he and three of the other farmers refused to lease the land for any price close to what the village leadership offered. He said he worried that local leaders might try stronger tactics on the farmers to force them to lease the land and revive the project. The 664 mile southern segment of the new high speed rail line, from Guangzhou as far as Wuhan, has been open for nearly three years. The trains, which come every four to 12 minutes, are often packed, which could limit the number of seats available for travel to Beijing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Fox Networks Group, days before the start of the annual advertising selling season, named a new head of ad sales on Wednesday. Joe Marchese, previously the group's head of advanced advertising products, will fill a prominent industry role that has been vacant since the longtime executive Toby Byrne left in September. Mr. Marchese, 36, joined the group two years ago after its parent company, 21st Century Fox, acquired TrueX, a digital ad technology firm of which he was a founder, in a deal valued at 200 million. He will oversee advertising for properties including the Fox Television Group, Fox Sports and FX, expanding his previous focus on the group's "nontraditional" ad ventures and revenue sources, like Fox's shows on Hulu and its own websites. (He will not be responsible for Fox News, which operates separately.) The selection of Mr. Marchese, who also recently helped Fox forge a data partnership with its rivals Viacom and Turner, highlights the TV industry's shifting landscape, as it contends with ad free platforms like Netflix, competition from YouTube and Facebook, and the challenge of tracking viewership across a range of devices. The current TV ad model "doesn't properly value what we're doing and kind of turns consumers off to our storytelling," Mr. Marchese said in an interview. "Is there a way we can get back to making brands heroes because they're the ones making the programming you love? That's hard to do especially when consumers are being taught that ad free options are easy." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Leading the crew are Hillary (Erik Lochtefeld), an electrical genius, and his right hand man, Hong Sling (Brian Lee Huynh). Hillary may not have MacKaye's magniloquence, but he shares his idealism. "I get to, with my own hands, make something that will be known forever," he tells his wife, Adeline (Aya Cash of TV's "You're the Worst"), a rich man's daughter possessed of her own entrepreneurial spirit. Ms. Cash also shows up as Ruth, who finds work at the 1933 World's Fair. Ruth is married to Lou (a period perfect Ken Barnett), a writer of advertising jingles. Lou, Ruth and their son, Charlie (Graydon Peter Yosowitz), inhabit a house on the edge of the fairgrounds, where Hillary and Adeline once resided. "The Light Years" alternates between the 1890s and the 1930s with fluid grace and clarity. It has an attentive ear for the language and mores of its different eras and the professional argot of its characters. But you sometimes feel too palpably the effortful research that must have gone into the show. (The technical descriptions of lighting the Spectatorium might have come from a deeply reported John McPhee opus in The New Yorker.) You respect the avid curiosity of the show's creators, but their interests don't translate into infectious passion. This is true even of Mr. Sisto's MacKaye, who is a droll presence, but comes across as oddly muted even at his cloak flinging hammiest. The physical production which includes sets by Laura Jellinek, costumes by Michael Krass, sound by Lee Kinney and witty music by Daniel Kluger is pretty fabulous, though, and becomes in itself a hymn to the glories and perils of creative minds remaking the world in their image. A sequence overseen by Mr. Huynh, in which 40 years pass before our eyes, is a small marvel of theatrical craftsmanship. And let's by no means omit the all important contributions here of Russell H. Champa. He is the lighting designer, and the man who gives life to pretty much every verb you associate with light, from flicker to blaze. He also conjures an entire constellation of hopes dashed and fulfilled through exquisite arrangements of bulbs that glow like mini epiphanies before fading to black. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
A mummified skeleton from the Atacama Desert in Chile has been described as "alien." But genetic analysis shows that she was human and may have had a previously unknown bone disorder. Was a Tiny Mummy in the Atacama an Alien? No, but the Real Story Is Almost as Strange Nearly two decades ago, the rumors began: In the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, someone had discovered a tiny mummified alien. An amateur collector exploring a ghost town was said to have come across a white cloth in a leather pouch. Unwrapping it, he found a six inch long skeleton. Despite its size, the skeleton was remarkably complete. It even had hardened teeth. And yet there were striking anomalies: it had 10 ribs instead of the usual 12, giant eye sockets and a long skull that ended in a point. Ata, as the remains came to be known, ended up in a private collection, but the rumors continued, fueled in part by a U.F.O. documentary in 2013 that featured the skeleton. On Thursday, a team of scientists presented a very different explanation for Ata one without aliens, but intriguing in its own way. Ata's bones contain DNA that not only shows she was human, but that she belonged to the local population. What's more, the researchers identified in her DNA a group of mutations in genes related to bone development. Some of these mutations might be responsible for the skeleton's bizarre form, causing a hereditary disorder never before documented in humans. Antonio Salas Ellacuriaga, a geneticist at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain who was not involved in the new study, called it "a very beautiful example of how genomics can help to disentangle an anthropological and archaeological dilemma." "DNA autopsies," as Dr. Ellacuriaga calls them, could help shed light on medical disorders "by looking to the past to understand the present." The research, published in the journal Genome Research, began in 2012, when Garry P. Nolan, an immunologist at Stanford University, got wind of the U.F.O. documentary, "Sirius," while it was still in production. Dr. Nolan emailed the producers and offered to look for DNA in the mummy. The skeleton's owner agreed to X ray images as well as bone marrow samples taken from the ribs and right humerus. Once Dr. Nolan and his colleagues received the samples, they were able to retrieve fragments of DNA from bone marrow cells without much struggle. "We could tell this was human right away," said Atul Butte, a computational biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and a co author of the new study. The scientists eventually managed to reconstruct much of Ata's genome. She was a girl, they found, most closely related to indigenous Chileans. But she also had a substantial amount of European ancestry. The scientists have not carried out any precise dating of the skeleton, so they can't say exactly when Ata lived. But her European heritage suggested it was sometime after Chile was colonized in the 1500s. After death, DNA disintegrates into fragments, which become smaller over the centuries. Ata's DNA fragments are still large, another clue that she's less than 500 years old. While her elongated head was striking, it wasn't the strangest feature of Ata's skeleton. Despite being the size of a human fetus, about the length of a pen, her bones were as developed in some ways as those of a 6 year old. Ralph S. Lachman, an expert on hereditary bone diseases at Stanford University, examined her X rays. He concluded that her constellation of symptoms did not match any known disease. The scientists reasoned that Ata might have had mutations for a disorder that had never before been described. Sanchita Bhattacharya, a researcher in Dr. Butte's lab, searched for mutations in Ata's DNA and identified 2.7 million variants throughout the genome. She whittled this list to 54 rare mutations that could potentially shut down the gene in which they were located. "I was amazed by how much you can tell from the genetic blueprint," said Ms. Bhattacharya. Many of those genes, it turned out, are involved in building skeletons. Some have already been linked to conditions ranging from scoliosis to dwarfism to having an abnormal number of ribs. But some of Ata's mutations are new to science. It's possible some caused her skeleton to mature quickly even while failing to grow to normal stature. Ms. Bhattacharya speculates that such a disorder would have caused the child to be stillborn. And she stressed that these mutations are, for now, only theoretical candidates. Other experts concurred. "There is no single slam dunk finding that explains the bizarre appearance of this individual," said Daniel G. MacArthur, a geneticist at the Broad Institute who was not involved in the study. Yet understanding what happened to Ata might shed light on skeletal deformities seen today. That may require engineering stem cells with each of the 54 mutations, growing them in a dish, and then looking for telling changes in their development. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
A POLAR AFFAIR Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins By Lloyd Spencer Davis In the annals of polar exploration, Robert Scott's 1910 expedition to the Antarctic remains an enduring example of the murderous traps of our coldest continent. During this mythic voyage of bravery, folly and ultimately horror, Scott and his colleagues hauled heavy sleds over glaciers and mountains, only to find that Roald Amundsen, a more savvy explorer, had arrived at the South Pole several weeks earlier. Weakened, famished and frostbitten, they then turned and attempted the punishing 900 mile trek to their station at the coast. Two men perished along the way; the rest died bundled in a tent during a blizzard, only 11 miles from a food depot. As he was freezing to death, Scott wrote what is perhaps the most famous diary entry of the 20th century: "We are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. For God's sake look after our people." Thankfully, not everyone died on Scott's expedition. A number of his companions awaited his return at a hut on the coast, while a smaller branch of the expedition known as the Northern Party explored a nearby area called Cape Adare. One member of this group was George Murray Levick, a doctor who studied the habits of a large Adelie penguin population. Levick, as Lloyd Spencer Davis notes in his sprawling, fascinating and sometimes exasperating book, "was indisputably the father of penguin biology." Indeed, many decades later, Levick's work influenced the author in his own scientific study of penguins. Yet Levick's published writings don't square with his actual observations. Davis writes, "He ... covered up the most salacious parts of his field notes with a code that used Greek letters. Why?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
CHICAGO The Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome H. Powell, said on Tuesday that the central bank was prepared to act to sustain the economic expansion if President Trump's trade war weakened the economy. His remarks sent stocks soaring as investors predicted a cut in interest rates. "We do not know how or when these issues will be resolved," Mr. Powell said of the United States' trade disputes with Mexico, China and other nations. "We are closely monitoring the implications of these developments for the U.S. economic outlook and, as always, we will act as appropriate to sustain the expansion, with a strong labor market and inflation near our symmetric 2 percent objective." Mr. Powell did not explicitly say that the Fed would cut interest rates, but his comments sent a signal that the central bank was watching Mr. Trump's trade wars warily, ready to fend off any economic damage. While the Fed has been closely monitoring the effects of Mr. Trump's trade war on the economy, Mr. Powell's comments were his first since the president escalated his dispute by threatening tariffs on all Mexican goods. "He's making a point to say to the markets that 'We can act if necessary,'" said John Briggs, a bond market strategist at NatWest Markets in Stamford, Conn. "I think the markets are taking some comfort, at least, by the idea that he's moving in the right direction." Mr. Powell's remarks sparked a rally on Wall Street. Equity markets which had risen ahead of the remarks piled up the gains in the hours after his statement. The S P 500 rose 2.1 percent, its second best daily gain of the year. The S P is up 11.8 percent this year. The rally was broad based, with shares of large technology companies, financial institutions and industrial firms all rising more than 2 percent. The tech heavy Nasdaq composite index rose more than 2 percent. An index of semiconductor manufacturers rose more than 4 percent. The rebound in stock markets coaxed some investors out of the safety of government bonds, pushing prices down and yields which move in the opposite direction up. The rise in yields reversed some of a sharp decline in recent days that had reflected growing investor concern about the outlook for economic growth and inflation. The yield on the 10 year Treasury note was 2.12 percent at 3 p.m., according to Bloomberg data. But in signaling that it is prepared to limit economic damage from the trade war, the Fed could perpetuate the feedback loop that has developed among financial markets, the central bank and Mr. Trump and could embolden the president to continue his fight. When Mr. Trump's trade threats have roiled markets, the markets have, in turn, looked to the Fed for support. And when such support materializes as it did in January when the Fed turned away from plans to lift rates stocks rebound, allowing the administration to continue to pursue its policy goals. The latest stock market bump could give the president comfort that he can continue waging his fights with two of America's largest trading partners China and Mexico without derailing the economic recovery. Mr. Trump, speaking in London on Tuesday, said he was ready to punish Mexico with tariffs next week for failing to curb the flow of migrants across the southern border. "I think it's more likely that the tariffs go on, and we'll probably be talking during the time that the tariffs are on, and they're going to be paid," Mr. Trump said. The president has threatened to increase those tariffs to 25 percent by October, a move that could hurt the North American economy. Investors, bond markets and Wall Street analysts have grown increasingly alarmed by the potential slowdown in growth that could result from Mr. Trump's tariffs on China and Mexico. The worsening outlook for trade over the past month has been accompanied by signs of weakness in global markets. Prices of key industrial commodities such as crude oil and copper have slipped. After hitting a high on April 30, the S P 500 was down nearly 7 percent through the close of trading on Monday. Yields on safe government bonds had tumbled worldwide. And yields on some long term Treasury securities are now below those of short term bills, an unusual occurrence known as an "inversion of the yield curve," which, in the past, has heralded recession. Against that backdrop, investors have grown increasingly expectant that the Fed will abandon its "patient" stance and move to cut interest rates in the coming months. Fed funds futures markets are now placing a probability of more than 60 percent on the Fed reducing interest rates at its meeting at the end of July, according to Bloomberg data. Earlier in May, the market was putting less than 20 percent odds on such a move. Taken with his colleagues' recent statements, Mr. Powell's speech signals that the Fed is not yet ready to lock in coming rate cuts. Robert S. Kaplan, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said in an interview that he still favored patience on rates, especially because at least some of the trade tensions might be resolved. "I'm concerned, and I'm watching them very vigilantly, but I'm also mindful that some of these factors could change, and they could change relatively soon," he said on the sidelines of a conference in Chicago. "I just want to be patient and give it a little time and a little breathing room." Charles Evans, the head of Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and Mary Daly, the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, have also called for continuing the Fed's pause in adjusting rates. Covid's impact on the supply chain continues. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain and made all kinds of products harder to find. In turn, scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher as inflation remains stubbornly high. Almost anything manufactured is in short supply. That includes everything from toilet paper to new cars. The disruptions go back to the beginning of the pandemic, when factories in Asia and Europe were forced to shut down and shipping companies cut their schedules. First, demand for home goods spiked. Money that Americans once spent on experiences were redirected to things for their homes. The surge clogged the system for transporting goods to the factories that needed them and finished products piled up because of a shortage of shipping containers. Now, ports are struggling to keep up. In North America and Europe, where containers are arriving, the heavy influx of ships is overwhelming ports. With warehouses full, containers are piling up. The chaos in global shipping is likely to persist as a result of the massive traffic jam. No one really knows when the crisis will end. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year's Christmas and holiday shopping season, but what happens after that is unclear. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said he expects supply chain problems to persist "likely well into next year." Officials are watching trade warily, however. In a speech on Monday, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, James Bullard, said a cut in interest rates "may be warranted soon" to stoke inflation and "provide some insurance in case of a sharper than expected slowdown" in growth. "The main story from Powell for near term policy, in my view, is that this debate about whether the next move is a hike or a cut is effectively over," Neil Dutta, an economist at Renaissance Macro Research, wrote in a note to clients after the speech. "They are no longer holding open the possibility of a hike." The president's actions on trade have left the Fed in a tough spot. Growth remains above its longer run trend and the job market is strong, which would argue against rate cuts. Plus, trade disputes could be resolved quickly, removing a major obstacle to continued expansion. But inflation is already low, and if a global slowdown provides a drag on the United States economy, Fed rates are still historically low which could argue for quick, decisive action, since the central bank's recession fighting ammunition is limited. Mr. Trump himself has been pushing the Fed to cut rates, even contrasting the central bank with China's. "China is adding great stimulus to its economy while at the same time keeping interest rates low," Mr. Trump said in a tweet on April 30. He said that the economy would go up like a "rocket" if the central bank cut rates. "Our Federal Reserve has incessantly lifted interest rates, even though inflation is very low, and instituted a very big dose of quantitative tightening." That also raises an optical problem for the central bank, which is independent of the White House. A move to cut rates could look political, even if it arose from a change in the economic landscape. Officials have reiterated time and again that they will make policy decisions based on the economic outlook, and that politics will not influence them in either direction. After the Fed raised rates nine times since 2015, investors late last year began to grow concerned that monetary policy might be too tight, potentially risking the start of a recession. That helped send stock markets sharply lower, with the S P 500 losing nearly 14 percent in the last three months of 2018. Then, in early January, the central bank abruptly shifted its tone away from previous plans to continue lifting interest rates this year, and instead emphasized that it would remain patient, flexible and attuned to signals being sent by financial markets. Some analysts question whether fresh Fed cuts would stimulate a similar reaction now. A decade into an economic expansion, lower interest rates might not measurably improve the outlook for corporate profits, the economy or the stock market, they say. "This is just the reality of it," said Michael Wilson, the United States equity strategist for Morgan Stanley. "The Fed has done everything they can do to extend the cycle. And it might not be enough." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
As the first babies born with brain damage from the Zika epidemic become 2 year olds, the most severely affected are falling further behind in their development and will require a lifetime of care, according to a study published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study, the first to comprehensively assess some of the oldest Zika babies in Brazil, focused on 15 of the most disabled children born with abnormally small heads, a condition called microcephaly. At about 22 months old, these children had the cognitive and physical development of babies younger than 6 months. They could not sit up or chew, and they had virtually no language. "A child might be making those raspberry sounds, but they are not making even the sort of consonant sounds like 'mama, baba, dada,'" said Dr. Georgina Peacock, an author of the study and the director of the division of human development and disability at the C.D.C.'s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. It is unclear how many of the nearly 3,000 Brazilian Zika babies born with microcephaly will have outcomes as severe as the children in the study, but the experiences of doctors working in Brazil suggest it could be hundreds. "It's heartbreaking," the C.D.C. director, Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, said in an interview. "We would expect that these children are going to require enormous amounts of work and require enormous amounts of care." The new study, conducted with the Brazilian Ministry of Health and other organizations, evaluated children in Paraiba state, part of Brazil's northeastern region, which became the epicenter of the Zika crisis. The researchers initially studied 278 babies born in Paraiba between October 2015 and the end of January 2016. Of those, 122 families agreed to participate in follow up evaluations this year. The study released Thursday involves what were considered the most severe of those cases, Dr. Peacock said. The children were evaluated when they were between 19 and 24 months old. Four of the 19 evaluated had very few symptoms or developmental difficulties, and researchers concluded they were "misclassified" as Zika babies, possibly because of errors in lab testing or head measurement. But 15 children, eight girls and seven boys, had a range of symptoms, most of which had not improved since infancy. All had severely impaired motor skills, with all but one child meeting the conditions for a diagnosis of cerebral palsy. Most had seizures and sleeping problems. Eight had been hospitalized at some point, most for bronchitis or pneumonia. Nine had difficulty eating or swallowing, which can be life threatening because food can get stuck in the lungs or the children can be malnourished. Most had vision and hearing problems serious enough to impede their ability to learn and develop, Dr. Peacock said. "Children wouldn't turn to the sound of a rattle or they wouldn't be able to follow an object, which typically a child can do by six to eight weeks of age," she said. "What we suspect is that because they have experienced so much damage to the brain, that connection of an object being presented and being transmitted to the back of the brain is not happening, so that is a significant cognitive impairment." Brazilian doctors not involved in the study say it matches their experience. "Our results are similar to this study," said Dr. Camila Ventura, head of clinical research at the Altino Ventura Foundation, which provides physical therapy, vision care and other services to its registry of 285 Zika babies in Pernambuco state. She and colleagues are evaluating their patients in conjunction with the National Institutes of Health and RTI International, a nonprofit research institute. She said a pilot study of 40 toddlers found they are not babbling or making language sounds, many cannot even swallow regular milk, some need gastric tubes, and only two of the 40 are walking. "The others are having trouble even holding their head up," she said. Now, the number of babies being born with complications from Zika has decreased as people in the region gain immunity after having been bitten by infected mosquitoes during the crisis and as some women are taking precautions to prevent infection during pregnancy. Nevertheless, Dr. Ernesto Marques, an infectious disease expert at the University of Pittsburgh and the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Recife, said about 3 percent of 1,000 pregnant women in a recent sample were infected with Zika. "The problem's not going away," he said. "We are still having cases." In the continental United States, there have been 98 live births and nine pregnancy losses involving birth defects associated with Zika, the C.D.C. said. In the U.S. territories, there have been 142 live births and eight pregnancy losses. The C.D.C. is following nearly 7,000 pregnant women with evidence of Zika infection in the United States and its territories. "We certainly have seen decreased cases, but it's not zero," Dr. Fitzgerald said. In Brazil, the future of Zika babies is complicated by poverty and strained resources. "Most of these babies are from low socioeconomic status and rely on the public health system to provide care," Dr. Marques said. "It's very difficult to manage those children because they need multiple types of specialists." He said the most promising interventions include vision therapy and glasses provided to babies by the Altino Ventura Foundation and Botox injections that have helped relax rigid muscles. Dr. Peacock said one bright spot is that many babies have outgrown their early intense crying and irritability and seem to be able to soothe themselves or be calmed by their mothers. In some of the severe cases, however, treatment like physical and occupational therapy can only really make the children more comfortable, not improve their development. "These are the worst of our fears," Dr. Fitzgerald said. C.D.C. officials want to monitor the Zika babies for years to understand the range of difficulties and see if problems develop for more mildly affected children and "children who at this point appear normal," Dr. Fitzgerald said. "We need to keep working on this issue and we need to be trying to figure out what's going on with these babies." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The pop singer's estate, along with Columbia Live Stage, said Tuesday that it had agreed to develop a stage musical about his life, aiming for Broadway in 2020. The musical, reflecting Jackson's stature, features an unusually acclaimed creative team. The book is to be written by Lynn Nottage, a playwright who has won two Pulitzers, for "Ruined" and "Sweat." And the show is to be directed and choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon, the artistic associate of the Royal Ballet in London, who won a Tony Award for "An American in Paris." Jackson has been the subject of many previous entertainment ventures, including a staged concert, "Thriller Live" that has been running for nearly a decade in London. The estate's executors have collaborated with several projects, including "Michael Jackson ONE," a Cirque du Soleil show running for the last five years in Las Vegas; a documentary, "Michael Jackson's This Is It," released a few months after his death in 2009; and "Michael Jackson's Journey From Motown to Off the Wall," a Spike Lee documentary from 2016. Jukebox musicals have become a Broadway staple those now running include "Beautiful: The Carole King Musical," "Summer: The Donna Summer Musical" and "Escape to Margaritaville" (featuring the songs of Jimmy Buffett, and closing July 1). Those scheduled to open soon include "Head Over Heels" (the Go Go's, starting previews on Broadway this week) and "The Cher Show" (now running in Chicago and opening on Broadway in December), and those circling Broadway include "Tina: The Tina Turner Musical" (now running in London), "Ain't Too Proud" (The Temptations, now running at the Kennedy Center in Washington) and "Jagged Little Pill" (Alanis Morissette, now playing at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.). And "Girl From the North Country," featuring songs by Bob Dylan, is scheduled to run Off Broadway at the Public Theater beginning in September. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Badger brothers Tic and Tac are bored in "Laundry Day," by Jessixa Bagley ("Boats for Papa"). They have built a fort, fished, and read all their books forward and backward. Then their mother asks, "Well, would you like to help me hang the laundry?" Their response is enthusiastic, so much so that she's free to slip off to the market while they handle the clothesline. Only one problem. They run out of clean clothes. What follows is an act of exuberant excavation. The boys empty the house of all its contents, sacrificing utility, comfort and convenience to the joy of the clothesline, to the open air. They hang combs, alarm clocks, carrots and checkerboards, apple cores, roller skates, LPs, plungers and paintings. The vibrant array of objects is matched by the book's brilliant color and the moments of delightful minutiae present in each illustration. This Marie Kondo esque meditation on objects and their uses evolves into an exploration of the nature of play and work. On her return, the wise matriarch surrenders to her sons' reinvention of laundry. Why resist? Why hold on to the labors we never wanted in the first place? The boys themselves, freshly bored, imagine the other domestic arenas where their riotous skills might be best put to use. Dinner? "Tidy," another badger book, this one created by Emily Gravett, reminds me of my onetime Brooklyn landlady. Returning home once, I entered the paved over garden of her home. She spied a bunch of chard peeking out the top of my grocery bag. "Yick," she said. "Green things." "Tidy's" badger, unlike Tic and Tac, is an efficient fellow named Pete. He decides he needs to clean up the forest. Off color blossoms are pruned while woodland animals are scrubbed. Explosive portraits of nature meet a disciplined hand, reverent of detail. Fallen leaves are bagged in plastic, and ultimately all the trees are removed so that a neat, thick layer of convenient concrete can be poured over all that icky mud. The horror is complete. "This forest is practically perfect," Pete says. It resembles a parking lot. But soon he is tired and hungry and these woods are no longer a poor man's overcoat. There are no bugs or worms to catch for dinner. The door to Pete's cozy burrow is covered in cement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
An independent investigation by the Queens Museum's board into the handling of an event sponsored by the Israeli government has concluded that "the president and executive director of the museum, Laura Raicovich, and deputy director of the museum, David Strauss, exercised poor judgment," adding that they "knowingly misled the board, and otherwise failed to comport themselves with the standards consistent with their positions." "In light of the results," said the report, which was conducted pro bono by the law firm Katten Muchin Rosenman, "the board offered both Ms. Raicovich and Mr. Strauss the opportunity to resign. The board has accepted the resignation of Ms. Raicovich and terminated Mr. Strauss." Ms. Raicovich resigned on Jan. 26, citing differences with the board that prevented her from taking political stands on issues like immigration. Her departure prompted expressions of support from outside curators and others. Mr. Strauss could not immediately be reached for comment. Asked to respond to the report on Wednesday, Ms. Raicovich said she was not forced out, but that her resignation was the result of "the cumulation of all of these various things that happened along the way." The report, however, suggests that Ms. Raicovich was asked to resign because of a pattern of behavior revealed by the investigation into the Israel incident. Last summer, the museum appeared to cancel and then, after accusations of anti Semitism, reinstate an event sponsored by the Israeli government. Councilman Rory I. Lancman accused Ms. Raicovich of anti Semitism and called for her removal. The Israel event to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the United Nations vote establishing the State of Israel took place at the museum in November and featured Vice President Mike Pence. Ms. Raicovich had said that the board's decision regarding the Israel event simply had to do with the museum's policies on renting out its space. Kristian Nammack, a trustee at the museum, resigned last month, citing his disappointment with the board's decision to allow the event. But the report said that Ms. Raicovich "showed immediate hostility to hosting the event at the museum even before consulting with the board and then, together with Mr. Strauss, sought reasons why the board should not agree to the event." Ms. Raicovich said she was only concerned about "operations and security issues" surrounding the event, and that she viewed Mr. Pence's involvement as "problematic for the museum." The report also discusses a 2017 book, "Assuming Boycott," that Ms. Raicovich edited with Kareem Estefan and Carin Kuoni. It includes essays strongly supportive of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, known as B.D.S., which is highly critical of the State of Israel. "Ms. Raicovich did not disclose her involvement in the book to the board," the report said, "even though (1) the book prominently identifies her as director of the museum, (2) the foreword she co wrote states that the goals discussed in the book are 'complemented by programs, exhibitions and educational initiatives' at the museum, (3) she paid one of the co editors for his work on the book with museum funds, (4) she placed the book for sale in the museum's gift shop." Ms. Raicovich said she had viewed the payment, 4,000 to Mr. Estefan, as appropriate, given the book's focus on artists, and had reimbursed the museum after the issue was raised with her. The museum said it received this payment on Tuesday. The report also said that Ms. Raicovich allowed the museum to serve as a "fiscal sponsor" of a Kickstarter campaign for a new cultural center in the West Bank "without the approval of or disclosure to the board, and without putting into place proper controls for the solicitation or use of such funds." The center on its Kickstarter site gives "special thanks to the Queens Museum" for its support. In response to the report's findings, Councilman Lancman said in a telephone interview: "The leader of this museum is supposed to represent the values of Queens but also represent to the world our values. This is just a breathtaking breach of that responsibility." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. The past isn't a road map to the present or even a travel guide but there's tremendous value in knowing how our predecessors tackled the challenges of their era. The period of the early American republic, in particular, was a fierce and fractious time in our political history, with highly charged debates over the very foundation of self rule and constitutional government. Over the last week, I've written about the judicial battles of Thomas Jefferson's first term and the constitutional conflict behind the Missouri controversy of 1819 to 1821. To conclude this brief cycle of columns, I want to take a look at the first and most consequential electoral crisis in American history: the election of 1800. On Dec. 3 of that year, the 138 members of the Electoral College gathered in their respective states to choose between Thomas Jefferson and the incumbent John Adams for president of the United States. The last two years had been among the most tumultuous in the life of the young nation. Rising tensions with France brought paranoia, anti French feeling and fears of armed conflict. It was against this backdrop, in 1798, that President Adams and the Federalist Party turned their eyes toward their Democratic Republican critics in the press. "I cannot but be of the opinion," Adams wrote a month after the signing the bill, "that the profligate spirit of falsehood and malignity are serious evils, and bear a threatening aspect upon the Union of the States, their Constitution of Government, and the moral character of the Nation." The Sedition Act came on the heels of the Alien Friends Act, the Alien Enemies Act and the Naturalization Act, all of which were aimed at a purported French revolutionary conspiracy to organize, as the Federalist congressman Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts said, "bands of aliens as well as their own citizens, in other countries, to bring about their nefarious purposes." The Friends Act, in particular, gave the president the power to expel, without due process, any "alien" judged "dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States." To save the nation, Federalists would wield the state against foreign outsiders and domestic opponents, lest they poison the republic with their radicalism. The Democratic Republicans were appalled. Jefferson, then vice president, believed the federal government under Adams had become "more arbitrary and has swallowed more of the public liberty than even that of England." The Federalists, he said, had begun an "experiment on the American mind to see how far it will bear an avowed violation of the Constitution." James Madison Jefferson's longtime friend, ally and neighbor similarly believed that the Federalists were seeking to "transform the present republican system of the United States, into an absolute, or at best a mixed monarchy." Jefferson, Madison and their followers countered with resolutions, drafted for the Virginia and Kentucky legislatures, in which they laid out a state centric view of American union. As written by Jefferson, the historian Susan Dunn explains in "Jefferson's Second Revolution: The Election Crisis of 1800 and the Triumph of Republicanism," the Kentucky Resolutions had stated that the federal union was a compact among states and that if any acts of the federal government went beyond that government's delegated powers, states had the right "to nullify of their own authority all assumptions of power." Madison didn't go as far as nullification in his Virginia Resolutions, but he still argued the point that "states could judge for themselves the constitutionality of acts of Congress." This was the climate in which Federalist and Democratic Republican partisans fought the 1800 election, both sides convinced that the other would unravel the American experiment and bring the republic to either anarchy or despotism. As a Federalist pamphlet called "A Short Address to the Voters of Delaware" asked: Let these men get into power, put the reins of government into their hands, and what security have you against the occurrence of the scenes which have rendered France a cemetery, and moistened her soil with the tears and blood of her inhabitants? The Electoral College made its decision, the future of self government seemingly in the balance. And when the votes were tallied and announced, the Democratic Republicans had won the election, 73 for Jefferson to 65 for Adams. But there was a problem. The framers did not anticipate political parties, and the Constitution did not make room for them. Jefferson and Adams had running mates, but there was no way for electors, who each had two votes, to back a ticket without causing a tie. Instead, the winning party's electors had to carefully cast one vote for a losing candidate, so that the running mate could come in second place and claim the vice presidency. The Federalist electors were disciplined and coordinated enough to make this happen. Adams won 65 electoral votes and his running mate, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, won 64 votes, with the spare vote going to John Jay of New York. Republican electors, on the other hand, gave 73 votes each to Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr. This sent the election to the House of Representatives, where each state delegation would cast a single vote to decide the winner. Jefferson may have won the election, but the lame duck Federalist Congress would decide his fate. And those Federalists saw an opportunity to keep their worst enemy out of high office. They wouldn't try to negate the will of the legislatures and voters who chose a Democratic Republican for president, but they would vote to give Burr the top spot. Here is Dunn: The reasons for supporting Burr, admitted Theodore Sedgwick, "are of a negative nature." Burr was "not a Democrat ... not an enthusiastic theorist ... not under the direction of Virginian Jacobins ... not a declared infidel." He was selfish, pronounced Sedgwick, transforming unfettered self interest into a virtue. Burr, for his part, neither rejected the overture nor did he say he would resign the office if elected. Republicans in the House were united in support of Jefferson. But this meant gridlock, and after that, the unknown. "What will be the plans of the Federalists," wondered Albert Gallatin, a Democratic Republican congressman from Pennsylvania. "Would Federalists elect Burr? Would they call for new elections? Would they force a stalemate and then hand power over to one of their own?" He continued, "Would there be civil war? Resistance? Shall we submit? And if we do not submit, in what manner shall we act ourselves?" The deadline to pick a president was March 4, when Adams would leave office. On Feb. 11, 1801, the House met to decide the election. To win, Jefferson needed nine of 16 votes in his favor. Although confident, Jefferson also wrote that "the defects of our Constitution under circumstances like the present, appear very great." On the first ballot, Jefferson won eight delegations. Burr won six. Two states, Vermont and Maryland, couldn't decide, which sent the House to a second ballot, then a third, then a fourth. By nightfall, they were still voting, both sides refusing to budge. "If our opponents will not take Burr," the Federalist Roger Griswold of Connecticut wrote, "they shall take nobody." The House cast 36 ballots over seven days before it came to a decision. The representatives from Vermont and Maryland were still divided on their choice for president, but rather than drag the fight out further, Federalist holdouts in both delegations abstained. Their Democratic Republican colleagues then cast their states' votes for Jefferson. With 10 votes to four for Burr (two states chose not to vote), Jefferson had finally won the presidency. No Federalist congressman voted in his favor. The United States had faced, and survived, its first constitutional crisis. The question is how. Some of the credit goes to Jefferson's allies, who assured Federalist lawmakers in the House that the Virginian would preserve some Federalist policies and retain some Federalist officeholders, clearing the way for a resolution in Jefferson's favor. Some of the credit goes to the president elect himself, who in the wake of his win used his inaugural address to lower the temperature of partisan politics and affirm the bonds of union. "Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle," he wrote. "We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists." But a good deal of credit goes to the Federalist Party as a whole, both in and outside of Congress. They fought, they lost and then they stood down. There would be no violence, no coercive attempt to subvert the constitutional order. Besides, after holding power for 12 years and then losing it, the Federalists could see that nothing was permanent: not victory, not defeat. This is important. Of all the elements self government needs to survive, it's this awareness the knowledge that power wanes, for you and your opponents that matters most. When a democracy loses this awareness, when there is a party or a faction or even a demographic that refuses to admit or accept defeat, it finds itself on life support, risking terminal decline. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
By this stage, Zlatan Ibrahimovic presumably has the image stored somewhere on his phone. You will have seen it, almost certainly: the one with Ibrahimovic, in profile, dressed in an angel's robes and arm wrestling a look of beatific concentration on his face with a sinew straining devil. He used it first, if memory serves, when he signed a new contract with Manchester United in 2017, a summer after the move to England that was supposed to represent his swan song. The iconography is a little unclear: Ibrahimovic was committing himself to United known to everyone except its own fans as the Red Devils but, in the picture, he seems to be in competition with the devil. Angels and devils are, after all, traditionally on different sides of the argument. It is hard to date, precisely, when this schtick started. Ibrahimovic has certainly always been an outspoken character, unafraid to let the world know how he is feeling. He has never, even as a callow teenager at Malmo, his hometown club, been in any doubt as to just how special he is. He is, by nature, given to braggadocio, to hyperbole, perhaps to exaggeration. The personality of Ibrahimovic is not the same as the character of Zlatan, though. That started at a rough guess with the publication of his memoir, "I Am Zlatan," in 2011. In retrospect, that book marked something of a sea change. It was the moment Ibrahimovic did away with any attempt to resist his reputation as an egotist and decided to lean into it, to not just be Zlatan but to play him, too. It was the moment he started talking about lions. Like the image of the Angel Zlatan, the lion is a leitmotif in many of his public pronouncements. His Instagram biography reads: "Lions do not compare themselves with humans." It is a quote he conjured in a television interview while he was playing for United. He is clearly very pleased with it. The decision paid off, of course. Ibrahimovic, for a long time, was regarded as something of a flat track bully: a star for teams who could crush all of their domestic opponents but were unable to shine on the grandest stages. He will retire without winning the Champions League. He never scored a goal in a World Cup. In recent years, though, that perception of him has correctly changed. England was always the last bastion of cynicism about Ibrahimovic. Scoring four goals in a friendly for Sweden in 2012 helped quell much of that resistance, and his displays in his two years at United, even late in his career, eliminated the rest. But what England really fell in love with was not Ibrahimovic, the striker, but "Zlatan," the cartoonish character, the marketing creation, the content provider. England loves eccentrics, but increasingly, and much to the nation's detriment, it also loves banter: an entire country, putty in the hands of anyone who says something outrageous enough to bring the lols. (For further evidence, please see: The British General Election, 2019.) It was that second wave of viral fame, as much as his gilded resume, that made him such a coup for M.L.S. David Villa is a peer of Ibrahimovic's in many ways, but when he arrived in America he did not warrant a series of grandiose full page newspaper advertisements declaring his intention to conquer a city. It would be interesting to know how much of this is accident, and how much design, how much of the public relations strategy and make no mistake, "Zlatan" is in some part a P.R. campaign is organic, an amplified version of Ibrahimovic's own persona, and how much is confection. It has always felt as if Ibrahimovic is in on the joke, delivering the lines with a smile and a wink, but it is impossible to be sure. Over time, it has become easier to believe that he is not. It has been nearly a decade since his book was published: nine years of nonsensical pronouncements and clever lines and comparisons with apex predators. The schtick is starting to wear thin. At some point, even those who are still laughing will realize that the joke wore off some time ago. Perhaps it will not matter by then. Ibrahimovic will have retired. He will have drawn every last drop from both his talent for playing a game and his talent for playing a role. But perhaps it will matter. Perhaps, when we come to remember him, we will remember the character, and not the player. Perhaps we will remember the joke, and not why it was funny. Television Killed the Magic of the Cup In one sense, what happened in Niort last Saturday was not unusual. The home team which plays in France's second tier was knocked out of the country's cup competition by a semiprofessional side that operates, in theory, four divisions below. That is pretty standard for the Coupe de France, a tournament that is designed, in many ways, to encourage the minnows to overthrow the mighty. What made this one stand out what brought it to the front page of L'Equipe and earned it highlights on national television was the identity of the victors: J.S. St. Pierroise, a club based in Reunion, a French department in the southern Indian Ocean. Its players had traveled 6,000 miles each way to slay a giant. St. Pierroise is only the second overseas team in history to reach the tournament's last 32; its presence there it will play Epinal, a weaker opponent than Niort, next weekend gives this year's edition of the French Cup a little sprinkling of magic, one that is missing from pretty much every other domestic cup competition in Europe. Only in England, though, does anyone really care. The demise of the F.A. Cup now a competition resentfully contested by managers happy to put out reserve teams and throw their fates to the wind is an ongoing national conversation; how to fix it is a staple of the January soccer diet. And yet the thing that is killing the F.A. Cup is the same thing that made it special in the first place. For decades, the only soccer that anyone could watch on television in England was the F.A. Cup final. It gave the competition a unique prestige; in the 1950s and '60s, winning the cup was a greater achievement than winning the league. That was not true in the rest of Europe, where the domestic cup was seen for what it was: an added bonus, a bit of fun, a chance to give the lesser lights their day. England now is catching up. There is a lot of soccer on television. Indeed, television is so important to soccer now that the Premier League demands its teams play three times in the space of nine days over Christmas and New Year, so that by the time the F.A. Cup rolls around, everyone is exhausted. That old prestige has gone. It may just be time to accept it. There was a strange moment, before the Champions League final last year, in the beIN Sports studio in Madrid. Jose Mourinho was sitting next to Arsene Wenger, his old adversary that was strange enough when he turned in his seat and stopped talking. Instead, he watched Liverpool's fans, awaiting the game's kickoff, sing the club's anthem, "You'll Never Walk Alone." Eventually, Mourinho snapped out of his reverie. "This is more beautiful than what we can say," he said. Wenger concurred. "It is unique," he said. What Wenger said was unsurprising: He often praised Liverpool, and particularly Anfield. He has, previously, called it the worst stadium in the world for an opposing team. Mourinho, though, has always been how shall we put it? a little more fractious in his attitude. Mourinho, it is fair to say, does not like Liverpool. The longstanding theory is that it's because he was once overlooked for the manager's job there, but whatever the reason, he has always taken particular pleasure in frustrating his old foe. His view of Jurgen Klopp, too, is not what you would call universally positive. That makes this weekend's visit of Liverpool unbeaten in the Premier League to Tottenham a perfect sort of Mourinho occasion. He has a team weakened by injury Harry Kane was the latest, now ruled out for months, the team said Thursday and on a poor run of form. He has an opponent that is being talked of as an unstoppable force. Mourinho would love to be the man to disprove that notion, to throw a spoke in Liverpool's wheels. His back is against a wall. And that, with Mourinho, tends to be when he is at his best. Michael Rose, quite rightly, points out that there tends to be far more coverage of the scale of soccer's racism problem a subject we have covered, distressingly, far too often in the last few years than there are serious discussions of how to go about tackling it. "Closing stadiums and/or fines have failed," he wrote. "I have long thought teams should be deducted points. Some might say this is one of the nuclear options, but surely it is a step worth taking to protect the players." It is, Michael, but there are other changes that might help, too. I'd do away with stadium closures, and replace them with flipped games: Repeat offender clubs should be stripped of a certain number of home fixtures and forced to play them on the road instead. That is a much more punitive sporting measure, to my mind. But I'd also like to see the emphasis shifted. It tends for obvious reasons to be players on visiting teams that are abused. The responsibility for deciding whether a match should continue should therefore fall on the home team. Only when fans see their own players condemning their behavior will they be denied the sense that they have successfully unsettled an opponent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The Stephen Petronio Company, which has spent the last year fund raising for a permanent home for its nascent choreographic residency program, has bought a 175 acre property in the Catskill Mountains. Called Crows Nest, the 1.3 million property, near Cairo, N.Y., includes about 9,000 square feet of residential and studio space. It will house the Petronio Company and the Petronio Residency Initiative, which is to begin in summer 2018. "With Crows Nest, I'm hoping to leave the world an intimate place where dance can be made, where history happens, and where the dance community can feel at home," Mr. Petronio, the troupe's founder, said in a statement. A 3 million fund raising campaign to cover the costs began in January, with much of the early money coming from the sale of artworks given to Mr. Petronio to raise funds. Mr. Petronio, 60, who often collaborates with artists, received gifts from the sculptor Anish Kapoor and other artists, including Jasper Johns and the painter Cecily Brown. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
LONDON Every week without fail Lucy Elkin, a comfortably middle class mother of two small children, receives a PS33.20 child benefit payment, or about 52, from the debt plagued British government. "It's useful and it helps pay the bills, but it is not as if we are struggling to put food on the table," Ms. Elkin said as she led her children from the park to their house on the leafy fringe of Hampstead Heath, one of London's most desirable neighborhoods. Ms. Elkin, 40, is a freelance writer. Her husband is a computer programmer. Along with more than three million middle to upper income British families, they are among the recipients of PS11 billion ( 17.2 billion) a year paid to mothers with children here. It is a universal benefit that not only costs taxpayers about twice as much as the total for unemployment payments but also represents the largest chunk of the estimated PS30 billion ( 47 billion) the government pays each year to Britons with above average incomes. "It is one of those things that is quite hard to justify," Ms. Elkin said. She is not alone in thinking that Britain can no longer afford such generosities. But even as civil servants and ministers are preparing to drastically cut most categories of government spending to help close Britain's budget deficit, the government is so worried about alienating middle class voters that it is proceeding very cautiously in limiting the subsidy for having children. "There is a long history of universal welfare schemes here," said Patrick Nolan, an economist for Reform, a free market oriented research organization that has issued a report claiming that as much as 16 percent of total welfare benefits go to those who do not need them. "But it has become a very expensive luxury when hundreds of thousands are losing their jobs." The debate in Britain highlights an issue that other advanced industrial countries are also beginning to grapple with: Who should bear the burden of the coming wave of austerity? Unless politicians are prepared to dig into the pockets of middle and upper income families, experts say, the demands from bond market investors to get government finances under control can be satisfied only by cutting back even further on benefits for the poor and needy. But any serious effort to curb long established middle class entitlements risks setting off a public reaction that few political leaders are eager to face. In Britain, the quandary is particularly stark. The social safety net that has been an essential feature of British life since World War II ended has been built largely on providing similar benefits to all, like health care and home heating allowances for the elderly, regardless of income. Those earning up to PS37,400 a year pay income tax of 20 percent per year. All told, about a third of Britain's 61 million people claim either a child subsidy or winter heating allowance. Together they represent a formidable political bloc of families and senior citizens that Prime Minister David Cameron was loath to alienate during last spring's election. That helps explain why Mr. Cameron promised not to "means test" the child benefit by limiting it to the poor. He said that payments to the elderly to subsidize television license fees, along with bus fare and heating allowances, would not be touched, either. Lately, though, the government has begun to signal a harder line. At the Liberal Democrat's party conference in September, Mr. Cameron's coalition partner, Nick Clegg, made the strongest call yet for cutting middle class benefits, telling delegates that he would be willing to give up the PS2,450 ( 3,850) in annual child benefits that he and his wife, who is a corporate lawyer, receive for their three children. It remains unclear whether the government will follow through on that suggestion. But there is little question that social protection, as it is labeled in government accounts, has been the locomotive behind the 53 percent increase in overall outlays, adjusted for inflation, over the last eight years. This spending spike was driven by previous Labour governments supplying the extra padding to make the British welfare state one of the most accommodating in Europe. Cuts for the middle class are now on the table throughout Europe, as governments struggle to close budget deficits and reduce debt levels that now average 84 percent of gross domestic product. In France, the government is planning to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62; in Greece, public sector pensions have been sharply cut, and in Ireland government wages have been reduced by more than 10 percent. But with protests mounting, most governments have said that any further cuts in benefits to the middle class were unlikely. And in the United States, where demands are rising from the right to cut government outlays, none of the advocates have proposed reducing such sacrosanct middle class benefits as the tax deduction for interest on home mortgages or the tax breaks for pensions and retirement savings. As for Britain, while universal child benefits are common in Europe, total payments to families here including child tax credits and maternity allowances are the third highest among the 33 affluent countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, trailing France and Luxembourg. The child benefit pays PS20 a week to the oldest child and PS13.20 for each additional child until they reach the age of 20. The only requirement is that they continue to attend school. Research shows that, although payments are promoted as a direct and simple means to allay child poverty by putting money into the hands of needy mothers, nearly half of the payments go to families with above average incomes. According to a soon to be published study by Ian Walker, an economist at Lancaster University, well to do families that received the benefit were more inclined to spend it on themselves, not their children with alcohol and tobacco among the most notorious substitutes. These findings make a "good case for means testing the benefit," Mr. Walker said. "It's clear that a number of universal benefits look vulnerable." But many poverty experts strongly defend universal payments, arguing that, despite the excesses, the largest portion of the money goes to those who really need it and that paying benefits across the board is the best way to preserve political support for such programs. The British government, apart from pensions, pays large sums to the elderly, much of which ends up in the pockets of more affluent citizens. The government spends PS2.7 billion ( 4.24 billion) a year to provide a winter heating allowance to everyone over the age of 60. It provides PS1 billion for free bus passes for those senior citizens and devotes PS575 million for complimentary TV licenses for people 75 and older. Opposition to spending cuts is already building, and unions across the country are banding together, promising a series of strikes. They are expected to culminate in a mass protest on Oct. 19, the day before the government makes public its spending review. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
It all began to unravel for Melissa Harris Perry four weeks ago. It was a day before the Iowa caucuses, and despite being in Des Moines, she was not hosting the weekend show on MSNBC that bears her name. That privilege belonged to the network's legal correspondent, Ari Melber, who quickly introduced her in a split screen at the beginning of the show. "It's a very exciting day here in the 'Place for Politics,' " he said, referring to MSNBC's slogan. "We are going to get to Melissa, who everyone can see there live in Iowa, in just a second." Ms. Harris Perry vanished from the screen and Mr. Melber added, "That's what we call proof of life." Mr. Melber was joking but the phrasing turned out to be eerily prescient when it came to how Ms. Harris Perry felt she was treated by the network in the following weeks. Two days after an email became public in which Ms. Harris Perry said she felt "worthless" to NBC News executives, and after two weeks of her show being pre empted so that the network could cover other news, an MSNBC spokesman on Sunday confirmed that the network and Ms. Harris Perry were "parting ways." Ms. Harris Perry said in an email on Sunday that she was not in direct communication with anyone at the network but that "terms of severance, not reconciliation" were still being negotiated. Ms. Harris Perry also posted a message on Twitter that said, "Inviting diverse new voices to table was a privilege. Grateful for years of support criticism." MSNBC, which significantly trails Fox News and CNN in ratings, is in the midst of an overhaul, pivoting away from its left leaning identity toward hard news in the daytime hours. Ms. Harris Perry had been the host of her show, which focused on issues like racism and social justice, since 2012. On Friday, she went public with an email that she sent earlier that week to staff members in which she complained that the NBC News chairman, Andrew Lack, and Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, were letting her twist in the wind. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. "I will not be used as a tool for their purposes," she wrote. "I am not a token, mammy, or little brown bobble head. I am not owned by Lack, Griffin, or MSNBC. I love our show. I want it back." She later explained in an interview she did not believe that her lack of airtime was because she was black. When she was in Des Moines and Mr. Melber was hosting from New York, Ms. Harris Perry said she felt "like a guest" on her show. It was the first bad sign for what she would call a "painful" four week stretch. She wanted to host the show from Iowa, and other primary states, but she was told by network executives that there were "insufficient resources" to allow that to happen, she said. The following week, on Super Bowl Sunday, she said she planned to discuss Beyonce's new video, "Formation," and how it addresses race, but was encouraged to focus on the election instead. She wound up discussing the video anyway but as she did, video of Jeb Bush and Chris Christie rallies in New Hampshire appeared in a box, a notable juxtaposition for a network that is now emphasizing round the clock election coverage. It was the last time she would appear on MSNBC. Her show was pre empted each of the next two weeks. "The branding was taken, editorial control was taken and I was no longer invited to host the show," she said in the interview on Friday. The MSNBC spokesman explained that there have been pre emptions because of news coverage across the network as it focuses on the election. Since the beginning of the year, the network has had strong ratings gains in the daytime hours. Ms. Harris Perry, who is also a professor at Wake Forest University, said on Friday that she had not been given clarification on whether her show would continue but an MSNBC executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that she was told several times that "Melissa Harris Perry" had not been canceled. It was only after her email became public, the executive said, that a breakup was inevitable. News that MSNBC was officially ending its relationship with Ms. Harris Perry was first reported by The Washington Post. On Twitter, the former attorney general, Eric Holder Jr., called the move of Ms. Harris Perry being dropped from MSNBC "a real loss." He added, "She brought to television voices/perspectives too often unheard/ignored. Truth was her guide." Jamil Smith, a former segment producer for the show who is now a correspondent for MTV, said that Ms. Harris Perry's program championed diversity, and that she invited people onto the show who otherwise had "no shot at getting on cable news." "Right now in the cable news universe, you still don't regularly see the diverse panels and conversations 'Melissa Harris Perry' was having," Mr. Smith wrote in an email. (Mr. Smith was also the person who posted Ms. Harris Perry's email to her staff on the website Medium on Friday, after she gave him permission to publish it.) Before the email became public, Ms. Harris Perry was invited to come back on the air over the weekend. But in her email to colleagues last week, she said she wasn't going to return. "While MSNBC may believe that I am worthless, I know better," she wrote. "I know who I am. I know why M.H.P. Show is unique and valuable. I will not sell short myself or this show. I am not hungry for empty airtime. I care only about substantive, meaningful, and autonomous work. When we can do that, I will return not a moment earlier." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
LONDON The new year has brought new questions about the long term future of London Fashion Week Men's, where the latest round of shows began on Saturday. The now conspicuous absence of big league names on the schedule, as more and more brands opt to show mixed gender collections during the women's wear season or reconsider their spending on the traditional show format, has led to a dwindling numbers of foreign buyers, media representatives and photographers at the twice yearly event. And this season has been no exception. At times the calendar, with a few Savile Row stalwarts but also emphatic offerings from emerging designers heavy on the styling and outrageous statements but ultimately light on creative or commercial finesse, felt peripheral to the wider international fashion ecosystem. Yet it also fizzed with displays of energy, ideas and talent that underscored why the British men's wear scene should not be discounted. Here, some of the best shows that defiantly flew the flag for the future: Winner of the 2016 LVMH Prize for young designers, Grace Wales Bonner has been making waves in the industry with collections that ask boundary pushing questions about black male culture and identity. She produced a standout collection Sunday night, cementing her status as the leading light of the London fashion scene. Her starting point was a Creole sailor returning to his island after time at sea, and an exploration of the sense of both joy and dislocation wrought by a long awaited and romanticized return home. "I thought about what it would be like to look at a place and the way people behave, but from a distance and after a long period of isolation," Ms. Wales Bonner, 26, said backstage after the show. "I wondered what a Creole setting would look like as an outsider, but also an insider, one with a deep connection to the community he is watching." The silhouette was long and lean, her signature, presented in sumptuous wools and silks, with suiting and outerwear dominating the collection. Nautical pea and bomber jackets were cropped and buttoned, while cargo trousers fell perilously low on the hips, uniformly finished with a viscose denim trim. Shimmering waterproofs embroidered with the word "Creolite," or Creoleness, gave a contemporary edge, while recurring prints of bustling scenes, inspired by the 1940s paintings of the African American artist Jacob Lawrence, captured both the excitement of watching a collective behavior and the ache of standing apart from the crowd. Mixed heritage is a continuing fascination for Ms. Wales Bonner, who describes herself as mixed race. "There is something about his unresolvedness about it all that I can identify with," she said of her lonely sailor, back from his travels to Europe and America. "It's what you feel from being bullied when you're young, for being gay," he said, adding that he had been inspired by "The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man's World," a book by Alan Downs. "This show was about exploring that feeling that I used to have as a kid that, one day, I'll show them." As the lights dimmed, the show began with mournful performers in various states of makeup and dress, screeching, screaming and clawing at their faces. Then came the clothes: Opening with a wide lapel navy suit peppered with artful tears that then gave way to second skin T shirts and denim separates emblazoned with Basquiat like graffiti prints; an oversize Breton knit was belted to become a dress, after which came a hand painted pleather bustier with billowing silk pants. Most encouraging were the clear signs that Mr. Jeffrey had started to think more about his creative vision finding commercial translation: a blue, white and red tartan that he has patented, for example, and a clear move toward prints (many with circular patterns in a Pictish style) over expensive handpainting. The mood may have been dark, but his future looks increasingly bright. For the last two years, Craig Green has been named the British Menswear Designer of the Year at the Fashion Awards. His latest show, held in a warehouse on a bitterly cold Monday morning, underscored exactly why. The common thread of masculine uniforms and standard issue workwear, always present in his work, was enhanced by a meditation on breaking common molds. "I kept thinking about ideas of frameworks and molds, but all the parts of that process that usually get excluded that could also be included," the 31 year old said. So there were cargo pants and jumpsuits with layer upon layer of nylon trouser pockets, and shirts and cagoules with additional material on the seams that fanned out like fins. Textured knits with multicolor layers that were pulled apart and patched up again were finished with lashings of white cord fringe, which also ran through hoods, pockets and arms in a long connected thread. In the basement of a vintage record shop in Soho on Monday, few clues could be found. On the 70th anniversary of the four pocket Trialmaster jacket, Belstaff offered its flagship product in myriad colors and materials, alongside other outerwear staples for both sexes: Think parkas, sheepskin bikers and bomber jackets. The creative director Delphine Ninous said she had been inspired by the English youth subcultures of the 1950s, "while also looking to our future." Engines at the ready. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Pati Carlson, an astrocartographer, can help you make decisions about where to live based on your birthplace and time. Credit...Andrew Spear for The New York Times Pati Carlson, an astrocartographer, can help you make decisions about where to live based on your birthplace and time. This past fall, when Los Angeles burst once again into flames, I couldn't sleep. My husband and I kept our children inside, away from the smoke, while the guilt and fear chipped away at my love for the city. I started to question: Are we supposed to live here? Is there anywhere else we could be happy, safe, productive? My husband helpfully reminded me that the East Coast has snowstorms and hurricanes. We can't escape climate change but can we feel more secure? For an outside opinion, I turned to Pati Carlson, an astrocartographer. Ms. Carlson uses a series of mapping techniques, designed by the astrologer Jim Lewis in the late 1970s, to create a mesmerizing crisscross of sine waves or curves, each representing a planet plus the sun and moon sprouting from one's birthplace. Each line also signifies a specific energy: The intersections of various curves on a standard world map indicate which locations might be best energetically for the client, both for vacations and a permanent dwelling. Much has been made of the spread of astrology on the East and West coasts, but Ms. Carlson operates out of her home in Youngstown, Ohio, speaking with clients by phone and over email. She charges 85 for an astrocartography map, or three relocation charts, with a one hour reading; those seeking advice on where to live or spend time walk away with a custom PDF map. Before I called, I stared at Ms. Carlson's number on my laptop for days, feeling ridiculous. Decisions are made with common sense and lists and consensus, right? My mother, who was born and raised in India, reminded me that even though every person in my extended family is some kind of scientist or engineer, all major logical decisions, from wedding dates to move in dates, have traditionally been made only when cross referenced against an Indian guru's star chart. She said that astrology, while not determinate, might provide some peace of mind. Location astrology has never been Ms. Carlson's day job she laughs, "of course not" but it's what she loves to do. At the age of 13, she developed an interest in yoga, meditation and Eastern philosophies, for which her mother bought books that she devoured. Later in life, she and her husband built a series of small software and tech based companies in San Francisco, where they were happy until they retired and moved to Ohio to be closer to her son's family. Ohio is "comfortable," she said, and she's happy she can be with family, but a lifetime of major moves, from Belgium to Santa Barbara, have taught her there are places that can make her "soul sing." Where would I live best? Her task was not a straightforward one, I thought. I was born in Kashmir, had a stint in England, and then from five to 14 attended an international school in Saudi Arabia. I moved to America as a high school freshman and was thrust into a situation in which I felt foreign for the first time in my life. Finally, I moved to California, where I found my people and made my home. "If you follow your Venus line, that shows you where your heart is a little happier," said Ms. Carlson. She shared an undulating web of lines, every which way, that crossed over Europe and barely touched down in the United States, except for on the West Coast. She noted that my sun, Jupiter and Venus lines all intersect near where I already live. The only other place in the United States she would recommend is Seattle, but options in Europe included Stockholm, the Costa Brava of Spain and southern Switzerland. (Now, there's a retirement plan!) It was soothing to hear about places I might have lived, or could live, and to feel analyzed, in an emotional sense, by Ms. Carlson. She interpreted, from her charts, that I was friendless, silent and observant. That I flourished academically, but not creatively, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. That I became a miserable, rebellious valedictorian in New York, and found peace and friends in Michigan. Los Angeles has been where love, career and creative expression have personally flourished. I wanted to know what Aditi Ohri, a Canadian astrologer of Indian origin based in Austin, Tex., might think. (Ms. Ohri does not practice Vedic astrology, saying that she finds Western astrology to be a more welcoming space for the self taught.) She laughed when I asked her why, if most Indian families I know have had an astrologer back home for time immemorial, are all of the astrologers I'm finding ... not Indian? Ms. Ohri said it can often feel that traditional Vedic gurus are telling clients who they are and how things have to be, directing people and establishing social norms. The kind of astrology that is popular in the West lays out the elements a person is working with, with a focus on teaching clients how to use them. "I can't tell you why this works," says Ms. Carlson, "But it works. It speaks to people." Whatever it is, her clients seem to find comfort in talking about one's physical place in an increasingly scary world. But I was still curious about another opinion. Jessica Lanyadoo, a popular astrologer in Oakland and the author of the upcoming book "Astrology for Real Relationships," said the information she gleaned from my charts matched Ms. Carlson's own analysis perfectly. The charts are the charts, she said, no matter who's doing them; it's like math. Whatever math may govern astrocartography, having my maps and charts in hand felt grounding and reassuring. Especially since Ms. Lanyadoo and Ms. Carlson came to the same conclusion: L.A. it is. For now, forever. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Each week, Kevin Roose, technology columnist at The New York Times, discusses developments in the tech industry, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two. Kevin is away this week, so Adam Satariano, The Times's European tech correspondent, is stepping in. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here. Hello! All your regular newsletter authors are writing books, taking a week off, or taking a week off when they should be writing books. Instead, you've got me, the newest member of The New York Times tech crew, covering the European tech world based in London. In what seems like an acceptable form of new hire hazing, I've been asked to share some of this week's tech news from a perspective 5,000 plus miles from Silicon Valley. Let's get to it. Instagram is threatening to block me and many others in Europe out of its app if I don't acknowledge new privacy settings. I had a similar dance with Facebook and Twitter recently. The notices are a result of a European data privacy law called the General Data Protection Regulation, known as G.D.P.R., going into effect on May 25. I won't bore you with details. With 11 chapters and 99 subsections, the law's text is a good homeopathic cure for insomnia; it even has many well paid lawyers confused about how it will be enforced. I'm not convinced that the regulations will do much to change the current tech hierarchy, or that bombarding people with consent requests will change behavior, but I'm eager to see how new transparency rules play out. The law gives European residents stronger rights to see the information a company collects about them such as banks, health clubs, retailers or other organizations with personal data and to ask that it be deleted. The disclosures will provide an inside look at the dossiers companies compile about us. Privacy groups, seeing an opportunity, are planning to submit data requests on people's behalf and file class action style complaints when they spot wrongdoing. As we've seen with the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal, shame can be a more efficient method for changing a company's behavior than any legal proceeding. A long running sore spot in the European tech scene is the region's lack of large, globally influential technology companies to match the likes of Alphabet, Uber, Alibaba or Tencent. European governments have responded by throwing money at the problem. In the past several months, the European Union, France and Britain have announced billions of dollars worth of new financing for venture capital firms and start ups. A little known group backed by the European Union, called the European Investment Fund, has for years bankrolled some of the region's top venture capital funds. People disagree on whether this is a good use of taxpayer money, but to keep up with the United States and China, particularly in areas like artificial intelligence, many European policymakers don't think they have a choice. Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting firm that has been embroiled in a data harvesting scandal, said on Wednesday that it would cease operations and file for bankruptcy. But there was immediately some skepticism about the announcement. My colleagues Nicholas Confessore and Matthew Rosenberg reported that executives at Cambridge Analytica and its affiliate, SCL Group, along with the family of a billionaire Republican financier, Robert Mercer, have moved to set up another British firm called Emerdata. Also involved in the new company is Erik Prince, who founded Blackwater, the private security firm that was renamed Xe Services after Blackwater contractors were convicted of killing Iraqi civilians. Cambridge Analytica said it was being punished for common practices in the online advertising industry. It's a deflection, sure, but also not entirely wrong. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
How to watch: From noon to 6 p.m. and from 7 to 11 p.m. Eastern time on ESPN; and streaming on the ESPN app. On Tuesday, the singles quarterfinals begin at the United States Open, all consolidated at Arthur Ashe Stadium. The doubles draws reach the semifinals today, with two seeded men's teams making it this far. Here are some matches to keep an eye on. Because of the number of matches cycling through courts, the times for individual matchups are at best a guess and are certain to fluctuate based on the times at which earlier play is completed. All times are Eastern. Osaka, the 2018 U.S. Open women's singles champion, has had an action packed few weeks at Flushing Meadows. After reaching the final at the Western Southern Open, she pulled out, citing concerns over a hamstring injury. She has taken the lead on raising awareness about the Black Lives Matter movement, not just for the audience which has seen her take the court wearing masks bearing the names of victims of police violence but also for many of her international peers. As Osaka has made her way through the early rounds of the U.S. Open, she has oscillated between needing to struggle past opponents and convincingly reducing them to rubble. Osaka, 22, for all her strengths, can sometimes seem to be not entirely effective at utilizing them. On her off days, her lackluster footwork inhibits the precise nature of her powerful ground game. But no matter the sport, that's one of the main marks of a champion; even on their bad days, they find a way to win. Rogers, 93rd on the WTA singles rankings, is having a resurgence of form that has been a long time coming. Her first Grand Slam quarterfinal came in 2016 at Roland Garros. But she had not been able to make it past the third round of a major tournament since then, especially after struggling with a knee injury and having surgery in 2018. Now, Rogers has taken out two seeded players Elena Rybakina, No. 11, and Petra Kvitova, No. 6 on her way to the quarterfinals, a remarkable feat considering last year she retired in the first round of the qualifying tournament at the U.S. Open. Rogers upset Kvitova by pushing the usually aggressive player onto her back foot, even when down a match point in the third set. It will be a tough feat to replicate against Osaka, but it's not without precedent. Brady, the 28th seed, reached her first Grand Slam quarterfinal by playing as if she'd been there plenty of times before. She has not dropped a set on her way here, including a convincing drumming of Angelique Kerber, a three time Grand Slam tournament champion. Brady's mammoth serving helped her secure the first set in just 22 minutes, but it was her returning that proved the main differentiator in the match. Kerber was able to win only eight of her 23 second service points, a situation that not only puts pressure on the scoreboard, but also can make players nervous on their first serves. Putintseva defeated the eighth seed, Petra Martic, in a tough three set battle in the round of 16, where she actually won one less point than Martic. This is a quirk of the tennis scoring format that can sometimes seem strange to casual viewers, but the explanation is usually found in serving form. Although Putintseva served well, Martic was able to exercise pressure on her service games, pushing many of them to deuce. It's hard to say what Putintseva can improve in her service game, especially after landing 70 percent of her first serves during her last match. But it will take something special if she's going to keep Brady at bay. Coric, the 27th seed, is a defensive baseliner. In reaching his first career Grand Slam quarterfinal, he has epitomized what it means to grind out a match and win by refusing to be put away. In his five set upset over the fourth seeded Stefanos Tsitsipas in the third round, Coric faced six match points, and through a mixture of sheer will and luck, was able to overcome that to win a fifth set tiebreaker. In any other year, his late night heroics would be filed away as another rowdy moment of magic under the lights in Flushing. This year, without the baying New York City fans, the match felt muted as it finished after four hours and 36 minutes. But, Coric clearly did not need the adoring fans to take out Jordan Thompson in straight sets in his next match. Tonight, he'll need to try to unseat another promising young star in Zverev, the fifth seed. Zverev reached his first Grand Slam semifinal this year at the Australian Open, and has looked to be coasting back to that same achievement. One of the few criticisms of his game in the past two years has been his unreliable serving. But in his fourth round matchup against Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, he used his serve like a bulldozer, with 18 aces and only two double faults to win the match in one hour and 34 minutes. Zverev, the 2018 ATP Tour finals winner, has long been lauded as a part of the generation that can take up the mantle after Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal retire. If he keeps serving this way, and doesn't allow himself to get mired in long matches, he may be able to prove this year that it's only a matter of time. Although there is no real joy in advancing under these circumstances, there's only one way to react: keep competing. Carreno Busta has been playing well throughout this year's tournament, using his excellent movement to get behind his opponent's pacey shots and redirect them without adding too much pace of his own. In that sense, Shapovalov provides the perfect foil. His main weapon is a penetrating, one handed backhand that somehow looks even more coordinated when he jumps up several feet in the air to tackle a high defensive ball from his opponents. Although none of Shapovalov's wins at the U.S. Open have been in straight sets, they've still looked quite convincing. The main concern now will be about his fitness. Shapovalov, 21, also reached the quarterfinals of the men's doubles competition, where he and his partner lost in straight sets. With Shapovalov having completed seven matches in the past eight days, it will be interesting to see if he can outlast yet another opponent. Kudermetova and Blinkova, both of Russia, upset the eighth and fourth seeds on their way to reaching their first Grand Slam semifinal. Siegemund and Zvonareva upset the seventh and second seeds, but are no strangers to the later stages, having five Grand Slam women's and mixed doubles titles between them. The veterans surely won't take the young Russians for granted, and it will be interesting to see which of these upset producing teams will be able to reach the finals. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Labels. Can't live with them, can't live without them. At least not in today's milk glass world of vanguard culture, where the once distinct disciplines like dance, fashion, art, photography, food and performance have begun melding together like never before. In some quarters, it's now blurry enough to recall the Newton disc, a wheel of the color spectrum that when spun at high speed turns white (or at least a nice dove gray). The latest and most clearly confounding exemplar of this blurrealist trend opens Friday at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan's Meatpacking District. Titled "Eckhaus Latta: Possessed" and delving into (and around and about) the art inflected fashion house founded by Zoe Latta and Mike Eckhaus in 2011, the exhibition is almost dizzyingly multivalent. First off, it's not really an exhibition, because it's also a shop or at least a retail environment where you can browse, try on and buy the label's clothes. It's not in the Whitney's own lobby level bookstore, but in a lobby exhibition space that's free to the public and where a store vibe seems appropriate. Even so, it is the first time the Whitney has installed a shoppable space in one of its galleries. There are artworks (not for sale) included in the show, not Mr. Eckhaus and Ms. Latta's own but by artists they commissioned. The installation is also kind of a performance, since the sales staff is kind of part of the project and will actually be performing the role of salespeople through Oct. 8, when the show ends. All together, this kit and caboodle is really something else entirely, a kind of conceptual art installation that aims to encapsulate today's fashion system (if not today's galloping consumption of all kinds) through a distillation of our experience with shopping and clothes into a three chambered feast for the eyes. The first stokes future desire with light box ad imagery; the second delivers the tangible, present pleasure of the clothes themselves; and the third space lets you look back at the past, warping your own memories of the purchase through security footage. So it's about shopping, but it's also not about shopping, but it's also not not about shopping. Is it art? Fashion? Here's the thing, and it applies whether you are talking about Eckhaus Latta or their Whitney show (or about Mr. Eckhaus or Ms. Latta themselves): If you are trying to pin them down as being one thing or another, you're already out of the game. Defying categorization isn't a goal or a gimmick; it's a given. And it's one that everything else is built upon. "This is something we get asked a lot," Ms. Latta said earlier this week, after having flown in from Los Angeles to install the show. (Mr. Eckhaus lives in New York, so even their base of operations is blurry.) "For us, if it wasn't getting asked of us, we wouldn't ask it of ourselves ever. That gray area is always where we've been the happiest, and not needing a definitive label." Articulate as Mr. Eckhaus and Ms. Latta are, they falter in describing their own style. "We've always had this issue when people want us to describe the clothes or ask 'What is Eckhaus Latta?'" Mr. Eckhaus said. "We still don't necessarily know how to answer those questions, but I think that's a really exciting thing rather than a detrimental one. Why does everything need to be a one liner or an elevator pitch? Why does everything need to be so easily understood?" Moving to New York in 2010, Mr. Eckhaus started designing accessories at Marc Jacobs while Ms. Latta was designing textiles. In November 2011, they impulsively decided to submit a look to the famed fashion competition in Hyeres, France. "The day we sent it off we hadn't slept in, like, two days, and I remember hallucinating in the post office just trying to get it out on time," she said. That one design gave rise to a handful of others, which they showed at a friend's gallery on Bowery, and they were on their way. One of the early hallmarks of their line, and their approach, is what the artist and performer Kembra Pfahler has called "availabism," the practice of using what's on hand or at least easily procured. Most strikingly, that meant plastic the kind not really meant to be worn next to the skin. One early look that generated some buzz was a high waist pair of pants knit from tan plastic and mohair worn with mint green patent leather covered woodblock shoes and a double faced cashmere vest. "We were very into outdoor upholstery materials," Ms. Latta said. These comically avant garde early efforts were carried off with a pointedly un fashion y sense of presentation. Eschewing professional models for art world friends like Susan Cianciolo and Juliana Huxtable, casting people across the spectra of age, race, size and gender, and collaborating with artists like Alex Da Corte, Dev Hynes and Bjarne Melgaard, the pair almost seemed more interesting in formulating a new model for a label as they were about designing the clothes: the brand as conceptual artwork. But if that sounds even more airily arty and self indulgent, a no nonsense marketing professional might disagree. In an age when there are 1,500 names on the Vogue.com runway show list, finding a voice that resonates with people outside the Wintour circle is of paramount importance. With a canny mix of inclusiveness and exclusiveness, that is just what Eckhaus Latte has done, as borne out by their Whitney show. The charm of this approach is that it has allowed the pair to take an abstract and personal approach to runway clothes that can change from season to season without ever hewing to one aesthetic or rule. It really is almost impossible to define the Eckhaus Latta style, though in 2015 Women's Wear Daily came as close as anyone has to pinning it down: "a look that melds utilitarianism, pansexuality, streetwear and thrifted silhouettes into a unique, counterculture aesthetic." And yet if that suggests that pragmatism isn't part of the mix, that would be wrong. Indeed, the most surprising thing about Eckhaus Latta isn't the edgy chic clothes on the runway; it is the clothes in the showroom, where there are full fledged collections of denim, knits and accessories as well as one of a kind collection pieces. "That's the thing we're not artists," Ms. Latta said. "At the end of the day, we're serious about our business and changing the ways this industry works and working within its limitations. We can talk to you about tailoring and bias cut dresses and knit structures all you want." So in an age in which binary systems, like male/female and young/old, are being rejected left and right (sorry), maybe it's also time to retire the old canard that art is above commerce while fashion revels in it. That's very much the message of the Whitney show. "This concept of blending, allowing commerce to happen within the context of art, all came from them," said Lauri Freedman, the Whitney's head of product development and a co curator of the show, with Christopher Y. Lew. "It's not just that they know how to put on a fashion show, it's not just that they have this amazing group of artists they work with. They are stewards of their ideas in a way that is fully holistic." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
As summer approaches, many of us are looking ahead to languid days by the pool. New research, alas, suggests many of them are laced with something other than water. Though we all suspect it's there, it's not easy to assess how much urine there is in a particular swimming pool (the existence of a chemical that changes color when you pee is an urban legend). But it is not an insignificant public health question. So a team of chemists at the University of Alberta in Canada has devised a new way to estimate the amount by measuring levels of an artificial sweetener commonly present in people's urine. The scientists sampled 29 pools and hot tubs in British Columbia and Alberta, and found the artificial sweetener, called acesulfame potassium, in every one. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
LOS ANGELES THERE'S a newcomer to this city's auto row. Compared to the shiny showrooms displaying the latest Mercedeses and Toyotas, the Chinese carmaker BYD's outpost in the shadow of downtown skyscrapers looks rather forlorn. Just two of its models a red electric sport utility vehicle and a brown gasoline powered sedan are on view in an otherwise empty storefront. But it's the pair of 40 foot long battery powered buses parked across the street that is driving the company's ambitions to become the first Chinese automaker to break into the United States market. BYD this year became the first Chinese vehicle company to open manufacturing sites in the United States, building an electric bus assembly plant and a separate battery factory in Lancaster, a desert community 75 miles north of Los Angeles. The 30 billion company beat American competitors to win contracts to build electric buses for transit agencies in Los Angeles and nearby Long Beach. BYD is also pursuing deals to supply electric shuttle buses to rental car agencies, amusement parks and Silicon Valley technology companies. In New York, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority began a two month road test of BYD's battery powered eBus in September. "Buses are on the street and highly visible, so it's a good way to get our name out there and build our reputation," said Brendan Riley, BYD's vice president for fleet sales, at the Los Angeles showroom. "Once transit agencies work with BYD and understand BYD is going to take care of them with their bus fleets, we'll get them to try our electric cars," he added. BYD first came to Americans' attention in 2008 when the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett bought 10 percent of the company, convinced that it would dominate China's electric car market. Founded in 1995 as a mobile phone battery manufacturer, BYD has grown into a conglomerate that makes cars, buses, energy storage systems, solar panels, LED lighting and phones. Like other Chinese automakers, BYD has benefited from loans from state owned banks and contracts to supply its electric vehicles to Chinese municipalities. The company has sold electric cars in China since 2008 but is moving cautiously into the American market. Mr. Riley said BYD was mindful of Chinese cars' reputation for poor quality and of Hyundai's disastrous United States debut in 1986, when the South Korean company began selling a poorly built compact car that ruined its reputation for years. "We do not want to have missteps," said Mr. Riley. To that end, this year BYD began selling a small number of its e6 electric S.U.V.'s in the United States, but only to corporate fleets. The company has also placed the e6 with companies as demonstrator models. It has no plans to export its gasoline powered models to the American market. The 52,000 e6 is powered by an iron phosphate battery that BYD says gives the car a range of 186 miles on a charge, compared with around 75 miles for most other electric cars available in the United States. "You don't really want to bring a car into a market that is not properly supported," said Mr. Riley. "When you sell cars into fleets you can co locate engineers and parts." BYD has sold the e6 to taxi fleets in China, Britain and South America, and Mr. Riley expects it to pursue a similar strategy in the United States. For now, the company's challenge is proving it can manufacture its 800,000 eBus in the United States and meet federal standards for durability and safety. It recently suffered a setback when a bus being tested at a federal facility in Pennsylvania suffered cracks in its frame. And in October California officials fined the company 99,245 for violating state labor laws; the company said it would appeal the ruling. The first buses, which have a range of 155 miles on a charge, are set to roll off the Lancaster assembly line later this year to fulfill contracts with transit agencies in Los Angeles and Long Beach. California has adopted regulations that will require 15 percent of municipal bus fleets to be powered by low carbon alternative fuels. That prompted the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority in June to award BYD a 20.7 million contract to supply up to 25 electric buses. Richard Hunt, the agency's head of bus procurement, said the range and size of the eBus and the fact that BYD had deployed more than 700 of the vehicles worldwide persuaded Los Angeles to take a chance on a relatively unknown Chinese company. To hedge its bets, the agency placed an initial order for five vehicles and will evaluate them before buying additional eBuses. "These are expensive vehicles, and we don't want to make costly mistakes," Mr. Hunt said. "But we do think electric buses are the way to go for the environment." Though the eBus costs roughly twice as much as a conventional diesel bus, Mr. Riley of BYD said the eBus could pay for itself in three years because of savings in fuel and maintenance. A Long Beach Transit spokesman, Kevin Lee, said his agency was receiving 7.4 million in government grants to offset the 12.1 million cost of 10 eBuses it ordered. He said the lower operating cost of the electric bus and its ability to run all day on a single charge persuaded the city to take a chance on BYD. Mr. Lee noted that the bus's 324 kilowatt hour battery for comparison, the e6 S.U.V. has a 61.4 kilowatt hour battery and its ability to return electricity to the grid mean it could be a rolling generator of power in blackouts. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
A member of the Sackler family that owns OxyContin's maker directed the company to put a premium on selling high dosages of its potentially addicting painkillers, according to new disclosures in a lawsuit. Richard Sackler, a son of a founder of Purdue Pharma and its onetime president, told company officials in 2008 to "measure our performance by Rx's by strength, giving higher measures to higher strengths," according to an email written by Mr. Sackler, contained in the filing. The lawsuit, which was filed in June by the Massachusetts attorney general, Maura Healey, claims that Purdue Pharma and members of the Sackler family knew that putting patients on high dosages of OxyContin for long periods increased the risks of serious side effects, including addiction. Nonetheless, they promoted higher dosages because stronger pain pills brought the company and the Sacklers the most profit, the lawsuit has charged. A Purdue spokesman dismissed contentions in the lawsuit that the company promoted high dose opioid use. "None of the documents cited by the attorney general support her fictional narrative that the company was only interested in promoting higher doses," that spokesman, Robert Josephson, said. Richard Sackler has stated that he was not involved in the company's marketing activities. However, the 2008 email appears to be among the first internal company emails to suggest that Mr. Sackler urged the promotion of higher strengths of OxyContin. Two other members of the family, Jonathan and Mortimer Sackler, were copied in on the email, according to the new disclosures. That email is one of several disclosures that emerged Thursday when Ms. Healey filed a version of her lawsuit that contained information that Purdue Pharma had sought to block from public view. In a filing last week, several parts of the lawsuit were redacted, but a Massachusetts state judge agreed with several groups, including The New York Times and other media organizations, that the entire complaint should be made public. A last minute effort Thursday by Purdue Pharma to block the release failed. The drug maker has long sought to depict the Sackler family as removed from the company's day to day operations. The Sacklers are one of the richest families in the United States, with much of their wealth derived from sales of OxyContin. Their name graces museums and medical schools around the world, and the new revelations are likely to renew calls for institutions to decline their philanthropic gifts. In a statement, Purdue Pharma, which is based in Stamford, Conn., said that Thursday's release of the remaining portions of the Massachusetts lawsuit was "part of a continuing effort to single out Purdue, blame it for the entire opioid crisis, and try the case in the court of public opinion rather than the justice system." In 2007, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges that the company had misrepresented the dangers of OxyContin. Three of its top officials its chief executive, Michael Friedman; its general counsel, Howard Udell; and its top medical officer, Dr. Paul Goldenheim pleaded guilty to criminal misdemeanors associated with the company's conduct. Together, the company and the men paid 634.5 million in fines. At that time, the Sacklers were not accused of any wrongdoing and have not faced personal legal consequences over the drug. The new disclosures show that after the pleas, the Purdue board, which includes several Sackler family members, voted to pay Mr. Friedman 3 million and Mr. Udell up to 6 million. The lawsuit contends the payments were efforts by the Sacklers to maintain the executives' loyalty and protect the family. Mr. Udell is now deceased and Mr. Friedman did not return a telephone call seeking comment. The new disclosures also include a chart showing the billions of dollars the Sacklers have received from Purdue over the years. The lawsuit alleges that the Sackler family received more than 4 billion in opioid profits since 2007, when the company pleaded guilty. The lawsuit includes claims that McKinsey Company, a consulting firm, prepared reports for Purdue Pharma to develop strategies that would increase the prescribing by doctors of the more powerful forms of the company's painkillers. According to the complaint, McKinsey consultants advised Purdue Pharma to increase sales by claiming that opioids reduced stress and made patients less isolated. Patients on drugs such as OxyContin can in fact become socially withdrawn. McKinsey consultants, members of the Sackler family were told, also planned to study techniques for keeping patients on opioids longer and McKinsey urged Purdue Pharma to fight efforts taken by federal agencies to stop illegal drug sales, the lawsuit claims. A spokesman for McKinsey said in a statement that the company had only received the unredacted version of the Massachusetts lawsuit and was reviewing it. "We care deeply about the opioid crisis and the impact it has had on our communities," the statement said. The filing also shows that in recent years Purdue Pharma considered selling drugs used to treat opioid addiction or counteract the effects of a potentially fatal opioid overdose. A slide that was part of a 2014 presentation to company officials, including a Sackler family member, about selling an addiction treatment drug stated that "pain treatment and addiction are naturally linked." It also said, "There is an opportunity to expand our offering to be an end to end pain provider." While that plan did not go forward, the company also considered the possibility of selling naloxone, or Narcan, which is a drug given to revive people suffering an opioid overdose. According to documents cited in the filing, a potential marketing plan called for studying "long term script users" to "better understand target end patients" for Narcan. Since OxyContin came on the market in 1996, more than 200,000 people have died in the United States from overdoses involving prescription opioids, and Purdue Pharma has been the target of numerous lawsuits. The Massachusetts case is one of hundreds of lawsuits filed by states, cities and Native American tribes against manufacturers and distributors of opioids. Many of those case have been consolidated for trial in an Ohio federal court. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Bridging the literary and aesthetic worlds, some of the year's best large scale, illustrated hardcovers offer immersion and escape right from your living room. Coffee Table Books to Give (and Get) This Season From a splashy, limited edition Depeche Mode retrospective to a serene collection of quiet Japanese crafts; contemporary Black art to nature photography that will remind anyone who needed reminding just how much we stand to lose: There's a visual book here for everyone. The oil portraits collected in LYNETTE YIADOM BOAKYE: Fly in League With the Night (D.A.P./Tate, 55) depict people the contemporary British artist has imagined into being, and allude to the long tradition of European portraiture by men like Rembrandt, Goya and Degas only to overturn these examples, making the message, and the medium, her own. For book collectors, bibliophiles and design nostalgics, Peter Mendelsund and David J. Alworth's THE LOOK OF THE BOOK: Jackets, Covers, and Art at the Edges of Literature (Ten Speed, 50) tells an alternate history of the Western canon, in the physical editions they think have shaped it most. THE OXFORD ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE BOOK (Oxford University, 39.95) takes a more scholarly approach to bibliography: James Raven edits essays by academics from around the world to illuminate the evolution of global book making, from the ancient world to today. Much has been made of the Bloomsbury Group's impact on the ethos of 20th century Anglophone culture, but Wendy Hitchmough's THE BLOOMSBURY LOOK (Yale University, 40) is the first book to thoroughly unpack the group's visual aesthetic, from painted portraits of John Maynard Keynes to photographs Leonard Woolf took of his wife, Virginia, to fashion designs and handwritten correspondences. The World We Live In Whether or not you follow him on social media do Humans of New York's Brandon Stanton deserves a place on your coffee table: With HUMANS (St. Martin's, 35), the photographer expands his local scope to capture the stories of remarkable everyday individuals from all around the world. In REFUGE: America's Wildest Places (Earth Aware Editions, 50), the environmental photographer and filmmaker Ian Shive captures nearly half of the world's National Refuge Wildlife System, making a powerful visual case for preserving what we can of the natural world both species and landscapes around us. Shive is far from alone. HUMAN NATURE: Planet Earth in Our Time (Chronicle Books, 45) features the work of 12 photographers shedding light on the greatest threats to our planet right now, from the decimation of our forests and oceans to industrialization and poverty and species extinction. In 200 pages of comic book stills that will bring the reader immediately back to 1998, PEARL JAM: Art of Do the Evolution (IDW Publishing, 39.99) revisits the making of the rock band's seminal animated music video, as related by one of its producers, Joe Pearson. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
"You're a lobster if you don't read this one." "Funny bone ticklers that are hot and crisp from the popper." "We'd like to have been able to hand him a few swift swats in the breadbasket." "This one's about a very chesty French hayseed who had a swelled bean over his ability as a lion hunter." Passages from a Damon Runyon story? Lines from an old timey gangster movie? No, just cracking good quotes from a handful of pungent, salty, to the point early 20th century book reviews by a Sing Sing prisoner that were unearthed by an enterprising Times reporter and printed in the paper on April 30, 1911 and May 21, 1911. The reviews, which only covered books available in the Sing Sing library, were marked with numbers showing where each book was shelved. Most of them were positive (or "peacherino," as the writer himself might have said), but there were a few savage pans mixed in. "Nix on this," the critic wrote of Stephen Crane's "Whilomville Stories." "It's too kiddish and cuts no ice with yours truly." Of a novel called "Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush," he said, "The easy marks from the pie belt may fall for it, but no more for us." Mark Twain was clearly a favorite ("he's a cure for the blues if ever there was one"), and so was Victor Hugo ("Les Miserables" was "the richest thing that ever came down the pike"). Though The Times tried at the time to discover the identity of the reviewer, all they found was that at least some of the pieces if not all of them were written by Prisoner No. 57,709. That's as far as they got, explaining that "the making public of a convict's name is one of the gravest violations of prison rules .... The literary prisoners, and there are a large number in Sing Sing ... would not care, says the warden, to have their names known." The reporter who combed the reviews for clues came up with a few many of them were peppered with vernacular Boston slang; at least one mentioned a wife and speculated that William Bush, the assistant prison librarian, might have written some or all of them before his escape on Jan. 26, 1911: "In the nine years of his imprisonment for murder, he naturally became familiar with all the books of the prison library, and was able to criticize them perhaps as well, or better, than any other convict there." But a search of Sing Sing's intake records shows that Bush's prisoner number isn't a match. Prisoner No. 57,709 turns out to be one Fred L. Stockford, 35, a clerk and traveling salesman who entered Sing Sing on Jan. 27, 1908, convicted of "depositing obscene matter in U.S. mails." He's described as a trim man with grayish blue eyes and graying brown hair, a "rather large, long, slightly Roman" nose, five gold capped teeth ("balance false"), "arched and heavy" eyebrows and medium size ears. He used tobacco, he was married, he had no children and last but certainly not least he was born in Boston, where his mother still lived. Stockford's crime was a serious one: According to The Fairmont West Virginian, he sent letters to young girls he met "through the children's page of a Wheeling newspaper, where correspondents are invited to exchange letters on matters of mutual interest." Stockford gave the girls a secret code "by which certain letters of each word were used to convey a hidden message," and he groomed some of them with visits and gifts. Though the paper noted that he was arrested before a hotel room rendezvous took place, "up until a few years ago he was a traveling salesman and was familiar with West Virginia and towns not far off in Ohio and Pennsylvania from which complaints of a similar character have been coming." And when he was sentenced, the Evening Republican a newspaper in Meadville, Pa. headlined the story "Got Off Easy: A Degenerate to Serve Seven Years at Sing Sing." Stockford died in 1916, shortly after his release from prison. His crimes were terrible and inexcusable, but even a century on, it's clear Stockford was a skillful literary critic, too. The paper's 1911 assessment of his work still stands: "His work as a master of slang and criticism terse and virile stands as one of the masterpieces of Sing Sing's literature." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
It's more than just another dance film born during the pandemic, because it is more than a dance. It's a celebration of a culture: the underground scene of New York City. "UnderScored," by Ephrat Asherie, is also a rush, gliding across the screen like a wave of motion. The progression of rhythm, of bodies, of momentum are thrilling. It doesn't matter that the video, shot on the Lincoln Center campus, is short (it flies by at just under three minutes); it has layers of club culture and spirit embedded within it. Ms. Asherie has never made something so authentically herself. And its sheer exuberance? Well, that is Ms. Asherie. A choreographer with a passion for club life and social dance forms house, breaking, vogue Ms. Asherie, like many in the field, found herself with a dance and no place to show it. "UnderScored," part of her multifaceted project exploring the lineage of street and club dance, was originally scheduled to premiere in October at Works Process at the Guggenheim. Instead it became a video project, one of four in a series directed by Nic Petry in collaboration with the artists and presented by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and Works Process. It will be available indefinitely starting at 7:30 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday. (When performances resume, it will eventually be shown in its complete form.) Of course, for a dancer like Ms. Asherie, the pandemic has affected more than her work in the concert dance world. "The nightlife scene in New York City has been hit so hard," she said. "It's really been incredible to see how D.J.s and promoters are doing their thing on Twitch or on Instagram." "UnderScored" is a homage both to that world and to its veterans, and it features appearances by two of them: Michele Saunders, 77, and Archie Burnett, 61. Ms. Asherie said that the recent deaths of two important street dance innovators, Don Campbell and Tyrone Proctor, were on her mind. "I just felt like, let's collaborate with the elders when they're here," she said. "Why are we waiting to celebrate them?" She and the dancers worked on the choreography in a bubble residency at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in Tivoli, N.Y., but being on site at Lincoln Center made her understand exactly how she wanted it to look: shot, basically, in one take. "It was exciting to have this feeling of wanting to be in conversation with the space," she said. "It was so clear to me when I got there: Oh, I want this to feel like one sweeping movement, because so much of what we've done has been interrupted by the pandemic." Mr. Petry, a dancer who heads the media company Dancing Camera, understands the relationship between choreography and the camera. "Often the hardest part for me is that the dance is the dance and you want it to remain true to what it is," he said. "What was so fun and so great about Ephrat is how collaboratively she was interested in working. She was like, 'Let me do something that would really work for this part.' So it was actually making something new, which is very exciting." "UnderScored," set to Sam One's pulsating track "Kitale," feels urgent and alive: a visceral response to the moment. "The reason I've been riding my bike like a maniac in the pandemic is because I need to move through space," Ms. Asherie said. "As dancers, I feel like our whole sense of time and space has shifted so dramatically. When this opportunity came up, I was like, how do we take up space? How do we show that we're here?" Ms. Asherie, known in the dance world as Bounce, spoke about her film, which transports the cast from confined spaces to the open air, about what it's like to dance with trees (and other household objects) and about the importance of her club elders. What follows are edited excerpts from that conversation. What was the biggest challenge in shooting "UnderScored"? It's a huge space to cover. You can plan in your head, but ultimately it's also this dialogue with the videographer. It was so much about the moment and the joy of creating something so unexpected in a short amount of time after you've been alone and overthinking everything so much. The thing about the one take feel is that it's the closest to a performance. How did you choose the sites for your dance? I knew right away that I wanted to be in the slats on the side of the Metropolitan Opera house, because that is also very much how confined we've been and separated from one another and then slowly we break out of that. What is the root of the choreography in that opening moment? We called it the "'rona phrase," because I made it in my living room. I was like, we just need to be dancing. This is at the top of the pandemic; I'm like, we're just going to make a really long phrase, and every time we have rehearsal, I'm going to add four, five, six, seven, eight counts. And we're going to do it every time we rehearse to keep our stamina up. The slats are really reflective of our Zoom squares and our confinement in those squares. So that phrase represents the beginning of our experience in this time. The film unfolds like chapters to me. How did the section in the trees happen? We need to frolic. There are trees! You can't not use them. I also have a weird amount of standing lamps in my apartment. At one point, I put all three of them on the floor, and I was like, these are my dance partners right now. I was moving through these lamps. And this was before the Lincoln Center thing was in my mind, but then I saw the trees and I was like, oh my God people don't even know, but we were dancing by ourselves with our lamps. Or whatever with our brooms! I'm sure everybody did some kind of crazy stuff like that. We all did it. What do Michele Saunders and Archie Burnett represent here? They're the ones that have paved the way. If you ever see footage of the Paradise Garage, Michele was in it. She was there all the time in full out costume die hard, like going to the club with a suitcase and multiple outfits to change her costume. At Kaatsbaan, we would rehearse all day and then we'd go back and have big family dinners, and then Archie and Michele would dance for hours in the living room. That kind of energy that is the reason there is a club scene. What does that mean to you? It's like celebrating the reason that we're doing what we're doing. The energy that they share with us is so generous and magnanimous. I'm never going to leave a party early again ever. Once we're back at the club, I'm staying until closing every single night. So that's why. Because we are because of them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Bill Cosby stands accused of committing date rape long before drugs like GHB or Rohypnol were widely used for that purpose. Many of Mr. Cosby's accusers believed they had been drugged but with what? And how? In a recently obtained legal deposition, Mr. Cosby acknowledged giving quaaludes to some women with whom he had sex, but said consumption of the drug was consensual, "the same as a person would say, 'Have a drink.' " In a transcript of the deposition, reported on Sunday in The New York Times, the comedian told lawyers had had obtained seven prescriptions for quaaludes. Originally approved and marketed as a "safer" sleeping pill, less addictive than barbiturates, the drug (known generically as methaqualone) was both sedating and hypnotic. Recreational use was common, but the federal government withdrew them from the market in 1982. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Kudos to Mayor Pete. He has amazing talents, as everyone has seen, and his future is even brighter than it would have been had he waited until after Super Tuesday to graciously step aside. He was willing to accept (as some others have yet to accept) that remaining in the race could take votes from candidates who have a viable path to nomination. In this year, when the stakes are higher than any presidential election in my lifetime of 60 plus years, that is truly a valuable gift to our nation. Re "Amy Klobuchar Drops Out of Presidential Race and Plans to Endorse Biden" (nytimes.com, March 2): There was no other choice for Senator Amy Klobuchar except to drop out of the Democratic race. She did the right thing after running an admirable race. She conducted herself masterfully at the debates, showing calm, respect toward other candidates and knowledge. I salute her. She won my heart and my deep respect. She is a jewel in the Democratic Party. It should not lose her talent. She would make an excellent vice president. This will prepare her to run for the presidency when the next opportunity arises. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. "Please don't live in fear," Justin Vernon pleads in this benefit single for Direct Relief, which supports medical workers; later, he promises, "There will be a better day." It's ultraslow and thickly layered, with voices and instruments coming and going and seemingly random sounds even a crowd! drifting in from a faraway outside world. A recurring, rising three note saxophone sample keeps providing the will to go on. JON PARELES American Football first released "Stay Home" in 1999; it's a sociophobe's plaint that "empathy takes energy" and "that's life, it's so social." So while other bands Google around for quarantine appropriate songs John Lennon's "Isolation" already has at least one too many cover versions American Football could simply revive "Stay Home," layering separate home recordings, shorter and in a lower key than the original. Now as then, the song is calm, rippling, fingerpicking Minimalistic math rock, sounding relieved not to interact in any way but musically. PARELES Haux makes unerringly pretty music about unerringly sad things. "Heavy," the first single from his forthcoming debut album, "Violence in a Quiet Mind," exists near the intersection of Bon Iver and quiet storm R B. It's bracing weepy, pulsing, as still as when you close your eyes and can only hear the air funneling in and out of your nose. CARAMANICA The Streets featuring Tame Impala, 'Call My Phone Thinking I'm Doing Nothing Better' The Streets's Mike Skinner returns, his deadpan speak rapping not having aged a day. This excellent new song from a forthcoming mixtape, "None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive" is about the calm thrill of seeing an ex call relentlessly, and letting it go unanswered. "Whoever's with my ex needs to do better/She's still texting me at two 'til 10," Skinner raps, though there's self loathing lurking just beneath the dart. Tame Impala's Kevin Parker, singing the hook, is both soothing and terse. CARAMANICA Here's pop R B from the distant era before last month? of conjugal business as usual. Over a coolly plinking, pointillistic track Syd from the Internet is among the producers Kelly Rowland insists on starting the day with sex: "I know you need the stress relief," she prescribes. PARELES Lila Ike, a singer from central Jamaica whose star is on the rise, has no use for coyness. On "I Spy," backed by a thick, syncopated bass line and a rhythm guitar flicking on every upbeat, she dares, "Why don't you come over if you really feel it?" But the feathery, floating tone of her voice tells the other half of the story. She's confident enough to make the move, but her talent lies in the ability to use a soft touch even as she's calling the shots. You got the invitation, she's saying; now it's on you to show you deserve it. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO In the mid 1960s, Albert Ayler and John Coltrane were the tenor saxophonists working hardest to yank jazz toward an ethos of transcendence, making it a vessel for a kind of nonverbal liberation theology. Some spirit seemed to course through their horns, erupting and dispersing. James Brandon Lewis is a bristling young New York saxophonist who has been heavily influenced by both of them, but in his playing, the spirit refuses to escape. Much of the sweat and passion in his music springs from a sense that he is still toiling to unloose what's within; the listener is a party to that work. "Twenty Four" is Lewis's mash up of the Coltrane classics "Giant Steps" and "26 2," both built on a tornado of harmonic changes. But on this tune included on the newly released "Live in Willisau," Lewis's second duo album with the eminent drummer Chad Taylor he spends a lot of time with his body planted around a simple motif, stating and restating it, wringing it for life, as if trying to chase it down and set it free in a single act. RUSSONELLO | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
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