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LOS ANGELES Adam Sandler's "Uncut Gems" is sparkling at the box office. Once again, the top movies in North American theaters were family oriented holiday leftovers, including first place "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker" (Disney), which collected roughly 34 million over the weekend, for a new domestic total of 451 million ( 919 million worldwide). Second place "Jumanji: The Next Level" (Sony) took in about 26.5 million, lifting its domestic total to 236 million ( 610 million). But in Hollywood, where initial Oscar voting was in full swing over the weekend, minds were more attuned to the performance of prestige films starting with the R rated "Uncut Gems," which has developed into a runaway hit, at least for a divisive movie that cost less than 20 million to make. "Uncut Gems," directed by Josh and Benny Safdie and starring Sandler as an abrasive jeweler and gambling addict, sold 7.8 million in tickets, for a total of about 37 million since its wide release on Dec. 25. To compare, Fox Searchlight's PG 13 rated Nazi satire, "Jojo Rabbit," has collected 21.6 million since arriving in theaters in early November. Another Oscar hopeful, the R rated "Bombshell" (Lionsgate), starring Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie, has taken in about 24.6 million since it was released on Dec. 20. Several other awards oriented films, including "The Two Popes" and "Marriage Story," both from Netflix, have largely bypassed theaters and played on television sets and mobile devices. Greta Gerwig's rapturously reviewed "Little Women" (Sony), which cost about 40 million to make, has also exceeded expectations. It has collected a stout 60 million since arriving on Christmas Day, including 13.6 million over the weekend, enough for third place. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Having an optimistic mind set may reduce the risk for cardiovascular disease and early death, a r eview of studies has found. In previous studies, optimism has been shown to be associated with a range of favorable physical health outcomes and with greater success in work, school and relationships. This new meta analysis, published in JAMA Network Open, included 15 studies that measured optimism and pessimism by asking the level of agreement with such statements as "In uncertain times, I usually expect the best," or "I rarely expect good things to happen to me." Analysis of the 10 studies that looked at heart disease, which pooled data on 209,436 people, found that compared with pessimists, people with the most optimistic outlook had a 35 percent lower risk for cardiovascular events. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
LONDON The line had begun forming at 3 p.m., though the time varied according to whom you asked. A young American Marine, Claude Martin, at the back of the line the very back, since after less than an hour, the hired security forbade any more people from lining up said he had heard whispers that the earliest comers had arrived at 3 a.m. It was a damp Tuesday evening in London, but they waited down the block and around the corner to get in, mostly young men, mostly in sneakers, at least one with a Supreme bag. It wasn't a so called product drop. It was an opening at the Gagosian Gallery. "We have never had a lineup around the block to get into an exhibition," said Nick Simunovic, the director at Gagosian Hong Kong. Each man is a hero of the "hypebeast" community, and they came together last year at ComplexCon, the annual convention at which hypebeasts swarm. Mr. Abloh and Mr. Murakami had set up a silk screen station to create T shirts together and were mobbed. "I never knew sneakerheads," Mr. Murakami said of his first time at ComplexCon. "I said, 'What is happening?' I am walking around this convention, and everyone knows my face." He imitated the fanboys he encountered in a gasp: "'Oh my God, Takashi Murakami, oh my God, oh my God!'" Then he giggled in disbelief: "What?" ComplexCon had led here to Gagosian, the gallery that represents Mr. Murakami, for which, over the course of about two and a half months, he and Mr. Abloh collaborated on paintings and sculptures. Mr. Murakami made a large sculpture of one of his smiling flower characters; Mr. Abloh built a greenhouse around it. Mr. Abloh requested a screen print of an image from a 17th century self portrait by Gian Lorenzo Bernini; Mr. Murakami screened the mouselike ears of his character Mr. DOB on top. "Truth be told, I don't go into these things knowing if they'll work," Mr. Abloh said. The day before, Mr. Abloh, in T shirt and camouflage pants, and Mr. Murakami, in baggy sweats and Off White Nikes, had installed the show and discussed their working process. "My position is, he's the master, I'm the labor," Mr. Murakami said. They had come together each with their own thoughts and bounced them off each other, and developed ideas quickly. "From the idea to do the show to what some of these first pieces would be was, maybe, two minutes," Mr. Abloh said. Both men's icons are instantly recognizable in each piece Mr. Abloh's ever present air quotes, Mr. Murakami's characters but here they're presented as co signed artworks, even if Mr. Abloh's usual media are clothes and shoes. "When I'm designing a shoe, I'm employing ideas from art, everything I've seen, and it's manifesting itself in a shoe," he said. "Why not cement them in serious art pieces? That's what these four walls do, more than a retail store." He paused at a sculpture of a Murakami character rising off a base made from an Off White logo mark. "I could see this in a retail space," he said. "I could also see it in a home of a billionaire." It could well end up in one. Even before the exhibition's opening, half of the pieces had been sold. "The feedback and results have been incredible," said Mr. Simunovic, the gallery's liaison to Mr. Murakami. "We sold a painting today, for example, to a 21 year old who had never worked with the gallery before." The gallery does not disclose artwork pricing. For Mr. Abloh, part of the project's appeal was bringing his dedicated fan base into contact with the new horizons of the art world. In 2019, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago will stage the first museum retrospective of his work. "It's generational," he said. "I was born in 1980. I always thought that us buying a rare Supreme shirt is like buying a print for a previous generation." Mr. Abloh and Mr. Murakami did design an edition of 400 T shirts to be sold on the Gagosian website, which will be finished by hand as an entry level offering; they quickly sold out. But none were for sale the night of the opening, and the lines formed anyway. (Many of those waiting were hoping that the artists would sign their sneakers and shuffled around the gallery, once they were finally let in, in socks.) Mr. Murakami, who between the installation and the opening had traded his hygienic face mask (he had a slight cold) for one fashioned out of a Nike sneaker, one of Mr. Abloh's signature zip ties and a bit of camouflage print from his Louis Vuitton collaboration, seemed delighted. He sneaked out of the gallery to take selfies with those waiting. ("How's the population in London of sneakerheads?" he had wondered in all seriousness the day before. "I really want to welcome the new audience.") "The world moves as fast as Instagram scrolls," Mr. Abloh said. "What excites me more is the physical. I think that will be rewarding. That's my barometer: Is the piece done? Is it good enough? Is it worthy of someone's time?" Outside, they were still waiting. Even Mr. Martin, the marine. "I'm not going to get in," he said, with admirable even temper. There was over an hour to go. Luckily, the exhibition remains up through April 7. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
For aspiring homeowners, coming up with a healthy down payment has long been the biggest obstacle to owning a home. With property values soaring in many areas median prices in San Jose, Calif., and Denver are 60 percent above their prerecession peaks the barrier is rising. That has some firms promoting unconventional ways to scrape together a down payment, including crowdfunding and using Airbnb rental income. Now, a small but growing number of home buyers are trying something different: asking an outside investor to put down money alongside them. It is called shared equity, and Unison, a company based in San Francisco, is the largest of a handful of firms putting it to work. Unison will provide at least half of a consumer's down payment in exchange for a piece of any appreciation in the home's value when it is sold. If the home sells at a loss, the company absorbs a share of that, too. Until the home sells, Unison is mostly a silent partner. The homeowner pays taxes, insurance and all other necessary costs. The idea behind the program is to provide home buyers with more options. It can help those who are short on down payment funds increase their buying power, though it may also work for people who simply do not want to sink every last dime into their homes. But whether it is right for any individual buyer upfront cash now versus less proceeds later is a difficult and highly personal calculation. Most first time home buyers put down only about 7.4 percent, on average, according to Inside Mortgage Finance. Although there are plenty of programs that permit small down payments, they can substantially increase monthly housing costs. Unison and its competitors help increase a down payment to 20 percent of a home's purchase price the magic number needed to qualify for the best interest rates and to avoid the added cost of private mortgage insurance. But relying on an outside investor challenges traditional attitudes about homeownership, even if the conventional approach may be just as risky: Where else in our lives are we encouraged to plunk a huge piece of our net worth into a single asset? The same sort of behavior would be considered reckless in a retirement portfolio. Shared equity also raises a fundamental question about our overall approach to buying homes, given that the average homeowner moves after about eight years. "Why do households have to choose between renting their homes and buying them outright?" asked Andrew Caplin, an economics professor at New York University who co wrote a book 20 years ago about how shared equity markets could benefit homeowners. It should not be an all or nothing proposition, he said. Giving up a stake in your home to diversify may make sense in theory. The question is at what cost, and whether the average person is in the position to figure it out. For these programs to be adopted broadly, they would need the support of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government controlled entities that buy most conventional mortgages. Both are trying new ways to get people into homes, particularly younger adults coping with student loans, rising rents and increasing health care costs. Freddie Mac is working with Unison on a pilot program, but it is unclear whether it will expand widely. For now, shared equity deals are a droplet in the giant pool of new mortgages. Unison, which operates in 22 states, said it had invested alongside 450 home buyers last year, and was on track to invest with roughly 2,500 to 3,000 more in 2018. It has an investment management arm, and its investors mostly pension funds and university endowments seeking a return slightly above inflation provide the money for the down payments. Unison's costs and approach vary slightly from those of its competitors, including Landed, which offers a similar service for public school employees, and Own Home Finance of San Marcos, Calif. Here is how Unison's program works. THE BACKGROUND. Shared equity started as a way for people with low and moderate incomes to buy homes. The latest incarnation is geared toward those with solid incomes who can qualify for a traditional home loan or even a jumbo mortgage. Unison began in high price markets like California, so most people using the program are at least in their 40s with incomes between 75,000 and 150,000. The company said it expected those numbers to fall now that it had branched into different areas. THE PROCESS. Unison teams up with specific lenders that home buyers must work with. Applicants must qualify for a mortgage, and the home must be one that Unison wants to invest in. That generally means it has to be "typical" for its neighborhood. A McMansion on an acre plot amid more modest homes may not qualify. The company will invest in single family and multifamily homes with up to four units, and in townhouses and condominiums. To discourage the quick flipping of properties for a profit, Unison requres buyers to occupy the properties, but they can sell whenever they want. THE STRUCTURE. Unison's portion of the down payment is not a loan. No payments are made; no interest accrues. The company's agreement with a home buyer is structured as an option contract, with its investment effectively giving it the right to buy a stake in the home at a later date, typically when it is sold or after 30 years, whichever comes first. So if the company contributes half of a down payment, it collects over a third of any appreciation in the home's value (in addition to the original sum it invested). A homeowner can sell at any time, but Unison absorbs a loss only after three years of ownership. Alternatively, the homeowner can buy out Unison's share at a price based on an independent appraisal although that is permitted only after three years. In such instances, Unison does not share in any losses. THE RULES. Homeowners generally cannot draw on their home equity beyond the amount of the original mortgage. And they must cover the entire cost of any renovations, although Unison credits the value the work adds to the home's ultimate sale price. Conversely, there can be repercussions if a home is not well maintained. In the event of default, Unison which places liens on the properties it invests in has the right to foreclose to protect its stake. More often, company executives said, it may step in to help settle arrears and to initiate a more orderly sale at a price. THE MATH. Consider a family buying a home in Atlanta for 500,000. The home buyer and Unison each put down 10 percent, or 50,000, for a total of 100,000. (The company also charges an origination fee equal to 2.5 percent of the amount it provides, so it would essentially provide 48,750 in this example.) Seven years later, the home sells for 575,556, 15 percent above the purchase price. Unison gets back its initial 50,000, plus 35 percent of the price appreciation, or 26,444, for a total of 76,444. The homeowner walks away with roughly 108,000, after selling costs. That figure includes equity and roughly two thirds of the increase in value. If the same home sold for 469,000, a loss of 31,000, or 6 percent, Unison would offset some of that. The homeowner would absorb only 65 percent of the loss, keeping 46,600 after the sale versus only 35,720 if Unison were not involved. Brett Theodos, a principal research associate at the Urban Institute, said shared equity appeared to make the most sense for people living in the priciest areas, or for those unable to buy without help. "If you truly can't afford to do anything other than rent, you will build more equity with shared equity than you would have as renter," Mr. Theodos said, adding that he was not sure whether such arrangements were the best option for people in more affordable areas. "Whether this makes sense for Wichita and Duluth or even Chicago? I am less sure." Mr. Theodos also said there was something else that home buyers should not ignore. "Investors are looking for a way to make money most people's wealth is in their home," he said. "That is not a fully tapped market." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Every month, streaming services in Australia add a new batch of movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for October. Nikki Glaser has been performing stand up since she was a teenager in the early 2000s. But her career has taken off in recent years, thanks to her sexually frank talk show "Not Safe" and her hilariously cutting appearances on various celebrity roasts. Glaser's new special "Bangin'" shows off the comedian in her element, riffing on the awkwardness of sex as a way of making a larger point about the inherent repulsiveness and absurdity of human existence. The hormone addled junior high schoolers of "Big Mouth" return for a third season of raunchy and deliriously imaginative animated comedy about the fuzzy area between healthy adolescent sexual curiosity and demonic possession. Once again, some of America's funniest comedians including Fred Armisen, Jason Mantzoukas, Paula Pell, Jordan Peele and Kristen Wiig join the series' leads Nick Kroll, Jessi Klein, John Mulaney, Maya Rudolph and Jenny Slate, for some fearless and sidesplitting humor derived from embarrassing memories of teenage ignorance. With his British crime drama "Peaky Blinders," the writer Steven Knight has said he intends to cover the history of England between World War I and World War II through the life of Tommy Shelby (played by Cillian Murphy), a gang leader who returns from the war to his hometown Birmingham in 1919 with some fresh ideas for how to run the rackets. In season five, the story reaches the 1929 stock market crash, and the attendant rise in fascism across Europe. It's been nearly two years since season four ended, but "Peaky Blinders" fans should find this latest six episode run well worth the wait. When "Breaking Bad" wrapped production in 2013, the award winning series' creators shifted their attention to the prequel "Better Call Saul," which so far has only occasionally alluded to what might've happened to the drama's other characters after Walter White's story ended. Now, with the movie "El Camino," the writer director producer Vince Gilligan is finally taking the time to explore the immediate aftermath of "Breaking Bad." Aaron Paul reprises his role as the soul sick drug dealer Jesse Pinkman, who's still trying to find a peaceful place where he's not plagued by cops, old enemies and his own troubled conscience. The gifted comic actor Paul Rudd takes on a dual role in "Living with Yourself," a fantastical dark comedy created by former "The Daily Show" producer Timothy Greenberg. Rudd plays the sad sack Miles Elliot, who makes a last ditch effort to fix himself by visiting a radical rejuvenation spa, but then wakes up to find the facility has replaced him with a clone who is smarter, funnier, healthier and better liked than Miles has ever been. The series deals with the hero's existential crisis as he fights to reclaim a life he's been badly misusing. There are secrets within secrets in the documentary "Tell Me Who I Am," which starts with a strange situation: an 18 year old amnesiac awakes from a coma remembering only his identical twin brother and then it takes some surprising turns. As Marcus Lewis helps his confused brother Alex relearn the facts of their life together, he omits certain traumatic details, which are gradually revealed to the audience. "Tell Me Who I Am" should appeal to fans of docs like "Three Identical Strangers" and "Dear Zachary," which focus as much on the painful emotions within their stories as their more sensational elements. Eddie Murphy gives one of the best performances of his career in "Dolemite Is My Name," a riotously funny and surprisingly moving biopic, inspired by the life of the comedian Rudy Ray Moore. Murphy plays Moore, who struggled to find an audience for years before he developed a wild, vulgar braggart character named Dolemite, who appeared on X rated underground LPs and in a cult favorite 1975 blaxploitation film. Directed by Craig Brewer (best known for "Hustle Flow") and co written by the "Ed Wood" screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, "Dolemite Is My Name" is a bright, energetic film about an entertainer following his dreams. Want more Australia stories? Sign up for the Australia Letter here. Also arriving: "Living Undocumented" (Oct. 2), "Rhythm Flow" (Oct. 9), "Riverdale" Season 4 (Oct. 10), "Billy Elliot" (Oct. 11), "Elizabeth" (Oct. 11), "The Forest of Love" (Oct. 11), "Inside Man" (Oct. 11), "Jaws" (Oct. 11), "Kick Ass" (Oct. 11) "Sophie's Choice" (Oct. 11), "Da Kath Kim Code" (Oct. 13), "Sicario" (Oct. 13), "Beowulf" (Oct. 15), "Green Lantern" (Oct. 15), "Police Academy" (Oct. 15), "Upstarts" (Oct. 18), "Jenny Slate: Stage Fright" (Oct. 22), "Surviving R. Kelly" Season 1 (Oct. 22), "Breakfast, Lunch Dinner" (Oct. 23),"Brotherhood" (Oct. 25), "It Takes a Lunatic" (Oct. 25), "The Kominsky Method" Season 2 (Oct. 25), "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" (Oct. 28), "Arsenio Hall: Smart Classy" (Oct. 29). Because there are way too many great shows for the average TV viewer to keep up with these days, some outstanding series have failed to draw the attention they deserve. So it's gone with "Goliath," a punchy Los Angeles neo noir starring Billy Bob Thornton as the alcoholic lawyer Billy McBride, who takes on the city's elites as he tries to make up for a lifetime of mistakes. Moody and magnificently acted, the first two "Goliath" seasons have been stellar adult mystery fare like "Chinatown" crossed with "The Rockford Files." There's no reason to expect any less from season three. An all star cast helps bring The New York Times column "Modern Love" to life in this new romantic comedy anthology series, produced by the "Once" and "Sing Street" director John Carney. Each half hour episode features true tales about the myriad ways people meet, mate and break up these days, dramatized by the likes of Tina Fey, John Slattery, Dev Patel, Catherine Keener, Andy Garcia, Brandon Victor Dixon and more. As with the written version of "Modern Love," expect unconventional love stories, and not the same old "boy meets girl." In the complex historical drama "Peterloo," the English director Mike Leigh draws on the historical accounts of an 1819 riot in Manchester, England, where soldiers and hired guns opened fire on some frustrated working class men and women assembled for a universal suffrage rally. Leigh builds the story through long scenes of people arguing in vivid language about humanity and privilege. "Peterloo" follows dozens of characters so handsomely photographed that they look like classical oil paintings come to life who are all moving toward an inevitable clash. Through its first two seasons, the TV version of Elmore Leonard's comic crime novel "Get Shorty" has honored the kooky spirit of the book, which is about a mob connected hustler who uses his powers of persuasion to become a Hollywood player. This season features different characters with a fresh set of problems. Chris O'Dowd plays a hit man hoping to use his love of movies to escape his past and to reunite his family, while Ray Romano plays a B picture producer risking everything for one last shot at the big time. As dark as it is funny, "Get Shorty" continues to depict both the allure and the insanity of showbiz. The first two "Godfather" movies are among the greatest achievements of American cinema, with director Francis Ford Coppola adding a sense of grandeur and social commentary to novelist Mario Puzo's pulpy, decades spanning organized crime potboiler. The third film is something of a letdown; but regardless, this story of the powerful, corrupt Corleone family is absorbing and rich, with a lot to say about how criminal enterprises can become social institutions. The trilogy also features a remarkable cast, including Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall and Robert De Niro. Like a lot of young writers, John Green turned to his own life when penning his first novel, the acclaimed 2005 high school saga "Looking for Alaska," about a bookish teen who finds a sympathetic clique of misfits at a boarding school. After multiple attempts to adapt Green's story into a movie, the "Gossip Girl" and "The O.C." writer/producers Stephanie Savage and Josh Schwartz have made it into an eight part mini series, with the accomplished young actor Charlie Plummer as the introverted hero and Kristine Froseth as the title character Alaska Young. Also arriving: "The Amazing World of Gumball" Seasons 2 6 (Oct. 1.), "Rango" (Oct. 1), "Anchorman" (Oct. 4), "Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues" (Oct. 4), "Old School" (Oct. 4), "RuPaul's Drag Race UK" Season 1 (Oct. 4), "The Hurt Locker" (Oct. 5), "All American" (Oct. 8), "The Flash" Season 5 (Oct. 10), "Team America: World Police" (Oct. 15), "The Master" (Oct. 16), "Doctor Who" Season 11 (Oct. 18), "Clear and Present Danger" (Oct. 24), "The Hunt for Red October" (Oct. 24), "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit" (Oct. 24), "Patriot Games" (Oct. 24), "The Sum of All Fears" (Oct. 24), "Dreamgirls" (Oct. 26), "Hairspray" (Oct. 26), "The School of Rock" (Oct. 29), "Snakes on a Plane" (Oct. 30). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Philip Roth's 2004 novel "The Plot Against America" imagines a counterfactual history in which Charles Lindbergh, campaigning on a promise of "America First," defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election and, colluding with Hitler, embarks on a program of government sponsored anti Semitism and Jewish resettlement. A few months before he died, in 2018, Roth told me in an interview that he never intended his book as a political allegory. But by then, with the Trump administration in full swing, he agreed that the parallels between the world he invented and what was happening in contemporary America were hard to ignore: a demagogic president who openly expresses admiration for a foreign dictator; a surge of right wing nationalism and isolationism; polarization; false narratives; xenophobia and the demonization of others. Still, there was one difference, Roth insisted: Lindbergh, unlike President Trump, had been a genuine hero. During that same conversation Roth added, almost in passing, that he had recently agreed to let David Simon make a mini series of the novel and that though he was unfamiliar with most of Simon's work, he trusted him to get it right. Now viewers get to decide for themselves. Simon's six part version of "The Plot Against America," which he wrote with his frequent collaborator Ed Burns, and which stars Winona Ryder, Zoe Kazan, John Turturro and Morgan Spector, premieres March 16 on HBO. Filmed mostly on a Queens soundstage, the series follows an extended Jewish family in Newark here the Levins, changed from the Roths of the book as they try to make sense of a now dangerous country that no longer welcomes people like them. The parallels, resonances and connections the ways Roth so eerily seemed to anticipate our present moment are what most appealed to Simon. He is a master storyteller who in his best known works, like "The Wire," "Treme" and "The Deuce," brings an edge of polemic to his narratives, calling attention to societal or institutional injustice. His "Plot Against America" is no exception. "What I want people to take from the book at this moment is that all of us should be judged on what we accept and don't accept," Simon said recently, his voice rising as he warmed up to his theme. "The book works the way it works because it's not about Lindbergh or Roosevelt that's just the input. The book is about six people in a family arrayed against an ugly political moment and what each of them does. What's the cost of that and what's the effect?" "Every one of us should be asking ourselves that question right now," he added. Roth was a man of strong feelings, and wasn't shy about expressing them. So is Simon, who looks more like a bouncer than an Emmy winning TV writer and producer. He's passionate, intense, an occasional grudge holder and a compulsive sender of tweets almost Joycean in invention and astounding in invective, many of them directed against Trump and his defenders. ("Spittle chinned," "gibbering submenial troll" and "incompetent slop" are among the few of his epithets that can be printed in a polite newspaper.) A former police reporter, he's not usually in awe of the famous or powerful, but he told me last summer, on the set of "The Plot Against America," that the one time he met Roth, he was "so nervous you couldn't have pulled a pin out of my ass with a tractor." Simon has adapted, very faithfully, nonfiction books for television ("Show Me a Hero," "Generation Kill") but had never before taken on a novel, and part of what made him apprehensive was that he had a problem with Roth's ending. In the novel, Lindbergh and his plane suddenly disappear; after a brief period of chaos, order is restored and America goes back to normal. Simon didn't think that would work for a TV audience; there needed to be at least a hint of an explanation for the disappearance. He asked if Roth had any ideas. "He had the book in his lap, and he began flipping through the pages," Simon recalled. "Then he looked up and said, 'It's your problem now.' In other words, 'Figure it out, pal.' I took that to mean I could at least try." Along the way, there have been casting mistakes and directorial stumbles, but the main obstacles have always been Roth's writing itself how do you get that on the screen? as well as his way of refracting his narratives through the voices of people who know only part of the story. John Turturro, who plays Bengelsdorf in the mini series a Southern born rabbi who becomes an apologist for Lindbergh, played by Ben Cole was friendly with Roth and even collaborated with him on a planned, but ultimately never produced, one man stage version of "Portnoy's Complaint." He recently said that when Simon first approached him, he was skeptical. "I told him that there have never been any good adaptations, because they're all truncated and you lose the prose," he said. "That's why I always wanted to do something onstage." Simon eventually won him over by explaining that HBO was allotting six hours to the project and by pointing out that of all of Roth's books, "The Plot Against America" was the most story driven and the one best suited to the screen. "I really think it's our best shot," Simon told me last summer. Much of the mini series was shot then on a cavernous sound stage in Long Island City. The set smelled of freshly sawed lumber but was otherwise a meticulous re creation of Roth's boyhood home in Newark: dark woodwork, faded wallpaper, a bookcase containing a well used set of The Book of Knowledge, an enameled cooking range, an early generation refrigerator with the motor on top. The only details not exact were the many family photographs: pictures of weddings and bar mitzvahs and the like. Several of the faces were in fact those of Simon's own relatives. The more he looked at "The Plot Against America," the more he felt it addressed some of our current problems, Simon said. "Roth's book is not just about being Jewish but about being delivered to America and embracing it," he added. "It's about that generation that aggressively became American and about how that always happens if you just let it. If we just stop beating people up and stop highlighting the differences and the fears and the resentments, if you just take a breath and wait, we all become Americanized." For much of the summer, Simon was also wrapping up the third and final season of "The Deuce" and commuting back and forth between the two projects. Occasionally he seemed harried and impatient. "I'm wasting my life waiting for them to change a light," he said one afternoon during a halt in filming, before flicking through his Twitter account. He sometimes uses his Twitter page, which he has called "performance art," as a way to kill time, he said. "Maybe I should be in a softball league or something," he added. But Simon, in real life, is kind and thoughtful, nothing like his Twitter feed. He made himself available to the actors and directors Minkie Spiro for the first three episodes and Thomas Schlamme for the last three and he was expansive about his hopes for the mini series. If we mess this up, we've messed up the best chance, he said, or words to that effect. "I've seen all the adaptations, but this one has the structure of long form television and a political relevance at this moment," he added. "Given those things, we're actually working at an advantage." A disadvantage, he admitted, is that "The Plot Against America" is one of Roth's refracted narratives, told from the point of view of a very young Philip, or rather, a young Philip as remembered by his adult self. "What do you do about that?" Simon said. "Voice over? You can count on two hands the number of good voice over films." His solution was to tell the story from multiple points of view, including those of Herman and Bess, his father and mother; his brother, Sandy; Bengelsdorf; Bess's sister, Evelyn; and Philip's cousin, Alvin, who is so strongly opposed to Lindbergh and Hitler that he enlists with the Canadian army and loses a leg fighting in Europe. This opens the book up and allows it to become more explicitly political, Simon said. "It allows you to experience the time and the risks and the conflict, and to witness some of it, not just hear about it." "There's a great chapter there about Chaim Rumkowski," Turturro said, referring to the head of Poland's Lodz ghetto during World War II, who, thinking he was saving them, presided over the resettlement of thousands of Jews. "He's someone who thinks, 'I can negotiate, I can protect everybody.' I think that may have inspired the character." Ryder, who says she has been a "Roth head" since she was 18, plays Evelyn, Bess's sister (younger in the book, older in the series), who talks herself into falling in love with Bengelsdorf and becomes his willing accomplice. It's a part she was eager to get because she thought it would be interesting for a change to play a weak woman, not a strong one (as she did in "Show Me a Hero," about a ruinous desegregation battle in Yonkers). But it caused her so much anxiety, especially after a scene in which she dances at a White House state dinner with the Nazi foreign minister Von Ribbentrop, that she almost went to the emergency room. "I think it was something to do with Turturro," she said. "Even before we started shooting, he was saying, 'I'm going to drink the Kool Aid and totally, totally believe what I'm saying.' He was just so good, it was scary. Sometimes I was afraid that it was going to start making sense the words that were popping out of his mouth. But it was hard for me to forget that my character was so on the wrong side of everything. I got there about 90 percent, but there was always a part of me that knew how horribly wrong she was." Like Ryder and Turturro, Spector, who plays Herman, read "The Plot Against America" when it first came out, back in the George W. Bush era. "I thought it was resonant even then," he said. "But we didn't know from demagogues back then." Kazan, on the other hand, said that she had never read any Roth before signing on to be Bess and that when she did look at "The Plot Against America," she was struck by how prophetic it seemed. "It's impossible not to see the parallels," she said. "I remember thinking when I read the book, 'People aren't going to believe this; they're going to think we invented it just for the show.'" During shooting, Simon said he worried about tampering with Roth's great work. "You lose some things, you maybe gain some things that's the nature of adaptation," he said last month, after the series had wrapped. "At first I was really worried about the violence I was about to do to Roth's book. And I will say that when I was in the middle, I thought, 'I'm messing with something primal here.' And when he passed away I thought, 'Well, I'm sorry he's not here, but at least I don't have to show him what I've done.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
If you've been keeping score, you've probably noticed: Women have been getting sweaty on New York stages lately. They punch and kick. They jab and run. They push themselves and each other to their physical limits, until someone erupts in triumph or defeat. In Deborah Stein and Suli Holum's "The Wholehearted," at the Abrons Arts Center through April 1, a boxer wraps her hands, puts on her gloves and hits a bag as violently as she would the abusive husband who almost killed her. In January, Sarah DeLappe's Pulitzer Prize finalist "The Wolves," about teenage girls on a soccer team, ended its third New York run in two years; a month later, we could watch two high school fencers for whom friendship is a weapon as sharp as a blade in Gracie Gardner's "Athena." Reaching back a few years, Ruby Rae Spiegel's harrowing "Dry Land" was set mostly in the locker room of a girls' swim team. Football? We got that too: Julia Brownell's "All American" explored the dynamics in a family where a daughter did not want to be her school's quarterback anymore, while Tina Satter's "In the Pony Palace/Football" gleefully appropriated gridiron tropes by having women play boys. Coed plays about tennis have included Anna Ziegler's "The Last Match" and Kevin Armento and Bryony Lavery's "Balls," which reproduced the infamous "battle of the sexes" match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. This is starting to look like a trend. But then, there should be a better term for the act of making up for decades' worth of women playing the male star's girlfriend ("Rocky the Musical"), wife ("Lombardi"), mother ("Magic/Bird") or temptress ("Damn Yankees"). Telling untold stories is not merely a "trend," not 46 years after Title IX passed, forbidding sex based discrimination in federally funded education programs or activities. All these new plays have been written or co written, directed or co directed, by women. And in most of them, sports is more than the background; rather, it is a dramatic engine for exploring socialization and self image, femininity and power. For many women, athletics is one of the few places where it is acceptable to show ambition, where it is O.K. to want to win win win. Tellingly, several of these new shows have focused on adolescence, a time when a girl's body is simultaneously ally (it has newfound abilities) and foe (it changes in uncontrollable ways, triggers unpredictable moods and draws attention that may or may not be welcome). Teenagers can take pleasure in their power without necessarily having it linked to notions of attractiveness. "We are watching their bodies the entire time, but it's not sexualized," Ms. DeLappe said of the girls in "The Wolves" in an interview with The New York Times. "It's actually about strength." Sports allow these women and girls to carve autonomous identities. The only adult in "The Wolves" appears at the very end of the play; parents are mentioned but not seen in "Athena"; in "The Wholehearted," the boxer is alone on stage, in dialogue with her unseen ex girlfriend but really, with herself via video. Incidentally, that last show is among the few where homosexuality plays a central part; so far there's no stage equivalent to the film "Personal Best." This is startling considering the influence of gay women in sports. "The Wholehearted" also breaks from the pack, so to speak, in that it is about an adult. As wonderful and exciting as it has been to hear new theatrical voices take seriously a constituency that is usually taken lightly teen girls the next step for theater about women and sports may involve growing up and branching out. The sports industrial complex as a whole, for instance, is a boon to writers because it gets directly to the nexus of money and power. A flawed but promising attempt was Fernanda Coppel's "King Liz," in which an agent tries to sign a young basketball prodigy. Eric Simonson's sports trilogy "Lombardi," "Magic/Bird" and "Bronx Bombers," which played on Broadway (the final frontier!), was about real life star athletes and coaches. Shows tackling the female equivalents may not just be revealing; they might also break into the theatrical mainstream. Sure, I can sit through a Broadway bio drama about Vince Lombardi, but all things being equal, I'd rather watch one about the pioneering Tennessee hoops coach Pat Summitt or about the charismatically troubled goalkeeper Hope Solo. It's high time female playwrights have the option to be as nakedly inspirational and sentimental, as deliberately commercial as men and make a good living at it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Great ideas are not always good ones, as the characters in Greg Pierce's new play, "Cardinal," learn. The great idea in this case is Lydia's. A sparkler of a young woman who has been burned a few times, Lydia (Anna Chlumsky) returns from a life in Brooklyn to her depressed Rust Belt hometown with dreams of saving it from further disintegration. Already the population has declined by 50 percent since her school days there. Her plan, which she must first sell to the mayor, Jeff Torm, is to paint six blocks of Main Street, from Plum to Swan, cardinal red. What a great tourist attraction it will be, she explains at a town hall meeting in the high school gymnatorium: Just like in Chefchaouen, Morocco, the blue city, or Izamal, Mexico, the yellow one, tourists will soon arrive by the busload. Perhaps you will buy this premise, as Jeff (Adam Pally) and the voters provisionally do. Perhaps you won't care whether you buy it or not, because the play, which opened on Wednesday at Second Stage Theater, at first seems to be heading in a pleasant rom com direction. Tirelessly upbeat Lydia and hapless Jeff, as depressed as his town, are an opposites attract couple whose feints and parries seem to come with a laugh track. Ms. Chlumsky, of "Veep," and Mr. Pally, of "Happy Endings" and "The Mindy Project," both know how to play that game. But eventually Lydia's plan goes awry, as does every alternative (a New Age hospital?) she improvises to save it. Same with "Cardinal." It so outstrips its gears trying almost anything to keep the story heading toward the author's themes that you may experience severe bumps if you stick around for the whole ride. This is surprising, coming from Mr. Pierce. His earlier plays, including his 2012 debut, "Slowgirl," reflect the qualities patience with plot, modesty with character that make him a fine short story writer. Working of late with the composer John Kander, he has devised the book and lyrics for musicals, like "Kid Victory," that find grave darkness in the frozen heart of small town America. By comparison, the disposition of "Cardinal" is antic, even before it gets out of hand. It's an amusing twist that Lydia, who means to be a do gooder, is really a classic carpetbagger, tone deaf to the needs of the town she once did everything she could to escape. (She thanks the struggling voters for listening to her pitch by giving them complimentary copies of Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities.") But by the time the plot involves her with a Chinese American entrepreneur, who swoops in with tour buses and dumpling shops to reap the rewards Lydia hoped would accrue to the town, Mr. Pierce's concerns have twisted hers into an incomprehensible Mobius strip. Jeff, too, is dragged down that path, transforming from a sweet underachiever (who once had scurvy) to a vengeful husk and then back again. The same thing happens to the characters in both subplots. In the one involving the entrepreneur (Stephen Park) and his son (Eugene Young), a benignly comic caricature veers close to bad guy Orientalism before veering back for a sentimental ending. And in the one involving a bakery owner (Becky Ann Baker) and her autistic son (Alex Hurt), traits and actions fail to jibe, especially as those actions take a hard right turn toward another genre entirely. The tonal lurching makes "Cardinal" feel whimsical and even a bit aleatory, like a John Cage sonata. Yet I have to believe that a playwright as sophisticated as Mr. Pierce has made these baffling, disruptive choices meaningfully. Though the bakery is cutely called Bread Buttons, and sells crocheted monkeys and mittens along with the scones, he is not just satirizing small town America, with its hopeless reinvention schemes and hapless part time politicians. He's after something larger about the unintended consequences of capitalism on both individuals and societies: meant to be a cure all, it is too often a comeuppance. So perhaps we should see "Cardinal" not as a gritty postindustrial drama, like Lynn Nottage's "Sweat," but as a fable; that would certainly explain the way the characters, and not just the town, have been painted in such bright, primary colors. "Cardinal" even has a moral, delivered by Jeff, who is speaking of romance but might as well mean governance: "If you don't know about something, maybe you shouldn't mess with it." Unfortunately, the production, directed by Kate Whoriskey (who also directed "Sweat") on a vague, dour set by Derek McLane, does nothing to advance that reading, nor can it smooth the shift in tone that occurs in the last third of the 90 minute play. And though the story wraps up with a pair of lovely scenes that allow the leading actors, especially Ms. Baker, to do their best work, "Cardinal" never achieves the gravity of its worthy aims. Great ideas are not always good ones. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
But when her parents end their "exotic and unlikely partnership" after 20 years of marriage, Wagner starts to feel "truly alone, like an astronaut on a distant planet." And then, just as she begins to think about "the prehistories that ultimately determined my own story," a family mystery presents itself. Like many fellow seekers, Wagner starts her ancestral quest when she learns that one of her forebears might not have been what he seemed. Wagner's Catholic grandfather served kosher wine at Thanksgiving. An aunt thinks he was Jewish. Her father dismisses the theory, but a cousin tells her that once, when their grandfather's father had been in an accident, he'd cried out in Yiddish. An uncle had referred to himself as "an old Jew." The idea of belonging to a tribe starts to seem likely and appealing. Her curiosity about Burma grows, too. Increasingly she's puzzled that while her mother and grandmother "remembered the place with near mystical reverence," they "never expressed a single sentence of regret about leaving." For so long she's thought of herself as "futureface," "happy to be mistaken as a Sioux Indian or Egyptian Coptic." Now she wonders: In her family's "dive into the American Salad Bowl," has something important been lost? She travels to Burma and Luxembourg, spends time searching archives and looking for physical landmarks from her family's past. As she searches, she questions the hazardous effects of nostalgia, how it casts a rosy hue over inequality and smooths out complication. "It always rang alarm bells when anyone got misty eyed about the good times," which, she writes, tended to be "pretty bad times" for other people. While many of the answers she seeks can't be found, some can. There are victims and victimizers on both sides of her family. The Europeans "had upended two people" on opposite sides of the globe, "for very different reasons at the very same time." Between her parents' very different family histories, an unexpected "synergy" emerges as family members from both Europe and Asia emigrate to the United States, eventually enabling the connection that produces Wagner herself. After her travels, she tries to resolve lingering questions with DNA testing. Her stinging criticism of the "flossy statistics" set out in ancestry composition results is some of the best I've seen on the subject. "Possibly inaccurate to the point of uselessness," she calls them, observing that the categories themselves are suspect. Some DNA is "classified using political borders," such as "Irish," whereas others, such as "South Asian DNA," are defined by "regional assignments." The tests also fail to account for the permeability of borders over time. It's true that the British colonized Burma in the mid 1800s, but there were far earlier arrivals by the Pyu (200 B.C.) and the Mon (A.D. 1000). The sites don't purport to look back that far, but these historical events still raise the question: "At what point was Burmese blood considered 'unmixed' and exempt of outside influence?" Ultimately, Wagner mocks herself for being "afflicted with the narcissism of self testing, eager for data about me me me." She talks with experts who emphasize the likelihood that these tests will divide us rather than reveal our interconnectedness. She's right to highlight those perils, to denounce the tribalism and reductive scientific materialism that can motivate ancestry searches. And yet it's the concreteness of Wagner's own search, in all its messy detail and lingering uncertainties, that underscores our interconnectedness, that shows how "my our circle of human existence inexorably widens," looping us away from each other and then back again. "Trace your ancestry," she writes early on, "and you end up charting the course of global struggle." The dangers of fetishizing our forebears are plain. The tools currently available for exploring our histories are highly problematic. And yet, over millenniums and over borders, the hunger to feel a connection to those who came before us, to those whose bodies brought forth ours, has persisted. The answer isn't to berate ourselves for our curiosity but to understand it. Meditating on our ancestors, as Wagner's own story shows, can suggest better ways of being ourselves. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
ROBIN WILLIAMS'S widow, Susan Schneider, agreed that the rainbow suspenders he wore on the television comedy "Mork Mindy" should go to his children from previous marriages, but she did want the tuxedo the comedian wore at their wedding. Simple, it might seem, but not in the complicated world of blended families. This week, nearly eight months after Mr. Williams committed suicide in his home in Northern California, his children and his third wife were in court over a part of his estate plan that many people overlook: Who is entitled to stuff with more sentimental than monetary value? Mr. Williams left to his three children the clothing, jewelry and personal items that he had amassed before his third marriage, and that seems to include the tuxedo. But his wife was given their home and its contents, where the tuxedo presumably hung. She has claimed in court papers that someone took personal items from that home, where Mr. Williams died, and she believes she is entitled to them. (No one seems to be contesting that a second home in Napa, Calif., and its contents go to his children.) For most families, a desire for personal effects a father's watch, a necklace, a set of earrings a mother wore is less about what they are worth and more about their sentimental value. In the case of Mr. Williams, some of those personal items like an Oscar for his role in the film "Good Will Hunting" or those suspenders have real monetary value to collectors. But trust and estate lawyers said that this case, if stripped of its Hollywood glamour, would be no different from the many cases they see of children from previous marriages battling their parent's last spouse over the smallest things. "I've sent three sons to very expensive Ivy League schools thanks to the dysfunctional nature of estate planning for families with stepchildren," said William Zabel, a founding partner of the law firm Schulte Roth Zabel. Mr. Zabel, who represented Wendi Murdoch and Jane Welch in their divorces, recalled a case where the children locked their stepmother out of her home in Florida within 24 hours of their father's death. "They not only locked her out of the home, but they installed their natural mother," Mr. Zabel said. "She had to retreat to New York." In that case, not only could the stepmother not get her deceased husband's stuff, she could not get her own possessions, either. "Most estate plans tend to focus on the big ticket items: the house, the bank accounts, the investments," said Darren Wallace, a partner at the law firm Day Pitney, where he specializes in estate and trust planning, administration and litigation. "But often it's the personal mementos that cause the most contention." In the Williams case, Mr. Wallace said the comedian could have put the house he lived in with his wife and all of its contents into a type of trust, called a qualified terminable interest property trust, where she would have use of it during her lifetime. After she died, ownership would pass to his children. Such trusts, though, are normally used for assets that generate income, which goes to the surviving spouse, while preserving the principal for the children. Putting a house in such a trust could backfire, at least if the purpose was to give the house, not its value, to the children later on. "The spouse has the right to demand that the principal is income producing, so she could have the trust sell it," said Laurie Ruckel, partner at Loeb Loeb. A simpler but more emotional solution is to make a list of the items that you want people to have, but then give that list to the executor as a letter that is not part of the estate plan. That way, if the estate is audited, the I.R.S. will not see the letter and ask for items that are on the list but no longer around. "You don't want a client to come in every four or five months to make changes to the specific property," Ms. Ruckel said. "A letter is also less costly and time consuming for the client. They send me a sealed letter and I send them my old one back." Ms. Ruckel suggests that older people give all the things they want a spouse to have while they are alive, or create a very specific list that says what the spouse gets, with everything else going to the children. Ms. Ruckel is working with a client now who does not want his third wife and his grown children to sort out money when he dies. Nor does he want there to be trusts that the two parties will share, fearing that it will cause tension and end any relationship they have. So he is giving her a multimillion dollar apartment in New York City, money to pay for its upkeep and a little bit more. All of the furnishings, art and jewelry in the apartment go to her. The rest of his liquid wealth goes to his two children. Yet knowing how values can shift, he has tried to ensure that his children do not get inadvertently cut out. "What happens if there is a catastrophic event?" Ms. Ruckel said. "So we capped it, and it says, 'This goes to my wife, but at no point should it be more than X percentage of my estate.' " If there is one rule of thumb, it is that the more specific, the better. Ms. Ruckel said her firm was called in on a case where a well known actor had left all of the art and personal property in his apartment to his wife and all of the art and personal property in a storage facility to his daughters from a previous relationship. When the actor became ill, his wife began moving art and property from the storage unit to the apartment. What sets off family feuds is often small things. "If it's a watch, is that going to change any of their lives? No," Ms. Ruckel said. "But it's that, 'Dad was getting an award and wore that when I was in the audience and you weren't even around.'" In the Williams case, one catalyst seems to be his widow's use of the term "knickknacks" in referring to items like comic books and theater masks that he amassed over the years. His children contend that those items fueled Mr. Williams's creativity and were akin to collections assembled with thought and care, the way others might collect stamps or baseballs. Such back and forth is not confined to blended families. Plenty of siblings do not get along, and that can lead to fights over things that cannot be as neatly divided as money or stocks. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Leandro Barbosa had lofty goals for 2020. After playing 14 seasons in the N.B.A., Barbosa had hoped to make one more trip to the Olympics with Brazil's national basketball team his third at age 37. In these coronavirus times, Barbosa, like so many others, had to abruptly modify his wish list. Actually seeing his baby daughter and holding her became his priority. While playing for Minas Tenis Clube in Brazil as the league's top scorer at 20.1 points per game, Barbosa learned on March 21 that he had tested positive for Covid 19 two days earlier in Belo Horizonte. Talita Rocca, his wife, was 38 weeks pregnant and due to give birth on March 26 in Brazil's largest city, Sao Paulo, where the couple live full time. Amid soon to be confirmed fears that Rocca, a model, had also contracted the virus, her doctors decided, for the baby's safety, that labor would be induced immediately with Barbosa barred from the hospital. Rocca's mother, Geli, took Barbosa's place in the delivery room. He watched as much of the March 22 birth of Isabela Rocca Barbosa as possible on FaceTime. "I didn't know what to do," Barbosa said. "All I did is just talk on the phone: 'Listen, you're going to have to do it by yourself.' I told my wife, 'Think on the baby, not on me.' "We're all good now. We're healthy. The baby didn't have the virus and thank you, God." Barbosa, who won a championship with Golden State in 2015 and last played in the N.B.A. with Phoenix in 2016 17, spent the first two weeks of Isabela's life quarantined away from her and his wife. He said he was still working through how much the episode shook him. "That night was the worst night of my life," Barbosa said, referring to March 17, when coronavirus symptoms hit him the hardest after an evening practice with his team. Minas played its last game on March 14, securing a road win over Corinthians inside a steamy arena in a game without fans, with Barbosa managing just 10 points in conditions that he said left him dehydrated. Before tipoff, he had lobbied team officials to push for the league, Novo Basquete Brasil, to suspend play. Minas's March 16 game against Pinheiros was indeed postponed, but he began suffering from a blast of pain at "a point in the middle of the head" the next day. The discomfort led Barbosa to fear the worst. "Really, I felt that I was going to die, my man," Barbosa said. "I was having a crazy fever. My head was extremely bad. My nose felt like it was closed, but it wasn't closed. I was feeling a lot of pain in my back I couldn't find a position to lay down." Barbosa added: "I had fever before. I had pain in my head before. I had pain in my whole body when I was sick, but nothing similar to that. Whatever I get, I always fight through. That's just something I learned when I got to the N.B.A. But that night was something; it was tough to fight. Because it was different." Adding to the stress, Barbosa said, was the refusal of the team's medical staff to treat him at his home in fear of contracting the virus. Barbosa credited the family's driver, Fabiano da Silva, for nursing him through the first night and driving him six hours from Belo Horizonte to Sao Paulo after it was confirmed he had the virus and air travel was no longer possible. After concerns about her own breathing and platelet count during delivery, Rocca had to wait until the day after birth before she was allowed to take Isabela in her arms. Barbosa was instructed to isolate for two weeks once he arrived in Sao Paulo, but his brother Marcelo insisted that Leandro stay with him. The brothers are close after they spent considerable time together in the United States during Leandro's N.B.A. career. "He wouldn't let me be alone," Leandro Barbosa said. "I said, 'What if you get it?' He said: 'I don't care. Then we'll both have it.'" He added: "Talita's mother didn't get the corona. My brother didn't get the corona. My driver didn't get the corona. Just me and my wife, man. Can you believe that?" Brazil was originally scheduled to join Germany, Mexico, Russia, Tunisia and the host, Croatia, in a six team playoff for one of the four remaining berths in the 12 nation men's Olympic basketball field for Tokyo. Those Olympics were postponed for a year, until July 2021, leaving him with a new basketball aim: He continues to urge the Brazilian league to cancel the rest of its season. Minas's game on March 14 was the league's second to last before play was suspended. Barbosa has been critical of the league for not shutting things down earlier "They were the last sport in Brazil to stop," he said and he questioned the wisdom of planning to restart when "everything is shut down over here." "I would have loved to come back," Barbosa said. "The reason why is because I think we have the potential to win the championship. But I got the virus. I know how it is. It's impossible to have the league continue. Right now, it's not about the business. It's about our health." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Lionel Messi turned his back. He had given the ball away, but he made no effort to atone for his error, no attempt to regain control. He stopped, waited a beat, and then looked to the other end of the field. It was as if he knew what was going to happen, and he did not care or could not bear to watch. Once it had happened, Quique Setien turned away, too, with a shake of the head and a shrug of the shoulders, looking to his coaching staff for an explanation or a bit of solace or confirmation that this was not real because it could not be real and it was all some horrible hallucination. On the field, his players stared, glassy eyed. In the stands, his socially distanced substitutes kicked the seats in front of them in pain and rage and humiliation. That was at seven. Bayern Munich had scored seven goals against mighty Barcelona, the Barcelona of Messi and Busquets and Pique and Suarez, in a Champions League quarterfinal, with the whole world watching. It was unthinkable, unfathomable, unbearable. It was as low as they could fall. And then Bayern Munich scored an eighth. Rome was bad, in 2018. Barcelona had won the first leg of that quarterfinal easily, by 4 1 at Camp Nou. Few gave Roma much of a chance in the return: a chance to restore a bit of pride, maybe. But Barcelona collapsed, losing by 3 0. Messi and his teammates brooded on it for months. At the start of the next season, he gave a speech outlining his determination to put it right. Anfield was worse, in 2019. Messi had been as good as his word. Barcelona had cruised to the semifinals this time, and had dismantled Liverpool on Catalan soil. Arturo Vidal, the grizzled Chilean midfielder, had promised to make a particularly personal donation to science if Barcelona did not make the final. Trent Alexander Arnold took a corner quickly, and Barcelona buckled and broke. But this? This was something else entirely. "The bottom," was how Gerard Pique, almost teary, put it. This was not a momentary lapse in concentration, a few minutes of madness. This was not hubris or overconfidence or some character flaw, unearthed in the white heat of the Stadio Olimpico or Anfield. This was a box score to take the breath away, a result to end an era. That it was a player who has come to symbolize the wastefulness of the club, Philippe Coutinho the most expensive player in Barcelona's history, a player still owned by Barcelona who delivered the coup de grace has the tempting narrative feel of a parable, but the ultimate condemnation needs no explanation, no parenthesis. It was right there in the top left hand corner of your screen. It was right there on the scoreboard. Eight. Barcelona conceded eight. That and this is no exaggeration can only be the end. It will, certainly, be the end for Setien. It was "too soon to say" if he will remain in place, he said after the game. What else could he say? He is a fundamentally decent, idealistic coach who is horribly out of his depth, but he is no fool. He knows full well how this plays out. He might have been fired on his way out of the Stadium of Light in Lisbon on Friday night. He might be fired at the airport on Saturday morning. He might be fired on the plane, or at the baggage carousel. But he will be fired. Setien will pay, one way or the other, because at Barcelona as at all of the other misfiring super clubs, the teams who now consider themselves too big to fail, who have forgotten that their size and their success is a direct corollary of the excellence they once embodied, not something bestowed on them in perpetuity by the divine the coach always pays. That is what happened to Ernesto Valverde, who made the fatal mistake of only winning two La Liga titles in two seasons and setting Barcelona on the path to a third. It is what would have happened, sooner or later, to Luis Enrique if he had not jumped, if not quite before he was pushed then because he knew the push always comes eventually. It is what happened to Tata Martino. No, it is deeper than that, more far reaching than that, more urgent than that. It was not just the score again: eight, Bayern Munich scored eight that stood out on Friday; it was Barcelona's singular inability to do the things it is supposed to do. Setien did not tell Marc Andre Ter Stegen, the most technical goalkeeper in soccer, to forget how to pass the ball. He did not come up with a scheme that involved his defenders and midfielders repeatedly playing themselves into trouble. He did not tell his players not to track their runners or to leave Bayern's passing lanes open or to fail to drop back into defense. Barcelona's players remain, to a man, lavishly talented. Messi remains the finest player on the planet. But some have aged and others have not grown and some more have been brought into a team that does not suit their strengths. This is not a team that can play as it wants to, as it is meant to. It is a team that has come to the end of its line, as even Pique alluded to afterward, when he admitted that even he will have to leave, if that is what is best for the club. It is not a team that can compete with the finest clubs in Europe any more. It should have realized that at Anfield, really, but it cannot ignore it now. It is a team that needs to be broken up. That is easier said than done, of course: Barcelona has the highest payroll in soccer hanging around its neck its players earn more, on average, than any other team in any sport in the world and the sorts of teams that might buy its expensive, aging stars are few and far between. And besides, nobody would trust the current executive management of Barcelona to build again, to restore the team to its increasingly distant glory. It is the leadership of Josep Maria Bartomeu, the president, that frittered away the prince's ransom Paris St. Germain paid for Neymar on Coutinho and Ousmane Dembele. They are the ones who have spent three quarters of a billion euros on transfer fees since 2017 and managed to make the team worse, who have churned through sporting directors, who have watched on as prospect after prospect has left the club's academy because the path to the first team was blocked. Ultimately, that is where the blame should lie: with those who have overseen a decade in which the team that thrilled Europe under Pep Guardiola has withered away to a husk, who have wasted the final years of Messi's peak, who brought Barcelona those nights in Rome, Liverpool and now Lisbon, with those who have brought Barcelona low, who have brought Barcelona here. By the time the eighth went in, Barcelona's players were barely moving. Setien, too, was motionless. Under the glare of the floodlights, they looked haunted, shellshocked. The humiliation was a deeply public one, one that will follow them all for some time. Those that truly bear responsibility were spared that ordeal. But there are some things that cannot be avoided. Eight. In a Champions League quarterfinal, against the mighty Barcelona, with the world watching on, Bayern Munich scored eight. For Setien, certainly, for some of the players, most likely, and for this incarnation of Barcelona, this vision of it on the field and this regime off it, definitely, there is no return. This is the end. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Instagram said Tuesday it was expanding its online anti bullying initiative, adding a new filter to weed out comments meant to harass or bully the 800 million users of the popular social media site. The company said it would review accounts that have a large number of comments filtered out. If those accounts violate Instagram's community guidelines, it will take action, which could include banning them. The new filter will also hide comments attacking a person's appearance or character, and alert Instagram to repeat offenders. It is the second step in an initiative announced last year to curb offensive comments and rid Instagram of its most malicious members. "To be clear, we don't tolerate bullying on Instagram," Kevin Systrom, the company's chief executive and co founder, told Instagram users in a blog post Tuesday. The company will also expand policies to guard against the bullying of young public figures who are often the target of hate filled messages. "Protecting our youngest community members is crucial to helping them feel comfortable to express who they are and what they care about," he added. In a 2017 study conducted by Ditch the Label, an online anti bullying organization, 71 percent of respondents in the United Kingdom said social media sites did not do enough to combat online bullying. Instagram was of particular note: 42 percent of more than 10,000 people aged 12 to 20 surveyed in the United Kingdom said they had experienced cyberbullying on the site in the previous 12 months. In March, the model and actress Amber Rose called out cyberbullies for saying her 5 year old son was gay after she posted videos on Instagram of him opening a gift from the singer Taylor Swift. It is not only children who are targeted. In November, Drew Barrymore was attacked after she posed with a starfish in a photograph to promote a new lipstick. "It hurt me," she wrote in a follow up post, which was liked 484,238 times. Instagram, like other social media sites including Twitter and YouTube, has become an easy place to shame or offend, something the company acknowledged last year. Mr. Systrom addressed it in a blog post then, saying, "Many of you have told us that toxic comments discourage you from enjoying Instagram and expressing yourself freely." Instagram is using a machine learning algorithm to detect offenders. Called DeepText, it was built by Facebook, which owns Instagram, and uses artificial intelligence to review words for context and meaning, much as the human brain determines how words are used. (Facebook is holding its annual F8 developer conference this week.) Initially, Instagram had a team of people review and rate comments, sorting them into different categories: bullying, racism or sexual harassment. "What we are concentrating on is building the tools so people can control their experience on Instagram," said Karina Newton, head for public policy at Instagram. "Those will improve over time." Instagram's users are expected to follow the site's guidelines, which include being respectful to other community members and not posting photographs of naked bodies. The company has also embarked on a "kindness" campaign, hosting events to promote inclusion and diversity. "It's been our goal to make it a safe place for self expression and to foster kindness within the community," Mr. Systrom said. "This update is just the next step in our mission to deliver on that promise." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
MOSCOW A court on Tuesday extended the house arrest of Kirill S. Serebrennikov, the artistic director of the Gogol Center, whose case has raised alarms about repression of artistic freedom in Russia. Mr. Serebrennikov is accused of embezzling government funds that had been allocated for one of his theatrical projects. The ruling means he will spend another three months under house arrest while awaiting trial. Earlier this month, investigators reportedly elevated their accusations against Mr. Serebrennikov in a draft of an indictment, saying his theater company, Seventh Studio, had embezzled almost twice as much as they had initially suspected. He and his associates are now accused of stealing the ruble equivalent of 2.3 million. The Ministry of Culture has been recognized as an injured party in the case, and has asked to be awarded the same sum as compensation if Mr. Serebrennikov is convicted. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
This week's Billboard album chart featured two unusual contenders for the top spot: a pair of independent rappers, each heavily influenced by their Christian faith, who did well on streaming services but also moved thousands of albums by bundling them with deals for merchandise, concert tickets and even Lyft rides. In the end, the victor was an upset: NF, a rapper from Michigan, edged out Chance the Rapper, from Chicago, who was releasing what he called his first official album after years of success with streaming only mixtapes. NF's album, "The Search," opened at No. 1 with the equivalent of 130,000 sales in the United States, according to Nielsen, giving NF whose real name is Nathan Feuerstein his second time at the top of the chart. Chance the Rapper's "The Big Day" came in second place with 108,000. Within those "equivalent" numbers umbrella totals that reconcile the weekly numbers from various music formats Chance had by far the bigger streaming number. Songs from "The Big Day" were streamed 104 million times, more than any other album last week; "The Search" had just 58 million. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Credit...Melissa Golden for The New York Times BLUE RIDGE, Ga. On the 16 hour ride from Louisiana, Bo looked out the window, took in the scenery, dozed and relaxed. He was traveling with five other male chimps from the New Iberia Research Center in Lafayette, La., where they had been members of a colony of nearly 200 animals kept for biomedical and other research. During the ride, some of the other chimps hooted, restless and unsettled. Not Bo. "He's the best," said the driver of the truck. The animals arrived at Project Chimps, a sanctuary at the southern end of the Blue Ridge Mountains about 100 miles north of Atlanta, at 6:30 a.m. one day last spring. As the sanctuary staff began to open the truck and move the chimps' cages inside the facility, the occupants hooted and screamed, anxious and uncertain about what was going on. The first cage was opened into a sort of antechamber, and a chimp named Jason was first to explore his new home, rushing with what seemed like nervous energy through a small door into the large habitat. Called a villa, the enclosed space is built like an extremely large metal cage, about 1,500 square feet and two stories high with metal platforms at different levels. Jabari, the second arrival, slowly joined Jason to explore the new enclosure, but they kept their distance from each other. Lance was third in line, hesitant to leave the small antechamber. The staff waited about a half hour for him to build up his nerve. Then, hoping to encourage Lance, they decided to let in Bo, the group's dominant chimp. Bo knuckle walked, casually and confidently knuckle swaggered, you might say into the large enclosure. Lance followed immediately. And then the group hugs began. "That's normal reassuring behavior," Jen Feuerstein, the top administrator at the sanctuary, told me. Bo was in the house, and all was well. It probably will stay that way in the long run: The era of biomedical research on chimpanzees in the United States is effectively over. Given the nearly 100 year history of experimenting on chimps, the changes seemed to come fairly quickly once they began. In 2011, the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, declared that the N.I.H. would fund no new biomedical research using chimps, which he described as "our closest relatives in the animal kingdom" deserving of "special consideration and respect." His comments were both stunning and obvious. Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist, and others already had shown the world the richness of chimp intelligence and social life; molecular biology had revealed that humans and chimps share 98 percent of their DNA. But the biomedical scientific establishment has long emphasized the importance of animal research. Dr. Collins's decision reflected widespread ethical concerns among scientists about the treatment of such social, intelligent animals. But on a practical level, the care of chimps is costly, and they aren't always a good model in which to study human diseases. They're also a magnet for public concern. By 2015, the N.I.H. had gone through several stages of decision making and concluded that it would retire all chimps it owned, retaining none for potential emergency use in case of a human epidemic, for instance. The agency owns about 220 chimps outside of those now in sanctuaries and supports another 80, which will also be retired. All the government chimps are headed to Chimp Haven, a sanctuary in Keithville, La., where they will have a full social life and room to roam outdoors. Some critics say the process has been unnecessarily slow, but both Chimp Haven and the N.I.H. say transfers are moving more quickly now. The sanctuary has accepted 14 chimps in the past two months and is expecting more before the end of the year. Chimp Haven, with a staff of 50, more than 200 chimps and a 30 year history, has had a lot of experience caring for retired chimps. They are kept in mixed groups of various sizes and their social interactions monitored. To prevent breeding new chimps that would have to spend their lives in captivity, Chimp Haven gives all the males vasectomies. But "vasectomies do fail," said Raven Jackson Jewett, the attending veterinarian at the sanctuary. "Conan was the one that taught us that." Conan had the procedure but somehow fathered three youngsters anyway, including Tracy, now 10 and a favorite of visitors. Dr. Jackson Jewett said that because of Conan, Chimp Haven had learned that chimp vasectomies fail more often than those in humans. The staff changed its technique, re vasectomized about 75 chimps with the new method, and hasn't had a pregnancy since. The sanctuary also has learned to care for frail chimps. Many animals from labs have been infected with H.I.V. and hepatitis for vaccine experiments, and some have diabetes (not related to experiments). They are often old: Some arrive near 50 years of age, and the lifespan of chimps in captivity runs from 50 to 60 years. Occasionally chimps are deemed too old even to handle the stress of being sent to the sanctuary. Chimps will still be in zoos and, as the laws now stand, private owners could still breed them. But since the demand for their use in research is now zero, that is unlikely to happen on a large scale. Most privately owned laboratory chimpanzees are also headed for retirement centers. New Iberia has shipped 22 animals to Project Chimps, where Bo and his cohort now live, but still has nearly 200. The Project Chimps facility, which formerly housed gorillas, is still being renovated for chimps. They will get to play in eight acres of walled in open space, with trees, a stream and an open meadow once the walls are fixed. (Unlike gorillas, chimps are agile climbers.) Those left at New Iberia aren't isolated. They live in groups in large, dome shaped outdoor cages. The domes have a bit less than a 1,000 square feet of floor space. Although chimps in research were once housed in smaller cages, and in isolation for experiments, practices have changed; labs and sanctuaries have recognized that it is cruel to house chimps alone. The only other private chimps still at research institutions include 46 owned by the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, and one at Georgia State University. Yerkes is looking for retirement facilities for its chimps and has sent seven to the Chattanooga Zoo. Yerkes also sent eight chimpanzees to an unaccredited zoo in England, prompting an outcry from animal welfare advocates in this country and in Europe. The move prompted a lawsuit, because the Fish and Wildlife Service approved it even though advocates insisted there were better options in the United States. The lawsuit was the first test of the protections offered to chimps by the endangered species classification. Exportation requires a permit from the Fish and Wildlife Service, which can only be granted if the action benefits the species. The agency accepted Yerkes's argument that a donation by the English zoo to a group that had never before worked with chimps fulfilled that requirement. The decision outraged many primatologists and chimp advocates, but in the end the courts allowed the move. Within the animal welfare community, some of the elation about the government decisions of a few years ago has now, inevitably, been replaced by a recognition of the difficult logistics, the need for continued fund raising and the occasional roadblocks. "Patience has been a huge lesson for me," Laura Bonar, chief program and policy officer at Animal Protection of New Mexico, said in an interview. Ms. Bonar was one of the activists who had worked to bring about the decisions to end experimentation. Patience is useful even in the case of chimps like Bo, who have already been transferred to sanctuaries. Soon, perhaps by the end of this year, Bo and the other chimps at the sanctuary are expected to step outside of steel bars for the first time in their lives. They have been doing well. Janie Gibbons, one of the staff members who takes care of the chimps, said Bo continues to lead by example as he did recently when the group encountered something they never seen before. The first time they were given tomatoes, they were flummoxed. "Bo is very brave and tries things first," said Ms. Gibbons. "He took one and very meticulously ate the peel first, then the fruit." Satisfied that tomatoes were safe, the others followed. But not all in a rush: Jabari threw his first tomato against the wall, even though he and the other chimps had gathered around Bo and peered as closely as they could as he ate the alien fruit. Now the chimps all eat tomatoes as if they were apples. And that's what the future may hold for all chimps: open space and tomatoes. But it's just going to take a while. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Deserts aren't necessarily deserted they can be crowded with fantastic flora and fauna. Moses Pendleton knows how to make theatrical deserts bloom in his "Opus Cactus," which his company, Momix, is reviving at the Joyce Theater on Tuesday, June 27. With lights, shadows, props, puppetry and wondrously agile human dancers, Mr. Pendleton conjures the landscape of the American Southwest, filling the stage with images of desert storms, soaring birds, skittering insects, snakes and Gila monsters, tumbleweeds and giant cactuses. Audiences may find all this great fun, but, recognizing that desert landscapes can be fragile as well as magical, Mr. Pendleton also provides sharp spines of implications relating to ecology, conservation and other serious concerns. (Through July 16; joyce.org.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Richard Strauss's "Der Rosenkavalier" has several truly sublime and justly beloved scenes and ensembles. With a good cast and conductor, these are almost surefire moments in any performance. But "Rosenkavalier" also contains whole stretches of heavy handed comedy that can seem to go on forever. The challenge is to make something of these clunky episodes. That task falls mainly to a conductor. On Friday, Simon Rattle passed that test triumphantly in the performance he led at the Metropolitan Opera, when Robert Carsen's 2017 production of "Rosenkavalier" returned to the house, with a winning cast. This was only the third Met appearance for Mr. Rattle, who made his debut in 2010 leading Debussy's "Pelleas et Melisande" and returned in 2016 for a new production of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde." As a conductor, he has a penchant for conveying the drama of a piece by paying insightful attention to musical details. That approach came through on Friday from the start, with his feverish yet transparent conducting of the long orchestral introduction. The music depicts a night of lovemaking between the Marschallin, the princess von Werdenberg, entering middle age, and Octavian, her cousin, a 17 year old count, with whom she is having an affair. Mr. Rattle conveyed the heady fervor of the music without turning the introduction into a tone poem of the erotic. Through all its spasms of intensity, he revealed the music's obsessive use of thematic sequences and restless harmonic shifts. Mr. Carsen's production updates the story, set in Vienna, to 1911, the date of the work's premiere and the moment right before Europe's centuries old aristocratic order crumbled under the chaos of World War I. In doing so he takes risks, but almost all of them pay off, including the opening scene. Rather than first seeing the postcoital lovers lolling about in bed in the early morning, as the libretto indicates, we see Octavian emerge from the bedroom into an outer hall looking intoxicated from a night of passion. Playing this endearing character, the mezzo soprano Magdalena Kozena (who recently gave a splendid recital at Alice Tully Hall with Mr. Rattle, her husband, at the piano) looked like a typically randy if intensely serious young man. The dusky tones and slightly earthy edge to her singing lent a touch of emotional depth to her portrayal of this adolescent. At times, high flying phrases seemed to press her voice, resulting in some strained sound. But overall she gave a vibrant and affecting performance of a challenging role. The acclaimed Finnish soprano Camilla Nylund made an overdue Met debut as the Marschallin. Singing with lovely bloom and sensitivity, Ms. Nylund scaled down her essentially dramatic soprano voice to emphasize the lyrical eloquence of the music and the subtle emotions of this complex character. The worldly wise Marschallin tells Octavian, as tactfully as possible, that their affair, though lovely, will not last. Rather than reacting to Octavian's boyish distress by providing motherly comfort, as many sopranos singing this role do, Ms. Nylund, in a daring touch of honesty, seemed swept up in her own emotions. What's going on within her, as she senses time passing by, is what matters, after all. The formidable bass Gunther Groissbock, a revelation as the boorish, entitled Baron Ochs when this production was new, returned to the role on Friday. If anything, he was even better. The baron is often portrayed as a pompous, hefty, old fool. Mr. Groissbock's baron looks to be about 40, and at first comes across as imposing and good looking, which makes his lecherous treatment of women all the more dangerous. Most of the lame comedic scenes in the opera involve Strauss's attempts to depict the baron's absurd carryings on. This is where Mr. Rattle really comes through. The baron is about to marry Sophie, the young daughter of Faninal, an ambitious striver who has made a fortune selling arms. As the baron prattles on to the Marschallin about the advantages of this arranged union, Mr. Rattle plumbs the bustling orchestra music to highlight intricate details, jagged bits and pungent shards of dissonance that often pass by in other performances. The soprano Golda Schultz, fresh from a standout out performance as Clara in the Met's new production of "Porgy and Bess," was a radiant voiced and tenderly innocent Sophie. The supporting cast was strong, including Markus Eiche, a sturdy baritone in his Met debut as Faninal, and Matthew Polenzani as the Italian tenor who comes to sing for the Marschallin. The ultimate surefire ensemble in "Rosenkavalier," of course, comes in Act III, when the Marschallin, realizing that Octavian and Sophie are in love, heeds her own advice about life: It is crucial to know when to grab on to something, and when to let go. Ms. Nylund, Ms. Kozena and Ms. Schultz sounded glorious in this ravishing trio, with the sumptuous and never smothering support of Mr. Rattle and the orchestra. Through Jan. 4 at the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center; 212 362 6000, metopera.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
For months, Hector Hernandez, 47, didn't understand why his stomach had gotten so big. "I just thought I was fat," he said. "I've always been a big guy." It would be a year and a half before he discovered that his large belly was actually a 77 pound tumor. In the meantime, he watched as it grew and grew. When he took the Los Angeles Metro to work every morning, people would stare. "I wore big jackets to try to cover up, but it was very noticeable," he said in an interview on Wednesday. And when he sat at his desk, where he did billing for an information technology company, "my stomach would just lay between my legs," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
In another step forward for the rapidly expanding universe of invisible astronomy, scientists said on Wednesday that on Aug. 14 they had recorded the space time reverberations known as gravitational waves from the collision of a pair of black holes 1.8 billion light years away from here. It was the fourth time, officially, in the last two years that astronomers have detected such ripples from the cataclysmic mergers of black holes objects so dense that space and time are wrapped around them like a glove so that not even light can escape. In the August event, one black hole with about 31 times the mass of the Sun and another with 25 solar masses, combined to make a hole of 53 solar masses. The remaining three solar masses were converted into gravitational waves that radiated more energy than all the stars in the known universe. The observation is in line with earlier gravitational wave detections, confirming an evolving view of the cosmic night full of monsters and violence. The detection, announced at a G7 meeting of science ministers in Turin, Italy, and in a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters, marked the successful debut of a new gravitational wave detector known as Virgo, built by a European collaboration and located in Cascina, close to Pisa, Italy. The first detections of gravitational waves had been made by a pair of L shaped antennas, called LIGO, in Hanford, Wash. and Livingston, La., which monitor the squeezing and stretching of space between a pair of delicately positioned mirrors as a gravitational wave goes by. That announcement in February 2016 confirmed the existence of gravitational waves first predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago, and verified the nature of black holes, causing a sensation. LIGO's leaders are now front runners for the Nobel Prize in Physics, to be announced next week. On Aug. 1, the Virgo antenna, built by the European Gravitational Observatory, came on line to join the existing LIGO antennas. The addition paid off almost immediately, scientists for the observatories said on Wednesday, when a pair of black holes in collision rattled the antennas on Aug. 14. Although the Virgo antenna is still only about one fourth as sensitive as the LIGO antennas, it greatly increases the network's ability to triangulate the sources of gravitational waves so that optical telescopes can search for any accompanying fireworks in the visible sky. The current observing run ended on Aug. 25. After a year of work improving the sensitivities of their instruments, a new run will begin in the fall of 2018. Hopes are, you might say, sky high. In a news release from the University of Glasgow sent out before the G7 meeting, Sheila Rowan, director of the university's Institute for Gravitational Research, said: "We now are demonstrating the capabilities of a network of gravitational wave detectors, which deepens the pool of data we'll be able to draw from in future and will help to further expand our understanding of the universe." MIT's David Shoemaker, spokesman for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, said: "This is just the beginning of observations with the network enabled by Virgo and LIGO working together. With the next observing run planned for Fall 2018, we can expect such detections weekly or even more often." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
NOCHE FLAMENCA at the West Park Presbyterian Church (Dec. 26 Jan. 28). In the early 20th century, Arthur Schnitzler's play "La Ronde" scandalized audiences with its vignettes of sexual encounters that breached class borders. The inventive and indispensable dance company Noche Flamenca interprets that work through a series of duets that explore the dynamics of loneliness and desire, feelings that flamenco captures well. Accompanying "La Ronde" in a 75 minute program, which will performed from Dec. 26 through Jan. 7, is "Creacion," inspired by the lives of Noche Flamenca's incomparable star Soledad Barrio and the accomplished hip hop dancer TweetBoogie (in a role also performed by Nubian Nene). The two will share the stage with younger women dancing both styles. From Jan. 10 through 28, Noche Flamenca revisits "Antigona," the troupe's acclaimed and commanding adaptation of Sophocles' tragedy, which runs for 90 minutes. 212 352 3101, nocheflamenca.com | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
LONDON Last year, Sotheby's sold 6.4 billion worth of artworks worldwide, a 16 percent increase over 2017, the New York based auction house said Thursday, announcing its full year financial results. Earlier this month its archrival Christie's announced equivalent 2018 sales of 7 billion. Sotheby's said its 2018 performance had been bolstered by 1 billion in private sales, up 37 percent from the previous year. But profitability was down. The auction house achieved a net income of 108.6 million, or 2.09 per diluted share, compared with 118.8 million, or 2.20 per diluted share, in 2017. Sotheby's incurred significant losses on some high value lots guaranteed at auctions, such as a Modigliani nude, which sold below the amount promised to the seller for 157.2 million in May, and a 30 million abstract, "Pre War Pageant," by the American modernist Marsden Hartley that failed to sell in November. The following month, Adam Chinn, the company's chief operating officer, stepped down and his role was eliminated. But Sotheby's said it had achieved notable auction highs for contemporary artists such as Kerry James Marshall and Jenny Saville, and had raised 1 billion in auction sales in Asia, the highest total for the company. The auction house's investment in new technology had resulted in 72.1 million of online only sales, four times the total of the previous year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
SAN FRANCISCO When the virtual currency markets were hot last year, the boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. and the music producer and rapper Khaled Khaled, known as DJ Khaled, were getting paid to promote new digital tokens. On Thursday, regulators announced that Mr. Mayweather and Mr. Khaled will have to give back all the money they received for those promotions and pay additional fines in the latest crackdown on the virtual currency markets. The Securities and Exchange Commission said Mr. Mayweather was paid 100,000 and Mr. Khaled 50,000 to promote a virtual currency released last year by the start up Centra Tech in a so called initial coin offering. The men did not disclose those payments in their online postings hyping the digital coin, the regulators said. The payments and broader problems with the Centra coin offering were first reported by The New York Times last fall. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Aaron Posner's "Life Sucks.," a New York Times Critic's Pick, has reopened at the Acorn Theater on Theater Row, with Kevin Isola now playing Vanya. Here is an edited version of Elisabeth Vincentelli's April 1, 2019, review of the production, which originated at the Wild Project. A middle aged, grouchily single man is bemoaning his fate. "Chilly, lonely breakfasts might be the worst first world problem ever," he complains. A younger woman is not much happier, plaintively pointing out that "everyone thinks that if you look like me you have to settle for, you know, all the Steve Buscemis of the world." The pair, who fittingly are uncle and niece, are among a bunch of disgruntled folks who have gathered in a large house. They bicker with each other. They despair about frustrated loves and stalled careers. We wouldn't expect any less from a show called "Life Sucks." Then again, Aaron Posner's bitingly funny, unexpectedly touching play also delivers significantly more. If the premise feels vaguely recognizable, it's because the show, which is getting its New York premiere at the Wild Project, is "sort of adapted from 'Uncle Vanya,'" as Mr. Posner puts it. (He had already gone to the Chekhov well three years ago with his well received "Stupid Bird," based on "The Seagull.") Mr. Posner has kept the original play's basic architecture. The grump is Vanya (Jeff Biehl), and he still shares a home with the plain Sonia (Kimberly Chatterjee), but now we appear to be in the United States since there is talk of dollars and student loans. Both Vanya and the brooding Dr. Aster (formerly known as Astrov, portrayed by Michael Schantz) still pine for Sonia's stepmother, Ella (the new name of Yelena, played by Nadia Bowers). As ever, Sonia feels overlooked by everybody, including her secret crush, Aster, and her own father (Austin Pendleton, confirming once more his status as a New York stage treasure), an academic who specializes in semiotics. "That's the study of ... big trucks?" asks the daffy Pickles (Stacey Linnartz), an artist manque nursing a broken heart and who appears to be loosely based on Chekhov's Waffles. The only well adjusted person is Babs (Barbara Kingsley), a potter. The characters and basic plot will be familiar to "Uncle Vanya" fiends. But at the same time, "Life Sucks." will be familiar to just about anybody. Chekhov's play has transcended the centuries because it is about timeless concerns: how hard it is to communicate with others, the vagaries and unfairness of love, the idea that life is something you must simultaneously endure and make the most of. And underneath the fourth wall breaking jokes and contemporary references, Mr. Posner has preserved those elements. He understands full well that there is no date stamp on feeling stranded between regrets and hopes, between fancy dreams and the banality of existence. Briskly directed by Jeff Wise for the Wheelhouse Theater Company ("Happy Birthday, Wanda June"), the production keeps finding perceptive ways to rejuvenate the story. Ms. Bowers's Ella, pensive and kind, is uncomfortable with the fact that others see her as "the world's sexiest ocelot," while Ms. Chatterjee gives us a Sonia who is refreshingly bubblier than usual without losing any of her wistfulness. Its mock desultory title includes a period that gives it an air of finality, but flexibility and openness are part of the show's DNA. The characters must adapt to their anxieties and confront what keeps them stuck in place. In a key scene, they challenge the self pitying Vanya, as if conducting an intervention. "Spoiler alert," Babs says. "Most of us won't get everything we want." Flexibility is also baked in the text itself as Mr. Posner leaves a bit of wiggle room for improvisation and unobtrusive audience participation, down to the conclusion. The show's ending was comically surreal at the performance I caught, last Friday night. Yours will be completely different. Life and theater you just can't tell how they will turn out. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Stephen King has written some of the most beloved horror novels in the history of popular fiction, and many have been turned into equally acclaimed and successful films. Movies like "Carrie," "Stand by Me" and "The Shawshank Redemption" have more than earned esteemed spots within the cinematic canon. Others "Maximum Overdrive," "Thinner," "The Dark Tower" have not. But what about the small screen? As with the film adaptations, attempts to bring King's books to life on TV have had mixed results, and few have reached the heights of "The Green Mile" or "Misery." But thanks to the longer running time afforded by a series, several of King's more unwieldy novels have proved better suited to television than to the multiplex. "That is the great thing about TV," King said, calling from his home in Bangor, Maine. "You can take these things as they are and expand more." With a new adaptation of one of the author's longest, most complex novels, "The Stand," arriving Thursday on CBS All Access, King looked back at the best and worst adaptations of his stories for television. This two part ABC mini series, an adaptation of King's sprawling 1986 novel about a child murdering monster in small town Maine, is perhaps best remembered for Tim Curry's frightening performance as Pennywise the Clown. "I liked that series a lot, and I thought Tim Curry made a great Pennywise," King said. "It scared the expletive out of a lot of kids at that time." In fact, King credits the impact of the series on children with the later success of the film version, which starred Bill Skarsgard as the diabolical clown and was a box office sensation in 2017. (A 2019 sequel, based on the second half of the novel, was similarly successful.) "One of the reasons the movie was a big hit was because kids remembered seeing it on TV," King said. "So they went to see it." "I didn't like it; I didn't care for it at all," King said of "The Tommyknockers," a TV adaptation of his 1987 science fiction novel about the paranormal effects of a buried U.F.O. on the residents of a small town. (He has described the novel as "an awful book.") After both "It" and "The Tommyknockers" scored high ratings for ABC, the network agreed to green light an ambitious adaptation of "The Stand," King's 1978 epic about the survivors of an infectious disease that has killed more than 99 percent of the human race. Adapted by King himself and directed by his friend and frequent collaborator Mick Garris, the result is faithful and cohesive; the author likened it to other shows born of singular creative visions, like "Godless" and "The Queen's Gambit." "Mick directed everything, and I wrote everything, so there was never any sense of unevenness in the way they worked it had one single style all the way through it," King said. "Mick loved the book and was dedicated to the idea that we would just do the book, which is what we did. ABC spent a lot of money on it." A lesser known King adaptation, "The Langoliers" is another two part ABC mini series based on a novella in the anthology book "Four Past Midnight," from 1990. David Morse, Dean Stockwell, and Bronson Pinchot star as passengers on a commercial flight that slips backward through time and winds up stranded at an airport in Bangor. "They came up to Bangor to actually film that," King recalled. "I liked it because it brought money into the town, and I liked the screenplay. I can't remember if I wrote that or not. Did I?" It was in fact written by Tom Holland, who also directed. "Well, I did act in it," King said. He appears, briefly, as a sneering business executive in a dream sequence on an airport tarmac. King has never been shy about his preference for the TV version of "The Shining" over Stanley Kubrick's acclaimed 1980 movie adaptation of the 1977 novel, which follows an alcoholic teacher and playwright as he's driven to madness and violence by a remote haunted hotel in the Colorado Rockies. "Let's put it this way," King said. "I dislike the film. I always have. I admire the film, and I admire Kubrick as a director, which sometimes gets lost in the mix when people who absolutely love that film take me to task. I love Kubrick as a filmmaker, but I just felt that he didn't have the chops for this particular thing." "I don't like the arc that Jack Nicholson runs as Jack Torrance," he continued. "Because it isn't really an arc it's a flat line. He's crazy from the jump." "Storm of the Century" is not an adaptation, but an original mini series King wrote for NBC. It's also, he said, his crowning television achievement. "That is my absolute favorite of all of them," he said. Colm Feore stars as Andre Linoge, a nefarious demon who terrorizes a small Maine island town in the throes of a brutal blizzard. "I loved Colm Feore as Linoge, and I loved the story," King said. "They filmed it in Southwest Harbor in Maine in the wintertime and they got the snow, so you get the sense of this awesome blizzard and the people trapped in it. They did a terrific job." King wrote "Rose Red," another direct for TV project, while recovering from his near fatal road accident at the turn of the millennium. "I was in a lot of pain, but I thought I'd love to do an homage to Shirley Jackson," he remembers. The result was a special effects heavy ghost story mini series on ABC in the spirit of Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House." The production encountered problems, including the death of the actor David Dukes, and in the end, "I wasn't delighted with the way it turned out," King says. "Under the Dome," King's novel from 2009, has an irresistible premise: A small town is inexplicably trapped inside a giant impenetrable dome. The CBS series adaptation, which starred Dean Norris of "Breaking Bad" as the town councilman James (Big Jim) Rennie, had a promising start. "The first few episodes were great," King said. "But the thing was, what CBS wanted was basically meatloaf nothing too challenging, something to just fill some hours." As the series progressed, "it went off the rails," he said, and ultimately "descended into complete mediocrity." Not that he was particularly troubled by it. "It was a sad thing, but it didn't bother me," King said. "I stopped watching after a while because I just didn't give a expletive ." "Mr. Mercedes" is a thrilling, genuinely scary adaptation of King's series of recent crime novels about a retired Midwest detective taunted by a serial killer he was unable to catch during his career. Developed by AT T's somewhat obscure Audience Network, the series is not as widely known as some of the author's other TV adaptations. King thinks that's too bad. "It was like we brought a stadium show to a coffee shop," he said. "I liked it a lot, but nobody saw it." The show's three seasons have recently been picked up by NBC (it has not yet been renewed for a fourth) and are streaming on its Peacock platform. "And thank God for that," King said. "People are actually seeing it now." The new adaptation of "The Stand" on CBS All Access is much anticipated, and even King hasn't seen the finished product. "I've seen some rough cuts, and I can't really give you an opinion yet except to say that it was interesting to see it brought to the 21st century and to see some of the changes that were made," he said. One clear improvement so far has to do with casting and diversity. "The novel was very white; the mini series was very white," he said. "They have done a multicultural thing here, and that makes perfect sense." He also contributed a new ending which he won't reveal. "I always knew there was one more thing I had to say in that book, one more scene I wanted to write, and I finally did," he said. "And I'm happy with it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
It's one of the first rules you learn when you get taken into the backyard and taught how to play football: You can only throw one forward pass each play. On Monday night, Tom Brady tried to get away with breaking that rule. And in a way, it worked. Early in the fourth quarter of Tampa Bay's game against the Los Angeles Rams, Brady's Buccaneers had a third and 10 at their 34 yard line. Brady threw over the middle, but the ball was blocked at the line of scrimmage by linebacker Terrell Lewis. A lot of good things have happened to Tom Brady in his life, and here came another. The deflected ball, which could have gone in almost any direction, caromed directly back to him. Brady reacted with lightning speed, snatched the carom out of the air and ... passed the ball again? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Why go to a "gay" bar these days when you can specify a niche like twinks, bears, muscle queens and "Hellsea" gays? The latest addition to this fragmented landscape is the Otter Box, a Sunday night frolic that is aimed at "otters" guys who are hairier than twinks, while significantly more svelte than bears. "I didn't feel there was anything in Brooklyn that caters to boys with fur," said the 28 year old night life promoter who goes by the name Shameless, who started the weekly party on Jan. 4 with Jorge Mdahuar. Shameless said he may be a little too beefy to be an otter. Maybe a badger? The party is held at the Flat, a medium size bar just yards from the elevated J train tracks in South Williamsburg, with more mirrors than a Julia Roberts movie. But while this party could have become a hairy narcissist's delight, it instead evokes the freewheeling spirit of 1980s East Village rec rooms, complete with a go go boy on a crate and a not for prime time performance. On a recent Sunday, a longhaired otter who went by the name Cybil War writhingly lip synced the lyrics "You are rich and I am filthy" in a bra. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
This 8,611 square foot, painted concrete house is on a 0.40 acre lot on a ridge in Bryanston, a suburb of Johannesburg in Gauteng Province. The four bedroom, four bath house, built in 2014, has treetop views and limited vistas of the downtown skyline of Sandton, a business hub nearby, from the second floor. A long driveway leads to the parking court in front of the main entrance, said Lynda Greeff, a saleswoman with Pam Golding Properties Gauteng, which has the listing. There is a two car garage on either side of the staircase to this entrance. The house, which is in a gated community, has an open layout and a double height foyer. To the left of the foyer is a quarter turn staircase with stainless steel railings and an alcove leading to a guest suite with a balcony and an en suite bath. To the right is a study with sliding glass doors that open to the yard. There are floor to ceiling glass walls throughout the house. In the living and dining areas, which are separated by a gas fireplace, the walls stack back and can be opened to the lawn and a solar heated pool at the center of this walled property. The kitchen has glossy laminate cabinetry, Caesarstone counters, a center island with room for stools and a Smeg cooktop and stove; it is connected to a pantry and a laundry room. Upstairs, a central den opens to the master suite and two bedrooms, all of which are carpeted. The master bedroom has a gas fireplace; a separate dressing room with built in cabinetry; a balcony overlooking the yard and pool; and a bathroom with a double vanity, a spa tub and an oversized shower. The other two bedrooms also have built in cabinetry, balconies and en suite baths. There are wall mounted air conditioners throughout the house. The garage level includes a wine cellar and access to both garages. There is another outside entrance to a separate bedroom and full bath, Ms. Greeff said. Bryanston, a diverse and affluent suburb, has about 29,000 residents, as well as "excellent private schools and some amazing shopping centers," said Francois Rohlandt, a property consultant for Pam Golding Properties Gauteng who shares the listing with Ms. Greeff. This house is about six miles from the Sandton business district and five minutes from supermarkets, pharmacies, boutiques and restaurants. Central Johannesburg is about 14 miles away, or about a 30 minute drive, and O.R. Tambo International Airport is about a 35 minute drive. In recent years, South Africa has been weathering not only concerns about political corruption but also currency devaluation and a rocky economy. And those difficulties have adversely affected local residential real estate markets, particularly in the last 18 months, said Rupert Finnemore, the regional head of Pam Golding Properties in Gauteng. "Home prices are very undervalued" in Johannesburg, said Ronald Ennik, the principal of Ennik Estates, an affiliate of Christie's International Real Estate. "It's the cheapest it's been in 20 years." In northern suburbs like Hyde Park, Sandhurst, Westcliff, Bryanston, Rosebank and Sandton, Mr. Ennik said, "buyers are really few at the top end," and there is "an oversupply of stock." As Mr. Finnemore put it, "The more affordable and middle housing bands are tending to outperform the higher end, luxury segment of the market." The problems aren't entirely recent either, said Lew Geffen, the chairman of Lew Geffen Sotheby's International Realty: "The Johannesburg market has been a roller coaster since 2012." When the 2008 global recession began to ease five years ago, he said, the property market was buoyant, but that did not last. In early 2016, Mr. Geffen said, the market changed course to favor buyers over sellers, in "a reflection of the depreciation of the local currency, a loss of investor confidence as a result of a sharp decline in political leadership faith and the resultant stagnation of the national economy." At the same time, many Johannesburg homeowners moved to Cape Town, fueling its property market to the detriment of Johannesburg's, Mr. Ennik said. But in the past three or four months, with the recession over and the rand and interest rates stabilizing, he said, the market is steadying and "finally beginning to come right." A number of new commercial buildings and high rise condominiums are being built, he said, with new development fetching 30 percent more than resales of existing properties. And more inventory is coming on the market "at the correct price level," Mr. Geffen said, so it's easier to sell. But at the high end of the market, he added, people are still cautious about taking on properties that will be costly to maintain. Buyers from Africa Nigeria, Angola, Ghana, Uganda, Gabon, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Congo and Mozambique make up "an increasing proportion" of foreigners buying in the Johannesburg metropolitan area, Mr. Finnemore said. There has also been an increase in buyers from China and India, Mr. Ennik said. Those from Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, he added, typically work for multinational companies in the area. But as Mr. Geffen noted, the "percentage of foreign second home purchases is so small as to be statistically irrelevant in Johannesburg," which has mostly primary residences and investor and corporate properties. "Limitations on foreign property ownership in South Africa pertain solely to agricultural land," Mr. Geffen said. "It's relatively easy for foreigners to purchase property in urban areas." However, the maximum financing available to nonpermanent residents is 50 percent, Mr. Ennik said. Lawyers who specialize in property transfer are selected by the seller but represent both parties. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
In a small house in South London, five executives of the high end fashion retailer MatchesFashion.com sat around an oval conference table, discussing a coming event. From outside, the house looked like any sweet two story London cottage, with a cobblestone courtyard and small balcony, but inside, it was all white and open plan more Silicon Valley than Staffordshire. The topic under discussion that July day was the introduction of a new line by Luella Bartley and Katie Hillier, two hip British designers, at London Fashion Week, and how MatchesFashion.com would promote it. The conversation touched on mainstream news coverage, but it mostly covered how to attract fashion bloggers and which social media platforms to exploit. The subject of Periscope came up. "What is Periscope?" asked a sandy haired man, sitting at one end of the table. That was Tom Chapman, who, along with his wife, Ruth, a tall, graceful woman with shoulder length white hair who was sitting at the other end of the table, founded MatchesFashion 28 years ago as a single high end, multibrand boutique in Wimbledon. They were trailblazers, becoming the first such retailer in Britain to sell Prada, Versace, Ferre and Dolce Gabbana. Now Mr. and Mrs. Chapman, 52 and 53, again find themselves bushwhacking in uncharted terrain: They are among a handful of retailers in the luxury sector proactively managing the transition to online sales. These days, they are confronted as often with the rapidly shifting trends in the digital world as with the latest season's colors or silhouettes. So in 2013, they hired Mr. Jerome, a co founder of Pixmania, a consumer goods e commerce site based in Paris, with the mandate that he reshape the digital operation for the future which effectively meant reshaping the entire company. To test the Chapmans' commitment, he suggested renaming the brand, then called Matches, after its website. From there, there would be no going back. Today even the company's physical stores now bear the name "MatchesFashion.com" on their windows. If the new name is a little unwieldy, it is also a signal of the company's evolution from a local bricks and mortar retailer with a small e commerce operation into a global specialty luxury e commerce operation with a small bricks and mortar presence. This year, 85 percent of the company's projected 200 million in revenue will come from online sales. Seventy two percent of that revenue will come from overseas. This is a new look for the luxury sector, where the fight for e commerce dominance is finally heating up. This year, the two largest luxury online retailers, Net a Porter (owned by Richemont) and Yoox (listed on the Milan stock exchange), announced a merger that would mean combined sales of 1.5 billion. Those sites were built as e commerce companies, however, while MatchesFashion.com and a few other boutique sites like MyTheresa and Luisa Via Roma began as physical stores. (MatchesFashion.com has four stores in London and a private shopping townhouse, as well as the license to operate four Diane von Furstenberg stores and two Max Mara stores.) "Seven years ago," Mr. Chapman said, "if you'd asked me if we would consider going into an international market, I would have said, 'Well, that's a bit of a challenge. Maybe someday we'll have one other store somewhere.' " But in an age when consumers are accustomed to buying whatever they want on their laptops and phones, another shop, even on the most elegant boulevard, can't come close to the global reach of a shop on the web. In recognition of this reality, in July Mr. and Mrs. Chapman moved aside to become co executive chairmen, and named Mr. Jerome C.E.O. of MatchesFashion.com. A technology entrepreneur, Mr. Jerome now sits at the top of a heritage luxury retailer, managing its growth in a careful equilibrium with the guardians of its fashion sensibility. He increased the "traffic acquisition" team to 25 from three people and put them outside his office door. And while his dream to provide free food within 15 feet of every person something he had seen on a tour of Google was not exactly within the budget, he managed to provide free Coco Pops and Fruit 'n Fibre cereal near the refrigerator. The Coco Pops are not a bad symbol for how far the company's ambitions have come and how far they still have to go. MatchesFashion sells 50,000 style options by over 400 designers, and the average customer spends 430 pounds per order, about 670 compared with less than PS100 for the more mass focused British fashion e retailer Asos.com. The company ships to 176 countries, with the United States its second biggest single market after Britain. Rumors were rife in May that the Chapmans were talking to Morgan Stanley about a potential stock market listing, but Mr. Chapman and Mr. Jerome deny any plans to go public at least in the next four to five years. MatchesFashion's independence allows for a highly specific luxury identity that's not diluted to reach a more mass audience. By contrast, Yoox was founded as a high fashion off price outlet and has been called "the Amazon of the fashion world." But MatchesFashion is relatively small compared with Yoox, and as such is a potential acquisition target. (Neiman Marcus, which recently filed plans to go public, bought MyTheresa for an undisclosed sum in 2014.) Luxury brands, leery of ceding control over the interaction between consumer and brand, and convinced of the primacy of touch as a selling tool, have been slow to accept the Internet. It was only in 2012 that Kering, owner of Gucci, Alexander McQueen, Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent, among other names, formed a joint venture with the Yoox Group to build and manage the websites of several of its brands, an acknowledgment that they did not have the necessary in house expertise. Chanel announced it was exploring the idea of selling its handbags online for the first time just this spring. But as luxury companies are increasingly forced to acknowledge e commerce as a driver of sales it is projected to grow 20 to 25 percent over the next five years, according to the Boston Consulting Group, while the industry as a whole is growing at only 3 to 4 percent a year digital transformation, still relatively rare in fashion, is going to become more common. Mr. Chapman's corner office may be next to Mr. Jerome's, but instead of screens on his walls, he has framed photographs of circus performers by the artist Abigail Lane originally commissioned as an installation for the opening of MatchesFashion's Marylebone store in 2007. Next to a small round meeting table is a large exercise ball. "I have trouble sitting still," he said. "It helps to bounce a bit." Mr. Jerome, who ricochets around the office from meeting to meeting like a caffeinated pool ball, has the same trouble. It is one of the few obvious qualities they share. Mr. Chapman grew up in Wimbledon, Mr. Jerome in Paris. Mr. Chapman's style tends toward luxe casual Friday relaxed trousers, V neck sweaters while Mr. Jerome wears sharp suits, pressed white shirts and often Tod's loafers with no socks (though both favor Lanvin). Mr. Jerome has a folder labeled "competition" on his iPhone browser with rival websites that he checks obsessively; Mr. Chapman is frequently scanning art auction sites on his device. Yet together they have created a new in house vernacular. Craftsmen, in MatchesFashion lingo, include software developers, as well as those who cut leather or stitch seams. This is a way of acknowledging, Mr. Chapman said, that technology is not about just facilitating, but creating. In November 2012, Scottish Equity Partners and Highland Capital Partners Europe became the first outside investors in the company, buying a 25 percent stake. (The remaining shares in the company are owned by the Chapman family and the management committee.) These changes have not always gone over easily. "It's been complicated," Mr. Chapman said. "On the one hand, people who have been with us for 20 years are suddenly put in what is effectively a start up environment, while people just coming in are having to adjust to a very particular culture, because I don't believe in formula. And while we take data seriously, I also want my buyers to have the freedom to challenge it." "But I think we really had a breakthrough," he said, "when we realized that our actual stores were more like marketing, and the business was e commerce." To succeed in luxury online commerce means creating a luxurious virtual experience. At MatchesFashion, an entire building is devoted to a photo studio/styling area where products come in, are measured and are then remeasured in multiple ways in an effort to reduce returns. The items are photographed and the images uploaded onto the minimally elegant shopping site. About 300 new products are added to the site every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, a total of up to 1,000 a week. Next day delivery to Europe and two day delivery to the East Coast of the United States are possible thanks to a special arrangement with DHL. Each morning at 9:45 a "Just In" email goes out to registered users about new products. But 8:30 would be better, Mr. Jerome said. "You can capture so much business simply through speed." In order to cut down on order time even further, a SWAT buying team goes to shows in Paris and Milan, picks pieces and photographs them on the spot; the pictures are then uploaded for preorder. "It works very well," Mr. Jerome said. "It cuts down the speed to upload by 10 days." Mr. Jerome is a little obsessive about upload time. He has members of his tech team do opposition research by calling other fashion websites, pretending to be customers, and asking innocently when they upload items. "Most of them have no idea," he said. "They say, 'We do it when it comes in.'" The risk, of course, is that MatchesFashion tilts too far in one direction that luxury retailing, a business built on relationships with designers and customers, becomes simply about numbers (Mr. Jerome talks more about "feeling the numbers" than, say, "feeling the fabric") and loses the vision that links the identity of a brand to the identity of the people who shop there. "The opportunity to define digital leadership in luxury has yet to be realized," said William Hutchings, chief European luxury goods analyst for Goldman Sachs. Whether all the changes MatchesFashion has undergone have effectively positioned it to seize the moment is the question. "I've always looked at the business in phases," Mr. Chapman said. "The first phase was the stores. The second was when we took on investors. The third was appointing Ulric chief executive. But if there's one thing the last few years have taught me, it's that where that takes us, I don't know." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Kudos to The Times for breaking this story. With Election Day five weeks away, the American people now have the vital information that President Trump has been hiding for years and can judge accordingly as to his fitness for office. There's an even larger story here, however. Donald Trump isn't the only wealthy American who has played our tax system. I hope that this investigation will continue and expand to include a comprehensive review of a tax code that benefits rich people and profitable companies at the expense of ordinary citizens ordinary citizens who work hard and pay their taxes yet are constantly told that cuts in public programs and services must be made because the federal government "can't afford them." It's hard to know which is the most disturbing aspect of these revelations: the ability of the wealthy to exploit the tax code, President Trump's interest in enriching himself and his family at the expense of others, or the certainty that his congressional supporters will continue to cheer him on regardless of their past declarations of him as a fraud and a cheat. Although I am heartened by the free and independent news media that has exposed the president's mendacity and selfishness, we should all remain concerned that the president may be willing to pull any lever to retain the office of the president and hold off continued examination of his finances. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
If the red carpet parade and weird outfits at the Grammys left you with a bit of a fashion hangover, well, too bad. The fifth day of New York Fashion Week was one of its busiest, packed to the brim with shows from industry heavy hitters, including Carolina Herrera and Oscar de la Renta. The two American houses were involved in a lawsuit late last year after Carolina Herrera's former creative director, Laura Kim, left the label for Oscar de la Renta less than a year after departing from Oscar de la Renta in the first place. Mrs. Herrera's company asserted that Ms. Kim's quick move was a breach of her noncompete contract, and demanded that she immediately cease working on her fall 2017 collection for Oscar de la Renta. Oscar de la Renta fired back, accusing Carolina Herrera of poaching its employees. Alas, the two labels settled in early January, allowing Ms. Kim and her creative partner, Fernando Garcia, to complete work on the collection they showed this evening. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. The hosts pounced on President Trump's response to criticism of his Wednesday rally in North Carolina, where people in the crowd chanted "send her back" referring to Ilhan Omar, the Somali born congresswoman from Minnesota. Trump later claimed he'd tried to stop the chant; the hosts raised their eyebrows at that, as well as his remark at the rally that he had "nothing to do." "He started the rally saying he had plenty of time because he had 'nothing to do.' That might be the first factual statement he's made since becoming president." JIMMY KIMMEL "Nothing to do? The guy is president of the United States and he sounds like your buddy who just got laid off. 'Where's the party at, bro? It's Tuesday morning and I've got nothing to do!'" TREVOR NOAH "Nothing! Like Trump acts like all the country's problems have been solved. I bet you somewhere in Texas there's a border agent handling a crisis like dealing with the kids and he's like, 'Really? There's nothing you could be working on now?'" TREVOR NOAH " As Trump That's right: The only thing on my to do list was 'be racist' and I checked that one off on Sunday, so we're all in the clear." STEPHEN COLBERT During his speech, Trump referred to another progressive congresswoman, Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, as just "Cortez," because he said he didn't have time to say her full name. "Man, you literally just told us you had nothing to do! As Trump 'I have more time than anyone! I got nothing to do!' 'Can you say this congresswoman's full name?' 'Whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't have time for that. You think these crazy tweets write themselves?'" TREVOR NOAH " As Trump It takes too much time to say three names. Time I could be spending with my dear friends Mohammed bin Salman, Kim Jong un and KFC." STEPHEN COLBERT "I wonder if he uses that excuse with his kids. As Trump 'I can't remember three different names!'" SETH MEYERS "Yeah, first it was 'Lock her up!' Now it's 'Send her back!' At this point, it's like a racist Bop It. It's like 'Tweet her. Block her. Sue her. Mute her. Deport her.'" JIMMY FALLON, referring to a children's toy from the 1990s "This is one of the most vile spectacles in modern political history, a defining moment for our country, and any Republican who doesn't immediately condemn it should see how it will look in the history textbook years from now. Because there will absolutely be a section on this, and it will absolutely name everyone complicit in it, and they will absolutely use the worst photo of you they can possibly find." SETH MEYERS "He's trying to distance himself from something he created. That's the same thing he did with Eric and Don Jr." JIMMY FALLON "And if you do love America, you want it to be as great as it can possibly be. Does that mean you have to love every single thing about it? Obviously not, because if that was true, all these people screaming 'love it or leave it' would have left when Obama was the president. Or when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage. Or for that matter when they made a lady 'Ghostbusters.' They would have all gotten on their Ninas, Pintas and Santa Marias." JIMMY KIMMEL | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
This is the rule that was meant to seem weird in 2020. Before the four month shutdown, plus size playoffs, cardboard cutouts, phantom runners, neutral sites and so on, the three batter minimum was the radical change for this season. The purpose was mostly to limit tedious pitching changes by requiring each pitcher to finish an inning or face at least three batters. The rule was approved before the pandemic, which means it is here for the postseason, too. In Game 1 of the American League Championship Series on Sunday, we saw the wisdom behind it. Not that Kevin Cash would agree. Cash, the Tampa Bay Rays' manager, has little use for a gimmick that limits his options. "I wasn't thrilled with it; I don't know if I have changed my mind or not," Cash said late Sunday night. "Ideally, you recognize it, you get used to it; we had a little bit of spring and 60 games to prepare for it. And sometimes you're going to get pinned in there, pinned in those situations that make you a little uncomfortable." Cash felt that way in the eighth inning of the Rays' 2 1 victory over the Houston Astros in San Diego. Two of his best relievers Nick Anderson and Pete Fairbanks were unavailable after combining for 14 outs in Friday's division series clincher against the Yankees. The middle of the order was coming up, and three pitchers had already worked. Diego Castillo, who had closed out the Yankees on Friday, had promised to be ready for the end of Game 1. But what to do about the eighth? The Astros had the left handed Michael Brantley due up, followed by the right handers Alex Bregman and Carlos Correa. Cash went with a left hander, Aaron Loup, who had not pitched in 10 days. The Rays have few players like Loup, who has eight full years in the majors, enough service time to command a high salary. But Loup, 32, is a Rays kind of player, flawed but fixable at a good price. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. Loup had bounced among three teams over the previous two seasons, missing almost all of 2019 with an elbow injury. The Rays signed him just before spring training for 1.65 million, and he proved to be healthy and effective. Cash did not use Loup at all against the Yankees. Yet there he was, pressed into a critical spot, mandated to face at least three dangerous hitters and on his very first pitch, he drilled Brantley on the backside with a fastball. "I figured Loupy was fresh," Cash said. "He just comes out and first pitch, didn't have his bearings straight. Ideally you don't hit the first left hander you see." For fans with long memories, the pitch evoked perhaps the greatest A.L.C.S. game of all the fifth game in 1986 between the California Angels and the Boston Red Sox. One out from the World Series with a one run lead in the ninth, Angels Manager Gene Mauch called for a lefty, Gary Lucas, to face the left handed Rich Gedman. With Anaheim Stadium ready to burst, Lucas plunked Gedman with his first pitch. Out went Lucas as Mauch again sought an ideal matchup: a right hander, Donnie Moore, against the right handed Dave Henderson. But Moore hung a splitter, Henderson smashed it over the left field wall, and Mauch never did win a pennant. The one batter option is gone now, but strategy is not. The three batter minimum rule just gives managers a different set of variables to consider, and the decisions can be just as intriguing. While right handers historically hit him better than lefties, Loup handled both sides well this season, holding righties to a .192 average, even better than his .212 mark against lefties. He got ahead of Bregman with cutters, then blew him away with a 95 mile an hour fastball, 3 m.p.h. harder than his usual fastball. Missing the Yankees series paid off. "He's got enough velo on his fastball, certainly when he's rested," Cash said. "You saw some 94s and 95s that can really challenge any hitter." Even so, Loup didn't really have it on Sunday he followed with a wild pitch, then a walk and a single that loaded the bases for Yuli Gurriel. Cash called for Castillo, who erased it all with one pitch: a sinker that baited Gurriel into a double play grounder to second baseman Brandon Lowe. "I told Brosseau he was going to get the ground ball," catcher Mike Zunino said, referring to third baseman Mike Brosseau. "It ended up going to B Lowe, but you know with runners in scoring position, guys tend to get a little bit more aggressive. We just wanted to get something that had a better chance of getting on the ground than in the air, and luckily it worked out." Luck plays a role in every game, of course, but the Rays have much more going for them. Challenged every year by a meager payroll, their baseball operations staff consistently finds low cost talent for coaches to develop. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
PINE PLAINS, N.Y. The Mashomack Fish Game Preserve Club, a few hours' drive north of New York City, is not the natural habitat of dancers, at least not of members of New York City Ballet and the Martha Graham Dance Company. But this is where I observed them participating in the normal behavior of their species: performing live. The occasion, on Friday evening, was the premiere by BalletCollective of "Natural History," a new work by Troy Schumacher, a City Ballet soloist who has long presented his choreography through the independently run collective, which he founded in 2010. That side gig has now become more central, more necessary. City Ballet has been all digital since March and will stay that way through the fall. The same is true of the Graham troupe. If the current members of BalletCollective five from City Ballet, two from Graham were going to dance in person, they would have to find a way themselves. And, as in the example of Kaatsbaan, 15 miles from here, which has been presenting dance outdoors on the weekends since early August, planting a stage in a field upstate seems a good idea. The collective certainly discovered a lovely spot, at the edge of a pond backed by low hills. This preserve and upscale hunting club is in horse country, with stables and a polo club nearby. The area is bucolic yet cultivated. The small audience was arranged on a grassy incline above the makeshift stage, socially distanced on blankets and camp chairs or in cars, tailgate or drive in style. In the cool of the evening, as the setting sun dazzled the water, it felt like a fine setting for a civilized entertainment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
After years of fighting homophobic news coverage and working to bring about inclusion in the entertainment industry, the L.G.B.T. advocacy organization found itself losing money, scrambling to adapt to the rise of digital media and struggling to be taken seriously in Hollywood. "I was given a scary mandate," said Sarah Kate Ellis, who was named Glaad's chief executive in late 2013. "Fix it or shut it down." Determined to revive the nonprofit, Ms. Ellis pursued new donors, including the oil heiress Ariadne Getty and the Coca Cola Company. She created a "rapid response" unit to contend with online media; Glaad now advises Twitter and Facebook on content policies. And she rebuilt Glaad's credibility in Hollywood. But Glaad again finds itself at a crossroads. Success has emboldened Ms. Ellis, 47, to push the organization deeper into national politics with a gutsy and potentially historic mission: to build support for a constitutional amendment that would explicitly protect lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people from discrimination. "We are now actively working to make it part of the conversation for the presidential 2020 race," Ms. Ellis said, adding that she had been galvanized by the Trump administration's sweeping deconstruction of protections for gay and transgender Americans. But the Glaad leader is facing early skepticism from a surprising community: her own. Some gay rights leaders privately complain that the group has gone rogue. Amending the Constitution, they say, is not a realistic way to advance equality, in part because of the polarized nature of American politics. They fret that an amendment campaign could siphon resources from priorities like the Equality Act, which would add gender identity and sexual orientation to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. "I don't think that most advocates see this amendment as a promising avenue at the moment," said Naomi Goldberg, policy research director at the Movement Advancement Project, a think tank that focuses on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender parity. A recent Glaad report showed that 18 percent of studio films in 2018 included an L.G.B.T. character, up from 13 percent the previous year. Three of the four acting awards at the most recent Oscars were for gay or lesbian roles. In May, the Elton John bio musical, "Rocketman," became the first major studio movie to depict gay sex. By Glaad's estimation, 9 percent of regular characters on scripted broadcast series in 2018 were gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender an all time high. "RuPaul's Drag Race" has been a hit for 11 seasons. The CW's "Supergirl" features a transgender superhero. Disney Channel has gay characters. "Glaad has done a great job in its lane, and I wish it would stay there," said a senior official at one gay rights organization, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid "a public spat that wouldn't be beneficial to the movement." Ms. Ellis, who is as reliably upbeat and laser focused as a Reese Witherspoon character, said she understood the cynicism, but rejected it as misinformed. "We've moved from a Hollywood watchdog to a cultural change agent," she said over breakfast at the Beverly Hilton. "With that, we've expanded how we move hearts and minds to create a more accepting world for all people." She added: "We have now re established Glaad. How do we apply our momentum to a big, bold vision?" Ms. Ellis has powerful supporters in the entertainment industry, including the television mogul Greg Berlanti, whose hits include "Riverdale" and "The Flash," and Bob Greenblatt, chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment, which includes HBO. Mr. Greenblatt and Mr. Berlanti were two of the Hollywood power brokers whom Ms. Ellis invited to attend a kickoff for the group's amendment initiative in December. The event was held at a mansion in Los Angeles. Glaad staff handed out hardcover copies of the Constitution, including the 27 amendments. On the final page was Glaad's proposed amendment, which would also protect women, people of color and disabled individuals from discrimination. 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. Ms. Ellis started her pitch by citing alarming statistics. Gay and transgender people can still be legally fired from their jobs simply for their orientation in more than half the states. She said roughly 300 anti L.G.B.T. bills had been put forward in state legislatures since 2016. "Build this into your scripts," she told the Hollywood gathering. "You create culture, and we need to build awareness that we're not protected, we're not safe that we need this ultimate protection." The next morning, Ms. Ellis flew to Washington to meet with lawmakers about the amendment, which would require approval from both houses of Congress (each by a two thirds majority) and ratification by at least 38 states. "I expected some resistance, some 'you guys are out of your minds,' but our meetings on the Hill went phenomenally well," she said, noting that Glaad had hired the Raben Group, a lobbying firm, to help with the effort. "We see a path." Glaad calls it the Equality Amendment. It is different than the Equal Rights Amendment, which focuses more narrowly on gender equality and was approved by Congress in 1972; state ratification failed in 1982, although supporters have recently revived that effort. (Glaad is working with the ERA Coalition, which first brought the new amendment concept to the organization in 2016.) Glaad, formerly known as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, was founded in 1985 to fight homophobic coverage of AIDS in the news media. In time, Glaad expanded its work to advertising and entertainment. It lobbied Hallmark to remove "lesbian" from a list of banned greeting card words in 1991 and helped persuade ABC to allow the title character on "Ellen," played by Ellen DeGeneres, to come out as gay in 1997. But the organization started to get an unsavory reputation in the late 2000s. A respected Glaad leader, Joan M. Garry, had stepped down. The group seemed overly focused on somewhat tacky, fund raising awards dinners. Some studio executives viewed Glaad as a corrupt watchdog just write a big enough check and it would look the other way. "Sarah Kate knows how to work with businesses, and businesses are taking more of a stand on these issues now," said Jim Fitterling, the chief executive of Dow and a Glaad donor. (Ms. Ellis helped him come out as gay in 2014.) Glaad also changed its approach in Hollywood. Under Ms. Ellis, the group spends more time working proactively with producers. For instance, Glaad reviewed scripts, visited the set and advised on the publicity campaign for "Boy Erased," a recent Focus Features film about church supported gay conversion therapy. Netflix recently asked Glaad to advise on its "Tales of the City" mini series. Before, Glaad was mostly reactive. Ms. Ellis said Glaad had a lot more work to do in Hollywood, despite the entertainment industry's new willingness to embrace diversity. "A watchdog never goes away," she said. But she insisted that Glaad must also expand. "I'm a builder, not a maintainer," Ms. Ellis said. "Once I'm in maintenance mode, I'm not stimulated." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
CHANGSHA, China Until very recently, Hunan Province was known mainly for lip searing spicy food, smoggy cities and destitute pig farmers. Mao was born in a village on the outskirts of Changsha, the provincial capital here in south central China. Now, Changsha and two adjacent cities are emerging as a center of clean energy manufacturing. They are churning out solar panels for the American and European markets, developing new equipment to manufacture the panels and branching into turbines that generate electricity from wind. By contrast, clean energy companies in the United States and Europe are struggling. Some have started cutting jobs and moving operations to China in ventures with local partners. The booming Chinese clean energy sector, now more than a million jobs strong, is quickly coming to dominate the production of technologies essential to slowing global warming and other forms of air pollution. Such technologies are needed to assure adequate energy as the world's population grows by nearly a third, to nine billion people by the middle of the century, while oil and coal reserves dwindle. But much of China's clean energy success lies in aggressive government policies that help this crucial export industry in ways most other governments do not. These measures risk breaking international rules to which China and almost all other nations subscribe, according to some trade experts interviewed by The New York Times. A visit to one of Changsha's newest success stories offers an example of the government's methods. Hunan Sunzone Optoelectronics, a two year old company, makes solar panels and ships close to 95 percent of them to Europe. Now it is opening sales offices in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles in preparation for a push into the American market next February. To help Sunzone, the municipal government transferred to the company 22 acres of valuable urban land close to downtown at a bargain basement price. That reduced the company's costs and greatly increased its worth and attractiveness to investors. Meanwhile, a state bank is preparing to lend to the company at a low interest rate, and the provincial government is sweetening the deal by reimbursing the company for most of the interest payments, to help Sunzone double its production capacity. Heavily subsidized land and loans for an exporter like Sunzone are the rule, not the exception, for clean energy businesses in Changsha and across China, Chinese executives said in interviews over the last three months. But this kind of help violates World Trade Organization rules banning virtually all subsidies to exporters, and could be successfully challenged at the agency's tribunals in Geneva, said Charlene Barshefsky, who was the United States trade representative during the second Clinton administration and negotiated the terms of China's entry to the organization in 2001. If the country with the subsidies fails to remove them, other countries can retaliate by imposing steep tariffs on imports from that country. But multinational companies and trade associations in the clean energy business, as in many other industries, have been wary of filing trade cases, fearing Chinese officials' reputation for retaliating against joint ventures in their country and potentially denying market access to any company that takes sides against China. W.T.O. rules allow countries to subsidize goods and services in their home markets, as long as those subsidies do not discriminate against imports. But the rules prohibit export subsidies, to prevent governments from trying to help their companies gain in world markets. The W.T.O. also requires countries to declare all national, state and local subsidies every two years, so that if one country's exports surge suspiciously, other countries' trade officials can easily check to see if that product is being subsidized. But China has virtually ignored the requirement since joining the W.T.O. Contending that it is still a developing country struggling to understand its commitments, China has filed just one list of subsidies, which were in place between 2001 and 2004. And that one list covered only central government policies while omitting local or provincial subsidies. The Chinese mission to the W.T.O., which is part of China's commerce ministry, would not comment for this article. After reading questions The New York Times submitted by fax last week, mission officials declined to respond, saying that any comments might affect China's standing in other trade disputes. Sunzone and other Chinese clean energy companies also benefit from the fact that the government spends 1 billion a day intervening in the currency markets so that Chinese exports become more affordable in foreign markets. Systematic intervention in currency markets to obtain an advantage in trade violates the rules of the International Monetary Fund, of which China is a member, although the I.M.F. has little power to punish violators. Chinese wind and solar power manufacturers further benefit from the government's imposition of sharp reductions this summer in exports of raw materials, known as rare earths, that are crucial for solar panels and wind turbines. China mines almost all of the world's rare earths. W.T.O. rules ban most export restrictions. Of course, China's success in clean energy also stems from assets enjoyed by many of the nation's industries: low labor costs, expanding universities that groom lots of engineering talent, inexpensive construction and ever improving transportation and telecommunications networks. For example, engineers with freshly issued bachelor's degrees can be found here in Hunan Province for a salary of only about 2,640 a year not significantly more than blue collar workers with vocational school degrees can make. But the fuel propelling clean energy companies in China lies in advantages provided by the government, executives say. Other countries also try to help their clean energy industries, too, but not to the extent that China does and not, so far at least, to the point of potentially running afoul of W.T.O. rules. No doubt China's aggressive tactics are making clean energy more affordable. Solar panel prices have dropped by nearly half in the last two years, and wind turbine prices have fallen by a quarter partly because of the global financial crisis but mainly because of China's rapid expansion in these sectors and the accompanying economies of scale. Large Chinese wind turbines now sell for about 685,000 per megawatt of capacity, while Western wind turbines cost 850,000 a megawatt. The question is whether China is building this industry in ways that are unfair to overseas competitors and make other nations overly dependent on a Chinese industry whose approach to the business may not be economically or politically sustainable. Because China's clean energy industry has relied so heavily on land deals and cheap state supported loans, the industry could be vulnerable if China's real estate bubble bursts, or if the banks' loose lending creates financial problems of the sort that have plagued Western financial markets in recent years. Other countries may also become less enthusiastic about subsidizing renewable energy if it means importing more goods from China instead of creating jobs at home. The rapid rise of China's solar and wind industries illuminates how the government helps many export industries, as well as the challenges for the West now that the country has emerged as the world's second largest economy, surpassing Japan and gradually gaining on the United States. Barely a player in the solar industry five years ago, China is on track to produce more than half the world's solar panels this year. More than 95 percent of them will be exported to countries like the United States and Germany that offer generous subsidies for consumers who buy solar panels. By contrast, the Chinese government has relatively modest solar subsidies for its citizens. Instead it has devoted more money to helping manufacturers, allowing them to cash in on other countries' consumer subsidy programs. China is also on track to make nearly half of the world's wind turbines this year. China offers financial incentives for utilities to use wind power, which is less costly than solar power, and the country passed the United States last year as the world's largest wind turbine market. Government subsidized turbine makers are now preparing for large scale exports to the United States and Europe, which could also result in violations of W.T.O. rules. Meanwhile, China itself imports virtually no wind turbines or solar panels, instead protecting those developing industries. For example, China until late last year required that 70 percent of the content of each wind turbine and 80 percent of the content of each solar panel be made within China. China quietly dropped that rule after objections from American officials, but also because its own industries had become the world's largest, lowest cost producers. Now China strongly opposes suggestions in Congress that the United States or Europe follow China's example and impose "local content" rules to help their own struggling renewable energy industries. "Now if the U.S. sets up that kind of regulation, it will really be a problem" said Li Junfeng, a senior Chinese energy policy maker. "We need to buy from each other." China's expansion has been traumatic for American and European solar power manufacturers, and Western wind turbine makers are now bracing to compete with low cost Chinese exports. This year, BP shut down its solar panel manufacturing in Frederick, Md., and in Spain, and laid off most of the employees while expanding a joint venture in China. Evergreen Solar of Marlboro, Mass., plans to move the final manufacturing steps for its solar panels from Devens, Mass., to China next summer, eliminating 300 American jobs, after struggling to borrow money in the United States and after finding that costs in China were lower. The Obama administration has begun high level discussions on how to respond to China's industrial policies, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said in an interview in Washington in July. "We are concerned about the depth and breadth of the measures they have taken," Mr. Geithner said, later adding, "We will be aggressive on the trade front in terms of fighting anything that is clearly discriminatory." Here in Changsha, Sunzone's general manager and chief engineer, Zhao Feng, represents a new breed of Chinese clean energy entrepreneurs. Tall and fit, he is an avid painter, fisherman and golfer. "If I go to Los Angeles for 10 days, I am on a golf course for eight days," he said. A former professor of semiconductors at Hunan University, he has a daughter studying for a doctorate in bioengineering at the University of Chicago on a Pentagon grant, and he owns a house in Chicago a block from President Obama's. Mr. Zhao is quick to point out that state and federal governments in the United States have also encouraged the development of the clean energy industry. "Our provincial governor has come several times to our plant, just as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has made several visits to solar power companies" in California, he said. But the Hunan government's backing of Sunzone is much more extensive than anything in the United States. With government help, Sunzone lined up financing and received all the permits necessary to build a factory in just three months under an expedited approval system for clean energy businesses. It took only eight more months to build and equip the factory. "The construction teams worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week in three shifts," Mr. Zhao said. Building and equipping a solar panel factory in the United States takes 14 to 16 months, and getting environmental and other permits can take years, said Tom Zarrella, the former chief executive of GT Solar in Merrimack, N.H., a big supplier of solar manufacturing equipment to factories in the United States and China. A strong symbol of the government's commitment to the clean energy industry in China may be Sunzone's walled 22 acre compound here. The company has only 360 employees, who work in a modest two story building and small factory. Many of them live in a six story dormitory. The compound also has a demonstration house powered by solar panels. But the government has granted Sunzone enough cheap land to make room for an orchard of orange trees, a nearly finished golf driving range and winding country lanes all of it across the street from 17 story apartment buildings near the heart of downtown Changsha. A lone trellis covered swing that sits on Sunzone's vast plot seems to signal how little occupied the land is. As a clean energy business, Sunzone was allowed to buy the land two years ago for 90,000 an acre, Mr. Zhao said. That was one third of the official price then for industrial land from the government. Industrial land in this desirable neighborhood now sells for 720,000 an acre, giving Sunzone an eightfold profit on paper. The company carries the land on its books at this market price, and can borrow against it, Mr. Zhao said. The valuable land also means the company has big assets and little debt on its balance sheet, which should help attract investors for a planned initial public offering in 2012. Executives at three other clean energy companies in and around Changsha said they, too, had been allowed to buy government land for a third of the regulated price. Mr. Zhao defended the size of his corporate park as necessary for his business and said it was not a real estate investment. The driving range will be made available to all employees for their relaxation, he said. And he said Sunzone hoped to build a nine story solar research center on part of its land someday. The local government of Zhuzhou, a city near Changsha, is even more generous. "For really good projects, we can give them the land for free," said He Jianbo, the deputy director of the city's flourishing high tech zone, which already makes everything from electric buses to solar panels, and is preparing to build electric cars. "This land subsidy is not available to traditional industries, only high tech industries." Many state and local governments in the United States have also built roads, installed power lines and made other infrastructure improvements that have increased the value of private land as part of programs to attract clean energy. Tax holidays for such businesses are common in the United States, as in China. But according to Commerce Department experts in Washington, government agencies in the United States have generally refrained from the sale of deeply discounted government land to export industries, while infrastructure improvements have been made to benefit all road and telecommunications users, not just specific export industries. A wide range of international trade agreements, including W.T.O. rules, allow governments to provide infrastructure and some types of tax breaks, but bar subsidies in the form of cheap transfers of valuable government assets like land to exporters. But the American clean energy programs carry many time consuming and difficult requirements. Companies must show they can repay loans and have innovative technology. The department has given conditional approval to 18 renewable energy loan guarantees, although only four have led to the actual issuance of loans so far. But the administration is moving quickly to accelerate the process, said Jonathan Silver, the executive director of the Energy Department's loan guarantee program. China has been pumping loans into clean energy so rapidly that even 23 billion in credit offered by the China Development Bank to three solar panel exporters and a wind turbine maker since April has barely raised eyebrows. China Development Bank, owned by the government, exists to lend money for strategic priorities. Western clean energy companies complain of much higher financing costs when they can raise money at all. Banks have been cautious about the sector, which leans heavily on venture capitalists and private equity firms that demand implicit interest rates of up to 9 percent right now in the United States, said Thomas Maslin, a senior solar analyst at IHS Emerging Energy Research. Evergreen Solar, the Massachusetts company, struggled for three years to raise money in the States, but had no trouble doing so in China. Chinese state banks were happy to lend most of the money for the factory on very attractive terms, like a five year loan with no payments of interest or principal until the end of the loan, said Michael El Hillow, the company's chief financial officer. "You can't get a penny in the United States, it doesn't matter who you call banks, government. It's awful," he said. "Therein lies the hidden advantage of being in China." Many Chinese clean energy executives argue that China should offer more subsidies for its own people to buy renewable energy, in addition to helping export oriented manufacturers. But until domestic demand takes off, government support will remain crucial. "Who wins this clean energy race," Mr. Zhao of Sunzone said, "really depends on how much support the government gives." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Rooks, a host at Bleacher Report, said being a Black woman in sports journalism has its challenges, but her approach capturing players' full humanity gives her an edge. Marc Stein is on a brief hiatus after spending 54 days inside the bubble. Shauntel Lowe, N.B.A. editor for The New York Times, is filling in this week. Sign up to receive his newsletter each week by clicking here. Taylor Rooks has been praised by her industry peers and sports fans alike for conducting some of the N.B.A. season's most impactful interviews inside the league's bubble at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla. She asked Orlando's Jonathan Isaac, who is Black, if Black lives matter to him after he did not wear the N.B.A.'s Black Lives Matter T shirt during a pregame warm up, as every other player did. She asked Chris Paul, the president of the players' union, what has to happen before the players can call their push for social justice a success. She spoke to The New York Times about reporting from the bubble and the challenges of being a Black woman in a sports journalism industry that is mostly white and mostly male. This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. What were your most meaningful interviews? Fred VanVleet always comes to mind because I talked to Fred right after everyone saw the video of Jacob Blake, George Floyd. He wasn't taking basketball questions. He was very visibly emotional. And what he saw was visibly weighing on him. And he had a bunch of mics in his face, bunch of cameras in his face, and everybody was like: "OK, are you guys going to play? What are you going to do?" But when they got to me I just asked him how he was doing. I was just like, mentally, how are you? And he just gave this long, two minute answer about how this has affected him mentally, how it brings up really old wounds, how it makes him think about when his dad was shot and killed. He said he was going through a really hard time in this bubble. And I was like, I bet you nobody has just asked him how he was. And as a Black person, I know that when you see those videos, you're not doing well. How do you approach interviews and source building so that you are able to get candid responses? When I'm interviewing people, they understand that I am asking questions to understand. I'm not asking questions to criticize or judge. So from that and through time you're like, she is trying to just make sure that my voice is heard and she's telling the story in the right way. I think being Black in this space does have certain advantages because I think the players look at me and there's a level of relatability and there's a level of understanding. I think players trust me. I have been doing this for quite some time, so a lot of these players I have known for years. I have known Kevin Durant since I was 19. I've known Jayson Tatum since he was 15. I've known CJ McCollum and Damian Lillard for seven years at this point. There really is a friendship there and there is a trust level there that has definitely helped. And when I'm interviewing, I really do try to talk to everybody the exact same. I interview people as if I'm talking to my best friend. I think that makes them feel comfortable as well. Since you describe these as friendships, do you think that has ever compromised or could compromise your ability to ask those tough questions? When I interviewed DeMar DeRozan, I had asked DeMar, essentially, the idea is that the Raptors were able to get to the championship with Kawhi and not you. I mean, that's a tough thing to have to say to somebody, right? I really feel like when I'm interviewing someone, whether they're my friend or not, I ask the question that has to be asked. I might be more inclined to ask them because they're my friend. I might know that I'll be able to elicit a response because it's coming from a place of understanding. But there is genuinely no question I will not ask. Taylor Rooks has been with Bleacher Report since 2018. She hosts an interview show and a live Twitter show and makes appearances on TNT. How do you approach your fun interviews, and why did you make a point of doing them amid all the other things that were going on? Black people are sad, and they're frustrated, and they're mad, and they're tired. But we're other things too. We are resilient people. We are fun, and funny. And creative. And happy. And you have to show the full experience. And most importantly, we need a break sometimes! You said Black women have to do special things just to be in spaces like sports journalism. You also constantly deal with harassment, especially sexually harassment, online. But you said you're "built for this." What do you mean by that? I'll be dragged into something just for simply existing. Like imagine your mere existence being hypersexualized. Imagine people not listening to what you say because they are so focused on how you look. It's like, yes, I'm Black. Yes, I'm a woman. Yes, I am full figured. Those are facts. But who cares? If you want some more facts, I also have my own show. I'm also a journalist. I'm also an executive producer. I'm also Emmy nominated. I've also been on live television since I was 19 years old, and I'm still here. I am hard bodied. I am 10 toes down, always, and you're never going to break me. People always say, "Oh, well, you signed up for this." How do you sign up to be harassed? How do you sign up to be dehumanized? We should teach everyone how to respect instead of just teaching women how to deal with being disrespected. And I hate that we continue to just put that burden on the women because men don't know how to be grown ups. Recently, Jemele Hill and Cari Champion two Black women you admire were on "Good Morning America" and they made a point of thanking Robin Roberts for her contributions to journalism. Who has influenced you? What advice have they given you? There is no me without Jemele. There is no me without Cari or Robin Roberts or Pam Oliver. Cari always is just saying: "Bet on yourself. You believe in your ability. Let that ability guide you." I was trying to decide a couple of years ago if I was even going to move to New York. I was at the Big Ten Network. I was comfortable in that role. They would've let me stay there, but I wanted to grow, and I wanted to try something new, and I wanted to really use my voice in a bigger way. But I was also nervous. But Cari was like, you have to bet on you. And that's the thing, I try to use that to guide all of my decisions now. If you believe in yourself and the ability that you have, then nothing is going to be too big for you, and no career move is going to be too much for you. Lonzo Ball was with the Los Angeles Lakers for two seasons, averaging 10 points, 6.4 assists and 6.2 rebounds per game before he was traded to the New Orleans Pelicans last summer as part of the deal for Anthony Davis. Malika Andrews of ESPN reported on Monday that Ball, 22, had signed with a new agent: Rich Paul of Klutch Sports. Ball, drafted No. 2 over all by the Lakers in 2017, was the Lakers' first U.C.L.A. pick since guard Jordan Farmar in 2006. Farmar spent five seasons with the Lakers across two stints with the team, winning championships in the 2008 9 and 2009 10 seasons. He also played internationally for Maccabi Tel Aviv, based in Israel. Farmar was joined on the Lakers by another former Bruin: Trevor Ariza. After bouncing between Eastern and Western Conference teams over the past several years, Ariza landed with Portland for 21 games this season. He shot 40 percent from 3 point range (34 of 85) before opting out of the restart for personal reasons. The N.B.A. players Russell Westbrook, Kevin Love, Darren Collison and Luc Richard Mbah a Moute were teammates on the 2007 8 U.C.L.A. team that was the No. 1 seed in the N.C.A.A. tournament's West region. They lost to Memphis in the Final Four, but the Tigers' season was later vacated. Kareem Abdul Jabbar won three consecutive championships under Coach John Wooden at U.C.L.A. He was the No. 1 overall pick in the 1969 draft (Milwaukee Bucks) and spent 20 seasons in the N.B.A., most of which (14) were with the Lakers. He is No. 1 on the N.B.A.'s career scoring list with 38,387 points. Hit me up anytime on Twitter ( TheSteinLine) or Facebook ( MarcSteinNBA) or Instagram ( thesteinline). Send any other feedback to marcstein newsletter nytimes.com. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Slate, the online publication known for counterintuitive analysis and its many podcasts, has chosen a specialist in narrative journalism as its next editor in chief. On Wednesday, the company announced that it had given the job to Jared Hohlt, a veteran of New York magazine. He succeeds Julia Turner, who left Slate in October to become a deputy managing editor of The Los Angeles Times. Lowen Liu, formerly Slate's managing editor and deputy editor, has served as the publications's acting editor in chief since Ms. Turner's departure. Mr. Hohlt, 47, is scheduled to start April 1. During his 18 years at New York, he served in a variety of roles, including editorial director and top editor of the print version of the magazine. In 2016, the magazine won in the general excellence category at the National Magazine Awards. For most of his time at New York, he worked under the editor in chief Adam Moss, who announced his resignation in January after a 15 year run. Mr. Hohlt got his start at Slate as an editorial assistant two decades ago, when, he recalled in an interview, at least one contributor insisted on using a typewriter. "It was a journalistic training ground for me," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Wall Street is hopeful that American companies, after years of gaining ground at the expense of their employees, will start to succeed because of the rising fortune of those workers. Less than a week since the Dow Jones industrial average hit its all time high, the broader Standard Poor's 500 stock index is on track to surpass its own 2007 high. The reason, in no small part, is because of investor confidence in the growing economic strength of American households. This is a shift from the last few years, when stocks and corporate profits soared primarily because of cost cutting and increased productivity from a shrinking or slow growing work force. The Federal Reserve's stimulus programs helped corporate America, but they did little to help improve the lives of most American workers, whose wages declined while unemployment remained stuck at high levels. A surprisingly good employment report on Friday was the strongest of a number of recent indicators that the benefits of the Fed's program are now starting to trickle down to ordinary Americans, who should, in turn, push up sales at American companies. In addition to brisk job growth in recent months, the February employment report gave some of the first evidence of a sustained upturn in wages, and showed that it was spread across many industries. The improving job market could falter, particularly if cutbacks in government spending mandated by the so called sequester take a substantial bite out of economic growth. But even a more modest upturn comes not a moment too soon for American companies. Growth in corporate profits has slowed in recent quarters as the earlier gains from productivity and cost cutting reached their limits. Many strategists are now seeing signs that the slowdown in expense reduction the so called bottom line is being made up for by top line growth in revenues from reviving American consumers. "You can only cut and cut and cut for so long, eventually you have to have growth," said Paul Hickey, a founder of the Bespoke Investment Group. "Now we're starting to see some signs that is happening." In the fourth quarter, American companies experienced the biggest increase in sales per share of any quarter since the financial crisis, according to figures from RBS Securities. In announcing their most recent financial results, many executives spoke about the boost they have gotten from American customers, and the money they are putting back into the pockets of their own employees. Daniel S. Fulton, the chief executive of Weyerhaeuser Company, a timber company, told investors in January, "Most of the hiring that we have done in the company has been production employees that we've been putting back to work, in order to be able to ramp up and respond to the increased opportunities for wood products." The improving prospects for corporate revenues are encouragement to hesitant investors who have been wondering whether to get back into the stock market but worried that the current rally could already be reaching its peak. After six straight days of gains, the S. P. 500 closed Friday just 14 points, or 0.9 percent, from the record high of 1,565.15 it hit in October 2007. Factoring in inflation, however, the index is still far from earlier peaks, as is the Dow. The sequestration's automatic spending cuts have not yet appeared in economic data and there are fears it could exert a future drag on the economic recovery. But Friday's employment report showing a gain of 236,000 jobs and a dip in the jobless rate to 7.7 percent suggested that American businesses have largely shrugged off the 2 percentage point increase in the payroll tax that was expected to inflict more pain. 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. Even if corporate revenues climb further, it won't necessarily lead to rising share prices. Investors have already factored the optimistic economic signs while making their investments. What's more, skeptical strategists say there are significant threats ahead for both consumers and corporations. The basic fear in trading circles is that the economic recovery will not be able to survive the Fed's ending its bond buying programs. When the Fed does step back from its support for the market, it is expected to send up interest rates, which could dampen lending and the housing market. "How do you wean an economy off of this easy money policy, which was never meant to be as protracted as it has become?" said Edward Marrinan, the head of macro credit strategy at RBS Securities. But the Fed has so far been adamant that it will maintain its support for the economy at least until the unemployment rate drops to 6.5 percent. The trajectory the economy has been following is what Fed officials broadly projected when they began giant purchases of bonds in 2008. The money was expected first to shore up the balance sheets of the banks and then help push up the stock portfolios of higher income Americans. But lower interest rates were also expected eventually to lift the housing market, and then corporate investment in new employees. Data released in recent weeks suggest both are happening. A number of Wall Street economists responded to the February jobs data by increasing their projection for economic growth this year. Goldman Sachs raised its estimate to 2.6 percent from 2.2 percent, while the bond guru William H. Gross went further and doubled his firm's previous projection to 3 percent in an interview with Bloomberg Radio. The Ford Motor Company is one of many that came into the year facing expectations that its revenues would stagnate as a result of a recession in Europe and budget fights in Washington. The company did show declines in its European sales, but it surprised analysts by reporting a 5.5 percent increase in revenue in the fourth quarter compared with a year earlier. In January and February, the company's sales have continued to be better than expected. Ford executives have shown their confidence by announcing a new hiring push, including 450 jobs at a plant in Ohio. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Tips for dodging the virus as Americans retreat from colder weather: Open the windows, buy an air filter and forget the UV lights. How to Keep the Coronavirus at Bay Indoors As the autumn chill ushers people back into homes, classrooms and offices, the coronavirus may resurge even in states that have so far restrained its spread. Why? The virus poses a greater threat in crowded indoor spaces than it does outdoors. Southern states, for example, saw a spike in infections when the temperatures soared this summer, prompting people to remain inside with the air conditioners humming. "I'm a little concerned we're going to see that shift to the northern latitudes as the weather gets cold," said Linsey Marr of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, who studies how viruses move through the air. This summer, scientists isolated live virus from tiny droplets called aerosols floating in the air as far as 16 feet from an infected patient in a hospital. Unless you are living with an infected person in which case the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers specific guidelines to follow protecting yourself at home does not particularly require extraordinary measures, Dr. Marr said. And when you venture elsewhere, wearing a face covering and washing your hands are still the best ways to protect yourself indoors. But fear of the risk of transmission indoors has fueled a market for expensive devices that promise to scrub surfaces and even the air clean of the virus. But most of those products are overkill and may even have unintended harmful consequences, experts warned. "Anything that sounds fancy and isn't tried and true those are all things to avoid," said Delphine Farmer, an atmospheric chemist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. "Soap and water work beautifully." We asked experts which strategies people should embrace, and which ones to avoid, as the weather cools. It's not just about ventilation. Some school districts have focused on virus proofing their ventilation systems, and the C.D.C. has produced an exhaustive set of recommendations for businesses trying to keep employees from becoming infected with the virus. But "the conversation on risk reduction is beyond ventilation," said Joseph Allen, an expert on building safety at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "It's a layered defense approach where no one strategy in and of itself is sufficient, but collectively they can reduce risk." None Eliminate exposure whenever possible for example, by encouraging staff to work from home; None Permit entry only to those who need to be present in the building; None Manage the flow of people going through the building for example, the number of those in elevators at a time; None Require the use of face coverings and other personal protective equipment as appropriate indoors. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created an app to determine how many people can safely congregate in a given space and for how long. But regardless of these precautions, the optimal strategy is simply to wear a mask indoors, said Martin Bazant, a chemical engineer at the M.I.T., adding, "That's a much bigger effect than any of those strategies would provide." Simple solutions to try now. Here's one that's easy and free: If possible, open your windows, "especially during the shoulder season when the conditions are more mild," Dr. Allen said. Schools are required to have enough ventilation to fully exchange the air in a room every 20 minutes, but most barely manage to do so once every hour. "Even just opening windows six inches can dramatically change the air exchange rate," Dr. Allen said. The trick is useful for car travel, too. Just cracking open a window a little can help disperse any coronavirus that may be exhaled by other riders. Oscillating fans can be helpful or harmful indoors, depending on how they're used. Ideally, they should not be placed in any spot where they might push virus laden exhalations from an infected person around a room or into another occupant's face. A non oscillating fan placed in a window and away from people may increase the airflow in a room without these risks. If you are in a building with a mechanical ventilator, adjusting the damper settings can increase the amount of fresh air that circulates. Of course, this may not be desirable if the air outdoors is heavy with smoke and soot, as is often the case in big cities and, recently, on the West Coast. If the air is polluted, or if there aren't any windows to open, then air filters even portable ones may be the answer. They can rid the air of the coronavirus. Based on his years of experience investigating disease outbreaks in school and office buildings, "there was never a building we couldn't turn into a healthy building," Dr. Allen said. "There's always something you can do." Basic air filters are often the best. HEPA, MERV, HVAC: Conversations about air systems can devolve into an alphabet soup of acronyms. Relax and take a deep breath: Even the most stripped down devices can help bring down the microbial burden in the air. For a classroom or office, a portable air cleaner suited to the room's size "is a great low cost plug and play strategy to give you several air changes per hour of clean air," Dr. Allen said. These are compact devices that can be plugged into any outlet; effective models are available for less than 200. Some people mistakenly think that the average air filter, portable or part of a larger system, is no match for the microscopic virus. But "the virus is not naked in the air," Dr. Marr said. "It comes out in respiratory droplets." Even if all of the water in a droplet evaporates, salts and proteins traveling with the virus keep the droplet's size at a half micron or larger. That's big enough for an air filter to catch. "We don't need to worry about filtering out anything as small as a virus," Dr. Marr said. A.S.H.R.A.E., a professional society that sets standards for such devices, recommends air filters that qualify as MERV 13 or higher to filter out the coronavirus. Not all ventilation systems can handle a MERV 13 filter, Dr. Marr said, but most can at least handle MERV 11, which can keep out 60 percent of viral droplets. HEPA filters are also generally considered to be excellent, although some experts said the research on the extent of their effectiveness was limited. The best way to clean the air in a room is to replace it with air from outside or run through an air filter. But some air filters offer features that experts referred to as "gimmicks" useless at best, and dangerous at worst. So called exotic cleaners are not regulated by any federal agency, but they have been aggressively marketed to schools and businesses, Dr. Farmer, the atmospheric chemist, said. "There's a lot of potential for damaging side effects," she said. Some devices generate ozone yes, that ozone, a respiratory hazard while others produce dangerous hydroxyl radicals that may injure cells. There are products that claim to rely on "bipolar ionization" to break down the coronavirus, but they may also produce ultrafine particles that are dangerous when inhaled. Working with the coronavirus requires rare high safety laboratories, so a vast majority of these marketing claims are based on research with other viruses. Those studies were mostly funded by the manufacturers themselves, and they are not vetted by independent experts or by regulatory agencies. Some businesses, including dentists' offices, are fumigating their premises with bleach or hydrogen peroxide. But chemical sprays that "clean" the air would need to be so concentrated that they would also be toxic to people, experts warned. So which products can you trust? The experts' advice: Avoid all of them. "We don't need these gimmicks," said Brent Stephens, an indoor air quality expert at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. "I've got an air cleaner here that we use, and it has a weird little ultraviolet light on it. But I don't really trust it. I just turn it off and use it as a way to move air through the filter." Ultraviolet lights are a step too far. But unless the humidifier can maintain the space at precisely 40 percent to 60 percent humidity which would require an overhaul of most building systems it's unlikely to be useful, experts said. On the other hand, the kind of simple humidifier that people use at home might keep your nasal passages moist enough to mitigate some risk at an individual level. "Everybody is inundated right now with the shiny new solutions that are being sold to them," Dr. Allen said. "And the reality is, it's a time for the basics." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
From left: Theories swirl around the mysterious metal monolith found in southeastern Utah by state employees. David Zwirner said it seems nearly identical to "Fair," 2011, by John McCracken, a stainless steel monolith now on view at the Zwirner gallery on West 20th Street in Manhattan. Some cheekily wondered if it was planted there by aliens. Others thought it might be a tribute to the monolith in "2001: A Space Odyssey." But the most tantalizing speculation was that it might be the work of John McCracken, a Minimalist sculptor with an affinity for science fiction who died in 2011. The David Zwirner gallery, which has exhibited the artist's work since 1997 and represents his estate, has asserted that the mystery monolith is a bona fide McCracken. Just one problem: If that indeed is the case, McCracken pulled it off without ever mentioning a word to his dealer or his friends. Now most everyone in the art world is divided over whether the story is plausible or a larksome prank. The artist's son, Patrick McCracken, remains completely puzzled by the monolith. But when he heard the news, he thought back to an evening in May 2002, when his father was living in Medanales, N.M., in a small adobe house overlooking a mesa. "We were standing outside looking at the stars and he said something to the effect of that he would like to leave his artwork in remote places to be discovered later," he recalled in a phone interview. Did he think his father was joking? "No, I thought it was something that he would do," he said. "He was inspired by the idea of alien visitors leaving objects that resembled his work, or that his work resembled. This discovery of a monolith piece that's very much in line with his artistic vision." A photographer who lives in San Francisco, the younger McCracken added: "He wasn't your average sort of dad. He believed in advance alien races that were able to visit earth. To his mind, these aliens had been visiting Earth for a very long time and they were not malevolent. They wanted to help humanity to get past this time of our evolution where all we do is fight each other." McCracken, who died of a brain tumor at age 76, is known best for his glossy, resin covered "planks," geometric sculptures that imbue the products of the humble lumberyard with the hard surface sheen of California car culture. His otherworldly passions are hardly a guarantee of the authorship of the sculpture, and it is possible the piece was created by a non sculptor. You can narrow the pool of candidates to, at the very least, the millions of viewers enamored of "2001: A Space Odyssey," Stanley Kubrick's 1968 classic. The film, of course, features its own heroic monolith, a gleaming black structure that spawns evolutionary leaps. When apes encounter it and see their first straight lines and right angles, they begin using tools and undergo a transformation into intelligent beings. Ed Ruscha, who is known for his text inscribed paintings and is probably the dean of the California art scene, befriended McCracken during the years when he was living in Los Angeles. "I don't think that's a John McCracken," he said of the sculpture. "It's unlike him to be a trickster of someone. A monolith in the desert? It's so universal that it could be anybody. It's very sci fi to come across something like that. I like the idea of someone's having fun." The artist James Hayward, a close friend of McCracken and former assistant of his, agrees. "It's a giant hoax, as far as I am concerned," Mr. Hayward said. "The object in the photos I have seen is crudely made. I looked at the corners as much as I could; they are made by a machine called a brake, which bends metal. When you bend metal with a machine, the corners are not sharp and crisp. They're rounded." Compared to a classical Minimalist like Donald Judd, McCracken was an anomaly, in part because he resisted machines and industrial fabrication. He preferred to make his sculptures by hand, in a spirit of patient, painstaking craftsmanship. Truth be told, the piece in Utah differs from the planks he pioneered in 1966 and continued to think about until the end of his life. They consist of rectangular boards of plywood covered in Fiberglas, painted a single color and leaned against a wall, as if a workman had rested them while assembling, say, a platform bed. Done in a range of strong, saturated colors, including bubble gum pink, sunflower yellow and piano key black, they lend color an independent material life. But the high polish of their surfaces makes them so reflective they appear to dissolve in front of your eyes into something that feels less like sculptural mass than pure Platonic metaphor. McCracken liked to say that the planks inhabited a zone between painting and sculpture. With one end resting on the floor and the other touching the wall, a plank connects the earth beneath our feet with the higher realm of the wall, the surface on which painting, and thus illusion, first began. But there was more to his career than the planks. The monolith in Utah, a standing non wood column, is consistent with McCracken's lesser known sculptures in stainless steel, for which he relied on various fabricators, including Arnold AG. "We introduced him to this incredible company that works with Jeff Koons," Mr. Zwirner said of the German fabricator. Mr. Zwirner, by his own admission, was late in discovering McCracken's work. In 1992, he was visiting the artist Mike Kelley at his home in Los Angeles, when he noticed a pink hued plinth in the living room. The dealer asked who the artist was. "Mike said, 'You must be the world's biggest goofball. You don't know John McCracken? He is one of the greatest artists alive.' So I got a real dressing down for not knowing John McCracken." In coming months, Mr. Zwirner sought out the sculptor's work and telephoned him to ask if he belonged to a gallery in New York. McCracken hesitated before replying: "Gee, David, I don't know." In fact, McCracken had been represented by the prestigious Sonnabend Gallery since 1970, but apparently was feeling disconsolate over the state of his career. Although he had earned his first fame in the now historic 1966 survey at the Jewish Museum, "Primary Structures," that helped launch the Minimalist movement, his initial momentum had evaporated. He signed on to Zwirner, where he had his first show in 1997 and has continued to hold his own as a respected if idiosyncratic Minimalist. His tenth show at the gallery will open next March, and Mr. Zwirner has decided to devote it to the "plank" sculptures which, he says, have never been shown by themselves before. How do you prove that a chunk of metal in the desert is in fact the work of McCracken? In matters of art authentication, gut aesthetic opinions and the power of "the eye" are considered relevant never mind that no one besides Utah public safety agents has seen the monolith in person. A more relevant and reliable form of authentication must await the gathering of information about the sculpture's installation. It would be useful to learn who, exactly, transported this metal object to Utah, drilled through red rock to plant it in the ground, and perhaps laid a cement foundation beneath it. If you happen to be the person who did that, well, speak up, please! Mr. Zwirner, by his own admission, has no idea who installed the sculpture and seems unfazed by the question. And perhaps it is not surprising that now, toward the close of this plague year, when so many people have been besieged by varying degrees of isolation and illness and the numbness bred by television news, it is soothing indeed to contemplate a beautiful apparition rising out of desert rock, a moving affirmation of the triumph of the imagination over workaday reality. But beware. As Spock himself famously admonished, "Insufficient facts always invite danger." Deborah Solomon, an art critic, is the author of biographies of Joseph Cornell and Norman Rockwell. She is at work on the biography of Jasper Johns. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
More than four dozen journalists at The Wall Street Journal challenged their bosses and criticized the newspaper's opinion side in a letter that was sent to top executives on Thursday, the day after China announced that it would expel three Journal staff members in retaliation for a headline that offended the country's leaders. In all, 53 reporters and editors signed the letter. They criticized the newspaper's response to the fallout from the headline, "China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia," that went with a Feb. 3 opinion essay by Walter Russell Mead, a Journal columnist, on economic repercussions of the coronavirus outbreak. The letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times, urged the newspaper's leaders "to consider correcting the headline and apologizing to our readers, sources, colleagues and anyone else who was offended by it." Describing the headline as "derogatory," the letter was sent on Thursday from the email account of the China bureau chief, Jonathan Cheng, to William Lewis, the chief executive of Dow Jones and the newspaper's publisher, and Robert Thomson, the chief executive of News Corp, the Rupert Murdoch controlled parent company of Dow Jones. Mr. Cheng, who did not sign the letter, wrote in a separate note that he was passing the letter along to the two executives, adding that he believed their "proper handling of this matter is essential to the future of our presence in China." The in house criticism brought to the surface longstanding tensions at The Journal between the reporters and editors who cover the news and the opinion journalists who work under the longtime editorial page editor, Paul A. Gigot. As at other major newspapers, including The Times and The Washington Post, the news side and the opinion department are run separately. Mr. Gigot oversees the unsigned editorials that represent the newspaper's institutional voice, the op ed columns like the one by Mr. Mead and the criticism in the arts and culture sections. He also hosts a program on Mr. Murdoch's network, the Fox News Channel. Foreign news media organizations in China tread a difficult path. The nation's growing economic and political clout make it an essential story. Chinese officials covet attention from the global stage, and images of foreign reporters jotting down their comments at news conferences are a staple of state controlled evening news shows. The Chinese government uses visas for foreign journalists as leverage, doling out and retracting credentials as a way to influence news outlets. Foreign news media organizations face pressure to steer clear of sensitive topics like the wealth and political pull of the families of the country's leaders. Like many other international news organizations, The Times among them, The Journal is blocked online in China, and the "Sick Man" headline was brought to wide attention there by state controlled media, amid nationwide concern over an epidemic that has infected over 76,000 people in China and killed more than 2,400. China was sometimes described as the "sick man of Asia" at the end of the 1800s, in "the depths of what we now call China's 'Century of Humiliation,'" said Stephen R. Platt, a historian of modern China at the University of Massachusetts. The empire had then lost a series of wars and had feared being divvied up by imperial powers. "Nobody in their right mind would confuse China today with China at the end of the 19th century," Mr. Platt said. "I think that's where the insult lies, this hearkening back to this terrible period and somehow implying that it's all the same." On Wednesday, Geng Shuang, a spokesman for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a transcript provided by the Chinese government that Chinese officials "demanded that The Wall Street Journal recognize the seriousness of the error, openly and formally apologize, and investigate and punish those responsible, while retaining the need to take further measures against the newspaper." The statement added that "the Chinese people do not welcome media that publish racist statements and smear China with malicious attacks." The Journal has not made a formal apology. The closest it came was when Mr. Lewis, the publisher, said in a statement on Wednesday that the headline "clearly caused upset and concern amongst the Chinese people, which we regret." Susan L. Shirk, the chair of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego, said that there was reason for the newspaper to refrain from making an apology now that the Chinese government had demanded one. "The Chinese government has been coercive in its demands for apologies from all sorts of international groups on issues that are essentially domestic political issues," Ms. Shirk, a deputy secretary of state under former President Bill Clinton, said. "This has the effect of interfering in freedom of expression in our own countries." 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. A majority of the reporters and editors who signed the letter are based in the newspaper's China and Hong Kong bureaus. They included the three journalists whom China ordered to leave the country on Wednesday: Josh Chin, the deputy bureau chief in Beijing and an American citizen; Chao Deng, a reporter, who is also an American; and Philip Wen, a correspondent and Australian citizen who reported on an Australian investigation of a cousin of President Xi Jinping of China as part of an inquiry into organized crime. The Chinese government gave the journalists until Monday to leave the country. The letter argued that "the public outrage" over the headline in China "was genuine" and said the "Sick Man" headline should be changed online. "We are deeply concerned that failure to take such action within the next few days will not only inflict further damage on our China bureau's operations and morale in the short term," the letter said, "but also cause lasting damage to our brand and ability to sustain our unrivaled coverage of one of the world's most important stories." The letter also noted that people at The Journal had raised concerns about the "Sick Man" headline before China announced that it would revoke the journalists' visas and order them out of the country. It also questioned whether the headline was "distasteful," given the coronavirus outbreak. A Dow Jones spokeswoman confirmed that the executives had received the letter and said in a statement, "We understand the extreme challenges our employees and their families are facing in China." The company added that it "will continue to push" to have the visas of its three journalists reinstated. Mr. Cheng, the China bureau chief, and more than a dozen others who signed the letter did not respond to requests for comment. In addition to criticizing the headline, the letter took issue with an unsigned editorial published by the newspaper on Wednesday, after China's announcement that the journalists would be expelled. In the punchy style the editorial page is known for, it got right to the point: "President Xi Jinping says China deserves to be treated as a great power, but on Wednesday his country expelled three Wall Street Journal reporters over a headline. Yes, a headline. Or at least that was the official justification." The editorial went on to argue that the Chinese government had revoked the reporters' credentials to divert attention from its "management of the coronavirus scourge." The editorial acknowledged criticism of the headline but defended it as echoing a description familiar to American readers that cast the late Ottoman Empire as the "sick old man of Europe." Shen Yi, a lecturer on international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai, said The Journal's headline displayed a sense of racial superiority. The language was similar to comments by Kiron Skinner, a former director of policy planning at the State Department, who had said that with China, the United States had "a great power competitor that is not Caucasian," Mr. Shen wrote in a recent essay. "The increasing prominence and scope of this sort of language gives you a feeling for the despicable thoughts that underlie it," Mr. Shen wrote. "Even now, in the 21st century, some U.S. officials and elites still deep in their hearts know and understand the world through the framework of the suzerain and its colonies." In defense of the headline, The Journal and its supporters have pointed to the right to free speech and the newspaper's separation of its news and opinion departments. The writers of the letter said the main issue was "the mistaken choice of a headline that was deeply offensive to many people, not just in China." The Washington Post first reported on the internal debate at The Journal. China's announcement that it would expel the three journalists occurred one day after the Trump administration designated five major Chinese news organizations as foreign government functionaries, rather than journalistic entities, a move that drew the ire of the Chinese government. The expulsions, the first since 1998, according to the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China, were condemned by the United States secretary of state, Mike Pompeo. Journal leaders met with newsroom employees to discuss the headline before China condemned it. In one meeting, Matt Murray, the editor in chief, seemed to agree with the complaints, but said there was not much he could do about the headline because of the strict separation of the news and opinion sides. In a second meeting, journalists pushed Mr. Lewis, the publisher, to change the headline, to no avail. The letter offered several examples of Journal reporters who said they were impeded while trying to do their jobs. A researcher interviewing people on the streets of Beijing was surrounded by a crowd and called "traitor," the letter said; and a "senior doctor" in Hubei Province, where coronavirus seems to have originated, retracted an interview with the newspaper and told others not to speak with its reporters. One of the journalists who signed the letter was Chun Han Wong, a Journal correspondent whose press credentials were not renewed by the Chinese government last year. Mr. Wong shared a byline with Mr. Wen on the article that described the legal scrutiny of the Chinese president's cousin. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Lyft is part of a group of once highflying tech start ups that held disappointing initial public offerings last year and are now dealing with questions about whether they can turn a profit. It is the first time that Lyft is cutting jobs since it went public in March. Last year, Lyft's chief rival, Uber, laid off more than 1,000 employees in several rounds of cuts. Other tech start ups that were fueled by private money and that grew rapidly have also retrenched recently. WeWork, the office rental company, scuttled its plans to go public last year and has since cut 2,400 jobs. In India, Oyo, a highly valued hospitality company, has started laying off more than 2,000 workers. Lyft has faced investor doubts for months. After the company went public, its stock tumbled below its offering price on the second day of trading and has yet to recover. The shares are down more than 30 percent from the offering price. Logan Green, Lyft's chief executive, said during a call with investors in October that the company was making progress on its plans to become profitable. If it excluded some costs, the ride hailing service would be profitable by late 2021, a year ahead of schedule, he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
I never intended to be a professional beekeeper, but for my birthday, my girlfriend at the time unexpectedly got me a beehive. She's a talented organic farmer and built me a hive herself. I have a large property in downtown Tucson, and I grow as much of my own food as I can, but the one thing I was never able to produce myself was sweetener. I had my veggies and chicken, but not honey. Beyond honey production, how do bees enhance our travel experience? Beehives at hotels increase the overall bee population in the area and can play a major role in combating colony collapse. They play an integral role in the development of the food we eat and the natural habitats we explore. Now, more than ever, travelers are concerned with where their food comes from and make a conscious effort to eat organic, locally sourced foods. And bee pollination is key in growing healthy crops without the use of pesticides. How did you move into the role as the Miraval beekeeper? I was introduced to Miraval during my time as a wine distributor. Once they discovered my passion for beekeeping, I was invited to speak with the sustainability committee about the problems that bees are encountering. It was during these discussions that we developed the beekeeping program at Miraval. The idea was that I would keep some hives on the property, which related to my wine background. I was supposed to play around with different honeys. But there was a clear interest in the community. The clientele was very engaged, so I started teaching classes on the weekends. As much as I enjoyed my career in wine, I found working with the bees meaningful, enjoyable and an activist activity. The way we keep bees at Miraval is beyond organic. We use natural methods in this chemically intensive industry where a number of viruses, diseases and mites afflict bees. There's a chemical to eradicate and prevent every one of these problems. We let the bees make important decisions rather than imposing a structure. What can we learn from bees? We live in divided times, and bees are the picture of a harmonious society where the individual lives for the benefit of the whole. There's a book called "Honeybee Democracy" about how they make decisions about resources, how they're going to raise a new queen, if they're going to find a new home. There are many parts of that that are analogous to humans. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Next, here's a piece of paper. Write a simple sentence. It must have a subject and verb and make sense, like "Hey, this is not a very difficult exam to pass." (The maximum score for this test is 30; a score below 20 usually indicates cognitive impairment.) You get the idea. These cognitive tests are basic and, unless you have dementia or some other medical or psychiatric problem that would impair your cognition, you, too, will likely "ace" any of these tests. If Mr. Trump wants to impress the public with his cognitive prowess, perhaps he should take the SAT. I doubt that Mr. Trump will see it this way, but by bragging about his cognitive abilities, he's asking us to consider what to expect, cognitively, of older people and what cognitive attributes matter most in a president. After all, he and his likely challenger, former Vice President Joseph Biden, are well into their 70s, and their cognitive function is unlikely to be what it was in their 20s. And for a very good reason. Just like the heart, kidneys and muscles, the brain ages and typically loses some function, something that scientists refer to as normal cognitive aging. Which is to say that you are not as mentally fast or agile at 75 as you were at 20. Your short term memory is also probably not the same. And, at 70, you are probably not going to outperform your 17 year old self on the SAT or any test that requires fast reasoning. Not that you care, since you aren't applying to college. Yet, if you peer inside the brain it's easy to examine neurons under a microscope in a post mortem exam you will find that with age people don't lose too many neurons in the prefrontal cortex, the brain's executive control center and reasoner in chief. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
David Chang and his new Netflix series, "Ugly Delicious," can most easily be defined by what they're not. Mr. Chang is not a fastidious French kitchen god, a high energy American showman or an Anthony Bourdain like poetic observer. "Ugly Delicious" is not a stand and stir cooking show or a pack your bags travelogue. The show would, in some ways, look at home on the Food Network. Its eight episodes take on topics as conventional as pizza, barbecue, fried chicken and Chinese cooking. The cameras pan over jars of artisanal tomato sauce and capture the squirting juices of xiao long bao. Ritualistic pronouncements of deliciousness abound, often punctuated with a certain four letter word, and the occasional non culinary star Aziz Ansari, Jimmy Kimmel drops by to both lend and borrow celebrity wattage. What Mr. Chang and the food writer Peter Meehan, his co star and fellow executive producer, are attempting is something more ambitious, though: an extended television essay, in the form of free associative, globe trotting conversations about food and culture. Since this is Mr. Chang we're talking about, the conversations often take the form of arguments, and include a fair number of insults, which we're to believe are good natured. And those arguments aren't really, or solely, about pizza or barbecue. Those familiar foodstuffs are vehicles for Mr. Chang's cranky, obsessive pursuit of questions about tradition and innovation, authenticity and migratory mash ups, the racist roots of attitudes toward food, and Americans' unslaked appetite for Italian cooking. Working with the production company of the Oscar winning documentarian Morgan Neville, Mr. Chang and Mr. Meehan dress up "Ugly Delicious" with stylistic flourishes that recall Mr. Bourdain's shows as well as "The Mind of a Chef," which Mr. Chang and Mr. Bourdain originated. The restaurant visits and chef interviews are broken up with fake commercials, animations, film clips and parodies of Japanese TV comedies or the "Saturday Night Live" Julia Child bleeds out skit. The season finale is structured as a debate between Mr. Chang and the chef Mario Carbone over the relative merits of Italian filled pastas and Asian dumplings. These techniques, and a generous Netflix budget, are on display in the pizza episode, which was filmed in Brooklyn, Tokyo, New Haven, Copenhagen, Naples, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Demonstrating his trademark contrarianism, Mr. Chang praises Domino's even donning the company vest and delivering pies and declares New Haven and then Tokyo as the homes of the world's best pizza. The visual curlicues and the attempts to impose a larger thematic structure and narrative there's an awful lot of tired talk about how food tells stories don't hide the reality that there isn't a whole lot new or surprising about "Ugly Delicious." (The exception: the openness with which it discusses racism as a fundamental force in culinary culture.) Its primary influence, as with other food shows, will probably be to max out reservations at impossibly cool looking restaurants like the Tokyo pizzeria Seirinkan or the locavorish Salare in Seattle. What the show is really selling is the Chang attitude and mystique, a combination of ego, exactitude, foul mouthed rebelliousness and self deprecatory nerdiness. With the opening of Momofuku Noodle Bar 14 years ago, he fortuitously caught the waves of both millennial casualness and fangirl fanboy style fetishization (of ingredients, of methods, of chefs) that swept through the restaurant business. An important part of Mr. Chang's persona at the start was his outsider status, casting stones at (or at least making withering remarks about) the bastions of haute cuisine where he had learned his trade. That became problematic as he built an international restaurant empire that recently added the 200 plus seat Momofuku Las Vegas. And in "Ugly Delicious" he moves with a band of insiders that includes Mr. Meehan, the superstar Danish chef Rene Redzepi and Mr. Ansari, Mr. Chang's fellow Netflix star. It's also a boy's club. An episode about home cooking is the only one with an equal representation of women and men among the significant speaking roles. In all the others men outnumber women by 2 or 3 to 1; in the pizza episode it's 8 to 1. This may reflect the state of affairs in the food industry, but it's surprising for a series that wants to talk about diversity and representation. The show often allows Mr. Chang's rough edges to show, and sometimes its picture of him is unflattering in ways that don't seem intentional. His jibes can cross over into meanness, and his pontifications can appear oblivious, as when he compares the art of barbecue to the art of jazz in an episode focused entirely on white and Asian cooks. "I don't know how the hell it all happened," Mr. Chang says, contemplating the franchise that he has become. The claim seems unlikely, and one way to see the show, with its focus on pizza and tacos and dumplings, is as a branding exercise a pivot away from high intensity cooking toward the ugly deliciousness of comfort food. The penultimate episode ends with him holding a plate of kimchi and Spam fried rice toward the camera. In the Chang vernacular, it looks bonkers, and you'll want to crush it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
FUND RAISING At Public School 295 in Brooklyn, bake sales raise money for good causes. But they can also cause tension between affluent and less well off parents. THE Cupcake Wars came to Public School 295 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, in October. The Parent Teacher Association's decision to raise the price of a cupcake at its monthly bake sale to 1, from 50 cents was supposed to be a simple way to raise extra money in the face of city budget cuts. Instead, in a neighborhood whose median household income leaped to 60,184 in 2010 from 34,878 a decade before, the change generated unexpected ire, pitting cash short parents against volunteer bakers, and dividing a flummoxed PTA executive board, where wealthier newcomers to the school serve alongside poorer immigrants who have called the area home for years. "A lot of people felt like they really needed to be heard on this," recalled Dan Janzen, a mild mannered freelance copywriter with children in first and third grades who leads the school's development committee and devised the price increase. One mother expressed dismay at being blindsided, while others said they were worried about those at the school without a dollar to spare. Ultimately, the PTA meeting at which the issue came to a head was adjourned without a resolution. Such fracases are increasingly common at schools like P.S. 295, where changing demographics can cause culture clashes. PTA leaders are often caught between trying to get as much as possible from parents of means without alienating lower income families. Sometimes, the battles are over who should lead the PTA itself: many of the gentrifiers bring professional skills and different ideas of how to get things done, while those who improved the school enough to attract them become guardians of its traditions. Of course it is not always a cupcake. At Public School 11 in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, there has been discord over the annual auction, which last year drew more than 10,000. P.S. 11, which once had trouble attracting students, has gained popularity in the past few years, drawing the children of owners of new condominiums and beloved brownstones in nearby Fort Greene and Prospect Heights. The share of students at the school who qualify for a free or reduced price lunch meaning their family income falls below a certain level has dropped to 67 percent today, from 86 percent in 2005. During the planning of the auction, there were accusations of elitism, racism and defeatism, as newcomers and longtime residents debated whether to host a laid back affair with all you can drink rum punch or something more elegant, featuring donated bottles of wine. Should auction items be posted online to build excitement even though many families do not have computers at home? A seeming compromise, to offer all you can eat passes for 35 along with 25 tickets that exclude food, only generated more controversy last time around when some people who had bought the lower priced tickets ate anyway. "There has been so much distrust and resentment," said Eva Marie Arena, who has two children at the school and recently stepped down as chairwoman of the fund raising committee, citing burnout as one of the reasons. "There is this idea that we have come into this place that has been one way for so long, and we are bringing with us all our fancy ideas." At Public School 110 on the Lower East Side, where the number of children who qualify for a free or reduced price lunch has dropped to 65 percent today from 86 percent in 2005, conversation has focused on whether or not the annual spring fair which features face painting and craft projects should be mostly free or more of a fund raiser. And at the East Village Community School, which serves the children of architects and artists as well as those of housekeepers and handymen, a brouhaha broke out after the Parent Association sent a second "ask" letter in December in previous years there had only been one noting that it had met its 20,000 goal but had set a new one. The letter said 27 percent of families had given money, admonishing, "We can do better," which led to a backlash, especially since the push came at the same time as other fund raising initiatives: a holiday book sale and a 20 parents' night out. "It's a tricky thing," acknowledged Patricia Davies, a nonprofit management consultant who helped write the controversial letter. "It's fund raising. So you want to be aggressive. But this is also a public school." In Harlem, century old brownstones and gleaming high rises have lured a growing pool of middle class families to P.S./I.S. 180, where a handful of students privately confessed to the PTA president, Carmen Reyes, that their families could not afford the 20 bracelet that provided access to all the games and food at the popular fall fund raising fair. So Ms. Reyes proposed that they help decorate in exchange for entry bracelets, which she said pleased the students. Carrie Reynolds, a former book editor who is a co president of the PTA at P.S. 163 on West 97th Street, said she worked hard to fight off the impression that PTA sponsored events are designed for "rich people." That can be a challenge at a school where 56 percent of the students receive free or reduced price lunches (down from 68 percent in 2005) and tickets to the Winter Gala run 65. Recent auction items including a backstage tour of the Metropolitan Opera and a weekend getaway in the country have gone for hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of dollars (though at fancier schools, five figures for featured items can be the norm). To balance this, P.S. 163 also hosts informal events, like its International Celebration in March, where families bring in homemade empanadas, shrimp fried rice, and deep dish lasagna, which are displayed in the cafeteria along with flags and sometimes traditional garb from their countries of origin. The school begins the year with a series of free gatherings a welcome breakfast and a Saturday play date in the schoolyard before asking anyone for money. And the PTA also organizes a shadow online auction around the time of the gala that features things like 25 restaurant coupons. Some other PTAs, including those at P.S. 261 in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, and P.S. 11 in Chelsea, are trying to emulate professional fund raising outfits, by quietly reaching out to the splattering of bankers and small business owners for large donations, while largely bypassing those who have less. This, of course, has managed to offend people on both sides. At P.S. 295 in Sunset Park, efforts to bridge gaps both economic and ethnic are pronounced. The PTA requires that posters advertising fund raisers and other events include English and Spanish, and members often brainstorm about how to engage parents with limited resources, contemplating everything from the bus fare to the cost of feeding a large family. For the Spring Arts Festival and the Harvest Festival, 2 worth of tickets are tucked into every student's backpack, enough to buy a meal. But some of the wealthier parents were disappointed that one of their lower cost events, a 5 winter concert series titled Beat the Blahs, drew a meager crowd to hear Cumbiagra, a local band that plays music from Colombia's coastal region. Estela Bernabe, who has a fourth grader at the school and sometimes clocks 12 hour shifts as a baby sitter, said she thought she spoke for many in saying her absence was not politically charged. "I'm working," she explained. "I just don't have the time." A truce of sorts, meanwhile, has been called in the cupcake wars. The price is still 1, but two words have been added to the regular notice in the school bulletin: "Suggested donation." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Two weeks ago, "Saturday Night Live" returned to television with its first new episode of the at home era: a collection of remotely produced sketches that were low on production value but high on spirit and innovation. It offered a window into what the show could do without most of its resources and into the homes of its cast members, for those of us who always wondered what they looked like. Now that "S.N.L." proved that it could be done, what would it do for an encore? In its second run at an at home episode, "S.N.L." got more ambitious, adding flashy graphics and editing tricks, and diving into its pool of celebrity contacts for some well timed cameo appearances perhaps none more surprising than the opening sketch, which featured Brad Pitt as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In a CNN interview earlier this month, Fauci had said with a laugh that "of course" he would love to see himself portrayed by Pitt, the Oscar winning star of "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood." Perhaps he believed it was never going to happen, but there, at the top of the show, was Pitt wearing a wig, glasses, suit and tie, speaking in a mock Brooklyn accent and offering his thanks to "all the older women in America who have sent me supportive, inspiring and sometimes graphic emails." Following a video clip in which the president said that there might be vaccines "relatively soon," Pitt said, "Relatively soon is an interesting phrase. Relative to the entire history of earth? Sure, the vaccine's going to come real fast. But if you were to tell a friend, I'll be over relatively soon, and then showed up a year and a half later, well, your friend may be relatively pissed off." After another clip in which President Trump said the coronavirus would disappear "like a miracle," Pitt said, "A miracle would be great. Who doesn't love miracles? But miracles shouldn't be Plan A. Even Sully tried to land at the airport first." A third clip showed the president stating that "anybody that needs a test gets a test," and that the tests were "beautiful." Pitt replied, "I don't know if I would describe the test as beautiful. Unless your idea of beauty is having a cotton swab tickle your brain. Also, when he said everyone can get a test what he meant was, almost no one." Pitt then addressed rumors that President Trump planned to fire him, playing a clip of the president saying that he would not dismiss him, adding, "I think he's a wonderful guy." Under the limitations of sheltering in place orders, "What Up With That?" would seem to be the kind of recurring bit that should be avoided at all costs: It's an overstuffed talk show with an indefatigable host (played by Kenan Thompson) and it is dependent on filling a stage with as many performers and celebrities as possible, most of whom won't get to say more than a few words. But by the grace of Zoom, "S.N.L." pulled it off, working in recurring characters like an enigmatic saxophonist played by Fred Armisen and an enthusiastic, track suited dancer played by Jason Sudeikis. (Bill Hader, who usually plays Lindsey Buckingham, appeared only as a frozen screen graphic.) Charles Barkley, playing himself, summed it all up: "I'm not going to lie this is weird." Pete Davidson led off another of his musical segments by lamenting the tediousness of his home quarantine with his sister and his mother. ("Tired of sitting in the dark / Got nothing to watch, already did 'Ozark' "). Then, unexpectedly, he threw the song over to Adam Sandler, the "S.N.L." alum who, after almost 25 years away from the show, is once again becoming a fixture there. While it has been charming to see the grass roots "S.N.L." segments with homemade costumes and hand drawn, taped up posters on cast members' walls, let's also appreciate the more polished efforts on display in this advertisement featuring Aidy Bryant and Kate McKinnon. They play two of the grocers at Bartenson's, a store where staples like chicken, milk and bread are unfortunately out of stock, but where you can still find mint flavored Pringles, fluoride bananas, Pepsi Crab and plenty of Dasani products. As McKinnon says, "We want to give you what you want, but first we need you to buy what we have." This latest at home edition of "Weekend Update" was a significant step up from its debut gone were the weird audio inserts of people laughing at Colin Jost's and Michael Che's jokes, and the anchors now had the familiar world map backdrop inserted behind them. (We did miss seeing Jost's guitar, though.) The anchors riffed on Thursday's coronavirus briefing at the White House, where President Trump floated dangerous and widely derided solutions for halting the virus's spread. You know things are going well when DontDrinkBleach is trending nationally after a president's speech. After a doctor said that coronavirus dies quickly in sunlight, President Trump asked if they could bring "the light inside the body." Though I'm pretty sure "bring the light inside the body" is what they chanted at Jonestown before drinking poison. Then President Clean suggested injecting disinfectant into your body to cure the virus. Experts called the idea "a stroke of genius," minus the "of genius" part. Trump later backtracked and said he was just being sarcastic, which is just what you say when you know you've said something terrible. You know, Colin, speaking of terrible, you know how when a kid has really bad parents, somebody steps in and they have to go live with another family, right? Jost: "Sure." Do you think it's possible another country could come take custody of us, maybe? I mean, like, just until our government gets back on its feet. Somewhere stable, like Germany or Japan or Nigeria. Or even Iraq. I'll take Iraq now. Don't they owe us a favor anyway? Didn't we, like, kill their dad when they were in trouble? I'm being sarcastic, obviously. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Shortly before turning 30, Prince Charles complained to the press about its seeming obsession with bad news. "Why don't they, for a change, tell us how many jumbo jets landed safely at Heathrow Airport," he groused. So, as a birthday gift, the Times of London printed a front page containing only good news. The death rate from suicide was declining, the paper reported, and in the previous week 8,000 marriages were performed, 12,200 babies were born, 92 percent of the first class mail was delivered on time, and no banks collapsed. This news reached readers of The New York Times on Tuesday, Nov. 14, 1978. The item appeared on page C8, in a small story toward the back of the first issue of the paper's new Science Times section, where the science stories gave way to social news and movie times for "Grease" and "Animal House." Would the contents of that first Science Times have cheered the Prince? Some headlines, such as "Sociologists Plumb the Secrets of Compatibility" and "Turning the Other Cheek, A Psychological View," promised an optimistic take on human nature. Others, not so much. A story by Malcolm Browne "Doomsday Debate: How Near is the End?" described a "heated controversy" among scientists and scholars, the consensus being that "total human extinction is not necessarily as distant a possibility as many of us would choose to think." Nonetheless, the section was an inspiration to science journalism as a whole. By 1989, more than 90 newspapers in the United States had weekly science sections, supported in part by ads from the growing home computer industry. Science journalism became a subject of research in its own right. In 2006 the journal Science Communication published a research paper with the title "A Longitudinal Study of The New York Times Science Times Section," which noted that the section had "established itself as an important, reliable, and influential guide to the world of science, medicine, and technology." By 2013 the number of weekly science sections had fallen to just 19, as newsprint ads evaporated, the newspaper industry shrank, and the conversations shifted online. And there, it seems, the world of science is being discussed more vigorously than ever, on dozens of science news websites Aeon, Ars Technica, Gizmodo, Live Science, Nautilus, Quanta, Stat, Undark, Vox and a social media landscape humming with the voices of engaging scientists and deeply informed writers. The first Science Times cover, published on November 14, 1978. Yet, increasingly, we are besieged by alternative truths. Climate change is a myth a notion espoused by President Trump, despite all evidence to the contrary. The mass shootings in Parkland and Las Vegas were elaborately staged hoaxes, much like the moon landing, according to countless YouTube videos. The recent wildfires in California were started with lasers, by people scheming to reduce the population. These and other nuggets of misinformation are shared and amplified by cynics, the credulous and bots, thriving on the air of false equivalence. And, online, they live forever. Andrew Wakefield's research purporting to link vaccines to autism was discredited two decades ago, but it continues to circulate and infect, frightening parents into not vaccinating their children, and fueling the resurgence of measles. Over the weekend, several hundred people gathered in Denver for a two day conference to celebrate and share their very sincere belief that Earth is flat. The problem rests as much with the vector as with the virus. In March, a study in the journal Science found that a false story would propagate far more readily than a real story; it was 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than accurate news, and it reached a cohort of 1,500 viewers several times faster. YouTube persistently tempts us to view videos even more extreme than whatever we're watching at the moment. "The recommendation algorithm is not optimizing for what is truthful, or balanced, or healthy for democracy," Guillaume Chaslot, one of the algorithm's engineers, told the Guardian in March. The result is a misinformation ecosystem in which everything is true, especially if you believe it to be so. Anyone and everyone is an expert, steered toward the facts they think they already know. It's like a vast clothes dryer with a defective lint trap: As the lint accumulates, we begin draping ourselves in the fluff, confident that what we're wearing counts as clothing. "I have no academic credentials," one speaker at the flat earth conference told the audience. "But I do have a cloak of credibility." The host under attack is inherently vulnerable. The scientific process is a human one, its facts messy, contingent, hard fought and built through iteration. It doesn't help that scientists occasionally promote fraudulent research, or that thousands of predatory journals exist online to publish research papers so meritless that even a computer algorithm could have written them. What alternative truths exploit, and disguise, is the fact that science is a verb, not a noun. It is not the truth, but it is the best compass we have invented to guide us there. Indeed, it could be argued right here, for instance that science is the most optimistic endeavor that we have created for ourselves. Not all of its news will warm the heart: the mounting evidence of our warming planet, the vexing mutations of the influenza virus, the unavoidable signs that a black hole lies at the center of the galaxy, waiting to swallow us all. But even these are triumphs. Every step in science is the mark of a species that is willing to challenge itself and press forward, seeking out wonder, identifying problems and solving them, looking inward by looking outward. That's the task of science journalism, to tell that story, as well as keeping the enterprise accountable. Seriously, on the whole, science news is the best news you're likely to read on any given day. The challenge ahead for science is to avoid extinction. Can we learn from it how to disseminate news that is factual, maybe even good, more rapidly than falsehoods can spread? It's a matter of outsmarting the information ecosystem, the one we cultivated to satisfy the craven, all too human penchant for bad news. The ultimate foes, as ever, are our worst instincts. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
HOUSTON The only word to describe life here right now is this: hell. The pandemic is raging, the economy is shuddering and the energy city's lifeblood, oil, while rebounding from a terrifying negative 37 a barrel in April, is still in the not pretty 40 range. The state leadership is, at best, useless. Temperatures are averaging around 90 degrees with the "feels like" button on my weather app hitting 99 plus, due mostly to our Kolkata rivaling humidity. The prime months for hurricanes, August and September, are fast approaching. All the people who could leave town have done so, with flying tree roaches and mosquitoes taking their place. It was in this atmosphere that I got the news last week that Ruth Bader Ginsburg's liver cancer had returned. It seemed like the rotten cherry on top of the bad news sundae that has come to define life in America in the summer of 2020. There's an obvious explanation for this: If illness forces Justice Ginsburg to step down in the next few months and President Trump gets to pick a replacement, it would strengthen the conservative wing of the Supreme Court for as far as the eye can see, despite some recent rulings that might suggest otherwise. (Yes, President Trump could also have that option and more after his possible re election, but some things are just too painful to contemplate this summer.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
ORRIN EVANS TRIO WITH KEVIN EUBANKS at Jazz Standard (Aug. 29 Sept. 1, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). Evans's rambunctious piano style embraces the art of the stark dynamic shift. He'll lull you into a groove with a fiercely repeated phrase, then blast you with a fistful of dissonance. He'll indulge in a skittering run, then cut himself off with a tire skidding stop. But he lets nothing disrupt the deep, reassuring rhythmic flow that underlies his playing. All told, he is one of today's most faithful adherents to jazz tradition even as he has crafted a sound unlike anything before. Evans appears here with the guitarist Kevin Eubanks, who long served as musical director on "The Tonight Show," and the members of Evans's regular trio: Luques Curtis on bass and Mark Whitfield Jr. on drums. 212 576 2232, jazzstandard.com FESTIVAL OF NEW TRUMPET MUSIC at various locations (Sept. 3 12). This annual expo of rising and established talent serves as a good indication of how diverse New York City's improvised music scene has become. This year's festival (the 17th over all) kicks off on Tuesday at Threes Brewing Gowanus with a tribute to the trumpeter and educator Laurie Frink, who played at the first festival, and who died in 2013. On Wednesday, the esteemed trumpeter Charles Tolliver is the featured guest for an evening paying homage to Booker Little. Over the following week, highlights will include the experimental trumpeter Hugh Ragin's workshop and performance at the New School on Sept. 6, and a two night run by Philadelphia's Fresh Cut Orchestra, co led by the trumpeter Josh Lawrence, at Dizzy's Club on Sept. 10 and 11. fontmusic.org VINCENT HERRING, GARY BARTZ AND BOBBY WATSON at Smoke (Aug. 29 Sept. 1, 7, 9 and 10:30 p.m.). The Charlie Parker Jazz Festival has come and gone, but birthday tributes to this bebop hero who would have turned 99 this week continue to abound. At Smoke, three distinguished alto saxophonists with decades of history behind them (Herring, 54; Watson, 66; and Bartz, 78) will play selections from Parker's songbook, with David Kikoski on piano, Yasushi Nakamura on bass and Carl Allen on drums. (A few miles south, the saxophonist Greg Osby will be leading a series of tribute shows to Parker at Birdland through Saturday.) 212 864 6662, smokejazz.com TED NASH TRIO at Dizzy's Club (Sept. 3, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). Nash, a saxophonist, has won two Grammys for his compositions and arrangements with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, but on his new album, "Somewhere Else: West Side Story Songs," he dials down to a more intimate scale. Joined only by the guitarist Steve Cardenas and the bassist Ben Allison, Nash recasts the melodrama of Leonard Bernstein's most famous musical, turning these songs into dusky internal monologues, quiet ruminations, and slow, simmering showcases for his dusted tenor sax sound. He will appear with Cardenas and Allison at Dizzy's, playing versions of the tunes from the album. 212 258 9595, jazz.org/dizzys CHRIS POTTER UNDERGROUND at the Village Vanguard (through Sept. 1, 8:30 and 10:30 p.m.). In the mid to late 2000s, Potter one of the most talented (and unfairly taken for granted) tenor saxophonists alive released three albums with a fusion minded quartet called Underground. The group seemed to unite the kind of joyful, geyser of energy grooves that a jam band might play with the daring, taut wire ethic of contemporary jazz. The band hasn't played much in recent years, though Potter's newest trio, Circuits, can be heard as a reworking of some of the same ideas. But this week he has brought an altered form of Underground back to the Vanguard, where they used to play regularly. The current lineup features Adam Rogers, the only other longtime member, on guitar, plus Fima Ephron on bass and Dan Weiss on drums. 212 255 4037, villagevanguard.com ANNA WEBBER SEPTET at the Jazz Gallery (Sept. 5, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). A Canadian born tenor saxophonist and flutist, Webber has spent the past 11 years in New York City. In that time she's accumulated an impressive catalog of compositions for ensembles small and large. The ones she writes for septet are not overstuffed with activity, but they almost always invite you to focus on more than one thing at once: a couple misfit horn parts, sparring weirdly; slurry, halting rhythms from the drums and bass against a smooth, sluicelike melody; the rumble of a timpani in conversation with the squealing revolt of a scraped cymbal. At this show, the septet featuring Jeremy Viner on tenor saxophone and clarinet, Jacob Garchik on trombone, Christopher Hoffman on cello, Matt Mitchell on piano, Chris Tordini on bass and Kate Gentile on drums will play tunes from Webber's most recent album, "Clockwise." 646 494 3625, jazzgallery.nyc GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO HUMAN IMPACT at Union Pool (Aug. 30, 7 p.m.). This supergroup's lineup represents the fulfillment of a noise rock fan's most fervent wish: the face melting guitar sound of Chris Spencer (Unsane), coupled with the sampling mastery of Jim Coleman (Cop Shoot Cop), supported by the innovative percussion of Phil Puleo (Cop Shoot Cop, Swans) and strung together with the minimal yet impactful bass rhythms of Chris Pravdica (Swans). Over the past year or so, they have been working on material for their debut album, which is scheduled for release early next year on the Ipecac label (though keep an eye out for a track or two to drop over the fall and winter). On Friday, you can sample the fruits of their efforts when they perform live for the first time. Kurt Wolf (Boss Hog, Pussy Galore) will warm up the crowd with his solo project, Lapis Lazuli, followed by the moshy pop of Ageist. After Human Impact, Part Chimp, playing under the name Half Simian, will send you off into that good, good night with a nice heavy bottomed thwack. Tickets are no longer available online, but a handful will be on sale at the door, so get there early and hit up the taco truck while you wait for the mayhem to ensue. union pool.com DANIELLE DOWLING | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The wind was whipping around a makeshift outdoor SoulCycle studio at Manhattan's Hudson Yards the other day, but the fashion designer Michelle Smith pulled off her "Legalize Equality" sweatshirt, baring toned limbs. She was hot. For the second time that day, she was front row and center in a spin class taught by her girlfriend, the platinum haired star instructor Stacey Griffith. "You are the pebble, you are the water, you are the ripple," Ms. Griffith said into a headset, as tourists gawked and snapped pictures and Ms. Smith pedaled diligently. The power couple had more glamorous outings before the pandemic holding hands leaping into the water on the Cote d'Azur in France last fall, posing for bikini clad selfies on the beach of Saint Barths in February. But an exercise session in a troubled mall was paradise compared to what Ms. Smith was going through 18 months ago at a corporate office in Midtown. It was April 2019, and some 20 or so men were bidding for Milly, the contemporary fashion line known for brightly colored, boldly patterned dresses that she had built with Andrew Oshrin, whom she married in 2003 and separated from in 2017. This week, though, she is introducing a new fashion line, named simply Michelle Smith. It diverges from Milly in nearly every way and is a reflection both of the current moment and her own new life. In the penthouse apartment in Harlem that she shares with her children, ages 13 and 11, and often Ms. Griffith, Ms. Smith described relief from the pressures of the old fashion cycle. "Instead of working from a place of, 'I need to make a camisole that's on trend,' I am asking myself, 'How can I express myself most honestly through this fabric," she said. Milly was a comer in the contemporary market of the aughts, alongside brands like Alice Olivia and Marc by Marc Jacobs. It was introduced to a New York defined for women by the ladylike polish of Kate Spade and the lustful adventures of Carrie Bradshaw. The aesthetic of Michelle Smith is that of a more mature New York woman who's done with norms of office dressing (just let a man criticize her for what she wears to work not that she's leaving home to work these days anyway). It is not exactly androgynous, but it is less overtly ladylike. Women won't wear it to look pretty for others; they'll wear it to feel comfortable and sexy to themselves. Bright and flowy dresses have been replaced by comfortable and sexy loungewear: sweaters with extra long sleeves and chill out slip on pants, all in cashmere, to be paired and layered with silk camisoles and slip dresses for the dressing up version of dressing for your couch. In muted colors (beige, black and a few pops of maroon) the entire new line was hanging on racks in Ms. Smith's apartment, which doubles as her studio and office. A bolt of black sparkly fabric sat idly in a corner, awaiting a different moment in the culture. "I was excited to use it, then Covid happened and I literally went back to the drawing board," she said. Starting a business of luxury casual wear with pieces that cost between 600 to 1,000 during a pandemic marked by a steep economic downslope for the average American isn't ideal. She is using all her own money to get started, is selling directly to her customers online, and will take pre orders that will dictate how much she produces. After decades of the runway to department store churn, Ms. Smith is now interested in conserving resources, both material and psychological. "This is not a time of excess and Michelle's sensitive to the fact that she is launching a luxury brand when the country is under a lot of strain," said Stephanie Ruhle, the senior business correspondent for NBC News and the anchor of "MSNBC Live With Stephanie Ruhle," who has been a friend of Ms. Smith's and a Milly customer for years. "People are not going to spend money for the sake of spending money right now. We've all trimmed down our lives and so has Michelle. With her, you have a designer that truly lives her brands. Michelle Unzipped" the Instagram handle adopted by Ms. Smith as she separated herself from Milly "is the brand I followed much more than a label." On that Instagram account, Ms. Smith has chronicled her metamorphosis from creative director of a corporate brand and wife to unbound, freehanded designer and champion of personal freedom, love and L.G.B.T.Q. rights. The next internship was at the haute couture atelier of Christian Dior on the Avenue Montaigne. Ms. Smith worked on the second floor, illustrating gowns in watercolor: one copy for the client, one for the archives. "It was such a dream," she said. Missing the energy of New York, though, she decided to return in 1996. She got an entry level job on the design team at Gallery, an outerwear company. "I love coats," she said. "A coat is the first impression you make." She was brought in by Mr. Oshrin, an executive on the company's business side who was impressed by her portfolio. By 1998, Ms. Smith moved to a design role at Helen Wang, a contemporary brand. "It was a new market sector that I was excited about, with brands like DKNY, Anna Sui and Rebecca Taylor. I wanted to be able to create beautiful fashionable clothing that I could almost afford." She carefully tracked the progress of her designs, sold in the department stores that were not yet seriously threatened by e commerce. "The designs I worked on were doing well and one even got on the cover of a Neiman Marcus catalog," she said. "It was building my confidence." In 2000, Ms. Smith and Mr. Oshrin, who'd begun dating and ideating, started Milly as a wholesale brand. "I handled the design and creative aspects and Andy handled the financial side and production," she said. The business plan called for Milly to do 1.2 million in wholesale sales in the first year. They hit the target in three months. "I think Michelle has always done a great job at knowing how to design in a way that is relevant and shifting as things shift in time," said Tracy Margolies, the chief merchant for Saks Fifth Avenue. Milly spread across the country, to Neiman Marcus and Fred Segal in Los Angeles. "We were coming out of the minimalist '90s with the dark Prada and Calvin Klein looks. What I was doing was super colorful and printed with a little ironic wink to vintage," Ms. Smith said. "It was totally different from what was going on at the time." In 2011, Milly opened its store on Madison Avenue and, a few years later, another in East Hampton. Ms. Smith began to develop close relationships with her customers. "I would go to the store on Madison Avenue and we would sit in the dressing room and talk about our bodies and our lives and everything women talk about," said Ms. Brzezinski, who hosts "Morning Joe," on MSNBC with her husband, Joe Scarborough, whom she married in a dress designed by Ms. Smith. "Michelle can feel your vibe and has an ability to help you translate that into your own personal style that is just so spot on." But supplying the contemporary market, which demanded new product every month, could be dizzying. "By the end, I was designing 27 collections a year with over 100 styles per collection," Ms. Smith said. "It was a crazy carousel and it was going so fast." In 2013, the stressed out designer followed the advice of her friends and started taking SoulCycle classes. She especially enjoyed those of Ms. Griffith, a favorite of Kelly Ripa and the former trainer of Madonna who wrote a book about going from alcohol and drugs to fitness, "Two Turns From Zero." "I couldn't believe Stacey's energy and personality and the way she lit up the room," Ms. Smith said. The two became friends outside of class, collaborating in 2015 on a collection of T shirts with Ms. Griffith's motivational catchphrases like, "No One Remembers Normal." Ms. Smith worked on sketches, adjustments and pulled the dress from her collection to keep it special, but still wasn't sure it would be selected. "I had made coats for the second inauguration that weren't chosen, so I didn't think it was a slam dunk," she said. Its choosing "was the most exciting moment in my entire design career." (The dress will be on display in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery exhibit, "Every Eye Is Upon Me: First Ladies of the United States," which opens on Nov. 13.) It is the only piece of her past professional life that Ms. Smith hangs on to, and she finds it irritating when Milly's new owner seems to claim credit for the dress, as it has on Instagram on occasions like Mrs. Obama's birthday. "It's cheesy," Ms. Smith said. ("We bought all the assets of Milly and that dress is an asset of Milly," said Mark Friedman, the president and chief executive of S. Rothschild. "I feel bad that she's irritated, but she shouldn't be.") In August 2018, Ms. Smith was invited to a barbecue in Montauk. Ms. Griffith was there. "We both felt really happy to be in each other's presence and we started spending more time together," Ms. Smith said. When the relationship became serious enough to tell her children, Ms. Smith overheard her son tell a friend, "Wait till you hear this one: My dad has a new girlfriend and so does my mom." Last year, the couple made it Instagram official, posting photos of themselves in embrace at the New York City Ballet. Ms. Smith captioned hers " lovewins." Department stores are falling. Fashion is flailing. Winter is coming. But her wheels are turning, and she finally feels comfortable in her own skin. "Going through everything I've been through, going from a young woman to an adult in my late 40s, I have found my own voice and my confidence to freely express myself in my personal life and my creativity," she said. "For the first time, everything has aligned and it feels amazing and true." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
"I wish my father was alive," Mr. Blanchard said in a telephone interview. "He was an avid opera fanatic." "Fire Shut Up in My Bones" is based on a memoir by Charles Blow, an Opinion columnist for The New York Times, with a libretto by the writer and director Kasi Lemmons. In his review in The Times, Anthony Tommasini praised it as "subtly powerful." "Vocal lines flow from lyrical wistfulness to snappy declamations; dense big band sonorities in the orchestra segue into lighter passages backed by a jazz rhythm section," Mr. Tommasini wrote. "And there are rousing evocations of gospel choruses at church, blues and, during a fraternity party, a rhythmic chorus of spoken words, finger snapping and dance steps." Many details remain to be worked out, including whether the Met will present the work at its 3,800 seat opera house at Lincoln Center, or as part of its new initiative to collaborate with other presenters, such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Public Theater. But Mr. Gelb said that it could come to New York as soon as the 2021 22 season, with support from the Ford Foundation, and that the Met's music director, Yannick Nezet Seguin, would conduct it. Mr. Gelb and Mr. Nezet Seguin have been working to bring more contemporary and diverse voices to the Met. Last year the company announced that for the first time it was commissioning operas by women a Missy Mazzoli work based on George Saunders's novel "Lincoln in the Bardo," and a Jeanine Tesori opera, "Grounded," based on a George Brant play. In its history the Met has performed just two operas by female composers: Kaija Saariaho's "L'Amour de Loin," in 2016, and Ethel M. Smyth's "Der Wald," in 1903, both of which were originally produced elsewhere. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
WHAT'S a cat have to do to get some love? Jaguar is breeding its most competitive cars in decades, among them the graceful, dynamically sparkling XF and XJ sedans, yet too few people have been buying them. It's enough to make the company's latest owner, Tata Motors of India, wonder about that "Rule, Britannia" mythology. Now comes the XKR S, merely the fastest series production car in Jaguar's history. It's another model certain to lift Jaguar's esteem, if not its bottom line. Jaguar's American sales continue to hover around 13,000 cars a year, even as its sibling under Tata, Land Rover, sells three times as many vehicles. Put another way, only about one in 1,000 cars sold in America is a Jaguar. Yet Jaguars are measured against European prestige brands like BMW, which competes in more market segments and attracted nearly 250,000 American buyers in 2011. Even Jaguar's steady showings in quality measures has failed to sway the big spenders. In one closely watched J. D. Power Associates survey of initial quality released last week, Jaguar vaulted to second place tied with Porsche and hard on the heels of Lexus from a No. 20 ranking in 2011. So what's the problem? My hunch is that many shoppers, hearing the Jaguar name, still picture a neighbor's vintage model with the traits of a beautiful teenage rocker: moody, garage bound and usually broke. It doesn't help that Jaguar, alone in its sector of the luxury market, offers no entry luxury models or crossovers, products that Americans buy in bulk. But next year Jaguar will roll out a car enthusiasts have dreamed about: the F Type, heir to a sports car hall of famer, the E Type of the 1960s. As placeholders go, a company could do worse than the XKR S. Spectacular to behold, with 550 supercharged V 8 horsepower and a top speed of 186 miles per hour, it can be considered the explosive cap to the long running XK lineup. Just 100 XKR S coupes and 25 convertibles will come to America this model year. The exclusivity comes at a wallet detonating price: 132,875 for the coupe and 138,875 for a convertible. Compared with the 85,000 XK coupe (385 horsepower), or even the 98,000 XKR coupe (510), it is asking a lot. Yet in performance and presence, the XKR S slam dunks its doppelganger, the 200,000 Aston Martin DB9, another beautiful Briton shaped by Ian Callum, who is now the design chief of Jaguar. There's about as much visual testosterone as the XK's classical proportions can handle too much for some tastes. The scoops and slits, the stormy 20 inch forged wheels and the carbon fiber wing issue fair warning: this Jaguar is no gentleman. Underscoring the focus of the XKR S, Mr. Callum said that physics and aerodynamics dictated the styling: "If you don't like the way it looks, you probably won't like the way it drives either." Those looks include a selection of paint choices that highlight Jaguar's international racing heritage. The convertible I tested was jacketed in British Racing Green, and there's an Italian Racing Red. But the French Racing Blue of my coupe test car was the to die for color. I blame those hues in part for the stream of admirers who kept stopping me and the cars on our travels. I also succumbed to the Jaguar's megawatt charm. Finishing a hike on the Appalachian Trail in upstate New York and emerging onto a roadway blanketed in twilight fog, I chuckled at the blue orb, still some distance away, its paint cutting through the murk like a lighthouse beacon. The cabin is jazzed with chunky sport seats, glossy black console trim, a three spoke steering wheel and the choice of dark aluminum trim standing in for wood. But even a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon can't mask the XK's age spots. Jaguar's touch screen infotainment unit remains among the industry's lamest, from its murky display to its sluggish operation. Compared with the XKR, the S version gets a deeper breathing V 8, good for a gain of 40 horsepower. An active exhaust system opens its pipes when you really prod the gas pedal, and the V 8's siren song could lure even a tone deaf sailor to his doom. Despite its fearsome output, at 15 m.p.g in town and 22 on the highway the XKR S neatly avoids a guzzler tax. That's a nice touch in a car that can dash from a stop to 60 m.p.h. in a conservative, company cited 4.2 seconds and reach 100 m.p.h. in 8.7 seconds. The smooth, swift transmission on paper, a ho hum 6 speed automatic with paddle shifters proves that you don't always need eight gears or NASA spec clutch mechanisms to go fast and have fun. Enormous disc brakes with light, efficient monoblock calipers painted gray or red for an extra 450 and Pirelli P Zero tires helped reel in this nearly two ton car with ease. Steering remains the easy twist variety, yet it's also satisfyingly precise once you remember that every XK prefers gentle inputs from its driver. The stability control system and torque vectoring rear differential have been reprogrammed, in part to give freer rein to this beast. And an odd beast it is: one part purebred feline, one part jungle carnivore, and, um, one part squirrel. On damp or gritty pavement, the Jaguar wanted to spin its tires or shake its tail at the slightest provocation. That old school volatility is the opposite of modern sports cars like the Porsche 911 or the Nissan GT R, which are fairly idiot proof. In other words, I loved it. When the clouds parted, the XKR S revealed grace and grit that's rare in this genre of luxury sports car. This XKR S will lift the spirits of a few score Americans, and I'm glad to have driven it. With some storied brands dying, Jaguar's viability may demand that it deliver higher volume cars that buyers want, including entry level models and sporty crossovers, armchair purists be damned. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
F.D.A. Approves New H.I.V. Prevention Drug, but Not for Everyone The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved a new drug, Descovy, for prevention of infection with H.I.V., only the second drug approved for this purpose. The first, Truvada, has become a mainstay of government efforts to turn back the H.I.V. epidemic. But the F.D.A.'s approval of Descovy explicitly excludes "individuals who have receptive vaginal sex," which may include cisgender women and many transgender men, and does not outline a plan for making the drug available to them. The drug's maker, Gilead Sciences, tested it only "in men and transgender women," the F.D.A. noted. Some activists and scientists said the approval sets a dangerous precedent by allowing companies to dodge the expensive trials needed to test medicines in cisgender women and other groups at risk of H.I.V. infection. Such an exclusion "should be unacceptable in these days and times," said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, chief of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital. It's important to test the drug specifically in cisgender women and some transgender men, she added, because Descovy may work differently in the vagina than in rectal tissues. The F.D.A., in fact, will require Gilead to study the Descovy in cisgender women, company officials said. Gilead is considering a trial in Africa. Gilead also makes Truvada. Both medicines are to be taken daily, an H.I.V. prevention strategy called pre exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. The company has come under heavy criticism for selling Truvada at a high cost, currently about 20,000 a year. Critics have said the expense keeps the drug out of reach of Americans who would benefit from it. Few patients actually pay the full price, Gilead has said. Less expensive generic versions of Truvada are expected next year, as the drug's patent protections expire. But Descovy's approval ensures Gilead's continued dominance of the market for PrEP, said Jeremiah Johnson, a project director at Treatment Action Group, an advocacy organization. Descovy is not more effective than Truvada, Mr. Johnson noted. But in various presentation materials, Gilead on occasion has hinted that it is, and Mr. Johnson and others fear patients may reject affordable and accessible generic versions of Truvada in favor of the more expensive Descovy. Gilead Sciences has received strong criticism for selling Truvada for 20,000 per year. Any suggestion that Descovy is more effective than Truvada was unintentional, said Dr. Diana Brainard, who oversees Gilead's H.I.V. division. The company's message, she added, is that both Descovy and Truvada are highly effective at preventing H.I.V. infection when taken daily. "It's always good to have choice," she said. Descovy's patent is supposed to expire in 2026, but a nonprofit group called Prep4All Collaboration hopes to find a way to end it in 2022. The group had been running a campaign called "Break the Patent" to limit Truvada's patent protection, which was supposed to expire in 2021. But in May, Gilead announced that a generic version would be available next year. "As of today, we're adding an 's' it's 'Break the Patents,'" said Peter Staley, a founder of the collaboration. Descovy contains a newer version of tenofovir, the active ingredient in Truvada. Gilead tested Descovy in a multinational trial that included 5,313 men and 74 transgender women who have sex with men. There were no cisgender women or transgender men, and 84 percent of the participants were white. "They did a terrible job of inclusion for a company that dominates the market," Mr. Johnson said. There are some data suggesting that Descovy has fewer side effects on bones and kidneys than Truvada, but those problems have only been seen in a small number of people taking Truvada, Dr. Walensky said. She also noted that although Gilead scientists have presented some of their data at conferences, they have yet to publish their results in a peer reviewed journal. At a hearing in August, some activists urged the F.D.A. to deny approval for use of Descovy in cisgender women , or to require Gilead to test the drug in a large number of them promptly after approval. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Unless forced to do so by the F.D.A., critics said, the company has no motivation to test the drug in cisgender women and transgender men who may be at risk. "We had at least hoped that they would say something the day they approved it without an indication for women, that they would have a plan or forceful language laid out on how this disgraceful situation is going to be rectified," Mr. Staley said. Although the F.D.A.'s announcement does not mention it, the agency is requiring such a study. Dr. Brainard said Gilead plans to start the study in at least 1,500 high risk women in southern Africa by the end of 2020. The F.D.A.'s approval letter requires the company to complete the trial by December 2024. Dr. Walensky said she is disappointed by the numbers and timeline of that trial. "I want to see a large scale, rapid effort to get data in women as soon as possible," she said. "That, in my mind, is the only way to rectify this." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
We feel it whenever the ground quakes and volcanoes erupt. These devastating events, which kill thousands of people and affect millions more every year, may seem like random acts of nature. But when you watch them over a long time scale, a pattern emerges. A new interactive app released Thursday shows more than 50 years' worth of earthquakes and eruptions occurring across the globe. The blue dots represent strong quakes (5 on the Richter scale and above), and the red triangles mark volcanic blasts. Their locations illustrate the connection between the natural disasters and Earth's hot interior. "Our planet has an internal heat engine; it's like a warm blooded animal," said Elizabeth Cottrell, the director of the Global Volcanism Program at the Smithsonian Institution, which created the app. "That heat engine drives plate tectonics, the creation and destruction of the surface of our planet." By looking at the interactive, you can see that earthquakes and eruptions are concentrated along plate boundaries, the locations where Earth is creating or destroying crust. It also provides details on the destructive power of specific events, like the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption or the 2010 Haiti earthquake. The information for the app comes from the Global Volcanism Program's data on eruptions and the United States Geological Survey's database of earthquakes. Because the researchers had only what they thought were complete catalogs starting in 1960, the app does not cover earlier geological disasters. The map also features large green blobs that represent sulfur dioxide emissions spewed from volcanoes. The data for the gases was collected using NASA satellites and covers large emissions since 1978. When you click on a sulfur dioxide release label, you can see how far the chemicals travel through the atmosphere, like the catastrophic 2008 Kasatochi eruption in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, which ejected ash more than 50,000 feet into the air. "You can be in a city like New York and watch a volcano erupt in Alaska and see that the gases passed over your city," Dr. Cottrell said. She added that by visualizing the earthquakes, eruptions and emissions over the past 50 years, the interactive app "allows people to feel the heartbeat of the planet they live on." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
With Washington preoccupied by the government shutdown, Wall Street is shifting its attention to an even more worrisome situation: the possibility that the government could run out of money within the next few weeks, forcing an unprecedented default on its debt. The Treasury said last week that Congress had until Oct. 17 to raise the limit on how much the federal government could borrow or risk leaving the country on the precipice of default. If the debt ceiling is not raised by then, the Treasury estimates it will be left with about only 30 billion in cash, which would be used up in a matter of days. As a result, economists and investors have quietly begun to explore the options the White House might have in the event Congress fails to act. The most widely discussed strategy would be for President Obama to invoke authority under the 14th Amendment and essentially order the federal government to keep borrowing, an option that was endorsed by former President Bill Clinton during an earlier debt standoff in 2011. And in recent days, prominent Democrats like Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, have urged the White House to seriously consider such a route, even if it might provoke a threat of impeachment from House Republicans and ultimately require the Supreme Court to rule on its legitimacy. Other potential October surprises range from the logistically forbidding, like prioritizing payments, issuing i.o.u.'s or selling off gold and other assets, to more fanciful ideas, like minting a trillion dollar platinum coin. So far, administration officials have continued to insist that there is no plausible alternative to Congressional action on the debt limit. In December 2012, Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, flatly renounced the 14th Amendment option, saying: "I can say that this administration does not believe that the 14th Amendment gives the president the power to ignore the debt ceiling period." And on Wednesday, a senior administration lawyer said that remained the administration's view. Still, some observers outside government in Washington and on Wall Street, citing a game theorylike approach, suggest that the president's position is more tactical than fundamental, since raising the possibility of a way out for the White House like the constitutional gambit would take the heat off Republicans in Congress to act on its own before the Oct. 17 deadline. "If a default is imminent, the option of raising the debt limit by executive fiat has to be on the table," said Greg Valliere, chief political strategist at Potomac Research. "Desperate times require desperate measures." Some professional investors echoed his view, which is a reason Wall Street remains hopeful that the economic and financial disaster a government default could usher in will be avoided. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. "At the end of the day if there is no action and the United States has a default looming, I think President Obama can issue an executive order authorizing the Treasury secretary to make payments," said David Kotok, chief investment officer of Cumberland Advisors in Sarasota, Fla., which has just over 2 billion under management. "There's always been more flexibility in the hands of Treasury than they've acknowledged." According to some legal theorists, the president could essentially ignore the debt limit imposed by Congress, because the 14th Amendment states that the "validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law," including for debts like pensions and bounties to suppress insurrections, "shall not be questioned." Absent Congressional approval for raising the debt limit, the constitutional route or some creative financing plan, the only alternative to default would be to cut spending by as much as a third, financing debt payments and other government obligations out of money coming in from tax receipts and other sources. If continued for more than a few days, that would deliver a shock to the economy that would almost certainly send the nation, and perhaps the global economy, back into a severe recession. Before that could happen, analysts say, the stock market would inevitably plummet. "Investors will hit the panic button on Oct. 18 if the debt ceiling has not been raised by then," said Ajay Rajadhyaksha, head of fixed income research at Barclays. "The market will force Congress's hand." There are precedents for such a denouement. After the House rejected initial legislation authorizing the bank bailout known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program during the financial crisis in late September 2008, the Dow Jones industrial average plunged more than 700 points in one trading session, prompting legislators to reverse course and approve a similar bill within days. Market turbulence also helped set the stage for a deal in summer 2011 when Congressional Republicans and Mr. Obama squared off over the debt ceiling but ultimately compromised. After largely staying on the sidelines as the budget battle approached in recent months, business leaders are also increasing warnings about the danger of a default. On Wednesday, Jacob J. Lew, the Treasury secretary, and other White House officials held a conference call with leaders of the Business Roundtable, which represents major American companies. Afterward, both Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. sat down to discuss the issue with Wall Street chieftains, including Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs. Another option, at least in the short term, would be to issue i.o.u.'s to cover some of what is owed and buy more time. The California State government employed this tactic in summer 2009 during a fiscal showdown in Sacramento, issuing 450,000 i.o.u.'s valued at approximately 2.6 billion. Mark A. Patterson, who served as the Treasury's chief of staff from 2009 until May 2013 said that he and other top administration officials studied various strategies before the 2011 standoff, including the constitutional path, selling gold and a trillion dollar coin. "We would have been thrilled if we had an easy option to take default off the table," he said Wednesday. "We examined every idea and concluded that none of them would work." The idea of invoking the 14th Amendment has been attacked on both constitutional and pragmatic grounds. Some legal scholars said that the amendment did not confer any legal authority on the president, pointing to the words "authorized by law." Pragmatically, specialists on Wall Street said questions about the legality of such bonds might cause potential buyers to eschew them. "If there is no borrowing authority, any Treasury debt issued after Oct. 17 could become susceptible to legal challenges," Mr. Rajadhyaksha of Barclays said. While the Oct. 17 Treasury deadline will increasingly become the focus in the days ahead, both for politicians in Washington and investors around the world, there may still be a bit of wiggle room after that, said Michelle Girard, chief United States economist at RBS. But not much. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Michelle Wolf's Old Late Night Bosses Come to Her Defense Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. The comedian Michelle Wolf has worked on both "The Daily Show" and "Late Night," so Trevor Noah and Seth Meyers were not surprised by the rough riding, profane speech she gave at the White House correspondents' dinner on Saturday. The speech has drawn criticism for its unapologetic attacks on President Trump and, in particular, jokes involving Sarah Huckabee Sanders's makeup (Wolf said her eye shadow was made of "burnt facts"). Noah and Meyers saw little cause for outrage especially given Trump's own history of commenting crudely on women's appearances and they swept to Ms. Wolf's defense on Monday. "She is filthy and she is mean which is what we love about her. Because those are wonderful qualities for comedians, and terrible qualities for free world leaders." SETH MEYERS, comparing Michelle Wolf with President Trump "Michelle should have had the decency not to comment on women's appearances in any way, shape or form. She's a comedian, for God's sake, not the president." TREVOR NOAH Noah feigned anger at Wolf who left "The Daily Show" months ago to host her own program on Netflix and told her that she was retroactively "fired." "I agree completely with President Trump and his team: Comedians should be held to a higher standard than he is. Which is why even though Michelle Wolf left for her new show four months ago, tonight I'm announcing that I'm officially firing her. You hear that, Michelle? You're fired!" TREVOR NOAH Meyers was especially bothered by the fact that the White House Correspondents' Association, which hired Wolf for the evening, put out a statement denouncing Wolf. It said her statements were "not in the spirit" of the event. "You hired her! That's like a parent sending an email saying, 'Yesterday's birthday was meant to celebrate Kevin turning 6 years old. Unfortunately the stripper's dance routine was not in the spirit of the party.'" SETH MEYERS On "The Late Show," Stephen Colbert recalled hosting the correspondents' dinner in 2006, when he told intensely sharp edged jokes at President George W. Bush's expense. Colbert got back into the character that he used to play back then an over the top conservative commentator and opined about Wolf's performance on Saturday. "I've been busy collaborating with Kanye West on an album of Republican hip hop. It's called 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Reality.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "I want to congratulate Michelle Wolf for being so lucky to have me Steve splain everything she did wrong." STEPHEN COLBERT "This is the correspondents' dinner, celebrating the freedom of speech; you can't just say whatever you want!" STEPHEN COLBERT "How dare you besmirch the O.K. name of Sarah Huckabee Sanders?" STEPHEN COLBERT "I am so proud, right down to the breastbone, that the press is defending her despite the fact that her boss joked about throwing reporters in jail. That's the kind of comedy the press likes!" STEPHEN COLBERT, on Sarah Huckabee Sanders "Saturday was the White House correspondents' dinner, and Trump called it 'a very big, boring bust.' This was the first time in history Trump has called a big bust boring." JIMMY FALLON "The royal family just announced the name of William and Kate's newborn son, Louis Arthur Charles. I guess they couldn't decide on a royal sounding name, so they just went with all of them." JIMMY FALLON "Stormy Daniels is suing President Trump for defamation for something he said in a tweet. When they heard this, Muslims, African Americans, gays and Hillary Clinton said, 'You can do that?'" CONAN O'BRIEN "This could be a bigly victory for President Trump. The president of South Korea said he thinks Trump should win a Nobel Prize for Peace. 'Hairpiece,' he said but that's in the translation." JIMMY KIMMEL, on the peace talks underway between North and South Korea | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
LONDON It would be Europe's worst nightmare: after weeks of rumors, the Greek prime minister announces late on a Saturday night that the country will abandon the euro currency and return to the drachma. Instead of business as usual on Monday morning, lines of angry Greeks form at the shuttered doors of the country's banks, trying to get at their frozen deposits. The drachma's value plummets more than 60 percent against the euro, and prices soar at the few shops willing to open. Soon, the country's international credit lines are cut after Greece, as part of the prime minister's move, defaults on its debt. As the country descends into chaos, the military seizes control of the government. This scary chain of events might never come to pass. But the danger that Greece or some other deeply damaged country in the euro zone could leave the single currency union can no longer be ruled out. And it was largely this prospect that drove leaders last week to agree to adopt strict fiscal rules that they hope will wrap the 17 European Union nations that use the euro into an even tighter embrace. Officially, the guardians of monetary union have refused to discuss in public the possibility of member states abandoning the euro a contingency not even addressed in any of the treaties governing the monetary union. As Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, put it last week: "It would be imprudent to create contingency plans when we see no likelihood that they could happen." But as the truth dawns in Greece and other weak euro zone economies that the price for remaining bound to the single currency will be more hardship and sacrifice, a growing number of legal and financial experts to say nothing of the Greeks themselves are examining in detail what would happen if Greece abandoned the euro. "We should be under no false pretenses that we are not currently on the drachma train," said Jason Manolopoulos, a Greek hedge fund executive and author of "Greece's 'Odious' Debt." "That does not mean we will end up there, but that is our present course." Over the last year, Greeks have withdrawn almost 40 billion euros, or nearly 53 billion, in deposits from their banking system, equal to about 17 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. A total of 14 billion euros in deposits was withdrawn in September and October alone. According to testimony by Georgios A. Provopoulos, the head of the Greek central bank, before a parliamentary committee last month, this outflow continued in early November "at a very large scale." The deposit flight peaked in October and early November, at a time of intense political uncertainty in Greece and financial turmoil in Europe. According to Mr. Provopoulos, the outflows have stabilized of late under the leadership of the new prime minister, Lucas D. Papademos. A dedicated europhile, Mr. Papademos was the head of Greece's central bank in 2001 when the country adopted the common currency. Since becoming prime minister in November he has said forcefully that Greece's future lies within the euro zone, not outside it. But that has not stopped investment banks, academics and lawyers from digging deep into what a euro exit would look like. Over the last month Nomura and UBS have come out with detailed studies on the topic. Nomura forecast a 60 percent devaluation of the new drachma. UBS went further, warning of hyperinflation, military coups and possible civil war that could afflict a departing country. One of the more detailed studies comes from Eric Dor, an economist at the Ieseg School of Management in Lille, France. Shops would be required to accept scrip or devalued euros circulating only within Greece until the country's bank note printer, operated by the central bank, could churn out enough drachmas to replace the 200 billion euros in cash and deposits currently in Greece. Meanwhile, Greece would become a financial pariah. Visitors would find Greece a paradise of bargains, but for most Greeks themselves, travel would become prohibitively expensive. "I hope it does not happen," Mr. Dor said. "But one has to be prepared." One person who does think a Greek exit will happen is Charles Proctor, a British lawyer who has studied the legal intricacies of leaving the euro zone. "I think there has to be a recognition that a single currency does not suit a vast range of economies," Mr. Proctor said. "And that some member economies must depart in order to get their economic houses in order." Like others, he points to the fact that there is no explicit clause in European treaties that allows for an easy departure, either forced or voluntary. While 10 European Union countries do not use the euro, a disorderly exit would almost certainly mean that Greece would have to leave the union as well. Mr. Proctor also takes on the thorny issue of what would happen to the investor holding a Greek bond that is governed by domestic law, as more than 90 percent of Greek bonds are. Most likely, he concludes, the result would be default as investors would not accept interest and principal payments in devalued drachmas. While this would certainly hurt European banks, the European Central Bank, which owns around 60 billion euros or so of Greek bonds, would suffer the most. Unless the International Monetary Fund agreed to help, Greece would be unable to borrow from abroad. On the plus side, with a cheap currency and restored control of its monetary policy, Greece's chances of returning to growth might improve drastically. While their numbers remain small, some Greek economists say that this is the only way to address the country's persistent inability to balance its trade. Theodore Mariolis, an economist at Panteion University in Athens, argues that a devaluation of 50 percent or more could close Greece's trade gap without sending inflation soaring an outcome that many economists might regard as too good to be true. But whether that provides a long run solution for a country that has failed to improve its competitiveness is questionable. And the biggest problem for Greece if it returns to the drachma, says Hal S. Scott, an expert on international finance at Harvard Law School, would be persuading Greeks to believe in and hold an ever weakening drachma when a much stronger euro would be so readily available. This constant selling pressure would make a devaluation all the more extreme, raising the threat of hyperinflation. "The devaluation issue is the most serious part," Mr. Scott said. "I just do not see how you deal with it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
What books are currently on your night stand? I don't have a night stand. If I read at night in bed or too close to sleep time, I lie awake thinking in the dark for hours. But there are books piled randomly everywhere around the house, and I read randomly from them the little pillar of books here next to me at the moment is formed by Pushkin's "Queen of Spades"; Han Kang's "Human Acts"; Kate Tempest's "Let Them Eat Chaos"; Dilys Powell's "The Villa Ariadne"; Jenni Fagan's "The Sunlight Pilgrims"; Gillian Beer's book about Lewis Carroll's Alice, "Alice in Space"; and Elisabeth Young Bruehl's "Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World." What's the last great book you read? "Invitation to a Beheading," in which Nabokov treats us to, then liberates us from, the bad farce of totalitarianism. What a blast. I recently read "Pale Fire" for the first time too (so am now forever inoculated against critics), and the energy in it, the vision, the richness, the force of voice, the panache, the detail (e.g., the gift of the source of the word "eavesdrop") reading Nabokov is always liberating, the joy of not just the pure originality but also the knowing what safe hands you're in speeding along the unsafe edge of the curve high up the side of the mountain. What's the best classic novel you recently read for the first time? "1984." I've read a lot of Orwell, but not this, till last year. The Two Minutes Hate the Two Minutes Tweet? "A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, . . . an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp." Plus, a rereading can feel like a first time read in itself, which is another great thing about books and time; we think we know them, but as we change with time, so do they, with us. And to take this thought a little further: Over the past few years the poet Jamie McKendrick has been producing new translations of the works by the great Italian writer Giorgio Bassani that go to make up his "Il Romanzo di Ferrara," and something, maybe McKendrick's understanding of the poet in Bassani, means that the reread is a kind of new discovery. I felt the same about Sandra Smith's translation of Camus's "L'Etranger." It's like she'd studied and understood the heartbeat of the original syntax. I wish someone would ask her to retranslate all of Camus. What's your favorite book no one else has heard of? "Origins and Elements," poems by the Orkney film poet Margaret Tait; well, any of her books she's a maverick, quietly seminal in both the film form and the written form. You can see some of her films online in the National Library of Scotland's Moving Image Archive, but the poetry is harder to track down. It's unique, conversational, visionary, beat, thrawn and thoughtful. Or there's "O Caledonia," a novel by Elspeth Barker, a sparky, funny work of genius about class, romanticism, social tradition and literary tradition, and one of the best least known novels of the 20th century, I reckon. Which writers novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets working today do you admire most? This question just made my brain pixelate, and now the inside of my head's a roaring celebration. That first fragment of a second, this is who came through the door: Toni Morrison, Nicola Barker, Jan Verwoert, Margaret Atwood, Giorgio Agamben, Kate Atkinson, Alasdair Gray, Helen Oyeyemi, Laurie Anderson, Marina Warner, Elif Shafak, Kamila Shamsie, Paul Virilio. . . . That's just the start of the party. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. What do you read when you're working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing? I don't avoid anything. If I'm working on a book I keep the weekends free, if I can, for reading, and I choose what to read more or less randomly though there's no such thing as reading randomly, really, since one of the gifts of reading is that the satisfactions and the astonishments of serendipity always kick in sooner or later. What moves you most in a work of literature? The earth moves, for me, when the read comes together on all its levels, from syntax to instinctual platelet level. Also always really exciting to me is the crossing over the written work does into the other art forms, prose into poetry into music into choreography into visual text into textural. Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid? I like reading pretty much everything. How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or simultaneously? Morning or night? Well, I love all the ways of reading. The more the better. But I naturally prefer the form of the book. We've loved it for centuries, and no wonder: Look at it; its always opening to something, its two wings, its two sides making one form, its act of opening us as we open it you can't "open" a screen like you can literally open a book. And a book always holds the reminder of the organic world, the trees that went to make it and the word "spine" was originally used for the spine of the book because of the spine of the creatures whose skins were once used to bind books, the place where the skin folded over the creature's own spine. That's how close to the process of life, death, time, growth and oxygen the form of the book is. How do you organize your books? Alphabetically on the shelves, haphazardly in the little ziggurats round the house. What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves? I've thought about this, and I really can't tell. It'd depend on the people and their preconceptions. My shelves themselves haven't any preconceptions, I mean. What's the best book you've ever received as a gift? A first edition of Plath's (or Victoria Lucas's) "The Bell Jar." It's been well loved in its life, it's fairly barreled and slopy, and there are the remnants of what looks like Chinese takeaway on some of the pages. But opening that package and finding it there was the closest I suspect I'll ever come to being given a sports car or a pony. Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain? Emma Woodhouse (for being both heroine and anti ). What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most? Because I was the youngest, at the back of four older siblings, as a child I read as if I was 10 years older than I really was, which means I came to children's literature late, read a lot of the children's classics in my 30s and 40s, and read writers like Joyce and Orwell and Swift as a child sort of by chance, because they were on the (brilliant) Scottish secondary school curriculum and happened to be in the books cupboard above the bed when I was 7 or 8. It also means I've never really been able to see the division between the child reading state and the adult reading state, which is probably why I love Tove Jansson's works, which are themselves near interchangeables; her fiction for adults written with a clarity, openness, foresight and refusal to compromise on the darks and lights, all preserved from her children's fiction, and her children's fiction imbued with an adult philosophy, experience, wisdom, generosity, forgiveness. If you could require the prime minister to read one book, what would it be? The American president? I'll give them both "King Lear." It's good and prescient about divided kingdoms. I'll add a copy of "Macbeth" ("the Scottish play") as a special Scottish gift for your president. And in case they don't rate Shakespeare, or think "Shakespeare, yawn, that was then, this is now. . . ," I'll send Mrs. May a copy of Jose Saramago's "The Stone Raft," a book about what happens when a piece of the Iberian Peninsula breaks off mainland Europe and floats off by itself, and for your president, I'll add a cubit to his name with "Trumpet," by Jackie Kay, a novel whose humanism, humor and vision demolish anyone's urge to think they've got the right to decide about, categorize or dismiss other human beings. You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? I'd never organize a literary dinner party. The very thought. No, instead I'll phone the great 20th century photographer (and superb writer) Lee Miller, up in heaven she became a gourmet surrealist cook in her later years, and I'd love to try that bright blue fish dish she made and I'll ask her to invite Katherine Mansfield, Colette and Simone de Beauvoir. And we'll need a musician or two. Stephane Grappelli. Nina Simone. Ask Harpo Marx to bring his harp. I'll bring the Talisker and sit shyly in the corner with George Mackay Brown. Of the books you've written, which is your favorite or the most personally meaningful? Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn't? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing? Whatever it was, I'll try and finish it later. Sometimes books don't deliver till their very last pages. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
VEGHEL, the Netherlands With AIDS, malaria and other diseases costing millions of lives every year, worrying about the vision of people in the developing world may seem like an indulgence. But supplying glasses for the world's poor may be one of the most valuable investments around. Hundreds of millions of people some put the estimates as high as two billion do not have the corrective lenses that would allow them to lead better, more productive lives. A study published in a World Health Organization journal in June estimated the cost in lost output at 269 billion a year. Moreover, tackling vision problems early can help prevent later blindness. Now efforts are under way to find a means of distributing inexpensive glasses on a wide scale. One promising technology is self adjustable spectacles, which let untrained wearers set the right focus themselves in less than a minute, greatly reducing the need for trained optometrists, who are rarely available in Africa and many parts of Asia. Though these adjustable glasses cannot yet help with conditions like astigmatism, at least 80 percent of refractive errors can be fixed. At least three organizations are now offering their own versions of low cost adjustable spectacles. Two are relatively new groups based in the Netherlands that have received little international recognition. The third, based in England and championing a British invention called AdSpecs, has been attracting widespread media attention for more than a decade. AdSpecs, which allow the corrective power of the glasses to be adjusted by means of a clear fluid injected into the lenses, were developed by Joshua Silver, a physics professor at Oxford University who directs a research institute there called the Center for Vision in the Developing World. Since introducing the glasses in 1996, Professor Silver has set an ambitious goal of distributing a billion pairs of low cost adjustable glasses by the year 2020. In the intervening 13 years, though, only about 30,000 AdSpecs have been distributed; they cost about 19 a pair. One of the Dutch groups, the Focus on Vision Foundation, says it can produce its Focusspec glasses for about 4 a pair. The group's founders say the price will drop substantially once the glasses are being made in large volume. They plan to distribute about 30,000 pairs in early 2010, initially in Afghanistan, Ghana and Tanzania. The other Dutch offering, called U Specs (universal spectacles), is being promoted by the VU University Medical Center and a charity called the D.O.B. Foundation. Both Dutch models are based on a design pioneered in the 1960s by Luis W. Alvarez, an American who won a Nobel Prize in physics. The design uses two lenses that slide across each other to alter their focus. U Specs were initially developed in 2003 by Rob van der Heijde, a physicist at the VU University Amsterdam. Frederik van Asbeck, a former student of Professor van der Heijde, struck out on his own to develop the Focusspec in 2005. Though the Dutch camps have had sporadic contact, they are not working together. The tangled provenance of the designs demonstrates the unspoken yet occasionally palpable sense of rivalry among the various camps. "I view them as good friends," Professor Silver, the inventor of AdSpecs, said. "We're not competitors. I'm just rather keen on origins and facts being clearly stated." He said they all agreed that the developing world needed a "low cost design that can be produced at very high volume," conceding that "none of the enterprises around today can do that." But each camp is convinced that it has the best approach to supply the millions or even billions of inexpensive glasses the developing world needs. Focus on Vision says its advantage is the unique injection molding process that allows its Focusspec eyeglasses to be made cheaply. It was developed by a Dutch engineer, Ron Kok, who grew wealthy in the 1980s by streamlining the manufacture of compact discs and contact lenses. Focus on Vision invited Mr. Kok to work that same magic on its glasses. "I saw immediately that you could make it simpler," he said. "They're designed to be easy and cheap to produce." The U Specs team emphasizes its scientific pedigree. "We took more of an academic approach, or at least a scientific approach, rather than an entrepreneurial one," said Sjoerd Hannema, who was in charge of the U Specs project until the middle of 2009. "Having a university and an eye hospital behind it," he said, "helps build recognition and authority around this project." Mr. Hannema now leads a nonprofit organization called Adaptive Eyewear, which is running a distribution project in Rwanda called Vision for a Nation. It uses a combination of U Specs, a version of Professor Silver's lenses and traditional reading glasses. Although they are not made using Mr. Kok's special production technique, supporters of U Specs say they will ultimately cost about the same to produce as the Focusspec. "It will be around one to two dollars, depending on the quantity," Mr. Hannema said. "If you make a million glasses, then automatically your cost price goes down dramatically. But then the challenge is where are you going to bring those glasses? Ultimately the cost of distribution is what matters." "They're basically all at the same level," he said, "and at the first stage of a very complicated journey." The Focusspec team contends that it is the closest to reaching mass production. "I think we're the furthest," said Dr. Ben van Noort, an ophthalmologist who is president of Focus on Vision. "But we'll see. As soon as we make a million per year, the price will drop to a euro." He suggested that fluid based spectacles, like those promoted by Professor Silver, were more sensitive to shifts in temperature, which made them less stable, especially in the challenging climates where many of these glasses are to be distributed. Yet the Focusspec has also had its early problems. In a recent visit to the production facility in Veghel, which is about 50 miles southeast of Amsterdam, the adjustment wheel was not working properly on a large batch of glasses. They had to be repaired before they could be sent to Afghanistan, where they were eventually to be distributed by Dutch soldiers stationed there. "Once you start to produce them on a large scale, you bump into things like this," Dr. van Noort said. "It's trial and error. There's no handbook for this." Professor Silver said his fluid filled spectacles would eventually cost less as well. "The Focus on Vision work is very interesting in that it shows that significant cost reduction is possible," he said. "But from my perspective, the jury is still out. There's no reason why Alvarez would be cheaper" in the long term. When it comes to choosing sides, many of the charitable groups involved say they are open to whatever glasses do the job. J. Kevin White, a former Marine who runs Global Vision 2020, a foundation that distributes adjustable glasses, said fluid filled lenses generally offer better optical quality and correct a greater range of refractive error. The Alvarez designs, by contrast, are cheaper, smaller, better looking and less likely to break. For his part, Mr. Hannema of Adaptive Eyewear considers the occasional strife between the groups counterproductive. "Kids in India don't benefit from that," he said. "It's like if Unicef and the Red Cross would quarrel about a patent on a medicine from a hundred years ago." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Is it time to temper the American dream of homeownership? If you want to curb the power of Wall Street and reduce the risk that the financial system will bring the rest of the economy tumbling down again, there may be no other choice. Consider what happened last week, when regulators pretty much threw in the towel on new rules requiring mortgage bankers to keep on their books a minimum share of all but the safest loans. The idea was perfectly reasonable a way to keep bankers' "skin in the game" to encourage prudence. In the end, however, officials decided that just about all mortgages were supersafe. No need for banks to keep a chunk. "The loophole has eaten the rule," Barney Frank, the former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and co author of the Dodd Frank financial overhaul, told my fellow columnist Floyd Norris last week. "There is no residential mortgage risk retention." Phillip L. Swagel, an economist at the University of Maryland who was an assistant secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush, called the decision simply "perplexing." The reason for the about face, though, is not exclusively, or even mainly, the formidable power of the Wall Street lobby. The ability of the financial industry to fend off attempts to hem it in also relies on an argument that is difficult for outsiders to refute: We cannot live without it. Unable to determine the risk that finance imposes on the broader economy, voters and the politicians they put in office have a strong incentive to give the industry a pass. "What is the cost of a crisis I don't prevent against what is the cost to tame finance?" asked Alan M. Taylor, an economist at the University of California, Davis. "We've only been thinking about this for a short time." Mortgage lenders dodged the proposed rule by joining homebuilders and advocates of low income homeownership to convince hundreds of lawmakers that defining supersafe mortgages as those with significant down payments would curtail mortgage lending to the struggling middle class and poor. That argument, while only partly related to the notion of requiring lenders to have skin in the game, pretty much stopped a central tenet of financial reform. An event in 2010 in Los Angeles for mortgage refinancing. The breakneck growth of our modern banking system closely tracks the rise of the long term home mortgage. A recent study by Professor Taylor, Oscar Jorda of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and Moritz Schularick of the University of Bonn found that mortgage lending across the industrialized world rose from the equivalent of 20 percent of annual economic activity at the start of the 20th century to about 69 percent in 2010. In 1928, mortgages accounted for 39 percent of American banks' lending to nonfinancial private companies. By 2007, on the eve of the financial crisis, the share was 68 percent. "The changing nature of financial intermediation has shifted the locus of crisis risk towards mortgage lending booms," the authors wrote. Financial reform that gives mortgages a pass is not going to cut it. Most Americans have an interest in being able to obtain a reasonably priced mortgage. But there is a fundamental tension between Wall Street's interests and those of the rest of us. 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. Financial institutions will naturally prefer to take more risks. After all, for them risk taking has historically carried a lot of upside and, with taxpayer funds as the ultimate backstop, only a limited downside. Ordinary people have a very different experience. "Financial deregulation is similar to relaxing rules on nuclear power plants," argue Anton Korinek of Johns Hopkins University and Jonathan Kreamer of the University of Maryland in a working paper for the Bank for International Settlements. It makes it easier and more profitable for the utilities, their shareholders and executives. It might also help ordinary Americans get cheaper electricity. "However, it comes at a heightened risk of nuclear meltdowns that impose massive negative externalities on the rest of society." Tightening mortgage rules would no doubt make it more difficult to buy and sell homes. It would lead to more renters and fewer homeowners. That might be worth it, though. Germany is doing fine with a homeownership rate of 45 percent, compared with about 65 percent in the United States, which is actually down from a peak of near 70 percent in 2004. Sheila C. Bair, who ran the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation throughout the buildup of the mortgage bubble and its implosion, argues that a policy of pushing mortgages for every American family is hardly ideal. "There is this religion about homeownership being the primary path to wealth accumulation notwithstanding the bad experience we've had with it," she said. Indeed, in an uncertain economy with so little job security, it makes less sense for policy to encourage workers to lock themselves into mortgages. Even when homeownership is the right call, "I don't think low income people should be in private label subprime mortgages," she added. That is what the Federal Housing Administration is for. Still, many experts say Washington is at least moving in the right direction. "Regulations are putting the system in much better shape than it was," said Douglas J. Elliott, a former banker at J. P. Morgan who is now at the Brookings Institution in Washington. This is not merely a self serving, American view. Across the Atlantic, John Vickers, a professor at Oxford and the former head of Britain's Independent Commission on Banking, agrees. "I wish there had been greater steps," he said. "But major steps have been made toward a less fragile system." Is this enough to close the gap between Wall Street's unbridled appetite for risk and the broader public interest? Recent research suggests the growth of credit increases the odds of a financial crisis. Researchers have also found little evidence that more finance brings faster growth to industrialized nations. The problem is, as long as we can't precisely measure the cost of financial excess, we will be prone to believe that the financial industry is simply too fragile to be meddled with. And with growth disappointing in just about every developed country, many people may be willing, even eager, to roll the dice again. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
"I hate the written word," the choreographer Reggie Wilson said with an almost wicked edge, as he sat in his cozy kitchen in Brooklyn, drinking sweet tea on a recent blustery day. Then, acknowledging my confusion, he added, "Now breathe, breathe." This remark is doubly surprising, coming from a choreographer who routinely provides reading lists for the audience before his shows his "Citizen" has its New York premiere on Wednesday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and who has been described as a kind of cultural anthropologist working in dance. Mr. Wilson's creations develop out of personal obsessions that lead to years of reading and research trips before he even sets foot in the studio. The suggested reading list for "Citizen" includes Valerie Boyd's biography of Zora Neale Hurston; a monograph on Mother Rebecca Jackson, an itinerant preacher who taught herself how to read through prayer and joined the Shakers; and a study of African American culture during the Jazz Age, "The Practice of Diaspora." The original spark for the work, though, was a 1797 portrait of Jean Baptiste Belley, a Senegalese born slave who bought his freedom in Saint Domingue (now Haiti) and fought in the Haitian Revolution, before being elected to the French National Convention during the French Revolution. Mr. Wilson, 49, first glimpsed the portrait in a pile of photocopied articles; intrigued, he traveled to Versailles to see the original, by Girodet. In it, Belley is depicted as an elegant, relaxed man in uniform, with a grave expression and a distinct bulge in his crotch. (The 18th and 19th centuries were obsessed with the idea of black men's sexual prowess.) "That doesn't look like the portrait of a servant or slave; it looks like he has agency and prominence, and I wanted to know more about who he was," Mr. Wilson said. A reproduction hangs on his kitchen wall; the image is also one of the projections (by the cinematographer Aitor Mendilibar) that give "Citizen" its visual component. Research into Belley's life led to other subjects, related and unrelated: the life of Mother Rebecca Jackson; the back and forth of African American artists between Paris and New York during the Jazz Age; the singing and praying bands of Maryland and Delaware, one of the oldest African American performance traditions, in which slaves worshiped together in secret. But viewers shouldn't expect to see literal references to Mr. Wilson's research in "Citizen." The confluent streams of inquiry function as a parallel, related, pool of ideas, which may or may not be useful to a person sitting in the darkened theater. "We know Reggie's stories and we know how they relate to his ongoing research," said Raja Feather Kelly, one of the performers, but the focus in the studio is on creating movement, developing it and imbuing it with emotive force. Can audience members simply draw their own conclusions? "Yes, God willing," Mr. Wilson said. He is also aware that his "reading list" could result in some misdirection, and that's O.K. with him, too. What he hopes is that viewers will experience the work through their own eyes and personal experiences. "I've been in enough situations," he said, "where I thought I was saying something, and then had someone who had never seen dance come up with something much more meaningful or profound." For "Citizen," Mr. Wilson developed a repertory of movements for the five dancers, each of whom has a solo. "I think of myself as completing tasks," Mr. Kelly explained. The dancers' actions are straightforward: a quick sequence of claps, a hand circling the opposite elbow, a giant leg circle that ends in a lunge to the floor. Then, Mr. Wilson said, he and the dancers manipulated the movements, "sped them up, slowed them down, switched the order, randomized them." Finally, Mr. Wilson created a superstructure: first a set of solos, later layered one upon the other; then a long solo that quotes from all the others; and, finally, a group section that looks back again at what has come before. (It's a marathon for the dancers.) "The viewer's task," Mr. Wilson said, "is to look, acknowledge, respond, and try to make sense of it all or just to let go." The meaning of the dance, if there is one, is not fixed, as it would be in an essay or a book. Dance, he said, gives him the ability to "hold more than one meaning, to be encyclopedic, poetic, metaphoric." And while the movements may look abstract, he isn't after a cold abstraction, emptied of meaning, but rather an electric one, pregnant with allusions. "The piece, in my head, is about belonging and not belonging, which I think is the basic function or construct of what civic duty is about." In other words, citizenship. Something that, he finds, is best interpreted in dance, beyond the reach of written word. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Longing for alternatives to the conventional, cookie cutter hotel? Along with crocuses and daffodils, new specialty chains from major hospitality companies including Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt and Carlson Rezidor will be springing up across the globe in the coming weeks and months. The hotels are what's known in the industry as "lifestyle" brands: They strive to appeal to the predilections of next generation travelers. Some are trying to lure millennials (who are defined as between 18 and 34 in 2015, according to the Pew Research Center)) with high tech lounges, reasonable rates, locally inspired amenities, and grab and go meals. Others are aiming to attract cosmopolitan travelers who simply want affordable, modern spaces that feel luxurious without being fussy or sterile. Here's a primer on what to expect if you step inside. "It's just like home, but with a bartender," explains the brand's website to the uninitiated. To the right, there's a slide show with a photograph of a blond woman in diminutive jean shorts and a cropped jacket, head cocked and eyes closed, suggesting she's rocking out to music streaming through her headphones. This is Marriott for Millennials, a demographic Marriott International felt was being underserved by its competitors with staid hotels that lacked personality. Much of what one will find inside Moxy, which is being rolled out in the United States after being introduced in Milan in September, is based on Marriott's research into millennial behavior, according to Tina Edmundson, the global officer for luxury and lifestyle brands for Marriott International. For instance, the company's research suggested that millennials shy away from hotels that feel corporate; they're immersed in social media; and they enjoy shared spaces for both work and fun. So Moxy hotels have playful "living rooms" with free Wi Fi, plenty of electrical outlets and classic games sized for giants, such as Jenga and Connect Four. Photos that guests post on Instagram with the hashtag atthemoxy instantly appear on Moxyhotels.com and on a digital guest book: an oversize screen in the hotel "living room." Naturally there's a full service bar. And since millennials want what they want when they want it, according to Marriott, there's a 24 hour self service cafe. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
If it wasn't the absolute worst time someone's electronic device could have gone off during "Sea Wall," Simon Stephens's exquisite one act monologue that's part of a Broadway double bill, it still might well have sabotaged the show. The British actor Tom Sturridge had held us entranced all the way to the pin drop quiet of the play's delicate final seconds when a robotic voice intruded from the orchestra of the Hudson Theater to deliver what was it, an Amber Alert? A less masterful performer, or one of stormier temperament, might have let the audience's reflexive anger overwhelm the moment. Without breaking character, Mr. Sturridge chose a smarter, more graceful course. "It's O.K.," he said gently, definitely to us but maybe also partly to himself, and the words were a balm: soothing the room and restoring the spell he'd cast, almost as soon as it had been shattered. He paused a long while, then resumed the play's last little wordless bit, a coda now. Witnessing such a coup of craft and professionalism is part of the reason we go to live theater, where the best actors are sharply attuned to whatever is happening in the room. And that's very much the case with "Sea Wall/A Life," the program of twinned monologues that opened on Thursday night. Its second half, Nick Payne's "A Life," is performed by Jake Gyllenhaal. Mr. Sturridge and Mr. Gyllenhaal, co stars in Netflix's recent "Velvet Buzzsaw," are veterans of these playwrights' work. Mr. Sturridge made his professional debut in Mr. Stephens's "Punk Rock" in London, while Mr. Gyllenhaal has done Mr. Payne's plays Off Broadway ("If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet") and on ("Constellations"). Directed by Carrie Cracknell, "Sea Wall/A Life" a hit downtown early this year, at the Public Theater is the most stripped down storytelling on Broadway right now. The quiet spectacle these plays offer is in the acting of tragicomedies of love and loss, young men's stories about fatherhood and family, and about the hole that grief can blast right through a person's center. "She had us, both of us, absolutely round her finger," he begins, and from that opening sentence Mr. Sturridge has us as well, Alex's warm, amused affection for the people he loves making us love them, too. That includes Helen's gruff, ex military father, Arthur, the kind of man whose acceptance the tenderhearted Alex feels lucky to win. Their visits to him at his home in the south of France Alex exulting, comically, in the foreignness of the place names become cozy beachside idylls for the tight knit bunch. But just as the ocean floor drops abruptly by hundreds of feet at a sea wall, a fact that he learns from his father in law, the footing of Alex's life is more precarious than he realizes. When it slips away, it is devastating so if you go to see this play, remember to pack tissues. "Sea Wall" has fine, strong, elegant bones, and Mr. Sturridge's captivating performance has deepened beautifully since the Public run. In his hands, Alex is a man with his rib cage cracked open, everything inside on vulnerable display. After intermission, "A Life" takes the opposite tack, leaning hard on the comedy harder than it did Off Broadway from the instant Mr. Gyllenhaal makes his entrance as the flustered, hapless Abe. Like Alex, he also has a tale of a daughter to tell. What "A Life" intends is to blend mirth with grief as Abe relates not only the largely comic story of his child's coming into the world but also the more somber story of his father's exit from it. This loss haunts Abe, in some ways paralyzes him, but the spectators at the performance I saw seemed uninterested in taking it seriously. It is not Mr. Gyllenhaal's fault that there was laughter at moments that are meant to be painful. The play's opening primes the crowd for pure comedy, a problem compounded by the baggage of celebrity. A star enters the room and, zing, the air is electric with anticipation. Eager to adore, more easily caught up in their proximity to fame than in the story before them, fans laugh too easily, too loudly, too often. And if you're Mr. Gyllenhaal, that can really drown out the nuances of your monologue. He does know how to work a crowd, though. The most talked about part of "Sea Wall/A Life" is the slapstick interlude where Mr. Gyllenhaal dressed less schlumpily than at the Public, now sans cardigan gamely hops off the stage and into the audience, dashing up one aisle and down the next, squeezing into one of the front rows and then another. But "A Life" is an erratic play, less structurally sound than "Sea Wall," and performing much of it at a frantic pace doesn't help to clarify its sudden shifts. One instant Abe is talking about his pregnant wife, the next about his dying father. There's sometimes not much in the way of tonal cue in lighting, sound or affect so it can take the audience a while to catch on. To Abe, all of this is intertwined: birth and death, becoming a father and being a son. There's a reason that he's telling these stories together, and that they blend into each other. "I don't understand why we prepare so ... wonderfully and elaborately for birth," he says, using a modifier we can't print here, "and yet so appallingly and haphazardly for death." This production doesn't slow down long enough to provide the necessary undergirding for "A Life" to pack the emotional punch it's aiming for. But Mr. Gyllenhaal's fans most likely will not mind. If, overall, they appeared to be missing the point of the play, they also looked to be having fun. Tickets Through Sept. 29, 2019 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; 855 801 5876, seawallalife.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The economic and social trends that have long kept Hispanic and black women from making job and wage gains appear to be shifting . The United States economy on Monday hit a milestone, reaching its longest expansion on record. Just a decade ago, the nation was mired in a severe recession that had erased trillions of dollars in wealth and left millions of people out of work. While the recovery has delivered uneven gains, Hispanic women have emerged as the biggest job market winners in an economy that has now grown for 121 straight months, assuming data released in coming months confirms continued growth. Employment rates for Hispanic women between 25 and 54, prime working years, have jumped by 2.2 percentage points since mid 2007, the eve of the Great Recession. That's the most of any prime age working group. Black women came in second, adding 1.6 percentage points. "We have an issue with wage inequality, income inequality and wealth inequality where most of the growth is going to the top," said Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute's program on race, ethnicity and the economy. "Those people are less likely to be women, and much less likely to be women of color." But the economic and social trends that have long kept minority women from making job and wage gains appear to be shifting . Hispanic women have historically worked less than any other demographic, earned fewer degrees than white and black women, and had among the highest fertility rates. That is changing: Hispanic women have posted a major fertility decline over the past decade and they have steadily raised college attainment. The recent job gains show that prolonged economic growth, combined with those social changes, has the power to lift long marginalized minorities. The pattern also offers hopeful news for employers: As these women pour into jobs, they are providing a new source of labor in an economy where workers are increasingly scarce . The expansion record won't be official until growth data is reported over the coming months, but America has clearly experienced a long period of job market healing. Unemployment is near its lowest level in 50 years and prime age employment rates have bounced back after falling off sharply during the 2007 2009 recession and its aftermath. That progress has allowed the black work force to begin recovering from a painful recession. For Hispanic women, the recent gains are part of a more long running trend toward higher employment, but one that has recently accelerated. Starting around 2012 and picking up around 2014, Hispanic women between 25 and 34 began pouring into jobs, contributing substantially to the group's overall progress. They now work at their highest rates on record. Hispanic women concentrate strongly in service jobs including health care, which have grown throughout the expansion. "It does seem like there's something structural happening," said Ernie Tedeschi, policy economist at Evercore ISI. Education is a big part of the story. While the share of whites and blacks age 18 to 24 who were enrolled in college actually dropped slightly between 2010 and 2016, the share of Hispanic women going for a degree jumped to 41 percent from 36 percent. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The C.E.O. of Afiniti, an A.I. start up, steps down after accusations of sexual assault. Google questions if the new Justice Department antitrust boss can be impartial. That's an improvement from a low level 48.9 percent of white women were enrolled, by way of comparison but it has major job market implications. Employment rates climb steadily with educational attainment. Mariah Celestine, 25, is a student at Columbia Business School and the first person in her family to pursue a master's degree. She has a firsthand view of the cultural shift. Going back to school and leaving her salary at Bank of America was a difficult choice, because she was financially helping an aunt in New York and her extended family in Puerto Rico. "For us, a lot of times, it's a balancing act: pursuing that passion but knowing that there will be stability," she said. "We know that other people will be depending on our success." She believes that her peers often the first generation in their families to be born in the United States and raised in its culture are watching women succeed on a national stage and trying to follow in their footsteps. "It's about investing in yourself and having as many opportunities as possible," she said. "A lot of the household work and care taking responsibility have fallen on women in the past, and we don't see that changing. But I think it's: What can I do to make my family as comfortable as possible?" Smaller families might be allowing more Hispanic women time to devote to careers. Age adjusted fertility rates for Hispanic women plunged between 2008 and 2016, based on an analysis by the Institute for Family Studies. Why birthrates among Hispanic Americans have plummeted. Both changes education and fertility bring Hispanic women more in line with other American racial and ethnic groups. The group's millennials are more heavily United States born, so they've been raised within American culture, smoothing the way for that convergence. Now, the question is whether those gains will prove sustainable. Policymakers sometimes point out that some minorities suffer from a last hired, first fired phenomenon. Black women saw their employment rate drop 9.4 percentage points from its peak to its trough in the last crisis. Hispanic women had a similar but more muted response, losing about 6 percentage points. Even if that pattern repeats itself come the next downturn, the fact that minority women are finding jobs now could leave them with more experience for their future resumes and more money in the bank. "Shoring up labor market experience and earnings is a good thing," said Heather Boushey, executive director at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. "I think it is an unambiguous good." But it's up in the air whether minority workers will see their wages catch up. Hispanic women with bachelor's degrees or higher made 46,237 on average in 2017, compared with 55,450 for non Hispanic white women and 85,855 for non Hispanic white men, based on Census Bureau data. The jobs available in today's economy may favor women over men health services, food and leisure jobs, and education have all been hiring aggressively and are all female dominated and women may be working more to patch up household earnings as men struggle to find their footing. Regardless, the fact that minority women are steadily joining the ranks of the employed could spell good news for talent hungry companies. Because the unemployment rate is historically low, economists have been concerned that businesses would run out of applicants, forcing them to abruptly raise wages and prices as they competed for a finite number of would be employees. As sidelined groups prove themselves ready to work, they could help to keep widespread labor shortages at bay. "There is still room for employment population ratios to grow: These are largely untapped segments of the labor force," said Ms. Wilson at the Economic Policy Institute. "Since there are more black and brown people in the population, in the labor force, it's reasonable to think that these are the groups in which you'll see the growth." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
PARIS When a parade of black robed figures files solemnly by, each wielding a long, narrow black scepter, or spear (it was hard to tell), and then carefully mounts the walls of a giant reflecting pool and begins to dip the sticks into the water and all this happens on the same day that Jacques Chirac 's death is announced in France and impeachment picks up steam in the United States and probably something equally dire happens in Britain well, it might be natural to assume you were about to see some sort of elaborate funeral rite. Or an exorcism. And when those very same figures lift up their scepters, or spears, and begin, oh so gently, to pull them apart and whoosh them through the air, it might be natural to hold your breath. But when out of series of intricate loops come giant, iridescent ... soap bubbles (soap bubbles!), floating every which way, dancing on the wind, it is impossible not to laugh. Sure, Mr. Owens came to his alien nation through a somewhat circuitous mental route that began with the hot button issue of immigration (bizarrely, things move so fast now that the topic feels like yesterday's front page); which made him think about his Mexican grandmother and how she would be treated today; which made him think about visiting her as a small boy and the parks in Pueblo, Colo. ; and the movie star Maria Felix , known for playing a strong woman in a man's world. From there he leapt to Josef and Anni Albers of the Bauhaus , and their trip to Mexico, and Luis Barragan , the Mexican architect and his use of color in buildings and well. This is how it works. But this was not Frida Kahlo and pinatas; it was a reminder of the positive effects of cross border fertilization. Could you tell? Maybe, if you looked really hard. But it didn't matter. Because in the end, what infused the collection was not anger or cynicism, which often seem the defining tenors of the moment, but an invitation: Let's play. Roll the dice. Spin the color wheel. Have some fun. Fun! Remember that? Barely. Stop watching your social feeds. See where it takes you. It took Julien Dossena at Paco Rabanne down a daisy and heart strewn highway to the 1960s and '70s, for both women and men (hello, Paco Rabanne men's wear). Chain mail isn't armor, silly; it's sparkle by another name. It took Glenn Martens of Y/Project into an intriguing reality distortion field, with necklines purposefully pulled to the side, cardigans hoiked up and over, va va voom sheath dresses crumpled just so, the familiar twisted just enough to become a tease. And it took Olivier Rousteing at Balmain to all sorts of exaggerated, over the top places, which he (in his notes) situated in the late 1990s and turn of the millennium, in Destiny's Child and Britney Spears , though VH1 and Grace Jones also seemed to get in the mix. Actually "mix" might be an understatement for the riot of techno circles and stripes and polka dots, graphic black and white and millennial pink and Tetris tone jersey flares and one legged sequined jumpsuits that appeared. Metallic discs played a role. So did satin power jacket/plisse gown hybrids; Crayola toned skinny jeans with matching jean jackets; simple white T shirts with serious shoulder pads; suspenders; and a Big Bird fuzzy wuzzy onesie covered in bright yellow tubular beads. Also a plastic fantastic slip dress that looked as if it had been made from transparent Lego blocks. And a series of haute Playboy bunny white lapel tuxedo jumpsuits and gowns. People in the audience were smiling, but whether it was in happiness or sheer disbelief was not entirely clear. Still, there's nothing halfway about Mr. Rousteing's moxie: He's all in. It's a sense of gusto that was missing from a pretty, but dutiful, Chloe collection by Natacha Ramsay Levi , who abandoned most of her former cool girl on the road complications in favor of a straightforward mix of '80s pinstripes and floaty dresses. And it was missing from Off White . Perhaps it fell through the various holes that an absent Virgil Abloh had punched out of pants and tops and bags (the designer was resting at home for "health reasons," an email had informed everyone a few weeks earlier). Said holes were supposed to resemble meteor craters also cheese from Wisconsin, where Mr. Abloh went to school according to the show notes, but they mostly seemed like extraneous attempts to cut deeper meaning into what were essentially simple pieces: the shirtdress, the tank, leather pants, the giant parachute silk ball gown. The show began with a recording of Dr. Mae Jemison , who became the first black woman in space in 1992 , discussing the relationship between science and art. Mr. Abloh is a genius at giving brand language the gravitas of meta cultural commentary, but in this case, his Meteor Shower (that was the title of the collection) was more like a drizzle. So it was a pleasure to enter the maze of white pleated curtains created by Jonathan Anderson at Loewe , dotted with pots of marsh grasses and soaring geodes that had been sliced open to show the sparkling crystals within, and engage in a finely tuned game of hide and seek with history. Bits and pieces of 16th and 17th century costume were spliced with the contemporary wardrobe, abstracted and overblown or reduced to a detail. There's a Marie Antoinette before the guillotine strain of lost aristocracy running through many collections this season. Mr. Owens also offered two elaborately constructed Versailles gowns, bustles and all, one in cream, one in black, like mirror images of good and evil. You can understand where it comes from. The obvious reference is Dickens, but the trick of these clothes is that they've taken it somewhere else entirely, so instead the phrase that keeps coming to mind belongs to E.E. Cummings: "when the world was puddle wonderful." Splash. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
This is a moment of returns. It's back to school time. Novak Djokovic came back to win the United States Open. Barack Obama has been back on the hustings, providing a clarion call for Democrats. And Proenza Schouler erstwhile next gen hope of American fashion, a brand born with the millennium that seemed to effortlessly channel a certain New Yorkiness of the soul, a brand that rode off into the Parisian sunset a year ago is back on the ready to wear schedule. Hallelujah! That is, admittedly, a little sarcastic. But it doesn't entirely underestimate the stakes. New York fashion is in a weird place: bifurcated between the old names that shaped dressing when Wall Street (both the film and all it represented) was in its heyday, and the new, who want to tear it all down. Maybe the designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, who once seemed poised to redefine sportswear for a millennial generation, could bridge the gap. The scenario was promising an under renovation floor of an office on (yes) Wall Street, sandwiched between Federal Hall, billed as "the birthplace of American democracy," and the Trump Building, a skyscraper built in 1929 to be the tallest in the world. Up a stalled escalator guests climbed, to discover an installation by Isa Genzken, a German artist who is a favorite of the fashion world (Phoebe Philo and Raf Simons are also fans), featuring mannequins crowded together in various states of Proenza Schouler undress, their arms thrown up, wrapped in plastic and other warning signs. Just imagine the metaphorical possibilities. Instead the designers decided to focus on ... denim. "In Paris it became very about embroidery and feathers," Mr. Hernandez said after the show, explaining that he and Mr. McCollough wanted to come back to New York and do something different. "We thought, 'What if we do the whole thing in one fabric, and what if that fabric is denim?' Because what's more American than denim?" Certainly, that's what the European Union thought when it threatened to tax Levis. But that was earlier this year. Plus, it had a different kind of denim in mind. This was denim acid washed and bleached out; denim tie dyed and indigo dipped. Denim in the shape of long suit jackets and dropped waist dresses with high halter necks, denim in A line skirts torqued just ever so slightly askew. Denim paired, occasionally, with silver leather vests (Ms. Genzken likes a vest) and two tone tie dyed button down shirts, inset with cityscape photos inspired by Ms. Genzken's work. Denim made into steroid huge squishy shoulder bags. Denim given an urban cowgirl edge. Denim made entirely in New York and California. It was fine, as far as it went. It just didn't go that far. An apron dress and shirt in raw canvas twill covered in an elaborate pattern of sparkling silver studs promised something more the designers have a particular talent for abstracting old tropes of decoration and recontexualizing them but it was a tease, rather than a fully explored idea. Denim as the ultimate American fabric is pretty old hat. For designers to take it on, they really need to add to the conversation. Maria Cornejo gave it an admirable try, in her Zero Maria Cornejo show, with egg shaped caftans and suits absent hard lines in sheeny sapphire "eco denim," though the tiles of block printed black and white circles and squiggles that made up another daywear idea were even more interesting like a Zen crafty wearable Rubik's Cube. Pointedly, when Alexander Wang, another one time favored son of New York fashion, returned from Paris after a stint as creative director of Balenciaga, he, too, offered a collection that was almost stubbornly unfancy, that seemed to reject the value system from which he briefly came. Maybe it's something designers need to get out of their systems, like a juice cleanse after too much foie gras; a necessary reset. Instead he went in search of what he termed "happy clothes," the kind that the brand's founder, sitting front row with her family, might have worn to go dancing in the 1970s. Like neat suede miniskirts under bright yellow jackets covered in diamante flowers. White shirts a la Mrs. Herrera, now smocked at the waist and neck, and cut high on the thigh or cropped at the stomach with a bit of drawstring. Also trompe l'oeil evening looks that turned out to be palazzo pants (that was a good idea), and billowing balloon gowns. Also an unmistakable air of a different time, when kicks and polish were all a certain kind of woman really wanted from her clothes. Maybe it was because we were at the New York Historical Society, but it was hard to shake the idea that such a time is gone. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Smith Craft, 9, of Apex, N.C., was part of Aimmune's clinical trial. After taking the drug, she could try more new foods without anxiety, she said. A Food and Drug Administration panel on Friday recommended approval of the first ever drug to treat life threatening peanut allergies in children, a condition that confounds and frightens families across the country. The recommendation all but assures the agency will approve the drug, called Palforzia and made by Aimmune Therapeutics. The F.D.A. typically follows the advice of its expert advisory committees. Some panel members expressed reservations about the safety of the drug, since patients receiving treatment experienced more allergic reactions than those given a placebo. There is also little long term safety data about a treatment that may be lifelong, the critics noted. The drug's goal is not to cure the allergy, but to reduce the risk that an accidental exposure to small amounts of peanut will set off a life threatening reaction. It might also relieve some of the fear and anxiety many families experience as they struggle to cope with a child's severe peanut allergy. "This is one of the most important unmet needs of medicine," Dr. James R. Baker Jr., director of the Mary H. Weiser Food Allergy Center at University of Michigan, told the agency's advisory committee. He was paid by Aimmune. The demand for treatment among patients and their families is enormous, Dr. Baker noted. "Right now the only approved approach to this allergy is to avoid peanuts, and the amount of effort and cost involved in making sure everything your child is exposed to is peanut free is overwhelming to most families," he said, adding that even scrupulous efforts to prevent exposures fail, resulting in life threatening medical emergencies. "The quality of life of patients and their caregivers is adversely affected due to fear and anxiety about accidental ingestions," he added. Allergists who treat children with peanut allergies applauded the decision, though they acknowledged the treatment regimen was demanding and not appropriate for everyone. "Until now, patients with life threatening peanut allergies had no options but avoidance," said Dr. Sandra Hong, an allergist at the Cleveland Clinic. Still, "it is an exciting step for patients and their families who live in constant worry about coming in contact with even the slightest amount of peanut." The new drug is an oral immunotherapy regimen that aims to reduce sensitivity to peanut allergens. It gradually exposes children to small amounts of peanut protein over the course of six months, until they can safely eat the equivalent of two peanuts. The treatment is not always effective and it is accompanied by side effects, including severe allergic reactions to the peanut exposure. One in five children who were treated stopped because of side effects; 14 percent experienced severe allergic reactions, double the percentage in a comparison group receiving a placebo. The F.D.A. will require Aimmune to restrict the drug to patients who agree to carry epinephrine with them at all times to treat sudden allergic reactions. The agency also will require that the initial doses and increased doses be given at a medical facility capable of treating allergic reactions. There will be a black box warning on the package calling attention to the risks of peanut exposure, and Aimmune must warn patients that they still must avoid peanuts. The regimen begins with trace amounts of the protein, which are carefully measured and increased incrementally under medical supervision as tolerance develops. About 1.2 million American children have a peanut allergy. The allergies are believed to cause more deaths from anaphylaxis an acute physiological response that includes lowered blood pressure, shock and constriction of the airways than any other food allergy, though the precise number is not known. Because children generally do not outgrow peanut allergies, they must avoid peanuts, peanut oil and foods contaminated with traces of peanuts for their entire lives. More than a dozen parents traveled to the hearing in Silver Spring, Md., with their children to urge the advisory committee to approve the drug, often breaking into tears as they spoke. They recounted how their children's lives had changed after they took part in the study. (The company paid travel expenses for some of the families.) Guiliana Ortega, w ho participated in the Aimmune study, described life as an 8 year old with a severe peanut allergy: sitting at a separate peanut free lunch table in the cafeteria, for example, and having to ask relatives if they have eaten peanuts before giving them a hug. "It means getting only two friends at lunch instead of 20," she told the committee. "It means not getting to eat cake at parties, and eating my safe snack while watching others enjoy it." "It means feeling different all the time," she said. "It's a world of no. 'No, you can't have that it may not be safe.'" Tessa Grosso, 16, a high school junior from Menlo Park, Calif., told the panel she was allergic to peanuts, dairy and many other foods until she was 10, when she was treated with an early form of oral immunotherapy at Stanford University. Now, she said, she eats just about anything and has peanut butter every morning before school. "Before I was treated, my life was like navigating a minefield," Ms. Grosso said in an interview. "I couldn't go to anyone's house, and a crumb of something on my hands could have killed me. At one point, a glass of milk spilled on my hand and I went into anaphylactic shock and almost died." Now, she said, her diet is unremarkable. Though she still avoids shellfish and carries epinephrine to treat an unexpected reaction, "My life changed forever." Read more about coping with food allergies at NYT Parenting. She appealed to the committee to recommend approval of the drug. "Every child deserves this therapy that provides freedom, safety and the ability to live without fear of food," Ms. Grosso said. But several experts at the hearing raised questions about the drug's long term safety and effectiveness. Nina Zeldes, a senior fellow at the National Center for Health Research in Washington, pointed out that only one study had examined the drug's effectiveness. The participants were mostly white, she also noted, so little is known about how children of other backgrounds may respond to treatment. Long term consequences of exposure to the drug are unknown. "This is the first treatment for peanut allergies, and if this drug is approved despite the unanswered questions, it will set a precedent for future drugs to treat food allergies," Ms. Zeldes said. The group urged the F.D.A. to require additional research data about risks before approving the drug, "because it will be difficult if not impossible to obtain it afterward," Ms. Zeldes said. A trial of the new drug published last year in The New England Journal of Medicine found that after a year, two thirds of the 372 children who received the treatment were able to tolerate at least 600 milligrams of peanut protein the equivalent of two peanuts without having an allergic reaction. In July, the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, a nonprofit research organization in Boston that evaluates medical evidence, concluded in a report that there was inadequate evidence to justify the immunotherapy treatment over simply avoiding peanuts. Lianne Mandelbaum, who has a teenage son with a severe peanut allergy and writes the No Nut Traveler blog , said that the organization's report displayed a lack of understanding of what is required for parents to ensure that a child does not inadvertently ingest traces of peanut that contaminate many food products. "It's not as simple as it sounds to avoid a food," Ms. Mandelbaum said. "We live with it and we do it, but it's not black and white. You have to be vigilant 24 7, and things still slip through the cracks. You could do everything right and still get it wrong. In many cases of fatalities, there was just one time they slipped up." The institute's report also called for more long term data about safety and effectiveness, and said there was no evidence the Aimmune drug had any advantage over similar desensitization regimens that some physicians offer patients. But many physicians do not offer the treatment, Ms. Mandelbaum noted, and it is not always covered by health insurance. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
"This is a city that turned a disused industrial waterway into a kayak run and an emptied high school into new downtown homes," he said. "We took advantage of being at the center of six fiber optic routes to turn old factory acreage into data centers, an industry that didn't even exist when Studebaker closed." As the city celebrated after what, in 1963, had seemed like economic tragedy, fireworks and searchlights lit up the cold, rainy sky. Part the celebration was the repurposing of building 84 once part of the Studebaker factory into a technology center. "It really felt like we turned a corner," Ms. McCoy said. "There were a lot of people talking about the good things and the positive legacy left by Studebaker." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
A street drain in the shape of a man's torso and face quite the manhole that reads "Reclaimed Water." With it, carved into the metal at the bottom, a plaque of sorts, reading "Christopher Columbus": This is a poster design by the artist Nicole Awai, titled "Reclaimed Water CC'd." The work is for a project called New Monuments for New Cities by the nonprofit Friends of the High Line. It is a public art exhibition in which artists were asked to imagine new monuments. Their designs, on posters or on renderings that will be projected, will travel to five cities in the United States and Canada next year, to be displayed in industrial reuse spaces, beginning in Buffalo Bayou in Houston in February, and ending on the High Line in New York in October. "This was conceived of last year, during the removal of Confederate monuments, and after what happened here in New York with the commission that evaluated the monuments," said Cecilia Alemani, who is the director and chief curator of High Line Art. "It really felt like there was something in the air worth capturing." What should a contemporary monument look like? Who deserves to go up on a pedestal? Should there be a pedestal at all? Five artists, or groups of artists, from each of the five cities involved in New Monuments for New Cities were invited to respond to the questions and to create a poster or projection of their ideal monument. The same 25 designs will travel to each location: Houston; Austin, Tex.; Chicago; Toronto; and New York. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Rental cars are rarely anything special. And that's just fine. All you really need from a rental is unlimited miles, long term shelter for a few stray curly fries and a hassle free ride from A to B and back again before those martinets at the counter charge you for an additional day. If you're driving a rental, the car itself is most likely not the point it is merely a solution to a problem. And for many travelers over the last couple of years, the Chevrolet Captiva has been their rental car solution. The Captiva is a rare thing in the American auto market: a vehicle that isn't available to consumers but is offered only to fleet customers, including the rental car companies. You can rent one, but you cannot buy it. The reasons stem from General Motors' bankruptcy in 2009. Among the casualties of the company's reorganization was the touchy feely Saturn division, which amid its dying gasps offered the second generation Vue, an appealing small crossover S.U.V. developed by the Opel division in Europe and sold around the world in various guises, including the Opel Antara. In the United States, G.M. found itself with a relatively fresh crossover on its hands, but no Saturn dealers left to sell it. This was not much of an issue during the depths of the recession. But by 2011, with demand surging for compact crossovers, Chevy was having trouble keeping up with dealer orders for its fresher Equinox model. Obligations to fleet customers rental companies, government agencies and commercial buyers, who were ordering small crossovers in larger numbers only increased the strain on supply. So Chevy turned again to the Antara platform, resuscitating the Vue in fall 2011 as the Captiva Sport, a version already being built in Mexico where the Vue had also been made for South American markets. (To add to the confusion, a seven seater with similar architecture is sold as a Captiva, sans "Sport," overseas.) By offering the Captiva Sport for fleets in the United States, G.M. was able to reserve the Equinox for higher margin retail buyers. (Fleet customers, buying in bulk, typically pay less per vehicle.) In the process, G.M. could also amortize some of the costs it had sunk into the Vue, and if shipping the Captiva Sport to fleet customers instead of the Equinox helped keep used Equinoxes from glutting the resale market, so much the better. All of this explains how I ended up driving a Captiva Sport recently during a long weekend visit to northwest Arkansas. There was no owner's manual in the vehicle I rented at the Bentonville airport perhaps some previous customer, confused and fascinated by the Captiva, swiped the manual in hopes it would become a collector's item but by comparing specifications for the trim levels available for the 2012 model year I deduced that I drove a nicely optioned LT model, which included a leather trimmed interior, heated seats, rear view camera and sunroof. My LT had a 3 liter V6 that made an impressive 264 horsepower; all 2013 14 models get by with a 180 horsepower, 2.4 liter 4 cylinder. But even if the V6's power output was near the top of the class a class it effectively skipped given its fleet only status I found the Sport to be engineered mainly for comfort, with patient but persistent acceleration through the gears of its 6 speed automatic transmission. The numbers tell the tale: At 222 pound feet, the tested Captiva's torque fell short of Kia's more aptly named Sportage, whose turbo 4 cylinder puts 269 pound feet of torque at the service of its 260 horses. To me, the Captiva Sport has more in common with the mild mannered, family friendly Toyota RAV4. Still, comfort isn't a bad thing to shoot for in a rental car. We judge rentals by different standards, after all styling or gas mileage may not matter as much when you're committed to a vehicle for only three or four days, while user friendliness becomes even more crucial. By my own short term criteria, the Captiva easily passed muster, though with a few odd reminders that beneath its borrowed name lies a lightly refreshed 2008 Saturn. The Captiva's sound system appeared to be 1990s vintage, with a pale blue dot matrix readout and preset equalizer selections along the lines of Pop Rock Jazz Limbaugh. (The LTZ model comes with a premium 10 speaker audio system, but good luck finding that on the rental lot.) Not surprisingly, the satellite radio subscription in my rental had expired, but the USB port connected with an iPod immediately upon plug in. It's 2013, and some carmakers are still figuring that out. Elsewhere the Captiva Sport's global platform origins seemed evident, as with the backup camera, whose screen was integrated into the rear view mirror. I actually prefer this location I've always found the more common center dashboard placement to be an unnatural place to look when backing out of a parking spot. The cabin was comfortable, though a family of four traveling with more than their smartphones might find the cargo space behind the second row (29.2 cubic feet) to be a tight fit. And while mileage was not at the top of my list of concerns, the Captiva did average slightly more than 20 miles per gallon over my four day rental, a figure that aligns with the E.P.A.'s estimates of 17 in the city, 24 on the highway. For the curious, G.M.'s fleet website says the 2014 Captiva Sport starts at 24,360, which excludes the 875 destination charge you'd pay for a retail vehicle like the Equinox. More highly optioned Captivas approach 30,000; unless you're buying a dozen or so, though, you'll find the Captiva only on the used car market. Or parked just outside the terminal, of course. Rental rates vary widely based on location and availability: I paid 56 a day to Budget Rent a Car at the Bentonville airport, where in the past I have rented midsize sedans for less than 25 a day. And if, like me, you fail to grasp the logic of paying that much more for a crossover S.U.V. while getting little extra in the way of seating or storage well, that's your problem. Even with the disparity in rental rates, demand for small crossovers seems only to be increasing. Through October, sales of the Captiva Sport were up 33 percent from the period a year earlier, with more than 40,000 sold to fleet customers. That owner's manual may not be such a collector's item after all. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
It's impossible to talk to the chef Deuki Hong without talking about chicken. For him, almost every waking moment is spent thinking about it, making it or eating it. Mr. Hong has spent years perfecting the crispy, glass like skin of his famous barbecued chicken, but he's also a fan of American fried chicken. "I won't lie. I love Popeye's," he said. "The seasoning is the right level of spice. I grew up on KFC and I remember the first time I had Popeye's I was angry at my mom. I said, 'Why now? Why did you deprive me of this?'." That love of the classic American fast food style is evident in the fried chicken sandwich on the menu at Sunday at the Museum, a new cafe at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum, where Mr. Hong runs the kitchen. But it also reflects the culinary heritage of Mr. Hong's Korean background: It's served hot on a spongy, almost fluffy steamed bao bun and garnished with cucumbers, caramelized onions and a garlic aioli sauce a perfect textural contrast to the chicken. The revamped dining space is part of the museum's 90 million expansion. Mr. Hong, who has worked alongside lauded chefs like Jean Georges Vongerichten and David Chang, wants visitors to experience Asian cuisines without the cliches. Threading the needle between exotic and familiar, though, was tricky. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
What is it? A new Outback wagon that Subaru promises is roomier, more powerful, more efficient and quieter than the model it replaces. Is it real? Real and just around the corner. What they said: "As refined as it is rugged, the all new 2015 Subaru Outback combines a sophisticated interior with the most advanced safety features, which will put your mind at ease every time you get behind the wheel," according to press materials. "The 2015 Subaru Outback is built to take you to the place you've never been." What they didn't say: With this iteration, the Outback gets a bit more interior room, increased cargo capacity, additional creature comforts and a dose of exterior pizazz. If the company somehow managed to design back in the charisma that was dialed out of the last version, the changes in the new Outback would be welcome. What makes it tick: Either the carry over 175 horsepower 2.5 liter, 4 cylinder boxer engine, or a 256 horsepower 3.6 liter boxer 6, both of which will be mated to a C.V.T. Fuel economy is improved to 25/33 for the 4 and 19/27 for the 6. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
LOS ANGELES The black lit pillow fight room was perfect. "Anything with movement, it's an instant boomerang!" said Ayla Woodruff. "That's just a given." She quickly jumped into the milieu, picked up a few white feathers and asked her mother to start shooting. Half a dozen models in form fitting pajamas theatrically swung pillows at each other, jumped on the bed and hammed it up as party guests snapped pictures with their phones. Ms. Woodruff is a 25 year old professional social media influencer. She gets paid as much as 22, 000 for a post. This was at a real estate open house on a recent evening in Los Angeles. There were a few stacks of fliers with the usual twilight photos and bullet point highlights of the home on offer (a 15.895 million hillside contemporary style mansion with an infinity pool and 360 degree views of Los Angeles). "The standard real estate open house is a yawner," said Ernie Carswell, a Douglas Elliman agent with the listing for the Los Angeles house. "There's only so much appetite for wine and cheese." So some in the business are rethinking the scene, throwing out genre hallmarks like attractively arranged bottles of Pellegrino, crudite platters and rules about jumping on neatly made beds. Others are taking it a step further, spending money to move influencers into the building. Tavi Gevinson, the 21 year old actress and founder of Rookie, lives in 300 Ashland, a 379 unit luxury apartment tower across the street from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where studios start at 2,365 per month. From time to time her Instagram feed includes images from the building. In one, she plays dominoes on the roof deck. In another, she shares a picture of her bulletin board. Both include the hashtag 300ashlandpartner. The New York based developer Two Trees hired Ms. Gevinson and other influential locals to move in, mention the buildings in social media posts and host a few live events. Ms. Gevinson hosted a clothing tag sale on the public plaza of her building to benefit Housing Works. "We thought it would be a great way to give a voice to a building," said Brian Upbin, the head of asset management for Two Trees. "There's a lot of great product out there. Anyone can go to StreetEasy to see highly stylized photos or renderings." "I already share a lot of my home and my surroundings . It didn't feel like a stretch," she said. "I've been making free content for half my life, so to be able to be literally supported by Two Trees and give people glimpses into how I'm able to do what I do has been really nice." Though she and Two Trees declined to disclose the specific financial terms of the arrangement, Ms. Gevinson said she pays rent and the developer pays her for the promotional partnership. Alexander Ali, the publicist who planned the Los Angeles party for Mr. Carswell and the home's developer, ANR Signature Collection, said the idea was to create an event that would feel like less like a staid broker's open house and more like the Museum of Ice Cream, the popular Instagram bait pop up galleries in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami where guests can take pictures of each other jumping into a swimming pool size vat of rainbow colored sprinkles. Earlier that evening, Mr. Ali had scrapped a plan for a giant clamshell from which a model was going to emerge to serve champagne ("it just wasn't on brand"), but otherwise everything was coming together as planned. "The goal is to get 100,000 impressions with 100 visitors," said Mr. Ali, who described the event as a series of "moments" for guests to photograph, post and hashtag. "Everything is about, 'You have to take a picture with this!'" Invitations had been sent to real estate agents as well as assorted Instagram influencers, artists and minor celebrities (including the singer Dannii Minogue, Kylie Minogue's lesser known sister). In the end, about 150 guests spent the evening meandering their way through the 6,700 square foot house, collecting Jo Malone gift bags in the marble clad master bathroom and snapping "drug kingpin moment" pictures of each other on the pot throne. (Were there potential buyers in the mix? No one seemed too concerned either way.) "All the food is photogenic food," Mr. Ali said as he pointed to the sushi rolls from Nobu in the kitchen and an elaborate display of macarons from Laduree spread across the dining room table. The evening's "crescendo moment," as he described it, was a dance party with a colorful 20 foot long LED dance floor on the roof deck. Real estate agents have never been ones to shy away from trying something attention grabbing to stand out from the pack think goofy bus stop bench ads or embarrassing photo billboards. Social media influence is the next logical step. Evan Asano, the founder of Mediakix, an influencer marketing agency, estimates that advertisers ranging from small mobile gaming apps to American Express will spend 1.6 billion this year on paid Instagram influencer posts, up from an estimated 1 billion in 2017. (Celebrities like Ariana Grande or a Kardashian/Jenner sister, who are top influencers, can make 500,000 to 1 million for a single post. Smaller so called micro influencers often post about products in exchange for free stuff.) But can you sell your house this way? That's not yet been proven. The real estate industry has been somewhat slow to embrace technology, particularly social media. "Consumers don't sell their houses often and don't want to be a guinea pig," said Glenn Kelman, the C.E.O. of Redfin, an online brokerage with more than 1,000 agents. Some think an influencer's wide reach may be a disadvantage. Widecasting about a house for sale "will be seen by a lot of people who can't afford or don't want to live in that neighborhood," said Gil Eyal, the C.E.O. of Hypr, a company that does social media influencer analytics. Lately, he has been getting more inquiries from developers asking how they can harness the various platforms to brand and sell real estate. "I still don't know if it's going to get an enormously positive return on investment," he said. Microcelebrities with small but highly localized followings a popular neighborhood chef, for example may be more effective at selling homes than influencers with wider followings. Mr. Kelman said Redfin's research has shown the best tactic is using data analysis to track potential buyer searches online. "What works is making sure everybody who is a serious buyer knows about the open house, and using much more targeted marketing techniques," he said. (Other agencies and developers do this as well, using targeted Facebook or Instagram ads.) George Jordan and Agustin Rodriguez, of ANR Signature Collection, the sellers of the 15.895 million Los Angeles property, declined to say what they spent on the social media open house but said the cost was offset by several sponsors, including the weed purveyor (Bloom) and Vesta, the staging company that furnished the home. The listing agent also paid a portion. "I wasn't sure about the pillow fight at first, but it's amazing," said Mr. Rodriguez, standing near the home's infinity pool as the party picked up momentum behind him. "It's different, it's young, it's fun." Ms. Woodruff, the professional influencer who attended, said she has been making a full time living off Instagram posts for about six months but that she hadn't been paid to attend the open house. She was there with other influencers that the developer had invited and thought the intrigue of the evening would be worth it. Her parents, Diana and Brian Woodruff, happened to be in town so they tagged along, dutifully snapping and saving photos to her iPhone that she would later post in her Instagram stories. Toward the end of the evening she made her way up to the roof deck dance floor but had lost track of her parents. They emerged from around a corner near the master suite. "We're very impressed with the laundry room," Diana Woodruff shouted to her daughter. "There are two washers! Two dryers!" "Mom! Jeez, come on!" Ayla Woodruff said, corralling them upstairs to take more photos. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
In which we bring you motoring news from around the web: DeltaWing Technologies, maker of the rocket shape rear engine racecar currently competing in the United SportsCar Championship prototype series, has released a rendering of what a street legal four passenger DeltaWing might look like. The design, presented in what could be called "Wishful Thinking Red," is part of the company's effort to entice a higher volume manufacturer as a partner. (Newspress USA) General Motors, which could use a little positive publicity on the automotive safety front, will begin testing an updated version of a seatbelt interlock system on certain 2015 models. The new G.M. Belt Assurance System would require front seat occupants to buckle up before the engine would start; it would need to perform better, however, than the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration mandated systems that failed miserably in the 1970s. (CNBC) Not to be outdone in the seatbelt news category, Ford has announced that it will begin licensing to competitors its inflatable safety belts, currently available on select Ford and Lincoln models. (Ford Motor) The Union of Concerned Scientists has named Hyundai Kia its top green automaker for the 2013 model year, in a report that lauds the environmental performance of the country's eight leading auto manufacturers. It was the sixth Automaker Rankings report issued by the group since 1998, and the first in which Honda was not given the "Greenest Automaker" title. (Union of Concerned Scientists) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
"The queen is dead?" a preschool administrator in suburban Paris asked Matthieu Bize, a wasp controller who had come to rid the schoolyard of Asian hornets. On the ground, a nest was in tatters. Twenty minutes earlier, it had been high up in an ivy choked tree, where it looked like a jumbo gray brown balloon. Mr. Bize, 32, had sent a telescopic pole through the canopy, injected a paralyzing white powder into the hornets' home, and knocked it down. The colony's larvae, future queens among them, were strewn about. "Nearly finished here," he said. In English, the Bize family name is pronounced "bees"; in French, it is "bise" (short for kisses). Dozens of times a day, when Mr. Bize answers his cellphone "C'est Monsieur Bize" this gentle phrasing sweetens an otherwise sting y situation. For Mr. Bize doesn't hunt just any pest. One third of the nests to which he responds belong to a species of dreaded "murder hornet," a type of wasp that beheads and feeds to its larvae an insect that is very important to, and symbolic of, France: the honeybee. Beyond the fact that Napoleon chose the honeybee for his logo in the early 19th century (the emperor favored the insect for its tenacity), France is the European Union's largest agricultural producer, and generally known for pollinator friendly policies. It is also one of Europe's major honey trade hubs. The Asian hornet first appeared in southwest France in 2004, possibly having traveled from Southeast Asia as a stowaway in a pottery shipment that docked in Bordeaux. "I actually did not imagine this species would reach the capital," said Adrien Perrard, 33, a researcher of bee biodiversity at Sorbonne University. But in 2015, it did. France's honey production was at a 20 year low, and Paris had become a newfound oasis for honeybees and their keepers. Reports of hives bedeviled by the arrivistes mounted. Mr. Bize was then a sommelier, but as the honeybee versus hornet crisis of Paris intensified, his brother, a fireman named Gregory, roped him into wasp work. Thus, the brothers Bize won the municipal contract for wasp control in Paris. In two vans, they zigzagged to calls to nix nests citywide, one working the Left Bank while the other worked the Right Bank, as Gregory's wife, Lea, acted as dispatcher. Spring. Summer. Fall. The city paid handsomely, but the caseload was gruesome. Now, the Bize brothers live and work in the suburbs just outside Le Peripherique. They destroyed some 300 Asian hornet nests in 2019. "Last year was not that bad this year is heavy," Matthieu Bize said. "Beaucoup d'activite!" Wasps' numbers are at their max in late summer, and because of a mild spring, the city was lousy with both native wasps and the Asian hornets this year. They tortured the bakers' brioches. They danced on the fishmongers' squid. They sailed into fifth floor flats to drink from the juice cups of babies and even appeared on buildings as human size graffiti. "It's a very good year for this hornet," said Quentin Rome, an expert on the Asian hornet at the French National Museum of Natural History. (Vespa velutina, the wasp in question, is often confused with Vespa mandarinia, the giant "murder hornet" that made its way to Washington State, but that species is not in France.) "They are desperate to get other insects to feed" to their larvae, Mr. Rome, 40, said. "The hornets are extra aggressive with the honeybees in the autumn." Hornets eat a variety of insects, but beehives are easy marks. A hornet "hawks" the hive, Mr. Perrard explained, hovering around the entrance until it catches a honeybee and carries the sweet petite away. "It really stresses the bees," said Lionel Potron, the founder of Apis Civi, the city's only maison de miel (honey house) with a beekeeping school. "They know the hornets are there and won't leave to forage. And if they don't forage, they starve during winter." It was the end of summer and Mr. Potron was supervising a class at an apiary on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, one of two forests in Paris. Nearby, a beekeeper trainee wielded a bug zapper shaped like a tennis racket. Mr. Potron and his students had intercepted dozens of bee hawking Asian hornets in the past hour. Apis Civi, founded in 2016, has 250 beehives in neighborhoods across inner Paris, including Champs Elysees, Montmartre and the Marais, and another 150 hives in Greater Paris. Honey can be reserved from hives in the neighborhood of a customer's choice; a deluxe version is offered with gold flakes. (It sells mostly to clients in the Emirates.) "Depending on the location, there is variance in the taste," Mr. Potron, 41, said. His metropolitan bees have some 2,000 flowering plants at their disposal. The honey owes much of its flavor profile to the horse chestnut, black locust and linden trees. France forbade synthetic pesticides in public spaces in 2017, but Paris had done so nearly a decade earlier. Now, "Parisian honey also tests very clean," Mr. Potron said. "I tell my students that we could triple our supply and it would still sell out." Mr. Potron plans to expand Apis Civi to cities in other countries, hoping to begin next year with Monaco. "Urban beekeeping is exploding," Mr. Perrard said. "It has exploded in Paris." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
We take the weekend to highlight some of the recent books coverage in The Times: Emily Bazelon's "Charged" is an indictment of prosecutorial excess, arguing that lawyers bear much of the responsibility for over incarceration, conviction of the innocent and other serious problems of the criminal justice system. Bazelon is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, and she talks about "Charged" on this week's episode of the Book Review podcast. Ruth Reichl's latest memoir, "Save Me the Plums," is about the former New York Times restaurant critic's time as editor in chief of Gourmet magazine. Our review calls it a "poignant and hilarious account of what it took to bring the dusty food bible back to life with artistic and literary flair." Reichl also appears on this week's podcast. In By the Book, Julia Alvarez talks about her prolific reading habits: "I even have a stack of journals/nonfiction that I read when I'm brushing my teeth. (My dentist marvels at how healthy my gums look.)" Sally Rooney's "Normal People" is her second novel, following the widely acclaimed "Conversations With Friends." As Dwight Garner writes of the new novel's two main characters: "They are never quite boyfriend and girlfriend in the conventional sense. They merely break each other's hearts over and over again." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The National Book Foundation announced the finalists for the 69th annual National Book Awards on Wednesday, with a stylistically and thematically diverse group of 25 finalists in five categories fiction, nonfiction, poetry, young people's literature and translated literature. Fiction finalists included Lauren Groff, for her short story collection, "Florida"; Rebecca Makkai for her acclaimed novel "The Great Believers"; and the debut author Jamel Brinkley, for his collection "A Lucky Man"; while Sarah Smarsh's memoir "Heartland" and Jeffrey C. Stewart's biography of Alain Locke made the nonfiction shortlist. The finalists for young people's literature included a novel in verse by Elizabeth Acevedo, about a Dominican teenager who learns to express herself through slam poetry, and a young adult graphic memoir by Jarrett J. Krosoczka that reveals his mother's struggle with heroin addiction. This year, the foundation opened up the awards to works in translation, marking the first time in decades that the National Book Foundation has recognized international authors and translators. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
When Julio Urias struck out Willy Adames of the Tampa Bay Rays to secure the World Series title for the Los Angeles Dodgers last week, it capped an arduous achievement for baseball. There were months of bitter negotiations between Major League Baseball and the players' union over the structure and finances of a season played during a pandemic without fans in the stands. There were coronavirus outbreaks within the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals organizations early in the season that almost jeopardized the truncated, 60 game schedule. There was a strengthening of the health and safety protocols that helped ensure the completion of the regular season and the expanded 16 team postseason. And there was painful belt tightening in an industry that lost billions of dollars. Now comes an even taller task: doing it all over again in 2021 with a much longer season and continued uncertainty surrounding the virus. "There's a lot that we'll need to work out," Tony Clark, the executive director of the players' union, said in a phone interview this week. Dan Halem, M.L.B.'s deputy commissioner, added, "There's a lot of contingencies that we're going to have to plan for because there's no one at the moment that knows what '21 is going to look like." Before the World Series ended, Clark said, the union began what he called an informal dialogue with M.L.B. about next season. Not only are there baseball matters to sort out such as the potential continuation of the expanded playoffs and the universal designated hitter but health and economic ones, too. All of this will happen against the backdrop of fragile labor relations, fears of a brutal market for players this off season and slashed payrolls next season. On Dec. 1, 2021, the collective bargaining agreement between team owners and players is set to expire. "Having a conversation that works through the issues that does not play out publicly is to everyone's benefit," Clark said, alluding to the contentious discussions ahead of the 2020 season. "My hope is that there's a sense of normalcy to 2021," Clark said. In a phone interview this week, Halem added, "Right now, we're planning for a normal season." None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. But so much can change between now and when pitchers and catchers are expected to report to spring training in Florida and Arizona. "Everything we plan for has to be subject to the circumstances that exist, when we're about to start, vis a vis Covid," said Halem, who oversees the league's labor negotiations. Among the questions Halem said were on baseball's mind: While positive cases are surging to record levels in the United States, will that be the case come February? When will a vaccine arrive? Would players have access to it before spring training? Before the regular season? What contingencies will the sides plan for over a longer season? What changes will they make to their extensive health and safety operations manual, which outlined the every other day testing program for players and on field staff members? "It's hard to make decisions because nobody really has concrete information yet," Halem said. "Hopefully each month we'll get a little more and more information about what next year may look like." Everything about a longer season is more difficult, Halem said. So many things had to go right, from testing deliveries to individual responsibility, to pull off the 60 game regular season. Now multiply that by nearly three. Playing more games means more chances for infection, and potentially more games to postpone to a finite number of off days should positive cases arise. Halem and Clark said the lessons learned from the 2020 season will help M.L.B. and the players' union plan for the challenges of next year. Until Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner learned he had tested positive for the coronavirus during the final game of the World Series and left his mandated isolation to celebrate the championship with his teammates on the field there hadn't been a positive case among baseball players for nearly two months. "There was a physical toll as well as a mental toll on all of those involved, which is going to be important to take into account moving forward," Clark said. "As it relates to protocols, appreciating what we knew back in March, April and May versus what we learned in July, August and September is all going to be beneficial." But the economics of the sport could, again, be a major source of tension between M.L.B. and the players' union. For months ahead of the 2020 season, team owners and players vehemently and publicly disagreed over the length and compensation of the season. Owners wanted players to take a larger pay cut because nearly 40 percent of the league's revenue came from ticket sales and attendance related income. (Fans were not allowed in until the neutral site National League Championship Series and World Series in Texas.) Players held firm to a March agreement that called for prorated salaries. Ultimately, Rob Manfred, the league's commissioner, imposed the 2020 schedule, which began on July 23. This preserved the players' right to file a grievance, which was expected this off season. So for the 2021 season, how many games will actually be played? Will there be fans in attendance in all 30 stadiums, and at what capacity in which municipalities? Will players be asked to take a pay cut as a result? How much can owners budget for ahead of an uncertain 2021? Can the sides work out a short term extension of the expiring C.B.A.? "There's just a lot of unknowns," Clark said. "You anticipate there being an opportunity to work through them. Our players look forward to that conversation happening." By some measures, the industry's financial prognosis is still strong. Despite the pandemic, the Dodgers signed the star outfielder Mookie Betts to a 365 million contract extension before the season. Turner Sports and M.L.B. struck a TV rights extension deal worth about 3.7 billion in September. And the Mets' sale to a hedge fund manager, Steven A. Cohen, for 2.4 billion is nearly complete. But there are mounting signs that owners some of whom have large fixed costs, like stadium payments, no matter the season's length may ask their employees to share more of the burden. Manfred has said M.L.B.'s 30 clubs have taken on more debt and suffered about 3 billion in operating losses this year. John Mozeliak, the Cardinals' president, told reporters that the team's 2021 payroll was likely to drop. In a letter to season ticket holders after the season ended, the Colorado Rockies owner Dick Monfort wrote: "It will take time to rebound, and in some cases, these losses will never be recovered. As a result, there will be nothing normal about this off season as the industry faces a new economic reality, and each club will have to adjust." Hundreds of nonplaying employees across the sport have had their pay cut, been laid off or furloughed. In this off season, over 30 players such as Cleveland's Brad Hand, who led the major leagues in saves had their 2021 team options declined. Players and agents fear that a larger than usual number of players eligible for salary arbitration will be cut loose by teams. Clark, whose union has been skeptical of the league's accounting in the past, said that this off season's market "will really distinguish ownership groups that want to compete and grow their fan bases and ensure the long term well being of their franchises from those who are willing to continue to sacrifice winning in order to maximize the short term." Clark also said that while debt could be a "scary word and proposition" for individuals, it was a tool for corporations, particularly during an economic downturn when interest rates are low. He added, "So while I appreciate the assertions that have been made, we don't accept them at face value." In response, Halem said that M.L.B., like any businesses that relies on public gatherings, has had its "normal economics" upended by the pandemic. "Everyone associated with baseball is unfortunately feeling the effects of that," he added. "We view the players as partners in our business, and this season was only possible because of productive collaboration between teams and players. We look forward to having positive dialogue with the players about how, together, we can take the field again in 2021 in a way that prioritizes health and safety and puts the industry in the strongest financial position possible for the future." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The 100 Year Family: Here Are Some Tips for Becoming One Dennis Jaffe, a sociologist by training, has spent years trying to figure out the answer to a pressing question: what makes a hundred year family? The question attempts to confront an adage that exists in many cultures and languages and is often attributed to Andrew Carnegie: "Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations." It refers to the fleeting nature of wealth and the all too common tendency for one generation to make it, another to waste it and a third to end up without it. The families Dr. Jaffe analyzed have avoided falling into the trap in which grandchildren dissipate what the grandparents built. They have made it past the third generation. Understanding how they did this isn't easy. And the answer is, not surprisingly, nuanced. But Dr. Jaffe said his research kept bringing him back to one central point: 100 year families are better at communicating than other families. He has been sharing his research in a series of papers that will culminate next year in a book, "Borrowed From My Grandchildren: The Evolution of Stewardship in 100 Year Families" (Wiley). For the better part of four decades, Dr. Jaffe has been a leader in the field of family business research. He also works as a consultant to wealthy families. His previous publications have included, "Cross Cultures: How Global Families Negotiate Change Across Generations" with frequent contributor James Grubman, which compared families born into wealth with those who made it themselves, and "Working With the Ones You Love: Strategies for a Successful Family Business." The study on 100 year families is based on years of research on scores of families, but at its core it aims to explain something that can elude any family, rich or poor: how can families stay together through good times and bad. Here are some of his findings: How They Stay Together: It was family members not the business that these 100 year families focused on first. That investment, Dr. Jaffe's research showed, has paid dividends. "They made the choice to invest in the family," Dr. Jaffe said. "They've seen that the quality of the people in the family and who they are is going to determine if the family succeeds in the future. The business decisions are important, but they're really derived from the quality of the family." In some ways, what these families did was not dissimilar from what affluent, education focused parents do with their children, he said. They spare no expense for school, tutors and sports that will give their children an edge. But in the case of the families he studies, they have the added benefit of a coterie of advisers to insure the children understand finance, business and family governance. What Staying United Entails: Family first sounds like a cliche, but Dr. Jaffe said his research found that second and third generations in successful families with wealth focused on including people in business and the family decisions. It goes hand in hand with the need for mutual respect and engagement from family members who may not live close to one another. "The decision in the second, third generations to create a great family involves transparency, respect and engagement," he said. "It flows from the fact that because we're wealthy we want to invest in some sense of us as a family. It's not 'we all have money, let's pat ourselves on the back and enjoy it.'" Why They Do It: It's not about the money they'd have plenty of it without the family business. It's about their legacy, and all that entails. It's continuing what their relatives created and expanding and adapting it as the years go on. "To keep this entity together, they have to develop a respectful, positive, useful way of working together," he said. "They have to collaborate because there's going to be conflict and stress." He pointed to families like that of John D. Rockefeller or the one behind King Ranch, founded by Richard King and his wife, Henrietta, as examples of families that have stayed together through difficult times. Everyone Needs to Learn: Like it or not, families often have favorite sons or daughters, just as they have black sheep, those members who for one reason or another remain on the fringe. Some children in any family, rich or not, are rewarded; others are ignored. In the most successful 100 year families, that's not the case. Everyone needs to have basic skills and training to understand not only what their responsibilities are, but also what they're responsible for. "When you get to be a billion dollar family, you need to have a high level of skills to be a responsible shareholder," Dr. Jaffe said. "That's what stewardship is. If you're a shareholder with billions of dollars you have to develop a lot of skills, even if you're an artist or a violinist." The alternative is you break apart as a family. Or worse, you fulfill the prophecy of shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. "This is what I call the 'generative alliance'," Dr. Jaffe said. "They're all doing good and getting good returns. They're looking for the new opportunities and the new ideas. What I've found is with these families they have these wild men and women who are also educated and responsible. They have a greater capacity for innovation than if it was just a family office run by a professional with 30 years of banking experience." Outsiders Are Essential: The old model of a family being a closed entity is outdated. The savviest families create company boards with outsiders on them. The Carvajal family, which is based in Cali, Colombia, and has worked with Dr. Jaffe, went further and appointed a nonfamily member as a trusted adviser on its family council. The adviser is someone who worked in the family business, and rose to a senior level before retiring. His father also worked there. That gave him a deep understanding of the family but still an outsider's point of view. "He attends all the meetings, he has access to the same information as everyone else, but he intervenes when it's necessary," said Manuel Jose Carvajal, 64 and a member of the family's fourth generation. "Sometimes we ask for his opinion. Sometimes he acts as an overseer when we meet." While it may seem anathema to have an outsider meddling in family affairs, the Carvajals treat him like any adviser. Their family is now on its sixth generation, with a multinational business that stretches from the United States border throughout Latin America. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Congress granted women the right to vote on June 4, 1919, a bittersweet moment for many who had fought for equality for decades. To commemorate the centennial of the ratification in 1920, enshrined in the 19th amendment, new tours and exhibitions can be found across the country. "There's been a huge interest in the centennial and voting rights," said Deborah Hughes, president of the National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House in Rochester, N.Y. This national landmark, where Anthony was arrested for voting as a woman before that activity became legal, receives over 13,000 visitors each year. The 15 daily admission for adults includes a tour, while "Votercade 2020," a free series of daylong events with artistic and philosophical discussions, runs until Oct 3. In Seneca Falls, N.Y., well known as the official birthplace of women's rights, a new self guided tour, Celebrate 100, suggests places to visit for those interested in the topic. Stops include Wesleyan Chapel (where the first convention was held in 1848), the National Women's Hall of Fame in the rehabilitated Seneca Knitting Mill (opening this summer,) and the home of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, chief organizer of the convention. In Sherwood, N.Y., The Opendore Project, a restored Victorian dwelling that has witnessed abolitionist and suffrage activities, opens this year near the Howland Stone Store Museum. It has one of the most well preserved collections of women's suffrage posters in the country. Some operators have started to add relevant programming to the area in light of the centennial. JoAnn Bell of Road Scholar, a nonprofit educational travel organization, said that four new women's suffrage trips have been added this year: Two are sold out. "A lot of boomers have been interested in women's rights," she said. Each six day trip combines a visit to upstate New York with classroom education and lectures (from 1,499 per person). "All these states had a history with women's rights; the race to get to Washington was a nationwide event," said Christian Overland, who oversees the Wisconsin Historical Museum in Madison, Wis. An exhibition, "We Stand on Their Shoulders" opens this month and will run through the end of the year. Narratives of pioneers like Olympia Brown, who attempted to vote as early as 1887, and Ada James, who spearheaded a state campaign, are spotlighted. Visitors will see photographs, newspaper clippings and a diary of Carrie Chapman Catt, the founder of the League of Women Voters who hailed from Ripon. "We also have the telegram that Jessie J. Hooper received stating that Wisconsin had ratified the right for women to vote," said Mr. Overland. Hooper became the first president of the Wisconsin League of Women Voters. Admission to the museum is free and the exhibition is on the fourth floor; free guided tours are available with a reservation. Montgomery, Ala., typically attracts visitors who come for the civil rights history, but Michelle Browder who started her company, More Than Tours five years ago, will do a special version of her walking and trolley tour in March by focusing on women's rights. She starts in the heart of the city where slave auctions were held. Visitors will then learn about the black women who shaped the civil rights movement and see the home of Georgia Gilmore (she helped fund the Montgomery Bus Boycott by selling food), the apartment of Rosa Parks and meet Butler Browder, son of the African American activist Aurelia Browder. National museums and institutions have created exhibitions to mark the centennial and procession that took place on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1913. The Library of Congress unveiled Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote that runs through September. It shows papers and records of Susan B. Anthony and Mary Church Terrell, an African American activist who championed racial equality. More than 400,000 people have visited the exhibition already; it's free to the public. The Smithsonian highlights women's achievements in its Creating Icons: How We Remember Women's Suffrage exhibition, opening on March 6. The curator Lisa Kathleen Graddy said it invites audiences "to explore the creation of the traditional story that emphasizes the contributions of Anthony, but also those who have been forgotten or silenced over time." On June 10, the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pa., opens an exhibition, "The 19th Amendment: How Women Won the Vote" that features nearly 100 artifacts from the era, including a rare printing of the Declaration of Sentiments, a document signed from the first convention at Seneca Falls that demanded equality with men. "The right to vote is life changing, but it didn't come without a struggle," said Mr. Overland, commenting on the reform as a whole. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Everybody wants a baseball season. Nobody knows quite how that will look amid the coronavirus pandemic. Those are the only certainties for a sport that has an unbroken chain of seasons with at least 100 games stretching back to the 19th century. But as more and more hopeful hints have emerged this week from Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation's leading expert on infectious diseases, and from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, who both publicly touted the feasibility of playing in empty ballparks a distressing backdrop still looms: If teams cannot sell tickets, how much will the players be paid? "The issue over pay without fans is going to get ugly," said a top baseball official of one team, who insisted on anonymity to speak candidly about league matters. "It's very real. Owners will claim they'd lose money by playing without fans if players get their full per game salaries, and it may be true. They're going to want a big reduction in pay from players." When Major League Baseball and the players' union agreed on new ground rules for the delayed season on March 26 the original opening day they included a stipulation that the sides would "discuss in good faith the economic feasibility of playing games in the absence of spectators or at appropriate substitute neutral sites." For the owners, that set up another negotiation on pay structure, in an altered economic landscape. The players' side has a different interpretation of "economic feasibility," according to the agent Scott Boras. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. "The economics they're talking about is whether they play or not, not what they pay the players to play," said Boras, adding: "Owners had every opportunity to say, 'We will also reduce the rate of your salaries if these conditions exist.' They didn't, and the reason they wouldn't is because players would never accept it; they would never agree to the deal." The issue spilled into the public discourse on Wednesday when Cuomo told his brother, Chris, on CNN that he had spoken with the Mets' chief operating officer, Jeff Wilpon, about playing games without fans, and that Wilpon had mentioned an obstacle. "Apparently Major League Baseball would have to make a deal with the players, because if you have no one in the stands, then the numbers are going to change, right?" Governor Cuomo said. "The economics are going to change." Wilpon declined to comment through a spokesman, but M.L.B. supported him with a statement that said, "Both parties understood that the deal was premised on playing in stadiums with fans, and the agreement makes that clear." In a way, this would be a welcome fight, because in order to have it, baseball would need a clear path to returning. That does not yet exist, and it depends largely on the availability of tests, the spread of the coronavirus and authorization from state and local governments. As things stand, M.L.B. and the union have had no further discussions on the pay structure of a shortened season, because there are too many variables about the conditions. But the strong feeling from the union is that teams would be obligated to pay the players their regular salaries, prorated to reflect the number of games played. The players have already waived any potential legal claims over additional salary beyond an initial distribution of 170 million in the event a season is not played. They made that concession in exchange for a guarantee of service time for a lost season. But multiple union officials privately dispute the idea that teams would not profit without fans in the stands unless the players take a pay cut. The teams would make less money, to be sure, but they would also have television revenue coming in, and a reduction in expenses related to staging games with fans. And if a regular season is played, a lucrative postseason the prize for national networks would follow. The league estimates that teams get about 40 percent of their revenue from ticketing, parking, concessions and other elements of having fans in attendance all of which would be lost if games have no spectators. Officials are already bracing for the economic impact, with teams poised to furlough or cut pay for salaried employees by the end of the month, when M.L.B. is expected to suspend the uniform employee contract, citing a national emergency. Then again, if the game returns, some ballparks may not need to stay empty all season, which would mean another set of complications. What if one state does not authorize mass gatherings, but other states do? How would the sides account for reduced crowds, or having fans only in certain places? And how many fans would come to see, say, the Detroit Tigers play the Baltimore Orioles if the game were held in another city? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Steve Wolfe, an artist who died last year at 60, was known for the small, select library of trompe l'oeil books he created. From his first solo show in 1989, Wolfe's sculptures and wall pieces were all but perfect replicas of worn, well used copies of modern classics and artist monographs and catalogs usually his own tweaked to within a hair of the original. Initially anonymous and ordinary in appearance, these copies become exquisitely personal as you grasp the level of skill and commitment required to make them. They are labors of love. That love permeates "Steve Wolfe: Remembering Steve," a memorial exhibition at Luhring Augustine. It is the first show of the artist's work in New York since 2009, when the Whitney mounted an exhibition of studies for the books, and the first show since 2003 to include any of the book pieces themselves. The writers here include Leo Tolstoy and Henry James, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, and Allen Ginsberg and Jean Genet. The catalogs feature the work of Pollock, Warhol and Walker Evans. Also included are a few of Wolfe's trompe vinyl records, among them Patti Smith's "Horses," an LP, and the 45 r.p.m. single of the Beatles' "Help." Seen together, these works form a poignant self portrait. The show opens with Wolfe's rendition of Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," its green cover gently creased, like aged skin. It pays tribute to the various writers and artists, many of them gay, who, it seems safe to say, formed Wolfe's understanding of himself as an artist and as a gay man. For the most part, Wolfe made his book pieces from a combination of oil paint, modeling paste, lithography or screen prints and carved, painted wood, a thorough mixing of media to fashion work that melds art with literature and music. If a cover had a metallic finish, like Kenneth Anger's "Hollywood Babylon," he also used bronze casting. The first clue to the specialness of Wolfe's "painted sculptures" (his words) is that they hang on the wall, inviting scrutiny and savoring that usually reveal signs of artifice and process. These are especially evident in the studies, which vary often, but not strictly, according to book type. Studies for books with black and white covers tend to be executed in graphite. Those for paperbacks usually depict only the front, as with Nabokov's "Speak Memory," whose white cover Wolfe set aflutter with brushwork. For hardback books (but also some paperbacks), their typically ragged dust jackets are usually splayed open to expose front, back and spine more than in the final piece. One example, Gertrude Stein's 1948 monograph on Picasso, plays with perception: You can't tell if the textured brushwork of the painting on the cover is meant to show Wolfe's hand or imitate Picasso's. In all the final pieces, you simultaneously contemplate the love of the book as text and as design, and the life of the book as an object a mass produced one worn to a state of uniqueness before Wolfe began making his copy, memorializing one point in its particular disintegration. Wolfe's rendition of the familiar Penguin paperback of Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" is of a copy swollen to twice its size. It has, in effect, blossomed, the way Anna did when she fell in love with Vronsky. The pages fan outward delicately, like the gills on a mushroom. The book wasn't submerged in water nothing so crude. It was Wolfe's beach reading one summer, consumed in high humidity and often "with wet fingers," he once said. The drifting snow in the cover image taken from a 19th century Russian print is beautifully painted. Wolfe's books honor the exacting labor of cherished writers and artists by returning the favor. But they are also hidden in their labors of love, enacting the frequent need for homosexual attractions and bonds to remain undeclared. This show brings a new clarity and depth to Wolfe's art, through its attentive selection and installation, and because it is now, sadly, finite, fixed. But perhaps we give ourselves to it more fully because it's all that is left. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
As Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) himself puts it, "God, it seems like a thousand years ago, I fought my way out of that cave, became Iron Man." Scenes from later films in the series, including "Captain America: The First Avenger" and "Thor," follow. It all seemingly culminates with the conclusion to the cliffhanger from last year's "Avengers: Infinity War," in which many of the titular crime fighters disintegrated, and the survivors vowed to, yes, avenge their apparent deaths. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
What books are on your nightstand? I don't have a nightstand per se my bedroom is rather ascetic, with only a bed nestled between the constellation painted walls. I do tend to keep a rotating selection of longtime favorites near or in it, to dip into before sleep "The Little Prince" (which I reread at least once a year every year, and somehow find new wisdom and pertinence to whatever I am going through at the moment), "The Lives of the Heart," by Jane Hirshfield, "Hope in the Dark," by Rebecca Solnit, Thoreau's diaries, "How the Universe Got Its Spots," by Janna Levin. Of the piles that inevitably accumulate in every room of my house, friends' books I have recently read and loved tower nearest the bed part synonym and part antonym to the lovely Japanese concept of tsundoku, the guilt pile of books acquired with the intention of reading but left unread. Currently among my anti tsundoku: "Time Travel," by James Gleick, "Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine," by Alan Lightman, "Little Panic," by Amanda Stern, "Inheritance," by Dani Shapiro, and an exhibition catalog which, in her case, is part poetry and part philosophy by Ann Hamilton. What's the last great book you read? I read multiple books each week and have no qualms about abandoning what fails to captivate me, so I tend to love just about everything I finish. At this particular moment, I am completely smitten with Jill Lepore's history of America what a rare masterwork of rigorous scholarship with a poetic sensibility but I am barely a quarter through, so I'd be cheating if I counted it as read. I only recently discovered, and absolutely loved, "The Living Mountain," by the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd part memoir, part field notebook, part lyrical meditation on nature and our relationship with it, evocative of Rachel Carson and Henry Beston and John Muir. Shepherd composed it sometime around World War II, but kept it in a drawer for nearly four decades, until the final years of her life. Decades after her death, her work much of it by then out of print was rediscovered and championed by Robert Macfarlane, a splendid nature writer himself. Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time? Toni Morrison's "Beloved." I am filled with disbelief bordering on shame that I went this long without it. A book that gives the English language back to itself and your conscience back to itself. Do your blog posts grow out of whatever you happen to be reading at the time? Or do you pick books specifically with Brain Pickings in mind? I don't see my website as a separate entity or any sort of media outlet it is the record and reflection of my inner life, my discourse with ideas and questions through literature, my extended marginalia. It is a "blog" in the proper sense a "web log," part commonplace book and part ledger of a life. Nothing on it is composed for an audience. I write about what I read, and I read to process what I dwell in, mentally and emotionally. The wondrous thing about being human the beauty and banality of it is that we all tend to dwell in the same handful of elemental struggles, joys and sorrows, which is why a book one person writes may help another process her own life a century later, and why a "blog" by a solitary stranger may speak to many other solitary dwellers across time and space. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. What moves you most in a work of literature? Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid? I read mostly nonfiction and poetry. But I also don't believe in genre as a defining feature of substance. Ursula K. Le Guin's fantasy is animated by rich moral philosophy. Alison Bechdel's graphic novel "Are You My Mother?" is replete with more insight into the human psyche than most books in the psychology section of the bookstore. Great children's books speak to the most elemental truths of existence, and speak in the language of children a language of absolute sincerity, so deliciously countercultural in our age of cynicism. How do you organize your books? My children's book library is organized by color, everything else by subject and substance first science, poetry, biographies and autobiographies, diaries and letters, etc. then within each section, by color. I break the color system for multiple books by the same author on related subjects amid several Oliver Sacks volumes huddled together, "Hallucinations" beams from the solemn science shelf with its cheerful seizure of cyan. What's the best book you've ever received as a gift? My good friend and collaborator Claudia Bedrick, founder of the visionary Enchanted Lion Books, gave me a trilingual pop up book titled "Little Tree," by the Japanese graphic designer and book artist Katsumi Komagata a subtle, stunning meditation on mortality through the life cycle of a single tree, inspired by a young child struggling to make sense of a beloved father's death one of the artist's close friends. I have a deep love of trees they have been among my wisest teachers and recently returned to this book while spending time with one of my own dear friends in the final weeks of her life. Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain? Orlando. It is hard not to fall in love with a beautiful, brilliant creature who changes genders while galloping across three centuries on a pair of "the shapeliest legs" in the land. It is hard not to fall in love with Virginia Woolf's love for Vita Sackville West, on whom Orlando is modeled and to whom the book is dedicated. Vita's son later described the novel as "the longest and most charming love letter in literature." In a sense, Orlando is also an antihero in the drama of Woolf's oppressive heteronormative society a subversion, a counterpoint to convention, a sentinel of the resistance. A month after the book's publication, the novelist Radclyffe Hall was tried for obscenity the same half coded charge of homosexuality for which Oscar Wilde had been imprisoned a generation earlier and all printed copies of her lesbian novel "The Well of Loneliness" were destroyed by court order. In response to the trial, Woolf and E. M. Forster wrote in a joint letter of protest: "Writers produce literature, and they cannot produce great literature until they have free minds. The free mind has access to all knowledge and speculation of its age, and nothing cramps it like a taboo." What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most? I don't recall being much of a natural reader early on, but my paternal grandmother made me one. She read me old European fairy tales Hans Christian Andersen, the uncandied Brothers Grimm. (In the communist Bulgaria of my childhood, the classics of American children's literature were barred by the Iron Curtain.) I especially loved "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," long before I could fully appreciate the allegorical genius of a brilliant logician. I was awed by my grandmother's enormous library and was particularly enchanted by the encyclopedias, the way you could pull one out and open to a random page and learn about something thrilling you didn't even know existed. It is an experience we rarely have anymore in a culture where pointed search has eclipsed serendipitous discovery, leading us to find more and more of what we are already interested in. In a sense, this encyclopedic enchantment and the delight of unbidden discovery have stayed with me and become the backbone of Brain Pickings. What's the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently? From the fantastic new biography of Benjamin Rush by Stephen Fried my first and foremost writing mentor, whose research intern I was what seems like a lifetime ago, and was even paid two subway tokens per week for the pleasure I learned that we owe to this "footnoted founder" our formative understanding of mental illness and the then radical notion that mentally ill people are still people. A century before Nellie Bly's paradigm shifting expose "Ten Days in a Madhouse," at a time when mental asylum patients were chained to the floor until they "improved," Rush insisted that their humanity and dignity must be honored in treatment, and pioneered forms of psychiatric care closely resembling the modern. This radical, largehearted reformer was decades, perhaps centuries ahead of his time along so many axes of progress: He became the nation's pre eminent champion of public health and public schooling, founded the country's first rural college, railed against racism, helped African American clergymen establish two of the nation's first churches for black congregations, and pushed to extend education to women, African Americans and non English speaking immigrants. (He also penned the most devastating and delightful rant against materialism, condemning America as "a bebanked, and a bewhiskied a bedollared nation." I wonder how he would have framed the unfathomable notion that his nation would one day be governed by a billionaire who deals in golf courses, stars in his own reality TV show and bankrolls the business of hate.) If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? I am resisting the cheap impulse to simply say, "Any." Instead, I'd say Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism," but there is the obvious risk that he might take it for an instructional manual. Perhaps the safest thing for everyone would be to give the man some poetry it has a singular way of slipping through the backdoor of the psyche to anneal truth and open even the most fisted heart, "to awaken sleepers by other means than shock," as the poet Denise Levertov put it. I'd say "Crave Radiance," by Elizabeth Alexander one of our finest living poets but I doubt the fact that she was Barack Obama's inauguration poet would go over well with the current administration. Any book by Jane Hirshfield a splendid poet and an ordained Buddhist would probably do more good in this country, in the White House and in every home, than all the political op eds and polemics combined. You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? Rachel Carson, Susan Sontag, Margaret Fuller. It could go one of two ways: intoxicating intellectual repartee the fiercely opinionated Sontag and Fuller would either love or loathe one another, and Carson would sit in unassuming quietude, speaking only rarely and with the perfect, perfectly formulated sentiment or literary speed dating for queer women. I, for one, am half infatuated with all three. How do you decide what to read next? Is it reviews, word of mouth, books by friends, books for research? Does it depend on mood or do you plot in advance? I often say that literature is the original internet every allusion, footnote and reference is a hyperlink to another text. Nearly all books I read enter my life through the gateway of other books, which explains why, over the nearly 13 year span of Brain Pickings, my writing has plunged deeper and deeper into the past this analog web only extends backward in time, for a book can only reference texts previously published. It's a great antidote to the presentism bias that envelops us, in which we mistake the latest and the loudest the flotsam of opinion atop social media streams for the most important, most insightful, most relevant. Right around Ferguson, I discovered through a passing mention in an out of print collection of Margaret Mead's Redbook advice columns her 1970 conversation with James Baldwin, in which they discuss race, gender, identity, democracy, morality, the immigrant experience and a great many other topics of acute relevance today, with tenfold the dignity and depth of insight than our current modes of cultural discourse afford. What do you plan to read next? I recently discovered Jenny Uglow's 2002 biography of the Lunar Men a small group of freethinking intellectuals, whose members are responsible for the development of the steam engine and a cascade of other advances in science. Somehow, I had completely missed it in my research, even though members of the Lunar Men flit in and out of "Figuring." The more you read, the more you miss. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
J.J. Abrams Said to Be Near 500 Million Deal With WarnerMedia LOS ANGELES Sign with us. We can offer you spectacular opportunities. Have I mentioned how brilliant you are? So went the courtship of the producer J. J. Abrams by Apple, NBCUniversal, WarnerMedia and other entertainment companies over the past six months, as the companies scrambled to secure creative content for their streaming services. The contest neared a conclusion on Monday, with lawyers for Mr. Abrams in final negotiations with Warner for a multiyear partnership valued at about 500 million, according to two people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deal was not completed. In return for that breathtaking sum, WarnerMedia will get a first look at projects developed by Bad Robot, the media company run by Mr. Abrams and Katie McGrath, his wife. The deal covers movies, television shows, video games, consumer products, music and digital content for a WarnerMedia streaming service set to arrive early next year. It was unclear whether Mr. Abrams would continue to accept directing jobs at rival studios, a perk that was part of his previous deals. The proliferation of streaming services has supercharged the market for producers with a track record of delivering hits. It started in 2017, when Netflix signed the "Grey's Anatomy" creator Shonda Rhimes to a multiyear, nine figure contract. Then came a Netflix deal with Ryan Murphy ("Pose," "American Horror Story") valued at 300 million. Last year, Warner locked up Greg Berlanti, the producer of shows like "Riverdale" and "The Flash," with a contract worth more than 300 million. Representatives for Mr. Abrams and WarnerMedia declined to comment. AT T owns WarnerMedia, which includes the Warner Bros. studio, HBO and cable networks like TNT and CNN. Bad Robot has spent the last 13 years making films like "Star Trek Beyond" and "Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation" for Paramount Pictures, which is owned by Viacom. Over that same period, Warner has been Bad Robot's television partner, resulting in shows like "Westworld," a big budget science fiction drama, and "Fringe," a mystery show about unexplained phenomena. The last time Bad Robot orchestrated a bidding war for its services was in 2006. It was a heady moment for Mr. Abrams, who had been a Disney based supplier of television juggernauts like "Lost" and "Alias." When Paramount won Bad Robot's movie business, the studio compared Mr. Abrams to Steven Spielberg. Bad Robot has grown considerably since then. According to IMDBpro, an entertainment industry database, Bad Robot has more than 50 movies and shows in development or production, including "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker," which Mr. Abrams directed for Disney and has been scheduled for release in theaters on Dec. 20. Cryptocurrency group loses bid for copy of U.S. Constitution. The company that produced 'Parasite' is in talks to buy Endeavor's scripted content arm. Critic of Teamsters leader claims victory in race to succeed him. Paramount had a mixed experience with Bad Robot, especially when it came to original concepts. The action horror movie "Cloverfield" was a breakout hit in 2008, costing about 25 million to make and taking in 171 million worldwide. "Super 8," a science fiction thriller directed by Mr. Abrams, collected a successful 260 million in 2011. But misfires included "Overlord" and "Morning Glory." The sequel "The Cloverfield Paradox" was considered so theatrically unviable that Paramount sold it to Netflix. Paramount was also frustrated that Mr. Abrams chose to direct two "Star Wars" films for Disney the first was "The Force Awakens" in 2015 rather than focusing on Paramount directorial projects. Mr. Abrams's first hits were in television, as a co creator of the WB cult favorite "Felicity" in 1998, and then bringing two hits to ABC in the early 2000s: "Alias," which helped make Jennifer Garner a star, and "Lost." In its first two seasons on HBO, "Westworld" has won nine Emmys. Not everything has been a hit, with television misses including series like "Roadies" (Showtime), "Alcatraz" (Fox) and "Undercovers" (NBC). That has done little to tarnish Bad Robot's reputation. It has several projects in the works with HBO, and three series coming to Apple's forthcoming television service: "Little Voice," a musical starring Sara Bareilles; a Julianne Moore limited series adapted from the Stephen King novel "Lisey's Story"; and a limited series reuniting Mr. Abrams with Ms. Garner. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
VINCI, Italy In his biography of Leonardo da Vinci, written 30 years after the artist's death in 1519, Giorgio Vasari said Leonardo had "such a power of intellect that whatever he turned his mind to, he made himself master of with ease." In this 500th anniversary year of the artist's death, the Musee du Louvre in Paris has undeniably stolen the limelight with its blockbuster exhibition "Leonardo da Vinci." Yet, that intellectual dexterity manifest in Leonardo's paintings and drawings, as well as his scientific studies, and his engineering and architectural models has spawned celebratory exhibitions in several Italian cities where Leonardo's legacy remains a source of pride. That pride was somewhat bruised when the Louvre which has the world's biggest collection of Leonardo paintings took center stage in the centenary celebrations. But after some jousting between Italy and France, the presidents of the two countries met and made up at a ceremony in Amboise, France, where Leonardo died. Leonardo's actual birthplace is not definitively known. But as Walter Isaacson wrote in his 2017 biography of the artist, "legend, and the local tourist industry" have homed in on a stone cottage in the hamlet of Anchiano, two miles from Vinci, that is now a small museum. Until January, the 13th century Palazzo Guidi, one site of Vinci's Leonardo museum, is hosting an exhibition about Leonardo's origins and relationship to his native town. A section of the exhibition explores the artist's first dated drawing, a landscape from Aug. 5, 1473, that pays witness to his fascination with nature. The original, (a copy is displayed), which belongs to the Uffizi Galleries, has been lent to the Louvre show, along with Leonardo's Vitruvian Man a work whose fame almost matches the Mona Lisa's on loan from the Accademia Galleries in Venice. The museum focuses on Leonardo's interests in science, architecture and engineering, and includes several models including war and flying machines created in 1952 for an exhibition commemorating the 500th anniversary of his birth. Other sections focus on optics, anatomy, mechanical clocks, the study of water, and geometry. Sometime in the 1460s, Leonardo left Vinci for Florence, where his father lived. Because he was illegitimate, he could not become a notary, the family business, so he was first sent to learn math at what was known as abacus school. (Vasari wrote that Leonardo very quickly outwitted his teacher.) In his early teens he became an apprentice in the workshop of the artist and engineer Andrea del Verrocchio. There, in the mid 1470s, Leonardo painted the figure of an angel on the far left of Verrocchio's "Baptism of Christ." Leonardo's panel of "The Annunciation" for the Church of Monte Oliveto also dates to that time. Both hang in the Uffizi, next to the "Adoration of the Magi," which Leonardo abandoned when he moved to Milan in 1482. The Uffizi declined to lend these works to the Louvre because of their fragility. Leonardo's first stay in Milan lasted 17 years, when the city state was ruled by Ludovico Sforza, a prince who enlisted Leonardo for various tasks in his court, including the production of elaborate pageants. A draft of an introductory letter Leonardo wrote to Ludovico is on exhibit in Milan's Ambrosiana gallery in which he presents himself as an expert military engineer, able to design weapons that "will cause great terror to the enemy." He mentions his other skills, sculpture and painting, almost as an aside. He also promised to cast a bronze horse "to the immortal glory and eternal honor" of the house of Sforza. Five hundred years later, a modern version of the horse was installed at Milan's racetrack, though some citizens would like it to be moved to a more well trodden site. For Ludovico, Leonardo created the "Last Supper" in the refectory, or dining hall, of the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. For Ludovico, also, he painted the so called Sala delle Asse (Room of Planks) in the castle that served as the residence of Milan's ruling families (and is today a museum). These are the only known frescoes by Leonardo to survive. The Sala has been under restoration, and closed to the public, since 2013. But it opened for the celebrations with a multimedia show that takes spectators through Leonardo's early years in Milan. Leonardo once described the city's Church of San Sepolcro as the "true center of Milan." Today, the church is annexed to the Ambrosiana, the library and art gallery founded in 1607 by Cardinal Federico Borromeo, that's a must see in Milan. The Ambrosiana possesses the painting of a "Musician," now in the Louvre show, as well as 29 drawings, and most notably, perhaps the 1,119 folios that make up the Codex Atlanticus, the largest of the collections of Leonardo's musings that were assembled after his death. Visitors to the Ambrosiana will always find a number of pages on exhibit. A more modern addition to Leonardo's Milanese legacy dates to 1953, when the National Museum of Science and Technology Leonardo da Vinci opened to showcase a collection of models of Leonardo's inventions, created for the 500th anniversary of his birth. For 70 years, the museum has enchanted generations of Italian schoolchildren (and adults), and this week it will present a revamped installation of its Leonardo galleries, meant to better contextualize the artist. "We want to explore Leonardo within his historical era," said Claudio Giorgione, the curation of the new galleries. "We want to tell the story of his greatness in a more correct light," he said, stripped of its mythical attributes. Leonardo left Milan in 1499 but would return in 1506, living there off and on for seven years as he traveled to other cities including Parma, Florence, Mantua, Venice, Pavia, and others before heading to Rome in 1513, shortly after Giovanni de' Medici was elected to become Pope Leo X. In Rome, Leonardo was given lodging in the Villa Belvedere, the papal summer residence. The Vatican owns the only Leonardo painting in Rome, a St. Jerome that was lent to the Louvre show. But his Roman stay is being celebrated at the National Academy dei Lincei with various exhibitions. One, at the Palazzo Corsini, examines the books that Leonardo would have owned he had some 200 volumes in his library even though he was considered a "man without letters" because he did not have a classical education. Across the road, at the Farnesina, site of Raphael's famed fresco of the nymph Galatea, an exhibit explores Leonardo's influence and legacy in Rome, while yet another dubbed "The Impossible Exhibition" consists of full size digital reproductions of all of Leonardo's attributed paintings (as well as an imagined reconstruction of his workshop at the Belvedere). But, arguably, the most interesting exhibit is "Leonardo in Translation," which focuses on the propagation of Leonardo's research in the 19th century, including reproductions of his codices, the collections of writings and sketches. This show also showcases the work of Luigi Calamatta (1801 1869), an Italian artist known for reproducing famous masterpieces as engravings. He moved to Paris in 1822, and thanks to his friendship with the painter Ingres, he was given permission to make an engraving of the Mona Lisa, Leonardo's most ogled painting, which has become a hostage to its own fame at the Louvre. It was a painstaking enterprise that he worked on from 1826 to 1854. The engraving was shown for the first time at the 1855 Universal Exhibition of Paris. On a recent rainy afternoon, the room with various versions of his etched Mona Lisa, titled "Lisa Gioconda," its Italian name, was empty and a viewer was able to ponder that famed smile no less enigmatic in an etching taking all the time in the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
An agent for Denver Broncos linebacker Von Miller confirmed a Covid 19 diagnosis on Thursday. The agent said Miller was resting at his home in Denver with mild symptoms. Von Miller, the Denver Broncos' All Pro linebacker and the winner of the Most Valuable Player Award in Super Bowl 50, on Thursday became the latest and most prominent N.F.L. player to reveal publicly that he had tested positive for the coronavirus. "I was shocked," Miller said on Friday in an interview on NBC's "Today" show. "It all started with just a simple cough and it got worse. I also have asthma." When his cough did not go away after several days, Miller was tested for the virus and found out two days later that its result was positive. Miller, 31, said that he had been training in San Francisco before being diagnosed, but after stay at home orders were issued there, he returned to his home in Denver about four weeks ago. "Within that four weeks, I probably left the house four times," Miller said. "With all of those four times, I never got out of the car just drive to pick up food and come back home." Though he added that workers maintaining his house had been Miller, the second overall pick in the 2011 draft, has been selected to the Pro Bowl eight out of his nine years in the league. Miller said the N.F.L. should use caution when deciding when to play games, even if they are in empty stadium. "We shouldn't move too fast, just do whatever is safe," he said. "Whatever is safe that would always be our first precaution, to do whatever is safe whatever we have to do to get things back to normal, that's what we should do." Miller's diagnosis, which was first reported by NFL Network, was revealed on Thursday, a day after Brian Allen, a center for the Los Angeles Rams, became the first active N.F.L. player to publicly acknowledge he had tested positive for the virus. Through the team, Allen said he was feeling well and was not in the hospital. Allen reported experiencing some symptoms of the virus, including the loss of his sense of taste and smell, as far back as three weeks ago. "I lost all sense of smell to the point where I had smelling salts here, I cracked them open, put them to my nose and nothing happened," he told Fox Sports. "All I could feel was texture in my mouth literally, it was the only sense I had." Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. Allen had been rehabilitating from an injury at the team's training facility in Thousand Oaks, Calif., when the positive test came in a few weeks ago. Coach Sean McVay said that after the test, the Rams closed the facility, in accordance with a leaguewide shutdown mandated by the N.F.L. In a memo sent to teams on March 24, Commissioner Roger Goodell ordered that teams close their buildings to all but essential workers until April 8. The Los Angeles Times reported that it had since reopened on a limited basis. The Rams had previously declined to answer questions about whether anyone with the organization had tested positive, citing privacy concerns. Based on public statements about the coronavirus, the N.B.A. has been the hardest hit North American league, with several players testing positive. The first confirmed case was the Utah Jazz's Rudy Gobert, who drew criticism because he had earlier made light of the virus by touching reporters' notebooks and microphones. His teammate Donovan Mitchell also tested positive, followed by Kevin Durant of the Nets, Marcus Smart of the Boston Celtics and several other players, not all of whom were publicly named. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The Estate of Jean Michel Basquiat, Licensed by Artestar, New York; via The Brant Foundation; Charlie Rubin for The New York Times The Estate of Jean Michel Basquiat, Licensed by Artestar, New York; via The Brant Foundation; Charlie Rubin for The New York Times Credit... The Estate of Jean Michel Basquiat, Licensed by Artestar, New York; via The Brant Foundation; Charlie Rubin for The New York Times Installation view of "Jean Michel Basquiat," the inaugural exhibition of the Brant Foundation's New York space in the East Village. A salon style wall on the second floor includes a grid of 16 paintings from 1982. A few years ago, a plaza in Paris was named after the artist Jean Michel Basquiat, the Brooklyn born painter who became a global sensation in the early 1980s and died at 27 of a heroin overdose. No similar honor has been bestowed upon Basquiat by the City of New York. However, the opening of the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in the East Village, with an exhibition of nearly 70 works by Basquiat created from 1980 to 1987, serves as a fitting temporary shrine. The Brant in Manhattan is also part of a wave of private museums opening across the country, including the Hill Art Foundation in Chelsea; the expansion of Glenstone in Maryland; and the Marciano and Broad collections in Los Angeles. But first, Basquiat. The story of this painter of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent is one of the most documented in contemporary art history. Basquiat moved to Manhattan partly to escape his strict accountant father couch surfed, lived off girlfriends and formed a post punk band called Gray after "Gray's Anatomy." He sprayed poetic, enigmatic graffiti on walls in downtown Manhattan before moving to canvas and starred in an independent film, "Downtown 81." He dated Madonna before she was famous and made paintings with his hero turned friend, Andy Warhol. Basquiat was also part of a group of Neo Expressionists that were largely rejected by critics interested in photography, video and conceptual art but embraced by a popular audience and a surging art market, where he often felt treated like a faux primitive genius, which he found racist and demeaning. And yet, this seemed to fuel his work and the anger in it toward greater heights, forging a brand of African American history painting that addressed everything from cultural figures to black policemen. His reputation has grown posthumously and in 2017 one of his paintings sold at auction for a record 110.5 million to a Japanese billionaire. The show at the Brant Foundation, organized with the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, where more than half of the works here were recently on view, fairly represents Basquiat's contribution. He concentrated on the human figure and many of the works are grouped for heightened effect. One room is dedicated to paintings of boxers Sugar Ray Robinson, Joe Louis, and Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) while another features loosely drawn heads and skulls. And yes, the 110.5 million painting is in the building: a ferocious "Untitled" (1982) skull made with black and colored spray paint and oilstick against a banal blue background. Other paintings pay homage to jazz greats like Miles Davis and Charlie Parker (Basquiat worked in a similarly improvisatory way) and handwritten text appears everywhere. Basquiat favored the cutup technique of the Beat writer William Burroughs but he also witnessed the rise of rap and hip hop music. His words feel eerily poignant today: "debt shrine," "per capita," "Hooverville," "perishable," "black teeth," "immortality." Others relate to histories from the Roman Empire to "Grillo" (1984), which mentions sugar and the West Indies and sports heavy nails like those driven into minkisi power figures in Africa to cast spells or seal contracts. Crossed out words also recur in his paintings and are weirdly reminiscent of the bracketing or slashing of text in deconstructionist philosophy, to emphasize the cultural and biased nature of language. Funny to realize in retrospect that Basquiat and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida were on the same page. Notable works include "Unbreakable" (1987), a late painting in which the human figure is mostly banished the work has never been shown in New York. The wry "Hollywood Africans" (1983), on loan from the Whitney Museum, includes text like "gangsterism," "tax free," "200 yen" and "sugar cane, inc.," linking up creativity, race and corruption. A dramatic salon style wall on the second floor includes a grid of 16 paintings from 1982, on wooden supports constructed by Basquiat's studio assistant. Gluckman Tang has preserved the "bones" of the building sturdy beige brick walls and sleek industrial staircases and opened up rear facing walls with windows that provide light and spectacular views of the neighborhood. The building includes four floors of exhibition space and a rooftop garden with a reflecting pool visible as a glittering skylight on the fourth floor. Nestled among old tenement buildings, the location feels very similar to Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, a new multistory foundation related to the nearby department store. Both institutions serve as emblems of the gentrification of former working class neighborhoods, but also the proliferation of a new kind of museum. Private collections have long histories for instance, the Frick and the Morgan in New York but also, at present, carry a double edged meaning and purpose: They are private exhibition venues but also tax havens for the very rich. Mr. Brant was on the forefront of this phenomenon both the private institution showcasing contemporary art and trouble with the IRS when his foundation opened a decade ago across the street from his estate in Greenwich. One of the arguments in support of the East Village space is that it offers free admission to see works that are rarely on view although you have to make reservations, which are quickly becoming scarce. And the "free" admission to most of these private museums is the ultimate hidden fee economy tactic: We are all paying, in a variety of ways, to live in a system that supports colossal disparities of wealth. Museum admission might be free, but health care isn't. Interestingly, Basquiat's work speaks exactly to these issues, but in somewhat coded form. It's an old, old story: the black artist (or musician) who makes raw, personal work and sells it to a rich white person. There is something that feels almost not right about looking too long at a Basquiat because it's like looking into an open wound. He didn't go to art school (except for a few life drawing classes) to learn this because it's way beyond art, which is the best kind of art. But the words in Basquiat's paintings often point to what it's like to be turned into a masterpiece, a financial instrument, and a trophy. The show at the Brant doesn't wade directly into this but the Guggenheim will, in an exhibition opening in June that focuses on the response of visual artists, including Basquiat, to the death of Michael Stewart, a young graffiti artist who lapsed into a coma while in the custody of New York transit officers in 1983. (The officers were acquitted by a jury). "It could've been me," Basquiat said. Instead, Basquiat continued on, living a bifurcated life in which his work was highly valued but his existence, he even stated, was not. I stopped trekking up to the Brant Foundation in Greenwich because the program there didn't reflect the art I wanted to engage with. It was overwhelmingly male, white and approached through the triumph of the market what's hot and expensive rather than a more critical prism. The current show presents Basquiat in a gorgeous, former industrial space but there are already dozens of fantastic, adventurous and experimental spaces in the area. Perhaps one way private and public museums can work together is this: Private ones offer more opportunities to see work that has been highly (or over) valued, rather than stowing it away in free ports or elsewhere, while public institutions do the difficult, scholarly work we expect. (The Brant advertises itself as a "study center," but it's not clear yet what is going to be studied.) How the Brant will coexist with this context remains to be seen. It's great to see Basquiat in the East Village although, with its new condominiums, steep rents, and expensive restaurants, it barely resembles the neighborhood he inhabited 40 years ago. This exhibition will bring joy to a lot of people. The questions and complications it contains will reach far beyond Sixth Street and the art world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Season 3 of "Better Things," beginning Feb. 28 on FX, feels like the long awaited return of an old familiar friend. Sam (Pamela Adlon, one of the creators) continues to come to terms with aging; Sam's oldest daughter, Max (Mikey Madison), has boy troubles; Frankie (Hannah Alligood) and Duke (Olivia Edward) bicker and deal with puberty. Sam's mom, Phyllis (Celia Imrie), ignores her steadily declining mental health. The show, a semi autobiographical depiction of Adlon's life, is still silly, touching, absurdist, invigorating. The '60s and '70s pop/rock throwbacks can still pack a gut punch at the right moment. (The first episode ends with Sam and Frankie reading "A Raisin in the Sun" aloud together over Rod Stewart's "Mandolin Wind.") But these episodes almost didn't happen: Near the end of Season 2, in 2017, a New York Times article profiled several women who accused Louis C.K., Adlon's longtime writing partner and the co creator of "Better Things," of sexual misconduct. C.K. later admitted the allegations were true and was removed from the show as a producer. "Better Things" had already been renewed for a third season before the allegations came to light, but Adlon initially told John Landgraf, the CEO of FX, she wasn't sure she wanted to continue: "My heart wasn't in it," she said recently. "He said to me, 'Well, I'm not going to force you to do anything, but I want you to do your show. I want you to.' And he never pushed," she continued. Adlon opted to proceed, though not without some anxiety about being the sole person in charge of the show after sharing those duties with C.K. "It was scary, and I'd never been in a writer's room before, let alone run one," she said. "The things that I didn't think would happen are: I survived, I wrote 12 drafts of television, I shot 12 episodes of television and now I'm finishing post production on them." Then, after the girls left the call, Adlon talked about the subject everybody asks about, which also happens to be the thing she least likes to discuss: Louis C.K. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. How have your dynamics on set changed since the first season? MIKEY MADISON There was always a sense of freedom, creatively, on this particular set, and as time has progressed, I feel like even more so. We're able to come up with ideas and take liberties. HANNAH ALLIGOOD Once you've spent this much time with your cast and crew, you kind of become a family. PAMELA ADLON When we wrapped Season 1 and we were doing the last scene when we're driving on the freeway when we finished, do you remember what happened? OLIVIA EDWARD We were all crying. MADISON It was very emotional. I met some of them when I was 15, and I'll be 20 in March. I feel like I've known everyone for so long, and just that first season, I would wake up every morning just so excited to go to set. I still do. ADLON It killed me. I was getting emotional every time we went back out onto the freeway, when Mikey would go to play the song, "Only Women Bleed." We were listening to it and singing along to it, which of course heightens your experience. I kept having to cover my mouth with my hands, because I was sobbing. Oh, God, it was so intense. When we realized that it was a wrap, we all stood there in a heap just bawling. And Mikey and Hannah were like, inconsolable. One of the themes you've always dealt with on the show, but especially in Season 3, is aging and how it can conjure up the past. Do you think a natural part of growing older is having to deal emotionally with things that feel unfinished? ADLON You know how they say, right before you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes? You're reflecting on your life, if you're lucky enough to take the time and slow down and be in that kind of place. I'm at a place where I'm asking my mom lots of questions about the past, because I don't want her to forget, you know? I want the information now. You're unpacking memories and experiences, and I have the great opportunity to put a lot of that in my show. In one scene this season, Sam chats with an older man about his late wife while on set shooting a zombie movie. ADLON Oh, God, I love that you brought up that scene, Aisha. It's one of those scenes that, when we're coming down to the wire and we're losing time, it's like, "Well, does this really push the story forward?" Because we only had a few days to shoot in Pomona and I was like, "I have to shoot this scene." This conversation was so important and beautiful, to just see this man reflecting about his life. You've got a whole lifetime of memories, and he says, "Well, it feels a little short to be a whole anything." But that's what life is. There's also what you've called your " MeToo response," when Sam decides to speak up about the dangerous working conditions on the movie. Have you had conversations with each other around MeToo, and what it means to be women or young girls in this industry? ALLIGOOD Because I'm still a minor, I still have a parent on set. And our set is really, really safe anyway, and I feel so comfortable there, that I really haven't felt unsafe at all. And I love our cast and our crew; it's just a really good environment. MADISON Before we started filming this season, there was a meeting for all the adults, and I was included because I was 18. We had a big seminar with the entire crew before we started MADISON It was interesting and also kind of sad, because they were saying things like, "This is inappropriate, and you cannot do this to a co worker," giving examples. It's so heartbreaking that this happens to people on set. Pamela, your show has been the first set that I've pretty much ever been on, and the show is about women, for women, with incredibly supportive people surrounding me. I've always felt very loved and protected throughout this entire experience. ADLON The girls are luckier now, because it's a time where everybody is being watched and everybody's on point. They have to be on point. You know, I wasn't so lucky. I started when I was young a long time ago, and people were still getting up to stuff. So that's why I was able to put this in the show this season, of taking the production out to task for being abusive with people's time and potentially hurting them. Are there any moments from this season that are your favorites? Olivia, you get to hurl a bunch of expletives in one episode. EDWARD I love every time someone brings this up, because it was something that I would never be able to do. It was a funny scene, and I had to try very hard not to start laughing. I will say: I memorized my lines in advance. ADLON Oh, she was so ready. ALLIGOOD How much did you practice? EDWARD I actually didn't practice. I think I just memorized it, and I remember laughing the entire time, reading. Once I got up to that scene, I started on the floor laughing, because it was just so funny. Season 3 of "Better Things" was announced right before the Louis C.K. revelations came out. Pamela, what was your vision for the season at the beginning, and did it change once you knew he was no longer going to be a part of it? ADLON When I was shooting Season 2, I would get ideas. I would be like, "If we get a Season 3, I should do this or that." So I'm always scribbling down and having thoughts about places that story could go. But when the article came out, my "White Rock" episode aired the same night, which really expletive sucked. Because that was a beautiful episode, and it just kind of got lost. And then the gorgeous "Graduation" episode aired the following week. My head fell apart, because it was kind of a cataclysmic situation. So for me, it was about rebuilding, putting my head back on. He can't be a producer on the show, you can't write this show with him, but his name's still on the show as a co creator. I had to kind of start over with everything. I got an attorney; I never had one before. I have now a business manager; I had to change accountants. I had to think about making a writer's room. So, where did I want to go with this season? What I really wanted to do was say, "Sam's a mess. Max is a mess. Phil's a mess. Frankie's a mess. Duke's a mess. Sunny's a mess." I wanted to see these women kind of unraveling. I wanted the theme of the season to be about the changes of your life, and honoring that. Which is very much kind of a vintage "Better Things" thing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
First, it came for eyeglasses. And then it came for makeup. It came for mattresses, and razors and erectile dysfunction pills. And now, finally, the Great Disruption has come for your cookware. Up until a few years ago, consumers faced a dizzying array of pots and pans on trips to department stores or online: cast iron skillets in a multitude of sizes, nonstick fry pans with lids and without, triply saute pans with different metallic exteriors, and stainless steel pots of varying volumes. But with the emergence of several direct to consumer kitchenware companies, buyers can now eschew choice for curated, pared down sets just the essentials. Great Jones, for example, which was started by Sierra Tishgart, 28, a former writer for New York magazine, and Maddy Moelis, 28, offers only five pieces : an enameled cast iron Dutch oven, a ceramic nonstick pan, a stockpot, a frying pan and a sauce pot. The Dutch oven, which they refer to as The Dutchess, costs 145 and comes in five millennial matte colors (Blueberry, Broccoli, Earl Grey , Mustard and Macaron ) . The full set is 395. Potluck, which was founded by two former employees of the cosmetics company Glossier, Minsuk Kim, 31, and Jessica Sheft Ason, 28, offers just four pieces, all stainless steel : a skillet, two saucepans and a stockpot. The company also sells a knife set and utensil set, as well as a bundle that includes 22 items for 270. Misen, another recent cookware start up, sells a 320 bundle of three knives and three pots and pans, while other direct to consumer brands specialize in just one product. The Field Company manufactures cast iron skillets and a company called Milo just sells 95 Dutch ovens (they may eventually expand into other offerings). Ms. Tishgart said the impetus for starting Great Jones, named in honor of Judith Jones, the writer and editor who discovered Julia Child, was change: "Food has exploded as this cultural obsession, and yet the cookware feels very antiquated and detached from that," she said. What was needed to update it? Candy colors. Instructions on recycling. And illustrated directions for how to care for the products. (Ms. Tishgart declined to call Great Jones as a lifestyle brand , but outlined plans to offer customers more than basic functionality.) Mr. Kim, of Potluck, said a goal was to offer full sets that were less expensive than leading brands. The pots and pans are sourced from some of the same manufacturers, but Potluck sets lower prices by selling them directly to the consumer. When asked what differentiated Potluck products from those purchased at department stores like Macy's, Mr. Kim said: "Nothing." Of course, legacy brands like Le Creuset have other perks, including generous lifetime warranties. Ms. Tishgart acknowledged that the new entries into the cookware space need to "function exceptionally," and "can't just be a pretty thing on your Instagram." But when she sought to upgrade items in her kitchen a few years ago, she said she was surprised by the markup on high quality items. "I remember having the thought of 'Do I just need to be married to get these nice things?'" Ms. Tishgart said. "How strange and 1950s is that." According to Joe Derochowski, a home industry adviser for NPD Group, most purchases in the 2.5 billion cookware industry are made by people in their 20s to 30s who are often outfitting a kitchen for the first time, or those in their 50s and 60s who are upgrading existing products. (Mr. Kim said while most Potluck customers have been millennials, he's been surprised by the number of older people who have purchased his products.) And the industry is growing. Mr. Derochowski said that even though there has been an uptick in take home meals, consumers are increasingly interested in making healthy meals in products that are easy to clean. Thus, Great Jones started with investments from the co founders of the luggage maker Away, Jen Rubio and Steph Korey, the Sweetgreen co founder Nicolas Jammet and the chef and restaurateur David Chang , as well as Jessica Koslow of Los Angeles brunch spot Sqirl and Audrey Gelman of The Wing. A less confusing retail experience with lower prices still may not be compelling enough to lure consumers away from tried and true brands like All Clad and Calphalon. But these start ups are dead set on disruption, one kitchen cabinet at a time. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
FRANKFURT There was a touch of gloating in the most recent earnings report issued by Kuka, a company based in the Bavarian city of Augsburg whose orange industrial robots are a common site on auto assembly lines around the world. Kuka said last month that its sales had more than bounced back to levels predating the financial crisis. By contrast, sales at its Japanese rivals were still a third below where they had stood in early 2008, before the global downturn slammed the machinery industry. A surge in orders from European carmakers has helped Kuka's rebound. But it also does not hurt that the euro has plunged compared with the yen, which has given Kuka a price advantage against Japanese competitors that it did not have a year ago. "Price is not the sole criteria, but it's an important criteria," Kuka's chief executive, Till Reuter, said in an interview. "The weaker euro is to our advantage." European companies tend to focus on the dollar exchange rate, because the United States currency is the most important for world trade. But the yen's recent strengthening is playing a role in Germany's export boom as well. The euro has fallen 19 percent against the yen in the last year, nearly double the decline against the dollar. Over all, the euro is down more than 36 percent against the yen since August 2008. A stronger yen is good news for German machinery and auto companies whose main competitors often are based in Japan. And it is, of course, bad news in Japan, where the strong currency has become a political issue. The rivalry between the two countries is particularly intense in China. It is the fastest growing market for many German companies, but proximity gives Japanese exporters an edge. "Japanese manufacturers are all over the place, and they are usually the toughest competitors," said Oliver Wack, a China specialist at the German Engineering Federation, an industry group. In fact, German companies gained ground in China last year, increasing their share of imports to 22.9 percent from 20.6 percent, while Japan's share of Chinese imports slipped to 24.1 percent from 27 percent, according to the engineering federation. Because the Chinese currency moves in lockstep with the dollar, the yen is rising against the renminbi, even as the euro has grown cheaper. But economists and company executives caution that there are many other reasons for Germany's gains. For example, Germany benefited from China's heavy investment in infrastructure like power plants, which favored companies like Siemens. And the initial cost, in euros or yen, is often a secondary consideration in markets for specialized factory machines or heavy equipment, where both Japanese and German companies are strong. Customers scrutinize factors like energy efficiency, which may be a more important cost factor over the long term. But few German companies are complaining about the strong yen. "If Japan has a stronger currency, there is no question that helps the German companies," said Steffen Elstner, who specializes in exports at the Ifo Institute. The benefit is small but significant, said Rolf Schneider, head of macroeconomic research at the German insurer Allianz. He calculates that the dollar's rise against the euro has added three or four percentage points to German exports, while the yen's rise has added no more than one percentage point. But "one percent is still relatively high," Mr. Schneider said. "For companies that compete directly with Japanese companies, it plays a decisive role." The weak yen of a few years ago was a product of Japan's extremely low interest rates, which made Japanese bonds and other assets less attractive for international investors. But when the financial crisis hit, the European Central Bank also cut its benchmark interest rate, to a record low of 1 percent, which meant that the interest rate that investors could earn on euros was not much better than the return for yen. That and shaky growth in much of the euro area meant there was less incentive for investors to put their money into Europe as opposed to Japan. "Now that interest rates are low worldwide, this advantage is gone," said Ralph Wiechers, chief economist of the German Engineering Federation. German industry representatives tend to play down the importance of exchange rates, preferring to emphasize other reasons their strategies and products are superior to those of competitors. A spokesman for the carmaker Volkswagen, who said he could not be quoted by name because of company policy, said the company had been taking market share from Toyota because of the quality of Volkswagens, not because of a shift in the yen. ABB, a company based in Zurich whose products include industrial robots made in Germany and other locations, said it was not noticing any yen effect. "At this point we don't see an overall change in the competitive landscape because of the strong yen," Michel Demare, the chief financial officer at ABB, said in an e mail. Many multinational companies now produce their products all over the world, in part to protect themselves from currency swings. Kuka produces machinery in Shanghai as well as in Germany and in Hungary, and it buys parts from Japan. Liebherr, a German company that makes construction equipment, competes directly with Tadano of Japan in the mobile crane business. But, since Tadano manufactures mobile cranes at a subsidiary in Germany, the strong yen does not give Liebherr any advantage. Still, in Japan the yen has become a sensitive issue as the currency fluctuates around a 15 year high. In a government survey of 102 exporters, released last week, more than 60 percent said that they would see profits fall because of the strong yen. Ichiro Ozawa, who is challenging Prime Minister Naoto Kan to be head of the Democratic Party of Japan, said Thursday that action was needed to weaken the yen, Reuters reported. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Maureen Dowd: Like the Alma character in "Phantom Thread," you sometimes have to put poisonous mushroom shavings in your husband's eggs to settle him down. Rebecca Miller: I don't relate to that, quite. Like your character Greta in "Personal Velocity," you're rotten with ambition. I am a little bit led by the nose by my own imagination, which I think is a little different. Stuff comes up in my head and it's a little bit enslaving. You love watching reality TV with your husband. Yes, sometimes, yes. Like "Alaskan Bush People" is an example. We used to watch "Man v. Food" in Ireland. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Oprah Winfrey said on Friday that she was cutting ties with a documentary centered on women who have accused the music mogul Russell Simmons of sexual misconduct. The untitled film, scheduled to have its premiere this month at the Sundance Film Festival, focuses primarily on the executive Drew Dixon, who accused Mr. Simmons of raping her, an accusation Mr. Simmons has repeatedly denied. Ms. Winfrey had served as an executive producer on the project by the veteran documentary filmmaking duo Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, whose works include the 2015 film "The Hunting Ground," an examination of rape on American college campuses, and "The Invisible War," about sexual assault in the United States military. With Ms. Winfrey's departure, the film has also lost its distributor, Apple TV Plus. Apple had agreed to make the documentary available on its streaming platform as part of Ms. Winfrey's overall deal with the company. In a statement, Ms. Winfrey said she "unequivocally believes and supports the women," adding that their stories "deserve to be told and heard." Her departure, she said, stemmed from creative differences with the filmmakers. "In my opinion, there is more work to be done on the film to illuminate the full scope of what the victims endured," she said, "and it has become clear that the filmmakers and I are not aligned in that creative vision." Ms. Winfrey's decision to leave the project came a month after Mr. Simmons questioned her involvement in the film in an open letter to her, posted on Instagram, that started with the words "Dearest Oprah." The post appeared on Dec. 13 next to a photograph of Ms. Winfrey interviewing Mr. Simmons about his 2014 book "Success Through Stillness" on the OWN program "Super Soul Sunday." In the post, he said he found it "troubling that you choose me to single out in your recent documentary." After conceding that he had "already admitted to being a playboy," Mr. Simmons, who has faced at least a dozen accusations of sexual misconduct, said that he had "never been violent or forced myself on anyone." 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. The day before Mr. Simmons's Instagram post, the rapper 50 Cent used his own Instagram account to post a 2014 image of Ms. Winfrey and Mr. Simmons posing happily together with the comment, "I don't understand why Oprah is going after black men." Ms. Winfrey's departure is a blow to Mr. Dick and Ms. Ziering. The filmmakers had chronicled stories of sexual harassment and abuse even before the MeToo movement came to prominence. For the new documentary, which also addresses black women's relationship with the MeToo movement, they spent two years tracking down Ms. Dixon and other women with accusations against Mr. Simmons. Mr. Dick and Ms. Ziering said in a statement on Friday that, because the " MeToo experiences of black women deserve to be heard," they still planned to take the film to Sundance. "Revealing hard truths is never easy, and the women in our documentary are all showing extraordinary strength and courage by raising their voices to address sexual abuse in the music industry," the filmmakers said in a statement. "While we are disappointed that Oprah Winfrey is no longer an executive producer on the project, we are gratified that Winfrey has unequivocally said she believes and supports the survivors in the film." The difficulties surrounding the project represent another challenge to Apple, a newcomer to the film and television business whose streaming platform went live in November. Last month, the company shelved another high profile film, "The Banker," a civil rights drama based on a true story starring Anthony Mackie and Samuel L. Jackson, after a relative of its real life protagonist accused her brother, a co producer on the film, of sexual abuse. Ms. Winfrey's departure from the Simmons film was first reported by The Hollywood Reporter. In her statement, Ms. Winfrey called Mr. Dick and Ms. Ziering "talented filmmakers," adding, "I have great respect for their mission but given the filmmakers' desire to premiere the film at the Sundance Film Festival before I believe it is complete, I feel it's best to step aside. I will be working with Time's Up to support the victims and those impacted by abuse and sexual harassment." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
"Breaking Bad" did a remarkable job of highlighting Hank's savvy as a D.E.A. agent, while keeping the main suspect, Walter White, right under his nose. And as he negotiates with Saul and Domingo, we see his formidable side, even as he gets snowed. He pegs Saul's act for as a farce ("I feel like my chain is being pulled, and not in a good way," he says), but for perfectly understandable reasons, he has no idea that he's about to do the bidding of a drug kingpin. That kingpin is Lalo, who is getting played, too. By Nacho, who reports to Gus that his "dead drops" are now under federal surveillance. This makes Gus very unhappy. Can we pause for a moment to consider Nacho's plight? First, he appears to be living with a nutter. Specifically, a woman who is, for mysterious reasons, compelled to solve puzzles the real kind, like a jigsaw, and the self created kind, like how to clean a remote control. But an unhinged roommate is the least of Nacho's worries. He wants nothing more than to run for his life, the end of which he can clearly foresee, and to encourage his father, who is the quintessence of integrity, to run as well. In a poignant scene, Nacho the Elder (Juan Carlos Cantu) says he won't retire or flee, even if his son secretly tries to buy him out of his upholstery store for an extravagant sum. Poor Nacho. Who on this show is more miserable? Maybe Mike, who is underemployed and idling alone in a bar, trying to drink away his anguish. These feelings must now include remorse for the trauma he inflicted on his granddaughter when he yelled at her in the previous episode. He's in a flinty mood, and for reasons as yet unknown, he's triggered by a photograph of the Sydney Opera House. What did Australia do to you, Mike? We're here to help. The episode ends with Kim and Jimmy, tossing beer bottles off their balcony, which explode in the parking lot below. I took this as a howl at the sense of "in" that they would dearly like to escape. And yet this is probably as "out" as they'll be. Certainly, Jimmy is about to get in way over his head. None The opening scene ants, swarming over ice cream, melting on the sidewalk is not just an awe inspiring feat of directing and sound engineering. (The noise of the ants over the chorus of yodelers is a pretty genius combination. Very Coen Brothers esque.) It's also a great symbol for the cosmos of "Better Call Saul." There is the law abiding citizenry of Albuquerque, which walks the pavement, blithely unaware, as represented by the pedestrians who don't even notice the ice cream feast. And there is the criminal underworld, which is savage and somehow operating in plain sight while also completely invisible. You watch an opening like that and know you are in the hands of maestros. None Speaking of master strokes: At Nacho's house, we briefly see a television commercial for Numilifor, a nonexistent medication. The creative minds behind "Better Call Saul" have nailed the look and feel of TV drug ads, in much the way they nailed the look and feel of fast food commercials for Los Pollos Hermanos, in "Breaking Bad." Maybe Numilifor cures the urge to clean remote controls. Let's hope. None Do Hank and Gomez seem especially irritated by each other? I remember their banter as somewhat warmer. None Lalo gets the best line in the episode. Which isn't a line, actually. It's more like a noise, which he emits right after telling Jimmy, "You'll make time," for future cartel related legal work. "Kla!" he says with a smile, before getting into his muscle car. I wonder if that was in the script. None Anyone else struck by the lack of erotic spark between Kim and Jimmy? Nary a cuddle or a kiss. Even when Kim says she's celebrating the coming work day, and Jimmy says he's had his most lucrative 24 hours as Saul Goodman, nada. In another show, we'd at least get a hug. "Good for Saul," is the most that Kim can muster. Maybe she's souring on the guy. But the reality is that this pair have never demonstrated much physical interest in each other. What's up with that? Please weigh in, and if you ever find an old can of vanilla frosting, don't eat it. Give it to Gomez. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
After a lull in September, General Motors picked up the pace of its safety campaign this week, announcing two recalls on Friday of more than half a million vehicles worldwide and an order to dealers to stop selling some pickup trucks because of a problem with the air bags. Including the impending pickup recall, Friday's actions brought G.M.'s recall tally for this week to four, for a total of 72 recalls this year, covering about 26.4 million vehicles in the United States. Experian Automotive, an information services company, estimated that during the first quarter of 2014, about 65 million vehicles registered in the United States were from G.M. The bigger of the two recalls announced on Friday covered about 290,000 vehicles in the United States Cadillac SRX crossovers from the 2010 15 model years and Saab 9 4X crossovers from the 2011 12 model years because of a rear suspension problem that could cause the driver to lose control. The automaker said that a nut that secures a piece of the rear suspension could loosen, allowing the part to detach. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
The United States faces a wave of small business failures this fall if the federal government does not provide a new round of financial assistance a prospect that economists warn would prolong the recession, slow the recovery and perhaps enduringly reshape the American business landscape. As the pandemic drags on, it is threatening even well established businesses that were financially healthy before the crisis. If they shut down or are severely weakened, it could accelerate corporate consolidation and the dominance of the biggest companies. Tens of thousands of restaurants, bars, retailers and other small businesses have already closed. But many more have survived, buoyed in part by billions of dollars in government assistance to both businesses and their customers. The Paycheck Protection Program provided hundreds of billions in loans and grants to help businesses retain employees and meet other obligations. Billions more went to the unemployed, in a 600 weekly supplement to state jobless benefits, and to many households, through a 1,200 tax rebate money available to spend at local stores and restaurants. Now that aid is largely gone, even as the economic recovery that took hold in the spring is losing momentum. The fall will bring new challenges: Colder weather will curtail outdoor dining and other weather dependent adaptations that helped businesses hang on in much of the country, and epidemiologists warn that the winter could bring a surge in coronavirus cases. As a result, many businesses face a stark choice: Do they try to hold on through a winter that could bring new shutdowns and restrictions, with no guarantee that sales will bounce back in the spring? Or do they cut their losses while they have something to salvage? For the Cheers Replica bar in Faneuil Hall in Boston, the answer was to throw in the towel after nearly two decades in business. "We just came to the conclusion, if we're losing that much money in the summertime, what's the winter going to look like?" said Markus Ripperger, president and chief executive of Hampshire House, the bar's parent company. Many businesses that failed in the early weeks of the pandemic were already struggling, had owners nearing retirement or were otherwise likely to shut down in the next couple of years. Those closing down now look different. Cheers was a longstanding, successful business with access to capital and owners willing to invest to keep it going. But the bar, built to resemble the one on the 1980s sitcom, depended heavily on tourist traffic that collapsed during the pandemic. The company's three other restaurants, which include the original Cheers bar on Beacon Hill that was the inspiration for the show, remain in business. But Mr. Ripperger said he was worried about what a winter resurgence of the virus might mean. "We're on life support now, and if we have to go through another shutdown or more restrictions, it's going to be even worse for a lot more restaurants that are just barely scraping by," he said. On Friday, the Commerce Department reported that consumer spending rose only modestly in July after two months of resurgence and remained below pre pandemic levels. Economists warn that without the 600 a week in extra unemployment insurance, spending is likely to slow further this fall. Data from Homebase, which provides time management software to small businesses, shows that roughly 20 percent of businesses that were open in January are closed either temporarily or permanently. The number of hours worked a rough proxy for revenues is down by even more during what should be the year's busiest period. Both figures have stalled or turned down in recent weeks. 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. Small businesses have grown more pessimistic as the pandemic has dragged on. In late April, about a third of small businesses surveyed by the Census Bureau said they expected it to take more than six months for business to return to normal. Four months later, nearly half say so, and a further 7.5 percent say they do not expect business ever to bounce back fully. About 5 percent say they expect to close permanently in the next six months. The ultimate damage could be much greater. In a recent survey by the National Federation of Independent Businesses, a small business lobbying group, 21 percent of small businesses said they would have to close if conditions did not improve in the next six months. Other private sector surveys have found similar results. Widespread business failures could cause lasting economic damage. Nearly half of American employees work for businesses with staffs under 500, meaning millions of jobs are at stake. And while new businesses would inevitably spring up to replace those that close, that process will take far longer than simply reopening existing businesses. "The consequences to allowing a tidal wave of closures is we will make every aspect of the recovery harder," said John Lettieri, president and chief executive of the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington research organization. There could also be longer run implications. Despite high profile bankruptcies in the retail industry and other sectors, many large corporations have been able to solidify their position during the pandemic: demanding concessions from landlords, borrowing billions of dollars at low interest rates and leveraging sophisticated supply chains and distribution systems to reach suddenly homebound customers. Small businesses, which usually have less access to credit and rely more heavily on foot traffic, have been struggling to survive. The challenge has been particularly acute for Black owned businesses, which were more than twice as likely to close down in the early months of the pandemic than small businesses over all, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Black owned businesses were more likely to be in areas hit hard by the virus, had less of a financial cushion and were less likely to have established banking relationships, which put them at a disadvantage in seeking loans under the emergency Paycheck Protection Program in the critical first weeks that the aid was available. By the time they got access to the federal money, "many Black owned businesses were already out of business," said Ron Busby, president and chief executive of the U.S. Black Chambers. "We just couldn't make it that long." Maurice Brewster is hanging on. He runs Mosaic Global Transportation, a California company that was growing quickly before the pandemic running the private buses that shuttled tech workers between their San Francisco homes and their suburban office campuses. Those campuses have been all but empty since March, and many companies aren't planning to bring workers back until next year. Other parts of Mr. Brewster's business providing transportation for conventions, wine tours and other events are also suffering. To survive, Mr. Brewster, who is Black, has slashed costs and sought new lines of business, including delivering packages for Amazon "anything to get the vehicles moving and get some revenue coming in the door," he said. Mr. Brewster says he is confident he can make it through the end of the year. After that, he doesn't know. "You just can't go a year unless you have just an endless pool of money to sustain you until March or April of 2021," he said. "A lot of us are going to go out of business." Economists say there is time to limit the damage. Despite a rocky start, the Paycheck Protection Program eventually paid out more than half a trillion dollars in loans and probably saved many businesses from failure, according to research from economists at the University of Illinois and Harvard. But the program lapsed in August, and if Congress doesn't move soon to replace it, the earlier effort could end up delaying failures rather than preventing them. Many experts still expect Democratic and Republican leaders to reach a deal on an aid package that includes support for small businesses, but a new, large scale program seems increasingly unlikely. "Why didn't we use the time that P.P.P. bought us to design the kind of program that would be commensurate with the national challenge that we're facing?" Mr. Lettieri, of the Economic Innovation Group, asked. "That's all P.P.P. was. It was a mechanism to buy time. It was never the long term solution." A paycheck protection loan helped keep In Symmetry Spa afloat early in the pandemic. But the money is long gone, and the San Francisco spa hasn't been allowed to reopen. Nearby storefronts are boarded up, and Candace Combs, who has run the spa with her brother for two decades, said she doubted that many of those businesses were coming back. "I can survive because I'm betting on another stimulus package," Ms. Combs said. "But without that, we start to really teeter." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
SAN FRANCISCO Facebook on Tuesday made its largest single investment by putting 5.7 billion into Jio Platforms of India, an enormous bet on the developing market and a sign of how large tech companies are forging ahead in the pandemic. Jio Platforms is a subsidiary of Reliance Industries, one of India's biggest multinational companies and a major provider of cellular and internet services in the country. The investment, which requires approval from competition regulators, would give Facebook a 9.99 percent stake in Jio Platforms, Jio said. Facebook said the move indicated its commitment to India. More than 388 million people in India have been connected to the internet over the past four years through Jio, Facebook said. "The country is in the middle of a major digital transformation, and organizations like Jio have played a big part in getting hundreds of millions of Indian people and small businesses online," Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, said in a post to his Facebook page announcing the deal. "With communities around the world in lockdown, many of these entrepreneurs need digital tools they can rely on to find and communicate with customers and grow their businesses." Facebook is moving forward with strategic investments at a fragile time in the global economy. While many businesses have been hurt by the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, large technology companies are positioned to benefit in the long run as more people turn to their services while sheltering indoors. Companies such as Apple, Alphabet and Facebook all have financial muscle to ride out a difficult period. Facebook sees plenty of opportunity with Jio. India is a large market for Facebook; more than 400 million people in the country use WhatsApp, its global messaging service, while more than 300 million people use the company's core social network. Facebook has historically not made as much money from each user in Asia as it does elsewhere. But the company hinted that the new partnership could change that. WhatsApp has worked for years to build tools for small businesses and has dabbled in payment systems, while Facebook has also invested in creating digital storefronts for entrepreneurs to sell goods and services online. "By bringing together JioMart, Jio's small business initiative, with WhatsApp, we can enable people to connect with businesses, shop and ultimately purchase products in a seamless mobile experience," said a statement by David Fischer, Facebook's chief revenue officer, and Ajit Mohan, Facebook's managing director in India. In a joint interview with a top Reliance executive, Mr. Mohan said tens of millions of small businesses in India were already using WhatsApp to communicate. "How do we help them access customers and help people discover products?" he said, adding that Jio offered a way to reach them. Jio has been teaming up with other American tech companies such as Microsoft to offer an enhanced suite of services to small businesses. Its current offerings include high speed internet, cloud storage, payments and even products from its vast retail supply chain. This is not Facebook's first foray into the Indian market. Several years ago, it tried to offer free internet connectivity to Indian users in a program called Free Basics. But that initiative hit snag after snag until it was banned in the country in 2016. Regulators decided that companies could not offer free internet services that favored some companies over others. More recently, Facebook has been at loggerheads with the Indian government over WhatsApp. The government has demanded that WhatsApp change its encryption to trace messages back to their source, which WhatsApp has refused to do. At the same time, regulators have repeatedly stalled WhatsApp's request to offer a payments service to its Indian users. Jio was founded by Mukesh Ambani, an industrialist who is India's richest man. It transformed India's technology scene when it hit the market in 2016 by offering free calls and ultracheap 4G data to Indians who were previously stuck with high prices and slower 3G connections from the existing carriers. Since then, Jio has become India's largest carrier by number of subscribers, with nearly 400 million lines. It has helped drive India's mobile internet costs to the lowest in the world, with virtually unlimited data and calls costing just a few dollars a month. The price war it began has also hobbled India's telecom companies, driving many out of business. Jio has ambitions to take on Amazon in e commerce, run data centers, provide fiber internet to homes and businesses and set up new services like tele health and distance learning. But Mr. Ambani incurred enormous debt to build the telecom business. Those costs have been subsidized by other parts of Reliance Industries, which is also India's largest retailer, its biggest producer of polyester and one of its biggest energy companies. The money from Facebook will help Reliance reduce some of that debt and invest further in its network, which it needs to do after regulators delayed approval of a high profile 15 billion deal to sell 25 percent of its energy business to the Saudis. Mr. Ambani has also been the most powerful corporate voice urging regulators to take an India first approach that favors local companies and hobbles foreign firms like Facebook and Amazon. He has argued that the vast amounts of data collected by such firms should stay in India and be controlled by Indians. In the joint interview, Anshuman Thakur, Jio's strategy chief, and Mr. Mohan said the companies had different perspectives on some issues but added that would not preclude them from working together in other areas. "We will collaborate on some," Mr. Mohan said. "We will compete on many." Facebook's investment may help turn India's battered telecom sector into a duopoly. A recent Supreme Court decision ordering older carriers to pay billions of dollars in back taxes has left the industry in dire financial shape, and one of the three major carriers, Vodafone Idea, is teetering on the edge of insolvency. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
If you ever win an Oscar, don't let it out of your sight. That was the lesson on Sunday night, when Frances McDormand saw her freshly engraved statue for best actress stolen for a short time at an Oscars after party. "After a brief time apart, Frances and her Oscar were happily reunited," Simon Halls, a representative for Ms. McDormand, said in a statement on Monday. "They celebrated the reunion with a double cheeseburger from In N Out." A man accused in the theft, Terry Bryant, of Los Angeles, was in custody on Monday afternoon, a Los Angeles Police Department spokeswoman said on Monday. Mr. Bryant, 47, faces a charge of grand theft, which in California is a "wobbler," meaning the crime can be prosecuted either as a misdemeanor or a felony, a decision left up to the district attorney's office. A felony grand theft conviction could mean up to three years in jail. He was being held with bail set at 20,000. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
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