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STORY DOULA Jodi Picoult was getting ready for the evening's virtual event a conversation with Kevin Kwan when she got a call from her editor, letting her know that her 27th novel, "The Book of Two Ways," had debuted at No. 1 on the hardcover fiction list. "It was a really nice moment in a really bad year," says the veteran author. "I was terrified about publishing a book during a pandemic, but this one has rejiggered itself in my mind to be perfect pandemic reading." Ten years ago, when Picoult's son was majoring in Egyptology at Yale, he translated the "Book of Two Ways," which is a 4,000 year old road map to the underworld. She says, "I walked by him, looked at the title and said, 'Great name for a novel.'" She did some digging and learned that the mystical text was all about choices: "The deceased could take either a land route or a water route to get to the field of offerings, which is the ancient Egyptian version of heaven. No matter which path you took, you wound up where you were supposed to be." That's when the wheels started turning. Picoult envisioned a middle aged woman who braces for impact as her plane is crashing and is surprised by what flashes before her eyes. Instead of the life she's on her way home to in Boston, married to a guy named Brian, working as a death doula she sees the life she thought she'd have: with a career in Egyptology, in love with a man she hasn't seen in 15 years. "She has to decide: What do I do with this information?" says Picoult, who scheduled a research trip to Egypt and had to cancel it because of the Arab Spring. She put the idea aside. At her son's wedding four years ago, Picoult struck up a conversation with his thesis adviser, a renowned Egyptologist: "I said, 'I still want to write that book,' and she said, 'I'll take you to Egypt.'" Picoult also immersed herself in the world of death doulas "They help people journey out of this world the way a birth doula helps someone journey into it" and then worked on "The Book of Two Ways" while on book tour in 2018. ("I remember I had this weird meta moment on a plane, writing about a plane going down.") | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Boy meets girl. Boy leaves girl to return to his wife. Girl falls into despair or the nearest funeral pyre. So it goes with Dido, the famous queen of Virgil's "Aeneid," and Nora, her modern day analog in Abby Rosebrock's morbidly charming "Dido of Idaho" at Ensemble Studio Theater. The play, co produced with Radio Drama Network, opens with a sloppy afternoon tryst between an English professor, Michael (Curran Connor, thoroughly embodying a mansplaining academic), and an alcoholic musicologist named Nora (Layla Khosh), who bond over their mutual love of the tragic opera "Dido and Aeneas." Two years into this affair, Nora imagines their life together while Michael promises he'll get a divorce. But when she meets his entitled beauty queen wife, Crystal (performed with appropriate pep by the playwright), a series of lies leads to a violent confrontation. In an effort to regroup, Nora checks in with her estranged evangelical mother (Dalia Davi) and, we learn, her mother's roommate with benefits (Dawn McGee). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
With more than 50 women having flown in space over the last 50 years and the ranks of women astronauts growing, one might assume that a basic physiological question has been answered: What's the best approach to manage menstrual cycles in space? An analysis published Thursday in the journal "npj Microgravity" reports that many women astronauts might choose to pause their periods while in space, especially as missions get longer, and discusses ways to do that. Using long acting contraceptive methods, like implants or intrauterine devices, may be best, the authors say not only for the women but for reasons of convenience and cargo. The authors, Dr. Varsha Jain at King's College London, who has been described as a space gynecologist, and Virginia E. Wotring at Baylor College of Medicine, who might be considered a space pharmacologist, write that menstruating in space is safe. (The old myth that zero gravity would cause "retrograde" menstrual flow, causing blood to accumulate in the abdomen and cause infections, has been shown to be baseless.) In a NASA oral history, Dr. Rhea Seddon, an astronaut who flew on three space shuttle missions in the 1980s and 1990s, said, "I'm not totally sure who had the first period in space, but they came back and said, 'Period in space, just like period on the ground. Don't worry about it.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The Lasker Awards, among the most respected prizes in medicine, will go to six researchers who made major discoveries in physiology and virology, and to a scientist who has tirelessly promoted science education, the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation announced on Tuesday. The awards, honoring basic medical research, clinical research and special achievement, each come with a 250,000 prize and a nice omen: 87 Lasker laureates have also won Nobel Prizes. This year's awards speak to the additive nature of scientific research, with both the basic and clinical research prizes recognizing scientists who worked independently of one another but who built on one another's findings, said Joseph L. Goldstein, chairman of the awards jury. Three physician scientists William G. Kaelin Jr., Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza shared the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for elucidating the cellular path by which almost all animals respond to variations in oxygen. In the late 1980s, Dr. Semenza, a pediatric geneticist at Johns Hopkins, and Dr. Ratcliffe, a kidney specialist at Oxford, began independently researching how oxygen deprivation, or hypoxia, prompts the production of a hormone that elicits red blood cell production to combat it. Their work eventually led to the discovery of a protein, HIF 1, that showed up only when oxygen was scarce and that activated many genes as part of a large, interwoven physiological response to oxygen. Nobody understood what caused the HIF 1 protein to change with oxygen availability until Dr. Kaelin, a cancer specialist at the Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center in Boston, started studying a rare genetic syndrome. The syndrome, Von Hippel Lindau disease, or VHL, is characterized by tumors made of newly formed blood vessels. Those tumors "were behaving like they were constantly starved of oxygen," Dr. Kaelin said. William G. Kaelin Jr. of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. In the mid 1990s, Dr. Kaelin found that the VHL protein helps remove hypoxia related compounds from cells when oxygen is abundant. Dr. Ratcliffe then linked VHL to the disappearance of HIF 1 in rich oxygen conditions. Researchers have since found that HIF 1 and related proteins factor into many biological processes and medical conditions. "When we started, we were focused on one gene," Dr. Semenza said. "Now, there are thousands." Several companies are conducting late phase trials on anemia treatments that activate HIF to produce red blood cells. Other researchers are looking into treatments for cardiovascular disease and certain cancers. Peter J. Ratcliffe of the University of Oxford and the Francis Crick Institute. "I don't think any of us ever thought the system might be a 'classical' drug target," Dr. Ratcliffe said. "So it was really exciting to discover the potential consequences." The Lasker DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award went to Ralf F. W. Bartenschlager and Charles M. Rice for creating a system to replicate the hepatitis C virus, or HCV, in the laboratory, and to Michael J. Sofia for using this system to develop a potent and safe new drug to treat the debilitating disease. Ralf F.W. Bartenschlager of the University of Heidelberg. Hepatitis C causes chronic liver infection in as many as 170 million people worldwide and results in more than 350,000 deaths each year. Untreated, the virus leads to liver failure or cancer in 15 percent to 30 percent of cases. Dr. Bartenschlager, a virologist at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and Dr. Rice, a virologist at Rockefeller University in New York, started researching hepatitis C in 1989, after scientists first sequenced the genome of the virus. At the time, researchers thought the work might be as simple as inserting that newly sequenced RNA into cultured cells and watching it replicate. But in experiment after experiment, this approach failed. "If you don't have a virus that replicates in culture, it becomes very difficult to study," Dr. Rice said. He and his colleagues, then at Washington University in St. Louis, wondered if the original genome sequence lacked some pieces. Dr. Rice and a team of Japanese scientists independently discovered that it did. But it took Dr. Bartenschlager, working at the University of Mainz in Germany, to find a way to efficiently replicate the virus in cells in the lab. This allowed pharmaceutical researchers to test their theories in the drug discovery process. One such researcher was Dr. Sofia, chief scientific officer at the pharmaceutical company Arbutus Biopharma. In 2005, Dr. Sofia had just joined another company, called Pharmasset, which wanted to create a new hepatitis C drug. Previous investigators had developed a chemical that blocked the virus's RNA copying machinery, but their compound was not very potent. Dr. Sofia found a creative solution to this problem. He created a "slippery" coat for the compound that allowed it to easily enter liver cells. Once in the liver, metabolic enzymes converted the compound into an active drug. In this process, the enzymes also stripped off the compound's coat, preventing it from traveling back out of the liver and into other cells. "This allowed us to provide very high concentrations of the drug in the liver, where it needed to be," Dr. Sofia said, "and also reduced the chance of side effects on other organs." His work led to the development of a new oral drug, sofosbuvir, capable of long term HCV eradication without severe side effects. The first sofosbuvir regimen, Sovaldi, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2013. Since then, several others have come out. One, Harvoni, has cure rates of 94 percent to 99 percent in only eight to 12 weeks of therapy, even for recalcitrant HCV cases. "I think this is probably the biggest success we've ever had in the antiviral therapy area," Dr. Bartenschlager said, though he noted that the high cost of the drugs prevent them from having a global impact. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The nation's largest patient advocacy groups are on the front lines of some of the biggest health care debates, from the soaring costs of prescription drugs to whether new medicines are being approved quickly enough. But while their voices carry weight because they represent the interests of sick patients, a new study has found that more than 80 percent of them accept funding from drug and medical device companies. For some groups, the donations from industry accounted for more than half of their annual income, and in nearly 40 percent of cases, industry executives sit on governing boards, according to the study, which is published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Nearly "nine out of every 10 are taking money," said Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, an oncologist and vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the authors of the study, which looked at the top 104 nonprofit patient advocacy groups that reported more than 7.5 million in annual revenues for 2014. "I think that is not well known I think that is a shock." Dr. Emanuel, who previously advised President Obama on health care, said patient groups were far less transparent about conflicts of interest than medical researchers, who are now pushed to disclose ties to the drug and device industries when they write articles and make public appearances. "Compared to what researchers are doing, this is pathetic," he said. And yet "they wrap themselves in white as if they're pure." Patient groups said they have taken steps in recent years to improve their financial disclosures and conflict of interest policies, and rejected the suggestion that they were influenced by their corporate donors. "Patient advocacy organizations are driven by their missions putting patients first," said Marc M. Boutin, the chief executive of the National Health Council, an umbrella group for patient advocacy groups. "To say otherwise negates the extraordinary work achieved by these organizations on behalf of their patients." The health council had previously said that pharmaceutical companies accounted for 62 percent of the council's 3.5 million budget in 2015. The study also found a wide disparity in how the groups disclose the donations, making it difficult for members of the public to know how significant the industry funding is. The study authors gathered their data by examining the websites of the nonprofit groups, as well as their tax filings and annual reports from 2014. The researchers pointed to the National Hemophilia Foundation as one group that is vague about its funding because, although it lists corporate donors, it only discloses donation ranges. Drug makers contributed a range from 8.5 million to 14 million of the group's 16.8 million annual budget in 2014, the year researchers studied. Its top donors, Baxter, Biogen and Novo Nordisk, make products used by people with hemophilia; each donated between 2 million and 3 million, the researchers said. The American Diabetes Association, by contrast, reported receiving more than 28 million in industry funding in 2014, or about 15 percent of its budget, but provided detailed disclosures of which companies donated, and how much, the study authors said. In a statement, the hemophilia foundation said it never allows its corporate sponsors to influence its decision making, and that it also does not endorse specific products or favor certain companies. It declined to provide precise dollar amounts of contributions from companies, saying that the foundation complied with "accepted financial reporting standards." The study's authors said transparency could be improved by requiring the drug and device industries to report how much they donate to patient groups, much like they are already required to do with doctors. That was applauded by other critics of the drug industry. "I think sunshine is an excellent disinfectant," said David Mitchell, the founder of a new group, Patients for Affordable Drugs, that seeks to lower drug prices, and does not take funding from industry groups. He was not involved in the study. Mr. Mitchell said patient groups often do not disclose that they take industry funds when they testify before Congress or government agencies, or when they disseminate educational information to patients. Many have also been silent on the issue of rising drug prices, even as the issue has enraged patients, who have been increasingly exposed to the prices that pharmaceutical companies set as insurers have asked them to pay a greater share of their drug costs. Last summer, patients and their families loudly protested the skyrocketing price of EpiPens, though the movement gathered steam on social media rather than through traditional patient advocacy groups. And a year ago, for example, a representative for the National Psoriasis Foundation did not disclose that her group receives at least 40 percent of its annual revenues from drug companies when she testified before the North Carolina state legislature on an unsuccessful measure supported by the pharmaceutical industry that would have limited insurers' ability to block coverage of certain drugs. Similarly, the hemophilia foundation did not disclose its pharmaceutical ties when it took the industry's side in 2015 in a letter to the Food and Drug Administration over the issue of biosimilars, which are cheaper alternatives to complex biological drugs. "In the absence of disclosure," Mr. Mitchell said, "those policy makers or patients are unable to make informed judgments about the motives of the information being given, and the credibility of the information." Randy Beranek, president and chief executive of the psoriasis foundation, said he did not see a conflict of interest because both the foundation and pharmaceutical companies are seeking to help serve patients. "Our interests all intersect at some point, and that's at the patient," he said. In the case of the North Carolina proposal, Mr. Beranek acknowledged that his group sides with the drug industry on some issues but said, "it's a coincidence that it's an important policy issue to them, but to us, it's in the patient interest." Holly Campbell, a spokeswoman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry trade organization, said its members did not expect patient groups to agree with them on every issue. "We work with many organizations with which we have disagreements on public policy issues, including on prescription medicine costs, but believe engagement and dialogue are critical," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Christmas and the days leading up to the holiday are a magical time to visit Ireland, according to Siobhan Byrne Learat, founder of Adams Butler, a Dublin based company selling trips to Ireland. "The Irish go all out for Christmas with decor and celebrations, and the mood is cheerful and generous," she said. "And over the years, it has become more of a cultural holiday for us than a religious one." Ms. Learat said that while pubs and restaurants throughout the country are full of revelers, hotels have a lull in business, which means that enticing, amenity inclusive deals abound for a Christmas themed Ireland getaway. Lynott Tours, for example, has a seven night "Ireland Bed and Breakfast Christmas" package that includes accommodations in your choice of more than 400 bed and breakfasts throughout Ireland, breakfast, a rental car, and round trip airfare on Aer Lingus from a dozen cities in the United States including New York City, Los Angeles and Boston to Dublin International Airport. Valid from Dec. 21 to 29. From 1,568 a person. Book by calling 800 221 2474 or emailing ireland lynotttours.com. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
COCO (2017) on iTunes and Amazon. Pixar's foray into death comes with this charming cartoon about Miguel (voiced by Anthony Gonzalez), a 12 year old aspiring guitarist who wants nothing more than to be like Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt), a legendary Mexican musician. But Miguel's family especially his shoe throwing Abuelita has a strict ban against music. When the departed are temporarily allowed into the land of the living during the Day of the Dead, Miguel finds himself between both metaphysical worlds, on a journey to uncover his musical potential and familial roots. The film "plays a time tested tune with captivating originality and flair, and with roving, playful pop culture erudition," A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times. PAUL ROBESON: TRIBUTE TO AN ARTIST (1979) on FilmStruck. This Oscar winning documentary short by Saul J. Turell celebrates the life of the singer, actor, activist and athlete Paul Robeson. In 1943, Robeson became the first black actor to play the role of Othello with a white supporting cast on Broadway. His most memorable work may be his rendition of "Ol' Man River" in the film "Show Boat." By later changing its lyrics, he transformed "a half ironic hymn to servility into an anthem of dignified resistance," Mr. Scott wrote in The Times. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Several women were accusing Joseph R. Biden Jr., about to announce he was running for president, of touching them inappropriately. Sy Presten had a newsy item for the gossip columns. He was sitting on a leather sofa in the living room of his apartment on West 26th Street. His wife, Joanne Binder, was out to lunch with a neighbor. "Years ago, I handled something called 'Oh! Calcutta!' It was the first nude musical," Mr. Presten said. "I'm getting to the item. You got it? The first nude musical." Mr. Presten was dressed for loafing, a few days' growth of beard on his jawline. "I did publicity for Norman Kean, who killed himself because his wife wouldn't give up a guy she was going with," he detoured, referring to the "Oh! Calcutta!" producer who, in a 1988 murder suicide, stabbed his actress wife to death one morning before jumping off the roof of his Riverside Drive apartment building. "Anyway," Mr. Presten resumed, "there was a party at Tavern on the Green. Some anniversary of 'Oh! Calcutta!' Joe Biden was an acquaintance of Norman Kean. I met Joe Biden. Joe Biden would not go to 'Oh! Calcutta!'" Mr. Presten had arrived at the item's punch line. "It's a nude musical," he repeated, his pitch rising. "The news hook is what he's accused of now!" He downshifted. "You don't see it," he observed, and wanly: "I'm glad you're not a columnist." Sy Presten turns 95 on May 23, further adding to the legend that he is the oldest living press agent in New York City. Mr. Presten prefers to be called a publicist, but the connotation no longer suits him. A publicist is a joyless and disembodied gatekeeper, unfamiliar with you or your publication but "looping in" others . Mr. Presten made his bones as a solo act, in physical reality, often getting paid by his ability to hustle an item into the paper, in the gone baby gone New York media world immortalized in "The Sweet Smell of Success." The columnists' names and their publications still roll off his tongue. The uber alpha Walter Winchell of The Daily Mirror, but also Frank Farrell on the World Telegram, Louis Sobol in the Journal American, Dorothy Kilgallen at the Evening Journal. And on and on until Liz Smith came and went, and The Daily News killed Rush and Molloy. Mr. Presten got into the game in 1944, selling topical gag lines to a P.R. man, Carl Erbe. In the late 1950s, Cafe St. Denis on East 53rd Street was getting enough play that Sherman Billingsley, owner of the Stork Club a few doors down, hired Mr. Presten to drum up juice for his famous but fading nightspot. Mr. Billingsley then recommended Mr. Presten to Jules Podell at the Copacabana. One night when Sammy Davis Jr. performed, Mr. Presten recalled, "in comes Eddie Fisher with a girl, and after Eddie Fisher comes Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton." Ms. Taylor and Mr. Burton were back from filming "Cleopatra" in Europe; Ms. Taylor was also still married to Mr. Fisher. "Naturally, all the press wanted to come in and see this," Mr. Presten said. "And Jules Podell, he was recognized as the toughest nightclub owner in the world, he said, 'Sy, just leave 'em in the lounge, and afterward you tip 'em off when they're gonna walk out so they can take pictures." Today, one imagines, this anecdote would end differently, with the stars Instagramming a typo addled group selfie to their social media feeds ("awesome night out w/friends 2 see the amazing Samy Davis jJr!!!"). Ask Mr. Presten to discuss the demystification of celebrity gossip in the 21st century, and it would be the shortest TED Talk ever. He has taken a pass on technology, save for the Aiwa AM/FM portable cassette recorder he keeps at hand to listen to Benny Goodman. But his memory is electric. Some of his clients over the years sound torn from the pages of a Stanley Elkin novel: Lowenberg the celebrity dentist, Baccus the 17 year old lawyer, Salem the hosiery scion who sold awfully large pairs of stockings and bras. Alongside these were restaurants (see: Nirvana, the since closed Central Park South Indian restaurant with a penthouse view and a reliable stream of boldfaced diners), a legit pornographer (the Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione), and a celebrity divorce lawyer (Marvin Mitchelson) who helped usher in the legal concept of palimony. It was Mr. Presten who read a pre publication profile in Sport magazine of the newest Yankee star, Reggie Jackson, who boasted of his arrival in the Bronx: "I'm the straw that stirs the drink." Mr. Presten highlighted the quote and circulated it to all the papers, giving rise to one of the most famous lines in New York sports history. More recent alumni of gossip desks recall how Mr. Presten's period key appeared to have punched a hole in the paper. Mr. Presten said he recently gave his last manual typewriter to his superintendent; he was hampered not by the tremors in his hands, he said, but by two bent fingers. Nowadays, he rhapsodizes, and Ms. Binder Googles. The emails go out to whomever and whatever is left of the gossip game as Mr. Presten has long understood it. True to form, the home office of Sy Presten Associates is a riotously cluttered newsroom like dugout with an abundance of battered file cabinets, located off the living room of the otherwise tidy and spacious two bedroom loft apartment that Mr. Presten bought in 2001, when the building he had lived in for many years went condo. The New York Sun carried this item in 2004: "When the late celebrity lawyer Marvin Mitchelson would come to New York from Los Angeles as a guest of his friend and music producer, Phil Spector, they would stay in separate suites at the Plaza Hotel, according to Mitchelson's longtime publicist, Sy Presten." The punch line: Instead of calling Mr. Mitchelson in his suite to make evening plans, Mr. Spector would call his secretary in Los Angeles who would call Mitchelson at the Plaza. As Mr. Mitchelson had just died and Mr. Spector was about to stand trial for murder in Los Angeles, that would be an example of a "gratuitous item" meaning Mr. Presten received no payment for the placement. But the circa 2000 item in The New York Post in which Mr. Mitchelson, back in the saddle after serving time for tax evasion, was overheard telling pals at Nirvana that he should sue actress Robin Givens for nonpayment of fees in her divorce from Mike Tyson? Ms. Binder, a former legal assistant for Judith Kaye, the late chief justice of the New York Appellate Court, is his second wife a nd second aide de camp. They remain very much a team, down to the matching Holland America cruise line robes, monogrammed "Sy" and "Jo," hanging in the bathroom. It was Ms. Binder who, shopping for a treadmill at the exercise equipment store the Gym Source in the 1990s, noticed a letter on the wall from Henry Kissinger. Ms. Binder reported this to Mr. Presten, and Gym Source items started showing up regularly, in The Daily News ("President Bush's crew picked up a new Cybex Arc Trainer from the Gym Source for the gym at Camp David"), The New York Times ("Billy Crystal wanted barbells. In his hotel room.") and The New York Post ("We hear ... that TV's Ricki Lake, who once had a weight problem, keeps the lard off by working out at home on a treadmill she rented for a year from The Gym Source."). Mr. Presten said that his Gym Source items ended around a decade ago, when celebrities complained about all the fitness equipment leaks. And how much did losing the Gym Source cost him? Mr. Presten ably beat back attempts to clarify his fee for placing items. "I don't give rates out, for Christ almighty," he said. "I'm like Trump. You can see we're not on food stamps." Barbara Corcoran, the Manhattan realtor turned entrepreneur and "Shark Tank" judge, also would not reveal Mr. Presten's fees. She started using his services around 1990, when she was looking to grow her firm, the Corcoran Group, into more of a player for high priced properties. "One of my star salespeople, Ron Rossi," connected her to Mr. Presten, Ms. Corcoran recalled. "I was well aware that public relations companies were paid large fees per month that were well out of my reach. Sy only charged you if he landed the placement." For Ms. Corcoran, Mr. Presten once enlisted the celebrity dog trainer Bash Dibra to conduct a seminar on how to train your dog to pass an interview with a co op board. "He was always banging them out, and I was always getting bills from him," Ms. Corcoran said. "And, by the way, happily paying for them." That pipeline has dried up as Ms. Corcoran's TV personality soared, to Mr. Presten's continuing bemusement . Other than favors for old pals like Sean Landeta, the punter for the Super Bowl Giants, the only "regular client" nowadays, Mr. Presten said, is Bruce Littlefield, the co author of Ms. Corcoran's first business book, "Use What You've Got: And Other Business Lessons I Learned From My Mom." See Page Six from last year: " ... THAT was Charlie Rose dining, not with a beautiful woman, but a priest at La Goulue, according to spy witness Bruce Littlefield ..." "It's unlike other posts I do on social media," Mr. Littlefield said of the item. "Maybe it's just a New York City thing, but it's got some kind of sparkle to it." Though Mr. Littlefield wouldn't reveal what he pays Mr. Presten, he did offer a glimpse into the press agent's unique invoicing system. Mr. Presten, Mr. Littlefield said, signs off his emails, "Cheersy." If he is billing, that salutation becomes "Cheer y." "There's never an amount," Mr. Littlefield said. "I don't know, I just send him out a check." He added, by way of metaphor: "You know those honesty jars that you'll see at some little stands on the road at certain times when there's no one tending the booth? They just have a little jar there, that honesty jar?" The sole survivor on the receiving end of Mr. Presten's items sounds somewhere between awed and exasperated that they still come her way. "He is a kind and wonderful man," said Cindy Adams of The New York Post, who, at 88, has prevailed as the city's last doyenne of the printed gossip column. Last year, with the release of "Green Book," Mr. Presten fed her some timely anecdotes about the film's main character, Tony Lip, a onetime bouncer for the Copa. Couching, she termed this material "not a lead, but filler." With reluctance, she used a dreaded phrase to describe herself and Mr. Presten: "dying breed." "I don't like it, I don't want to, I was trying to help you and be nice," Ms. Adams said. Richard Johnson, who retired last month as the longtime editor of Page Six, had a less complicated appreciation. Asked to name a few of the more memorable tips Mr. Presten gave him over the years, Mr. Johnson couldn't immediately call one to mind. Then he phoned Mr. Presten, who reminded him. "He gave me this great story when Andre Agassi was at the top of his game and he had this long flowing hair down to his shoulders," Mr. Johnson said. "Sy knew someone who was getting transplants at the same place. Dropped a dime on him." Growing up in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., the son of Russian immigrants (his father had a tailoring business), Mr. Presten born Seymour Herman Prutinsky foreshadowed the twin poles of his career by both stringing for the local paper and sending his autograph book to notables in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration. J. Edgar Hoover's response: "In accordance with your request, I am very pleased to place my autograph in your book, which was received in this bureau on January 22, 1937 ..." But, as Mr. Presten likes to say, listen to this: One day, Ms. Anderson went into a small shop on Madison Avenue and 58th Street called Salem Hosiery. The owner's son, Michael Salem, had started an offshoot of his family's hosiery business by selling undergarments to closeted, cross dressing men who came in to buy lingerie for their "wives and girlfriends." Mr. Salem ultimately advertised in Penthouse magazine and introduced Mr. Presten to the son of the publisher, 19 year old Bob Guccione Jr., who would go on to found Spin magazine. Then, he was peddling a three page poster magazine called Rock Superstars. Mr. Presten sent the younger Mr. Guccione to speak at a school in Harlem and put him on Barry Farber's radio show. He turned the affable Mr. Salem into a clip machine, with his titillating "male order business." And he became a go to outside P.R. man for Penthouse and the elder Mr. Guccione for years. Mr. Presten was there for the release of the X rated "Caligula" (1979), financed by Mr. Guccione, and the sweeping media blush of 1984, when Penthouse bought and published nude photos of Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America. Reliably, there were the "Pet of the Month" parties at Mr. Guccione's Upper East Side double townhouse, which contained Judy Garland's gold piano, a silver tiled sunken pool and the owner's posse of Rhodesian Ridgebacks. For all the stories, personal devastation has not eluded Mr. Presten. He described his marriage to Ms. Anderson as tumultuous. In 2003, Kary Presten, a banking executive and the older of Mr. Presten's two grown sons from his first marriage, committed suicide at age 44. "Those are the breaks, man," Mr. Presten said, his voice heavy for a change. In 2002, a wall collapsed at Nirvana, and the owner, Shamsher Wadud, couldn't pay the new lease. The next year, Mr. Guccione's publishing empire, General Media, filed for bankruptcy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
In T.S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi," the three wise kings, having witnessed the birth of Christ at the end of a long and difficult journey, return home to find themselves "no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation." Back in "our places," the kings are troubled. They feel they are in the presence of "an alien people clutching their gods." Yet they left their kingdoms not so long ago. What has transpired to estrange them so from all that was once familiar? How can they question the very worlds they shaped? The narrator, one of the kings, is led to speculate on what they have seen in Bethlehem during their journey: "I had seen birth and death,/But had thought they were different; this Birth was/Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death." The birth of Christ is also the death of their pagan worlds. There is no going back to the "old dispensation." There is return only in the physical sense. To live as they once lived has become impossible. They no longer see their fellows before them. They see strangers with idols. I have been thinking of this short poem because perhaps the deepest question posed by the pandemic is whether there can be any return to the "old dispensation." This "agony" could constitute a revelation, or even a redemption, or it may merely be a costly interruption. Having witnessed the unimaginable, having been on this journey into an unfamiliar world of silence and stillness and death, having been obliged to change unquestioned habits, will humanity simply return to its former ways if that proves possible? To bet against the human tendency to relapse into old bad habits is foolish. Tragedy tends to foster expressions of idealistic unity that prove fleeting. Remember Sept. 11. The history of greed, venality, stupidity, cruelty and violence is long because that part of human nature is ineradicable. As the 20th century demonstrated, it is better to bet on a liberal society's capacity to temper these flaws and iniquities than on a utopia's false promise to eradicate them. Those promises end being written in blood. In a provocative BBC podcast, Zia Haider Rahman, a British novelist, alludes to Eliot's poem and concludes that people will no doubt return to the old dispensation, more or less, "and in short order." They will do so, he suggests, for the simple reason that no alternative is within easy reach. "What," he asks, "can possibly slow the monster of modernity?" The monster that has given global corporations the ascendancy over individuals and created, in an advanced society like Britain, a situation where the life expectancy of the elderly has been falling and the infant mortality rate rising. This is the same monster, turbocharged by technology, that in the United States has produced fast growing inequality, diminishing class mobility, growing precariousness in the workplace and broad social fracture. The coronavirus, attacking those most vulnerable above all, has had a field day in this America, just as Donald Trump had one promising to "make America great again." "American carnage," it turns out, was not Donald Trump's inaugural day description of the country's recent past, but his prediction for the country under his rule. Of course, globalization also ushered hundreds of millions of people from poverty and opened myriad possibilities for human advancement. But cycles of history run their course. By 2008 it was clear that the world economic system was seriously skewed. Bailed out, it staggered on until now, accompanied by growing anger in Western societies. The rise of autocrats has been a direct reflection of their ability to exploit popular frustrations with anonymous global forces. The virus is a searchlight that lays everything bare. All the grotesque needed, to be revealed as such, was for time to stop. How quickly the world greens and new life stirs when the trains, planes and automobiles fall silent. What the frenetic "old dispensation" was doing to the fragile environmental health of the planet is right there in plain sight. I agree with Rahman that change will be hard. It always is. But a lot of people, in this quieted world, have experienced some transforming miracle, such as that brought on for the Magi by an infant in a stable on a bed of straw. They have heard Rilke's admonition in the last line of "Archaic Torso of Apollo:" You must change your life. Perhaps rebalancing is a useful word because attempts at wholesale reinvention, like those utopias, tend to end badly. From consumption to contemplation, from global to local, from outward to inward, from aggression to compassion, from stranger to guest, from frenzy to stillness, from carbon to green. My life has been uneventful these past weeks; it has also been richer. I've been thinking about children and the virus, this invisible thing that upended their lives, closed schools and playgrounds, ended play dates, introduced them to Zoom. How they draw the hideous red spiky headed pathogen with spindly legs and downturned mouth. How they advise their furry animals they cannot leave the dollhouse today "because of the virus." How they ascribe cancellations of their activities to "the virus." How they will put a mask on stuffed animals, because of the virus, and how they want to be told fairy tales, to be distracted from the virus. For them, and for this vulnerable planet, and more than 33 million newly unemployed Americans, it is worth trying to ensure that the "old dispensation" yields to something new, something more balanced, born of a strange revelation. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Sequels are always tricky. The original is a creative leap; the follow up is likely to be incremental. Until now, Taylor Swift has switched up her collaborators and general sound with each album. But she has rightly billed "Evermore," her surprise release ninth album, as the "sister" to the one she released less than five months ago, "Folklore." "It feels like we were standing on the edge of the folklorian woods and had a choice: to turn and go back or to travel further into the forest of this music," Swift wrote in a statement. "We chose to wander deeper in." She continued writing songs with the "Folklore" brain trust of producers and musicians primarily Aaron Dessner of the National, who plays most of the instruments and collaborated on 14 of 15 songs. Swift's boyfriend, the actor Joe Alwyn, had a hand in three songs under the pseudonym William Bowery; Jack Antonoff, who also wrote with Swift on "Folklore," worked on two. "Evermore" clings to the acoustic Minimalistic palette of "Folklore," with homey piano and imperturbable guitar patterns. Swift and Dessner enlisted more backup musicians for mini orchestral arrangements by Bryce Dessner, also of the National, but for most of "Evermore," Swift turns even further inward, away from her pop past, than she did on "Folklore," drifting toward elegant but cerebral craftsmanship. On "Folklore," Swift decided she could set aside autobiography to tell stories that weren't necessarily her own. "Evermore" features more character studies and role playing, as she sings about infidelity, con jobs, even murder. "Ivy," written with Aaron Dessner and Antonoff, is a folky, convoluted song about a married woman's secret affair, enfolded by banjo and guitar picking as she sings about the temptation that tears at her: "Your touch brought forth an incandescent glow/Tarnished but so grand." In "'Tis the Damn Season," the singer visits her hometown for the holidays and suggests a weekend fling with someone she had left behind. In "Champagne Problems," the narrator turns down an earnest proposal, singing, "Sometimes you just don't know the answer/Til someone's on their knees and asks you." The music is an elaborate, evolving sigh, starting with low fi, oompah piano chords that grow entwined with guitar arpeggios and a choir of "aah"s. Swift has more fun with "No Body, No Crime," joined by two of the sisters in Haim, Este and Danielle, singing about cheating, revenge and unsolved murders and egged on by a yowling harmonica. Swift's latest breakup songs, her longtime specialty, seek maturity by stepping back. Churchy organ tones surround her as she faces the end of a seven year romance in "Happiness," slipping toward anger "I hope she'll be a beautiful fool/Who takes my spot next to you" but determined to be fair: "There'll be happiness after you/But there was happiness because of you too." And the album's title song, "Evermore," looks back, over a serene piano line, on how she used to believe "that this pain would be for evermore"; Bon Iver (Justin Vernon), returning after his appearance on "Folklore," arrives midway through to recall more turbulent times, but Swift is determined to put pain behind her. Swift can still bristle, as she does in "Closure." With insistently clattering percussion and electronic creaks behind her, she refuses to give an ex the satisfaction of pretending to be amicable. Even though "It's been a long time," she sneers, "Don't treat me like some situation that needs to be handled/I'm fine with my spite and my tears." It's a glimpse of what Swift might call "the old Taylor," still in close emotional combat. "Closure" is in an unconventional meter, 5/4; so is "Tolerate It," in which Swift's character is a woman giving her all to someone who takes her for granted. Those are two of the album's countless musicianly flourishes, along with the restlessly intertwined guitar picking in "Willow" and the glimmering electronics and furtive pizzicato strings in "Marjorie" (which pays fond tribute to Swift's grandmother, Marjorie Finlay). The sonic details of "Evermore" are radiant and meticulous; the songwriting is poised and careful. It's an album to respect. But with all its constructions and conceits, it also keeps a certain emotional distance. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
"It doesn't matter if I get blocked I'm going to go right back in the paint again," the Liberty guard said. They bring that same tenacity to their role on the W.N.B.A. union's executive committee. On the court, Layshia Clarendon has become the leader of a young Liberty team coursing through a season with many unexpected challenges. As an executive committee member of the W.N.B.A.'s players' union, Clarendon has also become a voice for social justice for the league this year. Clarendon is averaging a career high 11.7 points a game, but the Liberty are 2 15 and in last place in the Eastern Conference. The team is playing this season without several key players who decided to opt out of this season because of concerns over the coronavirus. Sabrina Ionescu, their star No. 1 pick in the 2020 draft, has been out since she sprained her ankle in the third game of the season. Clarendon, who is in their eighth season, missed all but nine games last year, with the Connecticut Sun, because of a right ankle injury. The ankle "gets stiff every now and then," Clarendon said, but they have still been able to serve as a critical veteran presence for a young Liberty team that began the year with seven rookies. But this year is about more than just statistics for Clarendon. The W.N.B.A. has dedicated its season to Breonna Taylor, a 26 year old Black woman who was shot and killed by the police in Louisville, Ky., and the Say Her Name campaign, which focuses on Black women and girls affected by police brutality and violence. Clarendon is one of the players leading the W.N.B.A.'s social justice initiatives. The New York Times talked to Clarendon about playing fearlessly, the challenges of the tight game schedule this season and how, they said, social justice movements often overlook Black women. Q: What has life in the bubble been like for you? Clarendon: It's up and down, depending on the moment. The schedule is really hectic. I don't think I expected it to be this challenging to consistently play three games a week, so that's been really tough from a purely recovery standpoint. There's just not a lot of downtime or time off just because we are playing so often. How do you cope with the busy schedule? Normal ice baths and recovery stuff that I do every season. It's definitely been a more mentally challenging season. Obviously, with Covid going on, the state of the world and police murdering people left and right, it's been more emotional and spiritual than physical most of the time. You can sleep for nine hours and still wake up and feel the weight of the world on your shoulders. What do you think is the best part of your game? I would say tenacity and fearlessness. It doesn't matter if I get blocked, I'm going to go right back in the paint again against the same player who blocked me on the previous play. How did you develop that tenacity and fearlessness? Practice finishing a lot, trying to get into people's bodies and create contact. I think it's a mind set, too. If you are really early on in the league and you get your stuff thrown into the stands, it's embarrassing. But if you don't get crossed up in this league or your shot blocked in a game or something really bad in game, then you probably aren't playing hard enough and you really don't have your heart in it. This league is so good, it's just going to happen. Part of that is a mind set of knowing that when you go up against Sue Bird or A'ja Wilson, they are going to block you. You are also going to get them. It's about looking at it as a challenge and an opportunity rather than a: 'Oh, I got blocked. That's so embarrassing.' No one wants to be on the wrong side of "SportsCenter." As a member of the executive committee, you helped lead the day of reflection last week. What went into the decision to call it a day of reflection instead of a boycott or strike? (The league missed two days of games last week after its players joined an N.B.A. work stoppage to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man who was shot in the back multiple times by the police in Kenosha, Wis. ) After we had a players meeting we realized just how exhausted everyone was. It was more like we needed that day. I think very much of it was standing in solidarity with our N.B.A. brothers. You could see it in people's faces that day on TV how exhausted and heartbroken everyone was. Yes, we were striking. Yes, we were fighting injustice, but we are exhausted and we are tired. We are calling it for a day of reflection and a day of mourning. We needed the time to take a step back. What would you like to see the W.N.B.A. do next? Voting is going to be a big one that we are trying to figure out a strategy around it right now. We could wear a 'vote' mask, which would be great awareness, but there has to be some longer game strategy behind how we are going to engage people. We are going to really focus on voting and the work we have been doing with Say Her Name, which I think can't be understated. At a time when Black women continue to be erased from the larger conversation of police brutality and violence, that's why our work is particularly important. While, yes, we also stand with Jacob Blake and his family and all of the men who have been murdered in this movement, it is a constant reminder of how women have to choose between erasing themselves to stand up for their race or standing up for women, standing up for their own women. That's the constant struggle I feel like we are always in. I don't want us to get away from Saying Her Name because that's the whole point of the movement and why we came here. It's sad that we always have to choose between standing up for our men and standing up for ourselves, because who stands up for us? No one. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
LONDON The first image is of a man kneeling in a misty white light, his head bowed, his tattoo covered, muscular torso swaying rhythmically, side to side. Then we see an opera house, the audience arriving, musicians warming up. Backstage, the dancer Sergei Polunin in makeup and costume, is in his dressing room, taking various pills and potions. "Soon I am going to be so high," he says gleefully, doing quick jumps to warm up, in front of a mirror. These images, from "Dancer," a documentary film by Steven Cantor that opens Friday, Sept. 9, encapsulate the contradictions and anomalies that have made the Ukranian born Mr. Polunin, 26, a controversial, even notorious, figure in the ballet world, and also a viral sensation whose "Take Me to Church" video is edging toward 16 million views on YouTube. The greatest dancer of his generation. A once in a lifetime talent. Better than Nureyev. No, better than Nijinsky. These are some of the things written and said about Mr. Polunin, both during his years training at the Royal Ballet School, then after joining the Royal Ballet in 2007. Three years later, at 19, he became the company's youngest ever principal dancer, rapidly taking on most of the major male roles in the classical repertory, to increasing acclaim. Two years later, with no warning, he walked out. In interviews, he said he was tired of boring rehearsals, the punishing discipline and the physical stress of ballet, and dissatisfied with its meager financial rewards. He talked about the tattoo parlor that he co owned in north London, tweeted provocatively about drugs and parties, and said he wanted to live a normal life, perhaps get into films. The British media, shocked and titillated by Mr. Polunin's sudden role reversal, christened him the bad boy of ballet, and the dance press wrung its collective hands over what had gone wrong. "I was sort of sabotaging myself," Mr. Polunin said in an interview over lunch. Fine boned and soft voiced, he ate steak with steamed vegetables, drank orange juice and seemed younger than his 26 years. "At the time, it was kind of funny. I would tweet something as a joke, and it would hit the media. I sort of played with the bad boy thing, and I gave a couple of interviews where I said stupid things. Generally I was very happy with the Royal, who gave me everything. But I had worked so hard to be a principal, and when I got there, I felt, I can't afford a car. I felt I'd been betrayed. My fantasy about being the best, a celebrity, was all wrong." Mr. Polunin suddenly achieved a celebrity of sorts in Britain. The wrong sort. Offers of work, initially pressing, slipped away. It was around this time that Mr. Polunin met the film producer Gabrielle Tana, who had optioned Julie Kavanagh's biography of Nureyev and was looking for dancers for the film. Although Ms. Tana, and Ralph Fiennes, who will direct the biopic (production begins next year) decided that Mr. Polunin wasn't right for the role, Ms. Tana was fascinated by what she learned of Mr. Polunin's story, which Ms. Kavanagh documented in a long 2012 profile: his difficult early life growing up in the depressed town of Kherson in Ukraine; the family sacrifices made for his career; his move at 13, speaking no English, to the Royal Ballet School; his early success and fast burnout. "I thought it was not just a compelling narrative but also the opportunity to capture someone brilliant in the prime of their career," Ms. Tana said in an interview. "We didn't really know what it would be, and Sergei was very wary at first. We were scared we would lose him." By mid 2012, Mr. Polunin, who had been hoping to perform with American Ballet Theater, had moved to Moscow to dance with the Stanislavsky Theater. Although Mr. Polunin adored working with the company's director, Igor Zelensky, who had recruited him, he found himself once again restless and discontented 18 months later. "It became more repetitive, more about making money, somehow for wrong reasons," Mr. Polunin said. "I didn't want to be comfortable, I wanted to challenge myself. I quit, again, not in a good way." To take Mr. Polunin out of the ballet box, Ms. Tana suggested he work on a new segment for the documentary with David LaChapelle, the photographer and filmmaker who had directed "Rize," a documentary about the street dance krumping. "I thought, fine, this will be my last dance, my goodbye to ballet," Mr. Polunin recalled. Mr. LaChapelle suggested Hozier's song "Take Me to Church," and filmed the dance (choreographed by Mr. Polunin's Royal Ballet School friend Jade Hale Christofi) in the bare white space of the filmmaker's studio in Hawaii. In ripped flesh colored tights, his tattoos and muscles equally on display, Mr. Polunin is presented as a kind of sacrificial figure, leaping and crouching in an unabashed display of raw emotion and powerful physicality. The emotion was very real. "I cried for hours" during filming, he said. I realized I'm leaving behind everything I have learned, my teachers, the audience. And I kept thinking about my mum I'm letting down." It was those expectations, and the family drama behind Mr. Polunin's actions, that became the crux of "Dancer" a surprise for those expecting a more sensational tale. "It became a story of sacrifice on every level," said Mr. Cantor, an Oscar and Emmy nominated documentary director whom Ms. Tana approached in 2014. "His family did anything they could to get this golden child to the top of his craft," Mr. Cantor added. "His father moved to work in Portugal, his grandmother to Greece, his mother moved with him to one room in Kiev so that he could go to a better ballet school." Mr. Cantor said that he thought the extensive conversations he had with Mr. Polunin during the filmmaking process were cathartic for the dancer. "It became clear that he was dancing as hard as he could to get his family back together. Then his parents got divorced, and I think he felt, what am I dancing for? He just lost his will and went off the rails." Although Mr. Cantor had interviewed Mr. Polunin's relatives extensively and shot footage in Kherson, his family centered approach to the documentary received an enormous lift when, late in the day, the dancer's mother, Galina Polunina, sent him "a treasure trove" of home videos. "It's astonishing that they even had a video camera," Mr. Cantor said. "They had no money, and it wasn't common then." The touching footage of Mr. Polunin as a young child and outstandingly talented teenager, his desperate need to be best, his vulnerable cockiness, lend a new and touching slant to the well known bad boy narrative. The film also documents Mr. Polunin's change of heart about ballet after making the "Take Me to Church" video. Since then, he has continued to dance with the Stanislavsky company and the Novosibirsk Ballet (also run by Mr. Zelensky, who is now heading the Munich Ballet), has performed at La Scala, and has been in a program of contemporary work with his girlfriend of 18 months, the ballerina Natalia Osipova, who is a principal dancer at the Royal Ballet. He would like, he said, to perform there again. The huge online success of the video was an important factor in his decision to keep dancing, Mr. Cantor said. "I think it made him feel he could reach people, and gave him the courage to go on," he said. "We had thought maybe it was the end of the story." Mr. Polunin found "Dancer" very hard to watch the first time. "It made me feel really sad," he said. "But it is all true." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Will Power won the race, but by finishing fifth in Saturday's 500 mile IndyCar season finale at Fontana, Calif., Scott Dixon clinched his third title in the series. Dixon, who also won the title in 2003 and 2008, had trailed Helio Castroneves in points much of this season. But a sixth place finish in the race by Castroneves fell short of overcoming the 25 point lead Dixon held since the Houston double header races earlier in the month. Ed Carpenter trailed Power to the line, followed by Tony Kanaan and James Hinchcliffe. The race was marred by a multicar pileup that sent Justin Wilson to the hospital with pelvic fractures. In other racing news from the weekend: Jamie McMurray found himself in the right place at the right time leading the pack when a yellow flag came out midway through the final lap of Sunday's Nascar Sprint Cup race at Talladega, Ala. The caution froze the field, halting potential last minute rallies from several drivers, including Dale Earnhardt Jr., who said later that he had planned to slingshot in the draft from second to victory. The caution was brought by Austin Dillon, who is replacing the injured Tony Stewart. He was running behind Earnhardt and looked to be ready to help Earnhardt make a move to the front, when a tap from Ricky Stenhouse Jr.'s car caused him to spin out. Another hit from Casey Mears's car launched him airborne, damaging both cars. Stenhouse came in third, followed by Paul Menard and Kyle Busch. Jimmie Johnson, who is leading the season points standings, finished 13th. Matt Kenseth, now second in points, came in 20th. Busch is tied with Kevin Harvick for third in points. Earnhardt's runner up finish moved him up to sixth. Four races remain on the schedule, with a stop in Martinsville, Va., next weekend. Eugene Laverty won both ends of a World Superbike doubleheader Sunday in Jerez, Spain, but Tom Sykes collected enough points by finishing third in the first race to clinch the season title. Sykes, who for good measure finished second to Laverty in the finale, lost out on the title a year ago by a mere half point. Sykes, the 28 year old Kawasaki rider, started the season with a broken bone in his wrist, but rode through the pain to start piling up points. Jorge Lorenzo scored a victory and collected the maximum 25 points in Sunday's MotoGP race in Australia. The points leader, Marc Marquez, was disqualified while leading the race. Because of unexpected tire problems the riders had experienced in practice and qualifying, organizers shortened the planned race and changed its format mandating pit stops for new tires that required bike changes, within a specific window of no more than 10 laps on the newly resurfaced Phillip Island course in Australia. Marquez said he misunderstood the mandatory pit window and was disqualified when he pitted on lap 11 of the 19 lap event. Lorenzo went on to take the lead and the win, cutting the once seemingly insurmountable lead that Marquez held in the championship to just 18 points with two races remaining on the 2013 calendar. Driver David Higgins and Craig Drew, the navigator, won the Lake Superior Performance Rally in Houghton Lake, Mich., over the weekend, collecting enough points to clinch their third straight Rally America season title. Their victory ended a title run by Ken Block and Alex Gelsomino, who were going for a fifth consecutive event win that they needed to complete a come from behind bid. But on the 12th stage, Block rolled his car, ending the charge. Johnny Sauter finished clear of a huge last lap pileup Saturday that took out most of his competition in a Nascar truck series race at Talladega, Ala. The Sprint Cup series veteran Kyle Busch and Justin Lofton were among the drivers roughed up in the crash. Busch was able to race the next day in the 500 mile Sprint Cup race at the track, while Lofton was taken to an area hospital for treatment. The American Le Mans Series, which will be absorbed by the new Tudor United SportsCar Series next year, held an emotional final event over the weekend at the Road Atlanta track in northeast Georgia. The driving trio of Neel Jani, Nick Heidfeld and Nico Prost emerged victorious in the grueling 1,000 mile, 9 hour, 37 minute Petit Le Mans race that saw only one P1 class finisher. The P1 class will not return next year, leaving the slightly slower P2 cars to to do battle with modified Grand Am Daytona Prototypes. The P1 car of Klaus Graf, Lucas Luhr and Romain Dumas, which led the first half of the Petit Le Mans until overheating took them out, had already clinched the final season title. Second over all, and the P2 class champions, were Ryan Briscoe, Marino Franchitti and Scott Tucker, who finished just ahead of David Brabham, Scott Sharp and Anthony Lazzaro. A planned six hour endurance race at Fuji International Speedway in Oyama, Japan, was stopped Sunday after 3 hours and 46 minutes of torrential rains. Forecasters had said even worse weather was on the way. The Toyota team of Kazuki Nakajima, Nic LaPierre and Alex Wurz were declared the winners after only 16 laps were completed all behind the safety car. Several cars were damaged in the slippery conditions, and the race director stopped the procession twice because of extreme danger. Tom Kristensen, Loic Duval and Allan McNish were scored in second place, which gave their team enough points to win the manufacturers championship for Audi. But the drivers title remains undecided, with two races left on the 2013 calendar. The organizers of the World Endurance Championship event apologized to fans who braved the rains to watch the race, only to see a parade. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
For the past four years, congressional Republicans have shut their eyes, covered their ears and muted their voices, ignoring their obligation to serve as a check on the presidency. In a heartbeat, the United States has descended from the lofty perch of democratic idealism to the subbasement of an authoritarian banana republic. While President Trump has personified the descent, it is equally the handiwork of Republican senators and representatives who have wrapped themselves in the ragged and stained cloak of the enabler. However, with just a few days until Election Day, there is still time for members of Congress to apologize for their silence and to break it. This letter is not aimed at those who have joined in thumbing their noses at decency, honor or obligation. But there are many more who have been appalled at what they have witnessed and stunned by what they have accepted as the cost of avoiding insult or losing their precious perches. Doing harm not out of malice, but out of fear, does not make one less complicit in the outcome. It is not too late for some to escape the judgment of both history and their grandchildren, to break from this presidency and advise against continuing it. Days before Election Day, there is still time for Republicans to repent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Twice in the past month, National Security Agency cyberweapons stolen from its arsenal have been turned against two very different partners of the United States Britain and Ukraine. The N.S.A. has kept quiet, not acknowledging its role in developing the weapons. White House officials have deflected many questions, and responded to others by arguing that the focus should be on the attackers themselves, not the manufacturer of their weapons. But the silence is wearing thin for victims of the assaults, as a series of escalating attacks using N.S.A. cyberweapons have hit hospitals, a nuclear site and American businesses. Now there is growing concern that United States intelligence agencies have rushed to create digital weapons that they cannot keep safe from adversaries or disable once they fall into the wrong hands. On Wednesday, the calls for the agency to address its role in the latest attacks grew louder, as victims and technology companies cried foul. Representative Ted Lieu, a California Democrat and a former Air Force officer who serves on the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees, urged the N.S.A. to help stop the attacks and to stop hoarding knowledge of the computer vulnerabilities upon which these weapons rely. In an email on Wednesday evening, Michael Anton, a spokesman for the National Security Council at the White House, noted that the government "employs a disciplined, high level interagency decision making process for disclosure of known vulnerabilities" in software, "unlike any other country in the world." Mr. Anton said the administration "is committed to responsibly balancing national security interests and public safety and security," but declined to comment "on the origin of any of the code making up this malware." Beyond that, the government has blamed others. Two weeks ago, the United States through the Department of Homeland Security said it had evidence North Korea was responsible for a wave of attacks in May using ransomware called WannaCry that shut down hospitals, rail traffic and production lines. The attacks on Tuesday against targets in Ukraine, which spread worldwide, appeared more likely to be the work of Russian hackers, though no culprit has been formally identified. Though the identities of the Shadow Brokers remain a mystery, former intelligence officials say there is no question from where the weapons came: a unit deep within the agency that was until recently called "Tailored Access Operations." While the government has remained quiet, private industry has not. Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, said outright that the National Security Agency was the source of the "vulnerabilities" now wreaking havoc and called on the agency to "consider the damage to civilians that comes from hoarding these vulnerabilities and the use of these exploits." For the American spy agency, which has invested billions of dollars developing an arsenal of weapons that have been used against the Iranian nuclear program, North Korea's missile launches and Islamic State militants, what is unfolding across the world amounts to a digital nightmare. It was as if the Air Force lost some of its most sophisticated missiles and discovered an adversary was launching them against American allies yet refused to respond, or even to acknowledge that the missiles were built for American use. Officials fret that the potential damage from the Shadow Brokers leaks could go much further, and the agency's own weaponry could be used to destroy critical infrastructure in allied nations or in the United States. "Whether it's North Korea, Russia, China, Iran or ISIS, almost all of the flash points out there now involve a cyber element," Leon E. Panetta, the former defense secretary and Central Intelligence Agency chief said in a recent interview, before the weapons were turned against American interests. "I'm not sure we understand the full capability of what can happen, that these sophisticated viruses can suddenly mutate into other areas you didn't intend, more and more," Mr. Panetta said. "That's the threat we're going to face in the near future." Using the remnants of American weapons is not entirely new. Elements of Stuxnet, the computer worm that disabled the centrifuges used in Iran's nuclear weapons program seven years ago, have been incorporated in some attacks. And on Tuesday, on the eve of Ukraine's Constitution Day which commemorates the country's first constitution after breaking away from the Soviet Union attackers used N.S.A. developed techniques to freeze computers in Ukrainian hospitals, supermarkets, and even the systems for radiation monitoring at the old Chernobyl nuclear plant. The so called ransomware that gained the most attention in the Ukraine attack is believed to have been a smoke screen for a deeper assault aimed at destroying victims' computers entirely. And while WannaCry had a kill switch that was used to contain it, the attackers hitting Ukraine made sure there was no such mechanism. They also ensured that their code could infect computers that had received software patches intended to protect them. "You're seeing a refinement of these capabilities, and it only heads in one direction," said Robert Silvers, the former assistant secretary of cyber policy at the Department of Homeland Security, now a partner at the law firm Paul Hastings. Though the original targets of Tuesday's attacks appear to have been government agencies and businesses in Ukraine, the attacks inflicted enormous collateral damage, taking down some 2,000 global targets in more than 65 countries, including Merck, the American drug giant, Maersk, the Danish shipping company, and Rosneft, the Russian state owned energy giant. The attack so crippled operations at a subsidiary of Federal Express that trading had to be briefly halted for FedEx stock. "When these viruses fall into the wrong hands, people can use them for financial gain, or whatever incentive they have and the greatest fear is one of miscalculation, that something unintended can happen," Mr. Panetta said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
When the visual artist Suzanne Bocanegra was a girl, she was fascinated by Seurat's 1890 painting "Young Woman Powdering Herself." She also identified with "Little Dot," a comic book character, created in 1949, obsessed with dots, and as she gazed at the Seurat, an image composed of thousands of dabs of color, she imagined how fun it would be to count and sort them. More recently, Ms. Bocanegra accomplished that task. It took her two months to make a chart: 474 blue dots in the young woman's hair, six light orange dots in the powder puff. Artists can get engrossed in that kind of work, but her next idea was odder. What if the chart served as a score for a ballet performance? Thus came "Little Dot," as presented at Danspace Project in the East Village on Saturday. A stage of shiny black was shaped like a squared off abstraction of Seurat's model. Rising out of it were 14 poles, illuminated from below, and on top of each, like a flag or a head on a pike, nested a pair of point shoes dyed one of the 14 colors in the painting. A ballerina in black mounted the stage, tied on a pair of shoes and rose onto her toes. Then she untied the shoes, returned them to their pole (marking it with a piece of chalk) and left. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Dr. Steinberg is a professor of psychology at Temple University and the author of "Age of Opportunity: Lessons From the New Science of Adolescence." A number of American colleges and universities have decided to bring students back to campus this fall, believing they can diminish the risk of coronavirus transmission if everyone wears masks, uses hand sanitizer and social distances. Some schools also plan to reconfigure dorms to create family sized clusters of uninfected students, who could socialize in relative safety, if only with their suite mates. These plans are so unrealistically optimistic that they border on delusional and could lead to outbreaks of Covid 19 among students, faculty and staff. My skepticism about the strategies under consideration is not based on videos of college students frolicking on Florida's beaches when they were explicitly told to avoid large gatherings. Rather, it comes from more than 40 years teaching and researching young people. Most types of risky behavior reckless driving, criminal activity, fighting, unsafe sex and binge drinking, to name just a few peak during the late teens and early 20s. Moreover, interventions designed to diminish risk taking in this age group, such as attempts to squelch binge drinking on campus, have an underwhelming track record. There is little reason to think that the approaches proposed to mitigate transmission of the coronavirus among college students will fare any better. A series of studies that compare the ways in which young people and adults think and make decisions about risk taking confirms this. The late adolescent peak in risky behavior has been found pretty much around the world. Although risky behavior is more common in some countries than others, the heightened risk taking characteristic of adolescents, relative to adults, is more or less universal. My colleagues and I recently completed a study of more than 5,000 people between the ages of 10 and 30 from 11 different countries (including both Western and non Western ones). Respondents answered a series of questions about the extent to which they had engaged in various types of risk taking. Consistent with large scale epidemiological studies, we found a peak in risk taking somewhere between age 20 and 24 in virtually every country. Our team has also conducted experiments in which we test participants on various risk taking tasks under controlled conditions, which allows us to rule out any age differences in real world risk taking that might be caused by environmental factors, such as opportunity or cultural norms. As in our survey studies, risk taking peaked during adolescence. Other studies, using different samples, have reached similar conclusions. We've also conducted a series of experiments designed to identify just what it is about college age individuals that accounts for their relatively greater propensity to take risks. Three factors appear to be most important. First, this is the age at which we are most sensitive and responsive to the potential rewards of a risky choice, relative to the potential costs. College age people are just as good as their elders at perceiving these benefits and dangers, but compared with older people, those who are college aged give more weight to the potential gains. They are especially drawn to short term rewards. Second, college aged people have more trouble exercising self control than do those in their late 20s and beyond, an age difference that is amplified when people are emotionally aroused. Under calm conditions, college age individuals can control their impulses as well as their elders, but when they are emotionally aroused, they evince the poor self control of teenagers. Finally, college age people show more activation of the brain's reward regions and are more likely to take risks when they are with their peers than when they are alone. There are no such effects of peers among people who are past their mid 20s. Not all adolescents are risk takers, of course, and not all adults are risk averse. But it's hard to think of an age during which risky behavior is more common and harder to deter than between 18 and 24, and people in this age group make up about three fourths of full time American undergraduates. And, in case it's been a long time since you were in college, let me remind you that there is no shortage of rewarding temptations, emotional arousal or unsupervised peer groups on the typical college campus. It's one of those perfect storms people who are inclined to take risks in a setting that provides ample temptation to do so. My pessimistic prediction is that the college and university reopening strategies under consideration will work for a few weeks before their effectiveness fizzles out. By then, many students will have become cavalier about wearing masks and sanitizing their hands. They will ignore social distancing guidelines when they want to hug old friends they run into on the way to class. They will venture out of their "families" and begin partying in their hallways with classmates from other clusters, and soon after, with those who live on other floors, in other dorms, or off campus. They will get drunk and hang out and hook up with people they don't know well. And infections on campus not only among students, but among the adults who come into contact with them will begin to increase. At that point, college administrators will find themselves in a very dicey situation, with few good options. I look forward to a time when we are able to return to campus and in person teaching. But a thorough discussion of whether, when and how we reopen our colleges and universities must be informed by what developmental science has taught us about how adolescents and young adults think. As someone who is well versed in this literature, I will ask to teach remotely for the time being. Laurence Steinberg is a professor of psychology at Temple University and the author of "Age of Opportunity: Lessons From the New Science of Adolescence." The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Bill Hader is a hit man in "Barry," beginning Sunday on HBO, but his heart isn't in it. If there's one thing that defines HBO era TV, it's dramas about violent men. If there's a second thing, it's comedies set in and around the entertainment business. "Barry," which begins Sunday on HBO, is both, an audacious mash up that puts the chocolate of premium cable into its peanut butter, its gun into its greasepaint. The title character (Bill Hader), a Midwestern hit man, jets off to Los Angeles, where his handler, Fuches (Stephen Root), has arranged for him to handle some "personal business" for the Chechen mob. That "business" concerns an aspiring actor and personal trainer who's been having an affair with a mobster's wife. But the hit job gets complicated when Barry, doing his research, stumbles into an acting class and becomes smitten not only with one of the students, Sally (Sarah Goldberg), but also with acting itself. He's no good at it. What he excels at is shooting people, a skill he sharpened as a Marine in Afghanistan, and Fuches urges him to stay in his lane. "Acting is a very face forward kind of job," he says. "You could take up painting! Hitler painted! John Wayne Gacy painted! It's a good, solid hobby." The series, created by Mr. Hader and Alec Berg ("Silicon Valley"), ingeniously mixes wetwork and dry irony. (The relationship between Barry and Fuches, as it develops, is very much that of a frustrated actor and a money minded agent.) But it would be a cold satire without the transformation of Mr. Hader, best known for playing outlandish characters like Stefon on "Saturday Night Live." His Barry is wound so tight he hums he's like a slightly zanier Michael Shannon character but Mr. Hader also shows you the light flicking on inside him for the first time. The criminal going straight, or pretending to, is a mini genre unto itself ("Banshee," "Lilyhammer"). There are a couple ways you might expect a hit man in Hollywood story to go: The killer teaches a few lessons to the showbiz phonies, or he discovers that crime has given him unique insights into human nature. Not so in "Barry." Murder is a soul numbing day job for Barry that's done no good for him except pay the bills. It's a messier, better remunerated version of slinging coffee. There's a recurring theme in cable dramas that criminality is, if not admirable, at least more authentic and exhilarating than the overcivilized straight life. Walter White in "Breaking Bad" says that crime made him feel "alive." Tony Soprano, monster though he may be, is continually contrasted with pathetic and envious civilian schnooks like Artie Bucco. Here, Barry's the schnook. He's not animated by his work but drained by it. For someone who kills for a living, he's awfully passive, having let his hit man career happen to him more than having pursued it. When Barry tries to win Sally over by buying her an outlandishly expensive gift, she's put off by the "weird ass Tony Soprano move." When she calls him out on his "toxic masculinity" having no idea how toxic it really is Barry actually takes it to heart, even if he has a hard time applying the lesson. Because of Sally's role as a foil in what is indeed a very male show, I wish her character were better fleshed out. "Barry" is well cast top to bottom, though, from Henry Winkler as Gene, the acting class's passionate but fatuous instructor, to a scene stealing Anthony Carrigan as NoHo Hank, an incongruously polite Chechen lieutenant. The spatter comedy is not for the squeamish, but "Barry" plays cleverly with the contrast between Barry's two worlds. His mob clients have their own Hollywood inspired sense of theatrics, as when Hank needlessly complicates a hit by insisting on express mailing the target a bullet, because it will be cooler. This all might come across glib if "Barry" weren't also willing to go dark when necessary, and if Mr. Hader were less effective at finding the drama in his comic character. The season's last half finds another gear, as the guilt racked Barry has a harder and harder time compartmentalizing his vocation from his avocation. By pushing its story to an extreme, "Barry" hits on a universal conflict. Like many of us who are not trained assassins, Barry wants to believe he can make moral compromises while telling himself, "This is not who I am." (He sees himself in the character of Macbeth, but in his reading, Shakespeare's murderous Scot was "just following orders.") But there comes a point Barry crosses that point, and then some where that's a crock. What you do is who you are. Barry's targets, were they still alive, would testify that the guy who killed them was plenty real. It's a tricky game "Barry" is playing, cultivating our empathy for its protagonist, then confronting us with this recognition. And the season finale does raise the question of how long the series can string out its double life premise. But mostly, "Barry" pulls off the feat, developing into something more profound than its high concept premise suggests. You don't expect this comedy to find its target in the way it does. And as Barry could tell you, that element of surprise is the mark of a professional. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The posters promoting the inaugural football game at Madonna University started going up around its Livonia, Mich., campus last October, and Josh DePaulis grabbed the first one he saw. He hung it on his bedroom wall, and every morning since, he has woken up, stared at it and said to himself two words: It's coming. DePaulis, a quarterback, received offers from established programs in Divisions II and III, but so much about Madonna, an N.A.I.A. school, resonated with him. Throwing the program's first touchdown pass. Beginning traditions instead of following them. Leading as a freshman. About three months remain until the season opener, which was pushed back two weeks to Sept. 12, and DePaulis's coach, Brian Foos, has yet to see his quarterback play in pads or take a snap, control an offense or read a defense, call an audible or zip a pass into a tight spot. That all should have happened during spring practices, but the coronavirus pandemic halted Madonna's debut season before it even started, thrusting plans into disarray. While Erskine College, in Due West, S.C., is counting on the revenue generated from its four home games, its athletic director, Mark Peeler, said the economic impact of a truncated or canceled season, or one played with limited or no fans, would pale compared to the blow to morale and momentum. "That will definitely set us back financially, but it wouldn't be nearly as devastating as just the concept of what we kind of started this for," Peeler said. "We've embedded that day in people's minds." "It's important to make sure that we keep the football program on people's minds." On his phone, Peeler marks the days until Sept. 5, when Division II Erskine which dealt Florida State its only defeat in 1948 is slated to play its first game since 1951. Shane Bell, a defensive lineman, said it was hard enough watching other teams play last season while he and his teammates sat out. He, too, had been counting down until the opener but stopped soon after the outbreak forced him to stay home. "I think I got a little bit depressed," Bell said. "I was like, 'I don't need to count. We might not be playing anyway.'" The wait has also been difficult for Peeler, who unsuccessfully tried bringing football back to Erskine on at least two separate occasions. Massaging his approach, Peeler told the university president that football would be the only way to spur its growth, and in August 2018, Erskine reinstated its program as part of an extensive plan to boost enrollment, improve financial stability and cultivate a deeper sense of community, enticing students to remain on campus on the weekends. Peeler sensed the excitement at homecoming last autumn, when about 2,000 people, he said, attended practice and a tailgate. He was expecting far more to attend the spring scrimmage. To recapture that enthusiasm, Erskine redoubled its engagement efforts on social media and started doing football podcasts with guests like Coach Shap Boyd. "People who didn't want to have anything to do with the college for many years now want to come back and check things out," Peeler said. "It's important to make sure that we keep the football program on people's minds." Though it's unclear how the pandemic will affect Erskine's enrollment, the hope, Peeler said, is that its student population will rise to 1,000, from about 800, by 2023. Adding football, he said, will net the school roughly an additional 1.5 million every year in tuition revenue (Division II schools have 36 scholarships to split among their football teams as they see fit, often with partial aid). Erskine had about 130 players during fall camp, which Boyd likened to elementary school. He spent most of it teaching, trying to get each player to follow the next. Now Boyd must distill the four weeks of lessons he had planned for the canceled spring practice and integrate it into preseason camp. "The depth of what we can install and what we can do is going to be limited greatly by our kids' acumen," Boyd said. "No one's going to care that we're playing freshmen that's the reality," he added. "They're looking at the schedule right now saying, 'That's a win,' and we're looking at the schedule saying, 'Dang, we don't even know.'" The teams are taking cues from their schools on a return. With some exceptions, the colleges adding football are operating as if there will be no sports until there are students on campus and in classrooms. Todd Wilkinson, the athletic director at Division II Barton College, in Wilson, N.C., said he expects Division II to recommend six weeks of preseason camp, while the N.A.I.A. said this week that as soon as 47 of its 95 participating football programs are cleared by local authorities to resume play, the season will be authorized to begin. The N.A.I.A. also reduced the maximum number of games to nine from 11 and said that organized practices cannot begin until Aug. 15, giving schools four weeks before competition begins. Barton's coach, Chip Hester, was hired in 2018, and every time he has been asked to speak at a civic club he has used the same line. He promised that Barton would go undefeated that year, but he couldn't say the same for 2020, when play would actually start. Hester held spring practice in mid February. Barton was fortunate to get seven practices in before the campus shut down, canceling the blue and white scrimmage, when officials were planning to rehearse game day operations. "Now the first time we run through a game is probably going to be our first game," Wilkinson said. "That won't be much of a scrimmage." He recently texted Peeler, and together they commiserated over all the ordeals. Isn't it great, Wilkinson wrote, to be starting a football program in the middle of a pandemic? "I was like, 'Yes it is, brother,'" Peeler said. "We knew there would be a lot of bumps in the road. We didn't know there would be a pandemic." Some problems were expected, but not a health crisis. In a sport whose culture lionizes workaholics and teems with Type A problem solvers, the uncertainty has been particularly vexing. Coaches are searching for answers that do not exist yet and perhaps will not for a while. Foos previously assisted at two other N.A.I.A. start ups Ohio Dominican and Lindsey Wilson, in Kentucky and his experience no doubt helped him get the job at Madonna, in January 2019. But, he said with a laugh, he was not asked at his interview how he would guide a team through a public health crisis, oversee players' academic progress from afar or cope after a critical fund raising drive was interrupted, generating about 15,000, far less than expected. Football, he said, is his life, and in these last few months, DePaulis has told himself not to waste any time, since that is something he doesn't get to use more than once. The revisions to Madonna's schedule have rendered the poster in his bedroom obsolete. Pending N.A.I.A. approval, the Crusaders will begin two weeks later than planned, on Sept. 12 instead of Aug. 29, against a different opponent, likely on the road and not at home. It will have been 23 months since DePaulis's last football game. And so he uses the video game Madden NFL 20 to take mental reps. He gathers teammates new and old for 7 on 7 workouts and throws with his father in the backyard. He studies coverages and then sketches plays to beat them. In the middle of the night, when he can't sleep, he'll review defenses in the notebook he started keeping as a high school sophomore and then try drawing them from memory on the whiteboard in his bedroom. "My dream wasn't to watch college football," DePaulis said. "My dream is to play college football, and I'm just not going to let something that happened in the world that nobody can control take that away from me." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
American Ballet Theater plans to present the world premiere of a new ballet by Jessica Lang and the company premiere of 's "Daphnis and Chloe" during its fall season at the David H. Koch Theater, the company announced Wednesday. The new Lang work, set to music by Fanny Mendelssohn, will be the first dance she has created for Ballet Theater. The company previously danced her "Splendid Isolation III" in 2008. "Daphnis and Chloe," set to the Ravel score, was originally commissioned by Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes in 1912; Mr. Millepied choreographed it for the Paris Opera Ballet in 2014. Ballet Theater's fall season, which will run Oct. 19 to Oct. 30, will also feature revivals of George Balanchine's "Prodigal Son," Frederick Ashton's "Symphonic Variations" and Alexei Ratmansky's "Serenade After Plato's Symposium." The season will also see the return of Twyla Tharp's "The Brahms Haydn Variations," Mr. Ratmansky's "Rondo Capriccioso," performed by students from Ballet Theater's Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School, and Ashton's "Monotones I and II." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Credit...Alana Paterson for The New York Times The Amazon Critic Who Saw Its Power From the Inside SEATTLE Tim Bray, an internet pioneer and a former vice president at Amazon, sent shock waves through the tech giant in early May when he resigned for what he called "a vein of toxicity" running through its culture. Within a few hours, his blog post about the resignation drew hundreds of thousands of views, and his inbox filled up with requests from journalists, recruiters and techies. Soon, lawmakers on Capitol Hill cited the post. It all made Mr. Bray, 65, Amazon's highest profile defector. But there was more he wanted to say. In the weeks since, he has aimed his brain power not at fixing a coding problem but at framing a broader critique of the company. In talks and blog posts that have drawn attention inside the company, he has called for unionization and antitrust regulation. Amid "the beating of the antitrust drums," Mr. Bray wrote in one post, he would like to see Amazon separate its retail business from its lucrative cloud computing unit. "And I'm pretty sure I'm not alone," he said. Facing growing antitrust scrutiny at the same time that the coronavirus crisis has strained the company's operations, Amazon is increasingly forced to defend its record as an employer and its relationship with consumers. On Monday, Jeff Bezos, the company's chief executive, will testify for the first time before Congress, which is investigating the power of Amazon and other tech titans. Mr. Bray stands out because while much of the criticism of Amazon has been from the outside labor groups, lawmakers and rivals he spent more than five years in the top echelons of the company. In a series of video interviews from a gently rocking small boat, docked in Vancouver, British Columbia, that has been his office during the pandemic, Mr. Bray straightforwardly presented his ideas as a matter of logic. "I am not in some radical fringe because I think the wealth and power in the 21st century is overly concentrated," he said. "The tech industry is a leading candidate for what could be broken up." His time in Beirut stayed with him after he returned to Canada, making him unable to ignore politics. "Politics there takes the very rare form of riots in the streets and incoming Israeli missiles," he said. While a student at University of Guelph, near Toronto, Mr. Bray found joy and skill in computer science. He used it during the early days of the consumer internet, digitizing the Oxford English Dictionary and founding two start ups. But he is best known among technologists for helping invent XML, a critical standard for storing and sharing data on the internet. By 2014, after several years at Google, Mr. Bray had joined Amazon. He became a rare "distinguished engineer," part of an elite group whose clout comes not from managing large teams but from demonstrating engineering brilliance. Paul Hoffman, who met Mr. Bray in the 2000s while writing technical standards for blogs, said Mr. Bray was one of those people you really want to hate but can't, a polymath who was highly functional on just a few hours of sleep. Mr. Bray is definitely "a geeky geek," Mr. Hoffman said, "but what is atypical is that he also has a lot of other interests." In conversation and his writing, Mr. Bray readily cites the economist Thomas Piketty (whose book on inequality he has read "end to end"), admits a love of heavy metal (which he calls "sort of, well, ridiculous," because "the volume is much louder than can be sanely necessary") and talks in detail about the climate crisis (which he finds alarming "as a person who has a high respect for quantitative science and understands what mathematical modeling is about"). His involvement thrilled organizers. "To have a V.P. just confirmed how strongly Amazon employees felt about Amazon taking significant leadership on climate," said Emily Cunningham, an Amazon designer at the time who helped organize the letter. His public dissent angered some leaders at Amazon, Mr. Bray said. He said he had been told to remember the Amazon leadership principle known as "disagree and commit," the idea that people should vigorously debate internally but that once a formal decision on an issue is made, everyone should fall in line and support it. "As a V.P., you're not supposed to go off the rails with conflicting messaging, which is not an unreasonable position," Mr. Bray said. But that idea would eventually lead to his resignation. In April, Amazon fired Ms. Cunningham and several other workers who had raised concerns about safety in Amazon's warehouses. The company said each employee had repeatedly violated various policies. To Mr. Bray, it looked "like an explicit policy of firing anybody who put up their hand." "We support every employee's right to criticize their employer's working conditions, but that does not come with blanket immunity against any and all internal policies," Jaci Anderson, an Amazon spokeswoman, said in a statement. For Mr. Bray, the firings crossed a line. He said he had raised concerns internally but could not "disagree and commit," as Amazon wanted. He stayed for a few weeks to wrap up a project and resigned, leaving 1 million in compensation behind. In the days that followed, Mr. Bray's critique resonated in Washington, D.C. He spoke with Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat whose district includes Amazon's headquarters in Seattle. And a group of senators mentioned his resignation blog post when they wrote to Mr. Bezos about the firings. He initially tried to keep a low profile, responding only by email to press requests. But he kept blogging and eventually talked publicly, making even more aggressive criticisms of the company. On a live video in early June with National Observer, a Canadian investigative news site, Mr. Bray said Amazon was a symptom of concentrated capitalism. "We don't really have an Amazon problem," he said. "What we have is a deep, societal problem with an unacceptable imbalance of power and wealth." "It's not obvious to me why the retail company, the manufacturing company, the voice recognition company, the cloud computing company and the Prime video company should be the same company," he said at the event. "They're not particularly related to each other, and I think it's actively distorting and harmful." A week later, Mr. Bray spoke at a virtual conference convened by global unions critical of Amazon. He said that unions should be easier to form in the United States and that "one of the most powerful political programs we could run with the aim of correcting the power imbalances that concern us is antimonopoly." He also said the sheer size of Amazon and other large corporations gave them inordinate power over politics, policies and labor conditions. Mr. Bray soon turned to formulating a business case for breaking up the company. He wrote it in a standard Amazon format, known as a PRFAQ, envisioning how the company would announce the proposal once it was fully enacted. With antitrust pressures growing, Amazon might prefer to "proactively" spin off its cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services, he wrote, "as opposed to under hostile pressure from Washington." He posted the document on GitHub, a coding collaboration tool, asking for help improving the pitch. By spinning AWS off, he argued, companies like Walmart that compete with Amazon would be more comfortable using the cloud computing service, opening up more potential customers. "Organizations who compete with Amazon want to take advantage of AWS's industry leading offerings without having to worry that they are strengthening a competitor," he wrote. His post did not go viral like his resignation. But looking at logs on his blog's server, he could tell that it got attention somewhere critical: inside Amazon. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Lightning's intricate, darting dance across the sky can be mesmerizing or terrifying, elegant or explosive, divine or destructive, depending on how close it is. But meteorologists have historically viewed lightning as little more than a weather byproduct. Like a rainbow, only with teeth. That view may be changing as technology has evolved to study lightning and its potential to help predict, if not drive, atmospheric events. In 2017, two new space based lightning sensors are set to go live, joining a growing global architecture of ground based detection networks (some making their images available for free online). "We are now in the golden age of lightning measurement and research," said Christopher Schultz, a meteorologist and lightning specialist at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Worldwide, thunderstorms hurl about four million lightning bolts to the ground each day. So it's not surprising that researchers have spent decades figuring out how to track and measure the phenomena, and trying to persuade funding sources that collecting data was worthwhile. "When I got started back in the '80s, nobody cared," said Hugh Christian, a research professor at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and director of the team that developed a lightning sensor that will be attached to a truss of the International Space Station in 2017. It will augment coverage provided by a geostationary satellite, known as GOES 16, that was successfully launched in November. "It's been a long road," Dr. Christian said. "But now it's universally accepted that lightning flash rates are correlated with storm intensification and severity." This means the more that is known about lightning activity, the more advance warning it is possible to give people about the possibility of associated severe weather events like tornadoes and hail. Experts hope to locate about 90 percent of lightning strikes in the Western Hemisphere, within clouds and on the ground, using detection instruments in space that work by measuring photons blinking in the clouds below and, terrestrially, by sensing radio wave disturbances. European and Japanese lightning sensing satellites are expected to launch within the next five years, making similar data collection possible worldwide. Forecasters are most excited by the potential for tracking storm activity in remote areas, particularly in the tropics. "What happens is if you have a big area of thunderstorms in the tropics, that puts a lot of energy in the upper atmosphere, which propagates out and distorts weather in the middle latitudes where we are," said Cliff Mass, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington. "One of the Achilles' heels of modern American weather prediction is the fact that we can't get convection right in the tropics." In 2016, 38 people were killed by lightning in the United States. That's the highest death toll in 10 years, and some experts expect that number to climb in future years because of climate change. The stakes are higher in less developed nations like India, where deaths average about 1,000 per year. Researchers have also discovered different and strange iterations of lightning. For example, so called dark lightning, powerful bursts of gamma rays (strong enough to produce antimatter), can smash through the upper regions of Earth's atmosphere and into outer space. This has implications for the functioning and longevity of satellites used for communication, military reconnaissance and GPS. "It's totally unexpected and exciting that thunderstorms can turn into something like giant particle accelerators," said Joseph Dwyer, a professor of gamma ray astronomy at the University of New Hampshire. "And we found lightning is initiating it." Other surprising and mysterious sorts of lightning are elves and sprites colorful ultrafast bursts of electricity that dance above clouds into the upper atmosphere. "We're getting pretty good at saying what lightning does, but we're still pretty bad at saying how it does it," Dr. Dwyer said. "It's so common and yet we really don't understand it very well." The current thinking is that ice particles in different forms within thunderstorms bump up against one another during updrafts and transfer charges (similar to what happens when you walk across a carpet and touch a doorknob). The lighter particles get positively charged and migrate to the top of the cloud, while the negatively charged, heavier particles drop to the bottom. The negative buildup at the bottom of the cloud discharges to the positively charged ground below, or upward or sideways, depending on the easiest path for release. The same thing can happen with the accumulated positive charges if a certain threshold is met for discharge. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
If you had somehow forgotten the uniqueness of the 2020 Major League Baseball season, the Yankees' weekend series against the Mets had plenty of reminders. They played five games in three days at Yankee Stadium after a Mets player and staff member tested positive for the coronavirus, forcing a postponement of the previous weekend's series at Citi Field. They played doubleheaders on Friday and Sunday, which were made a bit more manageable thanks to the seven inning games and expanded rosters. But all the cramming led to a moment on Friday that encapsulated the Yankees' fortunes of late. When closer Aroldis Chapman surrendered a walk off, two run home run to Mets shortstop Amed Rosario in the seventh inning of the second game, both players seemed to forget the Mets were the home team even though the game was in the Bronx. Rosario said he did not realize his blast had won the game until he saw his teammates streaming out of the dugout in delight. Dominic Smith said he thought he had seen Chapman signaling to the home plate umpire for a new ball so he could continue pitching. "I was a little confused," Chapman said later. The Yankees, who improved to 19 13 after sweeping Sunday's doubleheader, have witnessed similar scenes, although with less awkwardness, over parts of the past two weeks: Their offense struggled to produce enough runs, and their bullpen squandered opportunities. Both are normally strengths even last season, when the team was depleted by injuries. That has not always been the case this year, which was why General Manager Brian Cashman said over the weekend that he was looking for outside help, particularly for pitching, ahead of the trade deadline, which is 4 p.m., Eastern time, on Monday. Entering Sunday, the Yankees had lost seven of their previous eight games. In that stretch, their offense averaged an anemic 2.6 runs per game, and their bullpen produced a 7.65 earned run average while blowing leads or falling behind in ties in six games. The Yankees reversed course in the first game on Sunday, beating the Mets, 8 7, on a game tying, two run home run by Aaron Hicks in the bottom of the seventh inning, and a game ending single by Gio Urshela in the eighth. They trailed, 7 2, entering the seventh. "You usually don't win many of those," Manager Aaron Boone said, "but they just continued to battle." 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. In the nightcap, the Yankees won, 5 2, in eight innings thanks to a dazzling major league debut by the pitching prospect Deivi Garcia, who allowed one unearned run over six innings, and a pinch hit grand slam by Gary Sanchez, who was hitting .130 entering the day. The Mets fell to 15 19. While the Yankees successfully used their deep pockets and savvy to overcome an M.L.B. record of 30 different players landing on the injured list in the 162 game regular season last year, they have faced more of a challenge over the current 60 game season. Eight players were on the injured list as of Sunday, with relief pitcher Zack Britton and the backup catcher Kyle Higashioka expected to return this week. Infielder D.J. LeMahieu, the Yankees' best all around player last season, returned on Saturday after missing 10 games with a sprained left thumb. But other important Yankees infielder Gleyber Torres, starter James Paxton and outfielders Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Judge will need more time. A key relief pitcher, Tommy Kahnle, is out for the year. Judge's injury, in particular, has proved troublesome for the Yankees, who revamped their health and performance staff in January. Although he begged not to go on the injured list this month, Judge did, and he missed nine games with a strained right calf. He lasted only six innings in his first game back, on Wednesday, before exiting with renewed calf discomfort. He was again placed on the I.L. on Friday with what Cashman called a lesser strain of the same calf. Even though Cashman said three doctors had agreed on Judge's original recovery time, it was considered a "failed rehab" because the outfielder was again dealing with the same injury. As a result, Cashman said Judge might need double the recovery time, or up to four weeks. It probably didn't help that Judge, with the minor league season canceled this year, could not test his calf in the minors before returning to the major leagues. But that is a reality faced by all teams in this pandemic affected season. The Yankees have been particularly affected by an inconsistent schedule over the past few weeks. Hitters and pitchers have said it has been difficult to get into any sort of rhythm. They had an unexpected five day break because of coronavirus related postponements and a rainout. Then came the weekend cramming, which strained their pitching staff. When Chapman lost on Friday night, it was his first appearance in 11 days. Given certain areas of weakness and the backlog of injuries, Cashman said the Yankees "could definitely use some help." But he explained that the coronavirus crisis had introduced new elements into the Yankees' decision making, and their rivals', ahead of the trade deadline. "It's a risky marketplace," he said. With no fans expected in the stands across M.L.B., Cashman said there was "very little money to be had" by teams, thus making it harder to trade for proven players who are surely earning millions. Another factor, he said, was the expanded 16 team postseason, in which all teams will play a first round, best of three game series, thus increasing the odds of an early exit. And, he said, the pandemic was still not over, so how much does a team want to trade away prospects and take on salary for as little as one month with so much uncertainty? "There's no guarantee that this season finishes, even though I think there's a lot of optimism that we've gotten this far that we can get all the way through," he said, adding later: "That risk reward factor is certainly something we all are aware of." Whether or not the Yankees bolster their roster by Monday afternoon, another hurdle awaits that day: They begin a three game series in the Bronx against the Tampa Bay Rays, who sit atop the American League East. The Yankees have won only one of their seven games against the Rays this season. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
A longtime analyst for Fox News is leaving the network, saying that he could not "in good conscience" remain with an organization that, he argued, "is now wittingly harming our system of government for profit." In a searing farewell note sent to colleagues on Tuesday, Ralph Peters, a Fox News strategic analyst and a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Army, castigated the network for its coverage of President Trump and the rhetoric of its prime time hosts. "In my view, Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration," Colonel Peters wrote in his message, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. "Over my decade with Fox, I long was proud of the association," he added. "Now I am ashamed." Without citing them by name, Colonel Peters, 65, wrote that Fox News's prime time anchors "dismiss facts and empirical reality to launch profoundly dishonest assaults on the F.B.I., the Justice Department, the courts, the intelligence community (in which I served) and, not least, a model public servant and genuine war hero such as Robert Mueller." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
SHANGHAI Chinese officials are investigating the Swiss food packaging giant Tetra Pak for "abusing its market dominance" in China, the latest in a growing number of multinational companies to come under regulatory scrutiny. China's State Administration of Industry and Commerce said on its Web site Friday that it had started an investigation, but it offered few details about why it was looking into Tetra Pak, which makes food and beverage packages. Christopher Huntley, a Tetra Pak spokesman, said Friday that this was the first time the government had formally investigated the company on antitrust grounds. Company executives were questioned several years ago about the matter and responded, he said. In 2005, a statement on the commerce agency's Web site complained about Tetra Pak's "monopoly" in the Chinese market and said it could take action. Days earlier, the National Development and Reform Commission, the powerful state planning agency, said it was investigating international producers of infant milk formula sold in China on suspicion of price fixing and anticompetitive behavior. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
The chief executive of Barnes Noble, James Daunt, who took over last summer, thought the company's stores were badly in need of some sprucing up. His plan, over the next two years or so, was to close locations on a rotating basis for a few weeks at a time to refurnish and refurbish. Then the coronavirus closed almost all of them down at once. This spring, Barnes Noble used lockdowns around the country as a chance to refresh more than 350 of its 614 stores throughout the United States, using small teams to move furniture around, paint walls and bring in new books. Revamping the stores was part of a broader plan to revive the company, a difficult task to begin with that has become a lot more formidable under the weight of the pandemic. "I knew I wanted to rip these stores apart and put them back together in a different way," Mr. Daunt said. "And then suddenly: 'Oh my goodness, they're all shut. Let's get to work.' "At the same time," he added, "we didn't want to spend any money, because we didn't know how long this pandemic was going to go on for." Jonathan Castro, the manager of a Barnes Noble at a strip mall in Yonkers, spent about two weeks in April and May taking books off the shelves and reorganizing the furniture. He was one of three people who came into the store every other day, alternating with another group of three. 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. Some of the walls are painted blue now, and the signs look a little different. Many more of the books face out on shelves, so that customers can see the covers as they walk by. The books have been reorganized for instance, nutrition titles and cookbooks are next to each other now, instead of on opposite ends of the store. And overall, the floor feels much more open. Many of the bulky displays have been thrown away Mr. Daunt said every store got a dumpster and replaced by smaller tables that are easier to browse and to walk around. "It's a lot more open," Mr. Castro said. "I can't even explain how tight it was in here. You couldn't really shop." But much about the store remains the same. The brown leafy wallpaper is still there, as are the green and beige carpets. The bookshelves aren't new, and have the chips and scuffs to prove it. There are still indents in the rugs that mark the old layout. Taken all together, it's like seeing a friend for the first time in a while and wondering: What's different? Did you get a haircut? Beyond tweaking the look of the place, what's on the shelves is also a bit different. Debra Edwards, who runs the children's books department at the Yonkers store, noticed while restocking during the lockdown that older titles like "Strawberry Girl" (1945), by Lois Lenski, and "Rifles for Watie" (1957), by Harold Keith were being sent in from the warehouses again. These books, both Newbery Medal winners, hadn't been kept in stock in recent years, she said, but teachers and grandparents would come in looking for them. Adding them back is part of an effort to beef up the backlist in Barnes Noble stores. They will have about the same number of total books on the shelves, but fewer of each title, offering a greater variety. "She came back," Ms. Edwards said, pointing to Elizabeth Enright's "Thimble Summer" (1938) on the shelf, near some other books that had recently returned. "We were excited because we get asked about them." This is not the first makeover that Mr. Daunt has orchestrated. A bookseller who opened his first store, Daunt Books, in London in 1990, he was put in charge of Waterstones, Britain's largest bookstore chain, nine years ago. He managed, over time, to return that company to profitability. Elliott Advisors, the private equity firm that bought Waterstones in 2018, now also owns Barnes Noble, which it purchased last year for 683 million. Elliott brought Mr. Daunt to New York to try a similar strategy to the one he used in Britain. Fundamental to his approach, he said, is to keep the efficiencies and buying power of a big chain while giving individual stores a bit more independence, which would, in theory, allow them to better reflect and cater to local tastes. Each store's manager will have more say in how they augment stock. If a book sells through and they don't think it makes sense to restock it, they don't have to though there are limits. "If they don't keep 'Catcher in the Rye' in stock, they'll find someone knocking on their door quite quickly," Mr. Daunt said. "Frankly, if they're good at their job, we'll leave them totally alone. But we have to have control in case they're less good at it. It's not a free pass to incompetence." "The reading habits in the far reaches of Alabama are not the same as on the Upper West Side," he added. "The calculation is that the local guy is going to do generally a much better job than we do from Fifth Avenue." Mr. Daunt said the plan to more thoroughly update the stores remains in place, with the hope of a lot less disruption now that these initial changes have been made during the lockdown. The question of when this will happen is still very much in the air. Books have sold well during the pandemic, but with stores closed this spring and the surging virus now threatening locations that have reopened, it's been an extraordinarily difficult year for the company. Store sales are up from where they were at the height of the lockdown, Mr. Daunt said, but still down about 20 percent overall from last year. But that number masks an enormous variation. In some parts of the country, he said, sales are normal or even up, while in New York City, it's "absolutely horrendous." In the meantime, shoppers are adjusting to the newly reorganized stores. "Where can I find all the puzzles?" a woman demanded at the Yonkers location last week. "Since you changed everything." Mr. Castro jumped into action and led her affably to a shelf nearby. "They're right over here," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
11 Year Old Boy's Death in Brooklyn May Have Been Caused by Airborne Fish Proteins An 11 year old boy who died on New Year's Day after visiting family members in Brooklyn may have had a fatal reaction to fish proteins released into the air while his relatives cooked. The sixth grader, Cameron Jean Pierre, had asthma and was allergic to fish and peanuts, his father, Steven Jean Pierre, said on Thursday in an interview with WABC. They had been visiting Cameron's grandmother in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn, where one of his relatives was making fish, and Cameron had an asthma attack, Mr. Jean Pierre said. Cameron's father treated his son with a nebulizer, a device they had used many times in the past to deliver medicine to the boy's lungs. At first, it seemed to work, he said. But then Cameron's condition worsened and the family called for an ambulance. "He said, 'I feel like I'm dying,'" his father recalled. "I said: 'Don't say that! What are you talking about? Don't say that.'" Cameron's father said he tried to do CPR, but by the time emergency workers arrived, the child was unconscious and unresponsive, the police said. Emergency workers brought him to Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center in Brooklyn, where he was pronounced dead. "My son's last words were 'Daddy, I love you, daddy, I love you," Mr. Jean Pierre told WABC. "He gave me two kisses. Two kisses on my face." Cameron's mother, Jody Pottingr, suggested to WABC that the fatal reaction might have occurred when Cameron and his father returned briefly to the apartment to retrieve a forgotten item, at a time when his relatives thought the boy was gone. The family could not be reached for comment on Friday. The New York City medical examiner is performing an autopsy as part of its investigation, a spokeswoman for the office said on Friday, adding that the results might not be released for weeks. While the cause of death has not yet been determined, experts say Cameron's combination of asthma and allergies could have been to blame. "We would fully expect the coroner's report will end up identifying this as a death from asthma induced by an airborne allergen," said Dr. Robert A. Wood, a professor of pediatrics and the director of pediatric allergy and immunology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. It wasn't the smell of the fish that would have produced the allergic reaction, experts said, but the proteins released by the cooking process. Fish cooked on a stove could have sent steam and proteins into the air, causing an allergic reaction that would have set off Cameron's asthma, Dr. Wood said. Cooking fish in an oven, however, would be unlikely to release proteins into the air, partly because the fish would be cooked at a lower temperature. Hypersensitivity reactions after the inhalation of food particles are an "increasingly recognized problem in children," according to a report in the journal Allergy and Asthma Proceedings. "Usually, respiratory manifestations include rhinoconjunctivitis, coughing, wheezing and asthma, but in some cases even anaphylaxis" a severe, potentially life threatening reaction "has been observed," the report said. For patients who experience a respiratory reaction to a food, such as coughing, hoarseness or wheezing, epinephrine is considered the drug of choice. "Albuterol and other asthma medications are less likely to be effective," Dr. Wood said. Allergies to fish and peanuts like the ones Cameron had are some of the most common allergies in the United States. Peanut allergies rank first, followed by allergies to milk, shellfish, tree nuts, eggs and fin fish. Although these allergens affect millions of children, severe reaction to airborne foods is "extraordinarily rare," Dr. Wood said, and fatal reactions are even more rare. "Severe and fatal reactions to foods usually occurring by ingestion almost exclusively occur in patients who have asthma," he added. Cameron attended school in Piscataway, N.J., where the family had been living for the last two years, Mr. Jean Pierre told WABC. Teresa M. Rafferty, the superintendent of Piscataway Township Schools, said in a statement on Thursday that Cameron was "a good student and a positive and happy presence in the classroom." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Twitch, the livestreaming platform popular among video game players, unveiled new guidelines on Wednesday aimed at cracking down on hateful conduct and sexual harassment on its site. The site, which is owned by Amazon, said it had broadened its definition of sexual harassment and separated such violations into a new category for the first time so it could take more action against them. Under the new guidelines, Twitch will ban lewd or repeated comments about anyone's physical appearance and expressly prohibit the sending of unsolicited links to nudity. The company also said it would prohibit streamers from displaying the Confederate battle flag and take stricter action against those who target someone's immigration status. Violators could receive warnings, temporary suspensions or permanent bans from the platform. Twitch said the changes were its most significant policy updates in almost three years. They followed a nearly yearlong review that included consultations with streamers and academics who study cyberbullying, diversity and inclusion, the company said. The new standards will take effect in January. "We need to ensure that anyone who shows up on Twitch feels safe and confident that they can broadcast without harassment," Sara Clemens, Twitch's chief operating officer, said in an interview. "There are constituents on Twitch, particularly underrepresented minority groups, who experience a disproportionate amount of harassment and abuse online." For years, Twitch has been dogged by claims that viewers could easily harass streamers with sexually explicit comments and threatening messages. On the platform, people can broadcast themselves playing video games or just talking, and their audiences can interact with them through a text chat in real time. Twitch streamers themselves are largely responsible for ensuring their audiences follow the platform's rules, such as by employing Twitch's moderation tools in chats. The company created stricter policies in 2018, but came under fire over the summer after dozens of gamers and streamers mostly women publicly shared that they had been sexually harassed and assaulted by others in the gaming industry, including on Twitch. In June, streamers organized a one day "Twitch blackout," when some abstained from broadcasting on the platform to pressure it to investigate and address the accusations. The company said at the time that it would permanently ban severe offenders and improve its handling of reported harassment. That same month, Twitch temporarily suspended President Trump's Twitch channel for "hateful conduct." The channel had streamed his rallies, which included comments that Mexico sent drugs, crime and rapists over the border, and that a "very tough hombre" broke into a woman's house. Other social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, have also been under pressure to remove hate speech and misinformation. Kenzie Gordon, a Ph.D. student at the University of Alberta who studies how games can be used to prevent sexual and domestic violence, said the new policies appeared to be "very thorough and comprehensive." But how they are enforced, she said, will determine whether they are effective. "By making creators responsible for moderating the policy on their own channels, they have put most of the work of enforcement onto people who were already vulnerable to abuse," Ms. Gordon said of Twitch. "We'll have to see how effectively they support streamers who are trying to stop abuse on their channels." Twitch has had a banner year. With the coronavirus pandemic forcing people to remain indoors, many have sought out online entertainment such as streaming video games. Twitch now averages 26.5 million daily viewers, up from 17.5 million at the beginning of the year, it said. As the community has grown and become more global, Ms. Clemens said, it is important for Twitch to ensure that its policies reflect societal norms. Many streamers earn a living from Twitch, with some making more than 1 million a year through subscriptions, donations and advertisements on the service. Because of that, Ms. Clemens said, Twitch users should keep a "workplace style" approach in mind when considering what comments might amount to harassment. Other changes include codifying and spelling out more explicitly the kinds of content and actions that were already unofficially prohibited. These include blackface, doxxing publishing personally identifying information like someone's phone number online and hate group propaganda, such as symbols associated with the Nazi Party or white supremacist groups. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Higher birth weight may predict better cardiovascular fitness in adulthood, researchers report. Scientists measured fitness in 286,761 Swedish men ages 17 to 25 by having them ride a bicycle ergometer and recording the wattage they were able to generate. They used data on birth weights from the Swedish Medical Birth Registry. They found that as birth weight increased, maximum wattage produced increased in direct proportion with it. For each one fifth of a pound increase in birth weight within the normal range of six to nine pounds, there was a 1.74 watt increase in the energy a man was able to generate. This means that, on average, a man born at 7.6 pounds was able to generate, at maximum effort, 8.7 more watts of energy than one born a pound lighter. "A higher birth weight means higher cardiovascular fitness," said the lead author, Viktor H. Ahlqvist, a doctoral student at the Karolinska Institute. "And previous studies have shown that higher cardiovascular fitness implies a lower risk for cardiovascular morbidity and mortality." The study, in the Journal of the American Heart Association, controlled for maternal body mass index, maternal age at birth, cesarean section, maternal hypertension and other factors. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Back in November, my bank sent my wife and me a letter asking that we provide proof of flood insurance for the condominium we own in Florida. We did. But three months later, we found ourselves in the midst of a Kafkaesque world, where we were being charged for bank imposed insurance and couldn't figure out a way to get the bank to take back the insurance and remove the charges. I quickly found out that we were not alone. Management companies for condominiums all around Florida offered similar tales, involving several big banks. "It's always one unit's mortgage company that sends you a letter saying the condo association doesn't maintain adequate flood insurance," said James W. Hart Jr., president of Sentry Management Inc., which manages more than 1,300 properties. "We'll write back and say we're not required to do so because the condo is not in a flood plain or the association has adequate coverage. Then they say we have to prove it." And then, I spoke to legal services lawyers who said that the practice of bank imposed insurance what's known as force placed insurance has become more widespread in parts of the country where foreclosures are prevalent. Property managers said areas prone to natural disasters like floods and hurricanes are also affected. Of course, banks have every right to require homeowners to carry insurance. It's in the mortgage contract. And if the homeowners do not have insurance, the bank buys it for them. This sounds straightforward enough, since the lender is trying to protect its investment. But for homeowners who are already having trouble paying their mortgages, the insurance is a hefty additional burden because the bank's insurance is far more expensive than what's available through a commercial vendor. And then there are the homeowners like me who already have flood or hazard coverage or do not need it and cannot understand why they're getting these letters. The complaints have been numerous enough that 50 state attorneys general recommended, as part of a nationwide inquiry into mortgage practices, that limits be placed on the ability of banks to use force placed insurance. "There are many practices that need to be changed, and this is one of them," said Geoff Greenwood, spokesman for the Iowa attorney general's office. The problem is that homeowners often don't pay much attention to the initial bank notice. And if they don't react quickly, they will soon see the new insurance bills. Bank of America, for example, gives 45 days from the first letter to force placing insurance on a home, said Frank Dunn, senior vice president for insurance. He said that once proof was shown, the bank would remove the policy and the charges. Mr. Hart said he himself received a letter last year from Citibank saying he needed to buy flood insurance on his house in Longwood, Fla., or the bank would buy it for him. "I had the home 20 years and suddenly out of the blue some guy in Philadelphia said I needed flood insurance," he said. "They started out the letter with buying me flood insurance. I said if anyone is going to be buying flood insurance it's me because I'm not going to buy it at your exorbitant rates." In the end, he said, he spent 150 for a surveyor less than the 1,000 that he said condo associations often pay and six weeks going back and forth to prove to the bank that his home was still not in a flood plain. So what should you do if you receive these letters or find that you are now expected to pay into an escrow account to cover insurance that has been placed on your home? LARGER ISSUE The first thing to understand is that there are serious ramifications if you do not quickly respond to a bank notice. At the extreme, Alice Vickers, a lawyer with Florida Legal Services, said force placed insurance policies often push homeowners into foreclosure. "In some cases, the homeowner has insurance and they haven't responded at all or quickly enough to show they have the insurance," she said. "In real time, they end up paying double. It's difficult to extricate yourself from that." The proposals from the attorneys general aim to curtail how force placed insurance is applied, how much it costs and what commissions banks receive from the companies that sell this insurance. It also bans banks from using subsidiaries to provide the insurance. A spokeswoman for the QBE Insurance Group, which owns Seattle Specialty Insurance and Balboa, two big force placed insurers, declined to discuss the company's business practices. WHO'S AT RISK For people not in foreclosure, condominiums, by their very nature, seem to prompt more letters. Part of the problem is how the insurance is written. The mortgage company is not named as a beneficiary, as it would be on a home mortgage. Instead, the association is named. Mr. Dunn said that letters at Bank of America were automatically generated when a third party processor noticed that a policy had lapsed. In calling three of the major mortgage banks Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citibank I received different explanations for why the letters were sent. Terry Smith, escrow administration manager at Chase Home Lending, said the discrepancy over the beneficiary was an issue, but so, too, was the confusion many unit owners had over who was maintaining the insurance: the owner or the association. That may be true but it did not explain why Mr. Hart received a letter saying he needed flood insurance on his house. Sean Kevelighan, a spokesman for Citi's consumer banking division, said that letter was a result of a change in flood designations. "Due to Congressionally mandated changes in recent years to the National Flood Insurance Program that included remapping of many areas in the country, Citi will notify customers if and when such changes affect their homes in order to ensure they have appropriate insurance coverage," he said. RESOLUTION How you extricate yourself from this trap depends on whom you talk to. Banks make it sound easy send in the declaration page, they tell you, and you will be fine. But lawyers, property managers and owners who have dealt with this process say it is usually not that simple. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
American art from the 20th and 21st centuries is broader, and better than previously acknowledged, especially by museums. As these institutions struggle to become more inclusive than before, and give new prominence to neglected works, they rarely act alone. Essential help has come from people like William Arnett and his exemplary Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Their focus is the important achievement of black self taught artists of the American South, born of extreme deprivation and social cruelty, raw talent and fragments of lost African cultures. The foundation is in the process of dispersing the entirety of its considerable holdings some 1,200 works by more than 160 artists to museums across the country. When it is finished, it may well have an impact not unlike that of the Kress Foundation, which from 1927 to 1961 gave more than 3,000 artworks to 90 museums and study collections. The Met was the first of the foundation's beneficiaries, receiving a gift of 57 artworks by 30 artists in 2014. Now, the museum celebrates its fortune with "History Refused to Die: Highlights From the Souls Grown Deep Foundation Gift." A selection of 29 pieces, many of them rarely if ever shown, it is suffused by an electrifying sense of change. The effect is majestic. The show validates the art's stature, but even more it transforms the Met's encyclopedic footprint while also being of a piece of its longtime efforts to collect African art and American folk art. Nine of Thornton Dial's characteristically fierce, self aware works are here, mostly his rangy relief paintings as well as three extraordinary drawings that in wildly different ways commemorate Sept. 11, Florence Griffith Joyner and Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration. A dozen of the 18 geometric quilts in the gift are here. Both muted and boisterous, they challenge the conventional history of abstraction and reflect the talents of the Gee's Bend collective, especially those of the Pettway family. There are also various assemblage reliefs and sculptures by Lonnie Holley and Ronald Lockett. And the most extensive conversation in their endless intricacies and shared uses of fabrics, textures and the grid is between the works of Dial, who died in 2016, and the quilters. The Dials start to seem like crazed, dimensionalized quilts, the quilts like flattened, more orderly Dials. Nearly everything included is made from scavenged objects and materials, scraps redolent of the shameful history of black labor in the South before 1865, of course, but also in the Jim Crow era transformed by aesthetic intelligence and care into forms of eloquence and beauty. One of the most valuable lessons here is the works' inherent formal and material sense of defiance, and of beauty itself as an act of resistance. The show's two hypnotic galleries have very different emotional and visual tones. After beckoning you from down the corridor with the bright colors and joyful asymmetry of Loretta Pettway's "Medallion" quilt (circa 1960), the exhibition starts with an elegiac room of works nearly devoid of color. Dial's "Shadows of the Field" (2008) evokes haunted expanses of cotton plants with the help of strips of synthetic cotton batting. Along one wall, the "work clothes" quilts of Lucy Mingo and four other Gee's Benders reflect lives of hard labor and scrimping; their fabrics are almost exclusively blues and gray denim whose worn textures and faded colors are masterfully played off one another. Blessing the artworks here is a jaw dropping Dial: a two sided relief painting assemblage, and source of the exhibition's title, "History Refused to Die." One side shows a couple chained to, yet sheltered, by a white metal structure and surrounded by a turbulent expanse: pieces of fabric deftly knotted that seem to billow and blow like a stormy sea or clouds. The other side is a rough weaving of the straight stalks of the okra plant, which came to the United States from Africa during the slave trade. Its scattered colors are primarily the red, black, green and yellow of the 13 striped Afro American flag and, at the upper right, the simple silhouette of a white dove of peace or freedom. At the top, a row of short steel angle beams, spray painted with horizontal dashes of browns and black, flips in suggestion between good and bad, from a crown or headdress, to the top of a tall fence or chain gang garb. Several other works here are similarly simply masterpieces. In "Locked Up Their Minds," Purvis Young offers his own version of James Ensor's "Christ's Entry Into Brussels in 1889." Young's large painting on wood shows a group of black figures, some with halos, others holding up padlocks signifying their freed minds to flocks of angels, while two immense white possibly rampant horses add to the drama. The show's coda is Dial's ironically titled "Victory in Iraq," a relief painting from 2004. It hangs just outside the second gallery, its barbed wire and twisted mesh against a field of fabric and detritus defines and holds space as lightly and powerfully as Jackson Pollock's "Autumn Rhythm," displayed nearby. It is de rigueur when writing on exhibitions of this kind to review the shortcomings of the terms used to allude to the vast body of art, emerging in the 20th century, created by people limited by racial inequities, poor education, mental or physical challenges, or poverty. "Outsider" was superseded by "self taught," which didn't work since many artists are self taught in some way. (Quilters, for example, learn their art from their female relatives.) The latest term is the more elastic "outlier" put in play by an enormous survey seen recently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington that argued for the integration of such work with supposedly "insider" art while also undermining that position since the outlier works often overwhelmed everything else. At this point I think of the words of the little boy refusing to eat his vegetables in the famous New Yorker cartoon: "I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it." Let's just call all of it art and proceed. Let's see the rest of the Met's gift. Let's see Mr. Arnett's foundation, now headed by the experienced museum director, Maxwell Anderson, complete its task. So far it has dispersed around 20 percent of its holdings to seven museums, with the most recent gift 34 works to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond announced this week. By these numbers, another 40 or so museums should benefit. Every thinking American understands the suffering these artists and their ancestors have endured and should grasp the meaning of Dial's poem of a title. History has indeed refused to die, and some of its greatest art is also very much alive. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
SEATTLE Amazon Prime is the kitchen sink of membership programs. The internet retailer keeps cramming new benefits into it music and video streaming, fast shipping and online photo storage. Next up: ridiculously inexpensive halibut steaks from Whole Foods. On Wednesday, the company will unveil the next stage of its step by step makeover of Whole Foods Markets, the grocery chain it acquired last year, with a collection of store discounts aimed at Prime members. Whole Foods customers who are also Prime members will get 10 percent off hundreds of sale items in stores, including tilapia, organic baby kale and chicken breasts. Amazon is rolling out the discounts in Whole Foods stores in Florida on Wednesday and will expand them to across the country starting this summer. It's also offering Prime members much deeper discounts on a handful of items that will change weekly, some of which are eye catching. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Deepika Subbiah and Michael Cicoria prepare to kiss after saying their vows at their outdoor wedding April 18 in Cedar Grove, N.J. Michael Cicoria is not the type to automatically pull out chairs and hold doors. But he will admit that when it comes to chivalry, he has his moments. In the summer of 2013, while he was attending Drexel University, he was at a birthday party off campus in Philadelphia when he saw a fellow student, Deepika Subbiah, struggling to help an intoxicated friend into a taxi. Instead of tucking the friend into the cab himself, then closing the door with a goodbye and good luck wave, he climbed in, too, and traveled along with them. Back on campus, he helped the women up the stairs and into an apartment. Then he disappeared. "Mike was such a gentleman," said Ms. Subbiah, a senior account executive at the Brownstein Group, a Philadelphia advertising and public relations agency. "He barely knew us. I hadn't even asked him for help. And then, after I got my friend settled in her room, I turned around and he was gone. I didn't even have his number to thank him." "I remembered meeting Mike my freshman year for a couple of minutes and being like, He is so cute," said Ms. Subbiah, now 26. In the fall of 2011, Ms. Subbiah and Mr. Cicoria were both active in Drexel's small Greek community. Mr. Cicoria, 30, then a junior studying engineering, was a member of Pi Kappa Alpha. His roommate, Brendan Dodge, was friendly with the women of Phi Sigma Sigma, the sorority Ms. Subbiah was pledging. They met at Mr. Cicoria's apartment when Mr. Dodge hosted several Phi Sig women as a stop on a pledging scavenger hunt. That night, Ms. Subbiah told Mr. Dodge she was attracted to Mr. Cicoria. "But Mike didn't want anything to do with me," she said. It was nothing personal. "I remember meeting her and thinking she was pretty," he said. The problem: He was already in a relationship. Mr. Cicoria, a mechanical engineer at Jacob's Engineering, grew up in Mahopac, N.Y., with his mother, Michelle Palange, a nurse, and a younger sister, Kaitlyn Palange. His parents divorced when he was a toddler. Ms. Palange moved the family to Mahopac from the Bronx for its safe neighborhoods and good public schools. "I started taking engineering classes in 10th grade, and from then on it was engineering or bust," Mr. Cicoria said. He showed similar dedication to a girlfriend he met at Mahopac High School; they maintained in a relationship throughout his first few years at Drexel. At the time of the 2013 cab encounter with Ms. Subbiah, however, he was single. His disappearing act that night wasn't out of disinterest in getting better acquainted with Ms. Subbiah. Instead, "I had gotten them home," he said. "I figured they didn't need me to hang around and impose." A few days later, Ms. Subbiah found him on Facebook Messenger. "I can't remember exactly what I said but I'm willing to bet it was flirty," said Ms. Subbiah. She was born in Canada, where her parents, Usha and Anthony Subbiah, and an older brother, Ranjan Subbiah, moved in 1989 from India so her father could attend an M.B.A. program at St. Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The family moved to Randolph, N.J., when she was 2. There she took up dance and competitive figure skating. She also kept a close eye on fashion; in addition to her work at the Brownstein Group, she maintains an Instagram account focused on Philadelphia fashion. "She was coming to pick me up and she asked me if he wanted to come," Mr. Cicoria said. "I later found out she was asking to be nice, but I'm bad at reading between the lines." That night, they would have their first kiss at Mr. Cicoria's apartment. First, Ms. Subbiah would get some sleep. "This was Mike's first look at who I was as a human," she said. "He had put on the movie 'The Avengers,' and I notoriously fall asleep during every movie." Mr. Cicoria draped a blanket over her until the credits rolled and then kissed her good night. Within weeks, they were seeing each other regularly. But Ms. Subbiah would not consider herself Mr. Cicoria's girlfriend until the end of that year, when Mr. Cicoria, who had moved to the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia after graduating from Drexel, started introducing her that way at a holiday party. "I was definitely excited to hear him calling me his girlfriend," she said. But Ms. Subbiah had jitters before the next party they attended together: a 2014 Memorial Day gathering at the home of his aunt and uncle, Lisa and Tom Resciniti, in Cedar Grove, N.J. "Mike's family is 100 percent Italian, and mine is 100 percent Indian," she said. Regardless, "I threw her right into the craziness," Mr. Cicoria said. They arrived to a backyard scene of about 75 people, both recall, all of them competing for airspace. "It's a loud family," he said. "They're some of the nicest people you'll ever meet, but they're definitely loud." Ms. Subbiah felt relief. "I realized big Italian families are exactly the same as big Indian families," she said. "Everybody is loud, everybody is obsessed with food. I thought, 'OK, I can do this.'" When Ms. Subbiah brought Mr. Cicoria home to meet her parents that August, he also felt he could let his guard down. "The similarities in our cultures were very apparent," he said. Bala Murty, a longtime Subbiah family friend, remembers being impressed by their ease around each other's families so early in their relationship "They were both raised with their own traditions, and they're determined to maintain their own cultures," he said. "But they're progressive. They deeply respect each other's backgrounds." Ms. Subbiah graduated from Drexel in 2015, then moved to Philadelphia's Fairmount neighborhood with roommates to start her marketing career. Mr. Cicoria moved into a house a five minute walk away. After two years of getting to know the neighborhood and getting used to seeing each other after work every day, they rented a house in Fairmount together. Right away, a learning curve presented itself. "D is a very much a neat freak," Mr. Cicoria said. Both agree that he isn't that kind of person. "Mike will do laundry, then dump it on the bed, pick out what he wants and put the clean clothes right back in the hamper," she said. "He lets dirty clothes sit on the floor. I don't know how a human being lives like that." Nevertheless, she ceded laundry duties to him permanently after seeing a mouse in their laundry room in 2018. "I freaked out," she said. "I couldn't handle it. I haven't done laundry since." This continued even after they moved to a new place in Fairmount, where they still live, in 2019. He still washes and dries. She folds. "Now if I even try to do the laundry he stops me and tells me I'm doing it wrong." Domino, a pit bull they adopted in 2017, moved them toward further tidiness compromises. "He drags mud in and he's on the bed half the time," Ms. Subbiah said. "I realized we can't be clean all the time. We met in the middle." By the summer of 2018, their families were asking regularly when they were going to get married. Both felt their relationship was veering in that direction. Ms. Subbiah started looking at rings. She sent Mr. Cicoria a picture of a sapphire ring more periwinkle than deep blue. Mr. Cicoria has always been close with his maternal grandparents. His grandfather, John Bennett, who was more like a father, died of Parkinson's disease in 2014. His grandmother, Grace Bennett, is 89. In December 2018, Ms. Bennett offered him her diamond engagement ring. "I had gone up to visit my mom and my grandmother, and it was one of those times my mom had been yelling at me about taking too long to get engaged," he said. He accepted the ring and had it modified. The original stone, swapped for a pale sapphire, was made into a diamond necklace for his sister. Ms. Subbiah admits she was getting impatient by the time he proposed, on a walk in Longwood Gardens, on Aug. 10, 2019. "There were so many weekends I thought it was going to happen," she said. "We had even figured out that we wanted to get married April 18." This would allow family in India to travel to Philadelphia because the school year there would be finished. Her "yes" in August came with tears. "Mike looked at me like, 'Why are you crying? You knew this was going to happen.'" What they did not know, of course, was that the wedding they began planning for more than 300 guests would be derailed by Covid 19. "We were optimistic for a while," Ms. Subbiah said. But by April 1, it became clear they would need to postpone a big celebration. Marriage, though, was their No. 1 priority. "I had been waiting a long time," Ms. Subbiah said. On April 18, in the Rescinitis' back yard in Cedar Grove, they said their vows before seven family members and scores of Zoom watchers. Ms. Subbiah, holding a white bouquet under an arch woven with white flowers, wore an embroidered pale blue ankle length dress she ordered online from BCBG Maxazria; Mr. Cicoria wore a navy suit by Bonobos with a white pocket square. Mr. Resciniti, ordained through the Universal Life Church, officiated a short ceremony in which he called on both to support each other and accept each other's support. "I promise to listen and learn from you," each repeated before Mr. Resciniti pronounced them husband and wife. As the couple kissed and then raised their arms in celebration, their Zoom friends cheered them with clapping and scrolling congratulatory chat messages and plenty of heart emojis. Homeward Bound Ms. Subbiah and Mr. Cicoria returned home to Philadelphia after the ceremony for a takeout Italian dinner for two, with champagne. "Nothing fancy, but still special," Ms. Subbiah said. First Dance The newlyweds had their first dance in their kitchen to "Perfect," a duet performed by Ed Sheeran and Beyonce. Their pit bull, Domino, was in attendance. More Celebrations The couple plan to have a bigger celebration this fall in Philadelphia, after social distancing restrictions are lifted. Ms. Subbiah expects to wear the white wedding dress she had hoped to be married in this spring, made by her friend Toni Banta. "I can't wait to wear it," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Her head bloodied and bandaged, and her hands caked with chalk, Emily Harrington pulled herself over the last lip of El Capitan and into the clear, still night above Yosemite National Park, 21 hours 13 minutes and 51 seconds after she began her ascent. In her fourth attempt last Wednesday night, Ms. Harrington became the fourth person, and the first woman, to scale El Capitan via the Golden Gate route in under 24 hours by free climbing it pulling herself upward with her hands and feet and using ropes and other gear only as a safety net. El Capitan, known as El Cap, is a 3,000 foot high granite edifice that draws thousands of climbers to Yosemite each year. Climbers typically take around four to six days to reach the top, using a variety of routes. Only a few elite climbers, Ms. Harrington now among them, have done it in less than a day. Ms. Harrington, 34, of Tahoe City, Calif., chose the Golden Gate route, which is divided into 41 pitches, or sections, because she had struggled to complete it in six days when she was first learning to free climb Yosemite's monoliths. During a free climb ascent, a climber goes up one pitch, then stops and is followed by a belayer, a person attached to the other end of the rope. If the climber falls, she returns to the bottom of the pitch and begins again. As Ms. Harrington climbed, she said, she repeated a mantra: "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast." "It was this giant representation of everything I've worked for in climbing boiled down into one day," she said in an interview. "There was a lot going on in my head, but at the same time I had this confidence deep down because I knew that I was more ready than I ever had been in my entire life." Ms. Harrington, who started about 1:30 a.m., completed the first two thirds of the route with Alex Honnold, whose free solo climb of El Cap, without ropes, was chronicled in the documentary film "Free Solo." They were attached by a rope her on top, him at the bottom moving up the wall like a caterpillar. The climb went smoothly until she attempted a difficult pitch in the sun around noon on Wednesday. Her fingers were so slick with sweat that she slipped off, she said, so she rested for 30 minutes and tried again. She slipped off again, this time smacking her head against the wall as she swung on the rope. Suddenly, she said, there was "blood everywhere, spewing out from my head." She flashed back to a brutal fall she suffered last year while attempting the same climb, one that sent her to a hospital. But after checking her vital signs and bandaging her head, she put her hands on the rock once more. "There was part of me that wanted to give up and the other part of me was like, 'You owe it to yourself to try again,'" she said. "Then I just had one of those attempts where it was an out of body experience, like, 'I can't believe I'm still holding on, I can't believe I'm still holding on,' and then I was finished with the pitch." Ms. Harrington, who grew up in Colorado, has been climbing since she was 10. She is a five time sport climbing U.S. national champion and a two time North American champion. She scaled Mount Everest and Mont Blanc in 2012, and Ama Dablam in 2013. Free climbing El Capitan, she said, requires strength, stamina, technical skill and the fitness to endure a day of exertion. It's unclear how many people in total have free climbed El Capitan in under 24 hours, but the American Alpine Club, a climbing organization, estimates that only 15 to 25 climbers have pulled it off. The first to do so was Lynn Hill, whose scaling of El Cap in 1994, following the Nose route, remains one of the most famous ascents in rock climbing. Free climbing El Cap is still very much "a male dominated thing, despite the fact that Lynn was the first to do it," Ms. Harrington said. "I always received so much advice from men, people telling me how I should do things, how I'm doing it wrong, but in the end I just decided to do it anyway despite the fact that a lot of people felt that maybe I couldn't or maybe I didn't belong there." Steph Davis, who in 2004 became the second woman to free climb El Capitan in under a day, using the Freerider route, said Ms. Harrington had achieved something truly remarkable. "El Cap is so big that it becomes a really big effort to free it in a day, and it takes a really big commitment and a skill set beyond just the hard climbing it involves," she said. "I think that's why there's a really big time span between seeing people do it." A little after 10:30 p.m., after hours of uncertainty and mental and physical strain, Ms. Harrington pulled herself onto the ledge at the top, where she and Mr. Ballinger were met by some of her closest friends. They popped a bottle of Champagne and Ms. Harrington called her parents before the group began the two hour descent to El Cap's base. "A lot of times, climbing achievements, you don't have a stadium, you don't have a bunch of people watching on live television," she said. "It was this intimate moment in a really special place." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Lynn Kellogg in about 1968. She had the closest thing to a female lead role in the musical "Hair," and was in the original Broadway cast. Lynn Kellogg Simpers, a singer and actress who, as Lynn Kellogg, played Sheila, a free spirited New York University student protester, in the original 1968 Broadway production of "Hair," died on Thursday in St. Louis. She was 77. The cause was Covid 19, according to Timothy Philen, her publicist. Her husband, John Simpers, said she had been infected at a recent gathering in a large theater in Branson, Mo. Most of the people there were not wearing masks, he said. Ms. Kellogg Simpers had had a non life threatening form of leukemia that compromised her vascular system, he added. She died in a hospital. "Hair," the original counterculture musical created by James Rado and Gerome Ragni, with music by Galt McDermot, ran for more than four years at the Biltmore Theater. It has always been an ensemble show, but Sheila is the closest thing it has to a female lead. Her big Act I ballad, "Easy to Be Hard" "How can people be so heartless? ... Especially people who care about strangers/Who care about evil and social injustice?" comes in response to the casual rudeness of the character Berger (played by Mr. Ragni). Sheila is also one of the lead singers on the show's finale, "Let the Sun Shine In." John Chapman, reviewing the show in The Daily News, did not care for the "tribal love rock" music, but he liked the cast's youthful energy. And he appreciated Sheila. "I did see at least one pretty girl, Lynn Kellogg," he wrote, "and she sang a pretty song called 'I Believe in Love.'" The 1969 Tony Awards seemed to be biased in favor of mainstream Broadway productions, and therefore against "Hair," but the cast's performance of a medley of "Hair" numbers on the awards telecast impressed a lot of people, including the next celebrity to appear onstage, Zero Mostel. Lynn Jean Kellogg was born on April 2, 1943, in Appleton, Wisc., a Fox River Valley city north of Milwaukee. She was one of four children of Harry Burton Kellogg, a chemist, and Maxine (Goeres) Kellogg. Lynn attended the University of Wisconsin but dropped out after one year. She made her television debut on the daytime drama "The Edge of Night" in 1964. She also appeared on episodes of "The Beverly Hillbillies" (as a bird watcher), "It Takes a Thief" and "Mission: Impossible" (as a folk music performer singing Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a Changin'" in an Eastern bloc country). She had a supporting role in Elvis Presley's 1969 western "Charro!" As a singer and guitarist, Ms. Kellogg entertained Vietnam War troops and toured with the folk musician Gordon Lightfoot. But she may be best remembered for her musical appearances on television, like one in July 1969 on "The Johnny Cash Show," in which she wore bell bottoms and center parted hippie hair in singing the nostalgic country song "When Papa Rolled His Own." Later, using her husband's surname in addition to her own, she began developing children's content for television and performing on those shows. "Animals, Animals, Animals" (1976 81), a Sunday morning series starring Hal Linden, won a Peabody Award and a Daytime Emmy for outstanding children's informational series. Ms. Kellogg also worked in Christian programming. In addition to her husband, whom she married in 1995, her survivors include a sister, Ede Kellogg Morris; two brothers, John and Harry Kellogg; a stepson, Justin Simpers; and a grandchild. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Facebook has made splashy announcements over the last four years about building a fleet of solar powered drones, with wingspans bigger than a Boeing 737, beaming internet access to people around the world who can't otherwise get online. (When you have as many users as Facebook, finding new ones requires some ingenuity.) On Wednesday, the ambitious effort was halted. Facebook announced in a blog post that it would no longer build the drones. The company said that it was still committed to the original goal of bringing more people online, but that it would instead rely on other companies to build aircraft. A plant in western England where the planes were being manufactured will be closed. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's co founder and chief executive, had envisioned drones powered by the sun, flying for months without landing, 60,000 feet above far flung areas. The aircraft filled a warehouse, but weighed as much as a grand piano. After a successful test flight in 2016, Mr. Zuckerberg hailed the project as "something that's never been done before." But the drone initiative, Project Aquila, suffered several setbacks. One test flight ended with a crash landing and a broken wing. The initiative fell under the company's Internet.org project to expand internet access in underdeveloped parts of the world, a controversial effort that critics called a ploy by Facebook to get new users. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
"Every major tech company has ramped up its presence here," said David McCabe, a reporter in Washington who covers tech policy. How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? David McCabe, who covers tech policy in Washington, discussed the tech he's using. What tech is most important for doing your job? One element of covering policy is understanding what forces are pushing certain ideas forward in Washington. I often turn to government and private disclosure databases to help answer that question. There's a lot of information a few clicks away: Congress maintains databases of whom companies are paying to lobby on their behalf. The Justice Department tracks which operatives are registered to work for foreign firms. The service Guidestar collects the forms that influential nonprofits file with the I.R.S. describing their finances, and many prominent foundations list their grants online. These records don't tell the full story, but they can be a source of valuable context when you're chasing a tip or trying to understand the landscape around a new issue. I try to speak with sources where they are most comfortable. That can be on the phone, by text or encrypted message, or in person. Twitter's and LinkedIn's direct message features can be great ways to reach out to people. For on the record interviews, I've recently started using the automated transcription app Otter at the recommendation of other reporters. If I'm doing an interview by phone, I use an Olympus earpiece that plugs into my recorder to capture the conversation. How is Silicon Valley having an impact on Washington? Washington has become intertwined with the Valley in lots of different ways. Every major tech company has ramped up its presence here. Small armies of lobbyists work Capitol Hill and a vast swath of the administration to fight attempts to regulate the industry or to shape the rules when they become inevitable. The revolving door between tech and Washington may have lost some of its luster a job at Google or Facebook isn't as shiny as it used to be but it is still functioning just fine. For example, Google just hired the chief of staff to Senator Rob Portman, a Republican from Ohio, to lead its Washington office. How do Washington folks use tech differently, compared with other parts of the country? My unscientific conclusion is that the Washington metro area has the highest per capita concentration of Twitter users whose profile photo is a shot of them appearing on cable news. Some of those people are my friends, and I would like to take this opportunity to urge them to reconsider. How has the tech fluency among lawmakers changed, or not, over time? Many lawmakers have become more fluent in tech or at least more conversant since the infamous Mark Zuckerberg hearings in 2018. There's an understanding that before they became giants, Capitol Hill didn't pay enough attention to the platforms that now account for a large share of the economy. In both the House and the Senate, lawmakers are often asking sharper questions than they used to and doing a better job of diving into the specifics. There's a related issue: For years, "tech policy" largely meant communications policy. It was about regulating the infrastructure that allows us to share information with one another. That has much wider implications than it used to. If you oversee banking, you have to grok Facebook's attempt to build a cryptocurrency. Google's use of patient records is a health policy question as much as it's a tech policy one. I'm interested in how lawmakers and their staff members adapt to this moment, when major tech companies are trying to play in more and more parts of modern life even as they face scrutiny for the business models that made them successful. And what is the tech industry like in Washington? All eyes are on Amazon and, more specifically, on its second headquarters in Northern Virginia. Its arrival has prompted a lot of questions about whether it will trigger even more gentrification in an already gentrifying city. Amazon has been aggressive in building relationships with local educational institutions. In October, its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, visited a class at Dunbar High School in Washington, and the company is counting on local universities to help build the work force for its new offices. The efforts have been met with resistance that is emblematic of the wider reckoning tech faces around its impact on society. Jay Carney, the former White House press secretary who leads Amazon's policy apparatus, visited Trinity Washington University this fall. While he was there, an undocumented student raised concerns about Amazon's work with United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and he was met by anti Amazon activists outside during his visit. Outside of work, what tech are you personally obsessed with? I'm a heavy Spotify user and find that music streaming has broadened my musical horizons. I listen to more artists than I did before and pay more attention to new releases. I am also one of those people who fell hard for AirPods. They look silly, but they work very well. Contrary to my expectations, I haven't lost one of the earbuds yet. That said: Buying the new, pricey AirPods Pro seems like tempting the earbud losing fates. I'm staying away and saving my money. Frankly, I spend more of my personal time trying to disconnect. I delete Twitter from my phone on vacation and on weekends when I'm being especially disciplined. I have been far less successful in cutting down on my Instagram use, but hope springs eternal. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
WASHINGTON Over a frenetic two weeks, as the coronavirus has upended American capitalism and changed every aspect of life, the Federal Reserve has taken drastic steps to keep money flowing throughout the financial system. It has cut interest rates to near zero, introduced a huge bond buying program, revamped a crisis era emergency lending program to calm the market big businesses use to raise cash, and enacted major backstops in an attempt to restore order to Wall Street's volatile inner workings. Late Wednesday evening, the Fed said it would offer emergency loans to money market mutual funds, backed by 10 billion from the Treasury Department, following a similar lending program for banks also established this week. Such efforts could keep credit flowing. But calls abound for the central bank to do even more in the days and weeks ahead. And Fed officials could help get cash to desperate businesses and workers. Already, the central bank is urging the banks it oversees to go easy on their customers, working with them if they fall behind on bills. With backing from the Treasury Department, it could also support lending to companies and households potentially going beyond its 2008 playbook, and pushing the central bank's authority to untested extremes. "The underlying power that the Federal Reserve has is massive," said Peter Conti Brown, a lawyer and leading Fed historian at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "Politically, I think the Fed has so far walked a careful path," he continued, but "that path is getting to the end." As the Fed takes center stage, it assumes a hefty risk. Blurring the lines between fiscal and monetary policy bailing out nonfinancial companies or state and local governments would lead to blowback down the road. More than a decade after the financial crisis, at a time when experts agree that the central bank's 2008 efforts helped prevent the United States from experiencing a second Great Depression, the Fed is still regularly blasted for its efforts to rescue banks. But the coronavirus crisis is fundamentally different. The financial crisis was a growth slowdown that imprudent risk taking magnified into a painful economic shock. This time, a real world shock is instead spilling into the financial system and breaking its gears. "It wasn't bad behavior it's a virus," said Patrick T. Harker, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. "Look at the streets it's affecting every single American immediately. This is just such a different scenario." So far, the Fed has used its firepower to keep loans cheap and prevent the financial system from melting down. That has been a challenge as companies grab for cash and banks and investment funds try to keep money at the ready. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. But as the meltdown enters a new stage closed dentist offices will struggle to make payroll and rent payments, quarantined chefs will fall behind on mortgage payments, and state and local governments will struggle to find the cash to fund relief efforts the Fed could play a more immediate role in bailing out Main Street. At the most extreme, some economists have suggested that the Fed could help send people money. David Beckworth, a senior research fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center, has suggested that Congress should allow the Fed to create a so called standing fiscal facility, which would allow it to deposit funds in the Treasury in exchange for Treasury bonds. The money would then be sent straight to Americans via the Internal Revenue Service, and would continue to be deployed until the economy was growing at a rate the Fed targeted using a monetary policy rule. Such a rules based, Fed supervised approach would be more effective than one run by Congress, Mr. Beckworth said. "You want an institution that is both nimble like the Fed but also careful like the Fed," he said. "The Fed is not out of ammunition," he added, "and this is what it would take to show that." More practically, the Fed could build on is postcrisis playbook. The central bank this week opened the taps on its emergency lending facilities, declaring that the coronavirus was posing "unusual and exigent" circumstances and swooping in to backstop the market for commercial paper, short term notes big businesses use to raise cash, as well as money market funds, vehicles that millions of Americans use to save money. Both programs were also used during the 2008 financial crisis to keep credit flowing. The Fed cannot take on significant credit risk, but the Treasury Department has agreed to take the first 10 billion in losses in the central bank's commercial paper and money fund facilities. Treasury is tapping a fund that has additional money that is not earmarked remaining, creating room for more programs. While it cannot bail out individual companies, the Fed could use that money to get loans into the hands of broad groups of institutions. During the financial crisis, the central bank used several emergency programs to support lending to households and businesses, including one that bought up securities backed by such loans. The Bank of England has a "funding for lending" scheme that provides low cost funding to banks to support small businesses, and the Fed could explore a similar effort. It could also legally buy short term municipal debt to help local governments fund themselves, per the Federal Reserve Act. That would amount to government finance, though, something central banks around the world avoid at all costs because it can require picking favorites and carries immense political downsides. "State and local governments may soon face funding pressures and need assistance as they address this public health emergency," Ms. Waters said in a statement on Monday. "I call on the Fed to re evaluate its response and work creatively to address the needs of everyday Americans." And the central bank could ask Congress to allow it to buy additional securities, like corporate debt, through its mass bond purchases. That could enable it to prop up a flailing market and provide direct support to American companies, but it could also be criticized as a bailout for corporate America. Asking lawmakers to reopen the Federal Reserve Act would invite partisan tinkering in the Fed's structure and threaten its prized independence. Even so, Mr. Bernanke and Ms. Yellen, who led the Fed through the darkest days of the 2008 financial crisis, suggested in an opinion piece published in The Financial Times on Wednesday that such a move might be necessary. "The Fed could ask Congress for the authority to buy limited amounts of investment grade corporate debt," they wrote, because doing so might "help restart that part of the corporate debt market, which is under significant stress." Eric S. Rosengren, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, had already raised such an idea, though Mr. Powell said on Sunday that policymakers had no plans to ask Congress for new buying powers at this point. Mr. Bernanke and Ms. Yellen underlined that the Fed could not solve all of the coronavirus problems in the country, but said it should continue serving as a first line of defense even if that requires going beyond the 2008 programs. "To avoid permanent damage from the virus induced downturn, it is important to ensure that credit is available for otherwise sound borrowers who face a temporary period of low income or revenues," they wrote. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
If the historians of the future try to pinpoint the exact moment when the term "digital fur" became ubiquitous in our culture, they might eventually identify the evening of July 18, when the "Cats" trailer premiered online just as the first public screenings of Disney's "The Lion King" remake were unspooling across the country . Here were two state of the art endeavors, using computer generated fur by all accounts an enormously difficult and time consuming special effects undertaking toward extremely different ends. On one side was a new version of a 1994 animated family classic that had been digitally engineered to look like a real adventure set among real lions in a real, albeit unidentified, stretch of Africa. On the other, a bizarre trailer for a surreal musical, set at night in an imaginary city, featuring real actors and singers and dancers (Taylor Swift! James Corden! Judi Dench!) as cat people traipsing around in human ish bodies covered in seemingly real fur. And while "The Lion King" has become a gargantuan hit, many critics find themselves wondering what's ultimately so special about a movie that tries to weld the original's "Hamlet" by way of "Bambi" melodrama onto something that, after all those effects, looks as if it could just be another wildlife special (though one with a higher budget than the company's own DisneyNature documentary series). "The Lion King" seems diminished when it enters the real world even if that world isn't technically real at all perhaps because it's not actually meant to be a story about lions, but an allegory about people. And brace yourselves "Cats" isn't actually about cats either. The jury is out on how Tom Hooper's completed movie will fare when it opens in December, and how faithful it will be to Andrew Lloyd Webber's lavish, nutty theatrical extravaganza of the 1980s. To its credit, unlike "The Lion King," "Cats" has not tried to make its feline characters in any way realistic. Still, one does wonder what, exactly, they were going for. Watching the clips of these actors covered in photorealistic fur, I can't help thinking that all that effects work has resulted in something not too different from the goofy feline costumes worn by the performers in the recorded version of the stage show broadcast (and later released on home video) in 1998 . To put it another way: Why try so hard to be realistic when, in many cases, fakery is part of the fun? Movies have always had to walk a fine line between the magical and the real. Cinema is built around the suspension of disbelief, but each era seems to have its own idea of what that entails. Once upon a time, special effects were used primarily to astound us with sights we'd never seen before. But in recent years, with our screens increasingly dominated by fantasy epics, sci fi spectacles and superhero antics, the idea of astonishment seems to have gone out the window. We can watch armies of mutants fighting on the outer edges of space with barely a shrug. "I feel like we're in a moment now when there's a loss of wonder," the director Guillermo del Toro, who once owned his own special effects house, told me when I interviewed him last year for an article about the many struggles of the VFX industry. The movies have gone from showing us things we've never seen before and convincing us it's all real to showing us things we have seen before and convincing us it's not real. "The Lion King" becomes, in a way, more impressive when you learn that those lions and hyenas were all created with computers. We admire the effort and the science, and all that they portend, while the sovereign work of art itself becomes a mere distraction in a broader narrative of technological progress. To be sure, hype about special effects and fancy new technology has always been used to sell movies, an art form that itself started, after all, as a fancy new technology. But the carnival barkers of yore promised us wonders we'd never witnessed before, even if they didn't always deliver on that promise. Today's carnival barkers allure us with, well, things we see every day. I'm reminded of all those tech "disrupters" who keep reverse engineering things that already exist. To that end, Hollywood has been hard at work trying to create photorealistic fake actors who will be indistinguishable from real performers. "Digital humans are often thought of as the holy grail," the special effects journalist Ian Failes told me last year. The industry has been laying the groundwork for this with advances in de aging and other developments, giving us younger versions of stars who are now middle aged, old or sometimes even dead. This fall, Will Smith will battle a digitally created, time traveling younger version of himself in Ang Lee's "Gemini Man." The results might be interesting, and the industry will be watching closely. But even if the film succeeds beyond anyone's wildest dreams, what will have been proven? And will the movie be that much more emotionally engaging than Rian Johnson's 2012 hit "Looper," in which a time traveling Bruce Willis battled a younger version of himself, who was simply played by another actor, Joseph Gordon Levitt? Somehow, audiences were able to make the imaginative leap required to accept two very different looking actors as the same person at different stages of his life. Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman" will feature Robert De Niro playing a character at multiple points in his life, with de aging technology used to create a younger version of him. Many of us are understandably excited about De Niro and Scorsese reuniting after nearly 25 years. But it's also worth remembering that in "The Godfather, Part II" (1974), De Niro himself played a young Vito Corleone, a character made popular by Marlon Brando in "The Godfather" just two years earlier. No computers were required, and somehow, audiences managed to not be confused or bothered by De Niro replacing Brando. One might even say they were enchanted: De Niro won a best supporting actor Oscar for his troubles, and his performance has passed into legend. That said, sometimes digital humans can lead to moments of genuine pathos. At the end of "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," many of us were moved by the sight of a young Carrie Fisher, who died a few days after the movie was released in 2016. Maybe it was because the film was ending on a cliffhanger after killing off most of its cast. Maybe it was because the moment evoked memories of the original "Star Wars." Or maybe just maybe it was because, by giving us this image for just a few seconds, the film reminded us of the very passage of time, and of the fact that we can't go back again. For one brief shining second, technology s howed us what wasn't possible. And it was beautiful. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
HIGH FALLS, N.Y. The gas station in this Hudson Valley hamlet sat empty for years, leaching petroleum into the soil and well water. But a renovation that will transform the abandoned station into a yoga studio, wellness center and a charging station for electric cars has turned the eyesore into a symbol of this struggling community's revival. The station's decline mirrors that of many others across the country. Thousands of gas stations have closed in the last two decades, leaving many communities saddled with vacant or abandoned properties. Because gas stations are often built on busy street corners, boarded up stations have marred the entrances to many bustling business districts in American towns and cities. More than 50,000 stations have closed since 1991 when there were nearly 200,000 nationwide, according to the National Association of Convenience Stores. The high cost of oil has made it hard to turn a profit selling gas, pushing station owners into selling snacks and soda at their convenience stores. With big box retailers like Walmart and Costco now in the gas business, attracting customers has become even harder. Simply put, mom and pop stations that once thrived just by selling gas and fixing cars in the repair shop can no longer compete. No numbers are available on how many closed stations remain vacant, but despite problems, the properties can be attractive to developers, especially if they are at desirable intersections. "If you own the real estate, there's no better time to get out everybody wants that convenient location," said Jeff Lenard, a spokesman for the convenience store association. "You could be sitting on a gold mine." But converting these sites can be challenging. They often are on small lots and may be contaminated by petroleum leaking from underground storage tanks, as was the case in High Falls. Petroleum brownfields ground contaminated or thought to be contaminated by fuel make up half of the 450,000 brownfields in the country, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. As gas stations close, towns must grapple with what to do with this land. If fuel has migrated into groundwater or a neighboring lot, costs can balloon. State and federal money available to municipalities to clean abandoned sites is limited. Federal regulations require private owners and operators to clean any spills on their property. Still, some developers are reluctant to buy old stations because of the risk that contamination could be found later and they would be stuck with the cleanup bill. "Gas stations are the gateway to a community," said Robert Colangelo executive director of the National Brownfield Association. "So it's very important to get these things cleaned up." In High Falls, a 300,000 renovation is changing a derelict structure to a colonial style strip of yellow storefronts with white trim that will be completed this summer. Then, charging pumps for electric cars will be installed where two gas pumps once stood. The quick charge pumps will offer free charging to store customers and anyone else. A wind turbine affixed to a 30 foot ledge behind the station and solar panels atop the ledge will generate the electricity. The five service bays have been converted to shops, and the garage doors replaced with storefront windows. The second floor has been turned into 2,200 square feet of office space offering views of the nearby falls. "People who come to a town like this, they're looking for a memory to take home with them," said Mark Robinson, who owns the property with Ronald F. Faia. "I've always loved old gas stations," he added. "It's a view into American history." In a village that once was home to Marc Chagall and the setting for some scenes in "Splendor in the Grass" a former neighborhood blight has become a new downtown center. "It's so nice. It's part of the revitalization of High Falls," said Michael Warren, town supervisor for Marbletown, which encompasses the hamlet. But it is not always easy to persuade developers to invest in a property that may need costly environmental cleanup. The High Falls station cost the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation more than 100,000 to clean up in 2001, seven years before Mr. Robinson bought it. "Whenever you see a for sale sign, it never says 'brownfields for sale,' " Mr. Colangelo said. While rural communities struggle to fill empty stations, New York City has a different problem. Property values are so high that stations are being converted to more profitable uses, like high rise buildings, giving drivers fewer places to fill their tanks. The city had 809 gas stations in 2011, down from 872 in 2006, according to the Department of Consumer Affairs. Of the remaining gas stations, only 44 are in Manhattan. In 2009, Eyal Shuster, a developer, spent 1 million to convert a defunct Long Island City service station into the Breadbox Cafe, which his wife, Tal, manages. A Getty gas station next door, however, is still operating. Mr. Shuster and his development partner, Moshe Mizrahi, hope to eventually build a high rise building above the restaurant and demolish the Getty gas station. On a rainy afternoon in June, the 48 seat restaurant was full of customers. From the street, the boxy single story building still resembles a service station, despite the quirky addition of 1,600 rolling pins on the facade. New garage doors with large glass panes roll back, opening out onto a wooden patio. Inside, zinc countertops and mahogany paneling give the space a modern look. "The main challenge is changing people's perception," said the restaurant's architect, Eran Chen, a principal at ODA Architecture. "How do you create an attractive food space in a place that used to service cars?" While gas stations might be an eyesore in some communities, in others they are treasured slices of Americana. A St. Louis developer met fierce resistance when he considered demolishing a 1968 Phillips 66 station. The building has an enormous flying saucer shaped roof. Although it has not been a gas station since the 1980s its latest incarnation was as a Del Taco restaurant that closed in 2011 residents saw the building as a piece of the city's architectural history. Rather than build anew, the developer Richard K. Yackey will begin a 1 million renovation this month on the property, which has 3,200 square feet of usable space. The roof, which is 12,000 square feet, will cost 100,000 to replace. When construction is complete next year, the station will house a Chipotle restaurant and a Starbucks and have a 1,300 square feet addition. "If you do the math, it doesn't make a lot of sense economically," Mr. Yackey said, adding that constructing a building on the property would have provided him with more space to lease. Because many old gas stations sit on small, three quarter acre lots, they often have to be expanded to be marketable. Buyers of old stations often angle to get the neighboring lot. But that, too, can be fraught with complications. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
WASHINGTON A federal judge in Texas struck down the entire Affordable Care Act on Friday on the grounds that its mandate requiring people to buy health insurance is unconstitutional and the rest of the law cannot stand without it. The ruling was over a lawsuit filed this year by a group of Republican governors and state attorneys general. A group of intervening states led by Democrats promised to appeal the decision, which will most likely not have any immediate effect. But it will almost certainly make its way to the Supreme Court, threatening the survival of the landmark health law and, with it, health coverage for millions of Americans, protections for people with pre existing conditions and much more. In his ruling, Judge Reed O'Connor of the Federal District Court in Fort Worth said that the individual mandate requiring people to have health insurance "can no longer be sustained as an exercise of Congress's tax power." Accordingly, Judge O'Connor, a George W. Bush appointee, said that "the individual mandate is unconstitutional" and the remaining provisions of the Affordable Care Act are invalid. At issue was whether the health law's insurance mandate still compelled people to buy coverage after Congress reduced the penalty to zero dollars as part of the tax overhaul that President Trump signed last December. When the Supreme Court upheld the mandate as constitutional in 2012, it was based on Congress's taxing power. Congress, the court said, could legally impose a tax penalty on people who do not have health insurance. But in the new case, the 20 plaintiff states, led by Texas, argued that with the penalty zeroed out, the individual mandate had become unconstitutional and that the rest of the law could not be severed from it. The Justice Department's response to the case was highly unusual: though it disagreed with the plaintiffs that the entire law should be struck down, it declined this year to defend not just the individual mandate, but the law's provisions that protect people with pre existing conditions. That prompted a coalition of 16 states and the District of Columbia, led by California, to intervene and defend the law. On Friday night, a spokeswoman for Xavier Becerra, the California attorney general, said California and the other defendant states would challenge the ruling with an appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. "Today's ruling is an assault on 133 million Americans with pre existing conditions, on the 20 million Americans who rely on the A.C.A.'s consumer protections for health care, on America's faithful progress toward affordable health care for all Americans," Mr. Becerra said in a statement. "The A.C.A. has already survived more than 70 unsuccessful repeal attempts and withstood scrutiny in the Supreme Court." Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas, who initiated the lawsuit, applauded the decision, saying in a statement, "Today's ruling enjoining Obamacare halts an unconstitutional exertion of federal power over the American health care system." He added, "Our lawsuit seeks to effectively repeal Obamacare, which will give President Trump and Congress the opportunity to replace the failed social experiment with a plan that ensures Texans and all Americans will again have greater choice about what health coverage they need and who will be their doctor." Mr. Trump, who has consistently sought the law's repeal and has weakened it through regulatory changes, posted a response to the ruling on Twitter late Friday night: "As I predicted all along, Obamacare has been struck down as an UNCONSTITUTIONAL disaster! Now Congress must pass a STRONG law that provides GREAT healthcare and protects pre existing conditions." The White House, in a separate statement late Friday, said: "We expect this ruling will be appealed to the Supreme Court. Pending the appeal process, the law remains in place." If Judge O'Connor's decision ultimately stands, about 17 million Americans will lose their health insurance, according to the Urban Institute, a left leaning think tank. That includes millions who gained coverage through the law's expansion of Medicaid, and millions more who receive subsidized private insurance through the law's online marketplaces. Insurers will also no longer have to cover young adults up to age 26 under their parents' plans; annual and lifetime limits on coverage will again be permitted; and there will be no cap on out of pocket costs. Also gone will be the law's popular protections for people with pre existing conditions, which became a major talking point in the November midterm elections, as Democratic candidates constantly reminded voters that congressional Republicans had tried to repeal the law last year. Many Democrats successfully centered their midterm campaigns on protecting the Affordable Care Act's insurance mandates for pre existing conditions. Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, one of the few Democratic senators to save his seat in a heavily Trump friendly state, excoriated his opponent, West Virginia's attorney general, Patrick Morrisey, for joining the lawsuit decided in favor of the Republicans on Friday. Democrats in Wisconsin campaigned on a pledge to withdraw the state from the suit, and after they won, that state's Republican Legislature passed legislation blocking the newly elected Democrats from withdrawing. That legislation was signed into law on Friday by Gov. Scott Walker, who lost his bid for re election in November. But most Republican candidates insisted during the campaign that they did not want to withdraw protections for pre existing conditions, and most were silent after Friday's ruling. Without those protections, insurers could return to denying coverage to such people or to charging them more. They could also return to charging people more based on their age, gender or profession. The Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan research organization, estimates that 52 million adults from 18 to 64, or 27 percent of that population, would be rejected for coverage under the practices that were in effect in most states before the Affordable Care Act. "If this Texas decision on the ACA is upheld, it would throw the individual insurance market and the whole health care system into complete chaos," Larry Levitt, a senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, wrote on Twitter. "But, the case still has a long legal road to travel before that's an immediate threat." Democrats immediately attacked the ruling as absurd. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California said that when the party took control of the House next month, with her as speaker, it would "move swiftly to formally intervene in the appeals process to uphold the lifesaving protections for people with pre existing conditions and reject Republicans' effort to destroy the Affordable Care Act." In his ruling, Judge O'Connor agreed with the plaintiffs that the individual mandate could not be severed from the rest of the Affordable Care Act because it was "the keystone" of the law, essential to its regulation of the health insurance market. "The individual mandate is inseverable from the entire A.C.A.," he declared. The judge said he would not "parse the A.C.A.'s provisions one by one," but had to invalidate the whole law, including the expansion of Medicaid and the requirement for employers to offer coverage to workers. "The Medicaid expansion provisions were designed to serve and assist fulfillment of the individual mandate," he wrote. At oral arguments before Judge O'Connor in September, California and the other intervening states had argued that the mandate could not be unconstitutional if it was not forcing people to pay penalties anymore. But even if Judge O'Connor threw it out, they said, the rest of the law could legally be severed from it and survive. The ruling came a day before the end of the fifth open enrollment season for Affordable Care Act coverage in most states, one in which sign ups for "Obamacare," as the coverage sold through the law's marketplaces is known, have declined so far by about 12 percent compared with last year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
As snow swirled through Manhattan this month, the British designer Tom Dixon found himself in a cozy spot above it all, standing atop a twin size bed with a dozen nervous students at the Parsons School of Design in Greenwich Village. Dressed in a charcoal suit, Mr. Dixon was trying to make a radical point: that Ikea, the Swedish furniture giant known for beds and dressers that are so inexpensive they are often perceived as being disposable, could manufacture a collection of affordable, heirloom quality pieces to last a lifetime. To demonstrate the strength of the bed's extruded aluminum frame, he challenged the students to crush it. They teetered on its metal edges (the mattress was removed) like acrobats on a high wire, until no more people would fit. End result: barely a wiggle. Even more remarkable, the bed has built in channels that allow it to be modified by users and customized with headboards, night stands and other non Ikea add ons. Loosely inspired by D.I.Y. Ikea hacking sites and plug and play app culture, the transformable bed is part of a new Ikea concept called Delaktig, which will be unveiled at the Salone del Mobile design fair in Milan next week. "It's very much something that can mutate according to your changing conditions," said Mr. Dixon, 57, who has a tight mess of curly hair, a polished gold tooth and a pout that conceals a crackling dry wit. "You could put on a lamp, a phone charger, a side table. You could raise or lower it, or put it on wheels. It can easily go from being a student bed to a really posh couch, and then back again when you have kids." The project is Mr. Dixon's moon shot for the future of furniture the latest gamble from a college dropout turned designer who has become one of Britain's foremost tastemakers. Best known for lighting and furniture that flit between the bravely industrial and supremely elegant, including his iconic Screw side tables that resemble oversize automotive jacks and his pillowy Void pendant light that could be mistaken for an Anish Kapoor jelly bean sculpture, Mr. Dixon's creations have typically appealed to a more rarefied and affluent clientele. But in recent years, Mr. Dixon has emerged as a Terence Conran like figure for a new generation, designing interiors for hotels and restaurants like the Mondrian London at Sea Containers; collectible furniture sold at high end design fairs; an ever expanding range of lighting and furniture; stores in London, New York and Los Angeles; and even home accessories like notebooks and scented dish soap. "He's one of the most successful designers in the world today who is actually self trained," said Stefan Lawrence, the founder of Twentieth, an influential Los Angeles store that carries cutting edge contemporary design. "He never had a formal design education, and basically bootstrapped his way to the top." The fashion designer Paul Smith, who is among Mr. Dixon's earliest clients and remains a close friend (he is the godfather of Mr. Dixon's daughter), put it this way: "He understands the use of materials, the process of manufacturing and the importance of thinking about how something will ultimately be used." Mr. Dixon was born in Tunisia, where his father taught English, but was raised mainly in England after his family moved there when he was 4. With little patience for academia, he lasted just six months at the Chelsea College of Arts after high school, and channeled his energy into music. In the early 1980s, he played bass for the band Funkapolitan, which appeared on the BBC show "Top of the Pops," opened for the Clash and recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York. His first flirtations with design came when he and a few partners started the London clubs Language Lab and Titanic, and he would weld sculptures on stage as experimental performance art. A broken arm from a motorcycle accident put an end to his music career, but the welding stuck. "In the club world, I knew lots of people, and they would turn into hairdressers and photographers who would all need a little bit of metal welded," Mr. Dixon said. "It was really through the joy of metalwork and resolving problems that I became a designer." Soon, Giulio Cappellini, the art director of the Italian furniture company Cappellini, heard about the iconoclastic young gun. "A good friend of mine, Franca Sozzani, the former editor of Italian Vogue, told me, 'Oh, there's some interesting artist you should go see the next time you go to London,'" Mr. Cappellini said. "So I went to see Tom and his laboratory, a very dark space where he was doing these strong metal pieces, like a chair on which you cannot sit." Impressed, Mr. Cappellini worked to put a number of Mr. Dixon's designs into production, catapulting the designer's name beyond Britain. Most successful was the S Chair, which is now in the permanent collections of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; the Museum of Modern Art; and the Victoria and Albert Museum. "The S Chair, which is a favorite of our curators, is rethinking a chair form one continuous gesture," said Cara McCarty, the curatorial director of the Cooper Hewitt. "He's not a fussy designer, but he excels in the craft of making beautiful, enduring forms." As his design practice grew, Mr. Dixon remained a maverick in both design and business. "The furniture industry tends to think in a very homogeneous way, with everyone repeating each other," said Todd Bracher, a Brooklyn based designer who worked for Mr. Dixon from 2003 to 2005, just as Mr. Dixon was getting his brand off the ground. "Somehow, Tom was able to cut through all that." The craze for warm metals like brass and copper in lighting can be traced back to Mr. Dixon's fixtures from more than a decade ago, Mr. Bracher said, including his golden Mirror Ball, Copper Shade pendants and brass Beat lamps. "He was zigging while everyone else was zagging," Mr. Bracher said. "He was using gold, brass and copper all these metals that everyone was afraid of at the time. Everyone thought we were crazy." From 1998 to 2008, as head of design and then creative director of Habitat, the European housewares chain started by Mr. Conran, Mr. Dixon spearheaded projects like the VIP (Very Important Products) collection, which introduced collaborations with Daft Punk, Ewan McGregor, Helena Christensen, Manolo Blahnik and Carla Bruni. As the creative director of the Finnish furniture company Artek from 2004 to 2009, Mr. Dixon oversaw the creation of the 2nd Cycle program, which bought back the company's vintage pieces, authenticated them and then resold them as time beaten treasures. As the manufacturer of his own products, he sold a majority of his company to investors (a stake now owned by NEO Investment Partners). "I'm a minority owner in my own name, which is a familiar way of acting in the fashion business, but is most unusual in our game," Mr. Dixon said. He has even given away some of his products, like when he dumped 500 polystyrene chairs in Trafalgar Square during the 2006 London Design Festival in partnership with a packaging association, before copper plating eight of them in a pricey limited edition the next year. Ikea aims to start selling Delaktig next February, and Mr. Dixon hopes it will have a starting price of about 400. Despite its grand ambitions, when Delaktig is shown in Milan next week, it will be only one part of Mr. Dixon's presentation. As a sign of just how big a player he has become, he is creating a multifaceted destination at Teatro Manzoni, a yawning 842 seat theater and galleria of sumptuous 1950 Milanese style. There, Mr. Dixon will offer film screenings, talks and a Johnnie Walker bar, and present his many creations in a series of shops, including a haberdashery with his first collection of pillows and throws, a chandelier store with his latest lighting collection, a perfumery of scented goods for the home and an antiques shop where his now classic designs will mix with other vintage goods. He will also reintroduce a number of his earliest designs for Cappellini under his own brand, including the Pylon chair, a skeletal composition of metal wire inspired by power transmission towers and a new version of the S Chair based on his first prototypes. "I'm doing a prequel," Mr. Dixon said. "It's like 'Star Wars.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
A small landmark of New York City architectural and automotive history disappeared recently, almost without notice. The theatrical auto showroom designed by Frank Lloyd Wright at 430 Park Avenue, at 56th Street, had displayed a number of European brands over the years, notably Mercedes Benz from 1957 to 2012. The space, with a spiral ramp and turntable interior, was designed in 1954 for the pioneering auto importer Max Hoffman. In early April, the Wright interior was demolished by the owners of the building, Midwood Investment and Management and Oestreicher Properties. Debra Pickrel, a preservationist and co author of "Frank Lloyd Wright in New York: The Plaza Years, 1954 1959" (Gibbs Smith, 2007) wrote about the showroom's destruction in Metropolis magazine. Born in Austria, Maximilian Hoffman immigrated to New York with the outbreak of World War II. In 1947, he established a firm to import little known European brands to New York and the West Coast. Hoffman first intended the showroom for Jaguars. Drawings from the Wright archives show a leaping Jaguar sculpture and planters. But by the time the showroom was completed, Jaguar had set up its own sales space. Instead, the Hoffman space was filled with a mix of cars, including Porsches, for which he was the official importer to the United States. The first drawings for the showroom have pedestrians on Park Avenue looking into the space. A rotating turntable held three or four cars; a ramp behind it accommodated one or two more. That spiral anticipated the design of the Guggenheim Museum, which opened in 1959. Frank Lloyd Wright's sketch of the Hoffman automobile showroom at 430 Park Ave. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art Avery Architectural Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York) The showroom was never considered a major work. In 1966, the architecture critic of The New York Times, Ada Louise Huxtable, who died in January, referred to it as "cramped." But it was one of a handful of Wright buildings in the New York area, and its form has a definite place in key themes of Wright's work, according to historians like David G. DeLong, professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Part of Wright's fee for the design work was two Mercedes Benzes, according to Douglas Steiner, who has written extensively about the architect. Wright also designed a house for Hoffman in Rye, N.Y. Almost alone, it seems, Mr. Hoffman saw a market for European luxury models in New York and Beverly Hills. Beginning in the late 1940s, he imported a wide range of brands, including Delahaye and Austin. He was willing to take a chance on the former Third Reich's people's car, the Volkswagen, which eventually became a huge hit. He also offered the Jowett Jupiter, which was not. Hoffman met Ferry Porsche, son of the company's founder, in 1950 and began importing Porsches to New York. He often raced cars himself to publicize the brands. Hoffman was known for coming up with ideas for new models that would sell well in the United States, suggesting the series production of the Mercedes 300SL Gullwing and the Porsche Speedster to their respective manufacturers. In 1958, Mercedes Benz bought out Hoffman and remained in the Park Avenue space, through two renovations, until decamping last year for a larger showroom in a new dealership on Eleventh Avenue. To students of Wright's work, the showroom ramps recall larger designs. One was the never built Gordon Strong Automobile Objective, a mountaintop tower imagined in 1924 for a wealthy client. It was to be a structure where cars would park at the culmination of a scenic drive in Maryland. The other is the Guggenheim Museum, which resembles the Automobile Objective tower flipped on its head. "We have a network of members and professionals who informally monitor Wright buildings in their regions and in the media, and we often learn about situations through these 'Wright watch' participants," she said. "They constitute a kind of early warning system for risks to Wright buildings. We sent a formal request for evaluation to the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in August 2012." According to Matt Chaban of Crain's New York Business, who reported on the events, on March 22 the commission called, and on March 25 sent a letter, informing the building owner that landmarking was under discussion. On March 28, the owner applied to the city Buildings Department, a separate agency, for a demolition permit, which was granted. Demolition took place the next week. "The Landmarks Commission was unaware that the space had been demolished until we had an eyewitness report that the space had been gutted," Ms. Halstead said. Calls and e mails to the owners, Midwood Investment and Management and Oestreicher Properties, and to the building's managers, were not returned. The conservancy's president, Larry Woodin, issued a statement reading in part, "It is very disappointing that the City of New York was not able to move quickly enough to prevent the demolition of this Wright space." Donna Boland, a spokeswoman for Mercedes Benz, said the hope when Mercedes left was that the showroom would be leased to another car company. "We were shocked at the removal," she said, "but had no say in it since we leased the space." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
It's No Secret That Espionage Is This Collector's Passion BOCA RATON, Fla. "There are probably more spies in America now than at any other point in our history," said H. Keith Melton, a longtime historical adviser to the C.I.A. who has spent the past few decades obsessively researching international espionage while amassing a sprawling collection of spyware from all sides, predating and spanning the Cold War. "I preserve and protect; I don't look at things politically." Read about the new K.G.B. Spy Museum in Manhattan. To that end, he's donating the bulk of his collection more than 7,000 items to the International Spy Museum in Washington, where he's on the board. Devices heading to its new 140,000 square foot headquarters include a Nazi Enigma code machine abandoned in France by a German unit fleeing advancing American soldiers, one of whom took it home after the war; a 13 foot long British "Sleeping Beauty" submarine that allowed a single sailor to slip undetected into an enemy harbor; and a British built World War II era cigarette that fires a .22 caliber bullet. Even as thousands of pieces are being donated, however, undercover gear and espionage ephemera fill the guesthouse adjoining the Boca Raton home where Mr. Melton and his wife, Karen, live, making it a de facto private spy museum. "I'm not sure I'd want to sleep under the same roof as some of this stuff," Mrs. Melton said, eyeing a particularly ominous bust of Stalin. Aside from being a prolific author on the clandestine world, Mr. Melton was a technical adviser for the recent 1980s set TV drama "The Americans," lending the show Soviet era hidden cameras and eavesdropping devices. He said veteran agents from the K.G.B. and its successor, the S.V.R., loved the series: "They thought it made them look really good." Their colleagues are apparently still at work here, he added. The same shortwave radio broadcasts used to transmit coded messages to the East Coast "sleeper" agents arrested in 2010 and deported are back on the air, sending fresh codes to presumably a new set of agents. Mr. Melton was never an intelligence agent himself. After graduating from the United States Naval Academy and serving in Vietnam, he became, according to Forbes, one of the largest McDonald's franchise owners in America a career that enabled him to remain above the ideological fray as well as to finance his collecting. Mr. Melton's most prized acquisition took him 40 years to find, the ice ax a Soviet agent used in 1940 to kill the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky as he sat reading inside his Mexico City compound. The ax finally surfaced in 2005: The curator of a Mexican police museum had given it to his daughter, who then stashed it under her bed for 30 years, Mr. Melton said. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. When the ax finally emerged, how did you know it was genuine? KEITH MELTON No. 1, I have a paper trail going back to the Mexican police evidence room since 1946. No. 2, this was a very obscure type of ax made only in 1928. Third and most definitive is the rust pattern on the blade. Photos taken on the evening of the assassination reveal a bloody fingerprint. A friend at the F.B.I. helped confirm every speck of this rust is exactly consistent with the contour of the fingerprint. What was the price? Six figures? You paid seven figures for the ax? MR. MELTON The assassination of Trotsky was the crime of the century! Relative to its time, it exceeded the publicity of the killing of Kennedy. Why was it so important to own the ax? MR. MELTON To relate to history, I need to touch and hold an object. It's one thing to read about it, but I need to hold it. MRS. MELTON Some homes have deer antlers mounted on the wall. Other homes have golf trophies. Sighs good naturedly We have murder weapons. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The revival of "Company" was in previews and 10 days from opening when Broadway shut down. And opening night was meant to be especially special, timed to the 90th birthday of the musical's composer Stephen Sondheim. Soon after, the show's director, Marianne Elliott, returned to her husband and producing partner, Nick Sidi, and their daughter in London, while one of its stars, Patti LuPone, headed to the Connecticut home she shares with her husband, Matthew Johnston, and their son. Prompted by The New York Times, they agreed to share their email exchanges during those first weeks, a conversation that touched on plans for the show and for Elliott Harper, its production company (optimistic); their respective nations' leaders (pessimistic); a former colleague's health (worrisome); and how family, friends and members of the current cast, including Katrina Lenk, were keeping in touch (Zoom parties). An edited selection of their emails follows, with Elliott kicking things off the day after the canceled opening night. It's amazing, isn't it, how one's life is now recalibrated. All things I took for granted are now long lost treasures. I've been clearing everything in this house, ready for God knows what, but it's easier than sitting at a desk and doing concentrated work. I like a pair of yellow rubber gloves, and I love to throw things into the rubbish heap. So there's truly satisfaction of sorts here. And it channels my energies. But it also means I've been going through old drawers of long kept items or piles of faded photos even from my 20s and looking at how young and happy we looked. I had to throw out Eve's school uniform the other day. As she had her last day of school on Friday. She's been there since she was four! I found myself burying my head and sobbing into an old skirt of hers. That uniform that always went missing, nobody liked, was thrown into heaps every day as she entered the house, that never seemed very durable, was usually hitched way too high up her legs, and was far too expensive for its own good. And yet there I was, crying over it as though it was born from my very own limbs. Yesterday was tough, wasn't it? I'm truly not sentimental about shows, and certainly not about opening nights because they are usually so pressurized about other things. But I really, really, and, yes, really missed ours yesterday. It felt like a huge hole. And all that publicity for Sondheim's birthday was wonderful on one level, but kind of bleak on another, because Elliott Harper had been working so hard to make sure we could be open on that very day, with Steve with us all celebrating! However, the sun is shining here in England. So I'm feeling hopeful. Nick and co producer Chris are working like buzzing bees, trying to decipher what is to happen to our work force, our employees, our future shows, most of which are probably going by the wayside. Though we are fighting tooth and nail to keep our staff. The government is offering help, but it's vague how much and when. It's hard not to catastrophize when you hear some of the stories out there. Some being very gloomy about the future of theater at all. But the one thing we all agree on, and that we all KNOW, is that by hook or by crook "Company" is coming back! We need it, we love it, the theater community needs it, and New York needs its story. Theater has always been and will always be vital. We humans are creatures that survive as a togetherness. And we need stories to make sense of things.P I look forward to that moment with all of my being. And I look forward to being in a room with you again Patti, to be sharing a G T and to be screaming with laughter over some silly thing or other. That was quite a missive. You put down the rubber gloves and wrote a monologue! It's so wacky and disjointed and at the same time kind of wonderful to be home with our loved ones and really grasping time. Whoever has the time to really understand time in the fullness of the word? My problem is structure. I want to be very disciplined, but I can't figure out how to structure the time. I'm cleaning house like you, but I do that a lot. I'm the Delete Queen. I actually threw out the elusive, desperately needed mask only a month ago. I have no idea why I had a box of them, but I looked at them and tossed them in the bin. Well done, Patti! Now I go to the market looking like a madwoman with scarves wrapped around my nose and mouth with fogged up glasses. I wonder if we'll come back. The uncertainty is the killer. I went through the polio scare, but there was a plan in place! I can still see the vaccination administered in my arm in the gymnasium of the elementary school. We had to suck on pink sugar cubes or I'm making the whole thing up. I think about you every day. Stay safe, healthy, warm, and know you are LOVED by so many of us. Gosh, it was good to see your face last night. And everyone's. Poignant too, because you all felt so near via Zoom, and yet, you weren't! What a bunch of gorgeous people, our cast of "Company." And how bonded we all seem. Now more than ever. Everyone cheery and happy to be connected again. It was three weeks to the day of our last performance, did you know that? Feels more like three years, doesn't it? But the quirks that everyone displayed in just their little close ups: Jen Simard and her gratefulness, Etai Benson with his dry humor, Matt Doyle recovering from Covid but actually looking more like George Michael every day, Chris Sieber dressed up in his beautiful blazer for our cocktail "party," Chris Fitzgerald with his son's Trump impressions. Amazing. And then there was you, dancing at the jukebox. Oh, and then mooning at us all! Brilliant. Not a dry eye in the house! You were always the very soul of the party and Zoom, I'm so happy to learn, has lessened none of that! By the way, have you got Judy Garland's "Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries" on that old jukebox? I was listening to it this morning (regarding another project I might do when and if I ever get out of this house!), and I thought I'd love to hear you sing it! Go on ... give me a rendition. Your Twitter feed would go mad!! I heard, two days ago, of a good friend of mine in dire straits in a New Jersey hospital. He's been there a few weeks. Still on a ventilator. That made my head spin, and I took myself to bed and started visualizing him well and happy and going for dinner and a good big drink, of course, with me in some packed restaurant in the future. I feel pretty lucky, though. We're safe and together here in the house. My sister had it pretty bad (and did get the test), but she's bounced right back. But I feel sorry for Eve, my teenager, the most. I think she's picking up more than she shows actually. But she mostly doesn't watch the news. Who can blame her? However, she's getting Nick and I doing Tic Tok (I'm too old to know the right blinking spelling) challenges to our neighbors across the road. I'll learn to body pop yet!! I'm trying to run most days, while we're still allowed. And I do a Pilates session and arm exercises (with lots of serious swearing I turn the air blue!) most days too. I tell you, I shall come out of this looking young and beautiful and with incredibly sculpted arms. And watch me wear that opening night dress! Come on! The Zoom cocktail party left me drunk on my ass. Matt said I was shout singing "Blue Moon" in bed. I think it's just the release. Our collective energy shot through those funny little boxes. We are all doing our best to be positive, mentally and emotionally. I think, I hope, we find a way to blow back all the negative energy in the world. This reset is good. It's forcing us to slow down, reflect, look out and see, really see, what's in front of us. I'm continually fascinated with the birds, squirrels and chipmunks at our bird feeder. The birds are singing and nesting, the squirrels are demanding more peanuts. They're so bold as to come to the door, raise up on their hind legs, peer in the glass imploring Farmer Matt to FEED ME! I feel for Eve. For all the youth in the world. What have we left them? I'm trying to remember 16 years old, in my high school on Long Island. There were those of us in the music department in joyous harmony with our teachers, our various choruses, our instruments, our summer band retreat with a high school from another county (a different set of boys in my case ...). We were the outcasts, the oddballs, the bohemians. I'll bet that division still exists. It's prevalent in our society as adults. The arts are superfluous. I am always made to feel like a third class citizen in this country. They are NOT superfluous. They are an inherent human right. Games and storytelling have been our life's force for as long as they've been writing on walls. Eve will have a story to tell, a story she'll tell her children who I hope will have a more peaceful Mother Earth. We must get rid of the current politicians on both sides of the Atlantic. We are stuck with a clown and his clown car of clowns. And while I'm raging, there has to be term limits for Supreme and federal court judges, the generals in the war room and Broadway musicals. That article you sent from the NY Times was amazing: "Come Back, New York, All Is Forgiven." Thank you. It sums up just exactly what I feel about that splendid city. It made me grieve for that beautiful volcano of craziness and brilliance. Well now, what to report in this weird cave of an existence over here? Boris Johnson seems to be out of hospital. But don't ask me who's running the country. Our press conferences sort of lack a leader and a driver. They are dry, boring, staid affairs. And the same things get repeated and repeated: Not enough tests! Not enough protective equipment for our health workers! It kind of drives you mad after a while. My friend who has been on a ventilator for nearly four weeks now is part of a very new drug trial, Pluristem. He's just gone on it, and he's making the news! The new drug is a sort of stem cell therapy. It comes from placentas! Can you believe it? He's doing well! It's literally Day Two on the drug, but he had a few hours yesterday off the ventilator and breathing himself! I'm praying. Every time I go jogging, I fill my lungs as I run, as though I was teaching him how to breathe again. I dunno. Anything. I'm trying anything. Ridiculous, but what can you do? We still watch movies most nights, which is highly educational for all of us! And we look forward to it each day. Although we realized the other night that the dog had pissed on the sofa. It slowly started to seep into Nick's trousers during "What's Eating Gilbert Grape." In the morning I took the cushions outside to properly clean and realized that clearly the dog had been using the sofa as a toilet for some time. It was full of stains! I wonder, if there had been no quarantine, we would have EVER discovered this? So maybe this is a metaphor for unearthing what was always beneath the surface? We'll all emerge from this cleansed and illuminated. Ha! Or I'm just looking for meaning and stories in every little thing? Directing and analyzing the text as ever! I just reread your email. You are eternal sunshine. I'm a black cloud. It's harder and harder to maintain equilibrium. I'm loving "Madame Bovary," but I find my mind scanning, not absorbing, Lydia Davis's beautiful translation (a quarantine gift from my dear friend Jeffrey Lane. When you return you must come to Salon de Jeff. He's a monster cook, and his dinner parties are Bacchanalian events.) I can't watch any more videos, because it's just too late at night, even though it's only 8 p.m. The daytime seems to slip through my fingers, and I've done next to nothing. I don't mean for this to sound like a bitch fest. I think I'm verbalizing my anxiety. I'm sorry. The one great treasure for me is being somewhere to really experience the blossoming of spring. The birds are in full cacophony, occasionally full harmony. The squirrels are demanding and trusting. The bear woke up and destroyed our bird feeder. It's all glorious nature. Virus? What virus? It's Sunday. What will I do? I think I shall drive to Farmer Randy, get the best eggs in the Western Hemisphere and attempt a souffle. I had a moral dilemma. Randy is a BIG TIME Trump supporter. There were signs all over his barn. What to do? Boycott his eggs? I just couldn't. They're too damn delicious. It's time for me to get out of bed. I wake up early, very early. I'll attempt to change my attitude today and make something of myself. But what will it end up being? A restless, unfocused energy? Or maybe a pensive, dreamy organism? Or maybe a housewife dusting? Dear pal o' mine, I wish you sanity, safety, health and peace. I have to tell you that my friend, the one that was on the ventilator for FIVE weeks, has made an amazing recovery. You may know him, Eddie Pierce? He codesigned my set of "Angels in America" on Broadway. Such an amazing guy and so talented. Younger than me and no complicated health circumstances that I know of. Anyway, he'd been through so much in hospital, was sedated most of the time, caught other infections while in hospital, and they even thought at one time that he'd had a stroke! It was not looking good, P. Well, he came home yesterday! His wife sent a video of him leaving the hospital. With all the staff, standing in awe, clapping as he left the front entrance, and his children running to hug him. Then there was another video of his friends welcoming him arriving at the house. It was incredible. They had gathered in their cars, in a nearby parking lot, and then PROCESSED together down his street, honking their horns. They couldn't get out, obviously, so they held out huge, homemade, colored signs to be read as they passed. Some had painted their cars, some had got dressed up in fancy dress, some stood on their car doors. It was like watching a carnival. He'll need a bit of physio, but otherwise he's totally on the mend. Seems like a miracle. Things that you can't believe can ever come about can indeed occur. Keep the faith. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
SAN FRANCISCO Over a cup of tea at a downtown Starbucks, Michael Rubio recalled how four friends became H.I.V. positive through unprotected sex, all within a year. The news shocked Mr. Rubio, a 28 year old gay man, into trying a controversial new form of H.I.V. prevention: a daily pill that studies show is highly effective in protecting people from infection. "With my inner circle so affected in the last year, it was a no brainer to consider this for my life right now," said Mr. Rubio, a front office coordinator at the Positive Resource Center, a social service agency for people with H.I.V. The very existence of that option represents a startling turn in the too long history of the AIDS epidemic. Many health experts hoped that the medication Truvada, a combination of two antiviral drugs that has been used to treat H.I.V. since 2004 would be exuberantly embraced by H.I.V. negative gay men. Instead, Truvada has been slow to catch on as an H.I.V. preventive in the 18 months since the strategy's approval by the Food and Drug Administration. In some quarters, the idea that healthy gay men should take a medication to prevent infection an approach called pre exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP has met with hostility or indifference. "It's gotten tons of attention at H.I.V. meetings as a new tool for prevention, and I consider it an important option for the right person," said Dr. Lisa Capaldini, a primary care doctor here who treats many gay men. "And yet there's been very little interest among my patients. There's a fascinating disconnect." For 30 years, public health officials have aggressively promoted condom use during every sexual encounter as the only effective method, apart from abstinence, for preventing H.I.V. transmission. Still, 50,000 new infections are occurring annually in the United States; sexual transmission between men accounts for more than half of them, and a disproportionate number among African Americans and other minorities. Many experts hailed Truvada as an opportunity to reduce new infections among high risk groups like young gay men, people in relationships with H.I.V. positive partners, and prostitutes. The F.D.A. called for prescriptions to be accompanied by counseling, frequent H.I.V. testing, and continued promotion of safer sex, although research suggests that daily use of the pill alone confers close to full protection. For many gay men, and for some public health officials, the new option has brought both hope and confusion. "We've had several decades of the recommendation to use condoms," said Dr. Kenneth H. Mayer, a professor of medicine at Harvard University and the medical research director at Fenway Health, a community center in Boston with many lesbian and gay patients. "Now we're saying, 'Here's a pill that might protect you if you don't use condoms.' So it's flying in the face of community norms." Certainly, fewer people have tried PrEP than many experts had anticipated. According to an analysis by Gilead Sciences, which makes the drug, data from more than half of retail pharmacies nationwide indicated that 1,774 people filled prescriptions for Truvada for H.I.V. prevention from January 2011 (it could be prescribed off label before the F.D.A. approval) through March 2013. The numbers did not include the thousands already receiving the drug as research participants. Almost half of the prescriptions were for women, a surprise to those who expected gay men to be the early adopters. Dr. Deborah Cohan, an obstetrician and gynecologist at the University of California, San Francisco, has prescribed it to several women with H.I.V. positive partners, including one seeking to get pregnant. "It's beautiful that we have this intervention that works for women who need it," Dr. Cohan said. So why haven't more gay men signed up? Some men have reported receiving negative reactions from their health care providers when they brought it up. Use of the drug as a preventive can be stigmatizing among gay men as well: the term "Truvada whore" has been bandied about on some social networks. And many simply may not know much about the strategy. Gilead has not launched a public campaign to market Truvada for prevention, but has instead sponsored activities by other organizations. Fenway Health, for example, has received Gilead funding for some PrEP related education and research. Potential side effects like kidney damage and a loss of bone density, although rare, are also a concern. And Truvada is expensive: more than 1,000 a month. So far, private and public insurers, including state Medicaid programs, have generally covered the drug for prevention. (Gilead also provides it to some patients who cannot afford it.) But a generational shift in attitudes toward H.I.V. among gay men may also be playing a role, some experts say. With advances in treatment, many younger men who did not experience the worst years of the epidemic are less fearful of the consequences of infection. Moreover, current medications can lower viral levels in H.I.V. positive people to the point where the risk of transmission is negligible, further reducing the perceived need for PrEP among H.I.V. negative partners. Damon Jacobs, a New York psychotherapist, began taking Truvada following the breakup of a long term relationship. "I found that I was no longer as consistent with condom use as I had been in earlier days, and that scared me greatly," said Mr. Jacobs, 42, who maintains a Facebook page promoting PrEP. He said that he has not missed a dose in two years; he also acknowledged that he was now much less likely to use condoms. That sort of acknowledgment makes some health care experts nervous, despite Truvada's efficacy when used daily. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a major H.I.V. services provider based in Los Angeles, lobbied against F.D.A. approval of Truvada for H.I.V. prevention, arguing that men taking the medication would be likelier to pursue riskier sexual practices. Certainly, "condom fatigue" among gay men is real. The proportion who reported unprotected anal sex in the previous year rose to 57 percent in 2011 from 48 percent in 2005, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But a recent study found that men in a large clinical trial who believed they were taking Truvada rather than placebo did not increase their risky behavior. For his part, Mr. Rubio, the San Francisco coordinator, said he remained "adamant" about using condoms. "For me, this is a whole other layer of protection," he said. Adherence to the drug regimen is another thorny issue. The major trial that confirmed Truvada as an effective H.I.V. preventive among men who have sex with men, also found that many participants did not take the pill every day, leaving them more vulnerable to infection. Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, warned that drug adherence will continue to be a problem, likely leading to more infections and the emergence of drug resistant H.I.V. strains. "If you don't take the medication every day and you don't use condoms, and you're highly sexually active, you're going to get infected," Mr. Weinstein said. Advocates for PrEP argue, without substantial evidence to date, that people now taking and starting Truvada for prevention may be more likely to follow instructions because they know that it works, unlike participants in the early clinical trials. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
MANILA It was a balmy evening in Hanover Park, Ill., and I was so giddy with excitement I couldn't sleep. It was one of the biggest nights of the year: Bigger than the Oscars, bigger than the Super Bowl. It was the night they crowned Miss Universe 1973. I have been obsessed with beauty pageants since I was 6 years old and watched Miss Philippines win the crown. For me, they are the entertainment and glamour equivalent of the United Nations. Every country is equal, and every country is celebrated. So when I was invited, 44 years later and as the editorial director of Paper magazine, to be a judge at the 65th Miss Universe pageant in Manila (the country was hosting the pageant for the third time, having also welcomed the event in 1974 and 1994), I not only was deliriously excited, but also felt I had finally arrived. Perhaps as a result, I overpacked my suitcase was crammed with Lanvin, Ashish and L'Wren Scott sparkle tops, an Ashish black sequined track suit and a J Crew classic tuxedo in case I had to be mildly dignified but I felt I needed options. I arrived at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, which somehow reminded me of San Diego, on Jan. 28. Waiting was a luxury coach emblazoned with the Miss Universe logo and the words "Confidently Beautiful" that would ferry me to the Mall of Asia Arena, where I was coached in operating the electronic voting machine along with the rest of the judging panel: Cynthia Bailey, model turned Real Housewife of Atlanta; Francine LeFrak, a film and theater producer with a jewelry company called Same Sky that employs women artisans around the world; and three former Miss Universe winners. Sushmita Sen of India, with thick, black hair and a movie star smile, was there; so was Dayanara Torres of Puerto Rico and Leila Lopes of Angola. If this were sports it would be like judging with Peyton Manning, LeBron James and Tiger Woods. Everywhere we went mobs of fans screamed and hysterically begged for selfies. The Filipinos are considered some of the most die hard, hard core pageant addicts in the world. They turn out in droves when contestants make appearances, and often dress up in their own homemade crowns and sashes. But Miss Universe is a global phenomenon. Many of India's biggest female superstars, for example, started as pageant winners. After it was announced I was going to be a judge, my Instagram feed was flooded with comments and direct messages from all over the world. I had hundreds of messages clamoring that I vote for Miss Colombia, or beseeching me to show love for Venezuela, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Curacao and Sierra Leone. Photos were sent to my Facebook inbox purporting to reveal the true look of two South American contestants before extensive cosmetic surgery. I even received messages on Grindr, the gay dating app, asking if I had met the contestants yet and who my favorites were. As I sat perched at my judges podium, nibbling on a breath mint that had kindly been provided along with tissues, water, dental floss and a pen, I looked around at crowd. There were fans from all over the world cheering for their hometown girls. I saw flags and signs for Brazil, Israel, Mexico and Thailand. There were casually dressed older adults, and young gay men and girls in party looks singing along to Boyz II Men, which serenaded the three finalists on their last strut across the stage. And, of course, there were women of all ages decked out in sequined gowns, some chic, some truly over the top, and all fabulous. As for the judges, we had all gotten the (unwritten) memo to wear sparkle. Ms. Sen was in a gold gown, Ms. Lopes in silver, Ms. Bailey in a purple encrusted with beige, Ms. LeFrak in navy and Ms. Torres in a strapless and backless pink feathered number. I chose my black Ashish sparkle track suit and sequined leopard top, and fit right in. Miss Colombia, who reminded me of Jessica Alba complete with big dark eyes and knockout figure, was the favorite going in because last year (as anyone who's ever on social media may remember), the host Steve Harvey mistakenly announced Miss Colombia as the winner before realizing she was actually the first runner up. Miss Philippines was, in fact, the Queen. This year's representative from Colombia made it to the final three along with Miss Haiti and Miss France, all in form fitting gold sequined gowns. But in the end, the winner was Miss France, a dental student named Iris Mittenaere who told Mr. Harvey she makes the best boeuf bourguignon (Mr. Harvey said his wife wouldn't let him come over to taste it). It was the question and answer portion that put her over the top. While the other contestants didn't seem to actually answer the question about a mistake they had made in life and what they had learned from it, she was poised and well spoken. Her response: Even though she thought she had failed her first year of medical school, she got her books and kept studying. The crowd exploded with excitement when the crown was placed on her head. I'm a feminist, and I know that pageants can be seen as a sexist relic of bygone days. But I could see these women's joy and satisfaction at being given a global platform to show off not only their legs but also their intelligence and accomplishments. The fact is, after "Brexit," the chaos of the Trump administration's first week, and global discussions of walls and isolationism, the Miss Universe 2017 pageant felt uplifting and empowering place by contrast. I can't think of any other experience where I've felt that inspired while being that overdressed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
DOLLY PARTON: 50 YEARS AT THE OPRY 9 p.m. on NBC. The newly crowned millennial queen, Dolly Parton, is currently enjoying a renaissance of sorts as the subject of a popular podcast and a Netflix anthology series. But this two hour special celebrates Parton's legacy as a performer. At age 73, she is celebrating 50 years as a member of the Grand Ole Opry, even though her first performance on the storied Nashville stage was at age 13, following an introduction from Johnny Cash. The special will feature performances from Parton and other country music artists like Emmylou Harris, Dierks Bentley and Toby Keith, as well as new interviews about the star's life and career. LINDSEY VONN: THE FINAL SEASON 10 p.m. on HBO. One of the most difficult decisions many Olympic athletes are forced to make at some point in their careers is when to stop competing. This documentary takes viewers inside that emotional process for Lindsey Vonn, a top female skier, who decided to retire at the age of 34 this year. The directors Steve and Todd Jones capture the moments leading up to Vonn's final World Championship appearance, and retrace the triumphs and setbacks the four time Olympic gold medalist encountered throughout her career. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
WASHINGTON The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, warned Congressional Republicans on Thursday not to "play around with" a coming vote to raise the government's legal borrowing limit or use it as a bargaining chip for spending cuts. In remarks after a luncheon speech here, Mr. Bernanke sided with the Obama administration in the fight over the debt ceiling, which the government is on course to hit in April or May, saying it should be raised without conditions. Some Republicans have insisted on immediate spending cuts in exchange for raising the limit. It was the first time that Mr. Bernanke, who in contrast to his predecessors has avoided taking sides in partisan debates on fiscal matters, had spoken out on the debt ceiling issue. His willingness to do so suggested a desire by the central bank to prevent Washington lawmakers from toying with bond markets that have been volatile since the European debt crisis last year. House Republicans have vowed to make deep spending cuts a precondition for voting to lift the 14.3 trillion debt ceiling. The White House has described raising the ceiling as nonnegotiable, saying that spending cuts and tax increases should be considered separately. The increasingly tense debate has left Republican leaders, like the new House speaker, John A. Boehner, in a politically delicate spot. Though he called on Congress and Mr. Obama to confront "daunting fiscal challenges," Mr. Bernanke said the debt ceiling should not be used as a negotiating tactic, warning that even the possibility of the United States not being able to pay its creditors could create panic in the debt markets. "I think this is very remote, but it's not something you want to play around with the United States would be forced into a position of defaulting on its debt," Mr. Bernanke said. "And the implications of that for our financial system, for our fiscal policy, for our economy would be catastrophic." He added: "So I would very much urge Congress not to focus on the debt limit as being the bargaining chip in this discussion, but rather to address directly the spending and tax issues that we all have to deal with if we're going to make progress on this fiscal situation." Mr. Bernanke's remarks, which were made in response to questions at a luncheon at the National Press Club, underscored once again his delicate position as a moderate Republican economics professor who was appointed by President George W. Bush but won a second term last year with support from Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats. Mr. Bernanke also expressed urgency about fiscal reform, in terms of deficit spending, saying, "There is only so far that we can kick the can down the road." He said, "We have to address this. And the sooner we do it, the less painful it will be and the better it will be for our economy." In his prepared speech, Mr. Bernanke said the United States could not rely on economic growth to solve its long term fiscal problems, emphasizing that the country would have to cut spending, raise taxes or both. But as before, Mr. Bernanke declined to specify how the deficit about 9 percent of the nation's gross domestic product each of the last two years should be reduced. He did, however, say that plans offered recently by a presidentially appointed fiscal commission and by other prominent groups "provide useful starting points for a much needed national conversation." Those plans have called for revising entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security and increasing tax revenue, though they differ on many specifics. Mr. Bernanke's increasingly urgent warnings about the deficit have been welcomed by Republicans, but on Thursday he also indicated support for Mr. Obama's position that the debate over fiscal policy should take into account the need to improve the nation's economic competitiveness. Mr. Bernanke said that tax and spending changes should "serve not only to reduce the deficit, but also to enhance the long term growth potential of our economy for example, by reducing disincentives to work and to save, by encouraging investment in the skills of our work force as well as in new machinery and equipment, by promoting research and development, and by providing necessary public infrastructure." Mr. Bernanke also reiterated his defense of the Fed's plan to lower long term interest rates by buying 600 billion in Treasury securities. He called the bond buying plan, which began in November and is to last through June, an appropriate response to high unemployment and low inflation. Since August, when the Fed first signaled it was considering the strategy, Mr. Bernanke said, stock prices have "risen significantly," inflation expectations have remained fairly steady, and interest rates on corporate bonds have fallen relative to yields on comparable Treasury securities, suggesting that investors are more confident about the outlook for businesses and less worried about the risk of defaults. Critics say the effort popularly known as QE2 because it is the second round of the bond buying strategy known as quantitative easing could touch off future inflation in the United States and abroad, devalue the dollar and increase the cost of food, energy and other commodities in the developing world. Mr. Bernanke said the United States was not to blame for inflation in emerging economies, which have been growing at a much faster rate than the rich economies of Western Europe, North America and Japan. The inflationary pressures, Mr. Bernanke said, arise from long term trends like the tendency of consumers to eat better as they move up from poverty, which tends to push up food prices and suggest that some economies are pushing the limits of their capacity for growth. He said that "emerging markets have all the tools they need to address excess demand in those countries," and added, "They can adjust their exchange rates, which is something that they've been reluctant to do in some cases." That was a clear reference to China, which has managed the value of its currency, the renminbi, in relation to the dollar. On the eve of new unemployment figures for January that the Labor Department will report Friday, Mr. Bernanke predicted that "we'll start seeing some stronger payroll reports and some lower unemployment rates pretty soon," but cautioned that it would take years for the job market to return to normal. He said that uncertainty about the recovery's durability was hampering firms from hiring. "Firms have been using a lot of temporary workers, because they can bring temporary workers on and if the economy weakens again, they can let them go," he said. "It'll be a really good sign when we see those temporary jobs being converted into permanent jobs." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom. Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democrats' presumptive nominee for president, has forcefully denied allegations of sexual harassment and assault made against him by Tara Reade, a former staff assistant in his Senate office. "They aren't true," Mr. Biden said in a statement on Friday. "This never happened." Ms. Reade's accusations, which have been percolating for several weeks, are grave and graphic. She charges that, in the spring of 1993, Mr. Biden cornered her in a deserted hallway of the Capitol complex, pinned her against a wall, reached under her skirt and penetrated her with his fingers. Ms. Reade's brother and multiple friends have said that she told them of the incident around the time it occurred. Some bits of evidence lend credence to her claim, even as others prompt skepticism. When Ms. Reade's brother, Collin Moulton, first spoke to The Washington Post about his sister's accusations, for instance, he mentioned only that she talked about Mr. Biden touching her neck and shoulders; several days later, Mr. Moulton texted The Post to say that he also recalled her sharing that Mr. Biden had put his hand "under her clothes." As is so often the case in such situations, it is all but impossible to be certain of the truth. But the stakes are too high to let the matter fester or leave it to be investigated by and adjudicated in the media. Mr. Biden is seeking the nation's highest office. In 2018, this board advocated strongly for a vigorous inquiry into accusations of sexual misconduct raised against Brett Kavanaugh when he was nominated to a seat on the Supreme Court. Mr. Biden's pursuit of the presidency requires no less. His campaign, and his party, have a duty to assure the public that the accusations are being taken seriously. The Democratic National Committee should move to investigate the matter swiftly and thoroughly, with the full cooperation of the Biden campaign. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." Ms. Reade's account has some apparent inconsistencies. Last year, she was one of several women who came forward with complaints of Mr. Biden hugging or touching them in ways that made them uncomfortable, but she did not raise the assault accusation until this March. She says she tried to share her story with the media earlier, only to get "shut down." Members of Mr. Biden's staff from that period have denied that Ms. Reade expressed any complaints about Mr. Biden, and they reject the idea that the office tolerated any harassment. Ms. Reade says that she filed a formal harassment complaint with a congressional personnel office in 1993. (She says the report did not mention the assault.) Although she kept some of her employment records from that time, she says she does not have a copy of that complaint. In his statement, Mr. Biden said that if such a document existed, there would be a copy of it in the National Archives, which retains records from what was then the Office of Fair Employment Practices. He called on the archives "to identify any record of the complaint she alleges she filed and make available to the press any such document." Later on Friday, after the National Archives said it did not have personnel documents, Mr. Biden asked the secretary of the Senate to direct a more extensive search, also asking for "any and all other documents in the records that relate to the allegation." This is a start, but it does not go far enough. Any serious inquiry must include the trove of records from Mr. Biden's Senate career that he donated to the University of Delaware in 2012. Currently, those files are set to remain sealed until after Mr. Biden retires from public life a common arrangement. There are growing calls for Mr. Biden to make those records available to see if they contain any mention of Ms. Reade or perhaps others who raised similar complaints about his behavior. In a Friday interview on MSNBC, Mr. Biden resisted these calls, insisting that his Senate papers do not contain any personnel files and so could not possibly shed light on Ms. Reade's allegations. He added that they do, however, contain sensitive information about his past work that could be unfairly exploited in a presidential campaign. While understandable, this concern is not prohibitive and Mr. Biden's word is insufficient to dispel the cloud. Any inventory should be strictly limited to information about Ms. Reade and conducted by an unbiased, apolitical panel, put together by the D.N.C. and chosen to foster as much trust in its findings as possible. Admittedly, this would be a major undertaking. Mr. Biden served 36 years in the Senate. He turned over nearly 2,000 boxes and more than 400 gigabytes of data to the University of Delaware; most of it has not been cataloged. But the question at hand is no less than Mr. Biden's fitness for the presidency. No relevant memo should be left unexamined. It has been noted that President Trump has been accused of sexual harassment or assault by more than a dozen women. Those claims also should be investigated, and the Republicans concerned about Mr. Biden's behavior now should be at least equally focused on the questions about Mr. Trump's. For his part, Mr. Trump does not seriously address the claims against him; he simply denies them and attacks his accusers. Mr. Biden has set higher standards for himself. That has been central to his appeal. His campaign is founded on the promise of restoring sanity, civility and decency to the presidency. Even if certainty isn't possible in this matter, the American people deserve at least the confidence that he, and the Democratic Party, have made every effort to bring the truth to light. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
For Abar, the answer is yes for reasons the episode isn't persuasive enough in articulating, but her goals as a justice seeker can only be helped by the most powerful being the world has ever known. Besides, the show has invented a doohickey that makes it possible for Dr. Manhattan to exist as Calvin, a stable and supportive husband and father with no memory of his life as Jon Osterman, who can live out those 10 years as something close to a human being. And through this "tunnel of love" they go, perhaps without regret at the end of it. Using the meet weird between Dr. Manhattan and Abar as the structural anchor for the episode provides for a fine union of form and content. He can stay in one place and know that she is going tell him in 20 minutes about the anniversary of her parents' death, or cite the moment from a decade later will make him fall in love with her. Yet their experiences of time create a strange discord between them: He can see enough of their future together to love her before she can even start to get to know him. Bachelors can't usually come on this strong at a bar and hope to succeed, but then again, never has a parlor trick been this dazzling. He ended the Vietnam War single handedly. He can pull this off. The warmth that develops between Dr. Manhattan as Calvin and Abar stands in sharp contrast with the vibe between Dr. Manhattan and Adrian Veidt, perhaps because both men are wrapped up in bigger plans. They have a chilly relationship in the book, to put it mildly, but their actions are also by far the most consequential for humanity. Veidt's strange activities in "Watchmen" have been frustratingly removed from the rest of the show all season long, but at least this episode attempts to reel him in a bit. As it turns out, Dr. Manhattan hasn't been exiled on Mars this whole time; he's been busy creating a verdant new Garden of Eden on Europa, the smallest of the four Galilean moons orbiting Jupiter, and appointing his own Adam and Eve. While it's a relief to get some basic answers about Veidt's situation we know where he is now, and we know how his oft replicated servants were created his subplot continues to feel as distant from the rest of "Watchmen" as Europa does from planet Earth. The contrast between Dr. Manhattan as Calvin and Veidt in this episode makes the problem worse: Calvin is an attempt by an exiled superman to rediscover his inner Jon Osterman and turn himself into someone who can live like an actual human. That allows him to be the man who's capable, years later by mortal chronology, of being moved by his wife's refusal to accept the inevitability of defeat without fighting back. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
How much of "The Music of Silence" is true and how much fiction, only its inspiration, the singer Andrea Bocelli, knows for sure. Adapted from Mr. Bocelli's 1999 novel of the same name (a story he has described as "similar to" his own life), this blah trudge from cradle to stage will be catnip to his fans and Ambien to everyone else. Directed by Michael Radford (no stranger to corny, middle of the road snoozers) with more attention to chronology than creativity, the story dallies so long in its hero's leafy Tuscan childhood that we're more than halfway through before anything resembling a singing career materializes. Before then, we learn about the glaucoma that rendered him virtually blind, the soccer accident that exacerbated the condition and the love of music set aside in favor of a law degree. Around him, primarily Italian actors gamely wrestle with thickly accented English dialogue, most of it hagiographic and all of it dull. The object of their admiration, meanwhile here called Amos Bardi and played as an adult by Toby Sebastian is a singularly bland talent, a mopey presence in cardigans and corduroy. Yet my sympathies are all with Mr. Sebastian: It can't be easy to create a dynamic character when you're unable to fully open your eyes. The filmmakers have no such excuse. Not until Antonio Banderas arrives to play Maestro, the crucial voice coach who knocks Amos into shape, does this metronomic slog to stardom muster a pulse. He's too late to save the movie, but he's just in time to stop us from nodding off altogether. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
WRESTLING WITH THE DEVIL A Prison Memoir By Ngugi wa Thiong'o 248 pp. The New Press. 25.99. On an afternoon in late December 1977, the Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o innocently drove by the walls of Kamiti, a high security prison on the outskirts of Nairobi. He had a sense of foreboding, though he could not know that the following week he would be arrested by security forces and spend almost a whole year in that very penitentiary. During those endless days and nights, everything was done to break his will: solitary confinement, pressure to confess by cruel supervisors and the humiliation of being manacled while receiving medical attention. The story of how he survived that ordeal with "the cunning instinct of the hunted," first published in 1982 under the title "Detained," has now been revised by the author and reissued as "Wrestling With the Devil." A welcome addition to the vast literature produced by jailed writers across the centuries (Boethius, Cervantes, Gramsci, Soyinka, Solzhenitsyn, Peltier), this book has several traits that make it special. Ngugi does not wish to enthrone his experience as unique. Instead, he sees his detention as a mere link in a chain of previous internments dating back to the British occupation of Kenya and continuing under the corrupt post independence regime. A third of the book therefore describes, not his own daily ritual of endurance, as most memoirs of this sort do, but a history of repression and resistance in his homeland, strewn with exhortations to liberate Africa from foreign domination. This formulaic repetition of revolutionary rhetoric a bit wearisome even to this sympathetic reader has, admittedly, an organic function. Ngugi is affording us a glimpse into how a prisoner of conscience, by stubbornly reiterating his convictions, keeps faith with the ideals that those in power want him to betray. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
While it might feel as if the coronavirus crisis is over, it's not. The virus is still out there. But some things have changed. To start, lockdowns are ending because cases are low or falling in some areas or because state leaders have decided to move ahead despite the risk. Testing has increased, giving us more indicators of community health. Plus we know a lot more about how the virus behaves and what activities pose the highest risk. And because life on permanent lockdown isn't sustainable, public health experts are beginning to embrace a "harm reduction" approach, giving people alternatives to strict quarantine. These options like forming a "bubble" with another household or moving social activities outdoors don't eliminate risk, but they minimize it as people try to return to daily life. Nobody knows exactly what will happen as communities open up. The most likely scenario is that virus cases will continue to surge and fall around the globe for the foreseeable future. "It's hard to imagine how we will avoid another surge in infections, which is why these harm reduction approaches that keep people away from much higher risk situations are so important," said Julia Marcus, an infectious disease epidemiologist and assistant professor in the department of population medicine at Harvard Medical School. "If someone expanding their bubble keeps them from having crowded dinner parties or going to bars, then that is a success." While we've learned to live with masks and social distancing, as well as new rituals of hand washing after handling packages and touching surfaces, we need some basic rules to minimize risk and still have a life going forward. We've consulted with several public health experts and scientists to give you the tools you need to make your own decisions, whether it's dining at a restaurant, going to church or simply getting a haircut. 1. Check the health of your state and community To gauge your risk of coming into contact with an infected person, pay attention to two important indicators of Covid 19 in your area: the percentage of tests that are positive, and the trend in overall case rates. Start by learning the percentage of positive Covid 19 tests in your state, which tells you if testing and contact tracing are finding mild and asymptomatic cases. When positive test rates stay at 5 percent or lower for two weeks, that suggests there's adequate testing in your state to get virus transmission under control, and you're less likely to cross paths with the virus. The closer the number is to 2 percent, the better. "It doesn't mean you have total freedom," warns Erin Bromage, a comparative immunologist and biology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. "It means there's enough testing going on there that you can feel confident that your interactions in society are going to be of much lower risk." If the percentage of positive tests starts to rise, you should take more precautions. To find out whether your state is meeting the testing criteria, go to your state health department website. Or you can use this chart from Johns Hopkins University The website Covid Act Now allows you to see positive test rates by county. 2. Limit the number of your close contacts You're safest with members of your household, but if you want to widen your circle to extended family or friends, keep the number of close contacts as low and as consistent as possible. One way to do this is to form a "corona bubble," which happens when two households form an exclusive social circle, agreeing on safety guidelines and to see only each other. The arrangement allows people to visit each other's homes and lead a somewhat normal, if limited, social life. It may be particularly helpful for families with similar structures such as those with young children longing for playmates or teenagers seeking in person contact. The arrangement requires a high level of trust. How does each family define reasonable precautions? Count the number of potential "leaks" for each member of the bubble such as trips to the store or office, play dates, children and teens who see friends, or housekeepers and nannies who may visit multiple homes. The U.S. Army secretary to National Guard members who resist the vaccines: Prepare for discipline. Greece, like some other E.U. nations facing case surges, adds restrictions for the unvaccinated. Keep communication open and without judgment, so people feel comfortable disclosing new exposure risks and potential "leaks" in the bubble. "People's activities are going to change every day schools may reopen, someone may decide to go to protest," said Dr. Marcus. "This is not just a one time agreement. The communication about risk needs to be ongoing and open." Risk is cumulative. Going forward, you'll need to make trade offs, choosing activities that are most important to you (like seeing an aging parent) and skipping things that might matter less (an office going away party). Think about managing virus risk just as you might manage a diet: If you want dessert, eat a little less for dinner. During a pandemic, every member of the household should manage their own exposure budget. (Think Weight Watchers points for virus risk.) You spend very few budget points for low risk choices like a once a week grocery trip or exercising outdoors. You spend more budget points when you attend an indoor dinner party, get a haircut or go to the office. You blow your budget completely if you spend time in a crowd. "Moving into a long term management phase, we have to start thinking like this," says Johannes Eichstaedt, a computational social scientist and psychology professor at Stanford University. "Don't take risks where it's not needed, and make trade offs that are congruent with your larger health needs and priorities. If seeing my grandchild in the park means, to balance this, I can only go to the supermarket every other week, maybe that's a trade off I'm willing to make for my mental health and well being." Unfortunately, there's no magic number to determine your personal exposure budget and the exposure "costs" of different actions. But think about your overall exposure budget when you make decisions to spend time with other people, particularly older people and those with high risk conditions. 4. Keep higher risk activities as short as possible Every time you make plans, ask yourself, "If an infected person happens to be nearby, how much time could I be spending with them?" It takes an extended period of close contact with an infected person, or extended time in a poorly ventilated room with an infected person, to have a substantial risk of catching the virus through the air, said Linsey Marr, an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech. When making decisions, keep indoor events brief and move social events outdoors. Wear a mask and practice social distancing. Here's some guidance about time of exposure. Brief exposure: Brief encounters, particularly those outside like passing someone on the sidewalk or a runner who huffs and puffs past your picnic are unlikely to make you sick. Face to face contact: Wear a mask, and keep close conversations short. We don't know the level of exposure required to make you sick, but estimates range from a few hundred to 1,000 copies of the virus. In theory, you might reach the higher estimate after just five minutes of close conversation, given that a person might expel 200 viral particles a minute through speech. When health officials perform contact tracing, they typically look for people with whom you've spent at least 15 minutes in close contact. Indoor exposure: In an enclosed space, like an office, at a birthday party, in a restaurant or in a church, you can still become infected from a person across the room if you share the same air for an extended period of time. There's no proven time limit that is safest, but based on contact tracing guidelines and the average rate at which we expel viral particles through breathing, speaking and coughing it's best to keep indoor activities, like shopping or haircuts, to less than an hour. Even shorter is better. As you make decisions, Dr. Bromage suggests you consider the volume of air space (open space is safer than a small meeting room), the number of people in the space (fewer is better) and how much time everyone is together (keep it brief). To learn more about timing and risk, read Dr. Bromage's blog post on the topic, which has been viewed more than 18 million times. Already some people in many communities have stopped wearing masks, suspended social distancing and returned to their pre pandemic socializing. Time will tell if case counts start to rise as a result, but in the coming months you would be wise to adopt the following habits. None Keep a mask handy. Wear a mask in enclosed spaces, when you shop or go to the office and anytime you are in close contact with people outside your household. None Practice social distancing staying six feet apart when you are with people who live outside your household. Keep social activities outdoors. None Wash hands frequently, and be mindful about touching public surfaces (elevator buttons, hand rails, subway poles, and other high touch areas) None Adopt stricter quarantine practices if you or someone in your circle is at higher risk. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Credit...Ryan Shorosky for The New York Times WOODSIDE, Calif. She's been performing for six decades and until this month hadn't released a new album since 2008, but Joan Baez has been picking up momentum. Taylor Swift brought her onstage, and Lana Del Rey said "Lust for Life," her most recent album, had "early Joan Baez influences." Last year, Ms. Baez was inducted into the Rock Roll Hall of Fame. Her 1970 version of the Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" (her only Top 10 single) was recently featured in the film "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri." Just as the folk music icon and pioneering activist has unlocked a fresh reserve of cultural resonance, however, she has decided to step back. She announced that her new album, "Whistle Down the Wind," would be her final recording and said that the eight month long world tour that kicked off in Sweden earlier this month will mark her farewell to the road. At 77, Ms. Baez certainly doesn't carry herself as if she has any intention of slowing down. On a recent afternoon, she interrupted a walk around her backyard to unlock her chicken coop and chase a dozen birds through the dirt. After rounding them back up, she was delighted to find a handful of new eggs, which she carefully carried up to her kitchen. In the house, the furniture was well worn, but the rooms felt spare and airy, perhaps because she's "decluttering" using the Marie Kondo method and is proudly down to three shirts in her closet. The crystalline purity of Ms. Baez's soprano rang out from the 1963 March on Washington to Woodstock six years later, from Live Aid in 1985 to the protests at the Dakota Access Pipeline less than two years ago. But it was changes in her vocal range that mostly led to her decision to retire. "I asked my vocal coach many years ago when it would be time to stop," she said, "and he said, 'Your voice will tell you.' And it has it's a muscle, and you have to work harder and harder to make it work." She started seeing a vocal therapist six years ago, which led to "an easing up, and finding more pleasure in the singing." But it also meant coming to terms with a different sound. "I've gotten to like where I am partly," she said. "This is what I got, I don't have any more than this, so what am I going to do with it? And that was a big step. It quit all the nostalgic expletive about what I wanted to sound like, and I was willing to give up the high notes because they weren't working anyway." The "Whistle Down the Wind" producer Joe Henry (who has also worked with Bonnie Raitt, Allen Toussaint and Solomon Burke) said Ms. Baez has adjusted to the new limitations on her voice. "She arrived very well aware of what she believed she could do with the instrument she now has," Mr. Henry said in a telephone interview. "I was aware of her feeling out the colors she had on her palette, but the loss of that range has done nothing to diminish her emotional power as a storyteller." Ms. Baez wanted the album on which she interprets songs by Tom Waits, Josh Ritter and Mary Chapin Carpenter, among others to be a "bookend" for a recording career that started with her 1960 self titled debut, which has been added to the Grammy Hall of Fame and the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress. It was more important to her to have "Whistle Down the Wind" speak to the present moment than to make any kind of final statement. "What was more conscious was trying to make an album that was in some musical way trying to make some beauty in the face of well, of evil, really," she said. "But not blatant or I couldn't do it. Two songs I had to let go were too topical, and I wanted this to have a more lasting feeling." She called the current political climate the result of "a battle with 40 years of think tanks for the right wing conservatives learned how to talk, how to lie, how to switch things around in a way that liberals and progressives never did." But Ms. Baez expressed hope in the energy she saw at the women's marches, and in the number of women who have decided to run for office. "I was pleased that they weren't just actions and then everything died down," she said. "The fear was 'Yahoo, a million women,' and then everybody goes home, but I don't think that's what's happening." Ms. Baez, who was honored by Amnesty International in 2015 with its Ambassador of Conscience Award, warned against imitating or romanticizing the protest movement of the 60s, which she helped to define and set in motion. "It's like trying to have a second Woodstock, which is really stupid, I think," she said. "I can see where people want that since back in the day I've heard from young people, 'Boy, I wish I'd been there.' And I think about how these kids would have had to make a decision about the draft, but that's not what they remember. It's so idealized, with all the magnificent musicians. "You have to remember the 10 years in which I came to the surface were packed with talent, cause, everything," she said. "It was like an explosion, or an implosion, but everybody had a way to speak and say what they wanted to say. Now people are waiting for 'it' meaning a movement, the movement. There are movements right now, and maybe that's the way it should be. Maybe it shouldn't all be under one person and one big banner." In January, Ms. Baez, whose father, a prominent physicist, was born in Mexico, went to the California state Capitol to help commemorate the 1948 Los Gatos Canyon plane crash that killed 32 people, including 28 Mexican nationals whose names went unreported; she sang Woody Guthrie's "Deportee," which told the story of the tragedy, to the descendants of those who perished. She said that she will never stop participating in that kind of action. In an email she sent a few days after our conversation, though, she seemed still to be grappling with her role and her responsibility. "When I go onstage, I don't make history, I am history," she wrote. "Perhaps it's enough for me be up there reminding people of a time when we had the music, the cause, the direction, and each other. "My foundation in nonviolent political action was set before I started singing, and both are second nature to me. So I do not preclude the possibility of civil disobedience and even going to jail. Someone will have to. Then again, perhaps there is virtue to having carried the flame, and grace now in passing the torch." Her commitment certainly remains a model for the generations that have followed. "For anybody interested in social justice, she is a great beacon," said the singer songwriter Rhiannon Giddens in a telephone interview. "It's very inspiring as a female artist to see how she has done things on her own terms and become a byword for musical activism." In recent weeks, as other musicians like Paul Simon and Ozzy Osbourne have announced their farewell tours, Ms. Baez has been thinking about growing older. "Like most of my fellow musicians who are 'retiring,' I do not feel my bizarre age," she wrote in her email. "But part of going off the road is learning to respect the years I spent on it." As she considers a life beyond making and performing music, Ms. Baez expressed the greatest enthusiasm for pursuing her painting, an activity she took up only in the last decade. Last year, she had her first solo exhibition in Mill Valley, Calif.; her house is filled with her canvases, and a backyard studio is crammed with portraits of her family members and figures ranging from Muhammad Ali to the musician Richard Thompson. She also talked about traveling to see art after the touring stops. "That's something I wouldn't have dreamed of doing, because I was always working," she said. "And I'll sit and shut up for a while. Which is really important, and it's the hardest thing to do." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Meghan Markle: 10 Things to Know About the New Royal In a wide ranging interview after Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, and Harry, Duke of Sussex, announced their engagement, she admitted "as naive as it sounds now" to being taken aback by the intensity of the tabloid spotlight and scrutiny. "I've never been in tabloid culture, I've never been in pop culture to that degree," she said. Though the Duke of Sussex is sixth in line for the throne, his wife has nonetheless drawn intense scrutiny because she is unlike any other person who has joined Britain's royal family in recent memory. And that is what makes this royal wedding so exciting for so many. Here's everything you need to know about the new royal, whose wedding was Saturday at St. George's Chapel in Windsor Castle. Ms. Markle was born and raised in Los Angeles. Her parents, Doria Ragland and Thomas Markle, divorced when she was young, and she was mostly raised by her mother. She has two older paternal half siblings, Samantha Markle and Thomas Markle Jr. Ms. Markle graduated from Northwestern University in Illinois in 2003 and became an actress best known for her role in the television drama "Suits." She's also known as a champion for women's empowerment, having served as an ambassador for World Vision and an advocate for U.N. Women. Ms. Markle married Trevor Engelson on a beach in Jamaica in 2011. The two divorced two years later. This is notable, as divorce was once a deal breaker in royal marriages. In 1955, the queen's sister, Princess Margaret, was told she needed to choose between the divorced man she loved and her royal title and privileges. She kept the privileges. Today, three of the queen's four children are divorced from their spouses. Prince Charles will walk her down the aisle. On Friday, Kensington Palance announced Prince Charles would be walking Ms. Markle down the aisle. While the statement referenced health issues, Mr. Markle had also been caught in a scandal when the The Daily Mail reported that he had collaborated with paparazzi on photos of himself preparing for the royal wedding. In a departure from royal customs, Ms. Markle's mother will ride with her daughter to St. George's Chapel. The mother of the bride is traditionally in the background, with the father of the bride taking the parental spotlight. She's the first person of color in the modern British royal family. It has been rumored that Princess Sophie Charlotte, who married King George III in 1761, had African ancestry. But Ms. Markle, the child of a black mother and a white father, is the first person to join the British royal family who identifies as biracial. The child of a black mother and a white father, Ms. Markle's soon to be royalty has been meaningful for many, like Tshego Lengolo, an 11 year old black girl who lives in southeast London. "There is nothing that racist people can do about it," she said happily. "So they might as well get used to it." Prince Harry's relationship with Ms. Markle was, in fact, confirmed in November 2017 when he released a statement attacking British news coverage and social media harassment of his then girlfriend. People of color are underrepresented in British politics and not represented in the British monarchy, so having a biracial woman in the royal family gives many a reason to celebrate. At the same time, others say the marriage will have little impact on British society. Still, after the couple announced the engagement, the hashtag blackprincess gained traction across Twitter and Instagram. Though she deleted all her social accounts, she's perhaps the biggest influencer. Ms. Markle can shift fashion trends, buoy brands and change the perception of the royal family. The coat that Ms. Markle wore during the announcement of her engagement to Prince Harry? It sold out immediately, crashing the brand's website within an hour. Because Prince Harry is sixth in line for the throne, he and Ms. Markle have different expectations, meaning Ms. Markle can push the envelope when it comes to her fashion choices. The engagement photo was a public signal she's a different kind of royal. Now all eyes have turned to the altar. The wedding dress Ms. Markle wears will signal the future fashion choices we can expect from the princess. Yes, the queen's dogs approve of her. Ms. Markle is definitely a dog person. She immediately was befriended by the queen's dorgis. No, that's not a typo. Dorgis are a breed of dog created when a dachshund belonging to the queen's sister, Princess Margaret, mated with one of the queen's corgis. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Last year, the National Park Service shattered its previous attendance record by 14 million, attracting more than 307 million visitors. This year, traffic is already up nearly 3 million in year to date comparisons. And while the service won't project another record breaking year, 2016 is shaping up to be perhaps its busiest summer, as judged by events created to celebrate its centennial year. Yellowstone National Park, dating back to 1872, preceded the National Park Service, which was established 44 years later, on Aug. 25, 1916, to oversee the management of a growing roster of parks. That list now stands at 59, though the National Park Service oversees 411 sites, including national seashores, monuments, historic sites, trails and more. It's those lesser known sites that the administration hopes to popularize through its anniversary campaign, Find Your Park. "Most Americans understand National Parks to be a few places out west," said Alexa Viets, the centennial coordinator for the National Park Service. "They know Yellowstone and Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. They don't necessarily understand the breadth of the National Park Service and the wealth of places set aside for enjoyment and to tell American stories. We are making a concerted effort to celebrate across the system." In addition to a few national programs, sites were encouraged to develop centennial events or hitch their perennial affairs to the birthday bash to call attention to the range of activities on offer throughout the country. Big or small, celebrated or obscure, many National Park Service sites will mark the 100th in events related to volunteering, the arts, history and, of course, nature. Last September, the National Park Service kicked off Every Kid in a Park, a program in which fourth grade students can log onto everykidinapark.gov to answer a few simple questions and obtain a free annual entry pass to the more than 2,000 federal recreation areas, including national parks. "We're inviting everyone to find your park," Ms. Viets said. "That includes very particularly the next generations. The document that created the park service in 1916 has the language 'for future generations.' " Of the 411 National Park Service holdings, 126 including 35 national parks charge admission fees of up to 30 a vehicle. In 2016, 16 days are designated fee free across the system, including the centennial weekend, Aug. 25 to 28. As part of nearly 2 million in grants to the park centennial from the National Endowment for the Arts, Music in the American Wild (musicintheamericanwild.com), a collection of composers and musicians from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., will tour nationally, performing music inspired by the national parks. August dates include the San Juan Island National Historical Park, North Cascades National Park and Olympic National Park, all in Washington State. Coastal Acadia, established July 8, 1916, consolidated county land and 10,000 acres donated by John D. Rockefeller Jr., who also financed the construction of the park's carriage roads and many buildings. In salute, the park will hold art exhibitions, lectures, concerts and readings; the full slate is at acadiacentennial2016.org. From July 22 to 24, park goers can participate in a BioBlitz, helping to measure biodiversity in the park. Less well known than Yellowstone, Lassen Volcanic, established on Aug. 9, 1916, after Lassen Peak erupted, protects steaming fumaroles and other hydrothermal features, and will mark its centennial Aug. 9 with its Day in the Park Festival, featuring music, food, ranger led programs and family activities. Several parks are marking the centennial with volunteer opportunities for visitors to help improve the landscapes and facilities. In Washington, Mount Rainier National Park is holding a series of trail maintenance events, including one on Aug. 13 that includes a potluck dinner and overnight camping (see mrnpa.org). In central California, Pinnacles National Park will hold its Centennial Day of Service on Aug. 20 to collect litter, weed out non native plants, collect seeds and maintain trails. Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park in Georgia is offering three dates over the summer, July 9, Aug. 13 and Sept. 10, to work on its 20 plus miles of trail. Among initiatives highlighting the arts, the NPS Centennial Band, a group out of the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park in Louisiana, will travel to various parks beyond the Big Easy, including Natchez National Historical Park in Mississippi, Chesapeake Ohio Canal National Historical Park in the mid Atlantic region and Saint Gaudens National Historic Site in New Hampshire throughout July. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Flora Traub is a 37 year old mother of three with a master's in public policy from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. But after years as a policy analyst, she found herself reflecting on her undergraduate premedical studies and the happy year she spent in AmeriCorps Community HealthCorps after college. She decided she wanted a new career, in medicine, but not as a doctor. "I wouldn't dream of medical school," said Ms. Traub, who entered Boston University's physician assistant training program this year. "Seven years of training and residency? I don't want that much time away from my kids." Another reason: "Doctors just seem to be running all the time, all day long." Think of it. No M.C.A.T., no residency, two years of professional school and you're out making 100,000 a year. And like nurse practitioners and other "physician extenders," P.A.s now carry out many duties once handled by doctors: They perform physical exams, diagnose illnesses, assist in surgery, order lab tests and prescribe medication. With tens of millions of Americans newly insured under the Affordable Care Act, and a shortfall in the number of doctors to care for them, it's little wonder that physician assistant is one of the fastest growing professions in the United States. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, their numbers are expected to increase 38 percent between 2012 and 2022. Already, between 6,500 and 7,000 new P.A.s are joining the ranks each year. Schools have noticed. There are currently 187 accredited master's programs across the country, with 78 more in the pipeline. Boston University started its degree program in April, and had 1,024 applications for 25 slots in its first class. Duke, with the country's top ranked program, had 1,600 applicants for 88 seats. Like most of the programs, Duke's requires applicants to complete coursework in pre med science classes like biology and chemistry and to have hands on experience with patients. "Six months is the bare minimum," said Karen J. Hills, the program director. "Most competitive applicants have quite a bit more than that, like 13 to 40 months." They have often worked as medical assistants, E.M.T.s or phlebotomists before matriculating. Typically, programs consist of a year in the classroom, then a year of clinical rotations. The education follows a medical model, with emphasis on data gathering, diagnosis and treatment. After passing a national certification exam, physician assistants practice under a supervising doctor. The Cleveland Clinic, one of the largest medical centers in the country, employs about 400 P.A.s and has openings for 30 more. "When I started here 10 years ago we had about 50 P.A.s," said Josanne Pagel, executive director of physician assistant services. "P.A.s are critical for access to care." For many health care providers, they are also critical to economic success. "You're really getting bang for your buck," Ms. Pagel said. P.A.s generally make about half a physician's salary or less, depending on specialty (an E.R. doctor makes on average 270,000, an emergency room P.A. 112,000). But when a P.A. performs a procedure, insurance companies reimburse the clinic for about 85 percent of the charge, opposed to 100 percent for an M.D. Ms. Pagel said these numbers are similar nationwide. The difference is made up with higher patient volume. "When a P.A. comes into a practice," she said, "we're able to see many more patients." P.A. programs are increasingly competitive. Flora Traub is one of 25 students in Boston University's program; 1,024 applied. Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times At the Cleveland Clinic, P.A.s assist in all disciplines of medicine and surgery, and have been heavily integrated into the emergency department to improve patient flow. Incoming patients are evaluated by P.A.s, who funnel urgent cases (strokes, heart attacks) to an M.D. and manage non urgent cases (ear infections, sprained ankles) themselves. Lynn Pagliaccio, the clinic's P.A. manager for emergency services, described her work with physicians as "very collaborative." "If somebody comes in with a simple toothache, we can manage that on our own," she said. "But if they have a toothache and a high fever and their whole face is swollen, we have the doc come over and take a peek." Since instituting the fast track system, wait time has decreased by two hours on average. Surveys show that patient satisfaction has increased, and reviews indicate no rise in misdiagnoses or malpractice suits, according to Dr. Stephen Meldon, emergency department director at the clinic's main campus. But not all patients embrace physician assistants. According to a national survey last year by the American Academy of Family Physicians, 72 percent of Americans prefer physicians for information related to their medical care, viewing them as more knowledgeable and experienced. Some doctors worry that patients are getting short shrift as the bottom line pushes physicians out of the examination room. Dr. Prakash Masand, a psychiatrist in New York City and C.E.O. of Global Medical Education, an online medical education resource, is a critic of their increasing role in mental health care while receiving only 6 to 12 weeks of psychiatric training in school. "This is one of the reasons misdiagnoses, underdiagnoses and the over prescription of antidepressants have flooded the mental health system," he said. "Until P.A.s receive more specialized training, they shouldn't handle patients who need a much more experienced doctor." Such concerns are echoed for other fields. Dr. Houtan Chaboki, a plastic surgeon in Washington, D.C., points to a growing trend of Botox injections and laser treatments being performed by physician assistants. "They might be under physician supervision, but the physician may not even be in the room," he said. "They may just be reviewing the chart afterward." Training should keep P.A.s from overreaching, said Mary Warner, director of Boston University's program. "P.A.s know what they can do," she said. "They know their limits. And I think that the safety factor, having two brains rather than one, really improves the quality of care." Studies have found that including physician assistants on health care teams can shorten hospital stays and decrease postoperative complications, among other improvements in care. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
British scientists have tied the tightest knot ever tied and, as unlikely as it may seem, this is important. Knots are useful in everyday life and specific kinds of knots are suitable for specific tasks bowlines, cleats, hitches and nooses all hold things together in different ways. The same is true on the molecular level, where braided or knotted strings of atoms and molecules can be put together in different patterns with varying characteristics. Until now, scientists have been able to create only simple molecular knots with three or five crossings of strands. Now researchers, in a study published in Science, have described a way to tie a much more complicated, and therefore much stronger, knot. Everyone knows, for example, that Kevlar is very strong impenetrable even to a bullet. But why? Its molecules connect to form long chains that run parallel to each other. Together these molecules form an extremely strong yet flexible material. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
, 40, is the chief executive of HAP Investment Developers, a company with offices in New York and Tel Aviv that focuses mainly on midsize residential and commercial properties, mainly in northern Manhattan. His partners in the company are Amir Hasid and Nir Amsel. Q. What is your main role in the company? A. I like finding new projects. We've been working in Budapest, Kiev, Tel Aviv, and now we're working in New York. Q. And what do the two other founding partners do? A. For all of the deals that we did here in Manhattan, the equity the money came 90 percent from Israel. And they're handling all the investors. We have a 50,000 investor to a 10 million to 20 million investor. They're all private investors we have, like, 50, 60, 70 investors people that want to invest directly in real estate and not a fund. They invest in a project and we are developing and managing the project. Q. How much of your work is in New York? A. Right now most of our portfolio is based in New York, in Manhattan. We have eight different projects in different stages several in northern Manhattan. Q. Let's talk about them, starting with the Chelsea site you recently bought for 51 million, along with air rights. A. We're planning to build about 150,0000 square feet, with 21 floors. We will have retail space on the ground level and we're looking to do two floor heights in the lobby, and then above that we will have residential. We will have about 140 units; they will be anywhere between 600 square feet to 3,500. We have not picked an architect yet. In a year we're going to break ground. Q. What kinds of prices are you anticipating per square foot? A. We're thinking for the lower levels about 1,400, in the middle about 1,600, and the higher level about 2,000. I think the location in Chelsea is very up and coming, but it's not the best location in Chelsea. It's three blocks from the High Line. F.I.T. is in front of us. Q. What else are you working on? A. We bought 4452 Broadway. It's a large piece of land, about 20,000 square feet. We are going to build 150,000 square feet. We'll have 50 parking spaces and 20,000 square feet of community facilities, about 110 apartments. I think we'll be able to sell from 550 to 650 per square feet. It's already in the Buildings Department and I hope we'll get approval in two to three months and then we will hit ground. Another project is on 167th Street. It's a condo under construction for three months: 39 apartments and a community facility. Another project is 120th and Second Avenue. It's a rental: about 30,000 square feet. We hit ground one month ago, so it's going to be finished 12 months from now. Q. You seem to be serving more of the needs of the middle class. A. Yes. The demand for that product will be high. This is a problem with cosmopolitan cities, and New York is the capital of the cosmopolitan cities of the world. You have to find Russian oligarchs, Chinese oligarchs rich people from all over the world. Q. Could you see HAP developing a luxury building? A. Twenty eighth Street won't be luxury, luxury, luxury, but it will be a more high end property. A. We are busy, yes. Look, I am young. I am 40, and I am definitely feeling that I'm in a peak and I'm sure that my partners are feeling the same thing. To work in Manhattan is already a peak. Q. You relocated your family here from Tel Aviv. A. We moved in August; I live here in Manhattan, at 79th and Columbus. My partners live in Israel. Q. How much of HAP's money goes into your projects? A. We always use our own money. The minimum we put in is 20 percent of equity. Most of the time it's 30, 40 percent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
After Prince died on April 21, one of the most urgent questions for the music industry was how quickly the estate could hire professionals to handle the star's vast collection of songs and other media content. The answer was two months. On Friday, Bremer Trust, a Minnesota bank that is acting as the special administrator for Prince's estate, confirmed that it had appointed two seasoned executives, L. Londell McMillan and Charles A. Koppelman, to manage Prince's entertainment assets, according to Marcia A. Jensen, a spokeswoman for the bank. The appointments, for an initial term of 90 days, were announced a week after the probate judge overseeing the estate gave the bank authorization to name experts from the entertainment industry who could "take all prudent steps to monetize the estate's intellectual property." Prince, who died at age 57 from an accidental overdose of fentanyl, an opioid painkiller, left no will, and estimates of his estate have varied widely. In a recent court hearing, a lawyer for Bremer Trust said that the estate's tax bill in January could range from 47 million to 146 million, depending on the estate's ultimate value. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
CONTEXTUAL A facade of concrete and glass will contain a group of four bedroom town homes on Pearl and Water Streets, an area better known for converted loft spaces. Construction is set to begin this summer. A group of town houses hidden behind a unified facade of concrete and glass in formerly industrial Dumbo has some calling the edifice a future landmark and others saying it's reminiscent of a 1970s era office building. The first 3,049 square foot town house in the project, which will be a collection of five homes called Dumbo Townhouses at Pearl and Water Streets in Brooklyn, went into contract last month, before construction started, at the full asking price of 4.1 million. At 1,345 a square foot, the price is more than double the average per square foot of a Brooklyn brownstone or condominium. The project will create town houses in a neighborhood better known for converted loft spaces, but will do so in a way that allows the homes to blend in with the area's industrial aesthetic. The developer, Alloy LLC, says construction is set to begin this summer on the four bedroom three bathroom town houses, which in renderings appear to have a single facade of ductal concrete fins separating floor to ceiling windows. While the upper floors of the five story town houses give the impression of an office building or warehouse, the ground floor has a wooden exterior with discrete entranceways. "In general, these don't look like 'Cosby Show' brownstones," said AJ Pires, an executive vice president of Alloy, a real estate development company based in Dumbo with about a dozen employees. "Inside, the town houses are actually somewhat traditionally laid out, but the exterior materials are more contemporary." The ground floor in each town house will have a bedroom and bath, with a private garage to the rear. The parlor floor, which will have 20 foot ceilings, will house a living room, a dining room and an open kitchen that leads to a garden terrace. The third floor will be an open landing off a floating stairway. The fourth will have the master bedroom and bath, while the fifth will have two bedrooms and a bath. A stairway will lead to a roof terrace with a covered dining area. The location of the project falls within the Dumbo Historic District, which was created in 2007 and protects about 90 buildings, mostly industrial, dating from around 1880 to 1920, so the developers had to obtain approval from the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. The five town houses will replace a one story garage built in the 1950s that is being demolished, Mr. Pires said. Alloy has previously converted two warehouse buildings to loft apartments in historic Dumbo. The developers said, though, that the design of the Dumbo Townhouses, being built from scratch, presented a challenge. Alloy decided against creating the 12 story building it could by rights have put up on the lot, leaving about half the zoned square footage unused an unusual move for property developers. A 12 story building would have been "way out of scale and not really appropriate," Mr. Pires said, because "the scale of neighboring buildings is right around that three , four , five story world." The landmarks commission supported not only the scale of the project, but also the rather unexpected use of concrete for the facade. Jared Della Valle, the president of Alloy, says that a handful of concrete buildings in the Dumbo historic district are some of the earliest in the city, including 20 Jay Street where Alloy has its offices, and that these served as a precedent. The design of the Dumbo Townhouses "completely fits in with the neighborhood," he said, "but it doesn't duplicate the material qualities or details of the old buildings. It's invented a new version that fits within the context of the neighborhood." The commission agreed; at a meeting March 12, Frederick Bland, a commissioner, even commented that the town houses were "a little landmark in the making." Mr. Bland said he particularly appreciated the camouflaging of the town houses in a neighborhood where town houses would be out of context. Mr. Della Valle said Alloy went with town houses as opposed to apartments because they would maximize the value of the square footage which was necessary since development rights were going unused. "There's no elevator core, common stairways or machine rooms in town houses," he said, "and we're not building any square foot that we're not selling." Besides the large windows, Alloy incorporated several skylights, including one in the master bedroom over the bed area, to make the town houses light and airy. Floors will be limestone and obsidian oak, and bathrooms will have marble slabs and glass panels, giving the homes a sleek, minimalist feel. The living room and master bedroom will have gas fireplaces. Reaction to renderings of the town houses so far has been polarized, with some online commenters calling them "gorgeous" and others spurning the project as reminiscent of an "ugly office building from the '70s." Ted Moncreiff, a 10 year Dumbo resident who recently bought a condo at 192 Water Street, another Alloy project, said that he appreciated the subtle reinterpretation of the area's industrial themes in the town houses and that he hadn't heard any criticism within the tightknit Dumbo community. "There's some pretty hideous contemporary architecture that's been put up in the neighborhood," he said. "If these were badly done modernism, I would probably be singing a different tune, but I like the renderings." Alloy, which never actively marketed its first two Dumbo projects, recently listed a second town house at an even higher price of 4.3 million, or 1,410 a square foot. "We're seeing velocity when we're not really asking for it," Mr. Della Valle said. "So we'll see, but those numbers are likely to move from where they are now and they're not going to go down." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The Crowd Mostly 20 somethings out in packs for a night of group fun in the Gowanus Industrial Playground; archery, rock climbing and shuffleboard are nearby. There are also some braver, slightly more timid 30 somethings paired up on adventurous date nights. (No ax murderer jokes, please.) There seems to be an unofficial dress code of country casual, with the majority wearing plaid or flannel shirts and grungy jeans. The Playlist The constant thump and clang of axes hitting and missing the targets provide the beat of the night, complemented by the high pitched squeals and guttural screams of boisterous team competition. Though no one is actually getting hit with an ax, it can sure sound like it. Getting In Anyone can walk in and sign up for time on a range, if it's available. But reservations are recommended, especially on weekend nights, which book up quickly with birthday parties or big groups. The rate is 35 per person for 75 minutes. It's a minimum of eight people to book your own range, otherwise you'll have to share with strangers. But making new friends is part of the fun here, too. Drinks Beer and wine only, for obvious reasons: a dozen canned beers (starting at 3) and a small selection of reds and whites ( 7.50). Bar snacks include Pop Tarts and microwave soups (from 4). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
MSNBC pulled an abrupt about face on Thursday, announcing that it had rehired a contributor just days after it fired him when far right activists drew attention to an inflammatory tweet he posted in 2009. "Sometimes you just get one wrong and that's what happened here," Phil Griffin, the cable network's president said in a statement on Thursday announcing that the cable network had rehired Sam Seder, a political commentator and host of the "Majority Report" podcast. The episode began late last month when Mike Cernovich, the far right activist, resurfaced a tweet sent by Mr. Seder in 2009 that was meant to mock supporters of the film director Roman Polanski. Mr. Seder's tweet, which has since been deleted, was posted shortly after Mr. Polanski, who pleaded guilty in 1977 to unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13 year old, was arrested in Switzerland in 2009 in connection with that crime. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Cindy Gallop lives in a black lacquer box of a loft. The walls and ceiling are painted glossy black. There is black carpeting galore, black cabinetry in the kitchen, black mosaic tile in the master bath, and a black curtain closing off the sleeping area. The singular look is courtesy of the specific instructions she gave her design team for the 3,800 square feet of raw space she bought a decade ago: "When night falls I want to feel I'm in a Shanghai nightclub" the Glamour Bar, to be precise, where her desire to live in that kind of space crystallized as she sipped her second martini. "My designers did exactly what I wanted in the apartment, in ways I couldn't imagine," said Ms. Gallop, an advertising executive turned entrepreneur/consultant. "I love it." Nonetheless, in an effort to reduce her monthly expenses, she put her apartment, which is on West 23rd Street, on the market in mid September. Asking price: 5.995 million. Wanted: very quirky buyer. In the real estate business, "taste specific" and "design specific" are the tactful, delicate phrases used to describe properties that might not be to everyone's liking. Or, perhaps with the exception of the current owner to anyone's liking. "Internally, we refer to this as building a shrine to oneself," said Kathy Braddock, an owner of Rutenberg Realty. A shrine could be an over the top renovation, a style of decor that seems out of place in a New York apartment or an odd arrangement of rooms for example, the Fifth Avenue co op with glorious views whose owners unaccountably moved the kitchen so it monopolized the parkside vistas. In any case, it's not something a listing broker can quickly and inexpensively fix, given a weekend and a can of Benjamin Moore's Linen White. "If you have a dark apartment you can brighten it up," said Caroline Bass, an associate broker at Citi Habitats. "If it's empty or it doesn't have great furniture, you can stage it. If it's old and in estate condition, you can market it exactly as that." But, Ms. Bass continued, "if an apartment has already been renovated and done in a very taste specific way, you have to wait for a buyer who has the same taste or be willing to do the work and take all the special finishes out." (More about this in a minute.) A few years ago, Ms. Bass had a listing on a high floor in a Fifth Avenue skyscraper, a one bedroom pied a terre. The sellers had done a 250,000 gut renovation featuring black and white striped hardwood floors laid diagonally. "It made you dizzy to look at it," she said. The half bath was paved in tiny iridescent Italian tile and had a stainless steel toilet, while the ceiling of the master bath was all mirrors. "All I could think was, it's going to be hard to find a buyer who can look past all these things," Ms. Bass said. The apartment was listed just under 2 million and ended up selling for 1.695 million. "There's definitely a discount," she said, "when you're purchasing someone else's taste." Joanna Simon, an associate broker at Fox Residential Group, had a similar trial when she was the agent for an apartment on the East River that was filled with platforms, recessed neon lighting and slanted walls, some with mirrors. "It was an embarrassment to show it," said Ms. Simon, adding that the apartment finally sold for less than its asking price, despite the spectacular river views. "Buyers want to be able to see themselves in the property," Ms. Braddock said. "That's a very important thing. In two to five seconds, they either envision themselves living in the space or they don't. If the space doesn't speak to somebody right off the bat, it's going to be hard to get them to come around. And if you do get them to come around, it's usually because of a price adjustment." Consider the case of a one bedroom loft on West 29th Street. On real estate websites and in awed descriptions from those who had seen it, the 1,800 square foot space with a large terrace was referred to as the "steampunk apartment." The green submarine style front door had a working porthole. Cogs, sprockets and gears paved the walls and ceiling. An enormous zeppelin shaped light fixture had an LED system. The master bedroom was rigged up like a tattered dirigible. The owner, Jeremy Noritz, a filmmaker, had bought the space in 2006 and wanted "to build a unique experience for visitors and for myself," he told an interviewer a few years ago. When CORE listed the apartment in August 2011, the price was 1.75 million. There were lots of gawkers but no takers. In February 2012, the listing moved to Nicole Beauchamp, a sales agent at Warburg, and the price dropped to 1.725 million. During her tour of duty with Mr. Noritz, who declined to be interviewed for this article, "I said the design was an issue," Ms. Beauchamp recalled. "I told him someone would want the price to reflect the cost of bringing the apartment back to neutral, and that would be buyers would overinflate that cost. I also told him I would keep him informed of the feedback I got." The feedback ran along the lines of "This is overwhelming" and "What would this place look like without all the stuff?" The price dropped to 1.695 million, then to 1.65 million. Finally, in fall 2012, Mr. Noritz agreed that neutralizing his apartment was a prerequisite for a sale, and work began just before Hurricane Sandy. The painful task done, there were streams of lookers, and four or five offers. The loft sold earlier this year for 1.53 million. "It would have been considerably less if we hadn't 'depunked' it," Ms. Beauchamp said. The new owner and her husband, who work in finance and asked that their names not be used, were drawn to the outdoor space "and to the amount of space we were getting for an attractive price," she said. "It was cool that it had been the steampunk apartment, and we mention it to people." She said she was trying to persuade her husband to display a photograph or a painting of how the apartment used to look, even though they had never seen it that way. "I'm told that it was just not very livable, so I don't think we would have purchased it the way it was." Brokers who represent such singular properties have to walk a fine line with their clients. "You don't want to insult sellers for their taste," said Ms. Bass of Citi Habitats. "Obviously they like what they did, or they wouldn't have done it." Ms. Braddock generally goes with some version of: "I'm so happy it worked for you so long, but now you're moving on, and I have to tell you this is very taste specific and that could limit the audience." As Sharon Baum, a senior vice president of Corcoran, puts it: "Everything about selling is: How big is the buyer pool? If you've done a renovation that appeals to 90 percent of buyers, your pool is huge." The pool gets smaller if, like one of Ms. Baum's clients with Fifth Avenue views, you wall up the windows to provide more space for your art collection. "Prospective buyers had no idea there were windows there unless they went outside and counted up to the floor where the windows would have been," Ms. Baum said. The pool can get smaller even for renovations that would not seem to be anywhere near controversial. "I've had clients who've made staff rooms part of a kitchen because they want a city kitchen as big as the one they have in the country," she added. "But that eliminated all the buyers with children who have live in help, or even older couples with caregivers." Leslie S. Modell, a senior global real estate adviser at Sotheby's International Realty, has seen everything in the way of curious renovations, purple kitchens, red kitchens, and apartments got up to look like the Casbah, complete with wooden columns flown in from Morocco. There was the Upper East Side apartment done with a nod to Fort Knox, heavy on the gold. She particularly recalls one of the bathrooms, which was a tribute to Cleopatra. "The sink inlay was her face," Ms. Modell said. "But my feeling is I can sell anything. It's sort of a challenge." When Maria Cangiano, an associate broker at Halstead Property, first saw the 1,100 square foot pied a terre at a Sutton Place co op, she knew selling it would be an uphill climb. "You generally don't see nine chandeliers in that size apartment," Ms. Cangiano said. She wondered what the owners' primary residence was like. A blend of urban palazzo and Tuscan villa with brown and gold tones throughout, the two bedroom apartment has coffered ceilings with myriad motifs, inlaid marquetry floors, crown molding, base molding and wainscoting. In the kitchen, ornate woodwork conceals the stove vent. Structural elements that have nothing to do with structure are used as decorative elements. "When the sellers bought the apartment it was a plain vanilla box," Ms. Cangiano said. "I was very honest with my clients," she continued. "I think the quality of the work is amazing, but I explained that it was very taste specific, and they understood that." They also have no particular need to sell, she said, so they have turned down offers that fell short of the 1.65 million asking price. Ms. Cangiano and other brokers counsel a safe middle of the road renovation for people who have only one residence and who must sell before they can buy. "I always tell people to consult an architect and a broker before they start a renovation," said Ms. Beauchamp, the Warburg agent. "If they think they might want to move in the near future, they should be as neutral as possible. In other words, give a wide berth to murals, fountains and colors favored by preschoolers." But she said she had found that higher end clients with several residences are generally planning on sticking around when they buy, so "they want to be comfortable with a design scheme they love." Sellers with unconventional apartments have a couple of options, according to brokers. They can renovate, though few do, because it often requires a co op board's approval as well as time and money. "People think: 'Why would I do that? Am I not just throwing good money after bad?' " Ms. Braddock said. Better, they think, to take their chances in the marketplace (especially now, with inventory so low and buyers so desperate), or to price the property to reflect the money that a buyer would to have to spend to right what the seller wrought. "What good brokers do," Ms. Braddock said, is show their clients the 10 properties in the neighborhood that are competing in their price range. "And people will see pretty quickly, when you show them some examples, that the apartments that are priced higher are neat and clean and more generic," she continued. "That's how you begin to tell the story." Of course, some sellers have no intention of dropping the price. In the real estate version of "Someday My Prince Will Come," they believe there's a buyer out there who is looking for just exactly what they have on the market. "But you have to be lucky with timing to find a buyer who wants exactly what you're selling when you're selling it," said Ms. Bass of Citi Habitats. In fact, Ms. Cangiano's many chandeliered listing just went into contract close to the asking price. Ms. Gallop is optimistic about her apartment's prospects and perhaps with cause. The agent for a foreign buyer who is in the market for something "special" just scouted her place and reacted very favorably, she said. "When I'm looking for residences, I'm always looking for something idiosyncratic," Ms. Gallop said. "That's what I'm looking for in my next New York apartment. And so I believe there are people who will be drawn to my black apartment. There are people who are actively looking for something that is not a plain box. I live in hope that there are a lot of people like that." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
John Waters, the filmmaker, at his four story Baltimore home. He's donating artworks from his personal collection to the Baltimore Museum of Art. The filmmaker will donate 372 works to the Baltimore Museum of Art. His collection tends toward the perverse, the ironic and the cheerfully nihilistic and much of it is still here on his walls. The 1998 John Waters movie "Pecker," about a young photographer on the rise, lovingly skewers the art world, with one of the filmmaker's longtime muses, Patricia Hearst, playing a pretentious photography collector. This week, it is Mr. Waters who is taking on the patron role in real life, announcing the bequest of 372 works by 125 artists, the bulk of his personal collection. The trove will go to the Baltimore Museum of Art, his hometown institution, after his death, although the works may be exhibited in 2022. The collection, stocked with photographs and works on paper, includes pieces by Thomas Demand, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Christian Marclay, Catherine Opie, Gary Simmons, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol and Christopher Wool. On a Zoom call the other day, Mr. Waters savored the ironies in his ebullient, amused, fast talking way: "I've always said you have to know good taste to have good bad taste." The Baltimore Museum's director, Christopher Bedford, put it this way: "Though outrageously vulgar in his work, John is himself a man of extraordinary refinement." Mr. Bedford noted that the collection fills gaps, given that, for instance, the institution has no works by Mr. Demand or Ms. Opie. "It's a complementary set of works," he said. The bequest announcement comes as good news for the institution, which recently called off its attempt to deaccession three valuable works, by Andy Warhol, Brice Marden and Clyfford Still, to create funds for acquiring works by people of color and to boost staff salaries. "I'm against it," he said. Mr. Waters added that the work by Mr. Marden, "3" (1987 88), is a favorite piece he has had dreams about. He wasn't worried about the museum eventually offloading the works he is donating. "They can't sell," he said. "My collection is restricted." The gift stipulates that the museum cannot deaccession the works. The controversy was ultimately a side issue in the conversation with Mr. Waters, who has been fiercely loyal to Baltimore, setting his movies there for decades, and to the museum, which he said was central to his development as a creator. "I want the works to go to the museum that first gave me the test of rebellion of art when I was 10 years old," he said. At 12, he bought a Miro poster from the museum's shop, depicting a painting in the collection; he still has the poster. "The kids saw it and they said, 'Ugh, that's disgusting,'" Mr. Waters recalled. His second major purchase was a print of Andy Warhol's "Jackie," bought when he was in high school for 100, that still hangs in his dining room. Mr. Waters's role as patron does include a signature tongue in cheek move. A rotunda will be named after him, in classic donor rewarding style, complete with a plaque, but so will two bathrooms. "That was my first demand," Mr. Waters said. "They thought I was kidding." A day after our video call and the day the museum reversed its plan to sell the three works Mr. Waters gave me a FaceTime tour of his four story Baltimore home, where many of the works intended for the museum are packed tightly into a fairly traditional setting with dark wood trim. On the fourth floor, Mr. Waters showed his "bomb room" a full room installation by Gregory Green called "Work Table 7" (1998). It's meant to be the lair of a mad bomber, strewn with paraphernalia resembling in progress explosive devices. "When I had my Christmas party every year, the mayor and governor used to come, and their security people had to go through the house," Mr. Waters said. "You should've seen their faces when I opened the door and showed them the bomb room. They were kind of nervous." Over the decades, he has tended to favor works that are visually witty, including many abstract pieces, as well as works that refer to the business of art or have a meta level take on creativity itself. Many artists in his collection are friends or acquaintances, and his collection includes gifts, like Richard Serra's "Birthday Drawing" (1996). Mr. Tuttle said he saw commonalities in their sensibilities. "My work isn't easily digested and spit out," he said. "And John's work isn't either." Among the more valuable pieces in the collection may be two photographs by Cindy Sherman, including "Untitled (Unwed Mother)" (2002/2004). "I'm just in awe of him, still to this day," said Ms. Sherman, who met Mr. Waters in the late 1980s and had a role in "Pecker" playing herself. (In one scene she offers a Valium to a little girl at an art gallery event.) "I feel like such a slouch compared to him," Ms. Sherman said in an interview. "He not only knows film, he also sees every art show." Mr. Kelley (1954 2012) is one of Mr. Waters's favorite artists, and there are 10 works by him in the bequest. "I thought he was funny, and I loved the art because it's about Catholic guilt, and it's about pitifulness," Mr. Waters said. "I think he did pitiful really well." His gift also includes 86 pieces by his own hand, making the Baltimore museum the largest repository of his work; he had a show there in 2018. Many works by Mr. Waters are artist's proofs from editions of photographs, including "Study Art " (2007), depicting an art school sign. Another piece, "Faux Video Room" (2006), is an installation comprising an audio track and a curtain with nothing behind it, a joke on the cordoned off spaces that galleries and museums use for showing video works. Looking back at his collecting of other artists, Mr. Waters seemed proud of his prescience. "I collected a lot of them really early," he said. "I never bought them late in their career, they were never blue chip artists. They became that later." He said he has only sold one work, a piece from Roy Lichtenstein's "Imperfect Series." When asked about the most he ever spent on a work of art, he revealed the figure: 30,000. But he wouldn't say whose work it was. "That's a little vulgar for The New York Times," Mr. Waters said of the money question. Perhaps. But from this filmmaker, that might be a compliment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Although Sergio Marchionne, chief executive of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, said during the recession that Chrysler would never build another plant in North America, the automaker's executives were considering opening another factory to build more Ram pickup trucks. The Ram light truck brand is Chrysler's best selling nameplate, but Mr. Marchionne said he favored increasing output at one of the two existing truck factories over opening a third. (Automotive News, subscription required) The stale European economy aside, Italian owned Maserati has been selling more cars than ever. The automaker, owned by Fiat after its merger with Chrysler Group, named Fiat Chrysler Automobiles sold 15,400 vehicles worldwide in 2013, more than it has sold since 2008, when it delivered 8,600 vehicles. (Motor Authority) Seven hedge funds are suing Wolfgang Porsche, Porsche's chairman, and Ferdinand Piech, one of its board members, for 2.4 billion for Porsche's failure to take over Volkswagen in 2008. The plaintiffs in the suit accused the Porsche executives of manipulating stock trading leading up to the deal that never happened, but Porsche said it was innocent and that it would defend itself "with all available legal means." Porsche was subsequently taken over by VW. (BBC) Aaron Paul, who played Jesse Pinkman on "Breaking Bad," has been promoted from fictional meth chef to underground street racer. An advertisement shown during the Super Bowl for "Need for Speed" a new film loosely based upon a video game of the same name shows Mr. Paul channeling his inner Steve McQueen as he careens across the country in a variety of fast cars. (Entertainment Weekly) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Making her feature directing debut, Kay Cannon (who wrote the "Pitch Perfect" comedies) handles all the nonsense in "Blockers" just fine, alternately corralling the performers and giving them room to cut very modestly loose. (The other daughters are played by Geraldine Viswanathan and Gideon Adlon, both charmers.) Ms. Cannon doesn't give the movie a discernible look beyond the strictly utilitarian, relying on the usual scene setting as well as lots and lots of shots of people talking and not moving nearly enough in the frame. The movie takes place in a Chicago that might as well be a studio lot, with generically attractive houses that look middle class only by Hollywood standards. "Blockers" is sloppy, sentimental and too good natured to take serious issue with, which is generally true of the other comedies that Seth Rogen's production company has had a hand in. It isn't as ridiculous as "Sausage Party" and lacks the dark, uneasy energy of the apocalyptic "This Is the End," but it's passably diverting. Like those movies, "Blockers" feels as if it was made by people who believe in kindness, friendship and smut that's one giggle away from an old Playboy joke page. It features a casually diverse cast and is openly, at times dutifully, feminist, with you go girl speeches that sound as if everyone involved had tried too hard to be decent. Funny and enlightened would have been better. The most notable thing about "Blockers" is how aggressively square it is, despite its wagging genitals and flashes of what, at this point in screen comedy, feels like pro forma raunchiness. It's predictable that no one comes across as remotely real, although Hunter, who carries the banner for bad parenting, at least suggests a person. But no one is weird, unsurprising, a little off, truly freaky. Ms. Mann's hyperkinetic vibe and slightly bonkers smile are promising, but both are in service to a movie that insists on just nice 'n' naughty. That's too bad, because when Lisa and Julie sit in front of their TV eating off matching trays with matching mad smiles I flashed on "Grey Gardens" and sighed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
NBTY, one of the nation's largest makers of popular supplements like ginkgo biloba and ginseng, has agreed to conduct advanced genetic testing to help ensure that its herbal products actually contain the ingredients promised on the label. The agreement, which affects several popular brands including Solgar, Nature's Bounty and Sundown Naturals, was announced Wednesday by the New York State attorney general's office. It follows an agency investigation last year that found that four out of five of the products tested from major retailers did not contain any of the herbs promised on their labels. Instead the agency said the bottles often contained pills made of cheap fillers like powdered rice, asparagus and houseplants, and in some cases, substances like nuts and soy that could be dangerous to people with food allergies. The agreement with NBTY is the third such agreement with a supplement maker negotiated by the office of the state attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, and adds pressure on the herbal supplement industry to adopt stricter quality control measures. Last year, two major supplement makers, GNC and Nature's Way, said that that they would implement strict new quality control procedures like the use of advanced DNA testing to authenticate the plants used in their herbal product lines. The attorney general's investigation was prompted by an article in The New York Times in 2013 that raised questions about widespread labeling fraud in the herbal supplement industry. The article referred to research at the University of Guelph in Canada that found that as many as a third of herbal supplements tested did not contain the plants listed on their labels. NBTY, which is based in Ronkonkoma, N.Y., said on Wednesday it would begin to phase in the use of advanced DNA testing on the ingredients from its suppliers, and will conduct random tests of its products to screen for any allergens. NBTY is one of the dominant companies in the 7 billion herbal supplement industry, although exact market share numbers aren't available. NBTY, which is owned by the private equity giant Carlyle Group, does not disclose what portion of its 3 billion in annual revenue comes from herbal products. The company lists more than 22,000 products, including herbal products, vitamins, meal replacements, protein bars and fish oil and other nutrition supplements. In a statement, NBTY's general counsel, Stratis Philippis, said its herbal supplements had passed standard industry tests required under federal law, but that it was agreeing to do more advanced DNA testing for the benefit of consumers. The statement said the firm will promote the development of "the most accurate, reliable standards and testing methods for the authenticity of herbal dietary supplements." The attorney general's investigation last year prompted increased scrutiny of the multibillion dollar herbal supplement industry and led to dozens of class action lawsuits. Consumer advocates said it highlighted the federal government's lax regulation of herbal supplements. The industry has countered that the DNA testing method is not always reliable because many supplements come from herbal extracts, and that DNA from the plants advertised on their labels would not always be present because DNA is damaged during manufacturing and extraction. In a written agreement, the attorney general's office acknowledged that NBTY had provided documentation showing that the company had used traditional chemical testing procedures on its herbal supplements as required by the Food and Drug Administration. But critics have said that the F.D.A.'s regulations and oversight of the industry is too weak. And the attorney general's office said that in many instances, the traditional tests required by the agency "fail to adequately detect the presence of known organic contaminants, including allergens, or unidentified fillers." The attorney general said that the advanced DNA testing procedure NBTY had agreed to implement known as DNA bar coding, which identifies plants and other organisms by their genetic fingerprints was a more powerful method for detecting potential contaminants in the herbal supply chain. Mr. Schneiderman said that the agreement and wider use of DNA testing in the herbal industry would provide consumers assurances that when they buy an herbal supplement, "the plant on the label is the plant in the bottle." "Consumers can only have that confidence if the companies that sell herbal supplements employ the best and most reliable testing measures for combating fraud and ruling out dangerous allergens," he added. "I am pleased that NBTY has joined GNC and Nature's Way and agreed to increase transparency, improve quality control, and do more to protect consumers, and I urge the rest of the herbal supplements industry to do the same." In recent years, herbal supplements have been increasingly scrutinized. A recent study by the New York Botanical Garden and research by at least two independent teams of scientists found that many popular herbal products contained cheap fillers like powdered rice and weeds, or evidence of soybeans, tree nuts and other potential allergens not listed on the labels. Experts say there are many stops along the herbal supply chain where ingredients can be substituted or tampered with, particularly for products coming from overseas. Last year, Mr. Schneiderman's office announced that it had tested dozens of herbal supplements sold at Walmart, Target, Walgreens and GNC locations across New York State. NBTY, which manufactured herbal supplements for Walmart and Walgreens, had been using traditional chemical analyses and quality control measures on its products. But Mr. Schneiderman said it wasn't enough. As part of its agreement with the attorney general, the company said it would phase in the use of DNA bar coding on its herbal ingredients within the next 24 months. The company said it would also begin randomly testing the supplements for allergens like milk, wheat and peanuts, and that it would partner with Cornell University and other scientific institutions. The company said that it considered DNA bar coding "an emerging science" but that it would promote its development and implementation "as an additional technology to benefit consumers." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
When Catherine Deneuve appears in "The Truth" she isn't simply in character. She comes in accompanied by a multiplicity of other roles and previous performances, by former directors and co stars, old loves and scandals and triumphs, all crowding around her like phantoms. That's often the case now with Deneuve, who, like any enduring star, has become a living testament to her own glory. Even when she's playing relatively down to earth characters, she transcends their ordinary constraints. In "The Truth," the Japanese writer director Hirokazu Kore eda wittily toys with Deneuve's persona, its layers and meanings. (This is his first movie made outside Japan.) She plays Fabienne, a figure not unlike herself, or perhaps more like an admirer's fantasy of a great French star. With decades of fame behind her, Fabienne has reached a waning point. She's still active and has begun a new film, but she doesn't have the lead role and now mostly plays the star at home, where she lords over her doting husband and an assistant. When "The Truth" opens, she's giving an interview, having recently written a memoir (also titled "The Truth"), an imperfect testament to herself. Like all monuments, Fabienne depends on recognition for stature. The journalist interviewing her isn't discussing only her history, but also worshiping at an altar that she has long helped maintain. The first line in the movie "I already answered that question," Fabienne says tartly suggests that the interview isn't going well. Here and throughout "The Truth," the seemingly spontaneous moment, an aside or look, carries as yet undisclosed depth. For while Fabienne is making her interlocutor squirm, her behavior is of a piece with the roles she plays with great fidelity: the imperious star, the oblivious narcissist and occasional, inadvertent comedian. You grasp just how accidental when the journalist asks "To what actress have you imparted some of your DNA?" Fabienne looks at him, eyebrows arching in a moment that artfully edges toward comedy. "In France, not really anyone," she says through a screen of cigarette smoke. Kore eda then cuts to a small group of people walking through what look like woods, their backs to the trailing camera. When they clear the greenery, the image brightens an effect like theater curtains parting and you see a young girl with a woman and a man. They're at the edge of a large garden that will soon become a stage. Only when the woman turns do you see that it's Juliette Binoche. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
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. War Crimes Ruled Out as of Tuesday Earlier this week, President Trump threatened to order attacks on Iranian cultural sites. After critics (and his defense secretary) said that would be a war crime, Trump took it back on Tuesday. "You know what, if that's what the law is, I like to obey the law," the president told reporters in the Oval Office. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Unlike many novels featuring large casts, Beah's does not apportion its main characters into different chapters, instead interweaving their stories together in one, unified narrative. It's a wise choice, in keeping with the overall tone of a story about adolescents held together by a cultivated consanguinity. Yet even Beah's fluid prose cannot save the first hundred pages from feeling oversaturated with information and names, which he gives to even the most insignificant characters. In the biography "Shah of Shahs," the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski names this dilemma of fiction: "A person, an individual being has a thousand ways of conveying his feelings and thoughts. ... That is why you can write a novel about a man, but about a crowd never." It's one thing if the crowd has a single, shared goal, as in "Lord of the Flies," but Beah's ensemble cast, like Kapuscinski's crowd, "reduces the individuality of the person," pulling the reader in different directions as we search for that one lead character whose arc we can follow. If one does emerge, it is that of the eldest girl, Khoudiemata, coming of age as this group's unofficial caretaker. Out of the psychic damage of her impoverishment she has fashioned herself an "intelligent and observant and street smart and tough" identity. Khoudi defies the bounds of society, not just by smoking ganja and committing petty (and even sometimes violent) crimes like the others, but also by having a mind of her own that struggles against the very notion of institutionalized power: "Young as she was, she had watched history set its wings and fly off in the wrong direction more than once." The conflict of the story arises from the character development of a young woman stretching out from her "little" life into the realm of the affluent, whose lives are planets away from hers, and having to choose between that wider world and the squalid, but intimate, world of her "family." That tension is strong and well realized, if aided here and there by dei ex machina, too convenient plot points that constantly bail Khoudi out of difficult situations while testing the limits of the reader's suspension of disbelief. Soon, however, her character becomes exaggerated beyond believability. If the men around her are evil, disrespectful caricatures, then she's portrayed as so strong and able she borders on villainy sending male government officials running with the flash of her knife. Beah dedicates the book to his own children, who provide him "the opportunity to re evaluate my masculinity"; like some writers today, he seems to see fiction not just as an art that tries to make sense of the world as it is, but primarily as a tool for combating social ills like racism and misogyny. Even so, this hyperbole does not completely diminish Khoudi's character, which is complex and deftly rendered. It's in the closing chapters, where the novel zeros in on Khoudi's search for a sense of self and the freedom to leave the margins for the mainstream, that the story comes alive. This strong, moving ending is a testament to Beah's confidence as a writer and a remarkable storyteller. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
WASHINGTON Janet L. Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, said on Wednesday that the country's economic expansion had broadened and strengthened, and that she expected the growth to continue. Ms. Yellen's upbeat assessment, delivered to the Joint Economic Committee, is likely to reinforce expectations the Fed will raise its benchmark interest rate in mid December. It could also sharpen questions about Republican plans for a major tax cut aimed at stimulating faster growth. "Economic growth appears to have stepped up from its subdued pace early in the year," she told the Congressional committee. "Moreover, the economic expansion is increasingly broad, based across sectors as well as across much of the global economy." The hearing may have been Ms. Yellen's last appearance before Congress in her current role. Her four year term as the Fed chairwoman ends in early February, and she has said that she plans to leave as soon as her successor is sworn in. President Trump has nominated Jerome H. Powell, a Fed governor since 2012, to serve as the its next chairman. Ms. Yellen was careful to say that the economy could be doing better. She noted that the pace of economic growth remained slow by historical standards. The two major determinants of growth, the number of workers and the productivity of the average worker, are rising slowly. " Congress might consider policies that encourage business investment and capital formation, improve the nation's infrastructure, raise the quality of our educational system, and support innovation and the adoption of new technologies," she said. In response to questions from members of both political parties, however, she declined to assess whether the Republican tax plan would achieve that goal. She said that it was up to Congress and the White House to evaluate the details of proposed changes. "Looking at the likely impact of the particular proposals that may be under consideration is something that we haven't done carefully at the Federal Reserve," Ms. Yellen said. She also said changes in fiscal policy could affect how quickly the Fed raises rates. Fed officials have drawn a careful distinction between tax cuts that increase economic capacity for example, by encouraging business investment and tax cuts that provide a short term sugar high, such as cuts in personal income taxes that would likely increase spending. The Fed estimates that the economy is already growing at something close to the maximum sustainable pace. A short term stimulus, therefore, would likely raise inflation. In turn, the Fed could seek to offset faster inflation by raising interest rates more quickly. "We welcome strong growth," Ms. Yellen said. "The Fed is not trying to stifle growth. We're worried about trends that could push inflation above our 2 percent objective." Ms. Yellen also addressed questions about financial regulation, largely echoing Mr. Powell's testimony at his confirmation hearing Tuesday. Like Mr. Powell, Ms. Yellen defended stronger regulation of large banks. She said it would be "very dangerous" to roll back the stringencies introduced after the 2008 crisis. She also reiterated Mr. Powell's view that the Fed supported legislation that would ease the regulatory burden on smaller banks. She even borrowed a phrase from Mr. Powell, endorsing the idea of "tailoring" regulations to the size of the bank. Ms. Yellen's assessment of economic conditions was perhaps the most upbeat in her four years as the Fed's chairwoman, reflecting the improvement of economic conditions during her term. The unemployment rate has fallen to 4.1 percent, while inflation remains below 2 percent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Ten percent of military families live on installations across the United States, and 43 percent live in some form of privatized housing. Fourteen companies administer housing for 79 communities across the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force, making over 3.9 billion per year in rental income. Almost no military families interact with the Department of Defense when they make housing complaints, which means there's very little official recourse. When my family was stationed in Hawaii last year, housing concerns across the Army became major news. To the credit of the then secretary of the Army, Mark Esper, and the then chief of staff of the Army, Gen. Mark Milley, remedying housing issues was at the top of the Army's "to do" list. Mr. Esper and General Milley traveled to installations around the world and even visited a number of soldiers' houses. The commanding general of the 25th Infantry Division ordered each commander to visit every soldier housed on post so that someone in uniform could have eyes on every problem, an order that was replicated Army wide. These inspections showed uniformed leadership exactly how soldiers and their families were served by housing contractors, a tangible example of accountability. At numerous town hall meetings, soldiers and spouses stood up and expressed frustration over mold, ventilation issues, the contractors' unresponsiveness and significant health concerns arising from mismanagement. The 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, the N.D.A.A., signed by President Trump in December, includes a number of provisions that try to remedy the housing problems, with fixes like a "tenant bill of rights" that gives tenants better information on a unit's historical issues and improved guidance on recourse. The N.D.A.A. also stipulates that health care costs associated with housing, such as mold induced asthma, will be reimbursed by the housing contractor and include any relocation costs associated with health issues. These are vital steps to better protect military tenants. Most importantly, housing contractors are on notice to change their ways. According to congressional demands, the Department of Defense must report back by March 1 on which of the 14 contractors failed to comply with the changes to the public private partnership agreement in the N.D.A.A. Congress's attention to military housing is promising for military families. The challenge is for the Defense Department to ensure consistent oversight of housing contractors. A preliminary report from the Government Accountability Office on the condition of privatized military housing found that the Defense Department was at fault on many levels: Performance metrics were insufficient, oversight of physical housing conditions was limited, data on housing maintenance was unsatisfactory and the department's reporting to Congress was misleading. Privatized military housing needs to be remedied, and so, too, does the department's oversight of housing for its most precious commodity: service members. Frances Tilney Burke ( 28cranfield) is a visiting research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a Ph.D. candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
This obituary is part of a series about people who died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here. Adam Schlesinger, an acclaimed singer songwriter for the bands Fountains of Wayne and Ivy who had an award winning second career writing songs for film, theater and television, died on Wednesday in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was 52. The cause was complications of the coronavirus, his family said. In Fountains of Wayne, which was started in 1995, Mr. Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood perfected a novelistic form of hummable pop rock in a style derived from the Kinks and from 1970s groups like Big Star and the Cars. Adored by critics, Fountains of Wayne in which Mr. Schlesinger played bass and Mr. Collingwood played guitar and sang lead vocals became a cult favorite but had modest record sales. Its most famous moment came in 2003 with "Stacy's Mom," a winking novelty track about a teenage boy infatuated with a friend's mother. With a racy video featuring the supermodel Rachel Hunter, the song made it to No. 21 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart. Almost from the start of his career, Mr. Schlesinger found success in other mediums. He wrote the Beatlesesque theme song to "That Thing You Do!," a 1996 film directed by Tom Hanks about an also ran 1960s rock band; like the best Fountains of Wayne songs, "That Thing You Do!" had an instantly catchy melody, a twisting chord progression and plenty of wordplay. The movie brought Mr. Schlesinger nominations for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe. He also won three Emmys, including one last year for his songs on the 2010s TV show "Crazy Ex Girlfriend," which often threaded campy, Broadway style numbers into its plot. As a journeyman songwriter, he also wrote jingles for the Maryland State Lottery and Gillette. Mr. Schlesinger received two Grammy nominations with Fountains of Wayne, but his sole trophy was for his work with David Javerbaum another frequent collaborator on Stephen Colbert's "A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All!," which took best comedy album in 2010. In the theater, Mr. Schlesinger worked with Mr. Javerbaum to write songs for the 2008 Broadway musical "Cry Baby," based on John Waters's 1990 film of the same title. That earned them a Tony nomination in 2008, and Mr. Schlesinger and Mr. Javerbaum worked together again in 2015 on the play "An Act of God." Adam Lyons Schlesinger was born in Manhattan on Oct. 31, 1967, to Bobbi and Stephen Schlesinger, and grew up in Montclair, N.J. He studied philosophy at Williams College in Massachusetts, where he met Mr. Collingwood. After graduation, Mr. Schlesinger went to New York, where he founded the group Ivy with Andy Chase and Dominique Durand, while Mr. Collingwood moved to Boston. The two men later reconnected in New York and founded Fountains of Wayne, writing most of the songs for their first album in a West Village bar. The band was signed by Atlantic Records and released its first album, "Fountains of Wayne," in 1996. With jagged guitars and sneering vocals on songs like "Radiation Vibe," the band fit the mold of post grunge alternative rock. But Mr. Schlesinger and Mr. Collingwood stood out with witty and sharp eyed lyrics. Melody and location were central elements to their music, a lesson they derived from Ray Davies of the Kinks, as Mr. Schlesinger told The New York Times in an interview in 1999 for the band's second album, "Utopia Parkway," named after a road in Queens. "When we were teenagers, we liked listening to Kinks records because we'd never been to England, and we got a sense of what it was like to live there," he said. With minimal sales, though, the band was dropped from Atlantic. It released its next album, "Welcome Interstate Managers," in 2003 on the small label S Curve. That album found some success with "Stacy's Mom" and reached No. 3 on The Village Voice's critics' poll for that year. Fountains of Wayne released two more studio albums, "Traffic and Weather" (2007) and "Sky Full of Holes" (2011), but had been on hiatus since. In recent years, Mr. Schlesinger had devoted himself to "Crazy Ex Girlfriend" and to the theater world. Two of his Emmy wins were for songs he wrote with Mr. Javerbaum that were performed during Tony Awards telecasts: "It's Not Just for Gays Anymore," which won in 2012, and "If I Had Time," in 2013. More recently, Mr. Schlesinger had been collaborating with Sarah Silverman on a stage adaptation of her memoir, "The Bedwetter," which was scheduled to begin performances Off Broadway this month at the Atlantic Theater Company, but was delayed by the pandemic; he wrote the music, and co wrote the lyrics with Ms. Silverman. And he had begun working with Rachel Bloom of "Crazy Ex Girlfriend" to write songs for a musical adaptation of the TV show "The Nanny," which is in development and aimed at Broadway. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Freddie and Myrna Gershon have added to their holdings in a building in Midtown East. A few flights down from their penthouse is another in house purchase, a one bedroom that will serve as his writing studio. Freddie Gershon lives with his wife, Myrna, and his dog in a penthouse duplex with a terrace in Midtown East. The space is plenty big, he concedes 6,500 square feet. But apparently not quite big enough. Last month, Mr. Gershon, the chief executive of Music Theatre International, a licensing agency, closed on some additional real estate in his co op: a one bedroom 1,000 square foot unit on the fourth floor. "I have reached a point in my life where I want to write," he said. "I have a book in mind, and I wanted a sanctuary that didn't require me to get dressed and go outside. I wanted to go to the passenger or service elevator and just go to a different floor." Mr. Gershon said he had tried working at home. "But then I'd hear the phones," he said. "Or I'd get distracted by the view of the river." New Yorkers who need more space, but would rather not move, generally try to make a deal with the departing next door neighbor oh, for a departing next door neighbor or with the people who live directly above or below. Deal done, they get busy punching through walls and ceilings to combine their holdings into a single flowing residence. But some, like Mr. Gershon, while they are eager for more room, really don't want that room to be right in the next room. They'd prefer something that's an elevator ride or a few flights of stairs removed from the mother ship. A noncontiguous apartment typically, a studio or a one bedroom whether used as a writing or an art studio, an office, a man cave or an escape hatch, allows its owners or renters to be so near and yet so far. This form of branching out may be happening a bit more these days because the market is improving, making potential buyers less skittish. It also helps that inventory for these smaller apartments is deeper than for larger units. In some prewar buildings where maids' rooms were laid out on a separate floor, Mr. Miller said, "people buy them and turn them into a study or additional storage space or me time rooms." In one co op on East End Avenue, he came across "side by side maids' rooms combined and made into a private gym for a resident, with a shower and a wine cellar." But, as he points out, the person who buys or rents a noncontiguous apartment isn't doing so to have more "walking around" terrain. This is space meant to serve a discrete function, to help fulfill a specific fantasy: writing the Great American Novel, for example, or sculpturing a masterpiece activities that, given all the usual interruptions, would be impossible to engage in at home. And unlike most real estate fantasies, it doesn't command a premium. "Let's say you have a 1,500 square foot apartment on the seventh floor and buy a 500 square foot studio on the third floor," Mr. Miller said. "The aggregate total of noncontiguous studio plus original apartment would be a lot less costly than buying a 2,000 square foot unit." That is, if you could even find a 2,000 square foot unit. "There are now twice as many studios and one bedrooms available in Manhattan as there are three or more bedrooms," said Beth Fisher, a senior managing director of the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group. "The ultratight market is forcing buyers to request combinations or seek out noncontiguous apartments." Six months ago, soon after their twins were born, Catherine and William Ebert bought the 300 square foot studio across the hall from their three bedroom co op on the Upper West Side. "It had come on the market and I thought, 'Wouldn't this be so great,' because I work at home, and with the twins that's hard to do," said Ms. Ebert, an interior designer. "I'd be close by, but I could have some peace and quiet and get stuff done and not be bothered." Her husband, a lawyer, was also looking forward to having a place to do a couple of hours of work without having to repair to the office. For years, Anne Adams, an author, rented an office 20 minutes' walk from her two bedroom duplex in a Park Slope co op. "I loved it," she said. "But it wasn't convenient. If the weather was inclement I would find reasons not to go." So when the garden apartment in her building became available, the pieces fell nicely into place. "It's great to have a place that's separate from where you brush your teeth," Ms. Adams said. "When the phone rings, you know it's work related. If the doorbell rings, you can answer it or not." She has used the space to conduct interviews, work on book collaborations and entertain friends. "My daughter would host sleepovers there when she was an adolescent," she said. "And when she graduated from college she stayed there. It was a good transitional thing for her." When Michael Sorrentino began living with his girlfriend, Caroline Bass, in her Upper West Side rental in early 2012 they were married last October Ms. Bass, an associate broker at Citi Habitats, was worried. Their love was here to stay for sure; so, alas, was her fiance's soundboard, to say nothing of his six guitars and three amplifiers. Mr. Sorrentino, an executive at Citi Habitats, plays in a rock band. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. "There was no way that would all fit into my one bedroom apartment," Ms. Bass said. "We thought we would have to get a bigger place." But a few months later, the next door neighbor decamped to live with his girlfriend, and Ms. Bass and Mr. Sorrentino rented his 250 square foot studio. "So now Mike has all his guitars there," Ms. Bass said. "If he wants to play them for three hours, he can and not be interrupted. He's got his TV there. He has his friends over to watch football." The couple considered asking the landlord's permission to knock down the wall between the units, said Ms. Bass, who had some second thoughts. "I was like: 'What do you mean you're going to have this separate place? How much time are you going to be spending there?' But it's turned out to be the best thing." Some buildings, co ops in particular, may be less than enthusiastic about residents' owning more than one apartment on the premises. There are other legal issues to consider, according to Steven R. Wagner, a real estate lawyer at Porzio, Bromberg Newman. "These buildings are zoned residential," he said. "If the space is being used strictly for business purposes, it may be a zoning violation or a violation of the certificate of occupancy." To reassure boards, he added, buyers should describe the second unit as additional living space and make sure the apartment remains usable as living space by keeping the kitchen intact. The studio the Eberts bought gives them welcome flexibility: office today, something else tomorrow. "Maybe a little down the road," Ms. Ebert said, "it might make sense to have it be the playroom and for me to move my office back to our main apartment, because then the mess and toys will be out of sight." Meanwhile, she said, she and her husband teasingly speculate about their baby twins' taking up full time residence across the hall: "We keep joking about what would be the right age for them to have the studio as their home." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
So China has won twice over: First rising with the active collaboration of naive American centrists, and then consolidating its gains with the de facto collaboration of a feckless American populist. Four months into the coronavirus era, Xi Jinping's government is throttling Hong Kong, taking tiny bites out of India, saber rattling with its other neighbors, and perpetrating a near genocide in its Muslim West. Meanwhile America is rudderless and leaderless, consumed by protests and elite psychodrama and a moral crusade whose zeal seems turned entirely inward, with no time to spare for a rival power's crimes. Furthermore, Trump's likely successor is a figure whose record and instincts and family connections all belong to the recent period of American illusions about China. Joe Biden speaks more hawkishly than he did five years ago, but the very thing that makes him effective as a foil to Trump his promise of a return to Obama era normalcy also makes him an unlikely person to drastically re evaluate the choices that gave China its advantages today. If you were scripting a historical moment when a rising power overtakes a fading hegemon, the cascade from establishment naivete through Trumpian folly to the coronavirus disaster would be almost too on the nose. And foreign policy hands who fear a "Thucydides trap" a scenario where a rising and an established power end up, like Athens and Sparta, in a war have good reasons to be nervous about how the current combination of Chinese ambition and American decline might play out in, say, the Taiwan Strait. But there is another way to look at things. It's possible that we're nearing a peak of U.S. China tension not because China is poised to permanently overtake the United States as a global power, but because China itself is peaking with a slowing growth rate that may leave it short of the prosperity achieved by its Pacific neighbors, a swiftly aging population, and a combination of self limiting soft power and maxed out hard power that's likely to diminish, relative to the U.S. and India and others, in the 2040s and beyond. Instead of a Chinese Century, in other words, the coronavirus might be ushering in a Chinese Decade, in which Xi Jinping's government behaves with maximal aggression because it sees an opportunity that won't come again. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Daniel Radcliffe is returning to Broadway, and to exploring the particular challenges of the Information Age, in a new play about an epic and thought provoking battle between a writer and a fact checker. Mr. Radcliffe will co star with Cherry Jones and Bobby Cannavale in "The Lifespan of a Fact," a new play adapted from a 2012 book about the real life, multiyear, wildly tortured editing of a magazine essay about an adolescent's suicide. Mr. Radcliffe will play the scrupulous fact checker, Jim Fingal, and Mr. Cannavale will play the essayist, John D'Agata, whose occasional prioritization of artistry over precision prompted a debate over the nature of truth and the meaning of accuracy. Ms. Jones will play a fictionalized version of Mr. Fingal's boss. Mr. Radcliffe, of course, is most famous for playing the title role in all eight "Harry Potter" films. But in the years since, he has taken on increasingly challenging stage and film roles. This will be his first time originating a role on Broadway, but he has appeared in three revivals: "The Cripple of Inishmaan," "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" and "Equus." His most recent, and relevant, New York stage role was Off Broadway in 2016, when he starred at the Public Theater in "Privacy," a play that explored the exposure of personal information via technology. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
What should the former Lanvin designer Alber Elbaz do next? As men's wear goes into high gear in Paris and the city prepares for couture, that is a question that keeps coming up. Though there was a movement last fall, in the immediate wake of his firing, to draft him to be creative director of Christian Dior, the post left vacant by Raf Simons, that talk has died down, and there is now a groundswell of support for him starting his own line. At the time of the Lanvin hubbub, the idea was mooted by Ralph Toledano, the president of the Federation Francaise de la Couture, du Pret a Porter des Couturiers et des Createurs de Mode (who was also Mr. Elbaz's boss during his two year tenure at Guy Laroche). Mr. Toledano told me: "It was always his own vision. At Lanvin, what he did was Alber Elbaz for Lanvin. At Guy Laroche, it was Alber Elbaz for Guy Laroche. Now he should just do Alber Elbaz." Similarly, Kim Hastreiter, the editor of Paper magazine and an old friend of Mr. Elbaz's, said, "Maybe he'd want his own house." Marigay McKee, a luxury consultant and former president of Saks Fifth Avenue, suggested the same thing. (She is engaged to Bill Ford, chief executive of private equity firm General Atlantic, which owns a stake in Tory Burch.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
On an early morning last June, I hit the streets of Lyme Regis dressed in a borrowed pair of Wellington boots and an anorak, hood cinched around my face against a cold wind. Sheets of rain had turned the steep streets of the historic town into rivulets, and the surrounding hilltops were shrouded in a dense, milky fog, known locally as Rousdon Mist. It was high summer on England's southwest coast. A frigid dip in the English Channel was out of the question, likewise a run on the rocky beach, but the otherwise dispiriting weather made for ideal conditions for a fossil hunt on the shoreline surrounding Lyme Regis, one of the most fertile fossil hunting grounds in England, if not the world. My wife, Flora, has become inured to the novelty of a beach littered with primeval relics. She grew up near Lyme Regis in an old rectory building. Her father was an English teacher at Allhallows, a now defunct boarding school in Rousdon, the town near Lyme Regis best known for lending its name to the aforementioned fog. Ever since hearing tales of her adventures and fossil finds on the beach as a child, though, I've been keen to try out the local pastime. For a morning long fossil hunt last summer, my companion was the English novelist Tariq Goddard, a longtime friend of my father in law, and one of his former star, if somewhat rebellious, students. The exposed cliffs reveal earthen layers of mudstone and limestone, known as Blue Lias. As they erode, which they constantly do, chunks of earth are sent tumbling onto the beach, especially when the weather is wet, and all manner of fossils are revealed anything from tiny lumps of fossilized dinosaur excrement to the entire skeletons of massive prehistoric beasts. Despite the inclement weather, Lyme Regis itself is as pretty as an English seaside town is likely to be. Perched on bluffs overlooking the English Channel is the town's bunting decked main street, packed with pastel colored Georgian buildings, fossil shops, cafes, bakeries and fudge stores, all overlooking the town's most famous feature, the Cobb, a curved man made harbor wall that dates to the 14th century. (According to the town's official website, "no satisfactory explanation of the name exists.") Old cannons that were once meant to protect the coast against French invasion still dot the town's higher points. And though popular with tourists, Lyme Regis is still somewhat less subscribed than other English seaside resorts, like Brighton and Whitstable, because of the lack of a direct rail link from London. Mr. Goddard regaled me with stories of his school years: the boy who swam out in the freezing English Channel on a dare, needing to be rescued by the Royal Air Force Marine Branch; and the student who ran away and hid out in the undercliff, a verdant wilderness formed by past landslides that sloped from the school's cliff top location down to the sea, and was the site of many a pubescent amorous assignation. When he was a student in the 1990s, Mr. Goddard said there was no interest in pandering to the general public, let alone tourists. "There wasn't the same desire to preserve," he said. Now, the mood couldn't be more different. "The town is much better tended to and cared for. It's now a living gallery, an outdoor museum of a classic English seaside town," Mr. Goddard said approvingly. While Mr. Goddard was keen to see how the town had changed in the 25 years since his school days, my interest in fossil hunting there was piqued by one of my favorite novels, John Fowles's "The French Lieutenant's Woman," in which one of the main characters is a gentleman fossil hunter. It is set in Victorian England, when competing theories of evolution like processes, along with spectacular fossil discoveries, were beginning to mount a fierce and frightening challenge to prevailing religious beliefs. Fowles was Lyme Regis's most famous resident until his death in 2005, and my wife indeed many locals fondly recalls when Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep descended on their little town to film the 1981 adaptation of the book. In the novel, Fowles writes that the earth under Lyme Regis is of a "highly fossiliferous nature and its mobility make it a Mecca for the British paleontologist. These last hundred years or more the commonest animal on its shores has been man wielding a geologist's hammer." This still seemed to be the case during our visit. Because of the rain, Mr. Pamplin gave us a quick fossil tutorial in the public beach's welcome center and cafe. Over acrid cups of black coffee, Mr. Pamplin explained why marine rocks, like the ones in the cliffs surrounding Lyme Regis, have an abundance of fossils in them. "It is easier to get fossilized when you die if you fall into the bottom of the sea and get covered with mud, where there is no oxygen. Land is a much more erosional sort of environment and things get eaten and oxidized, so it's not such a good environment to be fossilized in," he said. When the fossil rich mudstone cliffs get wet from the rain, Mr. Pamplin said, "the mud flows come down and the sea washes away the mud and the fossils are released onto the beach." There, novice fossil hunters like us can seek them out amid the beach's many rocks and stones. Despite or perhaps because of the dramatic weather, the Jurassic Coast is, in its own way, as beautiful a stretch of coastline as I've encountered. (Mr. Goddard declared he wasn't sure whether the gloomy scene looked prehistoric or post apocalyptic.) Only the lower half of the obsidian hued cliff faces were visible, fog shrouded the rest. A grass pathway leading to the top of the cliffs ascended from the parking lot, beyond which a dozen padlocked navy and light blue wooden cabanas, or "beach huts" as they are known in England, sat on a shore the color of slate. Amid the general grayness of the beach we could just make out the hunched figures of other fossil hunters. Mr. Pamplin handed us a small rock hammer and a pair of safety goggles. We both chose not to wear the goggles, feeling that they were deeply uncool and there was no real danger of eye injury. At this moment, it was hard not to think of Mary Anning, the celebrated Victorian fossil hunter who, accompanied by her mutt, Tray, braved the crumbling cliffs and fast rising tides of Charmouth Beach day in and day out to harvest the beautiful fossils that she would sell to beachgoers and geologists to survive. Despite having no formal education and being unwelcome in the all male scientific community of her time, Anning corresponded with some of the leading lights of Victorian geology and managed to make some of the most significant paleontological finds of her era, including the first known Ichthyosaur and Plesiosarus both giant marine reptiles that lived in the Jurassic era. (She is also reported to be the inspiration for the tongue twister "she sells seashells by the seashore.") The scientific community did not name any of Anning's finds after her. Here's Fowles on Anning: "One of the meanest disgraces of British paleontology is that although many scientists of the day gratefully used her finds to establish their own reputation, not one native type bears the specific anningii." Mr. Pamplin patiently explained to us that while fossilized Ichthyosaur skeletons were known to emerge from the subterranean B lue Lias strand exposed by the crumbling cliffs, we were more likely to find the bullet shaped inner shells of squid like creatures called belemnites, or beautiful fan shaped ammonites. Both are extinct species of small cephalopod mollusks and are in abundance on Charmouth Beach. Most of what we'd find simply needed to be spotted amid the plain old stones, but Mr. Pamplin also showed which rocks the disc shaped ones were likely to contain Ammonite fossils and how to split them open with the rock hammer to check by striking them along the edges. We had patchy luck with the hammer, preferring to search by simply trying to spot fossils on the beach. Before our eyes became accustomed to picking the little fossils out amid the countless rocks, Mr. Pamplin had quickly eyed several ammonites, which he handed to Mr. Goddard and me, before revealing he was partial to them above all. "They're just such beautiful things to look at and I never cease to be amazed when I find one on the beach," he said. There were a few people Mr. Pamplin recognized as regulars taking their chances climbing up the earth piled at the foot of the cliffs, left there by the still active and perilous landslides, which were announced by a deep groaning sound. Mr. Goddard and I stuck to the front of the beach, where the sea licked the rocks. We had the most luck searching in the small, clear rock pools left behind by the retreating water. In about three hours on the beach, we each found about 20 fossils, mostly belemnites and some beautiful ammonites, but also a few stones with cross sections of the star shaped Crinoids, or "sea lilies," a still existent animal that, when alive, resembles a tuft of flowers. Our clothes were damp and our backs sore, but we were pleased that we'd come on a day when Charmouth Beach was generous. Mr. Pamplin agreed. "There are easy days and hard days and the last couple of days have been really easy, actually," he said. But whatever was found recently, there is always renewed hope for another big find. "We're not going to run out of fossils," Mr. Pamplin said, indicating the B lue Lias. "It goes all the way up to Yorkshire." The sun came out and the air warmed up as we headed back up to Lyme Regis for lunch and a look around. We ate crab salad sandwiches and sausage rolls on a public bench before browsing the fossil shops and sampling the local fudge. Full, we hiked down to the town's harbor and to the Cobb, the harbor wall which provided shelter for about 100 moored small fishing and recreational boats. Jane Austen visited Lyme Regis twice and set a crucial scene there in her last completed novel, "Persuasion," in which one of the main characters, Louisa Musgrove, falls from the Cobb during a holiday in town, badly injuring herself. Several television adaptations of the fall have been filmed on the Cobb, which is to this day a treacherous climb. The town also is host to a yearly Austen pilgrimage. Austen's description in the novel of our route to the shore could almost still apply today. She wrote of Lyme Regis's streets "almost hurrying into the water," and "the walk to the Cobb, skirting round the pleasant little bay, which, in the season is animated with bathing machines and company; the Cobb itself, its old wonders and new improvements, with the very beautiful line of cliffs stretching out to the east of town are what the stranger's eye will seek." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Taking some time off from a tech job in Chicago earlier this year to contemplate a career move, Shannon Elarton signed up to visit Tanzania in May with AdventureWomen, a women only tour company, on a hunch that she might gain some perspective from her fellow travelers. She was also, she said, "craving something deeper than you would get in a basic tour," and got it one day when the company owner, Judi Wineland, introduced the group to 12 women from a local Masai community. Through interpreters, the assembled talked for over two hours about subjects ranging from female genital mutilation in Africa to divorce in the United States. "By the time it was finished, it was the biggest gift for me," she said. "At the end of the day we all want the same things: to have work, to provide for our family, to have a family." Traveling to experience such personal connections and search one's soul isn't limited to women, of course. But a rise in the number of women only trips, both from new companies and established ones, suggests women are keen to wander well beyond resorts touting girlfriend getaway packages and mother daughter spa retreats. "It's more than yoga and wellness now," said Samantha Brown, the television host of "Samantha Brown's Places to Love" (coming to PBS in January), noting the rise of women only learning trips. "It's empowerment through a skill set." Adventure trips in particular are surging among women. "When women make connections with other women who are very different than they are, it's an invitation to see the world through another woman's lens, to see all that we have in common, and an opportunity to develop more empathy and compassion for women, and the world around us," said Mary Cecchini, who left her corporate career in 2014 to found Living Big, an adventure travel company. Not all women's trips are adrenaline based. Wellness retreats have served as a springboard to more emotionally charged events such as Renew, a breakup boot camp coming Dec. 1 3 to an estate in Saugerties, N.Y. Founded earlier this year by Amy Chan, a writer who specializes in psychology who was motivated by her own devastating break up five years ago, Renew is open to a maximum of 12 women who will have access to sessions with female specialists, including a neuroscientist and a psychologist. "Men have been taking sporting trips and fishing trips and hunting getaways for ages and it's finally time for women to have the equal amount of hall passes so to speak," said Mollie Fitzgerald, the owner of Frontiers International Travel, a Gibsonia, Pa. based travel agency. She adds that she has seen demand for women only travel spike, particularly to places like India and Morocco where interests in wellness, culture and food are addressed. Cultural offerings bring together women with similar interests. Katharine Landale, a marketing executive in London, couldn't interest her husband or children in a trip to Moscow, but she found 10 like minded friends keen on Catherine the Great and caviar to go with Red Savannah on a new female guided tour. "It's just on the edge of our European comfort zone and I feel comfortable going on a real adventure with a group of women who are all very strong minded and interested and interesting," she said. "Going to Moscow as women in that bastion of male power will be fascinating." Still, the call of the wild seems to be the loudest for many women travelers. Below are some of the established companies and start ups that are offering challenging itineraries. Judi Wineland, a veteran of the adventure travel industry, acquired AdventureWomen, one of the oldest women only specialists, last year and brought in her 28 and 30 year old daughters to help run the company. New trips include viewing the northern lights in Finland and seeing orangutans in Indonesia and offer women to women exchanges with locals, from female politicians to divers for pearl oysters in Japan. "We're a relationship company and our medium is travel and our travel is to less visited places off the beaten path," Ms. Wineland said. Among new women focused companies, Living Big offers small group trips to places like Iceland and Kauai where the focus is on adventure (the eight day trip to the Hawaiian island of Kauai in May costs 3,649). But it also guides trips to Italy and New Orleans where the emphasis might shift to food or music, and customizes trips for solo travelers and small groups. Allison Fleece and Danielle Thornton co founded WHOA Travel, which stands for Women High on Adventure, in 2013 in a moment of inspiration after their own exhilarating climb up Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. WHOA now runs trips around the world, but its Kilimanjaro trips remain popular (from 3,400 for nine days). "It's safer and there's built in camaraderie when you're sharing experiences," Ms. Thornton said. Long established, but new to the gender specific tour, Austin Adventures will offer three new women only itineraries. The tours are led by Kasey Austin Morrissey, the 28 year old daughter of the company's owner, Dan Austin; she has worked in the family business since she was 11, and is now the company's vice president of operations. She considers adventure trips the new spa getaways, places where women "are looking to challenge themselves and their friends by pushing their limits together." Trips include nine days in Costa Rica in March (from 3,498) and from six days in Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in May (from 2,798). Responding to a rise in women traveling on its regular itineraries last year 65 percent versus 55 percent the year prior and the requests of its clients, Exodus Travels just announced 12 departures dedicated to and guided by women. They range from 15 days touring Iran (from 3,715) to eight days walking in Italy ( 1,705) and five days climbing Mount Toubkal in Morocco (from 545). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Q. I see there's yet another Windows 10 update out now. I get notifications about patches all the time, so how do I know when this notice is for a system upgrade? Can I tell if it already installed itself? A. Microsoft began rolling out its Windows 10 Fall Creators Update last Tuesday using the Windows Update utility on compatible computers and devices. When you are checking the available updates, look for the one labeled "Feature update to Windows 10, version 1709" in the list of security patches and other listed software fixes in Windows Update. You can manually check to see if the software is ready for you. Just click or tap the Start button on the Windows 10 desktop, and select Settings; as a keyboard shortcut to the Settings box, you can also press the Windows and I keys. In the Settings window, select the Update Security icon, and on the next screen choose Windows Update on the left side of the window. Next, click or tap the "Check for updates" button on the right side of the window. You should see a list of available updates for your computer or tablet. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
"Today is the 50th Earth Day. You can tell Earth Day turned 50 because earlier today, Earth changed its hairstyle and bought a Corvette." JIMMY FALLON "The big 5 0. And I gotta say, Earth is still looking good. She's just getting hotter every year, even with the receding glaciers and putting on a little water weight around the coastline." STEPHEN COLBERT "And you know, honestly, you gotta admit, man, Earth is having the best Earth Day ever. Because ever since coronavirus locked all of us in our homes, animals have been roaming free, the smog has cleared from the sky, the waters of Venice are blue again. Basically, as bad as coronavirus has been for humans, it's been amazing for the Earth. In fact, I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but isn't Wuhan a part of the Earth?" TREVOR NOAH "And Earth is having kind of a moment right now because, with people staying home, the Earth is turning wilder and cleaner, with reduced CO2, better air quality, and animals roaming the city streets. Turns out the best present for Earth Day is the best present for Mother's Day: time away from her children. Just get all the unruly humans out of her hair so Mother Earth can sit in a bubble bath and watch 'Outlander.'" STEPHEN COLBERT | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
"I'm revealing how naughty I was at a young age, and I don't really do that in my stand up," Ali Wong says. When Ali Wong is testing new jokes in front of an audience, she does something strange. "I talk very quietly in a monotone voice where there's almost zero performance in there, to see if the material holds up," she said. Purposefully boring an audience might sound like career suicide for a stand up, but Wong insists there's a method to it: If the crowd laughs despite her dull delivery, then she knows the joke is really good. "It's all about word choice," Wong said. "Sometimes I have a joke I know is funny, but I haven't found the right word, and when I do find it, it's so satisfying." Even though Wong seems wildly uninhibited onstage (one of her early signature moves was pulling down her pants to moon the audience), she's nervous about the reception to her book, which comes out on Oct. 15 and is even more personal than some of her stand up. "I don't know how people are going to react and it's scary," she said. "I hope my siblings don't get pissed at me." In an interview, Wong spoke about recent controversies in the comedy world, her writing process and the question she hates getting asked. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation. In the preface, you describe how you panicked while writing the book. Did you really almost quit and return your advance? One of the recurring jokes in "Dear Girls" is that the book is formatted as letters to your daughters, who are 1 and 3, but then you tell them extremely inappropriate and scandalous stuff. At what age will you let them read it? It's funny when people ask me that because, are we trying to pretend like I'm going to have any control over them? I lost my virginity when I was 15, you know what I mean? I would be flattered frankly if they're interested in anything I do, first of all. But I would feel comfortable with them reading it when they're 15. They can watch the special when they're 12. 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. I do think the book is a lot more scandalous than my act. I'm revealing how naughty I was at a young age, and I don't really do that in my stand up. Onstage I talk about sleeping with two homeless people, but it's like, how old was she, we don't know, it's a mystery. Your husband, Justin Hakuta, writes an afterword to the book, and he's also the subject of some of your stand up, which he says sometimes makes him "uncomfortable." Why did you want him to address readers directly? I wanted to see what he wanted to say, because he has a lot to say too. And frankly, I was tired of writing so many words and I needed to meet a word count. You describe a humiliating experience early in your career, when the host at a comedy club introduced you as someone who "does your nails" and "does your laundry" and people booed during your act, and you almost quit comedy after that. How did you work up the nerve to try again? Of course I thought about quitting at times, but I just kept going because I liked the process so much. Your attitude after bombing distinguishes the comics who are the real deal from the comics who aren't the real deal. Like, people would be so devastated after a set, so many grown ass men kick chairs and cry after a bad set at a place where the stakes could not be lower, you know what I mean? It just motivated me to go up again and fix whatever I did wrong. In the book you bring up a question that you hate getting, so of course I feel compelled to ask it, which is what it's like to be an Asian American woman in comedy. What bothers you about the premise and how do you answer when it comes up, like now? That question comes so much from Asian American women. They clearly want to be in comedy, but is this how you see yourself? Is this how you're reducing yourself? And it upsets me when they ask that, because it makes me think that's how they see themselves: as an Asian American woman. And also it's just not a very good question. If their goal is to pick my brain and get some insight on how to succeed, a much better question is, how do you cope with failure, or how do you write a great joke? Not what is it like to be an Asian American woman in comedy. Underlying that question is this assumption that being an Asian American woman is a weakness. If you see it as a weakness, it will be a weakness. Similarly, you talk about how annoying it is when white male comics tell you that you're lucky to have a "niche" because you're an Asian American woman. When they say that to me, it's a reflection of how they're not seeing a precedent, with the exception being Margaret Cho, of someone looking like me succeeding. I've never felt entitled to a career in comedy, whereas these guys, they're like, "Hey, I'm good looking, I can make an audience laugh for 10 minutes, where's my movie career, where's my TV show?" But I never felt entitled to any of this. This has all been a delightful, lovely surprise. To me, saying I want to be a stand up comedian felt like saying I want to be president. Those guys are not successful, and it's because they're not giving enough credit and weight and importance to the skill of writing, and they're not giving me credit for writing. They're just reducing you to your appearance instead of the quality of your jokes. Right. So it's like, if that were true, how come my mom's not, like, Richard Pryor? She's hilarious, she's an Asian woman. Geez, why couldn't she just snap her fingers and have like two specials or something? I don't know. There's been a recent controversy in the comedy world that I wanted to ask you about, since it's opened up a debate about using racial stereotypes in comedy. Oh my God, I'm so out of it right now. I know what you're going to ask about and I haven't read enough about it to make an informed comment. I've been really out of it. My husband was on a trip with his friends from business school and it's been just me and the kids so I haven't been on my phone reading everything. I know what you're going to ask about. No. And you know, for these things I don't feel comfortable commenting on it if I don't know the full context. You gave me some context, but before I give any official comment I should really read and watch those clips and stuff. Because, I don't know, I heard he had said some slurs and people were really disturbed by it and that S.N.L. had rescinded its offer. I was just really excited about Bowen Yang because I know Bowen. I just want to make sure to take the time to celebrate Bowen and not focus on this too much because it's a bigass deal that Bowen is going to be in the main cast. He's a smart guy who's hilarious and is such a fresh voice in comedy and on top of that he's this Asian American man. I love it. I'm sorry I can't give you more. One thing the Shane Gillis controversy highlights is this ongoing debate in the comedy world about sensitivity and what lines shouldn't be crossed. In your comedy you talk about racial stereotypes, sometimes invoking a stereotype to disarm it or other times pointing out truth in a cliche. What's your view, should some material be avoided because it's insensitive and offensive? People can get away with doing really offensive things as long as it's funny. Because if it's funny, then the laughter wins over the feelings of hurt and then you're doing something right. It comes down to writing and instinct. Also, when you know different people from all different walks of life and you're a compassionate person, then you're probably more capable of writing something that's really offensive that's funny, because there's truth in it and it's something that you haven't heard before. Come up with something that's fresh and true and unexpected. In the book you tell your daughters "you can be whatever you want to be, but not a vlogger. Never a vlogger. Videoing yourself and putting on makeup or unboxing candles is not a job." You also tell them, "you can be whatever you want to be, but I'll be worried if you want to do stand up." Why would you discourage them from pursuing stand up? It's the safety thing. I stayed in so many shady ass motels by myself. You have to put yourself in those situations. Even now I'll go to dive bars and I always ask some other comics to walk me back to my car. So you'd rather have your daughters grow up to be vloggers than stand ups? I guess so, because then they'd be safe. But not from my ridicule. Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Smile Direct Club, specializing in invisible aligners to straighten teeth, has signed a three year lease for a new two level flagship location 900 square feet on the ground floor with an upper floor of equal size in this five story Upper East Side building. The center, the sixth location in Manhattan, is to open by December. Infinite Beauty, a skin care salon and spa, is currently in the space. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Read all of our classical coverage here. Classical lovers! When the week began, I was still in hot yet ever so chill Ojai, Calif., for the tail end of the Ojai Music Festival, one of music's most lovably idiosyncratic, sunnily relaxed yet rigorous events. (Read my full report here.) The revelation of this year's festival, a single long weekend presided over by the fierce violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, was the music of Galina Ustvolskaya (1919 2006), who in virtual isolation built a style of grim extremity. Her six piano sonatas were played on a roasting afternoon by Markus Hinterhauser, the brilliant artist who runs the Salzburg Festival. It's an unbroken hour of focus and force, but Mr. Hinterhauser's touch is warm, human. Watch. It. Now. Esa Pekka Salonen didn't aim for "Foreign Bodies," his grand send off as the New York Philharmonic's composer in residence, to be about him. He designed a program in which he shared billing with a video artist, choreographer, soloist and even another composer. (To be fair, the real star might have been the Philharmonic's branded sippy cup, making a rare appearance inside David Geffen Hall with cocktails invented specifically for the night.) But for all the bells and whistles of this concert which with an improvised encore lasted over three hours that flew by it was still a valuable look back on Mr. Salonen's career as a composer. Particularly exciting was a relative oldie: "Foreign Bodies," a muscular work from 2001. The score's rhythmic complexity and cinematic feel could have easily passed for the latest "Star Wars" soundtrack. The audience certainly responded as if it were. JOSHUA BARONE New Amsterdam Records and the downtown space Le Poisson Rouge celebrated their mutual 10 year anniversaries in tandem this week, with two nights of concerts built from the label's wide ranging roster. A two stage setup inside the hall made quick transitions between acts possible; on Monday night, within the space of an hour, you could hear traces of Minimalist tinged jazz improvisation as well as dance music that emerged from droning chords on a toy organ. Those chords came courtesy of Molly Joyce, who released a memorable EP for violin and electronics last year. Ms. Joyce has said that in the wake of a car accident that left her with one weak hand, this particular organ's arrangement of chord buttons and keys ideally works for her. A recent YouTube video gives a close up look at her method on the instrument with gradually changing chords, managed with one hand, supporting faster figures in the other. During Monday's 20 minute set, the addition of Ms. Joyce's vocals made me eager to hear a full song cycle of similar material. Another hint of this performance style's serene power can be heard on an excerpt, posted on Soundcloud, from her collaboration with the percussionist Jop Schellekens. SETH COLTER WALLS Thanks to the guitarist, singer and composer Charlie Looker's history in a variety of adventurous groups including Zs, Extra Life and Psalm Zero he is a valued presence in several New York scenes. Some of his fans would likely think of him as being metal first in stylistic orientation. Others might slot him under prog rock, or avant jazz. With the release this week of "Simple Answers," an album recorded with a 17 piece group, fans of contemporary chamber music can claim him. The song cycle is an idea explosion: In a recent interview, Mr. Looker described a desire to reflect on "the new far right," "Jewish self hatred," and the "anti humanist" potential of self consciously extreme music. From a distance, it threatens to be a lot perhaps too much. But at the release concert on Thursday at National Sawdust, the vibrantly restless quality of the arrangements made this composer's range of concerns feel palpable, and potent. When his ensemble drawn from the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Mivos Quartet and other contemporary classical groups navigated convergences of trap music rhythms, catchy melodies and airy gusts of dissonance, it was easy to perceive a world struggling to balance its overwhelming populations. Even when Mr. Looker wasn't playing guitar, or singing himself, you could discern his intelligence at the center, working to hold communities of sound together. SETH COLTER WALLS Last weekend at Opera Theater of St. Louis read my report on "An American Soldier" and "Regina" a grave medical emergency curtailed a performance of Gluck's "Orfeo and Euridice" after the first act. But from what I saw, Ron Daniels's staging is inventively contemporary. The grieving Orfeo the radiant, robust mezzo soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano; watch her here in an aria from Mozart's "La Clemenza di Tito" and his companions are dressed in punkish black jeans and leather. A troupe of wild dancers and masked choristers depicting furies of the underworld appeared in fiery red. Opera Theater presents all its productions in English. (Amanda Holden prepared the new English "Orfeo" performed here.) Hearing Orfeo tell his companions "Leave me alone; I long to mourn for her in peace" enhanced the immediacy of the moment, and was particularly poignant given the unpleasant circumstances of this particular performance. ANTHONY TOMMASINI | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
"What the Constitution Means to Me," Heidi Schreck's autobiographical play that uses a childhood speech and debate competition to explore the treatment of gender in American legal history, will transfer to Broadway this spring. Ms. Schreck, a writer and performer in television as well as theater, has been working on the play for years, and stars in it. Clubbed Thumb staged a production during its Summerworks festival in 2017; that was followed by Berkeley Repertory Theater last spring, New York Theater Workshop last fall, and then an extension of that production at the Greenwich House Theater. The show, which also features another actor (Mike Iveson) and a New York City high school student debater (Rosdely Ciprian and Thursday Williams, alternating), will play at the Helen Hayes Theater, Broadway's smallest house (the theater is owned by a nonprofit, Second Stage, which is renting the building to this play's commercial producers for the run). It is scheduled to begin previews March 14, to open March 31 and to close June 9. Check out our Culture Calendar here. The play, based on Ms. Schreck's experience as a high school student giving speeches about the Constitution to earn tuition money for college, is directed by Oliver Butler, and the Broadway run is being produced by Diana DiMenna, Aaron Glick and Matt Ross. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Rushing an impeachment case through the House without due process and giving the Senate a half baked case to finish set a dangerous precedent. If the Senate were to convict, it would risk making this kind of quick, partisan impeachment in the House a regular occurrence. That would serve only to further deepen the divides that seem to permeate every part of our society today. People certainly see this divide in Congress. Many believe their elected representatives on both sides of the aisle have lost sight of what's important and are focusing on politics and partisanship rather than results for the American people. While the Senate is where this impeachment process will end, it is also the Senate that is best suited to help turn the page and begin a new chapter. We can do that by demonstrating that we can work together and address the issues our constituents care most about. I believe it is possible for both parties to come together for consensus solutions on these three issues: Lowering Prescription Drug Costs. Researchers are producing life changing medicines, but all that progress does us no good if they're unaffordable. It's gotten so bad that some Americans have to choose between paying their mortgage or rent and being able to afford expensive prescription drugs. In the Senate, three committees have approved legislation intended to help lower out of pocket costs for senior citizens, crack down on the high prices set by drug manufacturers and end surprise billing practices that have devastated families with shocking medical bills. The House has its own plan. The president wants to get this done and there is no reason we should not be able to find common ground here. Improving Skills Training. Everywhere I go in Ohio, employers tell me they need workers who have the skills to fill available jobs well paying work as welders, coders and health care technicians, all of which require skills training. I'm working with Senator Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, to pass legislation called the JOBS Act to ensure that Pell grants can be used to cover short term training programs for these careers. That would help fill well paid, in demand jobs and get more people off the sidelines and into our economy. This legislation is bipartisan, and ready to go. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
WASHINGTON Margaret Brennan, the senior foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News, will be the next moderator of "Face the Nation," the network's prestige Sunday morning public affairs show and one of the most influential venues in American politics. Her new role, announced by CBS on Thursday, makes Ms. Brennan, 37, the only woman currently serving as a solo anchor of a major Sunday political affairs show. She succeeds John Dickerson, who left "Face the Nation" in January after less than three years to replace Charlie Rose on "CBS This Morning." Along with mainstays like NBC's "Meet the Press" and ABC's "This Week," "Face the Nation" features interviews with prominent lawmakers and White House officials that often make news, and can forge Washington's political agenda for the week ahead. For decades, the hosts of these shows have primarily been men. "Meet the Press," which began in 1947, has had only one female moderator, Martha Rountree, its founding host. Lesley Stahl, now of "60 Minutes," moderated "Face the Nation" from 1983 to 1991. Christiane Amanpour, now of CNN, moderated ABC's "This Week" from 2010 to 2011. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
With labor unions seeing their influence wane, more than 200 organizations have sprouted nationwide to help low wage workers. But nearly all these groups say they are hampered by a lack of dependable funding because, unlike unions, they cannot rely on a steady flow of dues. To the dismay of many business groups, New York City enacted an innovative law last year that many labor advocates hope will become a model to finance such organizations across the nation. Under the law, fast food employees who want to contribute to a nonprofit, nonunion workers' group can insist on having the restaurant they work for deduct money from their pay and forward that money to the group. But before a group can receive these contributions, it must get 500 workers to pledge to contribute. One such group, Fast Food Justice, planned to announce on Wednesday that 1,200 New York fast food workers have signed pledges to contribute 13.50 a month to the organization. "This has been a lot of hard work, but we think this is great," said Shantel Walker, who works at a Papa John's in Brooklyn and is a member the new group. "We want to bring change not only in the fast food industry, but in our communities." The new group will not seek to negotiate contracts as unions do, but its leaders say it will most likely push for a higher minimum wage and for many other issues fast food workers support, including affordable housing, immigration reform, better police community relations and improvements to New York's subway system. The Restaurant Law Center the legal arm of the National Restaurant Association has filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to overturn the law. Among the center's arguments is that requiring the restaurant owners to forward money to workers' groups is unconstitutional forced speech under the First Amendment. "We think this law is a way of trying to get restaurants to fund groups" that "will harass restaurants with money from the restaurants," said Angelo Amador, the law center's executive director. "It doesn't make any sense." When the New York City Council passed the law which applies only to the fast food industry there were questions about whether an organization could persuade 500 workers to contribute. But Janice Fine, associate professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, said: "The fact that they've signed up 1,200 is impressive. It's a kind of initial proof of the concept." 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. "When I speak to people in other cities, they get really interested," she added. "They can imagine a law like this one where they are." The Fight for 15 campaign and the Service Employees International Union, which has contributed tens of millions to that effort, pushed hard for the New York law. While the Fight for 15 has won major victories getting Seattle, California and New York State to enact laws calling for a 15 minimum wage the movement has not achieved its goal of unionizing fast food workers. Fight for 15 leaders are concerned that even if they were to persuade workers at dozens of McDonald's locations to vote to unionize, it would be extremely difficult to get McDonald's or its franchise operators to agree to a contract. Without a formal union, the Fight for 15 has been eager for a reliable way to finance a fast food workers' group. The New York City law, which was enacted in May and took effect in late November, is the first of its kind. "What's important about this law is it provides for a way for fast food workers to help sustain a nonprofit organization that's dedicated to advocating for issues that members say is important to them," said Tsedeye Gebreselassie, chairwoman of Fast Food Justice's board and a senior staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project. For example, the group's leaders said many members were interested in pushing for reduced transit fares for low wage workers. Fast Food Justice's leaders say they hope to get 5,000 workers to contribute by the end of 2018, and 10,000 by the end of 2020. (New York City has about 65,000 fast food workers.) Contributions from 5,000 workers would mean revenue of more than 800,000 a year. The Restaurant Law Center's lawsuit asserts that the New York law and Fast Food Justice are merely mechanisms to help the service employees' union ultimately unionize fast food restaurants. Its lawsuit also argues that the law should be overturned on the basis that the National Labor Relations Act already regulates labor organizations. Fast Food Justice asserts that it is not the type of labor organization regulated by federal law. It also argues that the New York law doesn't violate restaurants' First Amendment rights because the money being forwarded belongs to the workers and not the restaurants. But the Restaurant Law Center says even having to process the payments violates employers' free speech rights. Even though LaShawn Herbert said her employer, Shake Shack, treats her well, she is a strong backer of the Fight for 15 and Fast Food Justice. She noted that when the Fight for 15 started in New York City in late 2012, the minimum wage was 7.25 in the city. Since then, it has jumped to 13.50 for fast food workers and will rise to 15 at the end of this year. "It's come a long way," she said. "The whole point is help people so they can make enough take care of their family and so they don't have to be on welfare." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
On April 23, about a week after the fire at Notre Dame in Paris, the designer Mathieu Lehanneur unveiled his plan for a new spire for the cathedral: a gleaming, 300 foot flame, made of carbon fiber and covered in gold leaf, that would be a permanent reminder of the tragedy. The suggestion, first made on Instagram, did not go down very well some even called it blasphemous, Mr. Lehanneur said in a telephone interview. The idea was meant as a simple provocation: to show the absurdity of rebuilding the spire as it was in the 19th century, he said. But, he added, he had since become serious about the plan. "A few days after I put it online, I thought, 'Why not?' " Mr. Lehanneur said. "The flame is actually a very strong symbol in the bible," he noted. "It's powerful." Mr. Lehanneur's plan is among dozens that have been made public since the fire, most of them produced by small architectural and design firms. They range from the madcap (an architectural folly that looks like a spaceship has landed on the cathedral) to the modern (a project that would turn the roof into a greenhouse). Many of the designs are glass towers. But one, from Vizum Atelier, a design firm based in Slovakia, would see a beam of light shoot up from a new spire into the sky. It would be a "lighthouse for lost souls," Michal Kovac, an architect at the firm, said via email. It would fulfill the aim of the architects of Gothic cathedrals around Europe who wanted to touch heaven with their spires, he added. Another proposal with religious overtones came from Alexandre Fantozzi, a Brazilian architect, who envisaged the cathedral's roof and spire being rebuilt entirely using stained glass. Several designers said in interviews that their designs were merely artistic responses to the shock of the fire. But some also hope that their plans will be chosen. Two days after the fire, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe of France said that there would be an international competition for a spire to replace the one designed by Eugene Viollet le Duc that was destroyed. "This is obviously a huge challenge, a historic responsibility," Mr. Philippe said. No details of the proposed contest have yet been released. President Emmanuel Macron of France said last month that he was not opposed to a "a contemporary architectural gesture" that could make Notre Dame "even more beautiful." But many in France have called for Viollet le Duc's spire to be restored as it had been built. On Thursday, the daily newspaper Le Figaro published a survey suggesting that 55 percent of French people wanted the spire restored to its original form and several politicians have pushed for an identical replacement. A proposed law on how the restoration would be financed was put before the French Parliament on Friday. The law would also allow exemptions from environmental and heritage rules for the project, seen as measures intended to make it possible to comply with Mr. Macron's stated desire to rebuild the cathedral within five years. In response, more than 1,100 architecture professionals and art historians published a letter in Le Figaro on April 29 calling on the government to "take time to find the right way" to restore the structure and ensure that heritage laws were respected. Franck Riester, the French culture minister, told Parliament on Friday that the restoration would "not be hasty" and that the government would listen to critics of the proposed law. No major architect has yet issued a proposal for how they would rebuild Notre Dame, but several said they would consider entering a competition when details were announced. Mr. Barrett said the five year deadline was unrealistic, unless a new spire was constructed elsewhere, using modern lightweight materials, and then dropped into place. But that was "not in the spirit of a medieval cathedral, which took decades and involved a lot of craft," he added. Mr. Barrett said "the most interesting" designs he had seen so far were those that involved opening up the roof and creating a new public space. Those included turning the structure into some kind of garden with trees, echoing the lattice of ancient timber beams that used to make up the cathedral's attic and that were known as "the Forest." "That process of democratizing space is something we like and have done before," Mr. Barrett said, though he speculated that the weight of trees could be too much for the cathedral. Several designs have appeared online that look to create gardens. The greenhouse design was created by the Paris based Studio NAB and would include beehives in the glass spire. Those plans are a nod to the beehives that have long been kept on Notre Dame's roof the honey produced has traditionally been given to the poor. (The hives survived the fire.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The notion of making vehicles turn better by steering all four of their wheels has inspired engineers for decades. The United States Army experimented with all wheel steering jeeps during World War II, and the benefits to maneuverability of rear steering have long been known to firefighters assigned to hook and ladder trucks. As demonstrated by its new flagship sedan, the Acura RLX, Honda Motor is taking its luxury division down the same well traveled path. But the company is adding some new gloss to an old idea. The 2014 RLX, on display in the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center when the New York auto show opened to the public on Friday, incorporates a feature that Acura calls Precision All Wheel Steer. The system is intended to improve the handling of the front drive RLX by adding steering capability to the rear wheels. The cheeky acronym that appears on the car's trunk lid, P AWS, seems well suited to a technology that the company claims will give the 50,000 RLX more catlike reflexes. The image enhancement promised by the P AWS system is something that Acura's top model could certainly use. Its predecessor, the 4 wheel drive RL, was a chronic slow seller; to compete with the likes of the Audi A6 and A7, BMW 5 Series, Infiniti Q50, Lexus GS and Mercedes Benz E Class, the RLX will need the ability to take corners as well as these poised and predominantly rear drive sedans. Starting in the 1980s, Japanese automakers like Honda, Mazda, Mitsubishi and Nissan brought four wheel steering to performance models, and in 2002 5, General Motors marketed its Quadrasteer system on full size pickups. But when sales dipped with the economy, the systems, which were heavy and costly, faded away. With miniaturized electronics and the widespread adoption of electric power steering, rear steering is now experiencing something of a resurgence. BMW offers it on the 5 Series, as will Porsche on the coming 911 GT3. In the new RLX, the rear wheels are steered by electric actuators on each side of the rear suspension. As a result, the left and right rear wheels can steer independently of each other. The system, which was in development for five years, adds just 11 pounds to the car's weight, said Yousuke Sekino, chief engineer of the RLX, whose credentials include designing the suspensions for the 1986 Acura Legend and the 1990 NSX supercar. Mr. Sekino likens P AWS to the two skis of an Olympic slalom competitor. "By controlling both skis independently, the skier can control his turning and braking very precisely," he said. Unlike the front wheels, which turn in a wide sweep, the RLX's rear wheels turn only a small amount, a maximum of two degrees left or two degrees right from center. They also react differently depending on the situation. Under braking, both turn inward slightly to increase the car's straight ahead stability. As the driver turns into a right hand corner, the rear wheels steer slightly left to make the car turn more quickly; in a left hand corner, they do the opposite. At parking lot speeds, this opposite direction steering also makes the car more maneuverable in tight spots. At freeway speeds, the system automatically switches modes; the rear wheels then turn in the same direction as the fronts. That's to improve control in situations like diving across multiple lanes for an off ramp. The almost undetectable labors of these systems are intended to make the RLX more agile and free it from understeer, or the tendency to plow forward even if the steering wheel is turned. For those who have enough trouble steering just the front wheels, fear not; the actuators are not directly linked to the steering wheel. Rather, a computer determines from the driver's inputs into the steering wheel, brake and gas pedal how best to steer the rear wheels to improve handling. And, unlike Honda's previous four wheel steering system for the Prelude model of the 1990s, P AWS shuts off when the car is in reverse. "Many drivers complained about that," Mr. Sekino said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
In a ruling on one of the art world's notable MeToo lawsuits, a court found that Artforum magazine can be held responsible for retaliation against a former employee but that Knight Landesman, the influential former publisher whom the employee accused of sexual harassment, legally remains in the clear. Amanda Schmitt, who started at Artforum in 2009 when she was 21, filed a complaint in late 2017. Mr. Landesman accused in the lawsuit of groping, attempting to kiss, sending lewd messages to, or otherwise harassing at least nine women in incidents stretching back a decade resigned hours later. The other women were not named as plaintiffs. Early last year, the lawsuit was dismissed. Last week, in a ruling first reported by Artnet News, a New York appeals court affirmed the dismissal of the retaliation claim against Mr. Landesman but ruled that Ms. Schmitt should be allowed to try to prove her claim against Artforum. (Lawyers for Artforum and Mr. Landesman declined to comment on Thursday.) Rather than suing for workplace sexual misconduct, for which the statute of limitations had run out, Ms. Schmitt filed a suit accusing Mr. Landesman of retaliating against her. Mr. Landesman cornered her at a restaurant in May 2017 and demanded an explanation for having been "unfairly accused," she said. Too much time, however, had passed between her employment at Artforum Ms. Schmitt left the magazine in 2012 and the confrontation for it to qualify as retaliation, the lower court judge ruled in January 2019. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
If you're wondering whether you'll enjoy the revolution, Jen Silverman's "Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties," which opened on Wednesday night at the Lucille Lortel Theater in Manhattan, makes an excellent (and hilarious) test case. The revolution I mean is the feminist one that has been rumbling, like a nascent earthquake, beneath the American theater for decades. In the past year, it feels as if it has finally struck, in the process swallowing up every worn out assumption about casting, subject matter, programming, leadership, inclusion and criticism. You won't get too much criticism from me. For all its political and aesthetic cred, the MCC Theater production is entirely a delight, as long as you don't mind hearing a certain feline term for vagina repeated about a thousand times. (A thousand and one times, if you count the elaborate sub subtitle.) This is the kind of play in which even the projected descriptions between scenes have punch lines; they are both Brechtian and borschtian. Betty 1 (Dana Delany) is an uptight socialite with a cheating husband and an unexamined inner life. What's unexamined for Betty 2 (Adina Verson) is more tangible; she is horrified by the prospect of looking at, let alone touching, her genitals. Betty 3 (Ana Villafane) is an exuberantly "high femme super queer" celebrity, or will be just as soon as she quits her job at Sephora and develops a talent beyond hotness. At a dinner party, she rocks Betty 2's world by giving her a hand mirror, with instructions on where to aim it. But "butch as you can get" Betty 4 (Lea DeLaria) is frightened by Betty 3's ambitions, especially if it means that her old pal (and crush) will leave her even further behind. She discusses these feelings, gruffly and obliquely, with Betty 5 (Chaunte Wayans), while the two work on their trucks together. Betty 5, who describes herself as "a gender nonconforming masculine presenting female bodied individual," yet "comfortable with female pronouns," runs a boxing gym where she meets, you guessed it, Betty 1. If this makes you think of the circularity of "La Ronde" while also recalling "The Vagina Monologues," you're only partway through the thicket of the play's theatrical references. Ms. Silverman's master template is the "Pyramus and Thisbe" plot from "A Midsummer Night's Dream," which Betty 3 decides to stage as a step toward her stardom. Before you quite realize the resonances, she has cast the other Betties as Moonshine, Lion, Wall and Prologue: the gender rainbow equivalent of Shakespeare's rude mechanicals. (Betties 4 and 5 are, after all, tinkerers.) In a series of woeful rehearsals, they "devise" their own take on this play within the play, which Betty 3 thinks is called "Burmese and Frisbee" or "Pyramid and Thursday." Some of this, it must be said, relies on sitcom style satire, the kind that exploits, however sympathetically, a manufactured gap between the characters' intelligence and the audience's. For a play set now, in New York City, the Betties are curiously incurious, as if Ms. magazine and "Our Bodies, Ourselves" never happened. (Betty 2 reads Ladies' Home Journal.) They are funny because they are working out ideas the rest of us imagine we mastered long ago. But that's exactly how Shakespeare used the "Midsummer" mechanicals and to make the same point: Besides humor, there are beauty and power in the emergence of a new sensibility. As the Betties help one another grow past their imposed limitations, whether cultural, sexual, marital or otherwise, they are creating, even within a spoof, solidarity. Ms. Silverman quite consciously connects that idea to the exploratory nature of theater. The phrase "collective rage," she tells us in one of the scene titles, means not just women's fury but constructive craziness, as in a rehearsal. This puts a lot of pressure on the actual production to serve as a case in point. Happily, it does. Under the confident direction of Mike Donahue, who also staged Ms. Silverman's plays "The Roommate" and "The Moors," this is a trenchant and snappy production; even the props which drop out of the egg crate ceiling of Dane Laffrey's set get laughs. The best revolutions are, after all, clear of purpose and expertly timed. The same could be said of the cast, which radiates the kind of gusto that actors working with enjoyable material don't need to fake. For Ms. Delany, best known for her television roles, that may partly reflect the pleasure of rediscovering the stage in a role that is itself about self rediscovery. Ms. DeLaria ("Orange Is the New Black") and Ms. Wayans ground "Collective Rage" in their own lived experience and give it a hit of butch realness. But Ms. Villafane, who played Gloria Estefan in the musical "On Your Feet," and Ms. Verson, so affecting in "Indecent" and "The Lucky Ones," steal the show together by grabbing it from opposite ends. Ms. Villafane achieves full manic liftoff upon her first entrance and never crashes down, elevating what could be a stereotype into an archetype. Ms. Verson digs in the other direction; she is somehow radiantly pathetic as a woman who can't find herself under her skin. One of the things I liked most about "Collective Rage" is that it does not apologize for its exclusive focus on the lives of these Betties; rather, it assumes the sympathy of audiences who do not check the same demographic boxes. Not long ago, that assumption might not have been rewarded or producers, fearful that it wouldn't be, might have declined to find out. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
A vest designed for the modern Girl Scout must have pockets, and those pockets must be large enough to fit the largest model of the iPhone. "In all our fittings that was the No. 1 thing," said Wendy Lou, the deputy chief revenue officer of the Girl Scouts of the USA. "Can you fit the iPhone in there? Yes? Let's go." The new vest was designed by three students from the Fashion Institute of Technology. It was released on Tuesday, along with more than a dozen separates for Girl Scouts in grades six through 12, including things that are likely already in their closets, like black spandex leggings and a denim jacket. The student designed collection is an attempt to make the Girl Scout uniform more versatile and relevant to infiltrate the modern teenage wardrobe with scouty swag, sometimes camouflaged as athleisure. (Although loungewear has never been more popular, the collection was finished pre pandemic.) The organization hopes the new styles will help encourage older girls those in the trenches of middle school and high school to stick with being a scout. "We've really modernized and changed everything that the girls are learning," Ms. Lou said, pointing to new STEM and entrepreneurship programs adopted in recent years. Today, girls earn badges in coding and cybersecurity, in marketing and making business plans. The outdated uniforms "didn't really reflect that same progression," Ms. Lou said. When the three F.I.T. students met with a few dozen Girl Scouts to present ideas and get feedback during the redesign process, it was clear that "they wanted something cooler," said Melissa Posner, 24, one of the designers. Girl Scout events are often held after school, but many would rather quickly change clothes after the final bell than wear their uniforms to class. "They wanted something that wouldn't be so embarrassing to wear to school," Ms. Posner said. The centerpiece of the official Girl Scouts uniform is a vest or sash or, for some younger girls, a tunic in blue, brown, green or khaki, depending on the scout's grade level, decorated with their badges and pins. When officially representing the organization, girls must layer their sash or vest over either a white shirt and khaki bottoms, or Girl Scouts branded "official apparel" a previously limited selection of mostly polo shirts and plain skirts. For preteen and teen scouts, the khaki sash hasn't visibly changed much in the F.I.T. redesign; there are only so many ways to redesign a diagonal loop of cloth, although it got a hidden iPhone size pocket, too. The khaki utility vest is another story. It has a new notch collar, epaulet shoulders, snap buttons and a cinched waist. The color is lighter and the fabric softer. It's the Burberry trench of Girl Scout vests. It's not Fashion Nova, but the collection is a trendier take on the current scout uniform. "It's been more than 20 years since we've done something to this scale," Ms. Lou said. "If you look back at historical Girl Scout uniforms, they really reflected the fashions of the time. We were evolving every decade. And somewhere along the way, about in the '90s, we stopped evolving." When the F.I.T. students began the process of redesigning the uniforms, they started with the Girl Scouts' unexpectedly rich fashion archives. In 1928, the color green was introduced, and it's still used prominently today. Earlier uniforms were khaki, which was contentious since the color was widely viewed as belonging to the Boy Scouts and the military, not homemakers. In 1948, the Girl Scouts commissioned Mainbocher to design its uniforms. The famous American couturier had moved back to New York at the start of World War II, following a successful decade of dressing royalty, socialites and celebrities in Paris. His Girl Scouts uniforms were grass green shirtdresses with sporty neck scarves and badges sewn onto long cuffed sleeves, advertised in the style of Dior's New Look. Twenty years later, Stella Sloat designed a green suit for adult Girl Scouts that leaned more flight attendant than outdoorswoman. It had flared elastic waist slacks and a short sleeve zip up tunic. Halston designed a polyester collection of professional separates in 1978, introducing a trouser, vest and belted jacket in a more subdued green. Bill Blass brought back bright green in the 1980s, cranking it up to nearly neon, and continued making separates a cardigan, straight leg pants, an A line skirt allowing the scouts to mix and match. "Not necessarily to always be on trend," he said. "But to constantly look at their uniform and their brand and say: 'What is it that our members really want? What would they find appealing? What is going to excite them?'" It's a tricky thing to pull off, particularly in the confines of a uniform: Balancing novelty with heritage, maintaining a strong shared identity while allowing for individuality. But that flexibility, Mr. Winkle said, has historically been key to attracting and retaining members which the Girl Scouts has been struggling in recent years to do. The three F.I.T. student designers (all 2020 graduates) said it was important to them to continue the tradition of mixing and matching, particularly for girls in that 11 to 18 age range. "At that age, you start to look at what you like, compared to what your mom or somebody else picks out for you," said Nidhi Bhasin, 24. They wanted the girls to be able to explore and play with fashion, to figure out and forge their own styles. "It's more about discovery and self identity," Jenny Feng, 22, added. "And just choosing who you want to be as an adult." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
SEATTLE The Seattle area, home to both Microsoft and Amazon, is a potent symbol of the affordable housing crisis that has followed the explosive growth of tech hubs. Now Microsoft, arguing that the industry has an interest and responsibility to help people left behind in communities transformed by the boom, is putting up 500 million to help address the problem. Microsoft's money represents the most ambitious effort by a tech company to directly address the inequality that has spread in areas where the industry is concentrated, particularly on the West Coast. It will fund construction for homes affordable not only to the company's own non tech workers, but also for teachers, firefighters and other middle and low income residents. Microsoft's move comes less than a year after Amazon successfully pushed to block a new tax in Seattle that would have made large businesses pay a per employee tax to fund homeless services and the construction of affordable housing. The company said the tax created a disincentive to create jobs. Microsoft, which is based in nearby Redmond, Wash., and has few employees who work in the city, did not take a position on the tax. The debate about the rapid growth of the tech industry and the inequality that often follows has spilled across the country, particularly as Amazon, with billions of taxpayer subsidies, announced plans to build major campuses in Long Island City, Queens, and Arlington, Va., that would employ a total of at least 50,000 people. In New York, elected officials and residents have raised concerns that Amazon has not made commitments to support affordable housing. Microsoft has been at the vanguard of warning about the potential negative effects of technology, like privacy or the unintended consequences of artificial intelligence. Executives hope the housing efforts will spur other companies to follow its lead. "We believe everybody has a role to play, and everybody needs to play their role," said Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and chief legal officer. The company's strong finances, a sign of its resurgence under Satya Nadella as chief executive, have given it resources to deploy, Mr. Smith said. In October, the company reported net income of 8.8 billion in its most recent quarter, up 34 percent, and it had almost 136 billion in cash and short term investments on its balance sheet. The company's stock has risen steadily under Mr. Nadella, and Microsoft is now valued at over 800 billion. A number of other tech businesses have tried to address the homeless crisis. Amazon's chief executive, Jeff Bezos, has supported homeless service providers through his personal foundation, and the Salesforce chief executive, Marc Benioff, helped fund a proposition in San Francisco to tax businesses to pay for homeless services. Voters approved the tax in November, rejecting opposition from some tech leaders, including Twitter's chief executive, Jack Dorsey. Others plan to build housing for their own employees. Such housing may help with demand, but it has also reinforced the impression that the companies are focused too closely on their own backyards. "This is long range thinking by a company that has been around for a long time, and plans to be around for a long time," said Margaret O'Mara, a professor at the University of Washington who studies the history of tech companies. Microsoft began researching the region's housing last summer, after the nasty tax fight in Seattle and around a peak of the housing market. The company analyzed data and hired a consultant to decide how to focus its work. The area's home prices have almost doubled in the past eight years, and Mr. Smith said he learned that "the region has counterintuitively done less to build middle income housing than low income housing, especially in the suburbs." That squeeze hits a range of workers. "Of course, we have lots of software engineers, but the reality is that a lot of people work for Microsoft. Cafeteria workers, shuttle drivers," Mr. Nadella said this week at a meeting with editors at the company's headquarters. "It is a supply problem, a market failure." Microsoft plans to lend 225 million at subsidized rates to preserve and build middle income housing in six cities near its Redmond headquarters. It will put an additional 250 million into low income housing across the region. Some of those loans may be made through the federal programs that provide tax breaks for low income housing. The company plans to invest the money within three years, and expects most of it to go to Seattle's suburbs. The loans could go to private or nonprofit developers, or to governmental groups like the King County Housing Authority. As the loans are repaid, Mr. Smith said, Microsoft plans to lend the money out again to support additional projects. The remaining 25 million will be grants to local organizations that work with the homeless, including legal aid for people fighting eviction. The Seattle Times reported Wednesday that if the 500 million were put into one project, it would create only about 1,000 units, so instead Microsoft will most likely put smaller amounts in many projects to help build "tens of thousands of units." The initial reaction to the company's announcement was positive. "There is almost no level of housing that isn't direly needed," said Claudia Balducci, a member of the King County Council who helps lead the Regional Affordable Housing Task Force. A report in December by the task force said that the region needs 156,000 more affordable housing units, and will need 88,000 more units by 2040 to accommodate future growth. A growing body of research has tied the lack of affordable housing to increasing homelessness. A December study from the real estate website Zillow said that was particularly true when households pay more than a third of their income in rent. The New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle regions the country's largest tech hubs have all already crossed that threshold. "The idea that you can live in your bubble and put your fingers in your ears just doesn't work anymore," said Steve Schwartz, head of public affairs at Tableau Software, which is based in Seattle. Amazon in recent years has worked closely with Mary's Place, a homeless shelter for women and children in Seattle, and is integrating a shelter for about 65 families into one of its new buildings. Amazon has paid tens of millions of dollars to the city's affordable housing trust fund as fees to build in the core of Seattle. Google supported the City of Mountain View's plan to add 10,000 housing units in an area it's developing, with 20 percent designated for lower income residents. And Facebook has planned to build 1,500 apartments near its Menlo Park headquarters, with 15 percent to be affordable. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Visitors returned to the Museum of Modern Art on Thursday, five months after it and other New York institutions closed because of the coronavirus pandemic. Now on view: "Felix Feneon: The Anarchist and the Avant Garde From Signac to Matisse and Beyond," which Roberta Smith called an exemplary exhibition. Before you head back to the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there are some things you need to know: capacity will be limited to 25 percent, temperature checks and face masks will be mandatory, and the advance purchase of tickets is required. Each museum has specific guidelines, so you'll want to visit their websites: moma.org and metmuseum.org. Our critics have reviewed some of the new shows "Felix Feneon" at MoMA, and "Making the Met," "Jacob Lawrence" and Hector Zamora's rooftop sculpture at the Met but they also weighed in previously about several exhibitions that are still on view. Below, you'll find an overview of those shows, as well as a partial listing of some of the museums opening in the coming days. NICOLE HERRINGTON The museum is now open. MoMA PS1 remains closed, though it plans to reopen Sept. 17 with the exhibition "Marking Time: Art in the Age of Incarceration." 'JUDD' (through Jan. 9) This retrospective of some 70 works by the American artist Donald Judd is his first in New York in more than 30 years. It ranges from formally spare early abstract sculptures to the high color work done before his death in 1994. The show is a beautiful thing: carefully winnowed, persuasively installed, just the right size. Judd once said that for art to matter, "it needs only to be interesting." (Holland Cotter) THE COLLECTIONS MoMA recently celebrated its latest expansion with these inaugural shows, drawing from its collection. "Sur Moderno: Journeys of Abstraction the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift" (through Sept. 12) presents a selection of South American postwar art so substantial that it could reorient the museum's focus. For "The Shape of Shape," the latest iteration of the museum's Artist's Choice series, the painter Amy Sillman filled a large gallery with an astounding array of carefully juxtaposed works from across the collection (through Oct. 4). "Taking a Thread for a Walk" (through Jan. 10) looks at the role of weaving in modern art beyond textiles. And "Private Lives Public Spaces" (through Feb. 21), a video installation in the galleries just outside the main movie auditoriums, comprises 47 hours of neglected footage from the museum's collection. (Roberta Smith) 'SAHEL: ART AND EMPIRES ON THE SHORES OF THE SAHARA' (through Oct. 26) Sahel was the name once given by traders crossing the oceanic Sahara to the welcoming grasslands that marked the desert's southern rim, terrain that is now Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal. To early travelers, art from the region must have looked like a rich but bewildering hybrid. It still does, which may be one reason it stands, in the West, somewhat outside an accepted "African" canon. This fabulous exhibition goes for the richness. One look tells you that variety within variety, difference talking to difference, is the story here. New ideas spring up from local soil and arrive from afar. Ethnicities and ideologies collide and embrace. Cultural influences get swapped, dropped and recouped in a multitrack sequencing that is the very definition of history. (Holland Cotter) 'THE GREAT HALL COMMISSION: KENT MONKMAN, MISTIKOSIWAK (WOODEN BOAT PEOPLE)' (through September) These two monumental paintings offer narratives inspired by a Euro American tradition of history painting but are entirely present tense and polemical in theme. Kent Monkman, a Canadian artist of mixed Cree and Irish heritage, makes the colonial violence done to North America's first peoples his central subject but, crucially, flips the cliche of Native American victimhood on its head. Here, Indigenous peoples are immigrant welcoming rescuers, led by the heroic figure of Monkman's alter ego, the gender fluid tribal leader Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, avatar of the global future that will see humankind moving beyond the wars of identity racial, sexual, political in which it is now fatefully immersed. (Holland Cotter) 'IN PURSUIT OF FASHION: THE SANDY SCHREIER COLLECTION' (through Sept. 27) Featuring 80 pieces of clothing and accessories, this exhibition is, more than anything else, the reflection of one woman's love affair with fashion. Schreier's collection, and the part of it on view, contains all the major names, but what defines it more than anything else is her own appreciation for pretty things. Hidden away between the Balenciagas and the Chanels, the Diors and the Adrians, are treasures by little known or even unknown designers that are a delight to discover. It is these less famous names whose impact lingers, in part because they are so unexpected. (Vanessa Friedman) 'ARTE DEL MAR: ARTISTIC EXCHANGE IN THE CARIBBEAN' (through Jan. 10). This exhibition of art from the West Indies concentrates on the ritual objects thrones, vessels and mysterious bird shaped stones of the Taino people, who inhabited the islands now called Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Cuba and Turks and Caicos. On these islands, and on the Caribbean facing coasts of Central America, styles mingled and migrated, and art had both religious and diplomatic functions; one extravagant gold pendant here, in the shape of a bird with splayed wings and zigzagging necklaces, traveled from Panama all the way to the Antilles. (Jason Farago) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Not every Super Bowl is super, and we'll find out if this year's edition fits the tag on Feb. 3. But we do know some of what is in store. One of those things is (no surprise) the New England Patriots, who will be appearing in their third consecutive Super Bowl and fourth in five years. The Rams will be the first team to represent Los Angeles in the game since 1984. Those are not the only records and oddities about Super Bowl LIII. Sean McVay, who took over the Rams last season after a meteoric rise as an N.F.L. assistant, turns 33 this week, which will make him the youngest head coach in Super Bowl history. He breaks the record held by Mike Tomlin, who was 36 when his Pittsburgh Steelers won the big game in 2009. At 66, Bill Belichick will not be the oldest Super Bowl coach, as Marv Levy went to the game with the Bills at age 67 and 68. But Belichick could become the oldest winner, breaking the record held by Tom Coughlin, who was 65 when the Giants beat the Patriots in 2012. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Last April, the New York State Legislature passed an ill considered set of criminal justice reforms that were buried in the state budget bill. As those reforms have taken effect, it has become clear that they present a significant challenge to public safety. The New York Police Department favors criminal justice reforms and bail reform, but within a framework that is fair both to the victims of crimes and to those accused of committing them. The time has come to rethink these reforms to achieve the desired goal of a fairer criminal justice system that doesn't undermine, but supports, public safety. New York is not a jurisdiction that overincarcerates. Arrests are down 46 percent since 2013. Eighty seven percent of arrested persons are released without bail within 24 hours of arrest. The city has the lowest jail incarceration rate compared to the five largest cities in the country, half the rate of Los Angeles and one third that of Houston. The Rikers Island jail population is 51 percent lower since 2013 and down 74 percent from its high in 1993. New York is now the only state in the nation that requires judges to entirely disregard the threat to public safety posed by accused persons in determining whether to hold them pending trial or to impose conditions for their release. In addition, the new law constrains judges from holding repeat offenders with long records of both crime and absconding trial. It eliminates cash bail and the possibility of detention for a wide array of offenses, including weapons possession, trafficking of fentanyl and other drugs, many hate crime assaults, the promotion of child prostitution, serial arson, and certain burglaries and robberies. According to our calculation, 738 people arrested on burglary and robbery charges in 2018 would have been released without bail or remand under the new law, despite the fact that their collective records comprise 9,926 arrests for crimes including 1,134 robberies, 891 assaults, 524 burglaries, 334 weapons charges, 48 sex crimes (including 15 rapes), and 25 murders or attempted murders. These are not the types of offenders who should be freed to continue their criminal activity. Judges should assess their risk to public safety. The new law's requirements also threaten to inundate police agencies and district attorneys with the sheer volume of paperwork that must be provided to defendants' attorneys within 15 days of arraignment under new discovery rules. Valid evidence can be suppressed and solid cases can be dismissed on the grounds of incomplete discovery, even when such failures are inadvertent and immaterial. The financial cost of compliance is also substantial in the tens of millions of dollars across the state. The combination of two other factors fewer people held pending trial and the early release of the names and contact information of victims and witnesses places some of these victims and witnesses at risk of intimidation or retaliation. Violent criminals are being returned to the community and will know the names of their accusers and where to find them. As any detective will tell you, one of the main concerns of witnesses is whether the defendant will learn their identities. The likely outcome will be many fewer people coming forward to help the police build solid cases against criminals. Defendants should have all relevant evidence before accepting any plea bargain and should not be receiving discovery materials on the very eve of trial, but the pendulum has swung too far against the interests of victims, witnesses and police investigations. First, in a staggered discovery process, defendants would receive the data they need to make an informed decision about plea bargains within 15 days of arraignment. Additional evidentiary material would be provided at reasonable intervals before trial. Second, to protect victims and witnesses, we would revise the rules about the release of sensitive information about their identities to suspects. Right now, the burden is on the district attorney to make the case that this information should be withheld to ensure witness safety. The burden should shift to the defense to establish that revealing this information is critical to the case. The presumption of protection for witnesses will encourage more cooperation, prevent witness intimidation and allow judges to carefully decide when and how witness identities are released. Finally, the N.Y.P.D. believes significant bail reform can be achieved, as long as judges are granted the discretion to remand suspects whom they determine to be genuinely dangerous, including chronic repeat offenders. We can trust New York State's judges to use this discretion wisely and only for individuals who pose a real threat to the public or who continuously flout the justice system. The inequities of the bail process can be eliminated, and the interests of public safety served. The April bail reforms were passed without any meaningful input from police agencies or district attorneys in the state, an extraordinary oversight that should not be repeated. Law enforcement should be at the table. We can help shape a law that will protect both defendants and the public. Dermot Shea is the commissioner of the New York City Police. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Credit...Brinson Banks for The New York Times LOS ANGELES Even now, just a few days before the release of her memoir, "In Pieces," Sally Field wasn't sure she wanted it published. She felt a similar ambivalence throughout the six or so years she spent working on it and wasn't confident, from the moment she composed its first words, that anyone would want to read what she wrote. "I didn't know I had a voice," she said gently, in a recent conversation. Still, Ms. Field felt compelled to say something when, in 2012, she addressed the Women and Power conference at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y. Rather than make some anodyne opening remarks, she shared a complicated reflection about her pursuit of the Mary Todd Lincoln role in the Steven Spielberg film "Lincoln" and about her own mother, who had died of cancer in 2011. Soon after she learned the "Lincoln" part was hers, she made dinner for her mother. Then she opened up to her about how Ms. Field had been sexually abused as a child by her stepfather. Recalling the experience of giving this speech, Ms. Field said: "I was shaking all over to do it. But I felt strengthened by that faceless mass of unknown people. When I laid it out there, I felt them giving me something back." Seated here in her airy Pacific Palisades home one afternoon in late August, Ms. Field, 71, carried herself with quiet poise. She is not by nature a confessional person; despite the visibility she has gained from a decades long acting career she has won three Emmys and two Oscars, and starred in films like "Norma Rae," "Steel Magnolias" and "Forrest Gump" she finds it easier to speak through her outspoken characters than put herself on display. "In Pieces," which Grand Central Publishing will release on Sept. 18, is hardly a traditional showbiz autobiography, though it does delve into some of Ms. Field's famous roles and relationships with celebrity co stars like Burt Reynolds (who died on Sept. 6), and it recounts how she raised three sons through two marriages that ended in divorce. "Something was growing in me, this urgency that felt gangrenous, and I couldn't locate it," Ms. Field said. "I could hardly breathe and I couldn't settle down." Ms. Field said that compulsion became more acute after the death of her mother, Margaret, who raised the Field family in Southern California and acted in movies like "The Man From Planet X." 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. After Margaret Field filed for divorce from Sally's father, Richard, in 1951, she got remarried in 1952 to Jock Mahoney, a stuntman and actor ("Tarzan Goes to India") known by the nickname Jocko. As Sally Field writes of Mr. Mahoney in her memoir, "It would have been so much easier if I'd only felt one thing, if Jocko had been nothing but cruel and frightening. But he wasn't. He could be magical, the Pied Piper with our family as his entranced followers." He also frequently summoned Ms. Field to his bedroom alone. "I knew," Ms. Field writes. "I felt both a child, helpless, and not a child. Powerful. This was power. And I owned it. But I wanted to be a child and yet." Ms. Field said her stepfather's abuse of her stopped after she turned 14. Her mother divorced Mr. Mahoney in 1968, and he died in 1989. Sally Field at the age of 14. Ms. Field's sexual awakening in her late teens, a period in which she said she felt she was "breaking out of my own brain," was followed by a secret abortion in Tijuana when she was 17. Then came her astonishing professional ascent on TV's "Gidget" and "The Flying Nun," and the end of any sense of normalcy in her life. "I was no longer a member of the club anymore," Ms. Field writes. "The Human Club. I was a celebrity." Feeling unable to fully share her experiences with others, Ms. Field sought an outlet in her acting, and in roles like "Sybil" (the 1976 TV mini series that cast her as a woman with multiple personality disorder) and "Norma Rae" (the 1979 feature in which she played a budding labor activist in a cotton mill), which allowed her to negotiate long held frustrations. Playing parts like these, Ms. Field told me, "I was able to feel something I didn't feel before. I heard my voice. And I wondered what would have happened if I hadn't. How long would it have taken me to feel that I had a right to be outraged?" She had ample reason to feel this way. Ms. Field writes of an encounter in 1968 with the singer songwriter Jimmy Webb, when, after they both smoked a joint filled with hash, she woke up to find Mr. Webb "on top of me, grinding away to another melody." In an email, Mr. Webb said, "I am being asked to respond to a passage in a book that the publishers refuse to let me read, even at my lawyer's request, so all I can do is recount my memories of dating Sally in the swingin' 1960s. Sally and I were young, successful stars in Hollywood. We dated and did what 22 year olds did in the late 60s we hung out, we smoked pot, we had sex." He added, "I have great memories of our times together and great respect for Sally so much respect that I didn't write about her in my book because I didn't want to tarnish her Gidget image with our stories of drugs and sex." When she auditioned for her role in the 1976 feature "Stay Hungry," Ms. Field writes, its director, Bob Rafelson, had one final stipulation: "I can't hire anyone who doesn't kiss good enough." "So I kissed him," she writes. "It must have been good enough." Ms. Field told me that at this time in her life, "I was the sole support for my family, and I didn't see that I had any direction but down, unless I could get out of this spot that I was in." Reached by phone at his home in Colorado, Mr. Rafelson said: "It's totally untrue. That's the first I've ever heard of this. I didn't make anybody kiss me in order to get any part." Ms. Field devotes several pages of "In Pieces" to Mr. Reynolds, her former lover and co star in films like "Smokey and the Bandit" and "Hooper." Though celebrity periodicals often portrayed them as a blissful, well matched pair, Ms. Field told me their time together was "confusing and complicated, and not without loving and caring, but really complicated and hurtful to me." She characterizes Mr. Reynolds in the book as swaggering and charismatic, and their connection as immediate and intense. She also portrays him as controlling of her, only able to accept certain aspects of her life and personality while uninterested in or disapproving of others. Ms. Field writes that Mr. Reynolds used Percodan, Valium and barbiturates during the making of "Smokey," and sometimes received mysterious injections to his chest. She recounts how she organized a surreptitious examination for him at the Miami Heart Institute, which came back all clear, but that Mr. Reynolds refused her urging to seek therapy for his stress and anxiety, dismissing it as "self delusional poppycock." Ms. Field's assessment now is that, in her romance with Mr. Reynolds, she was trying to recreate a version of her relationship with her stepfather. "I was somehow exorcising something that needed to be exorcised," she told me. "I was trying to make it work this time." Sam Greisman, the youngest of Ms. Field's sons, said that he had been broadly aware that she had been abused by her stepfather, and that he knew she'd had "a childhood where no one was allowed to talk about anything." Mr. Greisman, a 30 year old filmmaker, said that when he was growing up, Ms. Field "was already a woman with a very established career. I never felt like I saw her unsure how to handle something. She always seemed so together." Reading "In Pieces" and seeing the full breadth of his mother's life had given him a greater appreciation for her, he said. "To see her as someone who grew up confused and made mistakes and went through these traumas, it made me feel more connected to her." Now comes the part when Ms. Field will share her stories with a mass audience, and she could hardly predict how her readership will receive them, or how she might receive her readership. Though the frankness of "In Pieces" might resonate in a MeToo era, Ms. Field was reluctant to offer up her book as a paradigm for others who might want to disclose their survival narratives. "People should tell whatever story they want to tell," she said. "This is just my story and it happened the way it happened." Outrage at the abuses that others have suffered is warranted, she said, but it "is the first part of it, it's not the fix. Outrage has to come first and it can't just be quieted and go away." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
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