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The Hubble Space Telescope has a new problem. NASA reported on Wednesday that one of its most frequently used cameras, known as the Wide Field Camera 3, had turned itself off the previous day. The trouble has been traced to one of the telescope's channels that handles observations in the ultraviolet and visible light parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, according to Tom Brown, head of the Hubble mission at the Space Telescope Science Institute. Another channel, which handles infrared observations, is fine, he said. As of Wednesday afternoon, the engineers had not yet isolated the fault. Although initial suspicions had focused on electronics, Dr. Brown said, there was a good chance that it was a case of corrupted data, and could be solved by rebooting the instrument in a few days, once it has been deemed safe to do so. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
I'm sick. Not from coronavirus. I'm sick of the lies. I'm sick of the lack of empathy. I'm sick of putting freak show politics ahead of saving lives. I'm sick of the lack of national testing as the death toll mounts. I'm sick of watching members of the pandemic task force being forced to act like hostages with Stockholm syndrome every time the president speaks. I'm sick of watching the health of the nation decline, physically and ideologically. A treatment for the viral infection so far has eluded us. But a cure for the political plague will be available in November. You are the cure. Vote. Re "If West Wing Still Isn't Safe, Is Any Office?" (White House Memo, front page, May 9): Administration officials and White House staffers shown on camera are not usually covering their faces or social distancing something that should change under new rules reported on Monday. But these folks are tested very regularly for Covid 19. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
"He shouldn't be the story, and his clothes certainly should not be the story," Mr. Hand said. Yet from his first days in one of the world's most high profile jobs, Mr. Spicer's apparel attracted so much attention that a GoFundMe campaign was initiated to help him get a new wardrobe. (As of Friday, it had raised 685; the proceeds, the page says, will be donated to Planned Parenthood.) Reportedly at his boss's urging, Mr. Spicer quickly switched out his original boxy jackets the ones with shoulders seemingly inspired by either the Balenciaga designer Demna Gvasalia or else by Tom Brady's sideline coat, with collars that floated around his neck like an oxen yoke for marginally better fitting models. He even, according to a local television station, visited a Washington franchise of BookATailor, a custom clothing company based in New York, and a few days later walked out with a trimmer, more form fitting suit. Yet, despite these welcome modifications to a dress style that served as an unwitting tutorial on how not to wear a suit, Mr. Spicer has stuck to his attention grabbing neckwear, ties not only carnival barker garish but also manifestly wrong in other ways. "Someone evidently had a word with him and he ran out and got a new suit or two, though basically I didn't think there was anything terribly wrong with what he wore before," said Nick Sullivan, the style director of Esquire. Mr. Spicer's ties, on the other hand like many of those sold under Mr. Trump's own label continue to be thick and shiny: "turgid pieces of silk," as Mr. Sullivan said, in colors like an outlandish lime green or purple covered in polka dots. Far from the most serious issue facing a Trump administration, Mr. Spicer's distracting neckwear still troubles those who bother to address themselves to the meanings subtly coded into our clothes. "Style is semiotics," Mr. Sullivan said. "If a man's message is, 'Yeah, but look at my tie,' that seems like anything other than the actual message he should be putting across." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Let's have a moment of silence for Jeremy, the lefty brown garden snail, found dead Wednesday in a refrigerator in a British research lab. Jeremy was a rare snail, with an unusual shell that made him stand out among other garden snails. He will be missed. Jeremy won international fame for a mutation that caused his shell to coil left instead of right. For years, people searched for another lefty snail with which he could mate. Shortly before his death, she was found. His legacy will continue in the genetic knowledge gained from the lefty snail offspring they produced together. Jeremy was discovered in a compost heap in South West London by a retired scientist from The Natural History Museum. He recognized Jeremy was special and notified Angus Davison, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Nottingham in Britain who studies snails. Dr. Davison wanted to know if Jeremy's left coiled shell was inherited or just a strange developmental mishap, and for that he needed offspring. He took Jeremy into his care and appealed to the public to find him a mate with the hashtag leftysnail. The media followed with snaillove, and Jeremy became a star. He even inspired a love song. Thanks to all the attention the deviant snail received, the search for a mate ended in the discovery of six more lefty snails. Dr. Davison is now leaning toward a genetic cause for the snail's sinistral (lefty) disposition, because some found close to one another could be siblings, but confirmation lies in future generations of Jeremy's offspring. His left coiled shell wasn't the only thing making it hard to find him a mate. His organs, including his genitals, also turned counterclockwise. Mating with righty snails was impossible. Last November, two potential partners (Lefty of Ipswich, England and Tomeu of Majorca, Spain) were brought to Nottingham. But they appeared to prefer each other over him, producing more than 300 babies. Just days before Jeremy's death, however, Tomeu produced more than four dozen babies, some of which Jeremy likely fathered. He didn't get a chance to see the hatchlings, but "on a scientific note, he wouldn't have recognized" them, Dr. Davison said. All of the babies were born with a right handed shell. This means the gene causing a snail's directional twist (and body asymmetry in other animals), described last year in Current Biology, could take more than a generation for its recessive form to appear. Once it does, Dr. Davison hopes genetic studies will reveal why the snails are so rare and what sort of genetic switches may drive their bodies to turn one way instead of the other. The knowledge he gains studying the slimy shell dwellers will also provide insight about body asymmetries that develop in other animals, including humans. About one in 10,000 people (like Catherine O'Hara, Enrique Iglesias and Donny Osmond) have situs inversus, a rare disease, that flips their internal organ arrangement like an image in a mirror. Jeremy had been sluggish since February, and had hibernated in the fridge, on and off since. He was fine last Friday, Oct. 6, the day the hatchlings were born; by the time Dr. Davison returned to check on him Wednesday, he was dead. He had likely been decomposing for a couple days. "I should have put Jeremy in the freezer to preserve his DNA on Friday, but I thought so many people will be sad if Jeremy is no longer," Dr. Davison said. "I didn't do that, and it was a mistake." His DNA degraded from the state it was in on Friday, so genetic analyses will be tougher. Jeremy most likely died of old age. His shell, now preserved in the University of Nottingham, will serve to teach others. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
LONDON As Europe struggles to come to grips with its debt crisis, which has deepened with the collapse of Portugal's government after it pushed for yet another round of budget cuts, three numbers stand out: 12.4, 9.8 and 7.8. Those are the interest rates currently paid on 10 year government bonds for Greece, Ireland and Portugal. That they remain so high compared with just 3.24 percent on German bonds shows that investors remain unconvinced that Europe's haphazard strategy for bailing out troubled, highly indebted countries has succeeded a year after it began. As heads of state huddled in Brussels on Thursday, with a possible rescue of Portugal on their minds after similar bailouts of Greece and Ireland, the question remained: would Europe accept a resolution it has long resisted forcing investors to take a loss on their bond holdings to keep the crisis from spreading? While European stocks were stable on Thursday, credit markets remained uneasy, as the ratings agency Fitch downgraded Portuguese government debt and Moody's de rated 30 banks in Spain. If investors become more nervous about Spain with a much bigger economy than Portugal's, with higher levels of bank debt the relative calm of the last couple of months could evaporate. A bailout of Portugal perhaps to the tune of 80 billion euros ( 113 billion) remains the most likely if not the safest possibility, because it could prove to be another stop gap measure that might not keep the crisis from spreading. As the number crunchers from the European Central Bank, tax experts from the International Monetary Fund and other members of the bailout bureaucracy prepare to descend upon Portugal, preaching more budgetary pain and sacrifice, some economists argue that the smarter approach would be to restructure Portugal's existing debt instead of piling more of it on. While it may be too soon for final judgment, these economists note that the early returns on the 200 billion euros used to finance Greece and Ireland are less than promising. Both countries continue to struggle to generate the cash to become solvent again despite getting support from their European partners. In Greece, the central bank is forecasting that unemployment will hit 16.5 percent this year. Support for the Socialist government of George Papandreou and his reforms continues to erode, with a recent poll showing that just 35 percent of Greeks would vote for him again. In Ireland, it now seems that the banks whose bad lending brought the country to its knees may need even more than the 35 billion euros already allocated to them by the European Commission and the I.M.F. The lesson is clear, argues Barry Eichengreen, an economist and an expert on the euro and its origins sustained austerity that is not supplemented by some form of debt reduction in which the holders of bank or government debt are forced to take a loss is not just unworkable but unfair as well. "When you reduce the incomes of the people who service the debt but you don't reduce the incomes of the bondholders, you won't reduce the level of debt," he said. "Some might call it shared sacrifice, but some people are not sharing." While the argument against restructuring has been that the risks of contagion are too high, it is becoming increasingly clear that the real reason behind Europe's reluctance to accept losses on Greek, Irish and Portuguese debt is that the cost to European banks would be prohibitive. This week, Standard Poor's estimated that in a worst case of severe economic contractions in Greece, Ireland, Spain and Portugal, banks in Western Europe would need to raise 250 billion euros more than half the amount in the European Financial Stability Facility. Even so, the European Union remains unwilling to confront this issue head on. With its first stress test for its banks having been widely ridiculed, it has embarked on a second one. In light of the optimistic assumptions it is making on the value of Greek and Portuguese debt, this round is unlikely to be seen as much of an improvement. "The banks are obviously putting pressure on Europe to not restructure," said Raoul Ruparel, an analyst at Open Europe, a Europe focused research organization based in London. "But there is no real reason to impose such a cost on taxpayers when investors and banks have the ability to absorb these costs." In a report he published this week, Mr. Ruparel estimated that a bailout of Portugal would cost as much as 80 billion euros. It is an affordable figure, and that has been reflected in the lack of reaction from global markets and the euro as the Portuguese crisis has worsened. But, he argues, a cheaper way to attack the problem would be to go to the root of the issue and restructure the country's debt a form of default, because it would mean reducing the debt or easing the payment terms, or both and use a smaller amount of public money to help the process. At 75 percent of gross domestic product, Portugal's debt is not as high as Greece's. But its laggardly growth rate (the weakest in the euro zone) and its terrible competitive position relative to Germany make raising the money needed to refinance its obligations extremely difficult. That amount is estimated to be 25 percent of its output for this year. Even with money coming in from a bailout, taxpayers will be responsible for an even higher level of debt, as in Greece. Starting in 2014, that country must come up with cash equal to 8 percent of its national income to pay its annual interest cost. In a fixed currency zone, where countries do not have the luxury of devaluing, no country has produced that type of surplus via tax increases and spending and wage cuts. "It would be unprecedented," said Mr. Eichengreen, the economist. "But then the euro zone itself is unprecedented." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Credit...Jovelle Tamayo for The New York Times The coronavirus might be new, but nature long ago gave humans the tools to recognize it, at least on a microscopic scale: antibodies, Y shaped immune proteins that can latch onto pathogens and block them from infiltrating cells. Millions of years of evolution have honed these proteins into the disease fighting weapons they are today. But in a span of just months, a combination of human and machine intelligence may have beaten Mother Nature at her own game. Using computational tools, a team of researchers at the University of Washington designed and built from scratch a molecule that, when pitted against the coronavirus in the lab, can attack and sequester it at least as well as an antibody does. When spritzed up the noses of mice and hamsters, it also appears to protect animals from becoming seriously sick. This molecule, called a mini binder for its ability to glom onto the coronavirus, is petite and stable enough to be shipped en masse in a freeze dried state. Bacteria can also be engineered to churn out these mini binders, potentially making them not only effective but also cheap and convenient. The team's product is still in the very early stages of development, and will not be on the market any time soon. But so far "it's looking very promising," said Lauren Carter, one of the researchers behind the project, which is led by the biochemist David Baker. Eventually, healthy people might be able to self administer the mini binders as a nasal spray, and potentially keep any inbound coronavirus particles at bay. "The most elegant application could be something you keep on your bedside table," Ms. Carter said. "That's kind of the dream." Many scientists hope that mass produced mimics of these antibodies might help treat people with Covid 19 or prevent them from falling ill after becoming infected. But a lot of antibodies are needed to rein in the coronavirus, especially if an infection is underway. Antibodies are also onerous to produce and deliver to people. To develop a less finicky alternative, members of the Baker lab, led by the biochemist Longxing Cao, took a computational approach. The researchers modeled how millions of hypothetical, lab designed proteins would interact with the spike. After sequentially weeding out poor performers, the team selected the best among the bunch and synthesized them in the lab. They spent weeks toggling between the computer and the bench, tinkering with designs to match simulation and reality as closely as they could. The result was a completely homemade mini binder that readily glued itself to the virus, the team reported in Science last month. "This goes a step further than just building off natural proteins," said Asher Williams, a chemical engineer at Cornell University who was not involved in the research.If adapted for other purposes, Dr. Williams added, "this would be a big win for bioinformatics." The team is now fiddling with deep learning algorithms that could teach the lab's computers to streamline the iterative trial and error process of protein design, yielding products in weeks instead of months, Dr. Baker said. Daniel Adriano Silva, a biochemist at the Seattle based biopharmaceutical company Neoleukin, who previously trained with Dr. Baker at the University of Washington, may have come up with another strategy that could solve the resistance problem. His team has also designed a protein that can stop the virus from invading cells, but their D.I.Y. molecule is slightly more familiar. It is a smaller, sturdier version of the human protein ACE 2 one that has a far stronger grip on the virus, so the molecule could potentially serve as a decoy that lures the pathogen away from vulnerable cells. Developing resistance would be futile, said Christopher Barnes, a structural biologist at the California Institute of Technology who partnered with Neoleukin on their project. A coronavirus strain that could no longer be bound by the decoy would probably also lose its ability to bind to the real thing, the human version of ACE 2. "That is a big fitness cost to the virus," Dr. Barnes said. Mini binders and ACE 2 decoys are both easy to make, and are likely to cost just pennies on the dollar compared to synthetic antibodies, which can carry price tags in the high thousands of dollars, Ms. Carter said. And whereas antibodies must be kept cold to preserve longevity, the D.I.Y. proteins can be engineered to do just fine at room temperature, or in even more extreme conditions. The University of Washington mini binder "can be boiled and it's still OK," Dr. Cao said. That durability makes these molecules easy to transport, and easy to administer in a variety of ways, perhaps by injecting them into the bloodstream as a treatment for an ongoing infection. The two designer molecules also both engage the virus in a super tight squeeze, allowing less to do more. "If you have something that binds this well, you don't have to use as much," said Attabey Rodriguez Benitez, a biochemist at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the research. "That means you're getting more bang for your buck." Both research groups are exploring their products as potential tools not only to combat infection but also to prevent it outright, somewhat like a short lived vaccine. In a series of experiments described in their paper, the Neoleukin team misted their ACE 2 decoy into the noses of hamsters, then exposed the animals to the coronavirus. The untreated hamsters fell dangerously ill, but the hamsters that received the nasal spray fared far better. Ms. Carter and her colleagues are currently running similar experiments with their mini binder, and seeing comparable results. These findings might not translate into humans, the researchers cautioned. And neither team has yet worked out a perfect way to administer their products into animals or people. Down the line, there may yet be opportunities for the two types of designer proteins to work together if not in the same product, then at least in the same war, as the pandemic rages on. "It's very complementary," Ms. Carter said. If all goes well, molecules like these could join the growing arsenal of public health measures and drugs already in place to fight the virus, she said: "This is another tool you could have." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Researchers have designed a system that lets a patient with late stage Lou Gehrig's disease type words using brain signals alone. The patient, Hanneke De Bruijne, a doctor of internal medicine from the Netherlands, received a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as A.L.S. or Lou Gehrig's disease, in 2008. The neurons controlling her voluntary muscles were dying, and eventually she developed a condition called locked in syndrome. In this state, she is cognitively aware, but nearly all of her voluntary muscles, except for her eyes, are paralyzed, and she has lost the ability to speak. In 2015, a group of researchers offered an option to help her communicate. Their idea was to surgically implant a brain computer interface, a system that picks up electrical signals in her brain and relays them to software she can use to type out words. "It's like a remote control in the brain," said Nick Ramsey, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands and one of the researchers leading the study. On Saturday, the research team reported in The New England Journal of Medicine that Ms. De Bruijne independently controlled the computer typing program seven months after surgery. Using the system, she is able to spell two or three words a minute. "This is the world's first totally implanted brain computer interface system that someone has used in her daily life with some success," said Dr. Jonathan R. Wolpaw, the director of the National Center for Adaptive Neurotechnologies in Albany. The study was partly supported by funds from Medtronic, an international medical technology company, which also provided the components for Ms. De Bruijne's implant. One of the paper's authors is also a Medtronic employee, though the team notes in its report that "he was not involved in the interpretation of the results." The brain computer interface is not Ms. De Bruijne's only communication tool. For a couple of years, she has used another device that lets her select items on a computer screen by tracking her eye movements. With this system, she can spell five to 10 letters a minute. The eye tracker has a major drawback, though. Whenever the light levels in her surroundings change, the device must be recalibrated. This makes use outdoors difficult. Worried that she would not be able to alert her caregiver to pressing needs without a communication tool, she avoided going outside, Dr. Ramsey said. The computer used by a patient to spell two or three words a minute. She can halt the moving red box by imagining bringing her right thumb and ring finger together, which produces neural signals. "That's where we found our system really kicks in," he added. "With it, she feels confident she can spell words for immediate needs, like an itch or saliva building up, or more urgent things, like her respirator giving her problems." Ms. De Bruijne's inability to move comes from a disconnect between her brain and muscles. Though she has lost the ability to move, her brain still generates an increase in electricity when she thinks about doing so. The brain computer interface capitalizes on this. Electrodes on her motor cortex, the region of her brain that controls voluntary movement, detect small electrical spikes when Ms. De Bruijne's tries to move her right hand. Specifically, when she thinks about bringing her right thumb and ring finger together, wires transmit a signal to a typing software. The software displays four rows of letters on a tablet highlighting one row at a time. When it gets to the row Ms. De Bruijne wants, she makes a "brain click" by thinking about the hand gesture. Then the program goes along the selected row, left to right. When the correct letter is highlighted, she makes another click. Letter by letter, she spells out her thoughts. Some researchers have concerns about whether the system's benefits are worth the risk of surgery. "Because she can use an eye tracker, the brain computer interface is not necessary" for Ms. De Bruijne to communicate, said Niels Birbaumer, a professor of medical psychology and neurobiology at the University of Tubingen in Germany. Dr. Birbaumer added that other noninvasive brain computer interfaces had been shown to perform the same function as the communication system from Dr. Ramsey's team. There are always dangers with surgery, acknowledged John Donoghue, a professor of neuroscience at Brown University and the founding director of the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering. He added, however, that he thought the risks of this one were "not significantly greater" than those associated with more common procedures, such as deep brain stimulation to treat Parkinson's disease, or placement of pacemakers for heart arrhythmias. Moreover, Dr. Donoghue said, Dr. Ramsey's group used a safe, commercial device that the Food and Drug Administration has approved for treating Parkinson's disease and essential tremor, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary and rhythmic shaking. An invasive device holds two advantages over noninvasive methods, Dr. Ramsey said. First, an implant picks up a stronger, more reliable signal because it sits directly on the brain. Second, noninvasive systems require elaborate external electrode setups, while an implant can simply stay in place and "work all the time," he said. In time, Dr. Ramsey said, he would like to see whether this system can aid people who are totally locked in, meaning they have also lost the ability to move their eyes and, unlike Ms. De Bruijne, do not have the option of using alternative eye tracking technology. "The results look promising," said Jeremy Hill, a researcher at Burke Medical Research Institute in White Plains and the director of neurotechnology at Blythedale Children's Hospital. "I've been waiting for someone to make this breakthrough for a while, and I'm very pleased this group has. I think it opens the door to greater things.' | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
How do you solve a problem like liaising with the head of a violent splinter group in a volatile region that might soon fracture into genocidal conflict? Try acting. In Helen Banner's gripping, rickety "Intelligence," directed by Jess Chayes at Next Door at NYTW, three women have gathered in a State Department conference room, tasked with creating a manual called "Guidelines for the Resolution of Conflict in Intractable Global Situations." They'll create these guidelines through role playing. The leader of this very small and very serious improv team is Sarah MacIntyre (Rachel Pickup), a superstar diplomat with a thing for sleeveless blouses. Joining her are two Foreign Service underlings, the fawning Lee (Kaliswa Brewster) and the skeptical Paige (Amelia Pedlow). Together they have 10 working days to prepare a document that tells "everyone else how to encounter the world even when it's gone bad." Sarah wants to kick things off by simulating her last successful negotiation. Is that a reasonable premise? Not especially, and in an era of State Department cuts and executive branch bad faith, it risks suggesting that diplomacy is just one more empty exercise. On the other hand, role playing and simulation is an accepted part of diplomatic training and the first rule of improv is to say yes to a situation no matter how outlandish, so maybe just go with it. What you'll get is a play that might not make much sense, but can still thrill. Ms. Chayes and her designers use the few features of the room the chairs, the door, the world clock to create an almost unbearable tension. Even when the stakes should feel low (this is just a role play, right?), most moments seem balanced on the edge of a very sharp knife. Footsteps in the corridor or a knock at the door can make the breath catch in your throat even before you learn that Diplomatic Security has taken an interest in the proceedings or that Sarah's last negotiation may not have been a triumph. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
BRUSSELS Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the newly elected president of the group of ministers overseeing the euro, said on Monday he wanted to heal the rift over austerity policies that had bred mistrust between southern and northern nations using the currency. Mr. Dijsselbloem, 46, the Dutch finance minister, also said he wanted to improve the stature of the group, and the image of the currency, after three years of near constant crises and moments of deep division. The only opposition during the vote to elect Mr. Dijsselbloem, held late Monday, came from Luis de Guindos, the Spanish economy minister. Mr. Dijsselbloem, whose term lasts two and a half years, told a news conference that Mr. de Guindos offered no explanation for the decision but he said the Spanish move should not "lead to dramatic consequences." Spain is among the countries in southern Europe to have been hardest hit by the austerity policies that northern nations like Finland, Germany and the Netherlands have insisted on as an important solution to the euro crisis. Spanish officials have been irritated by the preponderance of representatives from so called Triple A rated countries, which pay less to borrow than countries with weaker ratings, in top economy jobs in Europe. Spanish officials were particularly angered by a decision last year not to select a Spaniard for a seat on the executive board of the European Central Bank. In a sign of his concern about fractures in the euro zone, Mr. Dijsselbloem pledged to do what he could to assuage those tensions in his new role coordinating meetings of finance ministers when they make decisions like giving political approval for bailouts and pressing governments to shore up their finances. "If we are going to approach the euro zone and the euro area as a zone with a harsh line in the middle between Triple A and non Triple A, between the north and the south, there's no way we're going to move forward and no way are we going to reach decisions that are so much needed," Mr. Dijsselbloem said. "So that will definitely not be my approach," he said. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. The French also had concerns about putting a representative from the Netherlands in charge of the group and they insisted that Mr. Dijsselbloem explain to the other 16 finance ministers in the Eurogroup how he intended to carry out the job before the vote was held. But the French finance minister, Pierre Moscovici, told a news conference that he was satisfied with the outcome because he expected Mr. Dijsselbloem to act fairly. "It's a Dutchman who is president; it's not a Dutch presidency," Mr. Moscovici said. Mr. Moscovici said he expected other top finance jobs, including the job of overseeing a new banking supervisor based at the European Central Bank, would be allocated to French candidates. But he insisted that was not a reason he voted in favor of Mr. Dijsselbloem's appointment. Allies of Mr. Dijsselbloem also have sought to ease fears that his presidency would be divisive, saying that his membership of a left leaning social democratic party could help him mediate between nations like France with different views to many in the Netherlands on how to stabilize the euro. "Jeroen should be able, within financial sound limits, to bridge the debate between those who criticize budget cuts and those who emphasize the need to enforce the treaties on budgetary controls," Thijs Berman, the leader of the Dutch social democrats in the European Parliament, said Monday. Another goal of Mr. Dijsselbloem is to reform the way the group operates to cut down on the need for emergency sessions and all night meetings. In a letter sent to ministers on the eve of the vote, Mr. Dijsselbloem suggested that the group hash out their views in "discussion papers" to make decision making smoother. He also said he wanted a "clear mandate" to represent the Eurogroup "on an international stage," including at Group of 20 meetings and in international financial institutions. "Our focus needs to shift from crisis management to delivering and implementing sound medium term policies," Mr. Dijsselbloem said in his letter to ministers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
In a bare fluorescent lit room at The New School in Greenwich Village earlier this month, three writers peered into their laptops as moans wafted in from the acting class next door. They took turns reading one another's television scripts, talking about how to pace their episodes, the kinds of visual cues they could offer the camera, and whether theirs was going to be the kind of show where the audience would see characters naked. "Well, HBO is showing full frontal now," offered one student, Jeremy O'Brian, before saying, yes, his characters would probably be nude. O'Brian and his classmates are not aspiring TV writers, at least not primarily: They are getting their Masters in Fine Arts in playwriting. But the New School's drama program, like those at a number of schools, has been making more and more space for a medium once considered too lowbrow for M.F.A. holders. With the proliferation of prestige TV, show developers have been seeking out playwrights for their ability to compose sophisticated dialogue, plot turns and character. Everyone from recent M.F.A. grads to some of America's most decorated playwrights have been snapping up jobs on shows, and now the schools that train them are seeing fresh opportunities as well. At the top schools, administrators are fielding recruiting calls from television producers and managers, adding TV classes, and competing with high paying shows for writers they can hire as adjuncts. While these programs say they don't want their students to leave theater altogether, TV offers them a way to make a real living, the kind of financial stability that has ramifications not just for individual artists, but for the programs themselves. "Everybody wants to write for TV," O'Brian said of his contemporaries, "because we want to live." Ming Peiffer wrote the first draft of her play "Usual Girls" in 2016 while she was a student at Columbia University's M.F.A. program, and it was staged for the first time in 2018, by the Roundabout Theater Company in New York City. But in the two intervening years, she wrote for two Netflix shows, "Gypsy" and "Locke Key," sold a show of her own and got a movie deal. The piece of writing her agents sent around as her sample was her play. "I'm actually teaching at Columbia now and my agents and managers have been asking me, 'Hey, are there any exciting playwrights we should be looking at for TV?'" she said. Rolin Jones, a Yale trained playwright who was a producer on "Friday Night Lights" and a showrunner on HBO's upcoming series "Perry Mason," says he scouts at some of those programs, too. Periodically, he said, he checks in with schools like Yale to ask if there are exciting students or recent graduates he should know about. "I call up and say, what do you got?" he said. "Who's cool? What's interesting to read?" David Lindsay Abaire, the co director of the playwriting program at Juilliard, said the school was toying with offering some TV instruction for the first time, maybe in the form of a three hour class that would focus on pilots. Perhaps, he said, it will happen when the newly announced co director comes on board: The noted playwright Tanya Barfield, who was hired for her theater work and her long relationship with Juilliard, and also because she has written a lot for TV. Some programs, like the New School, have had television classes for years, but have been experimenting with adding more. Last year, the New School offered an additional class focused on how to work in a writers' room a class that did not continue because the playwright spearheading it left so she could write for more TV. At Columbia, students can now take upper level classes like TV Revision, because when David Henry Hwang took over the program five years ago, he said one of his goals was to expand the TV offerings available to playwrights. After all, even some of the most successful playwrights out there were writing for television. Hwang is one of them: a two time Pulitzer Prize finalist and a Tony Award winner for "M. Butterfly," he spent four years as a writer for Showtime's "The Affair." Even the lowest paid person in a writers' room is required to make good money: At least 4,274 per week for about half a year's work, according to the Writers Guild of America East. Most jobs require a minimum of at least 6,967. By contrast, Adam Rapp whose play "The Sound Inside" is playing on Broadway starring Mary Louise Parker remembered a good year he had in theater about 10 years ago: "I'd written and directed five of my own plays, and at the end of that year, I'd made 53,000 and could barely stay in New York." Today, Rapp is an executive producer on a TV adaptation of the Philipp Meyer novel "American Rust," and even Broadway money, he said, is "not better than television money." With more shows being made, there are more writing jobs to go around. Members of the Writers Guild East and Writers Guild West saw nearly a 50 percent increase in the number of writers who worked in TV from 1997 to 2017, growing from about 4,000 working members to almost 6,000. Despite the increase, that number remains small as far as industries go, making it a difficult world to break into, whether one has an M.F.A. or not. Indeed, for MFA graduates, those challenges are often compounded by debt from their training. While some programs like the ones at Yale and Juilliard are free, the annual tuition for first and second year M.F.A. students at Columbia is 62,912. There is risk in inviting television into drama programs, some administrators said. Talented playwrights are something of an endangered species, and as much as TV allows them to stay in the game, does it also tempt them away? The playwriting program at University of California, San Diego, has offered TV instruction for years. But Allan Havis, chairman of the theater and dance department who has been running the playwright program, said he still feels somewhat conflicted about it. "It's hard to come back to theater once you bite the apple," he said. Barfield, the new co director of Juilliard's program, said that one way to look at it is that Hollywood is subsidizing theater by keeping writers employed. But, she said, "The downside of all the playwrights going to TV are all the ones who don't go back to the theater, because the money in TV is just so good. It's hard to say, 'Oh, I don't need that money.'" Peiffer said that while she has been thrillingly busy since graduation, she hasn't written another play. Ideally, she said she'd like to take a year or two off from TV and film to focus on theater, but she's afraid that the opportunities available now won't be waiting when she wants to come back. "I can't write a play on the weekends if I'm writing a play, I need to be writing a play," she said. "I'm grappling with how to do it and maintain a living." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
After countless years of daydreamers being told otherwise, there's now a good reason to keep your head in the clouds. Scientists combed through satellite photographs of cloud cover taken twice a day for 15 years from nearly every square kilometer of Earth to study the planet's varied environments. By creating cloud atlases, the researchers were able to better predict the location of plants and animals on land with unprecedented spatial resolution, allowing them to study certain species, including those that are often in remote places. The results were published last week in PLOS Biology. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
"Mad Men" ended its timeline in late 1970, with the advertising patriarch Don Draper peaced out at a yoga retreat, om ing his way to the inspiration for the classic 1971 Coca Cola "Hilltop" ad. Since then, fans have dreamed about a follow up, one focused not on the Don Drapers of the world, but on the women whose limitations and liberations were the through line of the series. FX on Hulu's breathtaking "Mrs. America," from the "Mad Men" writer Dahvi Waller, picks up in 1971, raising a throaty howl just as Don is teaching the world to sing. The story of the fight for and against the Equal Rights Amendment, it's not a sequel, either literally or in format: It's a nine part series following real historical figures. But it is a kind of spiritual successor, a meticulously created and observed mural that finds the germ of contemporary America in the striving of righteously mad women. Like "Mad Men," "Mrs. America" finds a fresh angle on a much observed age of revolution by focusing, first, on a counterrevolutionary: Phyllis Schlafly (Cate Blanchett), the cold warrior who, in Waller's telling, seized on the culture war over women's rights to raise her political profile and advance a broader conservative agenda. The insight of "Mrs. America," in the punchy words of Representative Bella Abzug (Margo Martindale), is that Schlafly "is a goddamn feminist. She may be the most liberated woman in America." She just chooses not to see herself that way. The wife of an Illinois lawyer, Fred Schlafly (John Slattery, putting a Midwest spin on his Roger Sterling suavity), she's run for congress, an ambition Fred has been glad to entertain as long as she didn't win. Men admire her beauty and indulge her intelligence. When she appears on a TV politics show with the Republican representative Phil Crane (James Marsden), he reminds her to "Smile. With teeth." Schlafly sees managing men as simply a woman's lot. At a meeting with male Republican lawmakers, she says, "Some women like to blame sexism for their failures instead of admitting they didn't try hard enough." They ask her to take notes, assuming she has the nicest penmanship. Still, her interests lie more in nuclear policy than in propagandizing the nuclear family, until her friend Alice Macray (Sarah Paulson) mentions the proposed amendment, which Alice worries will marginalize housewives and subject women to the draft. Schlafly soon retools her political brand from anti Communism to anti feminism. Her way to climb the ladder is to pull it up behind her. "Mrs. America" hardly sees Schlafly as its heroine, but it respects her cunning and force of will. Blanchett gives her a Katharine Hepburn clipped syllables charm like Blanchett's Galadriel in "The Lord of the Rings," she is regal and terrifying (to her allies above all). Her final scene, wordless and devastating, might as well end with Blanchett being handed an Emmy onscreen. Parallel to Schlafly's story is an ensemble series about the 1970s feminist movement. Its principals aren't introduced until the end of the first episode: among them, Abzug, Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne), Representative Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Aduba), Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman) and some less celebrated E.R.A. warriors, including the G.O.P. activist Jill Ruckelshaus (Elizabeth Banks). (Among other things, the series is a journey to a time when socially liberal Republicans could be spotted in the wild.) Schlafly and her fledgling movement are barely an annoyance to the noisy, ebullient group. (Friedan can't pronounce her name, a running gag.) They're busy plotting what they assume will be the swift passage of the amendment, endorsed by President Nixon. This chapter of history, they figure, is just about over. They won. Arguing over tactics and priorities is all that's left until they get hit by what's coming from the right. The decade long fight that unfolds is epic and swaggering, bubbling with cultural ferment and bouncing along on a soul laced soundtrack. There is an "Avengers Assemble" feeling here, both in the gathering of historical figures a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg even appears, briefly and the bumper crop of acting talent. Waller is producing feminism's most ambitious crossover event, and she relishes it. While Schlafly is the driving force of the series it is not, after all, called "Ms. America" the show spotlights one character at a time. The third episode, about Chisholm's 1972 run for the presidency, rings familiar not just in the story of an outsider fighting what she calls a "rigged" party machine, but in the intra movement clashes over whether race and gender are equal priorities. (Chisholm, whom Aduba gives a fierce magnetism, gets this from black politicians, too, who see her more as a "women's" candidate. "I don't look black to you?" she asks.) The series is constantly smart about how even visionaries can have blind spots, and about the arguments over picking up the master's tools versus knocking down the master's house. A debate over whether to confront sexually predatory Democratic politicians bad actors with good politics is all too relevant. There are too many knockout performances to list, but Ullman is tsunamic as Friedan, the outspoken "Feminine Mystique" author now raging for relevance in the current wave of feminism. Martindale's Abzug is a tornado in a hat, a piquantly funny force of personality. ("I never shouted," she says when confronted about her brash manner. "I spoke with feeling.") An episode focused on Alice Macray eventually sidelined and demeaned by the rising conservative star Schlafly is both caustic and deeply sympathetic. Her zeal for traditional homemaking may be reactionary, but irony of ironies, it's the Stop E.R.A. movement that gave her a sense of purpose outside the kitchen. History not being a spoiler, we know how the meta story turns out: Schlafly and company kept the amendment from passing the required 38 states by its deadline. (The attempt to revive it has continued, with Virginia ratifying it just this year.) But the real story animating "Mrs. America" is laying out how both sides of this battle won or, at least, changed America significantly. Schlafly's fight was the birth of the modern culture war, in which ideologues seek concrete gains by pushing sectarian buttons. Pointedly, Schlafly is introduced at the dawn of the Reagan era to Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, future blunt instruments of the Trump campaign. The parallels with today's setbacks for women are obvious. ("We select our leaders first by eliminating women," Steinem says in a monologue, and, well, read the news.) But "Mrs. America" is also attentive to the big and small advances. Some were behind the scenes in politics; some were gradual shifts in culture, represented in one episode by Steinem and friends sitting down to watch the TV premiere of "Free to Be ... You and Me." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
This three bedroom house sits on a lushly landscaped quarter acre lot in the Southlands section of Vancouver, in the province of British Columbia. Built in 2015, the 2,673 square foot home has retractable glass walls that open to make the large outdoor courtyard an extension of the main floor living area. The home was designed by Measured Architecture, a Vancouver studio focused on modern design. The owners formerly "lived in the area in a very large home and wanted to downsize to a home that was more easily taken care of and one that made it easier for the family to congregate," said Rob Zwick, an agent with Stilhavn Real Estate Services, which has the listing. The main entrance opens into a foyer with 22 foot ceilings and an accent wall of stained cedar, the material used on the home's exterior. A stairway leads up to the living area. The floors throughout the house are sanded concrete, the cabinetry is black ash and the walls are white. Concrete Moroccan tile adds splashes of bold color in most rooms. The ground floor master suite has a walk in closet, a bath with a walk in shower with the Moroccan tiles, and sliding doors opening to a private patio. The upper level has two more bedrooms with en suite baths, and an office with built in cabinetry and doors to a rooftop balcony. A separate office was created from a shipping container and it sits in the backyard, Mr. Zwick said. The home also has a ground floor laundry room with a dog wash, an attached two car garage and a gardening shed. The Southlands section, in the city's southwest corner, is distinguished by larger lot sizes, ample parklands and multiple horse stables. This property is close to two golf courses the public McCleery course and the private Point Grey country club and the city's popular Southlands Nursery. Both downtown Vancouver and the Vancouver International Airport are about a 15 minute drive, Mr. Zwick said. After a slowdown in spring sales activity because of the COVID 19 shutdown in March, home sales in the metro Vancouver area (population 2.4 million) came surging back in June. The 2,443 closed sales last month represented nearly an 18 percent increase over June 2019, according to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver. The market had begun to turn around last summer after more than two years of declining sales and prices, said Colette Gerber, the board's chairwoman. She attributed the slowdown to tighter mortgage lending rules and a hike in the province's foreign buyers tax to 20 percent of the fair market value of the home. "Last summer we saw everything plateau and slowly turn around," Ms. Gerber said. In the city of Vancouver, with about 630,000 residents, June sales were up 18 percent over the same month last year, while inventory was off by 26 percent. The median sales price for all home types was 944,500 Canadian ( 698,930), a five percent increase over last June. Khushhal Bains, a real estate lawyer in the city, said he was "a little bit shocked" at how busy the real estate market is, given the pandemic. "Of all the scenarios we imagined, we never contemplated it being busier than last year," Mr. Bains said. "We're getting a lot of rush closings; buyers are using that as an enticement to sellers. They offer to close right away." Mr. Zwick said the brisk sales pace is no doubt due in part to pent up demand. "There are people who had planned to move, and their urgency was compounded by staying inside for two months and realizing that they really, really wanted to move," he said. Nonessential travel into Canada from the U.S. is currently prohibited. As of July 4, the count of total cases of COVID 19 in British Columbia was 2,947, with 177 deaths, according to the Canadian government. The risk in the province is now considered low. A highly diverse city, Vancouver has typically attracted large numbers of immigrants. Most foreign buyers are from mainland China, other parts of Asia and Iran, Mr. Zwick said. Lately, however, he's seen an uptick in American interest. "I've had more American buyers in the last six months than I have in the previous four years," he said. "Mostly it's Californians looking here." Mr. Bains said he's seen a rise recently in Canadians living in the U.S. who want to return home. He attributed the trend in part to concern about the way COVID 19 has been handled. "I just got a call last week from a woman with 5 year old twins who said she doesn't want them to grow up there," he said. The property transfer tax is paid to the provincial government at a graduated rate of one to three percent of the purchase price, depending on the price of the home. Legal fees are around 1,500 Canadian ( 1,107), Mr. Bains said. Annual property taxes on this home were 13,323 Canadian ( 9,837) in 2019, according to Mr. Zwick. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
New Caledonian crows are known for their toolmaking, but Alex Taylor and his colleagues wanted to understand just how advanced they could be. Crows from New Caledonia, an island in the South Pacific, can break off pieces of a branch to form a hook, using it to pull a grub out of a log, for instance. Once, in captivity, when a New Caledonian male crow had taken all the available hooks, its mate Betty took a straight piece of wire and bent it to make one. "They are head and shoulders above almost every other avian subjects" at toolmaking, said Irene Pepperberg, an avian cognition expert and research associate in Harvard University's department of psychology. "These crows are just amazing." Dr. Taylor, a researcher at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and several European colleagues wondered how the crows, without an ability to talk and showing no evidence of mimicry, might learn such sophisticated toolmaking. Perhaps, the scientists hypothesized in a new paper published Thursday in Scientific Reports, they used "mental template matching," where they formed an image in their heads of tools they'd seen used by others and then copied it. "Could they look at a tool and just based on mental image of the tool can they recreate that tool design?" Dr. Taylor said. "That's what we set out to test, and that's what our results show." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. In a series of steps, the researchers taught the birds to feed pieces of paper into a mock vending machine to earn food rewards. The scientists chose a task that was similar enough to something the animals do in the wild while also brand new. The birds had never seen card stock before, but learned how to rip it into big or little shapes after being shown they would get a reward for the appropriate size. The template used to show the birds the right size of paper was not available to them when they made their "tools," yet the crows were able to use their beaks to tear off bits of paper, which they sometimes held between their feet for leverage. The finding is consistent with what previous research has shown about the brains of songbirds, said John Marzluff, an expert in crow behavior and a professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington. Earlier research has shown that connected neural circuits in the front part of the brain allow songbirds to learn songs they heard their parents sing months earlier, and might be useful for other complex activities, he said. "I thought their demonstration of behavior that's consistent with that in tool manufacturing was really cool," Dr. Marzluff said. Dr. Pepperberg, who once famously taught a parrot named Alex over 100 English words, said the researchers still needed to do more work to prove that the crows form mental pictures of the template. "This would seem to be experiment one in a series of other experiments," she said. "The birds really did show an interesting inference, but they were led down the garden path." Just before asking the crows to rip the paper into the right size, the researchers showed them exactly what size paper would earn them a reward. "The fact that they choose to make a small piece of paper, for example, is interesting," Dr. Pepperberg said. "But it would be a lot more interesting if they hadn't seen it and been rewarded 30 seconds before they had to do it." She said she would find it extremely exciting if this team or another conclusively shows that crows can learn by making a mental picture. Dr. Marzluff said that there was always more research to be done, but that he was comfortable with the group's conclusions that such thinking occurs. And, he said, he's never heard of another animal accomplishing such a task. "The tool use and the progressive accumulation of proficiency or of complexity in tools is something that hasn't been demonstrated in species other than humans to my knowledge," he said, adding that this should teach humans some humility about our own position in the world. "We're not so unique ourselves. Just perhaps better or more advanced at doing certain tasks." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
VENICE The Venice Biennale, still the world's most distinguished exhibition of international contemporary art, opened to the public on Saturday, after a prosecco drenched professional preview that has grown larger and less professional than ever. Not just curators, dealers and critics, but also oversize crowds of collectors and the regulars of Europe's partying class swarmed the lagoon last week to see the 57th edition of the Biennale and to make merry until long after the last scheduled vaporetto. The Biennale comprises a central exhibition, organized this year by Christine Macel, chief curator of the Pompidou Center in Paris; and 85 national pavilions, which feature solo or thematic presentations. Prizes are awarded to the best pavilion this year it's Germany, which hosts a harrowing performance work by the young artist Anne Imhof and to participants in the main show. The whole thing adds up to a kind of art world Olympics. And museum exhibitions, pop up shows, public sculptures and the occasional guerrilla performance make Venice the epicenter of contemporary art this spring. My colleague Holland Cotter will publish a review of the Biennale shortly. But first, here are a few highlights from the first week, inside and outside the exhibition grounds. Ms. Macel's exhibition takes a more optimistic and unrestricted view of today's cultural production than the highly polemical edition of 2015. But several national pavilions took a darker, if still more metaphorical, view of world affairs. While Ms. Imhof's German pavilion was the talk of the Biennale, my vote for the strongest national presentation this year goes to the Turkish pavilion, in the converted naval warehouse called the Arsenale and given over to Cevdet Erek, an artist and musician from Istanbul known for tricking out industrial spaces with clattering, unnerving sounds. Mr. Erek has created an impressive, unsettling installation that unites makeshift bleachers, wire fence panels and severe spotlights. It feels as much like a prison yard as a concert venue. Thirty five speakers murmur with chimes and metallic scratches, but also whispered syllables that may put you in mind of Turkey's campaign of denunciations by private informants since the attempted government coup last summer. Outside the Biennale, another young Turkish artist, Asli Cavusoglu, has produced a subtle and wryly engaged response to the Erdogan government's imprisonment of journalists and writers. At the Palazzo Contarini Polignac, a grand building near the Accademia that is hosting an exhibition of nominees for the Future Generation Art Prize, Ms. Cavusoglu is distributing her own newspaper, "Future Tense," whose articles on geopolitics, society and Turkey's recent constitutional referendum are written by astrologers, soothsayers and other prognosticators. One fortune teller predicts that Turkey will be divided into two states; another foresees that Donald J. Trump will not remain the American president for long and that George Clooney will enter politics. Of the 85 national pavilions, five are presented by countries participating in the Biennale for the first time. The most eye opening is the pavilion of Antigua and Barbuda (population 91,295), which features a historical presentation of the self taught artist Frank Walter, who made delicate paintings but also wrote a 25,000 page hulk of autobiography, philosophy and fictional genealogy. Walter (1926 2009), who styled himself as the Seventh Prince of the West Indies, lived his last decades in a scrap metal shack, evoked here in a video installation. But his paintings of Antiguan flora, the insignia of European nobility, or small abstractions of stars and circles that recall the Pop Art of Robert Indiana open onto a world much larger than that small dwelling. As always, Venice's museums and private foundations are presenting exhibitions whose openings pulled nearly as many visitors as the Biennale. At the Accademia, a hefty retrospective of Philip Guston examined the influence of poetry on this Canadian American painter's churning late figurative paintings. An earlier American artist, the 19th century realist William Merritt Chase, is the draw at Ca' Pesaro, Venice's modern art museum on the Grand Canal. And there is Damien Hirst, whose two site megashow of false antiquities rescued from the sea caused jaws to drop and eyebrows to arch across the lagoon. The most startling external exhibition in Venice, though, is at the Fondazione Prada, where visitors queued to see a deep thinking fun house of a show by three Germans: the photographer Thomas Demand, the filmmaker Alexander Kluge and the set designer Anna Viebrock. "The boat is leaking. The captain lied." the title is adapted from a Leonard Cohen song shifts dazzlingly among scales and across media as you pass from room to room: A scene from one of Mr. Kluge's films is echoed in one of Mr. Demand's photographs of constructed paper environments, and then a photograph is reinterpreted as one of Ms. Viebrock's life size sets. In a classically Prada move, the murals of the foundation's canalside home are overlaid in places with cheap, temporary drywall facades one more kind of layering in this brilliant mille feuille of a show. At another private foundation, the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, the brainy Arte Povera artist Giovanni Anselmo is presenting a characteristically subtle exhibition of sculpture in response to one of the most beautiful spaces in Venice. Mr. Anselmo, 82, has installed his works of granite and Plexiglas in rooms designed by Carlo Scarpa (1906 1978), the sainted Venetian architect who reintroduced highly detailed materials, such as marble, travertine and local glass, into Modernist architecture. In Scarpa's seductive rooms, including one where canal water laps into the gallery, Mr. Anselmo's deceptively simple granite blocks and sculptures speak even more clearly of the passage of time. Another intervention in a Scarpa building, which became a word of mouth success among the art world types hoofing across the stones of Venice, is already over. In an apartment that once belonged to Scarpa's lawyer, and which remains in private hands, the American artist Melissa McGill placed five small boxes with speakers inside each one playing a recording of the everyday noises in a Venetian square. Her sound works subtly evoked the evaporation of local communities, but the real romance came from the extraordinary privilege of entering this unknown architectural jewel, finding a minute's peace amid its elegance, and then returning to the artsy throngs outside. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The cover of Gossamer's debut issue features a mouthwatering image of orange juice being poured into a glass dotted with beads of condensation. Inside there's an article about books as home decor status items, a Q. and A. with the writer and director Janicza Bravo, and a fashion spread featuring the clothing lines of Rosetta Getty and Gabriela Hearst. The magazine's tag line and de facto motto, "High Quality," is opaque enough to not raise any red flags to narcs, but also serves as a winking reference to its connective thread and defining subject matter. In Broccoli's fourth and most recent issue, between advertisements for the cannabis body care brand Apothecanna and the weed delivery service Eaze, there's a profile of the women who founded an "ungendered skatewear" brand and an advice column from Emily Post concerning how to "tactfully talk about weed." And at Miss Grass you'll find a recipe for cucumber, tomato and CBD salad; a three step how to on rolling the perfect joint; and a guide to Los Angeles's best cannabis friendly attractions. Miss Grass's slogan? "Welcome to the high road." "We wanted to create something that reflected how we engage with cannabis on a daily or weekly or monthly basis in our personal lives," said Verena von Pfetten, who, along with David Weiner, started Gossamer magazine last year. "Everyone uses it for a different reason: to relax, to sleep, to have fun, to go out to dinner or on a hike. It's about the experience you do after. It was important for us to create a lifestyle publication that sat between cannabis and all the other interests of the consumer." Anja Charbonneau, the founder and creative director of Broccoli, and formerly of the hipster lifestyle bible Kinfolk, felt similarly. "There's this huge swath of people who use marijuana in a considered way, it's not their life's focus," she said. "Because it can touch so many different parts of life, like food, creativity, politics and science, it's important to situate it in that bigger picture of lifestyle." Set against a backdrop in which marijuana legalization slowly works its way across the United States, cannabis culture is being reframed thanks, in part, to independently run magazines with modest press runs but impressive coffee table presence. They are helping the archetype of marijuana smokers as shaggy haired, bloodshot eyed burnouts evolve into one of cultured, luxury designer wearing members of the creative class. For a certain upper middle class demographic, overwhelmingly white, pot has all but been transformed from illicit drug to wellness item or indulgence akin to a fine wine or cigar. A new generation of users are more likely to read Goop than High Times, the stoner bible, and publishers see an exciting opportunity in a marketplace that could reach 23.4 billion in consumer spending and employ a half million Americans by 2023, according to the cannabis data firm BDS Analytics. Print media is going up in smoke. Could weed, of all things, be its savior? "We've both worked at larger companies," said Mr. Weiner of Gossamer, referring to himself and Ms. von Pfetten. "But working on something that we could build from the ground up in a growth industry and that speaks to our peers and which people want to spend time with to me, what else would I be looking for in life, at least at this point?" (He is 33.) Ms. von Pfetten, 35, said: "The cannabis space is obviously popular and buzzy, but it's nowhere near at capacity. We're still very much at the nascent stages." For Kate Miller, the C.E.O. and a founder of Miss Grass, "it's about building the brand." Miss Grass launched last year. "Hopefully we'll have our own product line, do more events, partner with more cannabis and nonendemic brands," Ms. Miller said. "The big question is how to destigmatize and normalize this industry." While the market is still small, other titles are seeking to capitalize on its future growth. There's Dope Girls, a scrappy zine out of Atlanta, and Kitchen Toke, a foodie pot magazine out of Chicago. Online, there's Estrohaze, which focuses on minority women in the marijuana industry. "People have responded to it overwhelmingly," she said. "A lot of work has been done in just this year in terms of normalization, so now it's like, how do we continue that narrative?" "This is a sign that the stigma around cannabis is starting to disappear," said Morgan Fox, a spokesman for the National Cannabis Industry Association. "As that stigma has started to erode, we're starting to see that cannabis consumers come from a wide variety of walks of life." Mr. Fox, who started working in the field a decade ago, remembers seeing issues of High Times on magazine stands wrapped in plastic and placed near pornographic titles. Today, cannabis magazines are sold at trendy bookstores likes McNally Jackson and the Strand in New York, or offered in room at hip boutique hotels like the Ace in Los Angeles and Palm Springs. Ms. Miller started her cannabis career while working at a medical marijuana shop in downtown Los Angeles during college. "At the time everything we were selling leaned in to that stoner bro stigma," she said. "It had giant weed leaves on it and Rastafarian signs." When it came to her personal use, Ms. Miller saw a stark divide between reality and media representation. "The way that my girlfriends and I were speaking about, consuming and integrating pot into our lives felt so different than how it was portrayed, not only in pop culture, but within cannabis culture," she said. She had the foresight to buy the web address for Miss Grass at that time, in 2008, not yet knowing how she would put it to use. "There was a demographic that everyone was speaking to that was old and tired, it was these stereotypes and cliches," Mr. Weiner said. "We felt like a lot of brands and media companies weren't taking into account the realities of sophisticated consumers and readers and how they act and what they think about or what they desire in the world." Still there are challenges. Marijuana is recreationally legal in only nine states, and medically legal in 31. Because of this legal limbo, there are byzantine rules and regulations regarding how weed can be marketed, including a ban on online advertising. Many cannabis companies, however, are making a lot of money and want to use some for promotion, and perceive that an aspirational lifestyle magazine is the ideal product in which to promote their products (are they high?). "A lot of brands really want to be a part of this evolution of the culture," Ms. Charbonneau said. "They want to support others who are doing interesting work and lifting up interesting people in the community." With their playful aesthetics and generally lighthearted stories, these publications may appear blissfully oblivious to certain political realities of the drug. But staffers were careful to indicate to "check their privilege," to use the lingo of the day. "We always say if you're not thinking of the social justice aspect of this and you work in cannabis, you're doing it very very wrong," Mr. Weiner said. "We wanted to be upfront and thoughtful about the social justice component about cannabis as well, when you think of how many people are allowed to participate and how many people are still in jail for minor cannabis related offenses." Ms. Charbonneau said she plans on donating a portion of profits from sales of Broccoli's fourth issue to the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, which helps people who are jailed for minor offenses and are unable to pay for bail. "A lot of what we do is about educating consumers on how to use the product, but also educating them on how we got here," Ms. Miller said. Much of the content of these magazines may be trendy and apolitical, but Ms. Miller noted, as well, the importance of acknowledging the harsher history of pot namely the "victims of the war on drugs," she said, most of whom have been minorities. The new magazines, their editors say, also reflect the groups forged by pot smokers in real life. "David talked about going to weddings as the plus one and you go outside and see people smoking weed and you've got a community for the night," Ms. von Pfetten said. "When we thought about content, it's like, how do we put people forward?" She mentioned "Conversations," a feature of monologues with attractive product shots. "These are the types of people you meet and you don't talk about weed the whole time," she said. "It comes up peripherally and it's something you connect on and share your favorite products or experiences, but the person is so much more than that." Ms. von Pfetten added that she wants Gossamer to be a "global brand" that people who are into cannabis can relate to. "What that looks like? Who knows," she said. "The industry is literally changing on a month to month basis." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The last time Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant played an N.B.A. game, he went out shooting. It was April 13, 2016, and Bryant scored 60 points, much to the delight of the Staples Center crowd, which included the actor Jack Nicholson and the rapper Snoop Dogg. He was gunning from a distance without a conscience, showing little of the wear and tear that nearly 60,000 professional basketball minutes had put on him. It was the kind of performance that had become rare for Bryant as he transitioned from being one of the most dynamic players in the history of basketball to an elder statesman ready to pass the torch to the next generation. His resume, with one Most Valuable Player Award, five N.B.A. championships and 18 All Star selections, is among the most impressive in league history. N.B.A. teams, such as the Spurs and Raptors playing in San Antonio, and the Celtics and Pelicans playing in New Orleans, purposely took 24 second shot clock violations at the start of their games in honor of Bryant, who had played under the jersey Nos. 8 and 24. Both have been retired and hang in the rafters at the Lakers' Staples Center arena, which hosted the Grammy Awards on Sunday. The musician Lizzo dedicated a performance at the awards show to the former player, and fans quickly gathered outside the arena that evening, chanting, "Thank you, Kobe." Many players in Sunday night's N.B.A. games also wore shoes that honored Bryant and his daughter. It's easy to draw a straight line from the New Age Lakers, led by James, to the team that Bryant left behind. Without Bryant, there likely would have been no James in Los Angeles. Many were critical of the high dollar contract offered to Bryant near the end of his career, which hamstrung the Lakers from making roster choices that would have propelled the team to a post Kobe era. However, Bryant's presence allowed the franchise to retain its historical prestige, even while putting the team temporarily in the N.B.A.'s wilderness. N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement on Sunday that Bryant had been "one of the most extraordinary players in the history of our game." "For 20 seasons, Kobe showed us what is possible when remarkable talent blends with an absolute devotion to winning," Silver said. "But he will be remembered most for inspiring people around the world to pick up a basketball and compete to the very best of their ability." Few players saw Bryant's impact on the Lakers the way Shaquille O'Neal did. O'Neal, now a TNT analyst, formed a Lakers duo with Bryant that was widely acknowledged as one of the top tandems in basketball history. O'Neal said in a message posted on Twitter that there were "no words to express the pain" he was going through over losing Bryant and Bryant's daughter, and that he loved Bryant and would miss him. "My condolences goes out to the Bryant family and the families of the other passengers on board," he wrote. Other Lakers greats expressed their admiration as well. Magic Johnson, arguably the only player who matches Bryant in contributions to the franchise, posted, "Laker Nation, the game of basketball our city, will never be the same without Kobe." Kareem Abdul Jabbar appeared in a Twitter video wearing a purple Lakers sweatshirt and wrote: "Most people will remember Kobe as the magnificent athlete who inspired a whole generation of basketball players. But I will always remember him as a man who was much more than an athlete." During his playing career, Bryant began experimenting with endeavors outside of basketball that he would channel his competitiveness into after retirement. He co founded an investment firm, Bryant Stibel Co., that reportedly now manages more than 2 billion. He also collaborated with Spike Lee on the 2009 documentary "Kobe Doin' Work." When Bryant announced his retirement in 2015, he did so not through a statement or an interview, but in a poem titled "Dear Basketball." It began: "From the moment I started rolling my dad's tube socks; And shooting imaginary game winning shots; In the Great Western Forum; I knew one thing was real: I fell in love with you." Two years later, Bryant turned "Dear Basketball" into an animated short film, which won an Academy Award. Former President Barack H. Obama referred to Bryant's career reinvention in a statement on Sunday. "Kobe was a legend on the court and just getting started in what would have been just as meaningful a second act," he said. During his Oscar acceptance speech, Bryant said: "As basketball players we're supposed to shut up and dribble. I'm glad we do a little bit more than that." It was a reference to comments made by the Fox News conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, who had denounced basketball players, including James, for criticizing President Trump. James was not yet a Laker and Bryant's path provides a sort of blueprint for future athletes. And now the franchise that Bryant defined is in the hands of James. It is perhaps appropriate. Bryant had filled the shoes of Lakers before, such as those of Abdul Jabbar and Johnson as a young guard, and made his own way. But there was one shadow that stood out above all. Throughout Bryant's career, he was steadily linked to Michael Jordan as an apparent heir to the basketball throne. Their games were eerily similar, and both were faces of the league in their primes, often referred to as the unequivocal best players in the league. Bryant even once tried to engineer a trade to the Chicago Bulls, where Jordan made his name. On Sunday, Jordan, now the owner of the Charlotte Hornets, said in a statement that he was in shock over the deaths of Bryant and his daughter. "Words can't describe the pain I'm feeling," he said. "I loved Kobe he was like a little brother to me. We used to talk often and I will miss those conversations very much." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
PHILADELPHIA "I think that a great painter is even rarer than a great film director," Jean Renoir said. It was 1967, and that French filmmaker was sitting on the bank of the river Ource, amiably chatting during the making of a documentary by Jacques Rivette, a New Wave director who idolized Renoir's "Grand Illusion," "The Crime of Monsieur Lange" and the masterpiece "The Rules of the Game." But unlike the New Wave's auteurs, Renoir (1894 1979) had his doubts about cinema's importance. Because of the medium's limits, he told Rivette, a film could never fully express a single vision. Only a painter could "find the relationship between eternity and the instant, between the world and the soul." Filmmakers were cursed to be technicians. Painters, Renoir concluded, "are the great philosophers of our time." Jean Renoir did not always treasure his father's paintings; early on, he may have principally appreciated them for the money he made selling them to fund his films. Yet, eventually, after moving to Los Angeles, he spoke of Pierre Auguste Renoir as the central influence of his life, which he elaborated on in the genial memoir "Renoir, My Father." The place of one Renoir in the career of the other is the subject of "Renoir: Father and Son/Painting and Cinema," a terrific, heartfelt exhibition now on view here at the Barnes Foundation. Though the show seriously considers the interplay of media, this is largely an exhibition about Jean Renoir, and about cinema. There are just 16 works by Pierre Auguste Renoir; the museum's own 181 Renoir paintings remain on their traditional yellow walls, according to the terms of the will of Albert C. Barnes, the foundation's founder. The galleries are filled instead with projected clips from "A Day in the Country," "The Diary of a Chambermaid" and more than a dozen other films by the younger Renoir, as well as stills, posters, correspondence and costumes. (The show was curated by Sylvie Patry, a deputy director at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris and a veteran of the Barnes. It travels to the Orsay in November.) As a boy, Jean Renoir did not have a close relationship with his father. As in many bourgeois households in fin de siecle France, Jean's mother and the domestic staff looked after him and his two siblings, while his father was largely out of sight. Pierre Auguste Renoir was known not as "Papa" but as "Patron," or "the boss" the same nickname Rivette and other New Wave directors would later apply to his son. The boy's most consistent contact with his father would have occurred while he was posing for him, and there are half a dozen paintings of young Jean in this exhibition. In a portrait from 1903, the 9 year old son appears with a jaunty red foulard tied about his neck; as is so often true of Renoirs, the oil paint looks like pastel, and Jean's hair has the delicacy of spun silk. (In the same gallery, we see the 60 something Jean Renoir posing with that childhood portrait for a feature in the magazine Paris Match.) The younger Renoir also had ambitions in visual art, and started out as a ceramicist in the early 1920s. One of his only buyers was Dr. Barnes, and this show includes 10 of Jean Renoir's unremarkable vases and bowls, painted with a Cezannesque palette of greens, yellows and blues. He soon accepted, though, that his life lay in cinema, and made two intriguing silent films with his first wife, Andree Heuschling. Under the stage name Catherine Hessling, she starred in the ethereal "Whirlpool of Fate" (1924) and then in "Nana" (1926), an adaptation of Emile Zola's novel, in which she plays a smooth operator of the Second Empire. She had previously modeled for more than a hundred of Pierre Auguste Renoir's late paintings, including "The Bathers," a splashy discharge of flesh and grass completed in 1919, the year he died, and lent to this show from the Orsay. Yet it was in early sound cinema that Jean Renoir would make his deepest mark. In "La Chienne" ("The Bitch"), from 1931, he sent up the Paris art world by having a pimp offer an amateur's portraits at one of the best galleries in town. "A Day in the Country" (1936), by contrast, is soaked in Impressionist light effects, especially in the lyrical sequence of a woman standing on a swing as it climbs ever higher, the camera swaying with her. This is a rare case of Renoir's filming en plein air, as his father painted. It's projected here in the show's first gallery, just before you encounter Pierre Auguste Renoir's "The Swing" (1876), one of the finest of the artist's Impressionist paintings. Jean Renoir held onto just one of his father's works his whole life: "Jean as a Huntsman" (1910), which traveled with him to California, and which he left to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In it, the 16 year old Jean appears in a belted shooting jacket, a beagle at his feet; his father has painted the blue of his son's outfit with shifting red and purple undertones that recall the work of Edvard Munch. It hangs here, in one of the show's most cunning moves, across from a still from "The Rules of the Game" (1939), whose hunting sequence is both a landmark of technical acuity and a devastating portrayal of the French aristocracy. Jean Renoir, in the role of the scrounging failed conductor Octave, stands proudly in his country tweeds, staring at his younger self. Focusing on Jean Renoir's family inheritance means that this show overlooks some of the director's most important accomplishments. The great antiwar film "Grand Illusion" (1937) is totally omitted. His precise editing whether in the flawless light touch of "Boudu Saved From Drowning" (1932) or in the rapid cuts of the hunt in "The Rules of the Game" is also minimized in a show that places more importance on images than on movement. And the Barnes, perhaps unaccustomed to multimedia presentations of this sort, has botched some of the projections. "The Rules of the Game" is screened in a dreadful copy of sub YouTube resolution, with the night sky over Octave and his wealthy friend Christine pixelated into splotches of grays and black. Only some of the projections have sound, not always fully audible. The locomotive of "The Human Beast" (1938), so resonant of Monet's paintings of trains at the Gare Saint Lazare, churns here silently. Still, the search for the rhyming of the father's painting and the son's cinematography reveals the power of later, less celebrated films in color among them "Picnic on the Grass," which was shot on the grounds of the elder Renoir's home on the Riviera. "French Cancan," an accomplished, if syrupy, musical of the Moulin Rouge, brings the exhibition back to Pierre Auguste Renoir's Montmartre, though Toulouse Lautrec was a greater influence on its sequences of high kicking dancers and absinthe swilling patrons. And "The River," filmed on location in India, is projected in the final gallery here (again, with iffy sound); two lovelorn women sitting on a swing harken not only to "A Day in the Country" but also to his father's original Impressionist vision. This is cinema that takes inspiration from painting but transcends it, too. Although this is Jean Renoir's show, it also serves as a reassessment of Pierre Auguste Renoir, whose later works faced disparaging reviews as early as the 1920s. (In recent years, especially, juvenile internet parodists who blare the slogan "Renoir Sucks at Painting" have even staged mock protests outside of museums.) At the Barnes, which owns the world's largest collection of Renoirs, it can be easy to tire of his soft, honey hued paintings of undressed women. Yet his interweaving of classical motifs with the flat representations of Modern painting were more than a direct influence on Picasso and Matisse; this show insists that they were decisive, too, for the maturing of French cinema. "I have finally watched my films again at home," Jean Renoir said toward the end of his life, "and I have to admit that I have always imitated my father! That's all I have ever done." Could he not see that he had done so much more than imitate, that he had transformed his medium in ways even more profound than the elder Renoir did his? Think back to "The Rules of the Game," in which Octave explains that he loves Christine partly as a tribute to her father, a conductor of towering importance whom he idolizes but cannot equal. Some shadows, it seems, you never get out of, even when you have mastered the art of light. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
But the most recent results from two surveys one nationwide in France, the other limited to one region caused scientists to sound an alarm, because the results suggest that agricultural methods are hurting birds, according to Benoit Fontaine, a conservation biologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and a leader of the national survey, conducted twice a year by volunteers. "In the agricultural land," he said, "there is something really bad going on." Over the past 17 years, the numbers of birds in farming areas have dropped by a third. Some of the species have declined even more: Meadow pipit populations, for example, fell by 68 percent. Dr. Fontaine described the situation as "catastrophic." He suspects that pesticides used in agriculture and intensification of land use are linked to the decline, although neither survey comes to conclusions about causes or makes any policy recommendations. But he pointed to the loss of insects, the major food source for many birds, as a likely result of pesticide use. Vincent Bretagnolle, an ecologist at the Centre for Biological Studies Chize, led the other survey, which has been conducted by scientists in the Deux Sevres region in the western part of the country for 24 years. "Our results are completely in agreement with national and European surveys," he said. The trend is long term, he said, except that recently, particularly at the national level, the dip has been steeper, and the more generalist bird species have been affected as they weren't in the past. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Eduard Limonov, a Russian writer and political activist whose chameleonlike career included living in exile in New York and leading Russia's ultra right National Bolshevik Party, died on Tuesday in Moscow. He was 77. The Other Russia, a political opposition group of which he was a leader, posted news of his death on its website but gave no details. Mr. Limonov liked to describe himself as the Johnny Rotten of Soviet dissident writers, a reference to the impish, anarchic lead singer of the Sex Pistols. His first book, "It's Me, Eddie," published in France in 1979, was a fictionalized, somewhat scandalous memoir about a Russian in New York. "The Soviet press found it filthy," Keith Gessen wrote in Slate in 2003, "while the more perceptive emigre establishment denounced Limonov for stating the awful truth: that for many of those who came over, America was just nasty, brutal and expensive and New York was no city on a hill." The book, when finally published in Russia in 1991, is said to have sold a million copies. In the meantime Mr. Limonov had written, among other things, "His Butler's Story" (1987), another fictionalized memoir, inspired by his time as a housekeeper to a wealthy Manhattanite in the late 1970s. The protagonist, Maggie Paley wrote in a review in The New York Times, had a decidedly sour outlook. "He hates the underclass for being weak and stupid and the ruling class for being insensitive," she wrote. "He hates women whom he describes in terms of female sex organs for using men. He considers the other Russians in New York to be snobs or boors. He has no use for political systems, Communist or capitalist. He believes in revolution as a 'phenomenon of nature.' Yet he's made no plans to foment it." The review was critical of aspects of the book, but Ms. Paley found some merit in the work. "Though Edward Limonov's judgment may be faulty," the review concluded, "he's to be congratulated for his audacity, his insistence on saying what most people are afraid to say, his sheer, beautiful nerve." After living in France for a time, Mr. Limonov returned to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and created the National Bolshevik Party. He became a visible if sometimes hard to pin down figure, something like the semifictional characters in his books. "Limonov founded the NBP in 1993 after returning to Russia from years abroad," The Times wrote about him in 2008. "Since then, his message has changed from anti Americanism and anti capitalism to anti Putinism and anti fascism though rabid nationalism has dominated." The article described the group as "part Merry Pranksters, part revolutionary vanguard." Mr. Limonov called its protests "velvet terrorism" members, for instance, would throw tomatoes or eggs at political figures they disliked. The authorities, though, weren't laughing: Mr. Limonov spent two and a half years in jail in the mid 2000s on weapons charges. (A more serious charge of trying to overthrow the government had been dropped.) After his release, he continued to be a thorn, organizing demonstrations and drawing numerous fines, including one of 380 in 2012 that was added to the almost 17,000 he had already been assessed. "I earn less and less every day," he said at the time. "So I will not pay the 380, just like I did not pay the 16,880." Edward Veniaminovich Savenko was born on Feb. 23, 1943, in Dzerzhinsk, about 230 miles east of Moscow, to Veniamin and Raisa Savenko. His father was an officer in the secret police. He changed his name to Limonov as "a tribute to his acidic and bellicose humor, because 'limon' means lemon, and 'limonka' is slang for a kind of hand grenade," Emmanuel Carrere wrote in his semifictional biography, "Limonov: The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia" (2014). In another account, though, a painter friend was said to have given him the name because he was "very pale, almost yellow." When he was still a boy the family moved to the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, where Mr. Limonov grew up. He worked in a factory and a bookstore before moving to Moscow in 1967. There he began to write poetry and became involved with dissidents. In 1974, he said, the K.G.B. offered him a choice "rat out your degenerate friends or go into exile." That's when he left, going to Vienna and Rome before landing in New York. The protagonist of "It's Me, Eddie," which is based on his early years in New York, had a down and out arrogance. "I receive welfare," Eddie announces early on. "I live off your labor." "I have no shame or conscience," the character says later, "therefore my conscience doesn't bother me and I don't plan to look for work, I want to receive your money to the end of my days." Mr. Limonov, though, encountered some kindred spirits during the mid 1970s. "In New York I found the same kind of people nonconformists, painters, poets, crazy underground musicians that I had left in Moscow," he told The Guardian in 2010. Mr. Limonov's fortunes changed later in the decade when he was hired as a housekeeper by Peter Sprague, who was co chairman of the carmaker Aston Martin at the time. But Mr. Sprague told The Times in 2008 that "His Butler's Story" wasn't a particularly accurate portrayal of Mr. Limonov's tenure with him. "It was as if Hunter Thompson had written 'The Nanny Diaries,'" he said. By 1982 Mr. Limonov was living in France, where he enjoyed some acclaim in literary circles. When the Soviet Union collapsed, his Russian citizenship was restored, and he returned to his home country. For a time he was an incongruous ally of Garry Kasparov, the chess master, who advocated a pro Western liberalism that was at odds with the National Bolsheviks. Mr. Limonov was certainly no fan of the West. "Europeans are so timid, they remind me of sick and elderly people," he told The Guardian, adding: "In Russia, fortunately, the people still have some barbarian spirit. But Europeans and Americans are just dying, sick invalids." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Dr. Levi Watkins Jr., the first surgeon to successfully implant an automatic heart defibrillator in a human patient, and a civil rights pioneer who helped fling open medical school doors to hundreds of students who had been excluded as he had once been because they were black, died on Saturday in Baltimore. He was 70. His death was announced by the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he had been on the faculty for many years. The day before he died, Dr. Watkins had been welcoming students to a training program at Johns Hopkins University Hospital when he became ill, the school said. The cause of death was complications of a heart attack and a stroke, the school said. Dr. Watkins was baptized as a child in Birmingham, Ala., by the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, the civil rights leader and close aide to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As a teenager he participated in the Montgomery bus boycott, a seminal event in the civil rights struggle led by Dr. King that was set off in 1955 when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Dr. Watkins later volunteered as a part time driver for Dr. King, who was his family's pastor. He broke ground as the first black student to enter and graduate from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. "All my work since the integration of Vanderbilt University has been about inclusion, equity and opportunity," Dr. Watkins said in an interview with the University of Alabama at Birmingham, whose all white medical school denied him admission in 1966. Dr. Watkins's successful implantation of a defibrillator was performed on Feb. 4, 1980, at Johns Hopkins University Hospital just seven months after he had finished his surgical training. The device, which detects arrhythmia in the heart and emits an electric charge to correct it, had been developed at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore. Assisted by Dr. Vincent Gott, the chief of cardiac surgery, Dr. Watkins inserted the device in a 57 year old woman from California. At the time, the defibrillator cost 7,000, about the price of a midsize car, and was connected to a battery operated generator, the size of a cigarette pack, inserted under the stomach. Modern versions are implanted in as many as 100,000 patients in the United States every year. "His spirit lives on in the three million patients around the world whose hearts beat in a normal rhythm because of the implantable defibrillator," his brother, Donald, who desegregated the University of Alabama's Law School in 1970, wrote on Facebook. Dr. Watkins is also survived by another brother, James, and two sisters, Doristine L. Minott and Annie Marie Garraway. Levi Watkins Jr. was born in Parsons, Kan., on June 13, 1944. His father was a college professor who became president of Alabama State College in Montgomery. His mother, the former Lillian Varnado, was a high school teacher and homemaker. After moving to Montgomery, the family joined Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr. King was pastor. Levi was 8 when he first met him. He earned a bachelor's degree from Tennessee State University, where a biology teacher persuaded him to pursue a career in medicine. He learned he was accepted at Vanderbilt from a headline in a Nashville newspaper. He was still the only black enrolled there when he graduated in 1970. After a surgical internship at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, he was named the hospital's first black chief resident in cardiac surgery. His research at Harvard Medical School, from 1973 to 1975, led to the use of angiotensin blockers to treat congestive heart failure. He later joined the full time faculty at Johns Hopkins and, in 1979, the medical school's admissions committee. By 1983, the number of black students there had increased to 40, from 8. He retired in 2013. Among those he mentored were Dr. Selwyn M. Vickers, the first African American dean of the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, and Dr. James E. K. Hildreth, an immunologist prominent in AIDS research. Dr. Hildreth, who was dean of the College of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Davis, and is the incoming president of Meharry Medical College, a historically black institution in Nashville, said that Dr. Watkins, as a lone black pioneer, "had to be his own role model." "Dr. Watkins's life and work illustrate how one person, at the right time and in the right place, can profoundly change institutions and their culture," Dr. Hildreth said. Dr. Andre L. Churchwell, who said he had been inspired by Dr. Watkins in becoming a professor and senior associate dean for diversity affairs at Vanderbilt School of Medicine, said: "Levi, whether in his role as researcher, advocate for civil rights or pushing institutions as a soldier for diversity in medical education and admission processes, never forgot his roots or values taught him by his family, of humility, egalitarianism, grace and humor. He used these lessons as part of his tool kit to push for academic excellence and broad diversity." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
AMERICAN DANCE PLATFORM at the Joyce Theater (Jan. 4 and 5, 8 p.m.; Jan. 6, 2 and 7:30 p.m.). This eclectic display of both young and established American dance artists continues with a Philly double header by pairing the engaging, enterprising BalletX performing works by Matthew Neenan and Trey McIntyre with choreographer Raphael Xavier, who brings his b boy background to the stage (Friday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 7:30 p.m.). The New York based artist Ephrat Asherie also draws on breaking in her unique mix of styles, here presenting two works. She's joined on the program by fellow New Yorker Ronald K. Brown, who is celebrated for his inspired fusion of modern and African dance (Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m.). 212 242 0800, joyce.org AMERICAN REALNESS at various locations (Jan. 4 13). Fans of unexpected dance know to rest up over the holidays in preparation for the new year sprint that is American Realness, the genre busting performance festival now celebrating its 10th anniversary. Venues in four of the five boroughs play host to dozens of shows that subvert conventions, challenge systems (artistic, social, political) and reject, dissect and/or embrace every kind of identity. Among the many participants are Gillian Walsh, Marjani Forte Saunders at New York Live Arts, Juliana May at Abrons Arts Center and Jumatatu M. Poe at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. americanrealness.com NORA CHIPAUMIRE at Jack (Jan. 4 5, 10 p.m.; Jan. 6, 8 p.m.; Jan. 10 12, 10 p.m.). Last year, Chipaumire presented a characteristically raw and nervy work reflecting on her development in her native Zimbabwe in the 1970s, '80s and '90s as represented by punk, pop and rumba music. In a fresh sampling of that work, called "100% POP Shabeen Remix," Chipaumire dives deeper into the place of pop in a global society and the regionally specific African ingredients like underground beer halls and all night rituals that nurtured artists like her. 646 734 8985, jackny.org CUBA FESTIVAL at the Joyce Theater (Jan. 9, 7:30 p.m.; Jan. 10 11, 8 p.m.; through Jan. 20). Our country's relationship with Cuba may still be in flux but the Joyce Theater's commitment to Cuban artists remains steadfast. Starting Jan. 9, the space presents the Cuba Festival. First up is the frequent visitor Malpaso Dance Company, a skilled and earnest troupe that will present a diverse program of works by Merce Cunningham, Abel Rojo and Beatriz Garcia Diaz, plus Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin's haunting "Tabula Rasa" (through Jan. 13). The festival continues with the company Los Hijos del Director (Jan. 15 16) and the feisty contemporary Flamenco dancer Irene Rodriguez and her self named company (Jan. 18 20). 212 242 0800, joyce.org JACK FERVER at New York Lives Arts (Jan. 7, 10 p.m.; Jan. 8 12, 8 p.m.). After an acclaimed debut last spring, Ferver's "Everything Is Imaginable" receives a weeklong encore, as part of both the American Realness festival and the Live Artery showcase. Ferver is joined here by accomplished colleagues Lloyd Knight (Martha Graham Dance Company), Garen Scribner (Broadway's "An American in Paris"), James Whiteside (American Ballet Theater) and dancer and costume designer Reid Bartelme. In the work's first half, they individually and collectively pay tribute to childhood idols and reflect on their queer identities. In the second half, things get dark. 212 691,6500, newyorklivearts.org MIGUEL GUTIERREZ at the Chocolate Factory (Jan. 9 12, 8 p.m.; through Jan. 19). In the seminal 1981 feminist anthology "This Bridge Called My Back," women of color argued that the intersection of race and gender required a rethinking of identity and politics. In 2019, Gutierrez, a choreographer, has chosen a different, nearby body part to make a similar and, um, cheekier point. Part of American Realness, "This Bridge Called My Ass" is his first New York premiere in four years. With five other Latinx performers, Gutierrez uses the heightened emotions of telenovelas and tangled, sometimes chaotic, sometimes euphoric movement to reflect on the threads of his own identity as a queer Latino artist. 718 482 7069, chocolatefactorytheater.org LIVE ARTERY at New York Live Arts (Jan. 4 7). As arts presenters from around the country and the world flock to New York to discover artists and fill their performance spaces, audiences also get to revisit favorite works from the past year or catch critically lauded shows they might have missed. Over several days, and at uncommon times, like 2 p.m. on Monday, New York Live Arts will present a nearly nonstop parade of performances by artists like Joanna Kotze, Sean Dorsey, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Kyle Marshall and Roseanne Spradlin, among many others. 212 924 0077, newyorklivearts.org NOCHE FLAMENCA at Joe's Pub (Jan. 6, 3 and 7 p.m.; Jan. 8, 7 p.m.; Jan. 9, 9:30 p.m., Jan. 10, 8 and 10 p.m.; through Jan. 11). To watch a flamenco show at Joe's Pub is to harken back a century or so to the Cafe Cantantes in Seville, where song, dance, music and libations were enjoyed in intimate, immersive environs. Here, the New York based Noche Flamenca presents "Rondan Los Deseos" (Circle of Desire), which was created by the troupe's co founders Martin Santangelo and Soledad Barrio, who are also its star performers. After a previous engagement at the Pub and an appearance on the Joyce stage last year, the work returns with new duets and trios. 212 967 7555, joespub.com JOSHUA PETHER at Performance Space New York (Jan. 5, 7 p.m.; Jan. 6, 3 p.m.). "Jupiter Orbiting," the latest work from Pether, exists in a dystopian sci fi milieu populated by many colorful toys that he examines as if artifacts from a strange, happier world. Pether, who is of Kalkadoon heritage (a people indigenous to present day Australia), performs as part of both the American Realness festival and First Nations Dialog: KIN, a series of conversations, workshops and performances at Performance Space New York from Saturday to Thursday that is led by indigenous artists and explores indigenous experiences. performancespacenewyork.org CALEB TEICHER AND CONRAD TAO at the Guggenheim Museum (Jan. 6, 3 and 7:30 p.m.; Jan. 7, 7:30 p.m.). Teicher is a disruptor of dance, particularly tap, and Tao is an inventive pianist and composer. Together they have collaborated on a new evening length work called "More Forever," premiering as part of the Guggenheim's Works Process performance series. Against Tao's score for piano and electronics at times calm, at times frenetic Teicher and his team of dancers traverse a stage covered in a thin layer of sand, using dance styles like Lindy Hop and tap to create thrillingly textured sound. REGGIE WILSON/FIST HEEL at St. Marks Church (Jan. 7 8 and 10 12, 8 p.m.). Dance and devotion have met frequently in Wilson's works over the decades, from the ring shouts practiced by enslaved Africans to the dancing of Spiritual Baptists in Trinidad and Tabago. Recently, he's been researching Black Shakers members of the insular and diminishing Christian sect known for ecstatic trembling and sleek, minimalist furniture. In "... They Stood Shaking While Others Began to Shout," which was first seen last spring in New York and returns courtesy of Danspace Project, Gibney and American Realness, eight dancers and two singers enact a modern folk dance of faith that is in conversation with the past. 866 811 4111, danspaceproject.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Credit...Peter Prato for The New York Times SEBASTOPOL, Calif. On the morning of Dec. 1 last year, the musician Francis Farewell Starlite posted an announcement to his nearly 28,000 followers on Twitter. The message wasn't an apology, per se, but its pointed brevity and dispassion conveyed a certain amount of heartache and embarrassment. "Hi. I'm not gonna release music today. I believe in the future." Two days later, I drove to a small cabin he was renting at the end of a long, rocky road in Sebastopol, a leafy, vineyard choked town in Northern California 20 minutes from the coast. In more than a dozen years of releasing music under the name Francis and the Lights, Starlite, 38, had never sat for an in depth interview. Basic facts of his life (Who were his parents? Was that really his name?) remained a mystery, even as his sound and aesthetic sensibility, as a songwriter and producer for transformative acts like Kanye West, Frank Ocean, Drake and Bon Iver, seeped into the fabric of modern pop. When I arrived at the cabin, perched on a hill overlooking the Sonoma Valley, I half expected to find it empty. Instead, Starlite came to the front door with a shy smile. He was wearing a faded purple sweatshirt, black sunglasses and camel Yeezy boots, which made for a stark contrast with the home's faux frontier decor. He had arrived only the day before, but he was a gracious host, and answered every question I could throw at him in 12 hours of interviews over three days. West, for whom Starlite co wrote and co produced "I Thought About Killing You," among other songs, called the artist "a true original with an unorthodox style" in an email. Erykah Badu, another friend, introduced herself to Starlite backstage at one of his concerts in 2017. "I hadn't felt that inspired or stimulated in a long time," she told me of the show. "It's his freedom in his movements, his singing, his songwriting. Not everyone is in tune with that frequency, but he's on it, and he's sharing it with the rest of us." But Starlite himself never became a marquee name like the ones he channeled onstage, or assisted in the studio. After his first album, "It'll Be Better" (2010), and a tour opening for Drake, he went quiet for years at a time, with just two further albums released over the next decade. At the cabin in Sebastopol, we were supposed to be discussing a triumphant return a new project called "Same Night, Different Dream." It had been planned as the culmination of a busy year, in which Starlite, who has no record label or publicist, had contributed to new albums from West, Bon Iver and Chance the Rapper. Here are more fascinating tales you can't help but read all the way to the end. None Getting Personal With Iman. The supermodel talks about life after David Bowie, their Catskills refuge and the perfume inspired by their love. A Resilient Team for a Broken Nation. With the Taliban in control, what, and whom, is Afghanistan's national soccer team playing for? The Fight of This Old Boxer's Life Was With His Own Family. A battle among Marvin Stein's family over his fortune broke out, and he suddenly found himself powerless to fight for himself. But after two canceled release dates the last on Dec. 1, the day of his non apology apology on Twitter it was unclear when or if the music would come out. Starlite made mint tea and sat down at the kitchen table. He had just a handful of half finished songs where he'd hoped a complete thought would be. For months, he had been haunted by a dreadful feeling that a critical opportunity was escaping him, that they'd been escaping him his entire life. And yet he couldn't figure out what he should do now. When he thought about his career, he didn't feel "unorthodox," or like an inspiration to anyone. He felt lost. "It was harder to do it this way," he said. "And I didn't do the things that I wanted to." At the beginning, Francis Farewell Starlite, born Abe Morre Katz Milder in Oakland (he legally changed his name in 2004), was a dancer. As a 6 year old at summer camp, he discovered his body had an automatic reaction to music, that this reaction was different from other people's, and that seemingly everyone loved to watch. Summer camp begat dance camp, where choreography set to pop hits of the day, like "U Can't Touch This" by M.C. Hammer, taught a young Starlite to temper his wild energy with formal rigor. Francis and the Lights music videos are always a balancing act between the two. But the immoderate 6 year old remains his default setting. In a recording studio, where artists and their cheerleaders often work in a fog of self delusion, Starlite's collaborators said he can act as a kind of human compass. "When he likes something, he goes crazy he'll knock over your keyboards and mics because he's so affected by it," said Benny Blanco, a producer known for his work with Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran. "But as soon as he hears a sound that he doesn't like, he completely shuts down it's impossible for him to listen to bad music." At 8, Starlite was put into guitar and then piano lessons by his mother. He excelled at piano, but he felt cursed, even as a child, by long periods of what he called writer's block, usually accompanied by crippling self doubt. As an adolescent, Starlite was a classroom cutup who played Gollum in a student production of "The Lord of the Rings," performed in a mentor's soul cover band, and wore a tuxedo as the self appointed host of a school talent show. But the highs that he felt onstage could be wiped out by debilitating lows elsewhere. Even small perceived failures could send him into spirals of despair and self consciousness, sometimes lasting for months. "I remember walking around literally cursing myself out loud, just yelling all of these crazy things," Starlite said. "I was convinced I was a loser who couldn't do anything right, and that I had to change schools because everyone knew it." In middle school, a doctor gave Starlite a diagnosis of bipolar disorder (later, another doctor said he had depression) and prescribed psychiatric medication. At summer camp, he threw it out, unused. "I was afraid it was going to make me into something that I wasn't," he said. When he's not feeling depressed, Starlite has long stretches of happiness and relative stability, usually accompanied by surges in musical productivity. During these phases, his zealous pursuit of his creative vision can be intoxicating. "He would have these champagne chandeliers at the shows, and people would be drinking out of coconuts and eating strawberries and chocolate," Schreier said. "It started out with just a few people in his loft, but eventually there were hundreds of kids losing their minds." Aaron Lammer, another childhood friend of Starlite's and a keyboardist and songwriter in the band, calls Starlite's philosophy of absolute devotion to his music "knees to the floor," an expression that later became a song title and the name of Starlite's company (KTTF Records). "It refers to a video of James Brown he used to watch where Brown keeps dropping to the floor, full body weight," Lammer said. "At the end of it, his pants are skinned and he's bleeding from both knees that's Francis in pretty much everything he does." From the outside, the ups and downs of Starlite's career including the six years between his first album and his second, "Farewell, Starlite!" had seemed to fit a familiar script: tortured artist, capricious muse. But learning of his struggles with mental illness suggested a more complicated one. Starlite recalled meeting with a psychiatrist who cited the symptoms of a manic episode ("exaggerated self esteem and grandiosity") to imply that his conviction to emulate the achievements of James Brown and Michael Jackson was a manifestation of his delusion. If it was, then the engine that had powered his career and sustained him through his darkest days was a kind of mirage, no more real than the nagging thoughts that had tormented him as an adolescent. Was it? If so, where did that leave him? "In my worst moments, I feel like I don't know who I am," Starlite said. After years of going on and off medication, he'd recently decided to start again. On my second day in Sebastopol, I took Starlite to see about renting a piano. It was too rainy not to turn on the windshield wipers, but not rainy enough to really need them, turning the world into a smear of greens, browns and yellows. His plan for the next few months, he said, was to practice piano. Also: to get in shape. Both of which seemed easier than writing or acknowledging the necessity of writing a batch of new songs. But Starlite didn't actually feel much like practicing. He was depressed, and preoccupied with regret. Since 2008, he'd declined several opportunities to sign with record labels including XL Records, Kanye West's G.O.O.D. Music label, Drake's October's Very Own imprint and others that many other artists dream of, opting instead to self release his music. This has had definite upsides. Starlite controls his recordings and collects all revenue. But there are downsides, too. If he'd had the resources that a label could have provided, if his songs were on the radio and in soda ads, if his music video budgets were three or five times what they were, could he have been as big as his idols? "How many shows have I played since 2011?" Starlite asked, ruefully. "How many videos have I made? A few, but not nearly as many as I would have wanted. What pains me is that people wanted to help me. They wanted to take me in. And as soon as it was at the door, I ran away again and again and again." His most enduring collaborations have been with other artists, including Bon Iver, Blanco and West, with whom Starlite has grown especially close in recent years. The two first met in 2007, while Starlite was working as a runner at the SoHo restaurant Blue Ribbon Brasserie (he used the office computer to burn a CD of his demo), but they didn't become friendly until 2016, when both worked on the Chance the Rapper song "All We Got." They connected over a digital vocal production technique Starlite had discovered called the harmonizer (or "prismizer"), in which the notes on a keyboard are used to create a real time, five part harmony with the singer's voice. (He later showed it to Bon Iver and Frank Ocean.) Soon after, an invitation to West's ranch in Wyoming arrived. Starlite lived there on and off in 2018 and 2019, helping West, whose every interview he can quote on command, to craft the albums "Ye" and "Jesus Is King." "We just started working immediately," Starlite said. "I couldn't believe it. He was validating everything I'd ever thought about myself." In times when/You don't know who's listening/I'll be your witness. Jim helped raise Starlite after his parents' divorce. Thinking of his friend gave the artist a sense of urgency to finish the project. But it also deepened his guilt over the time he felt he'd wasted. "It's easy for me to get into that state where I feel like I'm already too old, and the touch is gone," he said. Every pivotal decision he'd made in his career replayed in his mind on a punishing loop. What was he thinking when he'd said no to all those record deals? Caius Pawson, a friend and the founder of the record label Young Turks, who'd twice tried to sign Starlite as a scout for XL, suggested the musician's fear of not making it had led him to avoid situations where he could fail. "The closer he got to a partner who could realize his vision, the more he wanted to disappear," he said. Blanco, who'd also tried and failed to forge a deal with Starlite, blamed his contrarian nature: "Francis is the kind of person where if there's two hallways and you tell him to go down one of them, he'll back flip down the other one, do a split at the end, and then look back at you and smile." But the artist himself was working toward a simpler theory: "hubris." As a young man, he had thought that accepting help meant admitting weakness. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
OUT OF THE SHADOWS Reimagining Gay Men's Lives By Walt Odets When the clinical psychologist Walt Odets began working with gay men in San Francisco in the mid 1980s, much of the therapy focused on trauma and shame. There was the reality of growing up gay in America combined with the catastrophe of the AIDS epidemic, which by 1989 had killed at least 90,000 people, including a number of Odets's patients. More than three decades later, the gay men Odets now works with live in a markedly different world, one where they can marry and in which sex doesn't come booby trapped with the fear of death. A gay man, Pete Buttigieg, is widely considered a viable presidential candidate, his sexual orientation seemingly no longer disqualifying (and possibly even an asset). Many in the contemporary L.G.B.T. movement insist that gay men particularly white gay men have relatively little to worry about in 2019. But in "Out of the Shadows," Odets argues that the transformational effects of recent political and judicial victories on the lives of gay men have been greatly exaggerated. "Shame still often lurks unconsciously behind the most successful of gay lives," he writes, a theme that he returns to over and over again in a book that is part polemic, part memoir and part road map for gay people hoping to live fully. Odets is clear that the shame he believes still haunts many gay men isn't their fault. "The stigmatization of gay people has always been a societal problem for which gay people have been blamed," he writes. To add to that, there is the lingering traumatic effects of a "deeply stigmatizing 15 year plague" and what Odets calls our current "late epidemic," which, despite game changing breakthroughs in treatment and prevention, still results in some 40,000 new H.I.V. infections a year. Odets also dissects the psychological impact of families and communities that too often burden young gay men with shame. He rejects the idea that we live in a post homophobic country. "There is not a single gay man alive in America who has not sometimes felt self conscious or fearful about touching a lover in public," he writes, correctly calling this "a human tragedy." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
A moat on Governors Island, a Wall Street intersection and a South Street Seaport Museum gallery are among the places where dance can be found in this year's River to River Festival. Presented by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and opening on Wednesday, June 14, the festival plants existing work in unexpected contexts and commissions new site specific pieces. Even if it weren't free (it is), the lineup would still be enticing. The first week brings remixes of modern classics by Netta Yerushalmy, who will deconstruct Martha Graham's "Night Journey" and Alvin Ailey's "Revelations" at the National Museum of the American Indian. Jodi Melnick unveils an outdoor work at Fort Jay on Governors Island, and Beth Gill's haunting "Catacomb," created last year for the Chocolate Factory Theater, finds a new home in Federal Hall. Also look out for Faye Driscoll and Maria Hassabi. (Through June 25; lmcc.net.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
There's still time this year to meet your New Year's resolution that wellness should be a priority in your life. Several hotels around the United States are offering an array of new incentives to reach your goal with health focused amenities that are included in the cost of your stay. The Dream Downtown, in New York City's Meatpacking District has a new partnership with Melissa Wood Health, a health and wellness platform founded by Melissa Wood Tepperberg, a certified yoga and Pilates instructor and wellness coach, to bring on demand workouts and guided meditation to in room televisions. The five workouts range in length from 20 to 30 minutes and involve Pilates and yoga. There's also a 10 minute meditation session. Ms. Wood Tepperberg has also designed a take home guide for guests that includes tips on how to meditate and incorporate wellness into everyday life. "Wellness doesn't have to take a vacation," she said. "I travel all the time and have learned over the years that you can stick to a healthy routine when you're away from home without too much effort." At the Chatwal, in Midtown Manhattan, also part of the Dream Hotel Group, guests can take part in yoga sessions with Eddie Stern, the co founder of the Brooklyn Yoga Club and Ashtanga New York. Nine 12 minute yoga sessions are available on in room iPads. The property also provides guests with in room mats. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The authorities in Oregon said Monday that they had located the remains of the actor Charles Levin, best known for his one off portrayal of a mohel in "Seinfeld" and a recurring role in the series "Alice" in the 1980s . Mr. Levin, 70, was found on Saturday several hundred feet from his car, which contained the remains of his pug, Boo Bear , in an "incredibly remote" area near Grants Pass in southwestern Oregon, said Warren Hensman, the city's public safety chief. The case is not being treated as a homicide or suicide, he said. The car was off an "almost impassable road" and had been "disabled due to terrain," the Grants Pass Department of Public Safety said in a statement. The actor, who had lived in Grants Pass, had not been heard from since June 28, said his son, Jesse Levin, adding that his father's last phone call was to a family friend in the area. "It was breaking up," he said. "It wasn't very clear what he was saying, but he did seem to sound confused and lost." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Adapted from Michael Crichton's best seller, Steven Spielberg's megahit incubated a franchise that is far from extinct. Since its 1993 release, it has spawned the usual mixed bag of sequels and reboots, including the wildly popular "Jurassic World" in 2015. A further installment, "Jurassic World: Dominion," is expected next year. There have been theme park rides, video games and T. rex toys. Driving all this profit and merch is the basic insight that inspired Spielberg, Crichton and the writer David Koepp: People love dinosaurs. That's kind of funny, since on the evidence of "Jurassic Park," they certainly don't love us, except in the way that some moviegoers love Twizzlers. But the big lizards or proto birds, as Sam Neill's paleontologist would insist aren't the bad guys. They're female, for one thing, and are also simply acting according to the dictates of nature. They didn't ask to be cloned back into existence as theme park attractions. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Rosy cheeked and curvy, Madame de St. Maurice smiles complacently on visitors to the 80WSE Gallery at New York University. The subject of a late 18th century portrait by Joseph Siffred Duplessis, she flaunts multiple chins, her fleshy arms and bosom becomingly veiled in a demi sheer frock. When the original canvas was exhibited, "it was praised for its truthfulness," said Tracy Jenkins, the curatorial director of "Beyond Measure: Fashion and the Plus Size Woman," the new student exhibition showcasing the work. Sure the sitter was chubby. So what? Flash forward a couple of centuries, and Madame would as likely have been skewered, her frame regarded as an aesthetic, and perhaps even a moral, affront to polite society. That assumption is at the heart of this small but affecting exhibition, one that encompasses photographs, mannequins, video and advertising imagery. Organized by graduate students in the costume studies program at N.Y.U.'s Steinhardt School, the show, which runs though Feb. 3, goes some way toward demonstrating that fat shaming, with roots burrowing deep into the 19th century, was, and remains, a freighted issue. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
PIER PAOLO PASOLINI: A FUTURE LIFE, PART 2 at the Metrograph (opens on July 5). Even though the career of this Italian director was cut short by his murder in 1975, Pasolini, also an author, poet and public intellectual, was too prolific and varied to be distilled in a single survey. Part 1 of the Metrograph's retrospective, held in January, focused on his later films. Part 2 captures the tumult of his movies from the 1960s, a period that found the director refracting his earthy style and Marxist worldview through the prisms of Italian neorealism, timeless texts ("Medea," on Saturday and Sunday, casts Maria Callas in a freehanded riff on Euripides) and cryptic symbolism. "Teorema" (on Friday, Saturday and Wednesday), with Terence Stamp as an ethereal outsider who seduces the residents of a bourgeois household from the maid on up, might come the closest to an encapsulation of Pasolini's obsessions. 212 660 0312, metrograph.com Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. 'THE RETURN OF MARTIN GUERRE' at the Quad Cinema (opens on July 5). Clearly modeled on 16th and 17th century paintings, the imagery of this 1983 French film remade as "Sommersby" and as a West End musical shines in a new digital spruce up. Daniel Vigne's movie, from a screenplay that counts Jean Claude Carriere among its writers, elegantly unfolds in flashbacks as a wife (Nathalie Baye) answers questions about her husband. When they married, he was callous and impotent. Upon his apparent return from many years away, including time served in war, he is a better spouse and father (and looks like Gerard Depardieu). Has he changed, or is he an impostor? quadcinema.com SCUM IN THE SUN, PART 1: JON MORITSUGU at Spectacle Theater (through July 31). This micro cinema in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, presents a retrospective of this underground filmmaker, whose punk inflected experimental features have as his biography states "scorched eyeballs worldwide" while also challenging stereotypes. Writing in The New York Times in 2015, Mike Hale credited Moritsugu's television movie "Terminal USA" (on Monday, July 20, July 26 and, in an original rough cut, on July 31) with gleefully trashing "the notion of Asian Americans as a 'model minority.'" Additional features, shorts, and merchandise apparently too scandalous to describe round out the series. spectacletheater.com | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Jean Luc Godard's 1966 film "Masculin Feminin" was intended to be an adaptation of two Guy de Maupassant stories. When representatives for Maupassant's estate saw the finished film, they found it so remote from anything the author wrote that they asked that he not be cited in the credits. I thought of this anecdote while watching "Out of Blue," which, its end credits do tell us, was adapted from Martin Amis's 1997 novel, "Night Train." Written and directed by Carol Morley, the movie retains several of the novel's central characters, but it is so far from the source material otherwise that midway through I asked myself, "Hey, isn't that the name of a character in a Martin Amis novel?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
That was the instruction the Writers Guild of America gave to its 13,000 members on Friday, after talks between the Hollywood writers and their agents broke down hours before a midnight deadline. The sudden end to negotiations upended a way of doing business that had been in place for more than four decades. The fight had been brewing for a year. The Writers Guild of America's Los Angeles and New York branches accused the agents of enriching themselves at their clients' expense and demanded that they agree to a new code of conduct. If the agents believed that the movie and television writers' threat to break the bond between them was a mere negotiating ploy, they learned it was a genuine stance when the talks fizzled out late Friday afternoon. The Association of Talent Agents, the group representing the major agencies, offered concessions in recent days, but their efforts were not enough to keep the two sides at the table. In an email blast sent to its members at the end of the failed talks, the Writers Guild of America said, "There is no settlement." "We know that, together, we are about to enter uncharted waters," the board of the two affiliated unions wrote. "Life that deviates from the current system might be various degrees of disorienting. But it has become clear that a big change is necessary." Writers and agents were once so close. TV's new golden age has changed that. The unions instructed members to sign a form letter that will allow them to fire their agents individually. "The Guild will forward all letters en masse to the appropriate agencies in a few days," the unions said. The Association of Talent Agents said in a statement released at the end of talks that the planned mass firing "will hurt all artists, delivering an especially painful blow to midlevel and emerging writers." The statement continued: "The W.G.A. leadership today declared a pathway for compromise doesn't exist. Agencies have been committed to reaching an agreement with the W.G.A., but, despite our best efforts, today's outcome was driven by the Guild's predetermined course for chaos." The TV writers and agents had been operating under a franchise agreement that took effect in 1976. That agreement was set to expire at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, when the Writers Guild of America would technically break ties with every agency that had not signed the new code of conduct. The four major agencies William Morris Endeavor, Creative Artists Agency, United Talent Agency and ICM Partners had been steadfast in shunning the writers' attempt to make serious changes to the structure that has long been in place. The fight made for an unusual labor battle. The writers' unions, which went on strike in 2007 and nearly did so again two years ago, have traditionally had disputes with their bosses at the big studios. This time, they have directed their fury with the people who have served as their advocates and friends. During a programming boom often referred to as Peak TV 495 shows were available in the United States last year, thanks in part to the rise of streaming television writers have claimed that their pay is stagnant or going down. The writers blame what they perceive as insufficient compensation on the agencies, accusing them of corrupt business practices. Two specific practices have gnawed at television writers. One is the agents' decades old habit of packaging a roster of talent from their pool of clients for a given project. In return, the agencies waive the usual 10 percent commission fee paid to them by individual clients and collect large sums, called packaging fees, from the studios. The writers claim that these deals allow the agents to effectively pocket money that should be theirs. The writers' second complaint concerns how three of the major agencies William Morris Endeavor, Creative Artists and the United Talent have ventured into the production business with the creation of affiliated companies that produce and own content. This development, the writers say, can mean that agents sit across the table from executives who are essentially their colleagues in what the unions call a conflict of interest. The agencies have called the writers' claims preposterous, arguing that their services are needed more than ever in a changing media environment in which Netflix, Amazon and Apple are on the rise. The writers have been adamant that the agencies must end the practices they find objectionable, which the code of conduct would accomplish. Last month, 7,882 members of the Writers Guild of America West and the Writers Guild of America East voted in favor of the new code of conduct, with just 392 members voting nay. A look inside Amazon. An examination by The New York Times into how the pandemic unfolded inside Amazon's only fulfillment center in New York City, known as JFK8, found that the Covid crisis exposed the power and peril of Amazon's employment system. Here are our major takeaways: Employee churn is high. The company conducted a hiring surge in 2020, signing up 350,000 workers in three months offering a minimum wage of 15 an hour and good benefits. But even before the pandemic, Amazon was losing about 3 percent of its hourly associates each week meaning its turnover was roughly 150 percent a year. Buggy systems caused awful mistakes. Amazon's disability and leave system was a source of frustration and panic. Workers who had applied for leaves were penalized for missing work, triggering job abandonment notices and then terminations. Strict monitoring has created a culture of fear. The company tracks workers' every movement inside its warehouses. Employees who work too slowly, or are idle for too long, risk being fired. The system was designed to identify impediments for workers. Though such firings are rare, some executives worry that the metrics are creating an anxious, negative environment. There is rising concern over racial inequity. The retail giant is largely powered by employees of color. According to internal records from 2019, more than 60 percent of associates at JFK8 are Black or Latino. The records show Black associates at the warehouse were almost 50 percent more likely to be fired than their white peers. Read more: The Amazon That Customers Don't See. The rupture between the writers and their agents will introduce disorder to Hollywood. The industry is approaching the so called staffing season, when the broadcast networks assemble their fall lineups and hire writers to bang out telescripts for sitcoms and police procedurals. Agents are the usual go betweens for the writers and studios, taking a strong hand in matching writers rooms with the appropriate writers. Union bosses have in recent days told writers that they would be able to apply for jobs through a web portal set up by the Writers Guild of America, or by empowering their managers or lawyers to make deals on their behalf. The agents have warned the writers against allowing managers or lawyers to do that kind of work. On Friday morning, Latham Watkins, a law firm representing the talent agents, sent a letter to the union, saying it was "unlawful" in California and New York for managers and lawyers to take on the role of agents. The note also suggested that litigation could soon be filed in both directions. There were hints of the coming impasse on Thursday evening after the Association of Talent Agents went public with its counterproposals to the writers. Some people in Hollywood interpreted the association's unusual step of revealing what had been happening during closed door negotiations as a sign that the two sides were nowhere near a deal. With their counterproposals on Thursday, the agencies suggested that they wanted to continue with packaging and running their own affiliated production programs, but they were willing to make their practices more transparent. For shows with packaging arrangements, the agencies said they would share "a percentage" of their back end profits with writers. More specifically, the agents said 80 percent of that share would be funneled toward writers who did not participate in profits on the series. The remaining 20 percent would go toward initiatives meant to improve diversity in writers' rooms. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
GRACE AND FRANKIE on Netflix. It's awards season, which means rare onstage appearances from reclusive Hollywood legends. These riveting cameos mostly consist of three lines from a teleprompter and the opening of an envelope. But two of those legends, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, are still working up a storm the fourth season of their sitcom "Grace and Frankie" arrives on Friday. The show follows the unlikely friendship that blossoms after the pair's husbands leave them for each other. This season deals with the aches and pains of aging, as Grace (Fonda) and Frankie (Tomlin) care for the next generation, while their ex husbands (Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston) try an open marriage. And Lisa Kudrow joins the all star cast as Grace's manicurist. MOM AND DAD on iTunes. Nicolas Cage has mesmerized audiences with his unhinged alter egos in plenty of movies, so why not go for it one more time? In "Mom and Dad," he and Selma Blair play a totally normal couple with two children in Middle American suburbia. But their town is soon infected by a virus that compels parents to kill their children. The pair soon wield saws and other sharp objects in a series of manic attempts to off their offspring. TROLLS: THE BEAT GOES ON on Netflix. The year 2017 brought many surprises, among them the phrase "Oscar nominated movie 'Trolls.'" The exuberant animated movie, which brings those colorfully tufted dolls to life, was a huge hit at the box office and earned an Oscar nod for best original song for Justin Timberlake's "Can't Stop the Feeling!" Now, the story continues with this Netflix series, created by a mostly different creative team. Amanda Leighton and Skylar Astin take over vocal duties from Anna Kendrick and Mr. Timberlake. VICE NEWS TONIGHT 7:30 p.m. on HBO. In August, Vice News provided a detailed and unencumbered look behind the scenes at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. The program will attempt to pull off a similar feat with a much wider scope on "America First," which airs Friday as President Trump wraps up his first year in office. The episode sends the correspondents Michael Moynihan and Isobel Yeung across the country to talk to people who voted for Mr. Trump and examine how his campaign promises have manifested. AMERICAN MASTERS LORRAINE HANSBERRY: SIGHTED EYES/FEELING HEART 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Ms. Hansberry was just 27 when she wrote "A Raisin in the Sun" and just 34 when she died of cancer in 1965. This melancholy documentary delves into her short life, which she devoted to art and activism, with interviews with Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee (both original Broadway cast members of "Raisin"), Harry Belafonte, and more. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
In Focus Studios of Coral Gables, Fla., hosts parties for newly married couples to view their wedding photos, musical soundtrack included. The company shows 900 to 1,400 photos at the viewing parties, which average about 9,500. Weddings can come and go so fast they might sometimes seem like one big blur to the newly married couple, their guests and families. With so much going, too, it's often easy to miss some of the day's more noteworthy happenings. That's why couples are opting for viewing parties. "It was almost as exciting as the wedding itself because you're watching it with all the people who were with you the first time," said Kevin Turchin, 29, a financial analyst from Miami. "There's all this energy in the room and everyone is crying." Mr. Turchin and his new wife, Daniella Turchin, a hospitality publicist and also 29, got to relive their February 2017 wedding at the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami through a 20 minute video shown six months later at a festive gathering. They enhanced the viewing experience by re enacting moments from their big event. Mrs. Turchin donned the dress she wore at the reception, while Mr. Turchin and their 25 guests raised a celebratory glass of champagne. Her brother made the toast (again) and her niece performed the dance she had created for the occasion. "I wanted to fully experience every feeling from our wedding and not let those moments die," Mrs. Turchin said. Mr. Turchin admitted he "wasn't as excited as Daniella until we pressed play." While some viewing parties are held at home, others are taking place in theaters or screening rooms. Peter Gubernat, an owner of Red Olive, a film production company in Chicago, has been shooting movie like wedding videos for the last three years. To capture the day, he employs the help of several drones, two to four compact steady cams and automated gimbals, an assistant, cinematographer, and of course, a director. "We saw the market needed more high end videos so we create a cinematic experience," Mr. Gubernat said. "I thought they should be seen that way. Eight months ago I contacted the Soho House in Chicago and set up premieres for couples to watch with 20 of their friends. It's a very luxurious service." Luxurious and expensive. Mr. Gubernat charges 12,000 for a five to eight minute film; the screening gathering is complimentary. Yet the price doesn't seem to have deterred people. Fourteen couples are scheduled for video services this year, he said, and six more are booked so far for 2019. Viewing guests are treated to popcorn, movie theater candy, wine and sparkling water. The first 30 to 40 minutes are spent mingling. "Because we haven't seen anyone since the wedding, we thank them for coming, tell them how much it meant for us to be there, and talk about the video for a few moments," Mr. Gubernat said. "Then we play the film." When the movie ends, people gather themselves most have cried during the experience and the video is replayed. "The first time people are in awe," he said. "The second round they get to see everything they missed, all the details they didn't catch before." Sarah and Aaron Konieczny didn't know what to expect when they drove from their home in Indiana to the Soho House in April for their viewing party. They married last September in downtown Chicago. "It was extraordinary," said Ms. Konieczny, 29, a law clerk. "When you see the video on this huge screen, you're pulled back in time and seeing the wedding from a different perspective. It let's you see your friends', siblings' and parents' reactions in the room, but also on the video, which we didn't get to see on our wedding day because it all goes by so fast." Photos, too, are getting the big reveal treatment. Manolo Doreste, the owner of In Focus Studios in Coral Gables, Fla., offers clients and 15 guests the chance to see their wedding projected onto a wall. The couple's favorite snacks, along with strawberries and champagne, are served. Then everyone is escorted to the viewing room, where 900 to 1,400 photos are shown, paired with music, usually opening with the song from the couple's first dance. Average cost: 9,500, with the viewing event included. Parties are given post work hours during the week. Mr. Doreste, who shoots about 25 weddings a year, said that offering a viewing experience improves the level of service he provides while allowing clients to "relive their wedding day and disconnect from the world." "No one has missed their viewing," he added. "We've even had two couples fly in from different states just to experience seeing their photos like this." For Shavest and Lee Brotherston, who married at the Epic Hotel in downtown Miami last October, reexperiencing their wedding on a massive wall was both spectacular and a bit overwhelming. "I got to see everything I missed, everything I didn't know happened," said Mrs. Brotherston, 33, a revenue analyst for Carnival Cruise Lines, "like the grooms getting ready, or a tender moment with my husband and his mother. No one knew it was captured on camera. My husband and our family watched the entire wedding happen all over." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
's "The Lucky Ones" offers a blunt, fresh and unsentimental look inside Colombia's last 30 bloody years. She assembles a diverse cast of characters and through them we see it all: the ravages of war; the social climbing of drug traffickers; the complicated relationships between the well intentioned rich and the poor who serve them; the abducted who spend years as captives of a peasant Marxist movement that uses children as soldiers; the feeling of displacement and deracination among young Colombians who grow up in the United States and are now bicultural and Latino, and are still obsessed by and conflicted about their country of birth. Colombia is fertile land these days if you're searching for writing material think of Netflix's "Narcos." "The Lucky Ones" is presented as a novel, but it feels more like a collection of interconnected stories. A few are set in New York and in Cali (Colombia's third largest city, where the author grew up), but others take place in the part of Colombia that is mostly jungle, in the canopied camps of rogue armed groups. Pachico takes us on an enjoyable and freaky joy ride. We travel from the monkey bars in the yard of an expensive private school to the dire playgrounds of displaced children living in the city's slums. We go from a drug lord's Xanadu to streets right out of "Mad Max"; from 20 day marches in the jungle with daily activities like Spiderweb Inspection and Toucan Watching to scoring cocaine in a parking lot in Queens with a spoiled calenita a young woman from Cali. Pachico's characters are all seductive, but what really drew me in is her ability to describe emotions. The book opens inside the privileged house of Stephanie Lansky, saying goodbye to her parents. She can't wait to spend the weekend on her own. By Page 5, the teenager's idea of the perfect plan turns into a horror film when a stranger rings the doorbell. She knows that he could be there to yank her away. Pachico conveys the fear that Colombian children grow up with she made that pit in my stomach open up again. Next, she takes us deep into the jungle and inside the head of a kidnapped American teacher who, to control impending madness, resorts to teaching "Hamlet" to a class of twigs and rocks. Then, it's a love story between two outsiders in Stephanie's elite school, a scholarship boy and the chubby daughter of a drug kingpin who keeps a lion in his backyard. We then endure a chapter in which descendants of the girl's coke addicted pet rabbits start speaking to one another. Give in to them at the end you'll come out of this ride with a better understanding of Colombia's surreal state of affairs. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
A roundup of motoring news from the web: After a 10 year run, the last Lamborghini Gallardo rolled off the automaker's assembly line in Sant'Agata Bolognese, Italy. Lamborghini says the angular Gallardo was its most prolific model. (Motor Authority) A Mazda CX 5 crossover crashed Nov. 10 at a dealership in Japan when its automatic braking feature failed. The police said both the driver and passenger in the car were injured in the crash. (Bloomberg) George Blankenship, the executive responsible for marketing and retail expansion for Tesla Motors, has left the company. He told The San Jose Mercury News that he wanted to spend more time with his family. (San Jose Mercury News) According to the Humphrey Bogart Estate, Bonhams sold the 1940 Buick convertible used in the final scene of "Casablanca" for 380,000. The auction also included memorabilia, posters, screenplay manuscripts and promotional photographs; a statuette from "The Maltese Falcon" sold for 3.5 million, the estate said. (Twitter) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
LONDON Bobby was not in the lobby. It was the week before previews began of a much anticipated revival of "Company," the 1970 musical that cemented Stephen Sondheim's reputation as a composer, and the first floor of the Gielgud Theater here was abustle with crew members, costumes and scenery including the bed on which the protagonist, Bobby, seduces a flight attendant, after which they sing the hypnotic "Barcelona." But Bobby himself, always somewhat recessive, was now vanished entirely. The ambivalent bachelor ringed by married couples haranguing him to settle down has been replaced by a female Bobbie, played by Rosalie Craig and catapulted into the 21st century, in a radical makeover that has given this show, long beloved critically, the sudden sheen of potential commerciality. Women, after all, buy the vast majority of theater tickets, and unmarried ones have become a larger and increasingly vocal portion of the population. "I feel a unique challenge to represent that demographic," said Ms. Craig, who is married. "And I want to do it carefully and with respect, so nobody feels patronized, or that Bobbie's a victim or anything like that." The new "Company" is the latest in a wave of gender conscious reconsiderations of well established musicals, "My Fair Lady" and "Oklahoma!" among them, with the advantage that Mr. Sondheim was around to offer his blessing, and his help. And why shouldn't it prove popular with modern audiences, like so many previous tableaus of urban singletons? "It has lots of elements of Bridget Jones to it," Ms. Elliott said, sitting on a love seat "side by side," as the song goes, with her producing partner, Chris Harper, during a break in technical rehearsals. "It has lots of elements of 'Sex and the City.' And it has lots of elements of 'Friends' to it." A versatile talent fresh from staging a highly lauded revival of "Angels in America" on both sides of the Atlantic, Ms. Elliott might be the only person in show business to draw a direct line from "Friends," the blockbuster 1990s television series recently rediscovered by teenagers on Netflix, to the libretto of "Company," a seminal Me Decade text by George Furth. The two works share "really kind of smart sassy characters who are very dry witted," she said. "In a quite New York way." Drier than a sauvignon blanc, more New York than the Yankees, "Company" has, since its initial run, assumed an important if slightly veiled berth in the Sondheim canon. A consummate ensemble piece lacking a movie adaptation though Furth, who died in 2008, wrote a two page treatment for one that Ms. Elliott said had helped inform her interpretation it is not a household name like "Into the Woods" or "Sweeney Todd." The title, a somewhat dated synonym for guests, neatly conjures the insularity of a theatrical troupe. Encapsulating the seesawing ennui and excitement of city life, numbers such as "The Ladies Who Lunch," which was explicitly tailored for Stritch, and "Another Hundred People" have become cabaret classics. The show is cherished in the West End, where, under Hal Prince's direction, it played at Her Majesty's Theater for 344 performances in 1972. It was revived by Sam Mendes at the Donmar Warehouse in 1995, with an African American Bobby, Adrian Lester. The latter production captivated Mr. Harper, a single father who first thought of a female Bobby after repeatedly listening to the character's signature ballad, "Being Alive," after the premature birth of his twins via a surrogate. The notion made immediate sense to Ms. Elliott. "The character is a people pleaser," she said. "The character wants to help and provide for all of her friends and try to make everything work for them all the time, to the negation of herself, which feels like kind of a feminine trait." The advent of egg freezing notwithstanding, the double standard still persists. "I know a lot of women and I remember being in that situation myself who have a very nice career, have friends, have partners but their biological clock is ticking," Ms. Elliott said. "Everybody starts to think when they're heading toward being 40: 'Mmm, that's a shame they're not with anyone.'" With gestures like making one of the husbands, David, a stay at home father, she is coaxing out feminist elements always latent in "Company" most powerfully in Joanne's exhortation to anesthetized housewives: "Everybody rise!" Ms. Elliott considered making Bobbie bisexual, puzzling over how to handle the character's offhanded proposal to Amy, a friend whose cold feet at the altar provoke the virtuosically jittery patter song "(Not) Getting Married Today." "If Bobbie's a woman and Amy's a woman, she's proposing to a woman, which we thought theoretically would be fine why not?" Ms. Elliott said. "But we tried that in the workshop, and it was just one of those 'Whooo I'm not sure I fully believe this' moments.'" After much thought and experimentation, Amy became Jamie, a gay man played by Jonathan Bailey, in a conceit that recalls another popular hit, the 1997 movie "My Best Friend's Wedding." "And that just felt so very truthful," Mr. Harper said. "'Cause I'm a gay man and I've got so many amazing beautiful female friends, and we've both said to each other 'Look, if we don't find that perfect partner by the time we're whatever, let's you and I get married.'" The conversion of Amy to Jamie has also enabled the new "Company" to integrate a gay story line that many long suspected was subtextual, if not central; why else, it was wondered back in the day, would Bobby be facing down his 35th birthday still a bachelor? The show's creators long denied this possibility, and though Mr. Sondheim explored the concept of an all male cast with the director John Tiffany in 2013, a banner year for marriage equality, the project was ultimately vetoed. This was different. "It's a little blush making, but I admire Marianne so much that if she said she'd wanted to turn him into a dog, I'd probably go ahead and do it," Mr. Sondheim said in a promotional video for the production last year, vowing "to try and get into the female psyche" during their collaboration. "Getting into a female psyche is a whole other matter, particularly a contemporary woman." (Mr. Sondheim declined to be interviewed for this article, saying he was busy at work on his new musical.) "One of the great strokes of genius is that these women who are complaining about Bobby find this chirpy optimistic style of singing to basically say that Bobby is a jerk," Joel Fram, Ms. Elliott's music supervisor and a onetime Yale Whiffenpoof, said. "And so when we were exploring this number we realized that three men pretending to be the Andrews Sisters really wasn't the answer, so I started looking at the male groups from the '40s and the '50s: The Modernaires, The Hi Lo's, The Williams Brothers, The Four Aces." Technological developments have also affected the update of "Company," arguably the first significant musical of the Information Age. The opening bars of the original cast recording are overlaid with a telephone's busy signal, a sound unintelligible to digital natives who have the beep of Call Waiting, if they make conversation over a receiver at all. Ms. Elliott has chosen to find instead in that insistent beat the biological clock, which conveniently echoes in "Tick Tock," formerly the coital bedroom instrumental of a committed playboy. (A crying baby is another new audio fillip.) The lyric "Look I'll call you in the morning or my service will explain," a reference to the now antique live answering service in "Another Hundred People," now ends "or I'll text you to explain." Smartphones and laptops make fleeting appearances, as indispensable instruments of current mating habits. (Indeed, what are Tinder and Bumble if not "another hundred people," available in a single swipe?) "It's about being exposed to so much choice that could be a bad thing, or perhaps in this case it could also be a good thing," said Mr. Fram, to whom the layered, staccato opening number, during which the friends propose various activities, seems "as if we are looking at all 31 days of Bobbie's iCal all at once." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Things got particularly messy for the N.F.L. in Week 12, when the Denver Broncos were forced to play a game against the Saints without a single established quarterback and the coronavirus ravaged Baltimore Ravens needed to have their game postponed by six days, all the way to Wednesday. All 16 games managed to be played, but things were tenuous enough to make the rest of the season seem far more uncertain than it did a few weeks ago. Perhaps Baltimore's struggles to field a roster will lead to tougher N.F.L. protocols to control the spread of the virus, but expect the league's schedule going forward to be remarkably fluid, with changes possible at any point before game days. With that in mind, here is a look at Week 13, with all picks made against the spread. And while you wait for the action, and for any schedule changes, get lost in the possibilities for the rest of the season with The Upshot's playoff simulator. To contain Tennessee, Cleveland will need to slow down running back Derrick Henry while making sure not to give quarterback Ryan Tannehill any time with which to work, as he is more than capable of stretching the field when the opportunity presents itself. The first part of that challenge might not be as difficult as it sounds, considering the Browns have the N.F.L.'s ninth ranked run defense. But even with some recent improvement in the Browns' secondary, it is hard to believe that Cleveland could simultaneously stack the box for Henry and adequately cover Tennessee's receivers. Tennessee has its own problems on defense, and the Titans will undoubtedly struggle to contain running backs Nick Chubb and Kareem Hunt. But Browns quarterback Baker Mayfield has a tendency to be his own worst enemy, and all it would take is a turnover or two to let this game get way out of hand. Pick: Titans 5.5 A few weeks ago, there was a tie at the top of the N.F.C. West, but after both the Rams (7 4) and the Cardinals (6 5) lost last week, the division lead belongs exclusively to Seattle. With an expanded playoff field, both of these teams look as if they will qualify for the postseason anyway, but division bragging rights are a real thing, and that will add some spice to this game. Arizona has lost three of its past four games, and there has been some speculation that the league's defenses are figuring out quarterback Kyler Murray. If Murray wants to quiet that talk, a win against Aaron Donald and the Rams would help. Pick: Cardinals 3 In a fairly ugly game at home, the Patriots (5 6) got 84 yards passing (and two interceptions) from Cam Newton and just 47 yards rushing from Damien Harris, but thanks to some tremendous work from the team's defense, and to the powerful leg of Nick Folk, New England was able to beat Arizona on Sunday. That gave the Patriots three wins in their past four games, but extending run that to four in five will be tough if the offense has a similarly quiet day, which will not work against the Chargers (3 8). Pick: Chargers None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. After struggling through a quarterback less loss to New Orleans last week, the Broncos (4 7) will have Drew Lock, Blake Bortles and Brett Rypien all available for this game. Before they get too excited, the Broncos will need to remember that a full quarterback room did not make much of a dent the last time they played the Chiefs (10 1): Kansas City walked away with a 43 16 win in Denver on Oct. 25. If the Chiefs really want to win by 27 points again, they probably will. But expecting even a 14 point margin of victory from a team that has won by an average of just 3 points in its last three games seems a bit unrealistic. Pick: Broncos 14 The Giants (4 7) have won three consecutive games, pulling into a tie with Washington at the top of the N.F.C. East. The Giants' defense has been improving on a weekly basis a process that started even before the win streak and the offense was reducing its mistakes and clearly building some momentum under quarterback Daniel Jones. Much of the optimism over those improvements fell away last weekend when Jones injured a hamstring. The team managed a few field goals without him, but there is no question that a switch to Colt McCoy has made the already remote chance of an upset of the Seahawks on the road (8 3) seem almost absurd. Seattle fans lovingly mock the Seahawks' tendency to keep games far closer than they need to be eight of the team's 11 games this season have been decided by a single score but without Jones, the Giants will be hard pressed to score. Pick: Seahawks 10 Carson Wentz got a little lucky on a Hail Mary near the end of Monday's loss to Seattle: The ball was swatted toward the ground in the end zone, but tight end Richard Rodgers, who wasn't even the targeted receiver, made a great play to scoop it up for a touchdown. That score, along with a 2 point conversion, gave the Eagles (3 7 1) a respectable 6 point loss. Keeping things that close against the Packers (8 3) will be a much more difficult task. Pick: Packers 8.5 With defensive tackle DeForest Buckner on the Covid 19 reserve list last weekend, the Colts (7 4) looked like a different team. Tennessee took full advantage, with running back Derrick Henry racking up three first half touchdowns in a blowout win. Now the Colts will try to rebound against the Texans (4 7) and that shouldn't be all that difficult with the expected return of Buckner and the suspension of Houston wide receiver Will Fuller V, who tested positive for a performance enhancing drug. Pick: Colts 3 The Vikings (5 6) have improved drastically after a horrible start to the season, winning four of their last five games while looking much improved on defense not all that impressive considering how bad they were in their first six games. The Jaguars (1 10) have lost ten straight, with an atrocious defense, and they plan to give the journeyman quarterback Mike Glennon a second straight start. Double digit point spreads are always risky, but this game certainly has the makings of a blowout. Also, it would be wise to make sure Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins, running back Dalvin Cook and wide receivers Adam Thielen and Justin Jefferson are active in your fantasy football lineups. Pick: Vikings 10 The Raiders (6 5) didn't just lose to Atlanta last weekend, they were humiliated. The game started slowly, seemed to go off the rails after a roughing the kicker penalty extended a drive that resulted in a touchdown and got continually worse until time ran out. Though it's possible that Las Vegas has been a bit overestimated in recent weeks, this loss shouldn't erase all the optimism the Raiders built before their loss to the Falcons. But given that running back Josh Jacobs might miss this game with an ankle injury, the Jets (0 11) could at least cover the spread. Pick: Jets 8 After missing last weekend's game against the Jets, Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa practiced on Wednesday, so despite fears that he would miss multiple starts, he might play for the Dolphins (7 4). Getting playing time for Tagovailoa is a big part of Miami's plans for the future, but the truth is that Ryan Fitzpatrick should give the team just as much a chance at winning this game. Cincinnati (2 8 1) was dealt a crushing blow two weeks ago with the season ending injury to the rookie quarterback Joe Burrow, and while keeping the score close against the Giants last weekend was a welcome surprise, the prospect of their doing something similar this weekend seems far fetched. They can probably keep the game tighter than the 11.5 points that oddsmakers have predicted, but that doesn't mean the Bengals have a chance to win. Pick: Bengals 11.5 The Bears (5 6) have lost five straight since their 5 1 start to the season, and the Lions (4 7), after picking up their fourth loss in five games, fired their coach and their general manager last weekend. Even the team that wins probably won't walk away with heads held too high, but Detroit's interim coach, Darrell Bevell, has reportedly been pushing for the Lions to pick up their pace, which would be a welcome change from the team's sluggish approach. Pick: Lions 3 The 49ers (5 6) got running back Raheem Mostert and cornerback Richard Sherman back from injuries last weekend and proceeded to give the Rams their first loss at SoFi Stadium. This matchup is even more difficult because San Francisco must get used to its temporary home at the Cardinals' State Farm Stadium while hosting the Bills (8 3), a solid playoff contender that on a good day is extremely effective on both sides of the ball. Buffalo is favored for a reason, but the 49ers seemed to enjoy the role of spoiler last week, and they will undoubtedly be looking for a repeat. Pick: 49ers 2.5 The Steelers (11 0) are the first team to get this far into a season without a loss since the 2015 Carolina Panthers, and they have had more than their share of hiccups along the way: Coronavirus outbreaks among both the Titans and the Ravens forced Pittsburgh to repeatedly juggle its schedule and play on odd amounts of rest. At some point, the various changes and the fact that the Steelers will not get a genuine bye week this season could catch up to them, and that may have been part of the reason for Pittsburgh's somewhat sluggish 19 14 win over Baltimore at home on Wednesday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Nevertheless, I saw all nine films nominated for best picture for the 2014 Academy Awards, and can recall offhand a quotation from only "Captain Phillips" ("I'm the captain now"). True, I've seen each film just once, but I also don't expect to see many of them again, and that has nothing to do with their quality. If "Her," which had me at hello, were made a decade or two ago, I may have bought it on DVD or VHS, and thus would have watched it several times over the years and ended up committing various lines to memory. If you can't handle the truth of the death of quotable lines, and the more meaningful correspondence to the dwindling number of high quality films that reach a critical mass and help define the culture, know that we have mainly ourselves to blame for this nice mess for ignoring the movies that would spawn them. We're big. It's how we make and watch sophisticated adult pictures that got small. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Kiran and Jyoti Matharoo in the Consort Bar at Toronto's Omni King Edward Hotel.Credit...Tara Walton for The New York Times Jyoti and Kiran Matharoo sought fame on social media by flaunting what nature and men gave them. Then they got locked up abroad. After years of romances with a series of fabulously wealthy Nigerian boyfriends, the flamboyant Canadian sisters Jyoti and Kiran Matharoo needed somewhere to store the pricey spoils of their dating careers. So they converted a bedroom in their Toronto home into a large walk in closet that resembles a luxury boutique. An entire wall is lined with more than 70 pairs of designer high heeled shoes. Glass wardrobes display dozens of handbags and purses from brands like Hermes, Celine, Gucci and Saint Laurent. Equally pricey clothing drapes tightly from hangers and fills trunks stacked up to the ceiling. There are separate drawers for belts, rings, earrings, bracelets, silver necklaces and gold ones. They own a collection of rose gold and diamond encrusted watches easily worth several cars. And the white Mercedes Benz sedan parked outside? It's their third paid for by a wealthy paramour, they said. Did they even pay for any of this stuff? "Not really, no," said Jyoti, 34. Her sister responded similarly. "The only time I go shopping is when someone gives me their credit card," said Kiran, 32. He flew both sisters on private jets to France and Greece and eventually to Nigeria, a destination they did not disclose to their strict parents. Upon landing, a convoy of Mercedes Benz G Class S.U.V.s drove them to his home, a heavily marbled mansion with a pool and a litany of servants. Kiran lazed away poolside while Jyoti accompanied her lover to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to play polo with a prince. "It all happened so fast," Jyoti said. "There wasn't even a moment for us to be like, 'Is this really happening?'" Within a few months, she said, he bought her a condominium in Toronto and began giving her a monthly 10,000 stipend so she would not have to work. This affair was not to be a forever love, though. Over the years, the sisters globe trotted with a succession of paramours. In particular, both sisters traveled frequently to Nigeria and said that dating wealthy men there was easy. "Once they find out you have a sister, it's over," Kiran said. "We don't find them. They find us." When the dark side of the fantasy arrived this was in Lagos, in December 2016 it was as sudden as it was severe. A few days after the Matharoos had returned to Nigeria, they were awakened by a loud knocking at their hotel room door. A group of men burst in and told the women they had to come to the police station. Some of the men, who turned out to be plainclothes police officers, took photos of the sisters in their bathrobes. These soon appeared online. The sisters asked to see a warrant and a badge but got no response. "I told them I'm going to call my embassy, but when I started dialing, one guy grabbed the phone out of my hand," Jyoti said. "They said if we don't get dressed, they were going to carry us out just like that." "We thought we were being kidnapped," Kiran said. At the police station, the officers kept asking if the sisters owned a gossip website that had been spreading scandalous rumors about Nigerian elites and about the sisters themselves. This site was among the blogs that had described them as prostitutes. "We couldn't help but laugh, because the whole thing was so ridiculous," Jyoti said. From there, the sisters said they were driven in a van to another police station, this one belonging to Nigeria's Special Anti Robbery Squad, a branch of the police notorious for corruption and using torture to extract confessions, according to a 2016 report by Amnesty International. They were taken to a dimly lit office where an officer, seated behind a wooden desk, demanded they write statements admitting that they owned the gossip website. "I felt this was our only chance," Jyoti said. Standing against a wall in their room as the man's assistant filmed, Jyoti read a confession off her phone, admitting that the pair ran the website and apologizing to Mr. Otedola and his family. The man never returned with their passports. The video was posted online the next day and swiftly attracted international media coverage, destroying the sisters' carefully crafted reputations as fashion obsessed ingenues. "We got everything we wanted by asking nicely," Kiran said, dismissing the confession video. "Why would we ruin that?" Kiran said Mr. Otedola was furious that she had spurned his entreaties to rekindle their relationship, and used them as scapegoats to deflect attention from the website's embarrassing rumors. Mr. Otedola did not respond to interview requests. About a week after they posted bail, the sisters flew to Toronto with emergency travel documents that Canadian officials issued after they determined the women faced no travel restrictions and that "there was a significant risk to their physical safety," an immigration official said in an email. The sisters said Canadian diplomats walked them to the plane. Going public had devastating consequences. A few months later, in September 2017, American customs officials based at Toronto Pearson International Airport told Jyoti she could not travel to the United States because there was an outstanding warrant for her arrest. A week later, Kiran flew to Venice, Italy, to go furniture shopping. She was waiting for her luggage at the airport when Italian customs officers locked her in a room with no food, water or explanation. "I was crying and crying," she said. Eight hours later, officials told her that she was under provisional arrest. "They said, 'There's a flag on your passport from Interpol,'" she said. She spent the next 40 days in jail, awaiting extradition to Nigeria, according to Italian court documents. European Union laws prohibit extradition to countries with poor human rights records, so it's likely she shouldn't have been held at all . But Nigeria never filed the extradition paperwork, and Kiran was allowed to fly home to Canada . (Italy's interior ministry did not respond to requests for comment.) Philip Adebowale, the Nigerian police official who detained the sisters in Lagos and issued the warrant that resulted in Kiran's arrest, said that he had not colluded with Mr. Otedola and had not demanded bribes . Asked why Nigeria failed to request Kiran's extradition, he first said the Italian police "allowed these girls to dupe them," and then blamed bureaucratic errors. "If I sent them my boys, we would have cleared everything up," Mr. Adebowale said. Her flight to Dubai was sleepless, even though she had packed all her Interpol paperwork. But she landed, and no one was there to arrest her. "It's like the notice never existed," she said. What began as a business trip swiftly grew into a romance, with a stay on a private island and fashion brainstorming sessions over candlelight dinners. One evening, Jyoti wore a tight orange dress she had asked Kiran a talented seamstress to make for the trip. Impressed, the man, whom the sisters declined to identify to protect his privacy, sent the sisters to immediately find manufacturers in Los Angeles. There, the Matharoos rekindled their love affairs with private jets and pools in Beverly Hills. Jyoti modeled on her Instagram in a neon bikini and other outfits her sister made. Direct messages started pouring into her Instagram with requests for the clothes. "I told Kiran, 'You need to sit your ass down and start sewing,'" Jyoti said. They are now in the midst of setting up their fashion line, SPCTRMstudio. "I'm so relieved we can get back to our normal life," Jyoti said. But they haven't, quite. Recently Jyoti arrived at the Toronto airport with a plane ticket to Houston, only to find herself interrogated by United States customs officials. "They were grilling me, like, 'So, are you a prostitute? When was the last time you had a boyfriend,'" she said. "I said, 'I didn't know being single was a crime.' I was so mad. Then I started crying." Don't be greedy. "When he asks what kind of car you want, don't ask for a Rolls Royce," Jyoti said. Second, observe proper "jetiquette" by dressing conservatively on his Cessna. "You don't want to look like some guy hired a hooker for a weekend," Kiran said. And, obviously, when he hands you thousands of dollars for a luxury shopping spree, bring him back some change. But if their brushes with incarceration have taught the sisters any new lessons, it's that they shouldn't bother. Men and their money are not worth the trouble. "There's always going to be a guy saying, 'Let me spoil you,' who wants to fly us somewhere," Jyoti said. "For once we want to just focus on ourselves." Emmanuel Akinwotu contributed reporting from Abuja, Nigeria, and Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Anthony Chisholm, right, and Harry Lennix in the August Wilson play "Radio Golf" at the Cort Theater on Broadway in 2007. Mr. Chisholm was nominated for a Tony for his performance. Anthony Chisholm, an actor who was among the foremost interpreters of August Wilson, appearing in dozens of productions of that playwright's works, both on Broadway and in leading regional theaters, died on Friday at his home in Montclair, N.J. He was 77. Jeremy Katz, of the talent management agency the Katz Company, announced the death. The cause was not specified. Mr. Chisholm, in a career that stretched across a half century, was known to television audiences from his recurring role as the inmate Burr Redding in the final three seasons of the HBO prison drama "Oz," which ended in 2003. But most of his work was on the stage, and he drew particular acclaim for his appearances in the plays that constitute Mr. Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle, 10 works chronicling the African American experience during the 20th century. Four of those appearances were on Broadway, in "Two Trains Running" (1992), "Gem of the Ocean" (2004), "Radio Golf" (2007) and "Jitney" (2017). The "Radio Golf" effort he played Elder Joseph Barlow earned him a Tony Award nomination for outstanding featured actor in a play. "The enjoyably raspy Mr. Chisholm is an old hand at playing a now classic Wilson archetype," Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times when Mr. Chisholm played Barlow in the play's premiere at Yale Repertory Theater in 2005, "the crazy like a soothsayer street person." A favorite Wilson role was Fielding, an alcoholic cabdriver in "Jitney," which Mr. Chisholm played in a number of productions, culminating in his final Broadway credit. The play was first performed in 1982, but in the mid 1990s Mr. Wilson revisited it, beefing up the Fielding role, inspired in part by Mr. Chisholm. The two had become good friends while working on "Two Trains Running," thanks to a shared habit. "You'd get a five minute break during every hour of rehearsal," Mr. Chisholm told The Times in 2017, "and the smokers would run out each time. I was smoking two packs a day, and August was smoking five packs a day. And so we started a connection away from the play." Among other things, Mr. Chisholm told Mr. Wilson about his family, and in the revised "Jitney," Fielding had a deeper back story about once having been a tailor. Mr. Chisholm knew it quite well. "When August wrote the play, that whole aspect about him once being a tailor wasn't in there," he told Newsday in 2000, when he was playing the role Off Broadway. " We got into a conversation about families, and I told him about my father, who was a red cap on the railroad but had great tailoring skills and started making clothes for traveling band members. August said, 'I like that; can I use it?' One day he handed me a wonderful, brand new scene, and I was so happy; it rounded out my character. Fielding wasn't just an alcoholic; he'd had a whole 'nother life." As for how he rendered the Fielding character so compellingly, Mr. Chisholm confided that the secret was in the bottle Fielding nips from during the play. "Granules of instant coffee with a slash of soy sauce mixed with water and a heaping teaspoon of cayenne," he explained to Newsday. "When I drink it, the pepper burns my throat and chest like alcohol would and opens up my emotional center." Anthony Victor Chisholm was born on April 9, 1943, in Cleveland. His father, Victor, was a tailor, and his mother, Edith (Amilia) Chisholm, was a homemaker and gift wrapper who, he told The Star Ledger newspaper in 2007, used to make him memorize and recite poetry. Mr. Chisholm grew up in Cleveland and was drafted into the Army in 1964, serving as a platoon leader in Vietnam. Leaving the service several years later, he returned to Cleveland. His description of his entry into the acting life made it seem effortless. "After I was discharged from Vietnam," he told Newsday, "I got a role in a musical, 'The Boys From Syracuse,' and then a small part in the movie 'Uptight,' where I met a lot of actors. I packed my car and moved to New York. I've been working ever since." He had studied architecture for a year at what is now Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, but what helped propel his acting career was enrolling in a master class under the director Lloyd Richards at the Negro Ensemble Company in New York in 1968. In the 1980s, he drew upon his war experience for roles in several productions by the Vietnam Veterans Ensemble Theater Company, including a well received staging of the collaborative work "Tracers," which played at the Public Theater in Manhattan in 1985 and toured internationally. In the 2017 interview with The Times, Mr. Chisholm recalled his first encounter with a Wilson play. "I saw 'Fences' and connected with it pretty quickly because I grew up in Cleveland, which is not far from Pittsburgh," he said. "His old timers talk pretty much the same as guys I'd grown up around." He first met Mr. Wilson when he auditioned for "Two Trains Running" in 1990. He didn't get the part, of Wolf, a numbers runner, for the world premiere that year at Yale Repertory Company (Samuel L. Jackson did), but when the production moved on to Boston and the West Coast, Mr. Chisholm was called in to take over the role. In 1992, with Mr. Richards directing, it became his Broadway debut. Mr. Chisholm's marriage to Valerie Moore in 1972 ended in divorce, as did his marriage in 1979 to Gloria Nixon. He is survived by a daughter from his first marriage, Che Chisholm; a son from his second marriage, Anthony Alexander Chisholm; and two grandchildren. Mr. Chisholm knew that with the explosion of cable television offerings, there were more opportunities for Black actors on TV than on the stage. In a 2000 interview with The Times, he lamented that reality. "We as actors want to act," he said. "But first of all, I'm an African American. And putting all politics aside, what we need is more producers, more writers and, as a people, more cohesiveness. We as Black people have got to support the theater." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. When President Trump fired James Comey in 2017, the F.B.I. was spooked enough that it opened an investigation to determine if the president was working on behalf of the Russian government, The New York Times reported on Friday. Late night hosts have been wondering aloud about the same question for years. Stephen Colbert, for one, said on Monday that he doesn't know what all the fuss was about this weekend. He introduced a new mock game show evaluating the president, called "Evil or Stupid?" "The New York Times revealed that after Donald Trump fired James Comey in 2017, the F.B.I. opened an inquiry into whether Trump was secretly working on behalf of Russia. I think that's ridiculous: There's nothing secret about it." STEPHEN COLBERT | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Over 300 million people visited the national parks system in 2015 and many left with indelible memories. In anticipation of the park system turning 100 in August, we asked five writers three novelists, a memoirist and a poet to recount times when a national park left a mark on their lives. The first impressions lay just beyond language: bands of color, so many and varied that color no longer seemed to mean anything, and dusty as if left on the bottom shelf. Everyone came, each eye like a stack of dimes, paying out 10 cents for that postcard, and that one, and that one. I realized immediately: It was a vagina. Of course the Grand Canyon was a vagina. It was deep, with a wiggle of silver at the very bottom. This explained why my sister Mary, 3, was trying to get back into it. My mother had her in a rainbow harness and was pulling her by a rainbow leash; Mary strained at the end of it like a small dog at a Pride parade. Simultaneously Mom snapped her Nikkormat, swiveling her eyes in the noon light, exclaiming that she needed to capture the sunset, in tones that implied she was going to hold it hostage until it surrendered information. I was 9, and stood windswept at the very edge, trying to make my emotions visible. This would have been easier if there weren't so many relatives around aunts, uncles, cousins, even my grandmother, who was possessed of a curiosity so creaturely that she probably should have been on a leash as well. We had all come in a caravan, trading passengers as it pleased us. The day before, I had driven through pine forests with my most sensual aunt, and the whole time she had played an audiobook of "The Valley of Horses," the thrilling sequel to "Clan of the Cave Bear." So far, the main character had invented calendars, dogs, the concept of men getting women pregnant, and something called the Node of Pleasure. "Dondalah," the woman had moaned to a well endowed Cro Magnon, her valley thundering with hooves of ecstasy. Delighted, I had released the theatrical sigh of a cushioned toilet seat, to assure my aunt I was dreaming the unsuspecting dreams of childhood, and settled in. Mary giggled again in her harness, millimeters from death. I stared down where the camera pointed, one hand in my neon fanny pack, idly tousling the hair of my best troll doll. I had thought the canyon would be a roadside attraction largest ball of string, greatest wheel of cheese. I wasn't prepared for it to be the world's greatest absence of world. That night we camped in flimsy tents, like windbreakers on hangers. At one point a drunken man loudly crashed into one of them. We all pretended it was a Sasquatch, though privately I wondered if it had been my favorite uncle, a trickster mechanic who was 90 percent mustache and got up to his best schemes after dark. The next morning, we found my best troll up a tree. Her tuft of cotton candy hair had been styled with pinesap and pine needles. "The wood god took her!" my uncle told me. "The lord of the tufted tree squirrels did it!" He had an imagination. In the corner of his eye was a perpetual twinkle, the star of having carried something off. It fit wonderfully into the sky of the West. I examined the troll. My uncle had ruined it and made it more interesting; he had done it so I would have something to remember indeed, I remember almost nothing else from that day. Years later, we found out he had a secret family, another lover and child in another state, an entire second life beating bright on the other side of ours. We loved him before and we did not think much of him after. He had created such a gap in reality that we simply removed him from the scenery no slow erosion; rather, the quick snip of a face out of a snapshot. But that morning, the morning I remember, we drove away from the enormous not there, thinking of its colors, and how each layer of color was a whole unbroken era. Thinking, was that the abyss they were always talking about? If so, then that was fine. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
MUMBAI, India Microcredit is losing its halo in many developing countries. Microcredit was once extolled by world leaders like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair as a powerful tool that could help eliminate poverty, through loans as small as 50 to cowherds, basket weavers and other poor people for starting or expanding businesses. But now microloans have prompted political hostility in Bangladesh, India, Nicaragua and other developing countries. In December, the prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheik Hasina Wazed, who had championed microloans alongside President Clinton at talks in Washington in 1997, turned her back on them. She said microlenders were "sucking blood from the poor in the name of poverty alleviation," and she ordered an investigation into Grameen Bank, which had pioneered microcredit and, with its founder, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Here in India, until recently home to the world's fastest growing microcredit businesses, lending has slowed sharply since the state with the most microloans adopted a strict law restricting lending. In Nicaragua, Pakistan and Bolivia, activists and politicians have urged borrowers not to repay their loans. The hostility toward microfinance is a sharp reversal from the praise and good will that politicians, social workers and bankers showered on the sector in the last decade. Philanthropists and investors poured billions of dollars into nonprofit and profit making microlenders, who were considered vital players in achieving the United Nations' ambitious Millennium Development Goals for 2015 that world leaders set in 2000. One of the goals was to reduce by half the number of people in extreme poverty. The attention lavished on microcredit helped the sector reach more than 91 million customers, most of them women, with loans totaling more than 70 billion by the end of 2009. India and Bangladesh together account for half of all borrowers. But as with other trumpeted development initiatives that have promised to lift hundreds of millions from poverty, microcredit has struggled to turn rhetoric into tangible success. Done right, these loans have shown promise in allowing some borrowers to build sustainable livelihoods. But it has also become clear that the rapid growth of microcredit in India some lending firms were growing at 60 percent to 100 percent a year has made the loans much less effective. Most borrowers do not appear to be climbing out of poverty, and a sizable minority is getting trapped in a spiral of debt, according to studies and analysts. "Credit is both the source of possibilities and it's a bond," said David Roodman, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a research organization in Washington. "Credit is often operating at this knife's edge, and that gets forgotten." Even as the results for borrowers have been mixed, some lenders have minted profits that might make Wall Street bankers envious. For instance, investors in India's largest microcredit firm, SKS Microfinance, sold shares last year for as much as 95 times what they paid for them a few years earlier. Meanwhile, politicians in developing nations, some of whom had long resented microlenders as competitors for the hearts and minds of the poor, have taken to depicting lenders as profiteering at the expense of borrowers. Nicaragua's president, Daniel Ortega, for example, supported "movimiento no pago," or the no pay movement, which was started in 2008 by farmers after some borrowers could not pay their debts. Partly as a result of that campaign, a judge recently ordered the liquidation of one of the country's leading microlenders, Banco del Exito, or Success Bank. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. "These crises happen when the microfinance sector gets saturated, when it grows too fast, and the mechanisms for controlling overindebtedness is not very well developed," said Elisabeth Rhyne, a senior official at Accion International, a organization in Boston that invests in microlenders. "On the political side, politicians or political actors take advantage of an opportunity. When they see grievances, they go, 'Wow, we can make some hay with this.' " In Bangladesh, Ms. Hasina appears to have become embittered with Grameen after its founder, Muhammad Yunus, who shared the Nobel, announced in 2007 that he would start a political party. At that time, the country was ruled by a caretaker government appointed by the military. Though Mr. Yunus later gave up on the idea, analysts say Ms. Hasina and Mr. Yunus have not made amends. Ms. Hasina's recent comments about microcredit were prompted by a Norwegian documentary that accused Grameen of improperly transferring to an affiliate 100 million that Norway had donated to it more than a decade ago. Ms. Hasina said Grameen, 3.4 percent of which is owned by the government, might have transferred the money to avoid taxes. The bank, which has denied that accusation, reversed the transfer after Norwegian officials objected to it. Norway recently issued a statement clearing Grameen of wrongdoing. The prime minister's press secretary did not return calls seeking comment. In India, leaders in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, which accounts for about a third of the country's microloans, have accused lenders of impoverishing customers. Stories proliferated in the local news media about women who had amassed debts of 1,000 or more as loan officers cajoled them into borrowing more than they could afford and then browbeat them to repay. Many had used the money to pay for televisions or health care or to soften the blow of failed crops, rather than as seed money for businesses. Microcredit firms in India were also accused of siphoning borrowers from government run "self help groups" women's organizations that can borrow small amounts at subsidized interest rates from government owned banks. The movement against microcredit was started by opposition politicians, who have encouraged borrowers not to repay their loans and have accused senior leaders of the ruling Congress Party of being in cahoots with lenders. The Congress led state government made the cause its own and passed a tough new law in December to cap interest rates and regulate collections. The crisis has had ripples across the nation. Banks, the primary source of money for microlenders, have turned off the tap because they are worried about the industry's future. As a result, microlenders have slowed or stopped lending nationwide. Grameen Financial Services, a microlender in Bangalore that is not related to Grameen Bank, has idled 600 new employees it hired just a few months earlier with plans to expand into western and central India. The firm does not lend in Andhra Pradesh. "This is frustrating," said Suresh K. Krishna, managing director of Grameen Financial. "This is not what we set out for. The whole objective of floating this was to support entrepreneurs and support people in the rural areas and people below the poverty line." Industry leaders say they hope the issues will be resolved soon. The federal government and the Reserve Bank of India, the country's central bank, are working on new federal regulations to oversee microcredit, said Alok Prasad, chief executive of the Microfinance Institutions Network. Still, some industry officials acknowledge that the sector needs to reform itself to overcome political opposition and live up to its promise. They say organizations that now offer only loans need to diversify into microsavings accounts, which many specialists assert are much better than loans at easing poverty. The industry, they say, also needs to speed up efforts to build a credit bureau that would reduce overlending. And organizations need to measure their success not just by growth and profits, but by how fast their customers are getting out of poverty, experts say. "We at microfinance have a job to do to make it easier for politicians to support us," said Alex Counts, the chief executive of the Grameen Foundation, a nonprofit in Washington that is not part of Grameen Bank. "Rather than make claims that get out in front of the research, we need to impose on ourselves the discipline of transparency about poverty reduction." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low wage workers who do not have insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to help, according to an analysis of census data by The New York Times. Because they live in states largely controlled by Republicans that have declined to participate in a vast expansion of Medicaid, the medical insurance program for the poor, they are among the eight million Americans who are impoverished, uninsured and ineligible for help. The federal government will pay for the expansion through 2016 and no less than 90 percent of costs in later years. Those excluded will be stranded without insurance, stuck between people with slightly higher incomes who will qualify for federal subsidies on the new health exchanges that went live this week, and those who are poor enough to qualify for Medicaid in its current form, which has income ceilings as low as 11 a day in some states. People shopping for insurance on the health exchanges are already discovering this bitter twist. "How can somebody in poverty not be eligible for subsidies?" an unemployed health care worker in Virginia asked through tears. The woman, who identified herself only as Robin L. because she does not want potential employers to know she is down on her luck, thought she had run into a computer problem when she went online Tuesday and learned she would not qualify. At 55, she has high blood pressure, and she had been waiting for the law to take effect so she could get coverage. Before she lost her job and her house and had to move in with her brother in Virginia, she lived in Maryland, a state that is expanding Medicaid. "Would I go back there?" she asked. "It might involve me living in my car. I don't know. I might consider it." The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are home to about half of the country's population, but about 68 percent of poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers. About 60 percent of the country's uninsured working poor are in those states. Among those excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses' aides. "The irony is that these states that are rejecting Medicaid expansion many of them Southern are the very places where the concentration of poverty and lack of health insurance are the most acute," said Dr. H. Jack Geiger, a founder of the community health center model. "It is their populations that have the highest burden of illness and costs to the entire health care system." The disproportionate impact on poor blacks introduces the prickly issue of race into the already politically charged atmosphere around the health care law. Race was rarely, if ever, mentioned in the state level debates about the Medicaid expansion. But the issue courses just below the surface, civil rights leaders say, pointing to the pattern of exclusion. Every state in the Deep South, with the exception of Arkansas, has rejected the expansion. Opponents of the expansion say they are against it on exclusively economic grounds, and that the demographics of the South with its large share of poor blacks make it easy to say race is an issue when it is not. In Mississippi, Republican leaders note that a large share of people in the state are on Medicaid already, and that, with an expansion, about a third of the state would have been insured through the program. Even supporters of the health law say that eventually covering 10 percent of that cost would have been onerous for a predominantly rural state with a modest tax base. "Any additional cost in Medicaid is going to be too much," said State Senator Chris McDaniel, a Republican, who opposes expansion. The law was written to require all Americans to have health coverage. For lower and middle income earners, there are subsidies on the new health exchanges to help them afford insurance. An expanded Medicaid program was intended to cover the poorest. In all, about 30 million uninsured Americans were to have become eligible for financial help. But the Supreme Court's ruling on the health care law last year, while upholding it, allowed states to choose whether to expand Medicaid. Those that opted not to leave about eight million uninsured people who live in poverty ( 19,530 for a family of three) without any assistance at all. Poor people excluded from the Medicaid expansion will not be subject to fines for lacking coverage. In all, about 14 million eligible Americans are uninsured and living in poverty, the Times analysis found. Mississippi has the largest percentage of poor and uninsured people in the country 13 percent. Willie Charles Carter, an unemployed 53 year old whose most recent job was as a maintenance worker at a public school, has had problems with his leg since surgery last year. His income is below Mississippi's ceiling for Medicaid which is about 3,000 a year but he has no dependent children, so he does not qualify. And his income is too low to make him eligible for subsidies on the federal health exchange. "You got to be almost dead before you can get Medicaid in Mississippi," he said. He does not know what he will do when the clinic where he goes for medical care, the Good Samaritan Health Center in Greenville, closes next month because of lack of funding. "I'm scared all the time," he said. "I just walk around here with faith in God to take care of me." The states that did not expand Medicaid have less generous safety nets: For adults with children, the median income limit for Medicaid is just under half of the federal poverty level or about 5,600 a year for an individual while in states that are expanding, it is above the poverty line, or about 12,200, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. There is little or no coverage of childless adults in the states not expanding, Kaiser said. The New York Times analysis excluded immigrants in the country illegally and those foreign born residents who would not be eligible for benefits under Medicaid expansion. It included people who are uninsured even though they qualify for Medicaid in its current form. Blacks are disproportionately affected, largely because more of them are poor and living in Southern states. In all, 6 out of 10 blacks live in the states not expanding Medicaid. In Mississippi, 56 percent of all poor and uninsured adults are black, though they account for just 38 percent of the population. Dr. Aaron Shirley, a physician who has worked for better health care for blacks in Mississippi, said that the history of segregation and violence against blacks still informs the way people see one another, particularly in the South, making some whites reluctant to support programs that they believe benefit blacks. That is compounded by the country's rapidly changing demographics, Dr. Geiger said, in which minorities will eventually become a majority, a pattern that has produced a profound cultural unease, particularly when it has collided with economic insecurity. Dr. Shirley said: "If you look at the history of Mississippi, politicians have used race to oppose minimum wage, Head Start, all these social programs. It's a tactic that appeals to people who would rather suffer themselves than see a black person benefit." Opponents of the expansion bristled at the suggestion that race had anything to do with their position. State Senator Giles Ward of Mississippi, a Republican, called the idea that race was a factor "preposterous," and said that with the demographics of the South large shares of poor people and, in particular, poor blacks "you can argue pretty much any way you want." The decision not to expand Medicaid will also hit the working poor. Claretha Briscoe earns just under 11,000 a year making fried chicken and other fast food at a convenience store in Hollandale, Miss., too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to get subsidies on the new health exchange. She had a heart attack in 2002 that a local hospital treated as part of its charity care program. "I skip months on my blood pressure pills," said Ms. Briscoe, 48, who visited the Good Samaritan Health Center last week because she was having chest pains. "I buy them when I can afford them." About half of poor and uninsured Hispanics live in states that are expanding Medicaid. But Texas, which has a large Hispanic population, rejected the expansion. Gladys Arbila, a housekeeper in Houston who earns 17,000 a year and supports two children, is under the poverty line and therefore not eligible for new subsidies. But she makes too much to qualify for Medicaid under the state's rules. She recently spent 36 hours waiting in the emergency room for a searing pain in her back. "We came to this country, and we are legal and we work really hard," said Ms. Arbila, 45, who immigrated to the United States 12 years ago, and whose son is a soldier in Afghanistan. "Why we don't have the same opportunities as the others?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes, the renowned Spanish writer and author of the enduringly popular "Don Quixote" In commemoration, a new trip to Spain from the travel company Zicasso traces his footsteps from Madrid to La Mancha. The eight day Miguel de Cervantes 400 Year Tribute Tour begins in Madrid; a Cervantes expert provides background on the author and his works and takes travelers to the convent where he is buried. Visitors also travel to the writer's hometown, the Unesco World Heritage City of Alcala de Henares; visit Esquivias, the village where he married and wrote much of the second half of "Don Quixote"; see a live performance of the book at a 17th century open air theater in the town of Almagro; and take a cooking class in dishes popular when he was alive such as pipirrana, a Spanish potato salad. Other activities include a tapas tour in Madrid, visits to wineries and a tasting of Spanish brandies. Prices from 4,336 a person, which includes accommodations, seven private tours with a Cervantes guide, all transfers, some meals and numerous activities. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
There is still a lot we don't know about the killing, early this month, of Michael Forest Reinoehl. Reinoehl, a self described antifa supporter, was a suspect in the shooting of Aaron J. Danielson, a backer of the far right group Patriot Prayer, during an August street confrontation in Portland, Ore. Prosecutors charged him with murder. Reinoehl, speaking to Vice News, said he acted in self defense. There will be no trial to sort out what happened, because the federal marshals sent to arrest him gunned him down. Federal authorities claimed that Reinoehl had a gun. The Olympian newspaper quoted two witnesses who said Reinoehl fired at the police, but one later said his remarks had been misconstrued and he wasn't sure if Reinoehl had a weapon. A third witness said that Reinoehl was carrying only a cellphone, and that the marshals started shooting at him without announcing themselves. Even if Reinoehl's killing was justified, in a country where the rule of law held, the government would have treated it as regrettable. For Donald Trump's administration, Reinoehl's death was cause for celebration. Calling Reinoehl a "dangerous fugitive, admitted antifa member, and suspected murderer," Attorney General William P. Barr said in a statement, "The streets of our cities are safer with this violent agitator removed." Trump, in a Fox News interview on Saturday, said of the killing, "That's the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this." (Perhaps needless to say, law enforcement is not permitted to kill suspects in "retribution.") Trump continued the theme at his Nevada rally Sunday night, saying to cheers, "We sent in the U.S. marshals, it was taken care of in 15 minutes." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Of all the damning details in the Justice Department indictment accusing Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, and Rick Gates, a campaign adviser, of money laundering and tax fraud, the one that seems to have caught the imagination of many is the approximately 1.3 million Mr. Manafort spent during two shopping sprees in New York and Beverly Hills. The indictment does not specify where he spent the money the establishments are identified only as "Vendor E: Men's Clothing Store in New York" and "Vendor H: Clothing Store in Beverly Hills, California" nor what he bought, though The New York Times reported in September that during a raid of Mr. Manafort's home over the summer, F.B.I. officers took many photographs of his "expensive suits." Which may be why it has got everyone in a tizzy. "Manafort's clothing tab: 1.3 million" read the Politico headline. "Fancy Suits at Center of Ex Trump Campaign Chief Charges," The Associated Press cried. Clothes may maketh the man. But they can also bringeth him down. Indeed, at least when it comes to politics, fancy clothes or even just an unseemly focus on clothes have been a stand in for (at best) bad character and (at worst) corruption for years. Sarah Palin came under fire in 2008 when it was revealed that the Republican National Committee spent 150,000 on clothes for her and her family after she was chosen as the Republican vice presidential candidate, belying her "hockey Mom" image. And then, of course, there was Imelda Marcos and her shoes. Which is the issue: Such consumption patterns are more associated with a plutocracy (and those who identify with it) than with a democracy. In that context, to spend enormous sums on appearance is not just indicative of a skewed value system, it's morally reprehensible. It runs against a puritan streak that goes deep in American mythology. It's the worst kind of gross excess and self indulgence. It represents a focus on self to the detriment of the welfare of others, as well as some sort of embarrassing display of emotional neediness. Because here's the other thing: In the indictment, Mr. Manafort is listed as having spent 849,215 at the New York store and 520,440 in California, of which 128,280 was paid in one go in 2010. It's really difficult to spend that much money on men's wear. What was in his shopping cart? Roger J. Stone Jr., a former Trump campaign consultant with his own style blog, told C Span in 2016 that Mr. Manafort favored "custom Italian suits." As a result, speculation has centered on brands such as Brioni and Kiton, favorites of James Bond as well as captains of industry, and where a made to measure suit can cost from 7,000 to more than 10,000. But according to The A.P., Mr. Manafort's New York tailor of choice was Eugene Venanzi, a store (now closed) off Fifth Avenue where suits cost 7,500. The A.P. also reported that Mr. Manafort's Rodeo Drive emporium of choice was House of Bijan, a.k.a. "the most expensive store in the world," where ties run 1,000 apiece. But do the math. Even if Mr. Manafort bought 30 ties, that's only 30,000. Add 50 suits, even at Kiton prices, and you are at just over half a million. Say for the sake of argument and spending money you threw in some Berluti crocodile loafers ( 3,380), a Rolex Daytona (there was some speculation on a watch blog that Mr. Manafort had one; prices can be in the 25,000 range), and an Hermes briefcase ( 8,850). You still wouldn't come close to the final tally. It's hard to make it all add up. Not only literally, but also because after all that, Mr. Manafort did not even look particularly elegant, as numerous commentators on social media have been quick to point out. Which makes it all seem even more disgracefully wasteful. Whatever he thought he was buying, it clearly wasn't worth it. In any sense of the words. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
DES MOINES Like many people in Iowa, Brianne Pfannenstiel has had campaign volunteers knocking on her front door. Unlike her neighbors, she must turn them away. That is because Ms. Pfannenstiel, 31, has a unique job: chief politics reporter at The Des Moines Register, the biggest newspaper in a state whose first in the nation nominating contests give it an outsize role in picking presidents. She was once the self described "weird kid" who, growing up in Lawrence, Kan., always wanted to be a journalist. Now, along with covering the candidates, Ms. Pfannenstiel has been selected as a moderator of Tuesday's Democratic presidential debate, a prime time production hosted by CNN and The Register. The first such forum of the election year will give millions of viewers a last long look at the contenders before the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3. In a state filled with handshaking candidates, their minions and local supporters, Ms. Pfannenstiel finds herself in the thick of the campaign even when she's not reporting. "The beauty of this is, people are coming into your neighborhoods and talking with people in your community," she said. "And the downside is, they're coming into your neighborhoods and talking with people in your community. It's really hard to turn it off." Despite an increasingly nationalized media landscape and the decline of local journalism, The Register and its top politics reporter are likely to continue playing a pivotal role in making sense of the presidential field as long as Iowa remains a proving ground. "The whole presidential process starts there, the candidates tend to spend the most amount of time there, and the access that particular reporter can have is pretty remarkable," said John McCormick, a Register alumnus who covers politics for The Wall Street Journal. An obsessive chronicler of all things caucuses, The Register grabs more than a dozen reporters from other beats and assigns them to front runners and also rans, a channeling of newsroom resources that begins long before Iowans gather to make their preferences known. As its politics editor, Rachel Stassen Berger, put it on Twitter: "It's been 2020 in Iowa for more than a year." The candidates reciprocate The Register's interest. Even as reporters from larger news organizations fly in for a look, the paper serves as an important conduit to the voters who count most early in the campaign season. "Sometimes the D.C. press focuses more on the horse race," said David Kochel, a longtime Republican operative who was a strategist for Jeb Bush last time around. "At local outlets The Des Moines Register, specifically it's usually easy to get policy and issues covered in a way that is away from the typical political process angles." The Register's endorsement will receive national coverage when it appears in the coming weeks. And its Iowa Poll, done in collaboration with CNN and Mediacom for the 2020 campaign, is the talk of the political cognoscenti whenever a new edition drops, as one did on Friday. "They winnow the field," Carol Hunter, the paper's executive editor, said of the local citizens, "and I think they feel like they're playing a role in the destiny of the nation. "Our job is to serve Iowans," she added. "If it's that important to Iowa, it's got to be that important to The Des Moines Register." Register reporters have gone on to cover politics at national outlets including The Associated Press, The Washington Post and The New York Times. Jeff Zeleny, the senior White House correspondent at CNN and a former Times reporter, covered the 2000 caucuses for The Register. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. "The people you met stayed on as sources," Mr. Zeleny said. And The Register's coverage is read all around the country not just on the internet, where its site is available through a special subscription geared to politics junkies, but in the print editions of other Gannett papers, a category that doubled to more than 260 dailies across 47 states in November when Gannett merged with the parent company of GateHouse Media. Such consolidation, along with the industry trends prompting it, has caused worry at Gannett publications such as The Register, which has its roots in a paper that was started in an abandoned log cabin in 1849. The daily, which was sold to Gannett for 165 million in 1985, has won more than a dozen Pulitzer Prizes in its history. The newsroom head count of 65 represents a decline, part of what the Pew Research Center has identified as a 25 percent cut in newsroom employment from 2008 to 2018. Print circulation, the traditional profit center for newspapers, has also shrunk. The Register's weekday circulation, which peaked at roughly 250,000 in the 1960s, has fallen below 60,000, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. "Despite its reduced circumstances and circulation, they devote a huge piece of their news hole and staff resources to this," said David Yepsen, who spent 34 years at The Register, working as its chief political reporter, political editor and columnist. "It's still The Register." The day before the caucuses will mark Ms. Pfannenstiel's fifth anniversary at the paper. Previously, she covered the statehouse, whose golden dome is easily spotted from The Register's downtown headquarters across the Des Moines River. She started at The Kansas City Star, where, months after her graduation from the University of Kansas, she covered the midterm election of 2010. In 2015, her first year at The Register, she was assigned to cover Scott Walker, then the Wisconsin governor. After he dropped out of the presidential race, her main quarry was Donald J. Trump. She was not credentialed for his events: The Trump campaign blacklisted The Register after it published an editorial criticizing him for focusing more "on promoting himself, and his brand, than in addressing the problems facing the nation" and urging him to drop out. Ms. Pfannenstiel said she hadn't expected to ascend quickly to the chief politics role, a job held by Jennifer Jacobs through the 2016 caucuses. But then Ms. Jacobs departed for Bloomberg, and her successor, Jason Noble, left to work in politics. (He is now Senator Elizabeth Warren's Iowa communications director.) "This opened up a lot faster than I anticipated," she said. "This is probably true of a lot of women a lot of people. You kind of have impostor syndrome and say: 'Am I ready for this? There's this long history, and can I live up to that?'" Ms. Pfannenstiel's coverage has ranged from political scuttlebutt, like last winter's list of the "50 Most Wanted" Democratic operatives, to wonky analysis of how new rules governing the caucuses could anoint multiple "winners." She has also produced illuminating features, like a look back at a 1979 strike that helped explain the political trajectory of Clinton County, one of 31 Iowa counties that voted twice for Barack Obama before swinging to Mr. Trump. "I'm super impressed with her," Mr. Zeleny said. "I've seen her with candidates she's no nonsense." In less than a month, after Iowans gather to hash it out, the race will move on to New Hampshire and beyond, and Ms. Pfannenstiel, like her predecessors, will have to accustom herself to a sudden quiet. She has contemplated how calm the newsroom would become during the quadrennial stampede should Iowa lose its first in the nation status in deference to critics who have bemoaned the premium given to a largely white and rural state with a byzantine system for awarding its delegates. "It does feel that, culturally, the Democratic Party is moving more toward diversity and inclusion, and that the caucuses may not ultimately be able to accommodate that vision," she said. "Democrats here won't go on the record talking about how concerned they are, but I think there is a real concern that this is the hardest fight they've had." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Rooms start at 229 Canadian dollars, or about 173. The 240 million makeover of Vancouver's Old Stock Exchange Building took three years, added 20 glass floors with aluminum louvers to create a pinstripe effect, and was originally slated to be entirely office space. After the building reopened in November 2017, winning the American Architecture Prize for Heritage Architecture, the developers decided to convert the original 11 floors of the neo Gothic, brick structure into a luxury hotel. Less than a year later, the 202 room EXchange Hotel, owned by Executive Hotels Resorts , opened, melding history with high tech advances. The LEED Platinum property nods to its pecuniary past with a mix of gray marble and brushed brass accents and includes the latest green technology. Carpeting is made out of recycled materials like plastic drink bottles, the heating and cooling come from a highly energy efficient, ceiling hung radiant panels and a nonpotable water system uses storm and ground water for the toilets. Smack in the heart of the central business district, the EXchange (the first two letters are capitalized in a nod to the old stock exchange) is surrounded by high end shops like Cartier and the Holt Renfrew department store and is just blocks to the waterfront, Canada Place and Gastown. Stanley Park and the Vancouver Aquarium is a 15 minute walk and popular Granville Island is an easy cab ride away. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Some scientists spend their lives trying to pinpoint the shape of tiny proteins in the human body. Proteins are the microscopic mechanisms that drive the behavior of viruses, bacteria, the human body and all living things. They begin as strings of chemical compounds, before twisting and folding into three dimensional shapes that define what they can do and what they cannot. For biologists, identifying the precise shape of a protein often requires months, years or even decades of experimentation. It requires skill, intelligence and more than a little elbow grease. Sometimes they never succeed. Now, an artificial intelligence lab in London has built a computer system that can do the job in a few hours perhaps even a few minutes. DeepMind, a lab owned by the same parent company as Google, said on Monday that its system, called AlphaFold, had solved what is known as "the protein folding problem." Given the string of amino acids that make up a protein, the system can rapidly and reliably predict its three dimensional shape. This long sought breakthrough could accelerate the ability to understand diseases, develop new medicines and unlock mysteries of the human body. Computer scientists have struggled to build such a system for more than 50 years. For the last 25, they have measured and compared their efforts through a global competition called the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction, or C.A.S.P. Until now, no contestant had even come close to solving the problem. DeepMind solved the problem with a wide range of proteins, reaching an accuracy level that rivaled physical experiments. Many scientists had assumed that moment was still years, if not decades, away. "I always hoped I would live to see this day," said John Moult, a professor at the University of Maryland who helped create C.A.S.P. in 1994 and continues to oversee the biennial contest. "But it wasn't always obvious I was going to make it." As part of this year's C.A.S.P., DeepMind's technology was reviewed by Dr. Moult and other researchers who oversee the contest. If DeepMind's methods can be refined, he and other researchers said, they could speed the development of new drugs as well as efforts to apply existing medications to new viruses and diseases. The breakthrough arrives too late to make a significant impact on the coronavirus. But researchers believe DeepMind's methods could accelerate the response to future pandemics. Some believe it could also help scientists gain a better understanding of genetic diseases along the lines of Alzheimer's or cystic fibrosis. Still, experts cautioned that this technology would affect only a small part of the long process by which scientists identify new medicines and analyze disease. It was also unclear when or how DeepMind would share its technology with other researchers. DeepMind is one of the key players in a sweeping change that has spread across academia, the tech industry and the medical community over the past 10 years. Thanks to an artificial intelligence technology called a neural network, machines can now learn to perform many tasks that were once beyond their reach and sometimes beyond the reach of humans. A neural network is a mathematical system loosely modeled on the network of neurons in the human brain. It learns skills by analyzing vast amounts of data. By pinpointing patterns in thousands of cat photos, for instance, it can learn to recognize a cat. This is the technology that recognizes faces in the photos you post to Facebook, identifies the commands you bark into your smartphone and translates one language into another on Skype and other services. DeepMind is using this technology to predict the shape of proteins. By analyzing thousands of known proteins and their physical shapes, a neural network can learn to predict the shapes of others. In 2018, using this method, DeepMind entered the C.A.S.P. contest for the first time and its system outperformed all other competitors, signaling a significant shift. But its team of biologists, physicists and computer scientists, led by a researcher named John Jumper, were nowhere close to solving the ultimate problem. In the two years since, Dr. Jumper and his team designed an entirely new kind of neural network specifically for protein folding, and this drove an enormous leap in accuracy. Their latest version provides a powerful, if imperfect, solution to the protein folding problem, said the DeepMind research scientist Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool. The system can accurately predict the shape of a protein about two thirds of the time, according to the results of the C.A.S.P. contest. And its mistakes with these proteins are smaller than the width of an atom an error rate that rivals physical experiments. "Most atoms are within an atom diameter of where they are in the experimental structure," said Dr. Moult, the contest organizer. "And with those that aren't, there are other possible explanations of the differences." Andrei Lupas, director of the department of protein evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Germany, is among those who worked with AlphaFold. He is part of a team that spent a decade trying to determine the physical shape of a particular protein in a tiny bacteria like organism called an archaeon. This protein straddles the membrane of individual cells part is inside the cell, part is outside and that makes it difficult for scientists like Dr. Lupas to determine the shape of the protein in the lab. Even after a decade, he could not pinpoint the shape. With AlphaFold, he cracked the problem in half an hour. If these methods continue to improve, he said, they could be a particularly useful way of determining whether a new virus could be treated with a cocktail of existing drugs. "We could start screening every compound that is licensed for use in humans," Dr. Lupas said. "We could face the next pandemic with the drugs we already have." During the current pandemic, a simpler form of artificial intelligence proved helpful in some cases. A system built by another London company, BenevolentAI, helped pinpoint an existing drug, baricitinib, that could be used to treat seriously ill Covid 19 patients. Researchers have now completed a clinical trial, though the results have not yet been released. As researchers continue to improve the technology, AlphaFold could further accelerate this kind of drug repurposing, as well as the development of entirely new vaccines, especially if we encounter a virus that is even less understood than Covid 19. David Baker, the director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, who has been using similar computer technology to design anti coronavirus drugs, said DeepMind's methods could accelerate that work. "We were able to design coronavirus neutralizing proteins in several months," he said. "But our goal is to do this kind of thing in a couple of weeks." Still, development speed must contend with other issues, like massive clinical trials, said Dr. Vincent Marconi, a researcher at Emory University in Atlanta who helped lead the baricitinib trial. "That takes time," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Galapagos penguins forage just offshore, close to their nests, and return to the nest site after the young fledge, so parents and fledglings are likely to encounter one another frequently. Only one other of the 18 species of penguins is known to do this: the Gentoo penguins. These birds, which inhabit Antarctica and nearby islands, feed their young after they have fledged for about 12 days, probably to give them time to learn how to hunt for themselves. The Galapagos penguins, the only penguins that live north of the Equator, are endangered, with fewer than 2,000 left in the world. They are not always so self sacrificing. "When conditions are good, they can raise two chicks in a season and continue to feed them," said Dee Boersma, a professor of biology at the University of Washington and the lead author of the study. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
SAVING FREEDOM Truman, the Cold War, and the Fight for Western Civilization By Joe Scarborough Anyone who has watched cable news programs knows the medium requires even complicated issues be boiled down to fit on a chyron. For United States foreign policy, such simplification often leaves talking heads debating whether a decision or proposal amounts to some new presidential doctrine, akin to the one named after Harry Truman, who in March 1947 committed the United States to support "free peoples" against the spread of Communism. In an earnest, engaging new book, "Saving Freedom," Joe Scarborough, the eponymous host of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," shows readers why and, most important, how Truman set a precedent for all his successors and cable news chatter more than seven decades later. If the story of the 33rd president's commitment, which at first aided only peoples in Greece and Turkey, is familiar, Scarborough's focus on Truman and other elected officials is not. By crediting wily politicians for America's Cold War policy instead of the wise men in the government's bureaucracy, Scarborough reminds readers that long telegrams like George Kennan's and policy memorandums from the State Department don't make successful doctrines; politicians do. At first, "Saving Freedom" feels like other books about the days before the term "Cold War" was coined, let alone capitalized. It starts on Feb. 21, 1947, the day when the British Foreign Office alerted the American State Department that it could no longer afford to support the Greek and Turkish governments, both struggling under pressure from Communist leaning elements. "Saving Freedom" then introduces the characters familiar to any readers on the origins of the Cold War: Secretary of State George Marshall, Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Kennan, whose famous telegram ignited Washington's reconsideration of the Soviet Union. But compared with the books by and about these behind the scenes players, Scarborough's stars are Truman and other politicians like Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a onetime isolationist and Republican from Michigan. The author's affinity for politicos makes sense. After all, he was one, having served six years in Congress. As such, he demonstrates a professional appreciation for Truman's success in what the president called the "greatest selling job" of any chief executive. He persuaded a suspicious Republican Congress and millions of exhausted Americans to support not just foreign aid, but also the Marshall Plan and NATO alliance (which, despite Scarborough's disappointing lack of attention to either, did far more to tie the former isolationist nation to Europe than Truman's doctrine). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
If you haven't had a conversation with your parents about handling their financial affairs after they die, Krysten Crawford's tale may spring you into action. She and her two older siblings tried to have that talk with their mother, a retired microbiologist, on several occasions, but she would promptly steer the conversation in another direction. Then in February, their mother died unexpectedly at age 74 after falling down the stairs of her home in Santa Fe, N.M. And since the family never had the money conversation, once they finally learned their mother had a mortgage, it was already in default. The mortgage bank said it couldn't divulge any private information to the family without a death certificate, which was still pending because the exact cause of death wasn't immediately obvious. So Ms. Crawford and her two older siblings didn't know how much was owed, or whether they had to catch up on any missed payments. The bank was willing to withdraw the money owed from a family member's checking account, but Ms. Crawford, a 43 year old mother of two young children in Berkeley, Calif., said she and her siblings were unwilling to do that without knowing the exact amount. Besides, they figured, it shouldn't take that much longer for the death certificate to arrive. But two months after their mother's death, there was still no certificate. Around the same time, Ms. Crawford found a package for a loan modification on her mother's doorstep the loan was indeed in default. Ms. Crawford's sister called the bank again. But this time, she decided to throw out some random numbers to the sympathetic bank representative, who responded with "higher" or "lower." So Ms. Crawford's sister was able to figure out that they owed about 3,500, and she made the payment. "There is this period of gray where you are navigating this legal process but the whole system keeps moving and you have to pay the bills," said Ms. Crawford, a freelance editor. The three siblings had also had to rummage through boxes and file cabinets when they all initially gathered at their mother's adobe style home. They found some items where you might expect them to be credit cards were in a wallet; a will in her office. But the car insurance policy turned up in their mother's knitting bag. "There was always this impression that money was very tight for her, even though we knew from the divorce from my dad that she was well established," said Ms. Crawford, whose father was a hand surgeon and died just weeks before their mother. "In an ideal world, you have the conversation and take the emotion out of it." A lot of the family's difficulty came from the delay in the death certificate, which the estate planning lawyers I spoke with said was not typical. Had their mother been willing to talk more about her financial affairs, it would have saved them a lot of stress and frustration. Yet there are many adult children just like them, who may eventually need to step in and handle their parent's affairs for several months or far longer, even during their lifetime. Here are some ideas on how to get that conversation started, along with several financial and legal fixes that would have made life easier for families like Ms. Crawford's. THE TALK "Finances tend to be one of the trickiest topics because people do have traditional ideas about what you should and shouldn't talk about," explained Amy Goyer, a caregiving expert at AARP, who is also handling her own parents' affairs because her father has Alzheimer's. "It's a difficult thing to talk about," so acknowledge that with your parents. Before you even broach the topic, adult children should think about the sort of information they are seeking, she explained. After all, you need to know much more than whether a will exists. Are there powers of attorney or advanced health care directives in place? What does their health insurance cover? Do they have life insurance? Have they made a list of every single account that they owe or collect money from? She also suggests using "I" statements, to help prevent the conversation from devolving into a power play. Say something like, "I'm concerned about doing the right thing when you pass," instead of, "You're so disorganized and are going to make this difficult for me," she said. Bringing in trusted people to the conversation whether professionals or family will also help. Adult children might ask to tag along on a visit to their parents' lawyer or financial adviser just so that they can get educated. "Sometimes there are several siblings and the two sisters do most of the help, but they trust their son when it comes to talking about money," Ms. Goyer added. After working with the elderly, Gwen Morgan, a hospice volunteer, was inspired to create a workbook called the "What if...Workbook" which has a page for just about everything, from financial account numbers and passwords to contact information for the lawn company and details about last wishes. "I created it to serve as a communication tool," Ms. Morgan said, noting that her own father initially didn't want to provide his account numbers. "I learned that people want to get their affairs together, but don't know where to start." So she tried to make it easy by creating a fill in the blank guide that puts everything in one place so that family members, in the depths of the grieving process, don't have to work too hard to find what they need. There are also several Web sites that allow you to scan and store all of your financial and legal documents online, from LegacyLocker.com to Aboutone.com, which Ms. Goyer likes. THE PLAN Ms. Crawford's family could've covered the missed mortgage payments with some simple planning. And while the bank, JPMorgan, said it could not provide any details without a death certificate, a spokeswoman said it would have accepted a letter from the medical examiner's office stating that the death certificate was pending. Ms. Crawford said the bank told them that it needed the certificate. Other methods would have also saved them a lot of hassles. A revocable living trust is often used instead of a will because it allows assets to immediately transfer to the beneficiaries outside of probate, which is the potentially lengthy court supervised process to settle an estate. For the trust to work, you need to retitle all of the assets to the trust. Then, after the death, a trustee named by the trust maker distributes everything according to the instructions in the document. (The other two big advantages are that the trusts are more difficult to contest than a will, and they allow you to keep your affairs private.) If the child was a co trustee, he or she wouldn't necessarily need a death certificate to carry out the trust's instructions, though not all families will be comfortable with that arrangement. The trust can also be set up so that the child becomes trustee after the parent dies, becomes incapable or "unavailable to act," said Laura Twomey, a partner in the personal planning department at the law firm Simpson Thacher Bartlett. Of course, setting up a trust may not be worth the trouble, some lawyers said, particularly if you live in a state where the probate process is relatively painless. And there are several easy ways to pass assets directly to your children outside of probate, giving them ready access to cash if that's necessary. Joint accounts are clearly a simple option, but not all aging parents will (or should be) comfortable with that. If the parents don't want the adult child to have unfettered access until after they die, they can add a "payable on death" provision to most bank accounts; and if there is a joint owner, it will go to the beneficiary after the second owner dies. Individual retirement accounts and 401(k)'s can also pass directly to beneficiaries. Even life insurance policies can be collected relatively quickly, said Daniel Rubin, a trust and estates lawyer at Moses Singer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
EVERY once in a while, just for laughs, Kevin Smith Fagan tries to call a friend of his, Priscilla, using the voice recognition system in his 2013 Chevrolet Volt. "I've tried it so many times and it never gets it right," said Mr. Smith Fagan, an executive at a public television station in Sacramento. "It always thinks I'm saying 'Chris,' and I have like five people named Chris in my phone book, so it's always interesting to see who's getting the call." Voice control systems have been in cars for more than a decade, and great strides have been made in the technology's ability to understand human speech. But many people still find these systems too unreliable, or annoying, to use for more than the most simple tasks, like "Call Mom." That isn't stopping auto and tech companies from trying to give drivers the ability to do even more things by talking to their cars while keeping their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel. The efforts have some added urgency now, as states pass stricter laws aimed at curbing distracted driving. Under a California law that went into effect Jan. 1, holding or operating a phone while driving is now prohibited. This week at the International CES, the giant electronics conference in Las Vegas, Ford Motor announced that owners of its cars would soon be able to use Amazon's Alexa voice activated assistant in their vehicles. Drivers will be able to ask for a weather report, stream music from Amazon Music or add appointments to their calendars. They will also be able to use Alexa from home to start or unlock their cars remotely. But the automaker also envisions drivers using Alexa to help with other tasks like shopping on Amazon. Stuck in traffic? You can take care of Valentine's Day by saying, "Alexa, order flowers on Amazon." Other companies are moving in the same direction. Apple's Siri can be used to control iPhone functions in cars, and Apple's CarPlay software allows drivers to dictate text messages while driving, as well as program destinations into Apple Maps and have the route plotted on the car's display. Google's Android Auto can do the same. In the last year, carmakers like BMW, Mercedes Benz and General Motors have also introduced improved voice recognition systems that can understand normal spoken words for many tasks. Older systems required drivers to learn specific commands. With newer models, owners can program in a destination just by saying the address, as if speaking to another person. In older cars, the state, city and street had to be given separately, one at a time and if you were lucky, each was correctly understood. While more advanced systems like Alexa will make it easier for drivers to use voice commands, there are still hurdles. The biggest is just changing habits, and persuading people to try talking to their cars. On the day before Thanksgiving, Frank Krieber bought a 2016 Dodge Challenger, granite gray, with a 5.7 liter Hemi V 8 engine, and the latest version of the Uconnect infotainment system. A few days later, when he set off on a road trip to Florida from his home in Michigan, he synced his phone to the car, but didn't bother to use the voice recognition capabilities to enter destinations or handle other tasks. "I probably should use it, but it's just easier to put in an address manually, so I haven't really played around with it," said Mr. Krieber, a sales executive for a computer company. "My experience so far has been, when you tell it to do something, it doesn't do what you want." Older cars used voice recognition systems that were built into the car and had limited computing power and memory. Now that more and more cars have wireless connections, the voice recognition processing can be done via the internet in distant computers and servers, what the tech industry calls the cloud. That is an advantage that Ford sees in using Alexa, said Don Butler, Ford's executive director for connected vehicle and services. "If you have the voice recognition done outside the car, people will see a much greater ability to interpret normal, everyday speech," he said. With Alexa, a user will need to download an Alexa app to a phone and carry the phone in the car, creating the connection with the cloud. Ford and Amazon have also developed a way to get Alexa to work seamlessly with a Ford car's own built in entertainment and navigation systems. Alexa will first be available in a few months in battery powered and hybrid models like the Focus Electric and Fusion Energi, and later in other Ford models. "You can ask Alexa where the nearest Starbucks is, and have her program the address into the Ford navigation system for you," Mr. Butler said. For Amazon, the collaboration with Ford is another illustration of a broader push by technology giants to push their versions of voice assistants, which are made to perform simple tasks like turning on lights at home, playing music and fetching sports scores from the internet. Apple was an early entrant into the market with its Siri assistant for iPhones. Google has its Assistant and a new connected speaker featuring the voice technology called Google Home. And Samsung, which has announced plans to buy the audio and automobile technology company Harman International Industries, last year agreed to acquire a voice assistant start up, Viv Labs. Many analysts believe Amazon has vaulted to a leadership position in the race with the surprise success of the Echo family of smart speakers. While Amazon does not reveal sales figures for its devices, the company recently said that the Echo speaker and a smaller device called Echo Dot were the best selling products on Amazon last year. Amazon has been more aggressive than other tech giants in getting other companies like Ford to integrate Alexa into their products. Dozens of other companies were expected to announce plans at CES to allow people to control their devices using Alexa. The satellite television provider Dish Network said people who use its Hopper digital video recorders would be able to use Alexa voice commands to change channels and play movies. Lenovo, the computer maker, announced its own Alexa based speaker, Lenovo Smart Assistant. The maker of Seiki, Westinghouse Electronics and Element Electronics televisions said it would build Alexa into the remote controls for some 4K sets from those brands. In California, Mr. Smith Fagan would welcome better voice recognition. "With the new law we have, I'm kind of worried, because everyone's going to have to find a way to use the phone without touching it with your hands," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
At Next Century, the boutique minded new shop inside Century 21, Isaac Gindi, a second generation garmento, and his new hire, Chrissie Miller (native New Yorkers both), were putting the finishing touches on a whole new vision for a metropolitan institution. "Everything that the millennial really likes to dress in, we have it here!" said Mr. Gindi, an owner of Century 21 Stores, the department store whose flame has burned, undimmed, to generations of discount loving moths. "That Gucci thing with a pair of Levi's that's the way they dress today. It's mix and match. That's what we have. Who has that? I'm asking you!" That's what they have, and have had for some 56 years, since Mr. Gindi's father and uncle, Sonny and Al Gindi, founded the store in 1961. Not Gucci and Levi's per se, though maybe on a lucky day, but a rack bursting mix of anything and everything, provided it is offered at a deep discount. Century 21 offers off price designer clothes, shoes, accessories and home goods, which is to say, slightly out of season or overstock, in an atmosphere where service may range between warm and war torn. For those willing to dig for their bargains (and defend them once in hand), it is practically a holy site. But at Next Century, which opens on Thursday, the rougher edges of Century 21 have been sanded away, the better to lure a new generation. Mr. Gindi and Ms. Miller, the former designer of Sophomore, have buffed the space and its offerings to an Instagram ready gleam. (The neon rimmed mirror is particularly good for selfies, Mr. Gindi said.) New to the store are young or under the radar labels like Adam Selman, Olympia Le Tan, Trademark and Maison Mayle, sourced by Ms. Miller. Upstairs, Proenza Schouler hangs not far from a rack of Fenty Puma by Rihanna. There are decor and impulse buy touches borrowed from the 2017 playbook: vases of leafy green fronds and jars of individually wrapped Korean face masks, the sort of thing that might confuse the bubbes and babushkas of yore, who once stripped down to their underpinnings in the big store's old communal dressing rooms, or even before. Next Century and Century 21 will be connected but disparate. Next Century has its own entrance, at 21 Dey Street, but connects to the main store through a pair of mirrored doors. The prices, as befit Century 21, are far lower than in season designer goods. Some finds are limited to a single piece, the kind pursued in dreams: an Alaia top ( 529.99, down from 1,765); a Celine blouse ( 429.99, down from 1,450); or a Row sweater ( 499.99, down from 1,690). Others are carried in a full run of sizes, and some, like the Telfar collection by Telfar Clemens, were made specifically for the store. Mr. Clemens's creative director, Babak Radboy, even created a logo for the capsule, a swooping "Telfar" over the looping Century 21, a design Mr. Radboy had been fiddling with long before Century 21 even came to call. ("I don't know if he was playing around with this in a full moon, or what," Mr. Clemens said.) The two have been Century 21 shoppers for years; Mr. Clemens decided to go to Pace University, he said, in part because of its proximity to the store. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Jimmy O. Yang is already a familiar face in comedy. Many will recognize him as Jian Yang, the deadpan foil from the HBO satire "Silicon Valley," which ended in 2019 after a six season run. In "Crazy Rich Asians," he stole scenes as the magnetic playboy Bernard Tai. Since then, he has been on Netflix's "Space Force," opposite Steve Carell and John Malkovich. But until now, he hasn't had a starring role. In his new movie, "The Opening Act," which comes out on Oct. 16, Yang plays Will Chu, a stand up comedian in Pennsylvania. When Will gets to open for his comedy idol, Billy G., played by Cedric the Entertainer, he realizes he still has a lot to learn about how to make people laugh. The movie, directed by Steve Byrne, has a murderers' row of comedians: Whitney Cummings, Alex Moffat, Russell Peters and Iliza Shlesinger. "It's really a behind the scenes look of how the sausage is made in the stand up factory," Yang said in a recent interview from Vancouver, Canada. His reverence for comedy is clear. "The great thing about stand up is it's such a meritocracy that if you are good, and if you are funny, boom, you get the respect and you're good to go," Yang said. "Whereas acting, you feel like somebody needs to give you an opportunity or the right project has to come along." The movie is also nostalgic for him. He saw a lot of parallels between how his own stand up career started and how the lead character's unfolds. He recalled his first open mic and the immediate camaraderie he shared with the other comics, who gave each other notes afterward. "On any given night," he said, "you walk in at the improv, and you'll see some of the best of the best comedians out there." He's been in Vancouver filming the Netflix romantic comedy "Love Hard," directed by Hernan Jimenez. Yang stars as the romantic lead opposite Nina Dobrev; Charles Melton, whom Yang calls the "stud with a six pack," is his competition. "The Opening Act" was filmed within a punishingly dense 19 day shooting schedule and he was in nearly every frame, Yang said. Things were a bit of a blur for him as he adjusted to workdays lasting 10 to 12 hours. Since then, he has committed to getting his sleep schedule right. He also had to approach this role differently. "With 'Silicon Valley,' I know that character so well; I can go in, and I know how to be funny," Yang said. "Being the lead, it's beyond just being funny. There's a lot more homework, and you have to be mentally prepared." Yang shared what he has been watching and listening to recently. You won't catch him with a book though. "I'm not a nerd," he said. "I mean, come on." (His exception was reading "Crazy Rich Asians.") In order to relax, I have to listen and watch stuff that has nothing to do with my life. It's hard sometimes for me to watch a scripted TV show. I've been listening to Howard Stern a lot. I'm a huge fan of him, and I listen in the morning. That's how I relax. It's something completely different from my life. It's four hours and an old school radio show, and sometimes I'll be playing video games or watching a cooking show, or I'll have Howard Stern on while taking a shower. He's just so lovable and very, very funny. He's one of the best interviewers; he just interviewed Chris Rock, and that was incredible. I watched "About Time." That's a good one. It's about time traveling as well as being a rom com. Rachel McAdams is one of my favorite people on the planet. She's so beautiful, talented, lovable and an incredible actor. I was also listening to this podcast that my buddy recommended: "Business Wars." It's pretty cool. It's like Netflix versus Blockbuster, Pizza Hut versus Domino's, FedEx versus UPS. I just got into that. I watched "Notting Hill." I saw it when I was a kid, and I still remember the soundtrack. My parents would play it. It's such an incredible movie. I would say, not that I'm giving movie reviews here, but Julia Roberts's character she's not a great person, she has a lot of flaws I feel like she's going to end up breaking Hugh Grant's heart in the future, but the chemistry between those two! It's shot so well and it's written so well that yes, it's a bit of a fairy tale, but I cried when she said her famous line, "I'm just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her." I cried. It just makes you feel so warm and fuzzy. It almost makes me want to call a couple of my ex girlfriends. I need to watch all the rest of the Richard Curtis movies "Four Weddings and a Funeral," "Bridget Jones's Diary." I also need to watch some old school, American rom coms, like "The Proposal" and "Failure to Launch." I have a whole list. Before I go to sleep, I always either watch cooking shows, or I watch travel shows on YouTube. So this guy, one of my favorites, his name is Mark Wiens, he's a YouTuber that travels everywhere eating exotic food. That takes me out of being an actor, you know, just seeing like an everyday guy eating and cooking. I'm a huge foodie. "Chef's Table" has a barbecue season now. Oh my God. It's incredible. There's "Taco Chronicles" that's also amazing. My favorite guy on YouTube these days is Gennaro Contaldo, he's on Jamie Oliver's channel. He's this really old Italian man. Amazing. He's so passionate. His dishes are so beautiful, but simple. His videos are usually under five minutes, like the most incredible pasta dishes. I posted a few cooking videos on my own on YouTube as well. I don't make exact recipes. I learn the techniques. Like if you have a couple of pieces of bone in meat and stuff, you cook it down for two, three hours and make this incredible ragu. I've made spaghetti alle vongole. I remixed it a little bit from what he does, but the basic concept is there. He's incredible; he makes everything look easy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Now Lives: In a tiny one bedroom apartment in the West Village, with a mini fridge instead of a regular fridge. Claim to Fame: Ms. Cohen is a standup comedian known for her self deprecating humor about being a woman dating in New York City. She has a monthly show at Joe's Pub called "The Twist? She's Gorgeous" and hosts Cabernet Cabaret, a standup musical showcase, at Club Cumming on Wednesdays. Time Out named her one of the five New York City comedians to watch in 2018. "Like I say in my song, 'Boys didn't want to kiss me, so I had to be funny to win them over,'" Ms. Cohen said. "And it didn't even work. Sad." Big Break: After graduating from Princeton in 2013, Ms. Cohen moved to New York and took classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade. She performed in various comedy shows around the city, and in 2017 was looking for a spot to do a weekly show. Her friend Henry Koperski, a pianist, had just performed at the newly opened Club Cumming and put her in touch with Daniel Nardicio, who owns the bar with Alan Cumming. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Paris Doesn't Get Sweatpants, Yet. So A.P.C. Brought Its Own to New York. Jean Touitou of A.P.C. is as close as contemporary fashion comes to a saloniste. The outspoken founder of the label, whose stores reliably dot the cool neighborhoods of the globe, declines runways and shows his collections in group presentations that he narrates, microphone in hand, often pausing to quote from Proust or digress into discussions of his late cousin's genius unpublished novel. They are not without incident (as when he stumbled into a fiasco of race relations and political correctness by quoting his friend and collaborator Kanye West), and they are never without interest. Mr. Touitou designs small and expounds big. While much of fashion shies away from the intellectual world, he dives in. "I don't want subversion," he said on Tuesday at his presentation, relocated for the season to New York. "French are famous for revolution, but I'm not doing any revolution. We're going to lose time trying to be revolutionary. We'd better keep what's left of the good." "Camus was called a conservative by other guys, and I think he was more revolutionary than Sartre, at the end," he said. "Sartre was a Stalinist, if you think about it." This debate more often finds a home on editorial pages, not fashion ones. It was, nevertheless, the preface to a showing of midlength corduroy skirts, simple sweaters, boxy car coats and an appealingly high waisted and high watered new jeans style. But in the canned wisdom world of fashion, there is every reason to be grateful for Mr. Touitou's discursive candor. Though his speeches are often seasoned with opinions ("A lot of men think that sandals with socks are unsexy. I hereby am telling you that socks are the new garter belt!"), they also alight periodically on truths the industry prefers not to acknowledge. He instructed his models, for instance, to hide their A.P.C. handbags beside their backs. "People in fashion, they only sell bags," Mr. Touitou said. "It's an ironical reason why we're hiding these bags. I think bags are a distraction to fashion." He paused. "But sometimes we do nice bags. This one." The model spun around. The reason for staging the A.P.C. presentation in New York (it is usually held in Paris, where Mr. Touitou lives) is the company's recent investment in Outdoor Voices, an American athletic wear line. A.P.C. collaborated with Outdoor Voices on a capsule collection of barely adorned sweats, shorts and spandex workout gear, also shown at the presentation. "More than an athlete, we're trying to do a Rudolf Nureyev kind of thing," Mr. Touitou said. "He was chic, and obvious to say, he was an athlete, too. I don't think sport should be taken too literally." As for the alternative (the "I'm eating kale, I'm going to my yoga class" look, as Mr. Touitou described it), he put his hands to his temples. "Headache, headache," he said. Of course, "athleisure," as such clothes are unbecomingly called in the United States, is becoming big business, and the streets of New York are full of women who appear to (but may or may not have) just come from the gym. That look is starting to be seen in Paris, too, Mr. Touitou said, but it is in its early days. If he showed Outdoor Voices in Paris, he added: "They would be like: 'O.K., what is this? Doing sweatpants?' They pretend they are big in fashion, but sometimes they don't get it." "The socks and sandals thing they don't get it," he said. "Here, they would get it very quickly. Already, they got it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
DANCE MOMS 9:00 p.m. on Lifetime. The eighth season of "Dance Moms" has been monumental for Abby Lee Miller, the dance instructor who has starred on the show since its beginning. This season was all about Abby putting her life and dance studio back together following a tumultuous year in which she completed a prison sentence for bankruptcy fraud and learned she had non Hodgkin's lymphoma. But the competitive spirit of the show is still dominant, with a spot on Abby's Elite Team still on the line as the finale airs. THE DEVIL YOU KNOW 10:00 p.m. on Viceland. For fans of true crime, the premiere of this five episode documentary series provides ample opportunity to delve into an unsolved and disturbing murder case. Set in a rural community outside of Winston Salem, N.C., the show centers on John Lawson, a self proclaimed Satanist who renamed himself Pazuzu Algarad. When the bodies of two missing men are found in his basement, Algarad's ties to Satanism and continuous run ins with the law seem to build up a case against him but the reality of what happened to the men may not be what it seems. The series follows Chad Nance, a local journalist, as well as the neighbors, authorities and friends some of whom are self styled Satanists themselves who have tried to unravel the mysterious case. TROLLS: THE BEAT GOES ON! Stream on Netflix. The characters from the "Trolls" films star in their own show, which is premiering its seventh season on Netflix. The series follows the trolls Poppy (Amanda Leighton) and Branch (Skylar Astin) as they and other members of the Troll Village embark on adventures in the magical forest that surrounds them. Executive produced by Matthew Beans, a writer for the quirky animated series "Robot Chicken," and with original songs by Alana Da Fonseca of "Pitch Perfect 3," the show offers an original take on the stories of the misfit cast of trolls who have played a role in kids' culture in the last few years. THE MULE (2018) Stream on HBO. "The Lincoln pickup truck with Iowa plates was hurtling down Interstate 94, headed for Detroit." So began the 2014 New York Times Magazine article by Sam Dolnick about Leo Sharp, a World War II veteran turned courier for the drug cartel Sinaloa in Mexico who was caught by the authorities at age 87. Four years after the piece published, the story of the drug mule whose nickname was Tata (meaning "grandfather" in Spanish) became a film directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, now streaming on HBO. In a review for The Times, Manohla Dargis writes, "Eastwood fills in the portrait of his mule with creative license, characteristic dry humor and a looseness that seems almost completely untethered from the world of murderous cartels." While "The Mule" embellishes a few facts surrounding the case, this account is as real as it is unbelievable . | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
William Peter Blatty, the author whose best selling book "The Exorcist" was both a milestone in horror fiction and a turning point in his own career, died on Thursday in Bethesda, Md. He was 89. The cause was multiple myeloma, his wife, Julie Blatty, said. "The Exorcist," the story of a 12 year old girl possessed by a demon, was published in 1971 and sold more than 13 million copies. The 1973 movie version, starring Linda Blair and directed by William Friedkin, was a runaway hit, breaking box office records at many theaters and becoming the highest grossing film to date for Warner Bros. studios. It earned Mr. Blatty, who wrote the screenplay, an Academy Award. (It was also the first horror movie nominated for the best picture Oscar.) "The Exorcist" marked a radical shift in Mr. Blatty's career, which was already well established in another genre: He was one of Hollywood's leading comedy writers. Mr. Blatty collaborated with the director Blake Edwards on the screenplays for four films, beginning in 1964 with "A Shot in the Dark," the second movie (after "The Pink Panther") starring Peter Sellers as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau and, in some critics' view, the best. His other Edwards films were the comedy "What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?" (1966); the musical comedy drama "Darling Lili" (1970); and "Gunn" (1967), based on the television detective series "Peter Gunn." He also wrote the scripts for comedies starring Danny Kaye, Warren Beatty and Zero Mostel. In praising his 1963 novel, "John Goldfarb, Please Come Home!," a Cold War spoof that Mr. Blatty later adapted for the screen, Martin Levin of The New York Times invoked the humorist S. J. Perelman, one of Mr. Blatty's literary idols; Mr. Blatty, he said, "writes like Perelman run amuck." The phenomenal success of "The Exorcist" essentially signaled the end of Mr. Blatty's comedy career, making him for all practical purposes the foremost writer in a new hybrid genre: theological horror. It was a mantle he was never entirely comfortable wearing. When he declined his publisher's entreaties for a sequel to "The Exorcist" and instead delivered an elegiac memoir about his mother, "I'll Tell Them I Remember You," published in 1973, Mr. Blatty felt the first cinch of the horror writing straitjacket. "My publisher took it because I wanted to do it," he was quoted as saying in "Faces of Fear" (1985), a collection of interviews with horror writers by Douglas E. Winter. "But the bookstores were really hostile." Mr. Blatty gave various accounts of what led him to try his hand at horror. He sometimes said the market for his comedy had waned in the late 1960s, and he was ready to move on. At other times, he said that his mother's sudden death in 1967 had led to a renewed commitment to his Roman Catholic faith, and to a soul searching about life's ultimate questions, including the presence of evil in the world. In every account, he said the idea for "The Exorcist" was planted in 1949, when he was a student at the Jesuit affiliated Georgetown University in Washington and read an account in The Washington Post of an exorcism under the headline "Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil's Grip." The incident, widely discussed at the time among Georgetown students and faculty members, came back to Mr. Blatty 20 years later as the basis for a book about something not getting much press in the fractured, murky landscape of late 1960s America: the battle between Good and Evil. He began writing what he thought would be a modest selling thriller about a girl, a demon and a pair of Catholic priests. About halfway through, he later said, he sensed he had something more. "I knew it was going to be a success," he told People magazine. "I couldn't wait to finish it and become famous." William Peter Blatty was born on Jan. 7, 1928, in Manhattan to Peter and Mary Blatty, immigrants from Lebanon. His father left home when he was 6, and his mother supported the two of them by selling quince jelly on the streets, yielding a wobbly income that precipitated 28 changes of address during a childhood he once described as "comfortably destitute." The church figured prominently in his life. His mother was a churchgoing Catholic, and he was educated at prominent Jesuit run schools that admitted him on full scholarships: the Brooklyn Preparatory School, now closed, where he was the 1946 class valedictorian, and Georgetown, from which he graduated in 1950. After serving in the Air Force, Mr. Blatty worked for the United States Information Agency in Beirut. He returned to the United States for a public relations job in Los Angeles, where he hoped to begin his career as a writer. "The Exorcist," Mr. Blatty's story of a 12 year old girl possessed by a demon, sold more than 13 million copies. He had already published his first book a memoir, "Which Way to Mecca, Jack?" but was still working in public relations in 1961 when he appeared as a contestant on "You Bet Your Life," the television quiz show hosted by Groucho Marx. He and a fellow contestant won 10,000. His winnings freed him to quit his day job and become a full time writer. He never had a regular job again. Mr. Blatty lived in Bethesda. In addition to his wife, the former Julie Witbrodt, whom he married in 1983, he is survived by their son, Paul William Blatty; three daughters, Christine Charles, Mary Joanne Blatty and Jennifer Blatty; and two sons, Michael and William Peter Jr., from earlier marriages; seven grandchildren; and six great grandchildren. Another son, Peter Vincent Blatty, died in 2006; his death was the subject of Mr. Blatty's 2015 book, "Finding Peter." His work after "The Exorcist" included several more theologically themed works of horror, including "The Ninth Configuration" in 1978 (a reworking of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane," from 1966) and "Legion" in 1983. Both books were made into movies, directed as well as written by Mr. Blatty; the film version of "Legion" was released in 1990 as "The Exorcist III." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Brett Kavanaugh had a confirmation hearing like none other, because of the extraordinary testimony of one woman. Christine Blasey Ford, a psychology professor, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her at a high school party decades earlier. "Brett got on top of me," she said, and "began running his hands over my body and grinding his hips into me." He groped her, she said, and tried to take her clothes off. When she yelled, she said, he put his hand over her mouth. "It was hard for me to breathe," she said, "and I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me." Blasey Ford's testimony was precise and measured and credible. Even many of Kavanaugh's supporters thought it sounded the death knell for his nomination. On Fox News, the anchor Chris Wallace called her account "a disaster for the Republicans." When Republican senators caucused, the mood was gloomy. "Almost all of us were saying, 'It's over,'" recalled Jeff Flake, then a senator from Arizona. It was not over, of course, and today Kavanaugh sits on the highest court in the land. How he overcame Blasey Ford's testimony and allegations of sexual misconduct from other witnesses is the subject of "Supreme Ambition," by Ruth Marcus, a deputy editor of The Washington Post's editorial page. Marcus's book is impressively reported, highly insightful and a rollicking good read. It also adds another dispiriting data point as if one more were needed that the American Republic is seriously ailing. This book was one of our most anticipated titles of December. See the full list. Kavanaugh was in many ways a perfect Republican nominee for the court. An only child from a Catholic family in suburban Maryland, he was the son of a lobbyist father and a prosecutor mother. Kavanaugh attended Yale College and Law School, and then began a conservative Pilgrim's Progress. He clerked for two Republican appeals court judges and then for Justice Anthony Kennedy. He worked for Kenneth Starr's investigation of Bill Clinton; helped out in the Florida recount that brought George W. Bush to power in 2000; served in the Bush White House; and finally became a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Along the way, Kavanaugh married Ashley Estes, a young Texan who was President Bush's personal secretary which helped place him in the Bushes' inner circle. The New York senator Charles Schumer called Kavanaugh "the Zelig of young Republican lawyers," an apt moniker given his knack for putting himself at the center of elite conservative action. There was, however, a dark strand running through Kavanaugh's life of calculated achievement: heavy drinking. In his high school yearbook, he made a reference to "100 Kegs or Bust," and in college, his interests included the annual Tang competition, an elaborate intramural beer drinking relay race. Law school classmates have said little about his intellectual pursuits, but one recalled, "If you had asked me who was the biggest drinker in our class I would have said Brett." As a judge on the D.C. Circuit, a traditional farm team for Supreme Court justices, Kavanaugh became a leading candidate for the court and he pursued the prize aggressively. He courted conservative judge pickers with his speeches and, arguably, his judicial opinions, which seemed to signal, among other things, a willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade. Kavanaugh's years in conservative legal circles provided him with battalions of lawyers to join the fight. At a critical moment, a group of his law clerks visited Leonard Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, the influential conservative legal group, to argue that he belonged on the court. One conservative journalist declared, "I have never seen the amount of support expressed for any potential nominee as I saw for Kavanaugh in terms of people reaching out to make the case for him." There was one advocate whose opinion counted most of all Justice Kennedy, whose seat Kavanaugh ended up filling. "Supreme Ambition" has made news with its report that, when he presided over Justice Neil Gorsuch's swearing in at the White House in 2017, Justice Kennedy requested a private meeting with President Trump to promote Kavanaugh for the court. If Kennedy did argue for his former law clerk, it was a disturbing intervention across the lines separating the judicial and executive branches but also a successful one. After Blasey Ford, other witnesses emerged. Deborah Ramirez, a college classmate, told reporters that Kavanaugh thrust his penis in her face at a party, although she had significant memory lapses. Another late arriving witness, the Washington lawyer Max Stier, remembered seeing Kavanaugh in college exposing himself to a different woman, lending possible further credence to Ramirez's account. The most interesting part of Marcus's narrative is her discussion of why, in the end, the evidence mattered so little. Much of the credit goes to Kavanaugh, whose own Senate testimony was as effective, in its way, as Blasey Ford's was. Kavanaugh's proclamations about liking beer were widely mocked including, memorably, in a "Saturday Night Live" skit, with Matt Damon as a semi deranged Kavanaugh. But his angry insistence that he was the true victim which took a page from Clarence Thomas's response to Anita Hill's sexual harassment charges decades earlier shifted the momentum in his direction. His railing against "left wing opposition groups," and his charges that the attacks on him were "revenge on behalf of the Clintons," skillfully rallied the Republican base. Kavanaugh also had strong allies in his corner. The White House counsel Don McGahn kept the F.B.I. on a short leash, and its decision not to interview Stier an "inexcusable lapse," as Marcus notes helped prevent a stronger case from being built against Kavanaugh. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, never wavered in his support, boasting, "I'm stronger than mule piss." The main reason the case against Kavanaugh failed, however, was that there simply was no audience for it in the Senate. Even if Republican senators could not bring themselves to believe the sexual misconduct charges, they witnessed with their own eyes Kavanaugh's angry partisan rant against "left wing opposition groups" and supporters of the Clintons. Given the ethical obligation of judges to act at all times in ways that promote public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary, his outbursts should have been disqualifying. As Marcus shows, however, there were scarcely any Republican senators who would even consider breaking with their party on the vote. Kavanaugh's confirmation has profound implications for the court. If he turns out to be significantly more conservative than Kennedy, he could provide the fifth vote to end abortion rights or affirmative action. His arrival also means that two of the nine justices joined the court despite credible charges of serious misconduct toward women something that has done incalculable damage to the court's reputation. As important as the Kavanaugh battle was for the court, however, there was something even more profound at stake: whether, on the most important questions, our nation is capable of putting the public interest ahead of partisanship, and whether the truth matters. The forces aligned for partisanship and against truth are stronger than ever. The week before this book's publication date, President Trump told his 67 million Twitter followers that "the Ruth Marcus book is a badly written researched disaster. So many incorrect facts. Fake News, just like the washington post!" It would be hard to imagine a more persuasive endorsement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
How Could a Tax Change Affect You? This Is What the Senate and House Propose On Thursday, Senate Republicans unveiled their tax bill. It differs from last week's version in the House of Representatives on a number of important issues. For instance, the Senate plan would completely eliminate the ability to deduct state and local taxes; there is no exception for up to 10,000 in property taxes each year, as there is in the House bill. It's too soon to predict what, if anything, will come of all this. In the coming days and weeks, we will see which proposals survive as Congress moves toward possible full votes on these or modified bills. In the meantime, here's a guide to some of the consumer facing issues under consideration. Seven brackets, with a top rate of 39.6 percent, which people pay on income they earn beyond 480,050 for couples filing their taxes jointly. Four brackets, with a top rate of 39.6 percent. But that top rate doesn't begin until a couple hits 1 million in annual income. Seven brackets, with a top rate of 38.5 percent that you pay on income beyond 1 million annually if you're married or 500,000 if you're single. The Senate bill's lowest tax bracket is at 10 percent for individuals, while the House bill had raised it to 12 percent. If you're single, the current standard deduction is 6,350. Add in exemptions and you're up to 10,400. Married without children? That's 12,700 for the deduction and 20,700 with exemptions. If you're married with two kids, the deduction plus exemptions figure goes up to 28,700. There is also a 1,000 tax credit per child. The House bill calls for simplification: If you're single with no children, your standard deduction would be 12,000. If you're married, it would be 24,000 no matter how many kids you have. The child tax credit, however, would rise to 1,600 per child. There is also an additional 300 credit for each parent and nonchild dependent, though that would expire after 2022. The same 12,000/ 24,000 standard deductions as the House. Single parents would see their deductions go to 18,000 from 9,300. The child tax credit would rise to 1,650. You can generally deduct the amount you pay for state and local tax income taxes, including property taxes, on your federal income tax return. You can also deduct the interest you pay each year on mortgage debt up to 1 million, a cap that can cover multiple homes. Plus, you can generally deduct up to 100,000 in interest you pay on a home equity loan or line of credit. No more state and local tax deductions, though you could continue to deduct up to 10,000 each year in property tax. For people buying in the future (which the bill defines as Nov. 2, 2017, or later), mortgage interest deductions would be allowed only on loans up to 500,000. Moreover, only debt from primary residences would count toward that limit, and you could not include any interest from home equity loans or lines of credit that you took out on that new home. No more state and local tax deductions and no exception for property taxes, either. The mortgage interest deduction, however, would survive in its current form. For the moment, you can deduct out of pocket medical expenses that exceed 10 percent of your adjusted gross income (but not the expenses that amount to the first 10 percent). This is particularly useful for elderly people and others with lower incomes who need regular assistance and care. The House wants to do away with the deduction in 2018. The Senate would keep the deduction. Currently, people with incomes below certain thresholds can deduct up to 2,500 of student loan interest each year. The House wants to do away with the student loan interest deduction. The Senate would keep things as they are now. In general, you pay taxes on inherited property at a 40 percent rate, but current rules waive that tax for estates up to 5,490,000. The House seeks to nearly double that exemption and repeal it altogether after 2024 a year later than the House first proposed. The Senate wishes to double the exemption but has not proposed any full repeal. In 2017, when an employer pays for up to 13,570 in qualified adoption expenses for an employee, the employee pays no taxes on that assistance. There's also a separate adoption credit, which generally provides taxpayers with a credit of up to 13,570 per eligible child. Under the current rules, the credit phases out for taxpayers with adjusted gross income between 203,540 and 243,540. The bill had proposed getting rid of the adoption credit altogether, but on Thursday afternoon, the Republican leadership changed its mind and left it intact. The Senate would keep things as they are now. Your money grows tax free (you can put in 2,000 per year with certain income limits), and then you can withdraw it tax free to pay for private school from kindergarten through 12th grade (in addition to college). Potential changes to this maneuver were last considered in 2012. The House wants to neuter Coverdells but let people pull up to 10,000 out of 529 plans tax free to use for private school. (You could still use that same 529 plan to save for college the same way you always have.) Wealthy families can gain a 30,000 plus tax break from this. The Senate did not propose any changes. If you're a victim of a house fire, flood, burglary or similar event, you can deduct those losses. The House did away with these so called "casualty" deductions. That means you would be out of luck, unless legislators passed a one time bill offering relief for victims of particular weather or other events that affected a lot of people. Starting in 2018, you could only claim a deduction if the loss happened during an event that the president later officially declared to be a disaster. Alimony is a deductible expense for people paying it, and those who receive it must pay income taxes. Divorce would become a bit more burdensome for the ex spouse who pays alimony because it would no longer be a deductible expense. But the party receiving the payments would no longer need to pay tax on the income received. The change would take effect for divorce and separation agreements (and any changes to current agreements) executed after 2017. The Senate bill would make no changes to alimony rules. As it stands, taxpayers can deduct moving expenses even if they do not itemize their tax returns as long as the new workplace is at least 50 miles farther from the old home than the old job location was from the old home. (If you had no workplace, the new job must be at least 50 miles from your old home.) Relocating for a new job? Moving costs would no longer be a deductible expense in 2018. The Senate's bill is similar to the House's, though it allows some exceptions for members of the military. You can usually deduct the amount your tax preparation specialist billed you or any similar tax related expenses, like software you purchase and the fee you pay to file your forms electronically. Taxpayers would no longer be able to take this deduction. Since the bill aims to reduce the number of taxpayers who itemize (and all the complexity that goes with that), in theory fewer people should require professional tax help (with the exception of wealthier people, who can afford to lose this break). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
A PAIR of New York architects describe the plan they have conceptualized for remaking downtown Orange as something that will "rewrite both the physical and social spaces of Orange." Township officials, on the other hand, compare it to what "you could see in a third world country" and say it's "not really grounded in reality." Certainly, at this point, any such remake is far from being realized. In fact, it exists only as a component in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Keeping company with towns in Oregon, Florida, Illinois and California, Orange is the focus of a show called "Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream." In preparation last summer, the museum matched up teams of architects, planners, ecologists and engineers with each of the chosen communities, asking them to re envision the ailing urban/suburban model. The results are on display at MoMA through Aug. 13. Led by Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample, partners at MOS Architects in New York, the team that took on Orange concentrated on the half mile radius around the main train station. They came up with a campuslike pedestrian village that replaces many streets with connected ribbons of four story mixed use buildings and an energy producing rooftop park. Titled "Thoughts on a Walking City," the plan also tries to address the problem of obesity by adding bike paths and replacing elevators and escalators with stairs. "The idea was that there's this poor, disenfranchised group that's paying for infrastructure they're not using," said Mr. Meredith, describing his and his colleagues' thought process after a tour last year. "So we asked, 'What if we rethink the streets?' The street is seen as this place of freedom, and yet it is incredibly polluted, it takes a lot of capital to maintain, it's filled with private interests. It's even illegal to stand there for too long." Predictably, the notion of cutting off thoroughfares didn't go over well with leaders. "That may be perfect for a utopian society where there's no crime, no fires, no issues," said Mayor Eldridge Hawkins Jr. "But how would you get fire trucks and emergency vehicles in there? It doesn't make any sense." Yet Orange not only has a good deal of crime and fire, but also a sizable population of poor and disenfranchised residents: 18.8 percent of its 30,134 people live below the poverty line, according to 2010 census numbers. Recognizing that the city has its challenges, the Hawkins administration has tried to tackle issues like decrepit public housing and blocks of boarded up homes, in what it considers a more measured response than the architects' radical vision. On a recent bus tour with a reporter, the mayor and his team were eager to point out the reality of the area they call "the heart of Orange." Joseph Portelli, an assistant vice president of RPM, said the company expected to break ground on the first building by the end of this year. Planned for a parking lot the city leases to the Postal Service, it will have a 175 space parking garage for residents and commuters, along with a wellness center that may include a health clinic and a gym. The 28 million first building is being financed by a federal tax credit program, state and local funds, a 13 million private mortgage and 4 million from RPM, Mr. Portelli said. The RPM group recently completed Grand Central Housing, a 70 unit affordable building elsewhere in Orange. One goal is to tie Tony Galento Plaza more closely into city life, which mostly takes place a block north, on bustling Main Street. And while they're at it, city planners are seeking to improve the quality of the shops along the two mile stretch of Main Street. Storefronts are already occupied, but ultimately the city would like to attract a major supermarket chain to the area, which Stephanie Gidigbi, Mayor Hawkins's chief of staff, calls a "food desert." Progress is more evident south of the train tracks, where residents have begun moving into the new Walter G. Alexander Homes: 48 units for older residents and 66 affordable town homes, which replace the seven story public projects that were the scourge of Orange until 2010, when they were demolished. "There was lots of crime, drugs, guns," Mayor Hawkins said, "but the good people were suffering, they had no control over their lives." To bankroll this 27 million project, the city took advantage of the state's Neighborhood Stabilization Program and other tax credits. And to stabilize this East Ward neighborhood, the part of town hit hardest by the foreclosure crisis, it is also looking to add market rate housing to the mix, as well as offering home improvement money to owners of some of the single family houses. There was never any interaction between city officials and the MoMA project team, either during the research phase last year or since the exhibition opened in February. Yet Orange officials are willing to admit that the architects got some things right. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
SAN FRANCISCO In an open letter posted to Microsoft's internal message board on Tuesday, more than 100 employees protested the software maker's work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and asked the company to stop working with the agency, which has been separating migrant parents and their children at the border with Mexico. "We believe that Microsoft must take an ethical stand, and put children and families above profits," said the letter, which was addressed to the chief executive, Satya Nadella. The letter pointed to a 19.4 million contract that Microsoft has with ICE for processing data and artificial intelligence capabilities. Calling the separation of families "inhumane," the employees added: "As the people who build the technologies that Microsoft profits from, we refuse to be complicit. We are part of a growing movement, comprised of many across the industry who recognize the grave responsibility that those creating powerful technology have to ensure what they build is used for good, and not for harm." At Silicon Valley companies including Google, Apple and Facebook, employees have in recent days circulated internal emails asking for donations to nonprofit groups that support immigrants. Many have shared information about protests in San Francisco and Washington. And some of the workers have spoken to their managers about the issue or called on internal message boards for their chief executives to respond. The activity has had an effect. Late on Tuesday, after Microsoft's employee letter went up, the company released a memo from Mr. Nadella in which he called the immigration policy "cruel and abusive" and said Microsoft was not working with the federal government on any projects to separate families. Microsoft's president, Brad Smith, also published a blog post titled, "The Country Needs to Get Immigration Right." Their comments came after other tech chief executives spoke up on Tuesday. Apple's chief, Timothy D. Cook, in an interview with The Irish Times, called the immigration policy "heartbreaking." Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, tweeted that he was a "top donor" to the American Civil Liberties Union and said that "if there is some way for me to help these kids I will do so." Sundar Pichai of Google, Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber and Chuck Robbins of Cisco also tweeted their opposition to the policy. On Facebook, two former employees of the social network started a fund raiser on Saturday to collect 1,500 for migrants who needed legal assistance because of the new policy. By Tuesday afternoon, the effort had garnered more than 5 million from donors who included numerous tech workers, according to a spokeswoman for the fund raising drive. Among the donors were Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and its chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, a Facebook spokesman said. In a Facebook post on Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg called for more donations and said the policy of splitting up immigrant children from their families needed to be stopped. Ms. Sandberg, in her own Facebook post, called the cries of the children taken from their parents "unbearable" and added that the practice "needs to end now." The activity by tech workers is reminiscent of protests in January 2017 when many Silicon Valley employees were up in arms over an executive order from President Trump that suspended immigration from seven mostly Muslim countries. At the time, Google employees held rallies to object; Amazon and Expedia were among the companies that filed in court to stop the order. (Many tech companies comprise workers who are first generation immigrants or who grew up in immigrant families.) Since then, tech workers have watched their companies increasingly come under scrutiny for their moral and ethical behavior. Many tech employees have begun organizing against actions by their own companies in April, for example, thousands of Google employees signed a letter protesting the company's involvement in a Pentagon program that uses artificial intelligence in weaponry. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both increased enforcement on the U.S. Mexico border. Here is how their approaches differed from the Trump administration. This image has become a powerful representation of the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration: a 2 year old girl sobbing, as U.S. border patrol agents searched her mother. "If you cross the border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you. And that child may be separated from you as required by law." The Trump White House's tactic of systematically separating migrant families is a dramatic shift. There have been cases of families being separated under the previous two administrations. But it's always been the exception, not the rule. That said, Trump's crackdowns are happening against the backdrop of more than a decade of stepped up enforcement at the Southern border. In 2005, President George W. Bush launched "Operation Streamline" along the Texas border. He was responding to a spike in apprehensions there. The program called for criminally prosecuting all migrants. "We're going to get control of our borders. We're making this country safer for all our citizens." The idea of zero tolerance took root under Bush, and it's what Trump has used to model his policy after. The Bush era program meant that migrants who were caught in certain border states were put through the criminal system, not civil immigration courts. It made exceptions for adults traveling with children, but others were ushered through mass trials aimed at deporting them quickly. It's a practice that's still around today. "One of the things we committed to do was end 'catch and release' by the end of fiscal year 2006." Under this policy, migrants were held until their deportation hearing. And that meant an increase in beds at private detention centers. In 2014, President Barack Obama declared a crisis at the Southwest border after a surge of unaccompanied minors, mostly from Central America. "We now have an actual humanitarian crisis on the border that only underscores the need to drop the politics and fix our immigration system once and for all." During that child migrant crisis, the Obama administration also focused on deporting people quickly and put some through criminal proceedings. But it chose to hold families together in administrative, not criminal detention. The Obama administration also set up makeshift overflow facilities. And we saw similar images back then, of adults and children behind chain link fences draped in thermal blankets. Now, Trump is reportedly taking it a step further and considering makeshift tent cities to detain minors caught at the border. The Trump administration says it's now merely enforcing the letter of the law. But images of children in detention have made it hard to sell it in political terms, and humanitarian ones, too. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both increased enforcement on the U.S. Mexico border. Here is how their approaches differed from the Trump administration. On Monday, the A.C.L.U. also demanded that Amazon stop selling a facial recognition software tool, called Rekognition, to police and other government entities because it feared it could be used to unfairly target immigrants. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., publicly promoted its work with ICE in January in a blog post, citing it as an example of the success of its technology. At the same time, Microsoft has been positioning itself as tech's moral leader. Mr. Nadella and Mr. Smith have publicly said they want to protect user privacy and establish ethical guidelines for new technology like artificial intelligence. "We need to ask ourselves not only what computers can do but what computers should do," Mr. Nadella said at Microsoft's developer conference last month. Mat Marquis, an independent developer who works with Microsoft, also said in a tweet on Monday that he no longer planned to work with the company because of its ICE contract. When he receives his last payment from Microsoft, he said, he plans to donate the money to a group providing support to families that had been separated at the border. Late Monday, Microsoft issued a statement saying that it was not working with federal agencies to separate children from their families at the border and that it was not aware of its services or products being used for that purpose. It also said it was "dismayed" by the immigration policy and urged that it be changed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
If your kids are making art that's at all about the pandemic drawings of their school from home work spaces, abstractions about anxiety, pictures of their friends drawn at a safe social distance we'd love to see it. We may feature some responses in the Coronavirus Schools Briefing in the coming days. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Leishmaniasis parasites eat human flesh. Cordyceps fungi lead ants to suicide. Toxoplasma gondii eliminate a mouse's fear of cats. And a barnacle called Sacculina carcini castrates crabs, roots itself into their bodies and brains and transforms them into walking zombie slaves that care for the parasite's brood as if it were their own. Parasites are bad except when they're not. In forests across eastern North America, wood eating beetles chew through fallen logs. This helps break down wood and return nutrients to the soil. But many beetles become infected by the thousands with a common, parasitic worm that makes their insides look like a plate of moving spaghetti. There's little evidence the parasites are harmful. Instead, infected beetles seem to be bigger and eat more than uninfected ones, suggests a study published Wednesday in Biology Letters. This increased consumption may help the forest cycle nutrients faster, and benefit the whole ecosystem. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. "Everything is connected," said Andy Davis, an ecologist at the University of Georgia who led the research. "Here's a case where there's a little tiny bug in the forest and it's actually doing a service within the forest. It's doing something important. But then there's another bug that lives inside that bug that's doing something important." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The Trump administration this week ordered the Food and Drug Administration to allow the use of a certain class of laboratory tests, including some for the coronavirus, without first confirming that they work. For months some F.D.A. officials have worried that the pandemic would provide an opening for clinics, academic institutions and commercial labs to get what they had long been lobbying for: the leeway to develop their own laboratory tests for various diseases without F.D.A. oversight. On Wednesday that became a reality. Some lawmakers are also troubled by the change, particularly during a public health emergency when the need for accurate coronavirus tests is high. The F.D.A. has required that it provide emergency authorizations for lab developed tests during other outbreaks. The announcement "is deeply concerning and suggests that the Trump Administration is once again interfering with F.D.A.'s regulation of medical products," Representative Frank Pallone, Jr., of New Jersey, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a statement. "I do not believe that now is the time to reduce oversight of Covid 19 tests," he said. While most common laboratory tests are commercial tests, manufactured and marketed to multiple labs, other tests are developed and validated within one particular laboratory. These tests, called "laboratory developed tests" or LDTs are used solely within that laboratory and generally are not distributed or sold to any other labs or health care facilities, although some work with mail in samples. The new policy states that lab developed tests will no longer require F.D.A. authorization. "This deregulatory action will better prepare us for future pandemics while maintaining regulatory safeguards for quality and accuracy," said Brian Harrison, the chief of staff of the Department of Health and Human Services. The administration faced widespread criticism for failing to make coronavirus tests available earlier in the outbreak, and for ongoing shortages and delays. But critics say that freeing all lab developed tests from F.D.A. scrutiny including those for cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and genetic conditions will pose new problems. "I think it's quite alarming," said Jeff Allen, president and chief executive of Friends of Cancer Research. He noted that a growing number of tests are in development to help determine whether cancer patients are responsive to certain drugs. "It's really important for the performance of those tests to be assured." Mr. Allen and other critics also note that the new plan appears to leave the F.D.A. with no knowledge of what lab developed tests are being devised, much less how they are performing. "Suppose you get a Covid test and you actually have the infection and it comes back negative," said Dr. Michael Carome, director of Public Citizen's Health Research Group. "You may believe you're OK and that may leave you in your home, exposing family and friends to the virus when you should quarantine." Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Earlier this year, the F.D.A. noted just that problem. In response to an inquiry, agency spokeswoman Emma Spaulding said in a statement in May that there were problems with some of the laboratory coronavirus tests whose developers had applied for emergency authorization. "Some of the laboratories didn't do their validation properly, making it impossible to tell if they had a good test or not," Ms. Spaulding said. "Others included data that suggested the test did not perform well, likely missing far more positive cases than authorized tests." Other laboratories, she added, had manufacturing problems such as contamination. And several made unsupported claims in their labels for home testing. With the new change, the agency would not find out about these problems. Under the policy, the F.D.A. retains the power to give emergency authorizations to companies that voluntary apply for them. The agency may also attempt to institute new rules for these tests, but would have to go through a cumbersome formal review process first. Such rules are subject to White House approval. The new policy covers tests developed by laboratories certified under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments program, which is part of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It does not change the requirements for tests that are made and marketed by companies to be sold off site, such as the rapid point of care tests for the coronavirus. Susan Van Meter, executive director of AdvaMedDx, the diagnostic division of AdvaMed, the medical device trade group, said her organization was still trying to assess the implications of the policy. Ms. Van Meter also said her organization would like to see the F.D.A.'s entire policy on lab developed tests updated. "We really think a new, overarching, modernized regulatory framework for all diagnostic tests" is important, she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
For the Museum of Chinese in America, this year has been one disaster after another. In January, a fire ripped through the upper floors of the Chinatown building that held the museum's archives, endangering roughly 85,000 artifacts. Then the coronavirus pandemic, which had prompted a surge in anti Asian harassment, also shut the museum down for months. But in late September, Nancy Yao Maasbach, the museum's president, got a call with some good news. It was from the Ford Foundation, which told her that the museum had been chosen to receive a grant part of a new initiative, organized by some of the nation's most prominent philanthropists, to provide pandemic relief for arts organizations run by people of color. The amount, the museum learned this week, is 3 million, which represents more than an entire year's budget for the small institution. "This is an absolute game changer for us," Ms. Maasbach said at a news conference on Friday. The grant will be disbursed over four years, and will first go toward conserving and repairing the portions of the collection that were threatened in January's fire. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
What are you experiencing, not just physically but mentally? Physically, it is demanding, because it's a full length ballet, and Romeo is on the stage for the majority of the ballet with lots of partnering. Mentally, I feel preoccupied. I spend every spare moment thinking about it and going over it in my head. Your early training included studying with Denys Ganio in Rome. Some of the most memorable moments from "First Position" happen with you and Denys. As you said in the film, "He's very strict, but he's not mean strict." Looking back, how important was he? He pushed me really hard, but always knew exactly when to let up. I never wanted to disappoint him. What other teachers helped pave the way for you? My very first teacher, Michiko Schulbach, in Bremerton, Wash., really set the tone for my training. I was 4. She didn't treat me like a baby, and she expected a lot from me. She didn't teach kids my age, so she put me in class with older kids and expected me to follow along. I was good at mimicking. David Howard was a very significant influence. Mr. Howard, an influential New York teacher, died in 2013. How did he guide you? He allowed me to start taking his professional class at Steps on Broadway when I was 8. He believed that if I could learn the general coordination of the steps at a young age, while still fearless, I would be able to refine them as I got older. How did growth spurts affect your dancing? I had a couple of huge growth spurts between 16 and 18, while I was in Ballet Theater's Studio Company and as an apprentice. I was tall and scrawny for quite a while. It was hard to gain muscle. Because it happened so fast, I sometimes felt like I was dancing in someone else's body. My limbs were hard to control, and it was challenging to find my balance. I also had a hard time with partnering, so I ended up doing a second year in the Studio Company while the rest of my group moved up to the main company as apprentices. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
TROY, N.Y. David Javsicas, a popular seventh grade reading teacher known for urging students to act out dialogue in the books they read in class, sometimes feels wistful for the days when he taught math. A quiz, he recalls, could quickly determine which concepts students had not yet learned. Then, "you teach the kids how to do it, and within a week or two you can usually fix it," he said. Helping students to puzzle through different narrative perspectives or subtext or character motivation, though, can be much more challenging. "It could take months to see if what I'm teaching is effective," he said. Educators, policy makers and business leaders often fret about the state of math education, particularly in comparison with other countries. But reading comprehension may be a larger stumbling block. Here at Troy Prep Middle School, a charter school near Albany that caters mostly to low income students, teachers are finding it easier to help students hit academic targets in math than in reading, an experience repeated in schools across the country. Students entering the fifth grade here are often several years behind in both subjects, but last year, 100 percent of seventh graders scored at a level of proficient or advanced on state standardized math tests. In reading, by contrast, just over half of the seventh graders met comparable standards. The results are similar across the 31 other schools in the Uncommon Schools network, which enrolls low income students in Boston, New York City, Rochester and Newark. After attending an Uncommon school for two years, said Brett Peiser, the network's chief executive, 86 percent of students score at a proficient or advanced level in math, while only about two thirds reach those levels in reading over the same period. "Math is very close ended," Mr. Peiser said. Reading difficulties, he said, tend to be more complicated to resolve. "Is it a vocabulary issue? A background knowledge issue? A sentence length issue? How dense is the text?" Mr. Peiser said, rattling off a string of potential reading roadblocks. "It's a three dimensional problem that you have to attack. And it just takes time." Uncommon's experience is not so uncommon. Other charter networks and school districts similarly wrestle to bring struggling readers up to speed while having more success in math. In a Mathematica Policy Research study of schools run by KIPP, one of the country's best known charter operators, researchers found that on average, students who had been enrolled in KIPP middle schools for three years had test scores that indicated they were about 11 months or the equivalent of more than a full grade level ahead of the national average in math. In reading, KIPP's advantage over the national average was smaller, about eight months. Among large public urban districts, which typically have large concentrations of poor students, six raised eighth grade math scores on the federal tests known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress from 2009 to 2011. Only one in Charlotte, N.C. was able to do so in reading. Studies have repeatedly found that "teachers have bigger impacts on math test scores than on English test scores," said Jonah Rockoff, an economist at Columbia Business School. He was a co author of a study that showed that teachers who helped students raise standardized test scores had a lasting effect on those students' future incomes, as well as other lifelong outcomes. Teachers and administrators who work with children from low income families say one reason teachers struggle to help these students improve reading comprehension is that deficits start at such a young age: in the 1980s, the psychologists Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley found that by the time they are 4 years old, children from poor families have heard 32 million fewer words than children with professional parents. "Your mother or father doesn't come up and tuck you in at night and read you equations," said Geoffrey Borman, a professor at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin. "But parents do read kids bedtime stories, and kids do engage in discussions around literacy, and kids are exposed to literacy in all walks of life outside of school." Reading also requires background knowledge of cultural, historical and social references. Math is a more universal language of equations and rules. "Math is really culturally neutral in so many ways," said Scott Shirey, executive director of KIPP Delta Public Schools in Arkansas. "For a child who's had a vast array of experiences around the world, the Pythagorean theorem is just as difficult or daunting as it would be to a child who has led a relatively insular life." Education experts also say reading development simply requires that students spend so much more time practicing. And while reading has been the subject of fierce pedagogical battles, "the ideological divisions are not as great on the math side as they are on the literacy side," said Linda Chen, deputy chief academic officer in the Boston Public Schools. In 2011, 29 percent of eighth graders eligible for free lunch in Boston scored at proficient or advanced levels on federal math exams, compared with just 17 percent in reading. At Troy Prep, which is housed in a renovated warehouse, teachers work closely with students to help them overcome difficulties in both math and reading, breaking classes into small groups. But the relative challenges of teaching both subjects were evident on a recent morning. During a fifth grade reading class, students read aloud from "Bridge to Terabithia," by Katherine Paterson. Naomi Frame, the teacher, guided the students in a close reading of a few paragraphs. But when she asked them to select which of two descriptions fit Terabithia, the magic kingdom created by the two main characters, the class stumbled to draw inferences from the text. Later, in math class, the same students had less difficulty following Bridget McElduff as she taught a lesson on adding fractions with different denominators. At the beginning of the class, Ms. McElduff rapidly called out equations involving two fractions, and the students eagerly called back the answers. Because the students were familiar with the basic principles finding the least common multiple of the denominators, rewriting each number as an equivalent fraction, adding the numerators, finding the greatest common factor, then reducing the final answer they quickly caught on when she asked them to add three fractions. New curriculum standards known as the Common Core that have been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia could raise the bar in math. "As math has become more about talking, arguing and writing, it's beginning to require these kinds of cultural resources that depend on something besides school," said Deborah L. Ball, dean of the school of education at the University of Michigan. Teachers and administrators within the Uncommon network are confident that they will eventually crack the nut in reading. One solution: get the students earlier. Paul Powell, principal of Troy Prep, said the school, which added kindergarten two years ago and first grade last fall, would add second , third and fourth grade classes over the next three years. Over time, teachers hope to develop the same results in reading that they have produced in math. Already, students at high school campuses in the Uncommon network in Brooklyn and Newark post average scores on SAT reading tests that exceed some national averages. "I don't think there is very much research out there to say that when you can take a student who is impoverished and dramatically behind, that you can fix it in three years," said Mr. Javsicas, the seventh grade reading teacher, who also coordinates special education at Troy Prep. "But I do think the signs seem fairly positive that if we can take kids from kindergarten and take them through 12th grade, I think we can get there." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Throughout the fall, the producer Greg Berlanti was trying to save his cable drama "You." The series had premiered on Lifetime in September, but its viewership was virtually nonexistent: roughly 650,000 people were tuning in to each episode of the soapy stalker thriller, starring Penn Badgley. Even Mr. Berlanti, one of the most successful and prolific producers in television thanks to shows like "Riverdale," "Arrow" and "Blindspot," conceded in an interview that "barely anybody watched" it. He made repeated calls to Lifetime executives, asking for patience and making his case for a second season. It wasn't enough. In early December, Lifetime announced it was finished with "You." But right after Christmas, something happened. "You" started lighting up social media. People were searching for it online. Entertainment sites like The Ringer were writing about the show. What changed? It began streaming on Netflix. Mr. Berlanti heard from family and friends about how much they were enjoying his new show, ignoring the fact that it had debuted months earlier. "It's very often in direct proportion to how young they are," he said. "The younger they are, the more they discuss the show as though it had never existed before Dec. 26." Read The New York Times review of "You." Last week, Netflix declared "You" had drawn the sort of audience to make it a "huge hit." The streaming service said that "You" was on track to be watched by 40 million households within its first four weeks on the service. The Netflix viewership disclosure one of the few times the service has made those numbers public, seven years after it began airing original series set off something of an earthquake in the industry. Could the numbers be believed? Could it be possible that a show that premiered on cable television may as well not have existed until Netflix which now has 139 million paying subscribers, including 58.5 million in the United States came around to stream it? Netflix is already a television network and a movie studio. Was it one step closer to effectively becoming television itself? As Daniel D'Addario, a TV critic for Variety, posited, "'You' flailing on Lifetime and being treated by the viewing public as a Netflix original is going to be remembered as a major turning point in what will shortly be a contraction of the TV industry." And it should be noted that Lifetime is not exactly a ratings wasteland. Its documentary "Surviving R. Kelly" has been one of the year's early hits. For the time being, Mr. Berlanti is a believer. "It went from being one of the least watched shows I've ever worked on and been most proud of and I'm choosing to take Netflix at their word on this to being the most watched show I've ever worked on in 20 something years of being in the business," he said. Oh, and Netflix is also making a second season of "You." Filming begins next month. Throughout the weekend, rival television executives groused privately that the viewership number Netflix released was virtually meaningless. Netflix explained that each of those 40 million viewers had watched at least 70 percent of one episode. ("You" has 10 episodes in its first season.) How that 40 million would translate into a traditional viewership figure is unknown. An average of 12.7 million people have watched this season of "The Big Bang Theory" on CBS, but a significantly higher number of people have sampled at least one episode. Few in the television industry would put much stock in such a figure. 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 reached for comment, Lifetime referred to an earlier statement it released when it cut ties with "You," saying, "We wish the cast and crew the best as the series continues on at Netflix." Mr. Berlanti began developing "You" almost four years ago with the producer Sera Gamble. Showtime originally planned to make the series, which is based on a novel by Caroline Kepnes, before passing on it. It then went to Lifetime, which over the summer committed to making a second season. "You" centers on a Manhattan bookstore manager named Joe (Mr. Badgley) who becomes obsessed with a young woman who stops by his shop. He plumbs her social media channels. He follows her home. He begins reading her text messages. The occasionally hilarious series, which examines internet privacy and youth culture, was warmly received by critics when it debuted in September. The New Yorker called it "a scary, delicious snack of a show." What it could not find was an audience on cable. On the days it aired, it had trouble gaining bigger ratings than the 7 a.m. edition of "SportsCenter." Months before the series premiered, Netflix signed on to be the streaming partner of the series. Bela Bajaria, a vice president of content for Netflix who scooped up the streaming rights, had seen success with "Riverdale," another of Mr. Berlanti's series. In its second season, after "Riverdale" began streaming on Netflix, its viewership on the CW shot up 42 percent. Netflix has had that effect on series before, including AMC's Emmy winning drama "Breaking Bad," which saw increased viewership totals after it began streaming. Ms. Bajaria was enthusiastic about "You" from the moment she read the script. "We really felt this hit a sweet spot for our audience, and we felt that our members would love the show," she said. "I was hoping it would be big." By the time Lifetime decided to renege on its second season commitment in early December, Netflix said it would make a second season even though the series had not started streaming yet. Ms. Bajaria's confidence in the show was well rewarded. She pored over the viewership numbers between Christmas and New Year's Day and saw Netflix had a hit on its hands immediately after it began streaming. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Jerome Karle, who shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with a former college classmate for creating what is now an essential tool in the development of new drugs, died on June 6 at a hospice in Annandale, Va. He was 94. The death was confirmed by Isabella Karle, his wife of 71 years, on Thursday. The technique developed by Dr. Karle and Herbert A. Hauptman, called X ray crystallography, is now routinely used by scientists to determine the shapes of complex molecules like proteins. "These structures are solved all over the world on a daily basis," said Louis J. Massa, a professor of physics and chemistry at Hunter College in Manhattan and a collaborator with Dr. Karle on more recent research. "It's one of those things that's taken for granted now." In X ray crystallography, an X ray beam bounces off the crystal form of a molecule to produce a pattern of points of light. The positions of the atoms in the molecule are then deduced from the pattern. But when Dr. Karle and Dr. Hauptman started working on the problem after World War II at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, it was "thought to be not just difficult but mathematically impossible to solve," Dr. Massa said. Dr. Karle and Dr. Hauptman, who had met at City College in New York, published their main ideas in the 1950s, but it took many years for them to convince others that their technique worked. "In the beginning, people didn't understand what my father was saying," said Dr. Karle's daughter Louise Karle Hanson, adding that she could "remember his frustration." Isabella Karle, who was also a chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory, joined her husband in the work, employing X ray crystallography to determine the structure of previously intractable molecules. "After I found some structures that no one could have dreamt of solving before, it started to get a lot of attention," she said. With a clearer picture of the structure of biological molecules, drug researchers now have a much better idea of the chemistry going on inside the body and how to formulate drugs to treat illnesses. "He could have gone at 14," Isabella Karle said. "I think his mother thought at five feet tall, he was a little short to go to college." Dr. Karle and Dr. Hauptman both graduated from City College in 1937. Dr. Karle obtained a master's degree in biology at Harvard in 1938 and then worked at the New York State Health Department in Albany to earn money for further studies. He enrolled in graduate school at the University of Michigan in 1940. The student sitting next to him in the physical chemistry laboratory was Isabella Lugoski, whom he married in 1942. "That was alphabetical order," Isabella Karle said. Just as precocious a student as Dr. Karle, she had finished her undergraduate studies at 19. After the couple completed their doctorates, they both worked in Chicago helping develop the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project, concentrating on the chemistry of extracting and purifying plutonium. In 1946, they moved to the Naval Research Laboratory, which was expanding into basic science research. Dr. Hauptman joined the laboratory the following year, and he and Dr. Karle began thinking about X rays and crystals. In the early years, the X ray crystallography calculations were laborious. "These things were done by hand and by eye, originally," Dr. Massa said. "They would make estimates by the human eye how bright something was or not." With faster computers in the 1970s, the use and acceptance of X ray crystallography accelerated. In jointly awarding the two men the Nobel Prize in 1985, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited their achievement "in the development of direct methods for the determination of crystal structures." It noted that "in order to understand the nature of chemical bonds, the function of molecules in biological contexts, and the mechanism and dynamics of reactions, knowledge of the exact molecular structure is absolutely necessary." Dr. Karle was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In addition to his wife and his daughter Louise, he is survived by two other daughters, Jean Karle and Madeleine Karle Tawney, and four grandchildren. Dr. Hauptman died in 2011. Dr. Karle continued to work at the Naval Research Laboratory and advanced his studies of X ray crystallography. With Dr. Massa and Lulu Huang, another scientist there, he helped develop a technique to glean from the X ray patterns not only the positions of the atoms but also the shapes of the electron clouds and the strength of the molecules' bonds. Dr. Karle and his wife retired from the Naval Research Laboratory in June 2009. After the academy announced the Nobels, Dr. Karle and Dr. Hauptman were at a meeting of the American Crystallographic Association, Dr. Massa recalled. Three decades earlier, Dr. Karle had appeared before the same group, only to leave frustrated by his inability to explain his work to his colleagues. The meeting was being held in a large auditorium, Dr. Massa said, and Dr. Karle and Dr. Hauptman walked in unannounced. "They were immediately recognized, and everyone stood up and clapped," Dr. Massa said. "That gives you the sense of the enormous importance of the problem these guys solved. I've never seen anything like it, before or since." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
On the brink of entering the N.B.A., LaMelo Ball is a most unusual prospect. His name has been suggested as a potential No. 1 pick in Wednesday's N.B.A. draft, but he also could fall out of the top five in a class considered by executives to lack standout players. Like his brother Lonzo, who was selected with the No. 2 pick in 2017, LaMelo's shooting form is unorthodox to the point of suspect. His size 6 feet 7 inches and roughly 180 pounds does not make him a natural fit at any position, at least not immediately. And nearly three years after he left the California high school where he first burst onto the national scene, there is still a very limited sample of tape showing Ball succeeding against the kind of competition he might face in the N.B.A. In some ways, though, Ball, 19, represents a new generation of basketball players who will be populating the N.B.A. in the coming decade. As the youngest of three basketball playing, reality show making brothers, he is already more famous than most professional athletes, with more Instagram followers than the majority of N.B.A. players. His highlights had been viewed by millions on social media before he was old enough to drive a car. And all of that attention has come in spite of his having circumvented the N.C.A.A. entirely, perhaps proving that an American player can skip attending a leading program like Duke or North Carolina, earn significant money overseas and still be a top pick. On that last point, he is not alone this year. James Wiseman, who played only three games at Memphis University, and Killian Hayes, an American born point guard who grew up in France, are also projected to be lottery picks. It is possible, if not probable, that the majority of picks in the draft's top 10 will have little to no connection to the N.C.A.A. system. But Ball's path goes far beyond what even the most hyped recent prospects, like Zion Williamson, have gone through. His personal life and that of his two brothers Lonzo and LiAngelo has been on display through an ongoing reality show, "Ball In The Family." He has grown up in the public eye, in front of an audience hungry for more. Yet he is, so far, a celebrity not because of his on court play but mostly because of his last name. What has defined Ball's career and the way he and his talents are perceived is that name, and the others who possess it. And that may ultimately determine where he is drafted. So what to make of this particular Ball as he gets ready to play in the league? Some teams will certainly be wary of the attention that follows his family. Any team that takes on the LaMelo experience also will take on a relationship with LaVar Ball, the bombastic family patriarch with a craving for the spotlight. Past experience has shown that this does not go well: LaVar was publicly critical of Luke Walton, the former Los Angeles Lakers coach, after Lonzo entered the league, one of many of his sons' coaches LaVar has blasted over the years. But beyond some comments about LaMelo's not being a good fit on the Golden State Warriors, one of the teams that has reportedly scouted him at a private workout, LaVar has actually been uncharacteristically quiet over the last year. And LaMelo seemed more than happy to brush off his father's comments. "I'm my own man, he's his own man," LaMelo told reporters recently. "He has his opinions, I have mine. I feel like I can play on any team, and do good anywhere I go." The run in Lithuania lasted four months. LaMelo struggled against more physically developed players. LaVar, predictably, clashed with the coach and pulled both of his sons from the league before the season ended, but not before creating an exhibition pro am league to showcase his children. LaVar coached one of the games. In the summer of 2018, LaMelo signed with the Junior Basketball Association, a semiprofessional league launched by his father that targeted high school graduates who did not want to go to college. That fall, he opted to finish high school at the SPIRE Academy in Geneva, Ohio, a school focusing on athletic training. (Eventually, the J.B.A. collapsed.) Where LaMelo made his best impression was in Australia. Last year, he joined the Illawarra Hawks of the country's National Basketball League, where he averaged 17 points, 7.6 rebounds and 6.8 assists in 12 games. But even as he struggled with long range shooting he made just 25 percent of his 3 pointers and a foot injury ended his season, Ball did enough to raise his stock for the draft. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
DUNDEE, N.Y. Five years after it exploded into a political conflagration over "death panels," the issue of paying doctors to talk to patients about end of life care is making a comeback, and such sessions may be covered for the 50 million Americans on Medicare as early as next year. Bypassing the political process, private insurers have begun reimbursing doctors for these "advance care planning" conversations as interest in them rises along with the number of aging Americans. People are living longer with illnesses, and many want more input into how they will spend their final days, including whether they want to die at home or in the hospital, and whether they want full fledged life sustaining treatment, just pain relief or something in between. Some states, including Colorado and Oregon, recently began covering the sessions for Medicaid patients. But far more significant, Medicare may begin covering end of life discussions next year if it approves a recent request from the American Medical Association, the country's largest association of physicians and medical students. One of the A.M.A.'s roles is to create billing codes for medical services, codes used by doctors, hospitals and insurers. It recently created codes for end of life conversations and submitted them to Medicare. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs Medicare, would not discuss whether it will agree to cover end of life discussions; its decision is expected this fall. But the agency often adopts A.M.A. recommendations, which are developed in meetings attended by its representatives. And the political environment is less toxic than it was when the "death panel" label was coined; although there are still opponents, there are more proponents, including Republican politicians. If Medicare adopts the change, its decision will also set the standard for private insurers, encouraging many more doctors to engage in these conversations. "We think it's really important to incentivize this kind of care," said Dr. Barbara Levy, chairwoman of the A.M.A. committee that submits reimbursement recommendations to Medicare. "The idea is to make sure patients and their families understand the consequences, the pros and cons and options so they can make the best decision for them." Now, some doctors conduct such conversations for free or shoehorn them into other medical visits. Dr. Joseph Hinterberger, a family physician here in Dundee, wants to avoid situations in which he has had to decide for incapacitated patients who had no family or stated preferences. Recently, he spent an unreimbursed hour with Mary Pat Pennell, a retired community college dean, walking through advance directive forms. Ms. Pennell, 80, who sold her blueberry farm and lives with a roommate and four cats, quickly said she would not want to be resuscitated if her heart or lungs stopped. But she took longer to weigh options if she was breathing but otherwise unresponsive. "I'd like to be as comfortable as I can possibly be," she said at first. "I don't want to choke, and I don't want to throw up." With reimbursement, "I'd do one of these a day," said Dr. Hinterberger, whose 3,000 patients in the Finger Lakes region range from college professors to Mennonite farmers who tie horse and buggies to his parking lot's hitching post. If Medicare covers end of life counseling, that could profoundly affect the American way of dying, experts said. But the impact would depend on how much doctors were paid, the allowed frequency of conversations, whether psychologists or other nonphysicians could conduct them, and whether the conversations must be in person or could include phone calls with long distance family members. Paying for only one session and completion of advance directives would have limited value, experts said. "This notion that somehow a single conversation and the completion of a document is really an important intervention to the outcome of care is, I think, a legal illusion," said Dr. Diane E. Meier, director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care. "It has to be a series of recurring conversations over years." End of life planning remains controversial. After Sarah Palin's "death panel" label killed efforts to include it in the Affordable Care Act in 2009, Medicare added it to a 2010 regulation, allowing the federal program to cover "voluntary advance care planning" in annual wellness visits. But bowing to political pressure, the Obama administration had Medicare rescind that portion of the regulation. In doing so, Medicare wrote that it had not considered the viewpoints of members of Congress and others who opposed it. Politically, the issue was dead. But private insurers, often encouraged by doctors, began taking steps. "We are seeing more insurers who are reimbursing for these important conversations," said Susan Pisano, a spokeswoman for America's Health Insurance Plans, a trade association. The industry, which usually uses Medicare billing codes, had created its own code under a system that allows that if Medicare does not have one, and more insurance companies are using it or covering the discussions in other ways. This year, for example, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan began paying an average of 35 per conversation, face to face or by phone, conducted by doctors, nurses, social workers and others. And Cambia Health Solutions, which covers 2.2 million patients in Idaho, Oregon, Utah and Washington, started a program including end of life conversations and training in conducting them. Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield of New York does something similar, and its medical director, Dr. Patricia Bomba, has spearheaded the development of New York's advance directive system. Doctors can be reimbursed 150 for an hourlong conversation to complete the form, and 350 for two hours. Dr. Hinterberger learned of Excellus's coverage when he called recently to ask about end of life discussions, but even if he undergoes Excellus's training to qualify for reimbursement, most of his older patients have only Medicare. End of life planning has also resurfaced in Congress. Two recent bipartisan bills would have Medicare cover such conversations, and a third, introduced by Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, would pay Medicare patients for completing advance directives. But few people think the bills can pass. "The politics are tough," said Dr. Phillip Rodgers, co chairman of public policy for the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. "People are so careful about getting anywhere close to the idea that somebody might be denying lifesaving care." Burke Balch, director of the Powell Center for Medical Ethics at the National Right to Life Committee, said in a statement that many doctors believed in "hastening death for those deemed to have a 'poor quality of life.' " If Medicare covers advance care planning, he said, that plus cost saving motivations will pressure patients "to reject life preserving treatment." "Honestly, sometimes I'm making an argument that treatment is not as bad as you think because of our ability to mitigate side effects," said Dr. Thomas Gribbin, a Grand Rapids, Mich., oncologist who recently persuaded two Michigan insurers to cover end of life conversations. It is unclear if advance care planning saves money, but some studies suggest that it reduces hospitalizations. Many people prefer to die at home or in hospices, so cost saving can be an inadvertent result, said Dr. William McDade, president of the Illinois State Medical Society, which asked the A.M.A. to create codes for the discussions. Dr. Hinterberger spent 40 minutes with Helen Hurley, 83, whose lung disease requires her to use nasal tubes connected to an oxygen tank she carries in a flowered bag. Then she tired, asking to finish the discussion in future visits, "a little at a time." But Mary Ann Zebrowski, 75, a retired vineyard worker with diabetes and arrhythmia, had a lot to say. She described her husband's collapse in 2008, saying she was glad he had been resuscitated, but felt pressured to agree to a feeding tube because a doctor said, "What are you trying to do, kill your husband?" She eventually decided to remove the tube and let him die. She said she wanted no feeding tube for herself, but short trials of other measures. Afterward, she seemed relieved, saying, "I just don't want to put my kids through having to make these decisions." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Marilyn Monroe is falling to pieces again. That most endlessly analyzed of Hollywood sex goddesses is now being subjected to an especially rigorous process of deconstruction or is it evaporation? at the Shed, the new, 475 million arts center of Hudson Yards, where Anne Carson's "Norma Jeane Baker of Troy" opened on Tuesday night. "Norma Jeane" which is less a play than a staged poem is the inaugural production at the 500 seat Griffin Theater, and it has cultural cachet to burn, with the added draw of pop appeal. Ms. Carson is the esteemed Canadian poet, classicist, professor and translator, known for playfully finding serious links between the ancient past and the evanescent present. The director is Katie Mitchell, the intensely cerebral theater and opera director. And its sole performers and this, for the less recondite theatergoer, is the beauty part are that fine stage and screen actor Ben Whishaw and the opera star Renee Fleming. Neither Mr. Whishaw nor Ms. Fleming portrays the title character in this equally hypnotic and exasperating production. Or not exactly. When first seen, on a snowy New Year's Eve in the early 1960s, their characters appear to be a rather anxious businessman (Mr. Whishaw) and the thoroughly professional stenographer (Ms. Fleming) he has recruited to help him work, after hours, on a special project. That would be the very script of the show we're watching, which is indeed about Norma Jeane Baker. If you don't know that Norma Jeane was Monroe's birth name, I wish you much luck in following this show. Because that's only the first and by far the simplest of the identities attached to Monroe in Ms. Carson's investigation of the illusion and substance of feminine beauty in a testosterone fueled world of war. For Ms. Carson has merged Monroe with another much maligned sex object, Helen of Troy. You know who she is, right, the face that launched a thousand ships? But wait. This Helen isn't exactly the woman you learned about in school. Instead, she's the heroine of Euripides' seldom performed tragedy "Helen." In that play, Helen never set foot in Troy, having been spirited away by the Gods (to exile in Egypt) before the war ever started. There was someone who appeared to be Helen living with her abductor, Paris. But she, it turns out, was only a phantasm or (to use a word much savored in Ms. Carson's poem) a cloud. That is the story that Mr. Whishaw's character is trying to tell, more or less, except that in his rendering, Helen is Norma Jeane, while her ostensibly cuckolded husband, Menelaus is transformed into Arthur, King of Sparta and New York (referring to Monroe's third husband, the playwright Arthur Miller). The movie director Fritz Lang figures in this version, as does Monroe's confidant Truman Capote, and oh, yes the singer Pearl Bailey. Norma Jeane is further conflated with another abductee from Greek mythology, Persephone, especially as she was conjured by the 20th century British poet Stevie Smith. All these variations on the theme of beautiful women held captive by men echo a phrase that is both spoken and sung throughout this production: "It's a disaster to be a girl." His ability to cross the gender divide without coyness or caricature turns out to be an invaluable asset in "Norma Jeane." As his nameless man dictates his reworked version of Euripides replete with spoken instructions as to punctuation and spacing, along with lengthy digressions on strategies of war he slowly divests himself of his workaday clothing. What's revealed beneath his business suit is a deeply scarred torso, possibly you may infer a legacy of time in the military. Then, little by little, this nervous, determined man reinvents himself painted by fingernail by painted fingernail, false eyelash by false eyelash as Monroe as she was seen in "The Seven Year Itch." It is a process that at first appalls Ms. Fleming's transcribing secretary. But as the production continues, she warms to her wounded employer's ardent attempts to understand a woman whose suicide is still fresh in the American mind. By the end, they have together achieved a sort of improbable apotheosis of empathy. Or that's the way I saw it. Ms. Carson is not the most immediately accessible of writers. Nor is Ms. Mitchell whose recent work includes the divisive, gender swapping Martin Crimp play "When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other" at London's National Theater one to lead her audiences by the hand. She has rearranged Ms. Carson's original text so that the play now begins with Mr. Whishaw uttering the ancient Greek word tis, which he explains is a highly protean pronoun. The monologue that follows is dense with references that range from the academic to the tabloid. And it is heard not only as spoken live by Mr. Whishaw, but as recited by his voice on a tape recorder. His words are occasionally picked up and echoed, often in song, by Ms. Fleming. From time to time, her creamy, disembodied voice floats through the air like thought made sound. You don't really you need to know your classics or even your Hollywood lore to grasp the thematic gist of "Norma Jeane," which ponders the follies of war making men and their abuses of women. Sometimes Ms. Carson's conjunctions of figures past and present can seem both too obvious and too obscure. The show's surprisingly predictable conclusion lacks the haunting resonance it aspires to. But the precise calibration of the physical production holds your attention. (Or held mine, anyway; there have regularly been walkouts since it began previews last weekend.) The cohesive technical elements include Alex Eales's perfectly detailed "Mad Men" era set, Sussie Juhlin Wallen's matching costumes, Anthony Doran's crepuscular lighting and Donato Wharton's creepily insinuating sound. Mr. Whishaw and Ms. Fleming are, against the odds, marvelous. They somehow lend an emotional spontaneity to ritualistic words and gestures, while conjuring an affecting relationship between two people who, after all, don't even exist in Ms. Carson's text. Mr. Whishaw's astutely measured metamorphosis here suggests both deep, contemporary personal neurosis and atavistic self sacrifice. As might be expected, Ms. Fleming brings a luxuriant, caressing tone to the song fragments composed by the composer Paul Clark (which sometimes bring to mind Samuel Barber's "Knoxville: Summer of 1915"). What you may not realize is that most of the sound effects and background music have been made entirely from a base of recorded clusters of notes sung by Ms. Fleming. This seems appropriate to a show about the mutability of perception and image. And though it's a man who narrates and tries to make sense of Norma Jeane's story, it is fittingly a woman's voice that supplies the aural oxygen in which it unfolds. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Here are edited excerpts from our conversation. Is there an overriding philosophy to what you collect? The collection isn't exclusively Cuban and Cuban American, but everything I have in my house is connected to a certain specific anecdote in my life. They're not just things I went out and bought. There's a story behind them. Many of the Jose Bedia paintings you own seem to be storytellers in their own right. Bedia is very good at that. If you look at his "Proyecto... y Resultado," the first panel shows two men carrying a house. In the second panel the house has fallen and broken apart. The two men stand in grief while the house appears to have grown its own brain a social movement run astray and the best comment I've ever seen on the Cuban revolution. You visited Havana in May. Were you impressed by any of the artists you saw there? Young Cuban artists have discovered that they can make a very decent living, better than anyone else's, including doctors and lawyers there, with what they sell to tourists. The work runs from A to Z, but the unique Cuban ness isn't there. If you leaf through a recent issue of Artforum magazine, it would all be perfectly at home there. It's being made just because it can sell. It's not going to last through the years. So you're no longer interested in Havana's contemporary artists? It hit me when I was there that I was having zero emotions. There are no visible traces of the memories that have lingered in my head for years. Every movie house I went to as a kid is closed and demolished. Even the places I saw when I visited Cuba in the '80s are obliterated. You walk around on the broken sidewalks and there's all these 20 , 30 , 40 year old men doing nothing on a weekday, just hanging out. Is this what socialism brought? It's very disheartening. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
BRUSSELS Renewable energy in Europe should be generated and distributed on a continental scale to make the greatest contribution toward reducing greenhouse gases, according to a report that raises significant challenges for a fragmented region. The report, to be released Tuesday, was compiled by the European Climate Foundation, a group financed by philanthropic organizations, using studies carried out by McKinsey, a consulting firm. Among its recommendations is a gigantic power cable that would link solar farms in Spain with energy hungry countries like Poland. Such a link could ship huge volumes of so called clean electricity, but it could face political opposition in countries like France. The report underscores how various renewable power sources, including wind from the North Sea, will need to be linked on a transcontinental grid to generate a secure and reliable supply of alternative energy to substitute for fossil fuels. Such a grid would probably be easier to build in countries that span continents, as in the United States and China. In Europe, power grids remain largely confined to countries, with limited cross border connections. The report, to be presented in Brussels to the European Union energy commissioner, Gunther Oettinger, and the climate commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, said that cross border connections would need to change if clean power was to be distributed more widely. "Transmission must develop from a minor trading and reserve sharing role to one that enables significant energy exchanges between regions across the year," according to the report. The addition of a huge interconnector crossing France could help French utilities export more nuclear power, but it also could cut into those exports by providing customers with an alternative source of electricity. Countries including France would need to "consider wider regional benefits than is currently the case," the report said. Another factor that could impede the plans is longstanding opposition to unsightly pylons and cables in border areas like the Pyrenees, the mountain range between Spain and France. Current capacity between Spain and France is less than a gigawatt and would have to rise to as much as 40 gigawatts to carry sufficient quantities of solar generated electricity, the report said. Efforts were needed "to change public attitudes regarding the construction of large scale overhead transmission infrastructure," it said; otherwise, "alternative solutions" to overhead lines over the Pyrenees, like underground and underwater cables, "may need to be considered." The European Climate Foundation said it had invited all major European utilities to participate in the study. EDF, which operates nuclear power plants in France, was not involved. A spokeswoman for EDF said it was possible that its subsidiaries were involved in the report, but she had no details. GDF Suez, another French utility with substantial nuclear operations, was involved but did not support the conclusions. A spokeswoman for GDF Suez said she had been unable to obtain an explanation as to why the company had distanced itself from the report. The report also seems to have irritated Alstom, a French engineering company that has a major focus on technology to reduce emissions from electricity plants fueled by coal or natural gas. Alstom participated but did not support the conclusions because it said parts of the report underplayed the role of carbon capture technologies. A company spokeswoman, Mary Varkados, said Alstom welcomed the report's main findings, but said that "further work will be needed" on how to reach goals for lowering emissions. Major energy companies that signed the final report included Shell, the English Dutch oil and gas company, and RWE, a German electric utility that in previous years had produced the most carbon dioxide of any company based in the European Union. RWE is participating in efforts to deliver solar generated electricity from North Africa. The power sector is currently the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in many parts of Europe. The report said the European Union would need to combine solar power from Spain with wind power from the North Sea if it were to meet a pledge made last summer to reduce emissions by 80 percent by 2050. That will be expensive but manageable, according to the report. The European Union already will have to invest 4.2 trillion euros, or 5.7 trillion, across the economy over the next 40 years to ensure it continues to generate sufficient power by midcentury, according to the report. To reach its goal of reducing emissions, the bloc would have to invest a total of 7 trillion euros, or about 66 percent more, it said. But the cost of energy to the economy should start to drop as of 2020 because of reduced fossil fuel use and efficiency savings that would help offset the cost of building a low carbon infrastructure. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Midday on Sunday, Nov. 15, the skyline of Manhattan came into view off to my left as our tour bus, still on the Jersey side, was driving up from Washington. This vista, to me, is always the opening of Milos Forman's "Hair." I worked on the film and this is where we shot Claude Hooper Bukowski's arrival, because for Milos, this location was iconic. It represented the America offered to any outsiders set on challenging themselves in a world bigger than any they had yet known. To me this is a feeling that is never outgrown. Set to open our evening of new dances in the Koch Theater at Lincoln Center on Tuesday, Nov. 17, the final stop on my 50th anniversary tour, I had to wonder, how will we do, even though the last year and a half had been gearing toward this moment. Visiting backstage early Monday to check on the load in, I did some exorcising of ghosts, remembering moments from the past in this house, and then got down to the business at hand. When the dancers came in on Tuesday afternoon for the tech rehearsal we were ready to go. After 16 different theaters over nine weeks on the road this tech went smoothly. The opening was solid. Wednesday was slightly better, a little more relaxed. Thursday hit a trough. I worried a bit; the dancers still had four shows to go. The company was made up of 12 dancers, all onstage for most of an extremely demanding 90 minutes. So far not a single dancer had missed a single show, and I know that my willingness to project myself into their bodies, sampling their energies at any point along the trajectory of their evening, was partially responsible for this resiliency. But tour fatigue had to be accumulating. Friday evening, gathering for the traditional mark through of the first fanfare before the house opened up, I could see the dancers were back on track. Saturday afternoon and evening the shows became progressively stronger, and the Sunday matinee was a triumph, the strongest show of all. I was stunned; I knew the dancers were buoyed by the audience's enthusiastic support, as they had been all along the tour, but never did I expect to see a homestretch performance so strong and confident. A blowout perhaps, but a perfectly poised and paced last show with strength to spare way to go guys. After the final show on Sunday night I slept 12 hours and took Monday off. But Tuesday was time to think again about being in the studio. There is absolutely nothing glamorous about starting over again. One foot down, next foot up. Find two ideas to rub together. No judgment, just get it down. But this small daily practice is, for me, sanity, and to begin constructing a new phrase of movement is my connection to the world. During the tour, I have also connected through this blog. Writing has been a special challenge and presents a conflict. It is rare that a creator has the opportunity to share both context and subtext with the audience: what surrounds the work its difficulties and challenges as well as its inspiration. I suspect that is in part because these are two completely different modes: One is doing, the other is accounting. It's like trying to be both the commentator and coach at the same Monday night football game. I'm still working this out. Yes, art comes from a singular point of view, but you won't go far by yourself. Fannie Ginsberg, my very first techie from my very first concert in 1965, was waiting at the Koch stage door after the last show. She had driven up from Virginia in case we needed help with our load out not because she was asked but because she still loves being a part of the show. Friends like her, who will do whatever it takes, help me continue to plunge off a very high platform into a very tiny thimble of water, which is the way I describe my first dance, "Tank Dive." It was a gamble. I survived. Thank you. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Canadiens goalie Carey Price, the N.H.L.'s most prominent Indigenous player, participated Sunday in the first league game broadcast in Plains Cree. For the First Time, an N.H.L. Game Is Broadcast in Plains Cree MONTREAL Fred Sasakamoose thought this day would never come. Sasakamoose, the N.H.L.'s first Indigenous player when he skated in 11 games with the Chicago Black Hawks during the 1953 54 season, watched from the Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation in northern Saskatchewan on Sunday night as the Montreal Canadiens battled the Carolina Hurricanes and heard his own language. It was the first N.H.L. broadcast in Plains Cree, the Algonquian language he grew up speaking. "It makes me so proud that they're going to broadcast the game in my language," he said in a telephone interview before the game. "I heard people broadcast local tournaments, the Indian Stanley Cup they call them. This evening I am going to listen to the game and understand, because I'm a Cree Indian." Sunday's production was born out of discussions between Sportsnet, the league's Canadian national TV rights holder, and the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, a Canadian cable channel dedicated to promoting the country's Indigenous heritage. Community leaders approached Sportsnet last year, wanting to continue the work done at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia, where A.P.T.N. aired 10 hours a day of coverage in a mix of Indigenous, French and English languages. "As a group, we discussed how to use hockey and tie it in with the Cree language," said Rob Corte, Sportsnet's vice president of N.H.L. production. "It was a very informative, interesting and emotional meeting, and we left there thinking that we wanted to do something." The broadcasters Clarence Iron, Earl Wood, Jason Chamakese and John Chabot, an eight year N.H.L. veteran and former assistant coach with the Islanders, called the game from the A.P.T.N. studios in Winnipeg, Manitoba, via a live feed provided by Sportsnet. "It's very monumental in that a lot of our people struggle on an everyday basis because of their disconnection from their everyday self," said Wood, who hosted the studio show. "A lot of our young people are shy about speaking the language. If they hear it on the mainstream media, we can use this to our advantage for the retention of our language." The commentators built their vocabulary during the 2010 Olympics, when A.P.T.N. covered hockey in Cree. They developed words by talking with community elders and Plains Cree speakers. "The puck itself, we call it napakiwanis, which is something that is pressed down," Iron said. Other terms like kociw (he shoots), osihew pihtokwahew (he scores), kipahwaw (penalty), and tako (overtime) translate more directly from English. The game also served as a showcase for the league's most prominent Indigenous player, Montreal Canadiens goalie Carey Price, whose mother is a former chief of the Ulkatcho First Nation in northern British Columbia. During a stellar career that has seen him become the Canadiens' franchise leader in wins, Price has supported Indigenous youth by hosting them at games. "I feel like this game is meant for everybody," Price said this month after winning his 315th career game to pass Jacques Plante for first place in franchise history. "It's obviously a league motto, but I definitely have seen that first hand. I think it's important that you need to be proud of where you come from and enjoy the game for what it is." Lining up opposite Price on Sunday was Hurricanes forward Micheal Ferland, who is Cree. The Hurricanes won, 2 1, in overtime. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
A tabloid once famous for its bustling, big city newsroom no longer has a newsroom. In a move that was almost unthinkable before the coronavirus pandemic, Tribune Publishing said on Wednesday that The Daily News, once the largest circulation newspaper in the country, was permanently closing its physical newsroom at 4 New York Plaza in Lower Manhattan. The same day, Tribune, the Chicago newspaper chain that has owned The News since 2017, told employees that it was closing four of its other newspapers' offices. "We have determined that we do not need to reopen this office in order to maintain our current operations," Toni Martinez, a human resources executive at Tribune Publishing, wrote in an email to the staff that was reviewed by The New York Times. "With this announcement, we are also beginning to look at strategic opportunities and alternatives for future occupancy." The paper will continue to be published. The company made no promises about a future physical location. "As we progress through the pandemic and as needs change, we will reconsider our need for physical offices," said a Tribune Publishing spokesman, Max Reinsdorf. Newspapers across the country have been struggling for more than a decade because of punishing industry trends like the move away from revenue generating print products and the nationalization of news. The pandemic, which has sharply squeezed advertising revenue, has added to the publications' woes. Workers at The Daily News were given until Oct. 30 to collect any belongings they had left in the office, although the email said the newsroom, which still has the distinctive four faced clock that has migrated with the newspaper over the years, "formally closed" Wednesday. Robert York, the editor in chief, suggested on a call with the staff Wednesday that there would most likely be a future newsroom, according to two participants. A Tribune Publishing spokesman confirmed that the newsrooms of The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa., and The Orlando Sentinel had also closed. This year was the 100th anniversary of The Morning Call's occupancy of its newsroom on Sixth Street and Linden Street. Also closing were the newsroom of The Carroll County Times in Westminster, Md., and the Annapolis, Md., newsroom of The Capital Gazette a newspaper that two years ago experienced tragedy when a gunman killed five staff members in the newsroom (then in a different building). A Chicago Tribune office for suburban publications in Aurora, Ill., a city of 200,000 to Chicago's southwest, was also closed, according to a staff email Wednesday. These offices had been largely bereft of staff for the last few months because of the pandemic, but the news on Wednesday that they were going away for good struck several journalists as a blow. "We've hung all the awards we've been given, all the photos of our dead colleagues," said Danielle Ohl of The Capital Gazette. Recounting the temporary newsroom the staff went to after the shooting and then the new newsroom that was closed Wednesday, she added, "It felt like we finally had somewhere we know we will be, and we can move forward. And now we have to leave again. And not only are we leaving, but we're leaving with nowhere else to go." 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. Jen Sheehan, of The Morning Call, reflected on the coronavirus imposed status quo. "Nobody wants to be home," she said. "You get a lot out of being around your co workers, both personally and how you report. We're going to lose all of that." In its 20th century heyday, The Daily News was a brawny metro tabloid that thrived when it dug into crime and corruption. It served as a model for The Daily Planet, the paper that counted Clark Kent and Lois Lane among its reporters, and for the tabloid depicted in the 1994 movie "The Paper." It has won Pulitzer Prizes in commentary, feature writing and even international reporting. The longtime home of the columnists Jimmy Breslin, Dick Young and Liz Smith, The Daily News reveled in its role as the voice of the average New Yorker. Etched into the stone above the entrance of its former home, the Daily News Building on East 42nd Street, is a phrase attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "God must have loved the common man, he made so many of them." "The attitude of The News was always: A tabloid is smarter than a broadsheet," said Michael Daly, who began there as a general assignment reporter in 1978, and was later a city columnist. "It gets to the essence of things. It doesn't talk down to people, it talks to them eye to eye." Last fall, The Daily News had the 18th highest weekday circulation of newspapers in the United States, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. But it has been in financial trouble for decades. Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the New York real estate developer and media mogul, bought the paper out of bankruptcy in 1993. He sold it to Tribune Publishing, then known as Tronc, in 2017 for 1. (That is not a misprint.) Even so, The Daily News won (with ProPublica) the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Public Service that same year, for uncovering New York Police Department abuse of eviction rules. Two years ago, the new owner slashed the newsroom staff in half and ousted its top editor, Jim Rich, who had reinvigorated the tabloid as an anti Trump answer to The New York Post, the rival paper owned by Rupert Murdoch. The company replaced Mr. Rich with Mr. York, a media executive who has spent most of his career in San Diego. The paper moved downtown in 2011. With fewer readers buying copies from newsstands, The Daily News, under Tribune Publishing, has emphasized its website. Over the past several months, Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that has aggressively cut costs at the newspapers it owns through the chain MediaNews Group, disclosed it owned nearly one third of the publicly traded Tribune Publishing shares. It also amassed three of its seven board seats. Before the pandemic, Tribune Publishing offered buyouts to journalists, and it has since imposed furloughs and pay cuts. The cuts, as well as the chance that Alden might take over the company outright, prompted employees at several Tribune Publishing newspapers to start campaigns calling for local benefactors to "save" their publications. In the lobby of The News's building is a wooden bench. On it is posted an article by Bill Gallo about the bench itself, told in the first person from the bench's perspective as it prepared to move from The News's former headquarters on East 42nd Street to another former headquarters on West 33rd Street in 1995. Dick Young, the legendary boxing writer Jimmy Cannon and a couple of dozen other Daily News mainstays sat on it through the years, according to the article. "I just hope they put me in a good spot," the article concluded. "I'm old now but observant, and I to want to watch the new breed grow to become great newspeople." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Over the past few decades, whenever a Republican president puts up an important judicial nominee especially a Catholic one we go through the same routine. Some Democrat accuses the nominee of imposing her religious views on the law. "The dogma lives loudly within you," Senator Dianne Feinstein notoriously told Amy Coney Barrett in a 2017 confirmation hearing. Then Republicans accuse Democrats of being religious bigots. Then the nominee testifies that her personal opinions or religious faith will have absolutely no bearing on her legal judgments. This unconvincing routine gets us no closer to understanding two important questions: How does faith influence a person's political views? How should we look at religiously devout people in public life? To the extent that I have answers to these questions it's through my own unusual experience. I came to faith in middle age after I'd been in public life for a while. I would say that coming to faith changed everything and yet didn't alter my political opinions all that much. That's because assenting to a religion is not like choosing to be a Republican or a Democrat. It happens on a different level of consciousness. When I was a kid, I was raised, like most people in our culture, on certain stories: Moses leading the Israelites out of oppression, little David slaying Goliath, Ruth swearing loyalty to Naomi. During my decades as an atheist, I thought the stories were false but the values they implied were true. These values welcome the stranger, humility against pride became the moral framework I applied to think through my opinions, to support various causes. Like a lot of atheists, I found the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr very helpful. About seven years ago I realized that my secular understanding was not adequate to the amplitude of life as I experienced it. There were extremes of joy and pain, spiritual fullness and spiritual emptiness that were outside the normal material explanations of things. I was gripped by the conviction that the people I encountered were not skin bags of DNA, but had souls; had essences with no size or shape, but that gave them infinite value and dignity. The conviction that people have souls led to the possibility that there was some spirit who breathed souls into them. What finally did the trick was glimpses of infinite goodness. Secular religions are really good at identifying some evils, like oppression, and building a moral system against them. Divine religions are primarily oriented to an image of pure goodness, pure loving kindness, holiness. In periodic glimpses of radical goodness in other people, in sensations of the transcendent I felt, as Wendell Berry put it, "knowledge crawl over my skin." The biblical stories from Genesis all the way through Luke and John became living presences in my life. These realizations transformed my spiritual life: awareness of God's love, participation in grace, awareness that each person is made in God's image. Faith offered an image of a way of being, an ultimate allegiance. But when it came to forming opinions or writing columns, I was still in the same business. Sure, my style of thinking changed a bit. I spent more time listening, trying to discern how I was being called. I began to think with my heart as much as my head. (That could just be male middle age.) But my basic moral values derived from the biblical metaphysic were already in place and didn't change that much now that the biblical stories had come alive. My point is there is no neat relationship between the spiritual consciousness and the moral and prudential consciousnesses. When it comes to thinking and acting in the public square, we believers and nonbelievers are all in the same boat trying to apply our moral frameworks to present realities. Faith itself doesn't make you wiser or better. When it comes to judges, I don't believe any operate without a moral framework, like perfect legal automatons. I don't believe faith alone points any of them to concrete answers. Look at how judges from the same faith come out all over the map on all issues. Look at how, deep down, the anti abortion Catholics you know are driven by intellectual and moral conviction, not by mindless submission to Rome. And to be honest about it, our worldly connections are usually more influential than our faith commitments when it comes to our political and professional decisions. If you want to know how Amy Coney Barrett is going to rule, pay more attention to the Federalist Society than to People of Praise, her Christian community. In a society that is growing radically more secular every day, I'd say we have more to fear from political dogmatism than religious dogmatism. We have more to fear from those who let their politics determine their faith practices and who turn their religious communities into political armies. We have more to fear from people who look to politics as a substitute for faith. And we have most to fear from the possibility that the biblical metaphysic, which has been a coherent value system for believers and nonbelievers for centuries, will fade from our culture, the stories will go untold, and young people will grow up in a society without any coherent moral ecology at all. 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 |
New Zealand today is home to a number of physically impressive parrots. Kakapo, the heaviest psittacines alive, are too chubby to fly. Sharp beaked keas are strong enough to attack sheep and yank rubber parts off cars. Once upon a time, though, there was a prehistoric Polly in New Zealand who had them all beat. This bruiser of a bird whose discovery was announced Wednesday in Biology Letters was perhaps three feet tall. At about 15.4 pounds, it was as heavy as some bowling balls, and twice as massive as the kakapo, which had previously held the record. That's a lot of crackers. "To have a parrot that big is surprising," said Trevor Worthy, a vertebrate paleontologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia and the paper's lead author. "This thing was way outside of expectations." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The parrot's bones were found near St Bathans on New Zealand's South Island, where fossil deposits are filled with creatures from the early Miocene, a period that spanned 19 million to 16 million years ago. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Bob Shane, left, with other members of the Kingston Trio John Stewart, center, and Nick Reynolds in Hollywood in 1967. The group spearheaded a folk revival in the late 1950s. Mr. Shane, Mr. Reynolds and Dave Guard were the original members; Mr. Stewart replaced Mr. Guard in 1961. Bob Shane, the last surviving original member of the Kingston Trio, whose smooth close harmonies helped transform folk music from a dusty niche genre into a dominant brand of pop music in the 1950s and '60s, died on Sunday in Phoenix. He was 85. Craig Hankenson, his longtime agent, confirmed the death, in a hospice facility. Mr. Shane, whose whiskey baritone was the group's most identifiable voice on hits like "Tom Dooley" and "Scotch and Soda," sang lead on more than 80 percent of the Kingston Trio's songs. He didn't just outlast the other original members, Dave Guard, who died in 1991, and Nick Reynolds, who died in 2008; he also eventually took ownership of the group's name and devoted his life to various incarnations of the trio, from its founding in 1957 to 2004, when a heart attack forced him to stop touring. Mr. Shane was born Robert Castle Schoen on Feb. 1, 1934, in Hilo, Hawaii, to Arthur Castle Schoen and Margaret (Schaufelberger) Schoen. His father, whose German ancestors had settled in Hawaii in the 1890s, was a successful wholesale distributor of toys and sporting goods. His mother, from Salt Lake City, met her future husband when both were students at Stanford University in the 1920s. In Hilo, Mr. Shane's father had planned for Bob to take over the family business. But at the private Punahou School in Honolulu, Bob learned the ukulele and songs of the Polynesian Islands and met Mr. Guard, with whom he formed a duet. After high school, Mr. Shane, Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Guard occasionally played together while attending college in Northern California Mr. Shane and Mr. Reynolds at Menlo College, and Mr. Guard nearby at Stanford. After graduating in 1956, Mr. Shane returned to Hawaii to learn the family business, but he found himself more drawn to music. As he told it, he performed as "the first ever Elvis impersonator" and counted Hawaiian music, Hank Williams, Harry Belafonte and the Weavers among his influences. A year later, when Mr. Guard and Mr. Reynolds decided to make a go of a professional music career, Mr. Shane joined them and returned to California, where the Kingston Trio was born, in 1957. The name, a reference to Kingston, Jamaica, was meant to evoke calypso music, which was popular then. The members exuded a youthful, clean cut collegiate style, exemplified by their signature look: colorful, vertically striped Oxford shirts. A year after that, the trio's first album, on Capitol Records, included a jaunty version of a ballad based on the 1866 murder of a North Carolina woman and the hanging of a poor former Confederate soldier for the crime. The song, "Tom Dooley," rose to No. 1 on the singles charts, selling three million copies and earning the trio a Grammy Award for best country and western performance. (There was no Grammy category for folk at the time.) From its founding to 1965, the group had 14 albums in Billboard's Top 10, five of which reached No. 1. It inspired scores of imitators and, for a time, was probably the most popular music group in the world. John Stewart replaced Mr. Guard in 1961. (Mr. Stewart died in 2008.) The Kingston Trio's critical reception did not match its popular success. To many folk purists, the trio was selling a watered down mix of folk and pop that commercialized the authentic folk music of countless unknown Appalachian pickers. And mindful of the way that folk musicians like Pete Seeger had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era, others complained that the trio's upbeat, anodyne brand of folk betrayed the leftist, populist music of pioneers like Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston. Members of the trio said they had consciously steered clear of political material as a way to maintain mainstream acceptance. Besides, Mr. Shane said, the folk purists were using the wrong yardstick. "To call the Kingston Trio folk singers was kind of stupid in the first place," he said. "We never called ourselves folk singers." He added, "We did folk oriented material, but we did it amid all kinds of other stuff." Indeed, some of Mr. Shane's finest moments, like the smoky cocktail hour ballad "Scotch and Soda," had nothing to do with folk. In 1961, Ervin Drake wrote "It Was a Very Good Year" for Mr. Shane. He sang it with the trio long before Frank Sinatra made it one of his classic recordings. Still, more than any group of its time, the Kingston Trio captured the youthful optimism of the Kennedy years. The title song of a 1962 album was "The New Frontier," echoing President John F. Kennedy's own phrase and alluding to his inaugural address with the lyrics "Let the word go forth from this day on/A new generation has been born." About the same time, the trio had an unlikely hit with the kind of material it had avoided: Mr. Seeger's antiwar song "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" But by then the trio was on the verge of being supplanted as the face of folk by a new generation of harder edged singers like Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Joan Baez, and by hipper ones like Peter, Paul and Mary. Then the coming of the British invasion and the rise of rock utterly marginalized the group. Over time, others, including Mr. Dylan and Ms. Baez, have given the group more credit for popularizing folk music and for serving as a bridge to the more adventurous folk, folk rock and rock of the 1960s. As Ms. Baez wrote in her memoir "And a Voice to Sing With" (1987): "Before I turned into a snob and learned to look down upon all commercial folk music as bastardized and unholy, I loved the Kingston Trio. When I became one of the leading practitioners of 'pure folk,' I still loved them." Mr. Shane's admirers said his talents were never fully recognized. "Bob Shane was, in my opinion, one of the most underrated singers in American musical history," George Grove, a trio member since 1976, said in an email in 2015. "His voice was the voice, not only of the Kingston Trio but of an era of musical story telling." The group disbanded in 1967, but after a brief stint as a solo artist Mr. Shane returned, first with what was billed as the New Kingston Trio, then with various Kingston Trio lineups. Mr. Shane, even by the group's wholesome standards, stood out and was billed, half seriously, as the trio's sex symbol. Over the years his hair went from frat boy neat to a snowy mane, but he remained congenitally upbeat, like a gambler accustomed to drawing winning hands. After retiring, Mr. Shane lived in Phoenix in a home full of gold records and Kingston Trio memorabilia. Fond of cars and dirt bikes, he also collected Martin guitars and art. He is survived by his wife, Bobbi (Childress) Shane; five children from an earlier marriage, to Louise Brandon: Jody Shane Beale, Susan Shane Gleeson, Inman Brandon Shane, Robin Castle Shane and Jason McCall Shane; and eight grandchildren. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Ballet exudes tradition, is surrounded by conservatism and still depends on a small core repertory of 19th century classics. This century, though, it's been showing multiple signs of changing its character. Some reforms remain too few: Misty Copeland's historic ascent to become American Ballet Theater's first African American female principal, for example, will dwindle into mere tokenism unless other black ballerinas soon start to make an equal impact. Still, there have been important dances reflecting the racial diversity of the Western world. More generally, ballet has begun to reflect an altered society. What's become evident, especially this year, is the new propensity shown by diverse choreographers to give equal weight to same sex and opposite sex couples. In his most recent ballet, "New Blood" (New York City Ballet, Oct. 1), Justin Peck addressed this equality as if it were his latest assignment. Characteristically, this precociously accomplished young man brought it off as a virtuoso compositional feat. "New Blood" has a chain like series of duets in which B, having danced with A, now partners C. Then C partners D; and so on until all of the cast's seven men and six women have taken part. It happens that some of those duets are female female and male male; most are male female. Though each of the 12 duets is different, the same sex ones aren't significantly different from the opposite sex ones. I've repeatedly praised its second movement, a men only quintet. (A City Ballet devotee pointed out to me that only one of the five men is entirely Caucasian; it's a sign of our era that this fact is of only incidental interest.) What's miraculous is how a quiet adagio mood is sustained through an ensemble that involves gentle male male partnering. These men's sexuality is not an issue; they're caught in a spell larger than one of love or sex. The result enlarges our idea of masculinity in dance. This quintet, though beautiful, is nothing radical. Modern dance has been making a point of same sex cooperation since the 1980s. Richard Alston, Bill T. Jones, Lar Lubovitch and Mark Morris were all in the vanguard back then. Ballet, however, has tended to remain what academics call heteronormative. (After you've said this horrid word four times, it trips off the tongue quite usefully.) I began labeling ballet "the sexist art" 30 years ago. True, the word "sexist" tends to be applied where women are being demeaned or overlooked, whereas ballet has long privileged and glorified women. What's more, the 20th century's greatest ballet choreographer, George Balanchine, made a series of classics in which women do not live for love and often seek independence from the male partners whom they also need. Yet ballet remains the sole art that is predicated on a dichotomy between female and male. She rises on point; he does not (except as a clowning or animal effect). He must partner her; she is not expected to return the compliment. Actually, ballet has always contained scope for variety. There were female female duets when the genre was young in the 17th century. A woman supporting another woman is seen in Balanchine's "Symphonie Concertante" (1947), a man another man in his "Orpheus" (1948). Still, these moments have been exceptions to the rule. In recent decades, the male female pas de deux, rather than develop along equal opportunity lines, has increasingly turned into the acrobatic manhandling of one sex by the other. (Guess which.) Many 21st century choreographers Christopher Wheeldon and Liam Scarlett are prime examples seldom allow a man to dance while a woman is nearby. Instead he bends her, lifts her, turns her, manipulates her, allows her no space of her own. She shines, but only on his terms. And male dancing tends to be a closeted activity: He does it only when she's out of sight or not looking. There's no equality in the work space and little of the freedom that Balanchine conferred upon his women. Fortunately, several other choreographers have been pushing the envelope for some years. Mr. Morris, though usually at his finest when working with his own Mark Morris Dance Group, tends to be interestingly provocative when creating for ballet troupes; he's made a series of works that have shaken up the audience's ideas of gender. The most fascinating of his experiments along these lines has been "Beaux" (2012, to Martinu music), made for nine men alone. Three other City Ballet world premieres occurred at the same gala as Mr. Peck's "New Blood." All of them Robert Binet's "The Blue of Distance," Troy Schumacher's "Common Ground" and Myles Thatcher's "Polaris" showed the same calm about sexual parity. "Common Ground," like some earlier pieces by Mr. Schumacher (he has his own company, BalletCollective), also shows men and women sharing the stage, and sometimes duets, with a degree of give and take and mutual support that refreshes the genre. In a 2013 piece, "The Impulse Wants Company," a man (Harrison Coll), while dancing on a large scale, was physically supported by a woman (Kaitlyn Gilliland) and others in an image that, again, added to our idea of masculinity in ballet. A few of Ms. Tharp's ballets are modern classics. I wish, though, that some were better known. In "Waiting at the Station," her 2013 creation for Pacific Northwest Ballet, the ballerina Carrie Imler was a character like nobody else in ballet repertory: a comic hausfrau in dress and cardigan, far from amused by her husband's interest in another woman, breezing across the stage in powerful leaps and rippling to the music (a commissioned score by Allen Toussaint, on the cusp of jazz and R B), with a forceful vehemence that turns her into a deity, bizarre, uproarious and disturbing. Though not all the "Waiting at the Station" narrative was clear, its dancing was too irresistible for that to matter. Here was that rare species a ballet about real people in our world, set to new music. A few years ago, it looked as if the main breakthrough in dance theater lay in video and computer technology, which can create other planes of existence around the dancers, and can change our idea of the world onstage. (Why have there been so few important experiments along these lines of late?) The way, here as so often, was pointed by Merce Cunningham, whose 1999 "Biped" (immediately hailed as choreography for the 21st century) created a poetic interplay between live dancers and computer generated dance imagery. This, though made for modern dancers, has already joined the repertory of one ballet company (the Bayerisches Staatballett in Munich); as Juilliard Dance performances this spring reminded us, it's a classic by which our age should be remembered. Another visual change is now widespread in modern ballet: the omission of tights. Mr. Peck's "Rodeo" is one instance among many. Its lone woman has legs bare from point shoes to leotard, and the five men of that quintet have similarly exposed thighs and knees. I don't mean to underrate the surface beauty of finely trained dancers' flesh; but the effect, as I've argued before, radically changes ballet aesthetics. Show us bare muscles, bare knees, and we'll stop noticing the transcendent line and geometry of ballet in favor of flesh, sinews, joints. Ballet for centuries has given us the ideal form in ways correspondent to the nude in art; many new ballets instead show us nakedness and exposure. It's quite possible that, as ballet goes on changing in the 21st century, it will grow less splendid than the art many of us fell in love with in the 20th. That art reached extraordinary peaks in the perfect and ceremonious hierarchies of "The Sleeping Beauty" (1890) and "Symphony in C" (1947); it's hard to imagine any choreographer wanting to create comparable realms today. What matters, however, is that the art is not fixed in amber. We can go to see new ballets and recognize in their stage societies aspects of the world we know. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
A rendering of Three Waterline Square, a tower designed by Rafael Vinoly. The area has been in development since high rises were proposed in the mid 1970s by Donald J. Trump. The Last Piece of a Far West Side Project Gets Built The effort to convert the old Penn Central rail yard on the Far West Side of Manhattan into high rises has bumped along since being proposed in the mid 1970s by a developer named Donald J. Trump. What was proposed for the area often rankled neighbors, who found the buildings to be too tall, too close together and too pricey. But, after welcoming its first residents in the late 1990s, the controversial mega project is entering its homestretch. Construction is underway at the site's three final apartment towers, which are rising from a nearly five acre site from West 59th to West 61st Streets, and Riverside Boulevard to Freedom Place South. Called Waterline Square for its proximity to the Hudson River, the 1,132 unit mixed use condo and rental development is from GID Development Group, the last in a line of developers to control the property. With designs from architects like Richard Meier and amenities that include an indoor tennis court, plus restaurants and a new public park, Waterline Square could quell lingering doubts about the area's being a perpetual work in progress. "When they first started building here, no one believed in it," said Gilad Azaria, an associate broker with Douglas Elliman Real Estate who has lived for 12 years on Riverside Boulevard, the neighborhood's main drag, and who frequently sells in the area. Waterline Square, which broke ground in 2015 and will open to residents in 2018, "will make the area more of a neighborhood," said Mr. Azaria, who isn't involved with the project. Stylistically, the 2.3 billion project is a departure from the past. Its towers are angular and glassy, unlike the boxier brick and stone versions in the area whose names through the decades have included Lincoln West and Riverside South. A partnership that included Mr. Trump developed most of those earlier buildings, and even though that group is no longer the landlord, Mr. Trump's name still appears on facades there. At Waterline, three major firms designed the exteriors of the towers, Richard Meier and Partners Architects, Rafael Vinoly Architects and Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates; each firm was responsible for a different address. But a detailed master plan imposed by the city in 2010 largely determined the buildings' crystalline shapes, according to GID. Still, GID officials seem grateful that their product will stand out on a somewhat homogeneous strip. "We wanted to break the mold of what came before," said James Linsley, the president of GID, which also owns the nearby Aldyn, a rental and condo complex, and the Ashley, a rental tower. Mr. Vinoly went even further, describing the first buildings in the area as "the blandest thing in the world." But, with the final piece falling into place, he said, "it's certainly going to be more interesting." Each Waterline tower stacks condos atop rentals. One Waterline Square, a 37 story tower, offers 56 condos atop 216 rentals, while Two Waterline Square, a 38 story building, has 160 condos and 486 rentals. And Three Waterline Square has 34 stories, with 47 condos above 167 rentals. In each building, the condo and rental sections have separate entrances. Twenty percent of the project, or 226 units, has been set aside as affordable housing. Condo buyers, meanwhile, will pay reduced taxes for 20 years because Waterline Square qualified for a 421a abatement. Condo interiors will feature counters made of veined marble and Gaggenau appliances. The rental units will have "different finishes but a similar level of quality," Mr. Linsley said. Inside will be about 118,000 square feet of amenities, with about 90,000 square feet spread out in a three level below grade space called the Waterline Club that will have a swimming pool, a two lane bowling alley, a recording studio, a full size basketball court and a tennis court. Renters will pay a fee for access. Lounges, catering kitchens and libraries will be scattered throughout the towers, too. Outside, threaded among the apartment buildings, will be a 2.6 acre public park. In addition, each tower will have retail spaces that restaurants are expected to lease, according to GID. The surroundings are getting a makeover, too. Ultimately, Riverside Boulevard will be extended to West 59th Street, opening flow in a walled off corner. A city project to extend Riverside Park southward is also underway. Sales at Waterline Square, where one bedrooms start at around 2 million and prices average about 2,900 a square foot, began earlier this month through Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group. Leasing, which will be handled by GID, won't start till 2018. In contrast, the average price of new apartments in Lincoln Square, the name of the broader area, is about 2,400 a square foot, according to StreetEasy.com. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Credit...Tomas Munita for The New York Times The hiking trail leading to the Morada del Diablo volcano (the Devil's Dwelling) crossed a field of blackened lava, congealed during the last ice age. Black lizards covered with white speckles, known as lagartijas Magallanicas, skittered across the ground, and the desiccated corpse of a guanaco, a wild grazer related to the llama, baked beneath the sun. A puma had probably killed it, my Chilean companion, Alvaro Soto, said. I picked my way across the crust, pocked by holes just large enough to twist an ankle. After a mile, we climbed over a heap of rocks that slid beneath our feet and emerged at the summit of the crater. Mr. Soto and I gazed across the maw at a scene of otherworldly bleakness: A curving wall, tinted green, splattered with bird feces, or whitewash, and riven with crevices, formed the volcano's lip. Steep slopes of scree and soil laden with red tinted hematite fell away into the abyss. The cries of buff necked ibises, large rodent eaters with cream and russet throats and curving gray bills, echoed off the canyon. A peregrine falcon rose, plummeted into the crater, circled back up and disappeared inside a crevice. We were deep inside Pali Aike National Park, one of the least visited, yet most dramatic reserves in Chile, 110 miles north of Punta Arenas. The Tehuelche hunter gatherers who once dwelled here called this moonscape both "the place of desolation" and "the devil's country," and believed that evil spirits possessed it. It's not hard to see why. The area is studded with volcanoes, formed during the Jurassic era 100 million years ago, by the collision of the Chile Rise and the Peru Chile oceanic trench. An Obscure Stop on the Route of Parks Despite the bleakness, this 31 square mile reserve, established by the Chilean government in 1970, teems with wildlife: hares, tuco tucos (mole like rodents), skunks, armadillos, gray foxes, pumas, guanacos, lizards and dozens of species of birds unique to Patagonia. Chilean flamingos, splashes of pink and orange in a charred landscape, gather in the park's soda lakes. Buff necked ibises build nests high in trees or inside the extinct volcanoes, sharing the ledges with peregrines a symbiotic relationship rare among birds of prey. Pali Aike is among the most obscure attractions on Chile's new Route of Parks, a 1,740 mile wilderness trail that was unveiled earlier this year. The route was the culmination of a yearlong process that began in April 2017, when Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, the widow of the North Face founder, Douglas Tompkins, donated to the Chilean government one million acres of Patagonian wilderness through Tompkins Conservation, the nonprofit umbrella group of conservation initiatives that she co founded and now leads. Out of that land, Chile carved two new reserves, Pumalin National Park Douglas Tompkins and Patagonia National Park Chile. As part of the deal, the government set aside an additional nine million acres to enhance the country's national park network. A total of 17 national parks have now been linked by the Route of Parks, a hiking trail that winds past mountains, glaciers, volcanoes, forests and arid steppe, and roughly follows the Carretera Austral, the country's storied Southern Highway (also known as Route 7) through Patagonia. The birds were mainly what I had come to see. While doing research on an ornithological related book over the past 18 months, I've traveled around the world, exploring bird rich countryside in Scotland, the Rhondda Valley of southern Wales, and Matobo National Park in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe. None of those regions, however, compares with Patagonia, home not only to the pallid peregrine a rare, white breasted morph of the southern peregrine but also to passerines, waders and carrion eaters found only at the bottom of South America. I made my forays from Punta Arenas, a windswept city of about 125,000 on the Strait of Magellan. Navigated by the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1520, the strait remained one of only three options, along with the Drake Passage and Beagle Channel, to sail between the Atlantic and Pacific until the Panama Canal opened in 1914. I stayed at the Hotel Plaza, a gaudy French neoclassical villa built by a family of cattle barons in the early 1920s, adjacent to the Plaza de Armas, otherwise known as the Plaza Munoz Gamero, a leafy square in the city center. There I met Mr. Soto, a young photographer, bird watcher and son of the local representative of the Servicio Agricola y Ganadera (Department of Agriculture and Livestock), the government agency responsible for protecting Chile's wildlife. He had agreed to be my guide for the trip. We rented a pickup truck and set out on a chilly spring morning at the height of nesting season through the Patagonian Steppe on the two lane highway known as La Ruta del Fin del Mundo (The Highway at the End of the World). Lesser rheas, known locally as nandus, gray flightless birds that resemble ostriches, scurried away from our pickup truck amid clouds of dust. (Charles Darwin heard about them during the Beagle expedition of 1831 1836, and after searching fruitlessly for months, realized that he had been served one for a post New Year's Day meal; he preserved the head, legs and a wing for study and classification back in England.) Guanacos, with brown coats and creamy white bellies, placidly munched the hardy yellow grass known as coiron. A few panic stricken beasts leapt over the fences of cattle ranches along the road. "Some of them get snagged and can't extricate themselves," Mr. Soto said. They become easy prey for the pumas that prowl the pampas at dawn and dusk. A fork in the road presented two options. One branch bore left toward Puerto Natales, the gateway to Torres del Paine, a 700 square mile expanse of glaciers, lakes and mountains, and one of the most popular parks in Patagonia. The less traveled route, which we took, bore to the right in the direction of Pali Aike, and farther north, the Argentine town of Rio Gallegos. The asphalt soon ran out, and a gravel track dipped and rose through bush covered hills for about 15 miles. Then we arrived at a one room ranger hut and a sign for the national park. I paid the gatekeeper 3,000 Chilean pesos (about 4.50), while Mr. Soto, as a Chilean citizen, paid nothing. "You're the first visitors in the park today," the gatekeeper told us. It was 1 p.m. According to Chile's National Forest Corporation, which administers the park, Pali Aike received just 2,537 visitors in 2016, half of whom were foreigners. That works out to seven people a day. "This isn't a park for everybody," the gatekeeper said, adding that many visitors have a particular interest in volcanic geology or the fauna of Patagonia. He said he had started working at Pali Aike only two weeks earlier, after spending most of his life as a gaucho in southern Patagonia. Now in his 60s, he had decided he wanted a more sedentary existence. He invited us inside the hut to share a mate the caffeine rich drink consumed everywhere on the pampas and served it the traditional way, repeatedly pouring boiling water into a mug stuffed with leaves, and inviting us to sip through a metal straw. Gracias, I said, after the first sip. Then, when I asked for more, he gave me a lesson in mate drinking etiquette. "We only say 'gracias' when we're finished," he said. As a late afternoon chill set in, we drove across the plain to Laguna Ana, a salt lagoon near the park entrance. I walked along the soggy shore, drawn by a blur of orange at the other end of the lake. Sinking to my shins in the ooze, I extracted my legs with an unpleasant sucking sound, briefly panicking at the thought that I had stumbled into a pool of quicksand. Veering onto firmer ground, I peered through binoculars at what now revealed itself to be a flock of Chilean flamingos slightly pinker than their North American cousins, with grayish legs, red joints and a mostly black bill at the water's edge. Driving outside of the park near sunset, Mr. Soto pointed out Southern caracaras, also called carrion hawks imposing, vaguely menacing birds of prey with black crests, scarlet faces and sleek, black and gray feathers perched on a dozen fence posts along the road. We spent the night in Punta Delgada, a ramshackle settlement in a saddle between bare hills, near the narrowest crossing between the Chilean mainland, El Continente, and Tierra del Fuego. At the family owned Hostal San Gregorio, we ate a hearty meal of noodles and roasted chicken, and received directions from the aged owners to the best spot in the area for seeing the rare peregrina pallida. I thanked the hostess for her hospitality the next morning, blurting out that I was not expecting to find such comfortable accommodations at the end of the world. She shrugged. "For us it's not the end of the world, but for you we understand." As we headed back toward Punta Arenas, one more avian spectacle awaited us. On a stretch of dirt road through the pampas, running parallel to the Bahia Posesion, Mr. Soto motioned for me to pull over. Here, not marked on any map, lay a nondescript puddle, just a few dozen yards across, that seemed to have attracted every species of water bird in Patagonia. Thumbing through his guidebook, Soto identified red gartered coots, white tufted grebes, four varieties of ducks, blue winged teals, silver teals, oystercatchers, upland and crested geese, tawny throated dotterels, Magellanic snipe and, on hard ground yards past the pond, another cluster of flamingos. We lingered for an hour, alone on the pampa, fascinated by the variety of avian life squeezed into such a small space. Our disappointment over missing the elusive pallid peregrine had receded. Mr. Soto tossed his bird book in the back seat, and we continued down the dirt track toward the Ruta del Fin del Mundo. Joshua Hammer's new book, "The Falcon Thief," will be published by Simon Schuster next year. Follow NY Times Travel on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Get weekly updates from our Travel Dispatch newsletter, with tips on traveling smarter, destination coverage and photos from all over the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
When Aisling McDonagh became pregnant with her daughter three years ago, she was living in Independence Plaza, a three tower complex in TriBeCa. With the exception of being on the 37th floor where she regularly witnessed parents struggling to maneuver strollers into crowded elevators there wasn't anything about her one bedroom apartment that was particularly ill suited to raising a child. But Ms. McDonagh had decided to have a baby on her own at 42 using a sperm donor after a failed relationship, and she didn't just want an apartment where she could raise a child. She wanted one that would help ease the considerable difficulty of doing so alone. She suspected that Gateway Plaza in Battery Park City would be such a place, having visited a close friend who lived there with her husband and two young children. "The city is hard enough; having a baby on your own is hard enough. Living here, it's like, 'Press the easy button and there you go,'" said Ms. McDonagh, who moved into a first floor two bedroom apartment at Gateway Plaza when she was seven months pregnant with her daughter, Gemma. The rental complex is "tailor made for families," she said, enumerating the many family focused perks of the 1980s waterfront complex: numerous children's events (most recently, a Halloween party); walled in lawns to stop wayward tots from running off; a set back from the street, parklike setting. Even a swimming pool overlooking the Hudson. And then there is the informal mom network. Many of the mothers at the complex work outside the home like she does, said Ms. McDonagh, who is in digital ad sales. So they help each other out with emergency babysitting, impromptu play dates during bad weather and camaraderie that often takes the form of hanging out on the lawn, catching up as they watch their children play. "We have a WhatsApp group chat and after work, we'll be like, 'Wine, lawn? Yes,'" she said. The tight knit community is all the more helpful as her own family lives out of state. "I had wanted to try living someplace different than where I grew up," recalled Ms. McDonagh, who is originally from Chicago and moved to New York after college. "I thought I'd be here maybe five years. That went by in a flash. Then it was 10 years." Occupation: Ms. McDonagh works in digital advertising sales. She also started The Clear Way to Conceive, a consultancy for which she is a health and hormone coach. Downtown girl: Since moving to New York, Ms. McDonagh has always lived below 13th Street. "My friends say if I go any farther south, I'm going to vote myself off the island," she said. Living with a toddler has its benefits: "I get to decorate the apartment as I like," she said. "No one ever says, 'Oh, that's too feminine.'" She started out living in prewar rentals in the West Village before buying a small one bedroom co op on Morton Street. "I was there for six or seven years, it was super cute, but it was about 500 square feet. And it was overrun by water beetles. I finally decided to sell," she said. "I really wanted to buy something else, something new bright and shiny but I didn't find anything I liked in my budget." Five years later, after concluding that her most recent boyfriend would not be the one she would start a family with, she used some of the money from her co op sale to cover the expenses of in vitro fertilization. "I've always wanted to have a child," Ms. McDonagh said. "So I decided, 'O.K., I'm going to do this on my own.'" She kept almost all of her furniture from her last apartment, adding one bright blue chair to her bedroom and a new dining set, and swapping out a shaggy area rug for an easier to clean shorter pile one. She redid the nursery in lavenders and pinks with the assistance of TaskRabbit hires, and a friend another single mother by choice, who had twins gave her Gemma's Stokke crib. She pays 5,485 a month in rent, an increase of 25 over her first two year lease. "Battery Park is very expensive," she said. "Almost all the other buildings were built post 9/11, and they're all five star," she said. "I have other friends in North Battery Park who pay 3,000 to 5,000 more than I do. Gateway Plaza is still a nice doorman building, but the rent is not as soul crushing." She isn't sure if she'll remain in the area, but the abundance of new and good public schools makes the notion attractive. "You don't need to apply to nine schools for kindergarten because there are enough seats in the schools here," she said. "And living in Battery Park City all the greenery, I think it does your mind and body and soul good to be by the water," she said. "Some days we never cross the West Side Highway; we just stay along the water. Life moves at a slower pace down here. People are happy." It may be the tranquil setting, or the network of mothers, or being able to walk a few steps out to an enclosed lawn whenever Gemma gets fussy, but so far, Ms. McDonagh said, single motherhood hasn't been as daunting as she feared. "Hopefully, I'll meet Mr. Prince Charming, Mr. Fabulous. But who knows," she said. "I think Mother Nature has been really easy on me. I keep on waiting for it to get hard, but Gemma's been really good." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Have you ever thought, while watching a dancer move, about her axis of rotation, her surface area with respect to the floor or her changes in gravitational potential? At Danspace Project, the particle physicist Sarah Demers drew our attention to these dynamics as Emily Coates, a former member of New York City Ballet, demonstrated a passage from George Balanchine's "Apollo." Ms. Coates and Ms. Demers, professors at Yale, have been collaborating since 2011, each using her discipline to shed light on the other's. They created a course together, the Physics of Dance, and wrote a forthcoming textbook based on that curriculum. While science tends to be viewed as more serious than dance, their approach revolves around collapsing hierarchies, giving equal weight to both. Ms. Coates's illuminating "Incarnations" translates this balanced partnership into performance, riffing on the structure of a classroom lecture. At one point during Thursday's premiere, while explaining how Balanchine, a founder of City Ballet, developed a more efficient pirouette, Ms. Coates playfully addressed the audience as "class." "The performance this evening is our laboratory," she said. "We're colliding the knowledge that dancers possess with the knowledge that physicists create." Though at times too intent on explaining itself, "Incarnations" also explored more ambiguous terrain, notably in a monologue by the postmodern dance pioneer Yvonne Rainer. Ms. Rainer, 82, has commented on aging in her work, and here she played a grumpy Apollo with a failing memory, recounting a lifetime of divine intervention. Crashing through unexpectedly, the lengthy rant underscored our need for myths and heroes, as much as science, to make sense of the universe. In Ms. Coates's view, movement, too, brings us closer to realms too large or small to comprehend. One section dealt with the body language of physicists attempting to explain the Higgs boson particle. As a scientist (on video) gestured vigorously, the dancer Jon Kinzel echoed her surprising lyricism. Lacina Coulibaly and Irene Hultman soon joined in, making the exercise more expansive. Surrounded by Will Orzo's spacious score and Carol Mullins's starry lighting, they captured Ms. Coates's description of gesture as "an effort to touch what cannot be seen or fully known." SIOBHAN BURKE If only Ms. Demers, who analyzed Ms. Coates's movement with the enthusiasm of a sports commentator, had been at the 92nd Street Y, where the company Boomerang, led by Kora Radella, offered the premiere of "This Is a Forge" during the Harkness Dance Festival. What forces were at play in this grim, punishing duet between Massimiliano Balduzzi and Simon Thomas Train? Choreographed by Ms. Radella (with input from her collaborator Matty Davis and the performers), "Forge," in keeping with its title, generated tension and heat. In ways that sometimes looked painful, the intrepid dancers wrestled with one another and the floor, accompanied live by the violin duo String Noise. Yet even as Mr. Balduzzi, reciting poetry by Jamaal May, began to shout, then sing, then howl, the work felt static and, for all its violent undertones, not dangerous enough. SIOBHAN BURKE Performed Wednesday through Saturday at New York Live Arts, Manhattan. When Richard Move dresses up as Martha Graham, as this 6 foot 4 dancer has been doing since the 1990s, it's quite a sight. But it's Graham as a speaker that Move most potently embodies, delivering that great choreographer's grand pronouncements, boasts and digs in a girlish voice that hides sharp teeth. The voice was in excellent shape when Move opened the discipline crossing series "Live Ideas 2017: Mx'd Messages" at New York Live Arts with "Martha 20," a greatest hits collection of Graham shtick sprinkled with topical updates. Move's dancing as Graham seemed more waxen, and the expert help of the former Graham company members Katherine Crockett and Catherine Cabeen didn't lift the excerpts from Graham choreography out of demonstration mode. The dry punch lines retain their bite, though, because Move believes in them. During Move's new "XXYY," he remained mute, dancing to recordings of the castrato singer Alessandro Moreschi a voice whose gender is hard to place. Here, it was Ms. Crockett and Ms. Cabeen who spoke, reciting from Ralph Werther's 1918 "Autobiography of an Androgyne." Their somewhat stilted readings, combined with murky choreography, made for a less than thrilling theatrical experience. That's despite the gender blurring ingenuity of Alba Clemente's costumes and the fascination of Werther's testimony with its painful presentation of transsexuals as "wholly to be pitied." The greatest fascination of the program lay in the contrast between Graham's assertion that all women are as murderously dangerous as Medea and Werther's defense of transsexuals as "harmless as women." Through Move, these voices spoke to each other, and to us. BRIAN SEIBERT | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Young Thug onstage at Rolling Loud in Queens. The festival made its New York debut over the weekend. Playboi Carti slender as a string bean, flexible as a yogi, his dreads dyed almost the same beige as his cropped jacket bounded onto the main stage at the Rolling Loud festival Saturday night to rile up his faithful. Carti is an impressionist rapper, slurring together syllables and murmurs into cloudy chant along mantras. But onstage, he was a dynamo jumping wildly, curling his body into a parabola as he shouted to the sky, and inciting his tens of thousands of fans to mosh. This was something like the platonic ideal of a Rolling Loud performance modern, young, deconstructed, riotous. This traveling hip hop festival made its New York debut in the parking lots of Citi Field in Queens on Saturday and Sunday for what was almost certainly the largest multiday rap event ever in the city; 60,000 tickets were sold for each day. It was a bold success, and reflected some truths about the genre. First, it has melted its essential stars and innovators all but eschew traditional structure in favor of songs that reduce hip hop to something primal and instinctual. Second, all bow before the wisdom of the mosh pit the huge crowds here were their own character in the festival's narrative drama. And though it took place in the shadow of the 7 train, the weekend was a reminder of just how far New York is from the center of contemporary hip hop. That gap was exacerbated by the New York Police Department, which insisted that five rising rappers from the New York area Pop Smoke, Casanova, Don Q, Sheff G and 22Gz be dropped from the lineup because they had "been affiliated with recent acts of violence citywide." (Tariq Cherif, a founder and owner of Rolling Loud, wrote on Twitter, "If we want RL to return to NYC, we have no choice but to comply. That's the position we're in.") In four and a half years beginning small in Miami, and now promoting Coachella sized events around the country Rolling Loud has established itself as a playground for the young. The aesthetic is relentlessly 2010s, even mid to late 2010s. The lineups, especially earlier in the day, depict a rapid feedback system: This time last year, many of the rappers now drawing crowds of several thousand were barely known. Even the most established rappers had an improvisational flair and a knack for bending words to their whim: Playboi Carti, and the performer who followed him on the main stage, Travis Scott, whose set was far less centered but even more volcanic. (Scott injured his right knee while performing, but hobbled on anyway.) On Sunday night, Young Thug and Lil Uzi Vert performed back to back, one splashy eccentric supplanting the other. There is an emergent pop minded generation following in their footsteps, represented at this festival by Juice WRLD, who writes sterling melodies about heartbreak; the squeaky sing rapping of A Boogie Wit da Hoodie; and Lil Tecca, who had a rapturous midday audience for his sweet voiced boasts. Excellent sets by the young rappers Polo G, Lil Tjay and Calboy included standout melodic songs about tragedy. Suicideboys and City Morgue channeled an urgent, gothic misery. Blueface persisted with his viral antics. And there were ample female rappers: Saweetie was impressively focused, Rico Nasty was energetically unhinged and Megan Thee Stallion was briskly efficient. Rolling Loud suffered from not atypical festival logistics issues some performers going on early, or late, or not at all. Not enough spacing between big name performers. A barrier that was no match for the crowd's intensity during Ski Mask the Slump God's set. Which is to say, the kids came to rage. Meek Mill complained about the limp energy of his crowd, but to be fair, he's a rapper of a different ilk while he was having trouble whipping his fans into a frenzy, Scott was on another stage inciting mayhem. That split also played out via the music the D.J.s chose between sets. Some opted for New York classics like Nas and Big Punisher, to little interest. Others played to the crowd's interests, emblematized by the staccato pugnacity of NLE Choppa's "Shotta Flow" and the reliably explosive Chief Keef chestnut "Faneto" from all the way back in 2014, a time that was effectively the birthplace of this generation's taste. Almost all of them consistently and pointedly played music by the absent Pop Smoke, who has had a handful of rowdy hits this summer. Rolling Loud's New York debut in part was going to be a showcase for new talent from the city, but the N.Y.P.D.'s request laid waste to that section of the lineup, preventing some of the most promising young New York rappers from performing at a signature hometown festival. That said, there is a difference between a rap festival that takes place in New York and a New York rap festival. For years, the city's closest approximation of the latter has been Summer Jam, hosted by the radio station Hot 97, a once a year accounting of changing local taste and declining local influence. There were several New York rappers of earlier generations booked for Rolling Loud. The Wu Tang Clan performed a focused set of old hits. ASAP Rocky, the festival's headliner a triumphant homecoming following his recent legal troubles in Sweden was joined by 50 Cent during his set, which was otherwise a tug of war between a conventional star turn and an embrace of the unruliness of the generations that came after him. But notably, many of the older New Yorkers and the rappers influenced by them were shunted to the third and smallest stage on the far side of the parking lot: Fabolous, Pusha T, Wale, Jim Jones, Action Bronson. Watching them was like sampling a regional delicacy. Toward the end of Saturday night, the New York veteran Fat Joe was performing to maybe 1,000 people there, stringing together hits from a decade ago. Midway through, he brought out the Lox to perform "We Gonna Make It." That song is something of a New York tradition the Lox must have performed it hundreds of times at other people's shows over the years, the opening horns and strings ringing out like a call to arms. In this context, it felt particularly defiant: For a brief moment, for just a few people, the home team was victorious. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. Where meteor showers come from If you spot a meteor shower, what you're usually seeing is an icy comet's leftovers that crash into Earth's atmosphere. Comets are sort of like dirty snowballs: As they travel through the solar system, they leave behind a dusty trail of rocks and ice that lingers in space long after they leave. When Earth passes through these cascades of comet waste, the bits of debris which can be as small as grains of sand pierce the sky at such speeds that they burst, creating a celestial fireworks display. A general rule of thumb with meteor showers: You are never watching the Earth cross into remnants from a comet's most recent orbit. Instead, the burning bits come from the previous passes. For example, during the Perseid meteor shower you are seeing meteors ejected from when its parent comet, Comet Swift Tuttle, visited in 1862 or earlier, not from its most recent pass in 1992. That's because it takes time for debris from a comet's orbit to drift into a position where it intersects with Earth's orbit, according to Bill Cooke, an astronomer with NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. The best way to see a meteor shower is to get to a location that has a clear view of the entire night sky. Ideally, that would be somewhere with dark skies, away from city lights and traffic. To maximize your chances of catching the show, look for a spot that offers a wide, unobstructed view. Bits and pieces of meteor showers are visible for a certain period of time, but they really peak visibly from dusk to dawn on a given few days. Those days are when Earth's orbit crosses through the thickest part of the cosmic stream. Meteor showers can vary in their peak times, with some reaching their maximums for only a few hours and others for several nights. The showers tend to be most visible after midnight and before dawn. It is best to use your naked eye to spot a meteor shower. Binoculars or telescopes tend to limit your field of view. You might need to spend about half an hour in the dark to let your eyes get used to the reduced light. Stargazers should be warned that moonlight and the weather can obscure the shows. But if that happens, there are usually meteor livestreams like the ones hosted by NASA and by Slooh. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
"It's been such fun, I can't tell you," she said. "The standout shows for me have been Givenchy and also Saint Laurent last night, which was simply incredible." "Hedi gave us beautiful party dresses in a simply gorgeous setting," she said, referring to Hedi Slimane of Saint Laurent. Ms. Deng pronounced herself a major fan of Chanel a statement supported by the fact that she was dressed in the label from head to toe and added that she had dinner with Mr. Lagerfeld while in town. "He really is just the most energetic and creative man and so interesting to talk to," she said before Cindi Leive, the editor of Glamour, walked over for a few words. Several aisles over, hordes of paparazzi seemed on the verge of punches in the hopes of getting in a better position to photograph Pharrell Williams, who was enthusiastically greeting Jonathan Newhouse, chief executive of Conde Nast International, while Willow Smith, Stella Tennant, Caroline de Maigret and Ines de la Fressange sat close by. Mr. Williams had newly blond hair, which appeared to match his sunny disposition, even when the scrum continued post show. "It was just amazing; it was like being hit by a barrage of creativity and not at all how I expected," the singer said as he tried to shuffle backstage. "I've worked with Karl on projects before, so I know he's the real deal. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
"Dolphins, dolphins!" the girls shrieked, leaping from their seats, where they had just returned after chasing one another through the ferry's aisles. They rushed to the windows, crushing shoulder to shoulder to glimpse a fin, rising and falling, here then there, cutting through the inky blue Pacific. Even from across the cabin, I was sure one of them must be the birthday girl. Among any group bound for Santa Catalina, often called Catalina, an island 22 miles offshore from Los Angeles, there is almost always at least one a passenger taking advantage of the annual free ride aboard the Catalina Express. They are identifiable by ribbons on their chests, like the prize winners at a county fair. Throughout the ferry ride, and throughout the day, they are wished a happy birthday by strangers, handed free ice cream at Lloyd's, treated to bowling at Three Palms Avalon Arcade or a free tour of the famous Avalon Casino. In this way, the once glamorous Catalina now billed "Birthday Island" by the marketers at Catalina Express has become a sort of upscale, multigenerational Chuck E. Cheese's, a place for "birthday boys and girls" (as adults and children alike are called in promotional materials) to celebrate their day. The kids tend to be giddy and the adults, tipsy. (The bar on our 8 a.m. ferry had a line during much of the one hour ride from Long Beach to Avalon, the largest of the two towns on the 75 square mile island.) I wasn't visiting Catalina for a birthday. Instead, I had tacked a two day detour onto a trip to Los Angeles. That, it turned out, was just the right amount of time. It was long enough to repeatedly walk Avalon's main drag, a pedestrian avenue lined with fish shacks, ice cream parlors and shops with names like Buoys Gulls and Afishinados. Most sold some mix of swimwear, Hawaiian shirts, sunglasses and souvenirs. To its great credit, Catalina doesn't take itself too seriously. My husband, daughter and I took a taxi one of the few cars on the island, where the waiting list for a vehicle permit is over a decade long and where most people go by foot or golf cart between the ferry terminal and our hotel, El Terado Terrace. Otherwise, we walked. Veering from the waterfront strip, I climbed the steep side streets devouring the smell of jasmine and relishing the sight of palm trees, purple flowered jacaranda and hot pink bougainvillea. Sticking to town, I didn't see the island's celebrated bison (now our nation's national mammal), which roam Catalina's almost entirely undeveloped interior, the descendants of 14 animals brought here in 1924 for the filming of a movie. But bison iconography is everywhere in Avalon (including a statue on the roof of our hotel) making it a sort of unofficial town mascot. During these walks, I would sometimes slip into seeing the streets, with their Art Deco architectural character and Moorish tiles, as a sort of movie set. Even the town's name, Avalon, could be mistaken for a fictional Disney town. On a tour of Catalina Casino, the iconic 1929 structure that dominates Avalon's waterfront, our guide a woman with terrific Cruella de Vil hair explained that the building was never a gambling hall, as most assume. It was a casino in the Italian sense, a palace of entertainment. During Catalina's heyday, it was the island's major attraction. The ground floor is a magnificent theater among the first cinemas in the country designed specifically for "talkies" while the top floor, 12 stories up, was an opulent ballroom with a Brazilian white hardwood dance floor and a Tiffany chandelier that drew big band fanatics chasing their favorite performers. The casino's theater still operates, showing one first run movie a week, one screening a night, and is owned, as much of the island once was, by the Santa Catalina Island Company and the Wrigley family. (Yes, those Wrigleys; the Chicago Cubs used to spend their spring training on the island.) Later, standing on the green pier, we watched a seal herd a thick school of darting, desperate fish. In contrast to Long Beach (our mainland departure point), the water in Avalon Harbor was as clear as an aquarium. The seal's meal was our entertainment. "Who needs SeaWorld," I thought. Here, there was snorkeling and diving, paddleboarding and kayaking, parasailing and sportfishing. I wanted to do it all. But short on time and traveling with an infant, we settled on a ride on a yellow submarine. The Nautilus, a semi submersible tourist vessel with large porthole windows beneath the water's surface and "missiles" of fish food, greeted us with a mock sci fi soundtrack of a captain's voice. But once we got moving, the hokiness gave way to excitement as my 10 month old daughter, Roxie, stared in awe at the air bubbles, the rays of light through the water and, finally, fish. So many fish. There were bright orange garibaldi, the California state marine fish (and a 1,000 fine to catch and fail to release), blue halfmoon perch and opaleye, named for their opalescent blue green eyes. With each blast of the food cannon, they swarmed and Roxie squealed, like the little girls on the ferry. The half hour tour was over just in time for us to catch the noon boat back to the mainland, escorted from Avalon Harbor by a pod of dolphins. If You Go The Catalina Express (catalinaexpress.com) offers multiple passages daily from three mainland departure points. From 36 one way, full fare adults. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
In the mid 1990's, we found ourselves in a tragic and uncomfortable situation of living amongst known torturers, kidnappers, and murderers. Genocide perpetrators had total liberty and freedom to navigate the same spaces that we lived in our city. At a bar, sitting next to your table, you could find one of the worst perpetrators of forced disappearances. In this photo, you can see my father in 1974; he was thirty years old. My father, Enrique Jose Juarez, was a leader in the Peronist youth movement. He was a filmmaker. He disappeared on December 10th, 1976. To this day, they have remained silent and there has been no mention whatsoever of what they did to his body. MONTAGE SEQUENCE TITLE CARD: Between 1976 and 1983, over 30,000 people were killed or disappeared by a military dictatorship in Argentina. TITLE CARD: In the mid 1990's, the children of the disappeared organized under the name of HIJOS. They staged peaceful protests they called 'Escraches' to demand justice, which had been denied them by amnesty laws. Buenos Aires Argentina, 2001 Chanting: "Murderer, Murderer, Murderer" The red paint filled balloon signifies that the house is stained with blood. We did not choose sticks or stones or violence. The "escrache" strategy is a way of revealing that there is an unpunished murderer adjacent to where you live. They shouldn't be in your neighborhood, they should be in prison, but if they are in your neighborhood, you know who they are. It is not about killing with your own hands and killing the members of the military. Instead the purpose is to build on this idea of justice and anti impunity. We are going to do an escrache on a perpetrator of mass murder. If there's no justice, there's escrache. Our demand was justice. Trials and Punishment. The previous governments hadn't paid any attention. "Trial and Punishment" We had to peacefully publicize what these people had done. Letting everyone know that this person was a rapist, a torturer, a murderer. Saying it loud, with paint, flyers and crowds of people in the streets, drumming and chanting. "Attention neighbors, a murder is living next door to you!" The point of the escrache is that it settles and it starts creating a ripple effect. We always said that the escrache starts the next day. When the action was over, when we had already shown who lived there, and what they did. The perpetrator's social isolation in the neighborhood becomes a symbol of his imprisonment. The visible joy was a powerful force as it had to counterbalance the fact that we were branded as violent or as doing something illegal by a large segment of society. What is unacceptable is to oppose the movement, and say "Don't do anything". It is precisely that silence that makes impunity possible. Many times we were repressed during these actions, with gas, batons; but at the same time our numbers grew. Escrache is our way of transforming memory into action. Tomorrow, the newsstand owner decides not to sell to him, the tax driver decides not to drive him, the baker won't sell to him. The next day, the struggle multiplies. It worked because many people did not know that the person greeting them everyday was responsible for the crimes of the dictatorship. My mother was a wardrobe designer for theater and film. She arrived at the Devoto prison in bad shape healthwise. They were detained without being accused or charged, with no indication of the duration of the captivity. We stayed with my grandparents. We asked my aunt what we could bring my mother in prison. She said we should bring her an apple because the military wouldn't let you bring anything through. "They'll let you through because you're a kid", she said. My mother took a bite out of the apple. And she passed it to her friends. I told her the apple was a present for her. And she told me that they shared everything. That I would understand why later in life. Jorge Rafael Videla was one of Argentina's most depraved and atrocious perpetrators of mass murder. He was the ideologue of the massacre that occurred during the dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. He is ultimately responsible for all of the forced disappearances. He was the fundamental figure. Hence the importance of him being in prison because if he was not detained, everyone underneath him would be absolved. The Videla escrache was symbolic for us. We rallied more than 10,000 people. My grandson would kill me if he saw me. We stopped by the Military Hospital, where many babies were born and subsequently, were stolen from their mothers. "Where are our siblings?" H.I.J.O.S At this hospital, mothers who had been abducted gave birth and lost their babies. "Videla, Murderer" Videla was one of the organizers of the theft of the babies belonging to disappeared women. The majority of the pregnant women were killed after they gave birth. Many of these children began living with a different name and a different identity. The grandchildren whose identities were recovered were able to tell their story. On October 8, 2004, I was able to discover my true identity thanks to H.I.J.O.S. and to the grandmothers' movement. For me, the most powerful ending happened in front of Videla's home. He was living comfortably in a luxury apartment. We rented a scissor lift that our friend climbed on. We displayed the victims' faces in front of the perpetrator's house. Our friend ends up at around the same height as Videla's balcony and speaks to him directly. Society judges you and everyone here says they do not want to live next to a murderer. They want you to rot in prison. Murderer! Murderer! The day we were at Videla's house, the window shutters were closed, you could not see inside or see if there was anyone there. The person usually does not come out and says "I didn't do it" or "What is happening?" On the contrary, they hide even more when there is an escrache. It's not a dialogue with the mass murderer. It's a message from society to that person and to the people who have the power to put him or her in prison. The Videla escrache was a milestone. Shortly thereafter Change to: A little later he was tried and sentenced to prison for the case of the stolen babies. He went to jail, as anyone with multiple life sentences should, instead of living at home. The powerful symbol of Videla's dictatorship collapsed with his imprisonment and subsequent death in prison. It was no longer possible that the most emblematic perpetrator of state terrorism could go unpunished forever. In those years, the silence started to reverse itself. Head of ESMA Detention Center Jorge Eduardo Acosta Sentenced to life imprisonment, 2011 Commander Alfredo Astiz Sentenced to life imprisonment, 2011 Navy Lieutenant Commander Ricardo Cavallo Sentenced to life imprisonment, 2011 Naval officers Manuel Garcia Tallada and Adolfo Donda Sentenced to life imprisonment, 2014 and 2011 At that time, it was unimaginable to hold trials for crimes against humanity. These trials started in 2003, when Nestor Kirchner assumed the presidency and he committed to the principles of "memory, truth and justice", which human rights organizations demanded become government policies. My mom had asthma. No one dies from it. And she died due to lack of medical attention. There is a lawsuit pending trial for my mother's case. We are suing the Bureau of Prisons and those who participated in her death. At least we've gotten a real conviction, not just social condemnation. Of the people who disappeared my father, along with so many other activists. The process of memory, truth and justice in our country was a collective achievement. It was an unprecedented and unparalleled example for the world. 30,000 disappeared. Present! Now and always! We have a saying, "The impossible only takes a little longer." It took us many years to re open cases of crimes against humanity to prosecute and convict the murderous criminals in this country. But we did it. Escrache was a useful tool during times of impunity. Silence is over in our country, and that is an advantage. But we have to keep fighting for the collective memory and for the 30,000 disappeared. There is still a lot left to escrache to this day. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
LOS ANGELES "Ah, I recommend it," Jodie Gates sighed, adopting the tone of someone advocating an exotic spa treatment or sky diving. The satisfactions she meant are much harder to come by. How many people get a state of the art building of nearly 55,000 square feet designed to their specifications? Ms. Gates was standing near the construction site of such an edifice: the Glorya Kaufman International Dance Center, the future home of the University of Southern California's new Glorya Kaufman School of Dance. As that dance school's director and vice dean, Ms. Gates could speak with proprietary delight about the center, scheduled to open by next September. But joining her on a tour of the partly finished structure a few weeks ago was a visitor with an even greater sense of ownership: the philanthropist Glorya Kaufman. It was Ms. Kaufman's 2012 donation of an unspecified multimillion dollar sum that made possible the founding of the Kaufman school, the first new school in nearly 40 years established through an endowment at the university, which barely had a dance program before. The Kaufman school, which started classes this week, is unusual in embedding a conservatory style bachelor of fine arts program within a private research university of some academic rigor. It's also distinctive in curricular focus; its motto "the New Movement" connotes revolution, and Ms. Gates speaks of "reimagining dance education for the 21st century." But aside from the part time involvement of the world renowned choreographer William Forsythe, its main attention getter is its nascent building. It's a major structure devoted to dance in a city better known for other arts, and a highly visible sign of how that situation is changing. On the tour, Ms. Gates emphasized the made to order flexibility of the design Collegiate Gothic on the outside, modern within and how room within room construction and basket weave sprung floors will insulate each of the six studios (one a convertible performance space) from the noise and vibration of the others. At this stage, though, the strongest impression was of scale: the 30 foot ceilings, the yawning arched holes where tall windows will let in the famed Los Angeles light. "Dance requires space," Ms. Gates said, spreading her arms wide. Ms. Kaufman, wearing slacks of sparkling silver not usually paired with a hard hat, seemed entirely comfortable among the tattooed workers and tickled by the project's progress. She is no stranger to scaffolding; her fortune derives from her late husband, Donald Kaufman, and the home building company (now known as KB Home) that he founded with Eli Broad. The new center won't be the first dance structure with her name on it. Dance is her passion she says she believes in it as a force for joy in the world and she's donated millions to dance and dance education. Despite her sunny exterior, Ms. Kaufman can be steely about how her money is spent. In past interviews, she has expressed dissatisfaction with how the University of California, Los Angeles whose dance department is housed in a women's gym renovated in 2005 into Glorya Kaufman Hall was too bureaucratically hamstrung to fulfill her grand vision. But so far, she said, she "couldn't be happier" about the scale and design of the new school and building at U.S.C. The ambition is as large as she wants it to be. She also expressed confidence in Ms. Gates, a prolific choreographer who spent most of her career as a ballerina with the Joffrey Ballet and Frankfurt Ballet (under Mr. Forsythe's direction). "I made sure she's in my contract," Ms. Kaufman said. Ms. Gates explained that the curriculum she designed would take advantage of the opportunity to build a "progressive program from square one." Talking to dance professionals around the country, she looked into what was needed and what was lacking. Her goal, she said, is "to breed the next generation of hybrid artists creators, innovators, entrepreneurs." B.F.A. candidates must study ballet and modern dance but also hip hop, dance management, dance for camera and digital media. They will learn and perform dance masterworks but also participate in colloquiums on topics like "What Is the Medium of Dance Today?" Senior projects must involve at least two disciplines apart from dance. Ms. Gates has already learned how to speak the language of the university's brochures. "Hybrid," "interdisciplinary" and "entrepreneurial" are buzzwords across the campus. Partnerships between the Kaufman school and U.S.C.'s Thornton School of Music and School of Cinematic Arts will encourage collaborations between dancers, composers and filmmakers. The Kaufman school emphasizes composition, both within the curriculum and in conjunction with a new U.S.C. Choreographic Institute, a still vague research platform advised by Mr. Forsythe, who plans to be on campus about six weeks a year (and who declined to be interviewed for this article). Connections and partnerships keep mounting, including one with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. Students will interact with the world class performers who tour to the Music Center, Los Angeles's largest performing arts presenter. The funding for its dance series is evident in its name, Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance. Ms. Gates also views her program as fitting in with a renaissance in the Los Angeles dance scene. She fell in love with the area in the 1980s and '90s, when the Joffrey Ballet was bicoastal, and after retiring from Frankfurt Ballet in 2004, she moved to Laguna Beach, where she founded the Laguna Dance Festival. Since then, she has witnessed a tidal shift. "It's covered wagon time again," she said. "There's opportunity in the West. Dancers are moving here to dance, and choreographers are coming here to form companies," she added, mentioning Benjamin Millepied's L.A. Dance Project and up and coming troupes like BodyTraffic. "If we can train our students well, can you imagine what they will contribute in five years?" "So many things have happened with so little resistance," she explained, citing high interest in the Kaufman school from potential students, faculty and institutional partners. "I feel like the universe is helping, like we must have the right plan." For now, the first class of students larger than expected, 33 young dancers who gave impressive answers to the question "What does the New Movement mean to you?" will have to make do with a slightly renovated studio in the old physical education building. Ms. Gates joked about the shabbiness of her current office, as only someone about to move into much better accommodations would. They all have the Kaufman center to look forward to. They can follow its progress by webcam or walk over to the site, adjacent to the even larger construction project of U.S.C. Village, a mix of student housing, restaurants and shops. What "the New Movement" means just how new and how valuable will depend on what they do with all that space. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
RUMPUS Zoning officials approved plans to build a continuing education facility on the campus of the former Wykeham Rise school. But neighbors have taken the proposal to court. MATTHEW KLAUER bought the picturesque former Wykeham Rise school property in Washington in 2008 with the intention of redeveloping it as an inn and spa. Neighbors balked, and the zoning commission rejected the plan, so Mr. Klauer has now come up with a new proposal: Wykeham University. Replacing a school with a school proved more acceptable, and earlier this year, the commission signed off on the alternative. But once again, neighbors of the 27 acre site are up in arms, this time challenging the plan in Superior Court. Central to their challenge is the claim that Wykeham University isn't a school at all. "It is a resort and recreation facility that happens to have some classroom space, or, more accurately, meeting, conference or banquet space as any inn resort would have," they charge in court filings. Mr. Klauer, who has spent four years trying to get out of the starting gate with what would be his first development, has stood by the school concept. He has described it as an unaccredited adult education facility focused on personal wellness. Nonetheless, it is clear that he hasn't given up on his original desire for an inn. He appealed the zoning commission's 3 to 2 denial of the inn plan and, after a lower court upheld the denial, sought a review before the state Appellate Court. It has now agreed to hear the case. "We all knew he really wanted an inn," said Robert L. Parker, a neighbor who owns a house on Bell Hill Road. "The school plan was just a test to see if the neighbors were going to have the wherewithal to lawyer up." Long a genteel getaway for New Yorkers, Washington has been debating the appropriate use of the former Wykeham Rise boarding school for girls for more than a decade. Situated along winding residential roads, the school opened in 1902 and operated, with some wartime interruptions, until 1989. A Swiss hospitality training school then bought the property, but it failed soon afterward. Other informal proposals including condominiums and an alcohol rehabilitation facility were quietly warned away, according to real estate agents in this well heeled Litchfield County area. Mr. Klauer bought the decaying campus from two local owners for 2.75 million. He has been the first to persist with development plans in spite of fierce neighborhood opposition. The inn plan called for a 44 room lodging facility, along with a restaurant, a spa and a fitness center. It drew solid support from residents who saw it as an important contributor to the town's limited commercial tax base. Yet neighbors with houses close to the site objected to the scale of the project, which they noted was far larger than the high end Mayflower Inn and Spa, a 30 room hotel on Woodbury Road. After zoning officials rejected the plan, Mr. Klauer briefly flirted with the idea of putting affordable housing on the site. With minimal state financing available for such projects, however, that idea loomed as "a hugely expensive proposition," said Robert Fisher, a lawyer for Mr. Klauer. Next up was Wykeham University, which Mr. Fisher acknowledged is not really meant to be a degree granting institution. He described more of a continuing education destination where people can learn about fitness, health, cooking and gardening. "The whole idea is that many people when they go away on a vacation are no longer willing to just lie in the sand and get sunburned," Mr. Fisher said. "They want to take classes of some kind, to keep the mind going and be with other people who are similarly inclined. That's the underlying philosophy here." "Sounds to me like a resort," retorted Mark Branse, the lawyer representing the property's neighbors. When Mr. Klauer first presented the application for Wykeham University in 2010, the plan didn't appear much different from the inn proposal, particularly since most of the space was designated for lodging, Mr. Branse said. Neighbors also object to the project's density its footprint is just under the town's allowed maximum of 10 percent lot coverage. In order to allay fears that it would wind up being a resort masquerading as a school, the zoning commission banned the sale of alcohol at the facility as a condition of its approval. Mr. Fisher says Mr. Klauer has no intention of applying for a liquor permit. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
For about four months, as the pandemic bore down on New York City, an island had been left practically deserted in New York Harbor. In a typical year, as spring turns into summer, Governors Island becomes packed with picnickers and families on bicycles; tour groups weave through the island's intricate paths and lines of sun kissed couples form for the next ferry back to the mainland. But the pandemic forced the stewards of the island to close it to the public to prevent a pleasant summer getaway from turning into a super spreader event. It wasn't until last month, when outdoor attractions like zoos and botanical gardens were preparing to open, that Governors Island did as well. On July 15, it welcomed its first visitors of the pandemic era, and the next day, so did the High Line in Manhattan. In Brooklyn Bridge Park, more than three acres of new parkland had recently opened for strolling and lounging. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
After receiving a 20 million gift from the Leon and Toby Cooperman Family Foundation, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark is slated to expand, building a multipurpose education and community center. "We've been talking about a new home for our education programs and more broadly for our other community programs for a couple of years," said John Schreiber, president and chief executive of the performing arts center. "We have a robust arts training program that's operating now in a building that's not a 21st century facility." The donation is the largest individual gift the center has ever received, Mr. Schreiber said. It will make possible a major upgrade, in the form of a 35,000 to 45,000 square foot space, to be named the Cooperman Family Education and Community Center. The hope, Mr. Schreiber said, is to break ground on the building sometime between July 2020 and June 2021. "This new education and community center, designed to serve citizens from all corners of our city, will provide life enhancing programs and activities for everyone from babies to seniors," Ras Baraka, the mayor, said in a statement. "We're grateful to the Cooperman Family for their thoughtful philanthropy." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
A recent study found that superspreading events typically occurred when a person was at the point in their infection when they were shedding large amounts of virus and doing so amid large numbers of people. Why the Coronavirus Is More Likely to 'Superspread' Than the Flu For a spiky sphere just 120 nanometers wide, the coronavirus can be a remarkably cosmopolitan traveler. Spewed from the nose or mouth, it can rocket across a room and splatter onto surfaces; it can waft into poorly ventilated spaces and linger in the air for hours. At its most intrepid, the virus can spread from a single individual to dozens of others, perhaps even a hundred or more at once, proliferating through packed crowds in what is called a superspreading event. Such scenarios, which have been traced to call centers, meat processing facilities, weddings and more, have helped propel a pandemic that, in the span of eight months, has reached nearly every corner of the globe. And yet, while some people seem particularly apt to spread the coronavirus, others barely pass it on. "There's this small percentage of people who appear to infect a lot of people," said Dr. Joshua Schiffer, a physician and mathematical modeling expert who studies infectious diseases at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Estimates vary from population to population, but they consistently show a striking skew: Between 10 and 20 percent of coronavirus cases may seed 80 percent of new infections. Other respiratory diseases, like the flu, are far more egalitarian in their spread. Figuring out what drives coronavirus superspreading events could be key to stopping them, and expediting an end to the pandemic. "That's the million dollar question," said Ayesha Mahmud, who studies infectious disease dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley. In a paper posted Friday to the website medRxiv that has not yet been through peer review, Dr. Schiffer and his colleagues reported that coronavirus superspreading events were most likely to happen at the intersection where bad timing and poor placement collide: a person who has reached the point in their infection when they are shedding large amounts of virus, and are doing so in a setting where there are plenty of other people around to catch it. According to a model built by Dr. Schiffer's team, the riskiest window for such transmission may be extremely brief a one to two day period in the week or so after a person is infected, when coronavirus levels are at their highest. The virus can still spread outside this window, and individuals outside it should not let up on measures like mask wearing and physical distancing, Dr. Schiffer said. But the longer an infection drags on, the less likely a person is to be contagious an idea that might help experts advise when to end self isolation, or how to allocate resources to those most in need, said Dr. Mahmud, who was not involved in the study. Catching and containing a person at their most infectious is another matter, however. Some people stricken with the coronavirus start to feel unwell within a couple days, whereas others take weeks, and many never end up experiencing symptoms. The length of the so called incubation period, which spans the time between infection and the onset of symptoms, can be so variable that some people who catch the virus fall ill before the person who gave it to them does. That rarely happens with the flu, which reliably rouses a spate of symptoms within a couple days of infection. If the coronavirus reaches a peak in the body before symptoms appear if symptoms appear at all that increase might be very tough to identify without frequent and proactive testing. Symptom free spikes in virus load appear to happen very often, which "really distorts our ability to tell when somebody is contagious," Dr. Schiffer said. That, in turn, makes it all too easy for people to obliviously shed the pathogen. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. "It really is about opportunity," said Shweta Bansal, an infectious disease ecologist at Georgetown University who was not involved in the study. "These processes really come together when you are not only infected, but you also don't know you're infected because you don't feel crummy." Some of these unwitting coronavirus chauffeurs, emboldened to go out in public, may end up causing a superspreading event that sends the pathogen blazing through a new population. This confluence of factors a person in the wrong place at the wrong point in their infection sets the stage for "explosive transmission," Dr. Bansal said. The team's model also pointed to another important variable: the remarkable resilience of the coronavirus when it is aloft. A growing body of evidence now suggests that the coronavirus can be airborne in crowded, poorly ventilated indoor environments, where it may encounter many people at once. The virus also travels in larger, heavier droplets, but these quickly fall to the ground after they are expelled from the airway and do not have the same reach or longevity as their smaller counterparts. Dr. Schiffer said he thought the coronavirus might be more amenable to superspreading than flu viruses because it is better at persisting in contagious clouds, which can ferry pathogens over relatively long distances. "It's a spatial phenomenon," he said. "People further away from the transmitter may be more likely to be infected." Since the start of the pandemic, many comparisons have been drawn between Covid 19 and the flu, both of which are diseases caused by viruses that attack the respiratory tract. But plenty of differences exist, and in many ways the coronavirus is more formidable. "This study adds yet another layer to how it's different from influenza," said Olivia Prosper, a researcher at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville who uses mathematical models to study infectious diseases but was not involved in the study. "It's not just about how sick it makes you, but also its ability to transmit." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
RHINECLIFF, N.Y. When Joan Juliet Buck completed the first draft of her new memoir, "The Price of Illusion," for Atria Books, the manuscript was over a thousand pages. "It was like a deposition," she said, an apt description considering the material she had to cover. In 2000 Ms. Buck, known for being the only American woman to edit Vogue Paris, was abruptly dismissed after nearly seven years there, and sent to rehab by her boss, Jonathan Newhouse, chairman of Conde Nast International, for a drug problem she did not have. (Though she said she agreed to go because it was part of her severance package, she also admitted that with a writer's perverse curiosity, she wanted to see firsthand what went on in a drug treatment center.) Eleven years later, as a contributing writer for American Vogue, Ms. Buck received a different sort of public drubbing. She had been assigned a profile of the first lady of Syria, Asma al Assad, a piece that was published under the cringe making headline, "A Rose in the Desert," just weeks before the Assad regime began torturing and bombing its own people. In the aftermath, Ms. Buck was exposed to the outrage of the internet, and Vogue declined to renew her contract. (Months later, the article was scrubbed from the magazine's website, and Anna Wintour, Vogue's editor, issued a statement deploring "the actions of the Assad regime in the strongest possible terms.") On a recent Monday afternoon, Ms. Buck, husky voiced and animated, was in the basement of the Morton Memorial Library, a corner of which she rents as an office and has outfitted like a Bedouin's tent. She has been holed up here, on and off, for the last three years, working on her memoir and trying to shed, not altogether successfully, the material relics of her former life. (She rents an apartment in nearby Rhinebeck.) Last year, she auctioned off a Cartier watch, Hermes and Chanel bags and her mother's sapphire studded compact, along with more idiosyncratic belongings, like a collection of R. Crumb comics. Ms. Buck's library has been only slightly culled to 7,000 volumes, which are spread out between a storage unit in Poughkeepsie and on walls of steel bookcases in this basement. In the wake of the Assad piece, Ms. Buck, now 68, said she was "tainted, like a leper," and developed lesions on her feet that still cause her to limp slightly. Still, she had her defenders. "I think she was very shabbily treated by Vogue," said Tina Brown, who has edited two Conde Nast titles, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. "Frankly, it was an editing responsibility. You don't just blame the writer. Not renewing her contract was harsh and she had no doubt why it was. The fact is, the piece comes in, there are a lot of eyes on it, and a lot of discussions. For Joan to be excommunicated for her work was very shabby." (A spokesperson for the magazine declined to weigh in.) Ms. Buck said: "There was so much opprobrium sticking to me. I was so flayed. My life as I knew it had vanished. And so it was a process of trying to figure out, Where did I come from? Where am I going? What really happened? I didn't know, until I wrote the book, that I had the right to my own life, that I could tell my own story." Ms. Buck's first memories are of a pink palace outside of Paris, a 19th century copy of the Grand Trianon and an early stop on her parent's self exile from McCarthy era Hollywood. Her father, Jules Buck, was a movie producer whose best friend was John Huston, an Army buddy whose life he had saved. Mr. Buck struggled to find work after leaving Los Angeles. Ms. Buck's mother, Joyce, was an actress whose best friend was Lauren Bacall. At the pink palace, Jacques Tati and Federico Fellini were impish dinner guests. Ms. Buck learned to speak French before English, setting Frenchness firmly inside her, as she writes, "as a hunger for rules and form that went unmet in the margins of my family's fantasy of a beautiful French life." When a French nanny told her that her Jewish family had killed Jesus Christ, Ms. Buck, just 7, apologized politely. The Bucks landed in London, where Jules would discover a young Peter O'Toole and arrange to have him cast in "Lawrence of Arabia," after which the two men formed a film company. Ms. Buck grew up partly in the eccentric households of the Hustons, playing dress up with Anjelica Huston, a surrogate sister. Jules's fortunes rose with Mr. O'Toole's, only to vanish when they had a falling out over "The Ruling Class," their 1972 film. Hurt and humiliated, Jules was later found to be a manic depressive. In her book, Ms. Buck gives her sexual guardedness a Marxist interpretation, "a question of ownership," as she writes. "I belonged to my father until I could earn my own way." Unsure of her looks, she would nonetheless have love affairs with Donald Sutherland, Eric Rothschild, Jerry Brown and a married European academic with whom she stayed involved for 15 years. Leonard Cohen was an admirer. Since her teens Ms. Buck has scrupulously noted dialogue in her diaries, which she has saved. "I'd think, 'Oh, he hasn't called, did I say the wrong thing?'" she said. "The only way I could get a handle on what had happened every day was to write down what people said, not what I felt." Of Mr. Brown, she writes that he told her, "You're part of this vague elite, you don't come from anywhere, you don't represent anything." Ms. Buck once worked for Jeanne Moreau as an assistant, and for Guy Bourdin, the French fashion photographer. She met Andy Warhol when she was 22, and he made her the London correspondent for Interview magazine. "I became a slightly plump It Girl," she writes. When Ms. Buck and the English writer John Heilpern, now a contributor to Vanity Fair, married in London in the late '70s, her friend Karl Lagerfeld made her wedding dress; Manolo Blahnik, a friend since they were teenagers, was her attendant. (That dress, a ruffled mauve confection, now lives in the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) She recalled a fight toward the end of the marriage, when Mr. Heilpern accused her of coming to New York to be a success, and she accused him of wanting to be a failure. "Then he said," as Ms. Buck remembered, "'And neither of us got what we wanted.'" Ms. Huston described Ms. Buck as someone "who combines essences of Coco Chanel and Isabelle Eberhardt" the cross dressing, 19th century Swiss adventuress and author. "She likes potent things," she added. "I think Joan has a good deal of courage, and often finds herself in rather stringent situations, and maybe she has a taste for that." The rehab saga is a fine example. When Ms. Buck checked into the Arizona clinic, the required drug and alcohol tests came back clean. Its director was mystified when Ms. Buck begged to stay. "I have nowhere else to go," she told her. Absent a diagnosis, Ms. Buck was put in a room with suicide survivors. Noting that her father was bipolar, she wondered if there was a test for that, too. When those results, from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, also came back "normal," save for "some evidence of paranoia" Ms. Buck had answered "yes" to the statement, "People are plotting against me" she signed up for kickboxing, Adult Children of Alcoholics, Sex Addicts Anonymous and Anger Management. While she was there, Mr. Heilpern sent her a clipping from Page Six reporting she had punched her publisher. When Ms. Buck called her lawyer to ask, "Is that legal?" he replied that she was a public figure and had no recourse. Ms. Buck was incredulous: "The editor of French Vogue is a public figure?" Ms. Buck will tell you she was miscast as its editor, but others will disagree. She upended what had been the magazine's rather staid coverage, often devoting its pages to single topic themes, like film, sex and quantum physics. She also nearly doubled its circulation. "It was the best period of French Vogue," Mr. Blahnik said. Ms. Brown said: "To me, she transformed the magazine. I thought she brought a wonderfully intellectual raised eyebrow to the whole thing. It became a magazine that people talked about." She added that she was baffled by the rehab tale. "I don't know why it happened," Ms. Brown said. Ms. Buck said that when she asked Mr. Newhouse why he thought she was a drug addict, he told her that he was concerned because she had lost weight, a surprising response from an executive overseeing a Vogue title. (A spokesman for Mr. Newhouse said he wasn't available for comment.) A story had also circulated about syringes falling out of her purse onto the floor. In the book, Ms. Buck speculates that the syringe rumor derived from her habit of carrying vials of seawater given to her by a spa and tipping them into drinks, to boost her electrolytes. During the recent Hudson Valley visit, there was much spritzing from a small bottle of lavender and thyme oil, a product she picked up from Catherine Deneuve, and which she pressed into a visitor's hands as a prophylactic against the germs of other passengers on the train home. After French Vogue and the rehab stint, Ms. Buck moved to Santa Fe, looking to make a home for her aged father, who had been in her care through much of her time in Paris, though he died before she was able to move him there. (Early in her tenure at French Vogue, her mother had died of lung cancer.) "She picked up the tradition of the men and women who used to inhabit Santa Fe," said Richard Buckley, a former editor of Vogue Homme, "the black sheep who didn't belong anywhere else and could be who they wanted to be there. And she gave pretty good parties. I don't mean wild parties where people are hanging off the chandeliers, just ones with interesting people. Where else but Joan's would you meet Tuesday Weld?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
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