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In recent days, as leaders of the International Olympic Committee went back and forth with organizers of the Tokyo Games, sponsors, media partners and leaders of international sports federations over whether to postpone the Summer Olympics because of the coronavirus pandemic, athletes around the world tried to jump into a debate they say they have had little role in. Some spoke out through the press. Others made their voices heard on social media. The Athletics Association, a labor group that attempts to provide a greater voice to the world's track and field athletes, released the results of an online poll of its members to gauge their views on the issue. The results were overwhelming. More than 4,000 track and field athletes from six continents participated in the poll and 78 percent of them said the Summer Games should be postponed. In addition, 87 percent said the coronavirus outbreak had adversely affected their training, and the average concern for their health and safety was 68 on a scale of 1 to 100, with 100 representing the greatest concern, if the Games opened as planned on July 24. "What's clear from our research is that the athletes overwhelmingly want the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games to be postponed," said Jeff Freeman, a founder of the group. "The Olympic Games are the pinnacle, but we are fighting a global pandemic and the athletes' health and also the health of every other citizen on the planet must surely be prioritized." The poll was sent in 13 languages. The 531 respondents who answered in Japanese favored postponement, 65 percent to 35 percent. Just after the Athletics Association completed its survey, Thomas Bach, president of the I.O.C., announced that the organization would continue to study the effects of the virus and decide in four weeks whether the Games would move forward or be postponed. "This step will allow better visibility of the rapidly changing development of the health situation around the world and in Japan," Bach said in a statement. "It will serve as the basis for the best decision in the interest of the athletes and everyone else involved." To members of the Athletics Association, and others in international sports, the much anticipated announcement, which came as pressure had mounted on the I.O.C. to postpone the Games, did not go nearly far enough. "The entire world is in a state of uncertainty," said Christian Taylor, a founder of the Athletics Association and a two time Olympic gold medalist in the triple jump. "We're in a revolving door we continue to be locked in. This is just being drawn out for too long." Taylor said he and other athletes have grown increasingly frustrated at the limited information they have received as the crisis has spread across the globe. He said he and his training group in Jacksonville, Fla., have been watching the news and reading blogs for information, rather than relying on updates from people in charge of the competition. Sebastian Coe, the president of World Athletics, track and field's governing body, on Sunday called on Bach to postpone the Games. "Whilst we all know that different parts of the world are at different stages of the virus, the unanimous view across all our Areas is that an Olympic Games in July this year is neither feasible nor desirable," Coe wrote to Bach on behalf of his federation. Beyond concern over their own health and safety, the athletes said they were upset that holding the Olympic Games when so many of them had not been able to train properly would be unfair. Emma Coburn, an Olympic bronze medalist in the steeplechase who is training in Boulder, Colo., said no one could predict what the world would look like this summer, but athletes know, right now, that the virus has wreaked havoc with training schedules. "I'm lucky," she said. "I can do most of my training on roads with just a pair of shoes, but athletes in field events or distance runners who are on lockdown, they can't train, and this is happening in waves. The vast majority of athletes don't feel comfortable with training for Games right now." Edoardo Accetta, an Italian triple jumper based in Milan, said he had to abandon most of his strength training. His gym and track have been shut down. His training is limited to the use of another track for a two and a half hour session each day. "It's not optimal, but I am lucky to have this opportunity," Accetta said. "If you can find a way to keep the competitive integrity and the fairness, we can think about doing the Games, but otherwise I can see no way out." Edwin Moses, the chairman emeritus of the United States Anti Doping Agency and a two time Olympic hurdling champion, said there was little doubt that the only solution was to postpone the Games. "I would be upset for someone to expect me to continue training at this point," Moses said on Sunday. "I can't imagine the stress and anxiety these athletes are going through these days." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Why did you want to leave the city proper? To live in the center of Paris, it's really noisy, it's really stressful. I wanted a quiet place with a view. I needed to see the sky. I can learn my lines on my terrace. I'm on the top floor and I have no neighbors. I feel like I'm on top of a castle. Do you live alone? For the moment. I hope it's not going to last. How does your home reflect your personality? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
From left, Rosena M. Hill Jackson, Bryonha Marie Parham and Carmen Ruby Floyd in the Broadway presentation of "After Midnight," which began as a short Encores! run. Lots of people have a passion for musical theater. Jack Viertel has made his passion into a project. For years, he has been excavating the history of the art form, digging up forgotten treasures that can be recreated for modern audiences. Now, after 20 years at the helm of the Encores! program at City Center, Mr. Viertel is stepping down. Next season "Mack and Mabel," "Love Life" and "Thoroughly Modern Millie" will be his last as the program's artistic director, City Center announced on Tuesday. He will continue to advise as a consulting producer, but will turn over control of the program to someone else. "Twenty years is a good run," Mr. Viertel said. "I came to the artistic directorship with a very specific bucket list of shows that I was fascinated by, and actually that bucket is empty." Mr. Viertel, who is 70, also said he believes it is time for new leadership of the Encores! program. "We're in a moment where the American musical, and particularly the classic American musical, is being reconsidered in so many ways because of its gender politics, its racial politics and all of its attitudes about life in America," he said. "I completely endorse the idea that that rethinking should be done, but I don't think I'm the best person to do it." It is hard to overstate the value of Encores! for theater aficionados. The program has become a sort of living archive three times a year, it presents a seven performance concert production of a historic Broadway musical that, in most cases, is so rooted in another time that it is unlikely ever to have a commercial revival. Some Encores! productions have nonetheless transferred to Broadway during Mr. Viertel's tenure those have included "After Midnight ," "Gypsy," "The Apple Tree" and "Finian's Rainbow." "His encyclopedic knowledge of musical theater has helped us uncover shows that haven't been seen for years," said Arlene Shuler, City Center's chief executive. The program, which was founded in 1994 with Mr. Viertel on the advisory committee, has always placed an emphasis on centrality of scores. It hires large orchestras usually about 30 musicians, a size that few Broadway shows can afford these days to provide a lush instrumental sound that attempts to replicate the original. "The mission has always been to hear musicals that have superior scores, played as they were originally played, with their original orchestrations or as close as we can get and with choruses that can sing the original vocal arrangements," Mr. Viertel said. "We have big casts, big orchestras, and, relative to Broadway, very minimal production values." Mr. Viertel, who has overseen 60 productions with an estimated audience of 850,000, declined to single out a favorite show, but cited productions of "Follies," "The Most Happy Fella," "It's a Bird ... It's a Plane ... It's Superman" and "Juno" as among his "thrilling moments." Among the most successful productions, he said, was "1776." He said his most pleasant surprise was "The New Moon," an operetta by Sigmund Romberg. When Rob Fisher, the program's music director, suggested an operetta, "I said I hate operettas," Mr. Viertel said. "Then I realized I had never heard one." He wouldn't name duds, but acknowledged, "There were disappointments along the way, in some cases because the shows themselves didn't contain as much great stuff as I had hoped or thought, and in some cases because we somehow misunderstood what they could be." He noted that, unlike Broadway shows, Encores! productions have no preview period, so they can't be revised once audiences start coming. Over the years, Mr. Viertel said, much has changed. Whereas actors originally performed in tuxedos and cocktail gowns holding scores in their hands, they are now generally off book and often in costume. Choreography has become a much bigger element of the productions. And audiences' sense of history has changed. "The loyal subscribers that we began with have begun to dwindle because of age and infirmity and moving to Florida," he said. "For the younger audience, what has changed is their knowledge of the really early shows it would be harder to do a show from 1925 now. It's funny how history becomes ancient history as time goes along I think this audience thinks of those shows the way I think of Gilbert Sullivan." Mr. Viertel's final show, "Thoroughly Modern Millie," will also be the newest Encores! has ever done just 18 years after it appeared on Broadway. He said there are a few shows he still dreams of working on as a consultant he cited the little known musicals "I Can Get It for You Wholesale," from 1962, "High Spirits," from 1964, and "The Human Comedy," from 1984. And he said an inability to get permission from rights holders had prevented productions of a few others he would have liked to have done, including "Oliver!" and "City of Angels." As for the future of presenting historical musicals in an era when the politics of entertainment is constantly up for debate, Mr. Viertel called that "an exciting challenge." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
At first, Janos Balazs had no idea why the tiny hand he found in a storage box of bones was green and mummified. It was around 2005 and he was examining remains from an earlier archaeological dig of a cemetery conducted at Nyarlorinc, a village in southern Hungary. The excavations had yielded more than 500 graves that mostly dated from between the 12th and 16th centuries. But none of those burials was anything like the mummified green hand Dr. Balazs and his colleague, Zoltan Bolkei, had uncovered in that forgotten box. More than a decade later, Dr. Balazs and his colleagues think they have solved the mystery, and in doing so uncovered a unique form of mummification. They published their results last month in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The bones Dr. Balazs found were so small they could have been confused with a rat's. Several, including some vertebrae, a hip bone and the leg bones were stained green. Both forearms were green as well, but the right one was still covered in desiccated flesh. The skin near the back was also mummified and embedded with five vertebrae pieces. Most of the ribs, a shoulder bone and two humerus bones were not discolored. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The journalist and author of "Becoming Grandma" says Ann Patchett's "Bel Canto" reminded her of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a high compliment: "My all time favorite book . . . is 'Love in the Time of Cholera.'" What books are on your night stand now? There's an order of priority when it comes to my reading: Books by my friends come first. And when you do what I do for a living (and when your husband's a writer, as mine is), the stack of must reads on my night table can get pretty tall. Sitting there right now are: Anna Quindlen's "Miller's Valley"; Linda Fairstein's "Killer Look"; "Capital Dames," by Cokie Roberts; and William Cohan's "Why Wall Street Matters." What's also there that I'm eager to get to is "Victoria the Queen," by Julia Baird. And there's always the latest Michael Connelly. What's the last great book you read? Ann Patchett's "Bel Canto." I had not read any of her books until I interviewed her this January. To get ready, I went on a Patchett binge, and what a delightful two weeks it was. "Bel Canto" was my favorite the pace and setting reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (You didn't ask, but my all time favorite book, if I had to choose one, is "Love in the Time of Cholera.") I also loved "Commonwealth." In the interview, Ann told me that all of her books end up being about the same thing: in a nutshell, finding a new family. What's the best classic novel you recently read for the first time? Have we decided that Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet is a classic? A friend gave me the first of that series, "My Brilliant Friend," for a long plane ride (a couple of months before "the outing"), and I was swept up into the tenements of Naples. Devoured all four books in a long, lovely banquet. What's your favorite book no one else has heard of? "The Honeymoon," by Dinitia Smith. It's a novel about George Eliot's love life, and her marriage to a much younger man. I had no idea. Not only is the portrait of Ms. Evans a surprise from Page 1, it is all beautifully written. I don't understand how it never became a big best seller. There's also "The Female Brain," by Louann Brizendine, which I read and underlined as research for my book on grandmothers. There is no better explanation for why we women act the way we do. I strongly recommend that everyone who's female read this book, from girls of 16 up to great grandmas of 96. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Which writers novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets working today do you admire most? I read a lot of political commentary. In that category I most admire Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal, Frank Bruni of The New York Times, and David Ignatius and Richard Cohen of The Washington Post. And I never pass up a column by Maureen Dowd. I also like biographies: Anything by Doris Goodwin and David Nasaw. And of course, McCullough. What's the last book that made you laugh? David Rosenfelt's "Open and Shut," featuring his lawyer and dog lover Andy Carpenter, who is hilarious. On a long car ride a few years ago my husband (Aaron Latham) put on one of Rosenfelt's audiobooks. I was bent over laughing the whole ride ... and have been addicted ever since. The last book that made you furious? Reading Richard Reeves's "Infamy," about the Japanese American internments during World War II, had me in angry tears. The injustice rings, like bells tolling, on every page. Another book that made me boil was Steven Brill's "America's Bitter Pill," about pharmaceutical companies getting away with charging unconscionably high prices for medicines. Some cancer drugs that patients would die without cost more than 200,000 a year. What's the best book you've read about journalism? Katharine Graham's memoir, "Personal History," got a grip on me. Her unflinching integrity at The Washington Post throughout the Watergate scandal made her the bravest publisher in the country (maybe for all time). My first assignment for CBS News was Watergate, so I had a special interest in the subject. But Mrs. Graham delved deeply into the workings of a newspaper, journalistic decision making under pressure and the special challenges of a woman standing up to male power in the 1970s. She was remarkably candid too about the sorrows of her personal life. It's one of the great books about journalism written by a heroine. Do you have a favorite book about the presidency? All of Robert Caro's books on L.B.J. Because of Caro's almost maniacal research, the books are lush with fine details about events, about the people in Johnson's life and about the mercurial man himself. I love the way he can spend 100 pages describing the workings of the U.S. Senate, or the loneliness of the isolated hill country of central Texas where Johnson grew up. At a lecture Caro gave on biography, I heard him say that all good books have a strong sense of place, which he set out to infuse into his books. So you come close to being in those lonely Texas hills and in the clubby mustiness of the U.S. Congress. I also loved Doris Goodwin's "Team of Rivals," about Lincoln, and "Barack Obama: The Story," by David Maraniss. Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid? I most like biographies and mysteries, and most dislike how to's. How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or simultaneously? Morning or night? I like reading a real book, hardcover or paperback. One book at a time. Mostly on airplanes and on weekends. How do you organize your books? What's the best book you've ever received as a gift? "The 12 Days of Christmas," by Robert Sabuda. It's a pop up book, every page a smile. Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain? Heroes: Pierre in "War and Peace," Jo in "Little Women." Villain: Richard Nixon. What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most? I wasn't much of a reader until high school, when I discovered Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Hardy and Tolstoy. Like so many of us my age, I was awakened by the 19th century! As a kid, I read the Bobbsey Twins ... and Nancy Drew (of course). Which children's books have you most enjoyed sharing with your grandchildren? And what book do you hope they read before they're adults? There's nothing better than reading a 5 year old "Charlotte's Web," though E. B. White does a fine job of reading it himself. There's also Franny K. Stein: Books about girls as mad scientists didn't exist when I was growing up. Though I'm just remembering that I had to read a biography of Marie Curie in school. Wonder if that was only assigned to the girls. I hope my granddaughters read "The Catcher in the Rye," Harry Potter and "Catch 22" (for a good laugh). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
How had she known that? I'd discarded the idea; it was too much, too intimate. "Write that chapter!" she said. "There's time. The book needs it." And of course I did. Susan's ability to read my mind astonished me; our editing sessions often felt like a visit to a psychiatrist. I'd arrive at her cluttered office every few months to find my latest pages sitting in the middle of her desk, covered with pencil scrawls and festooned with little yellow Post its. We'd pull up chairs, eat lunch (always sushi), chat about our families. Then we'd push the plates away and go through the manuscript page by page. Susan would lean across the desk, fix those large expressive eyes on me, point at a paragraph. "Are you sure he'd do that?" "What are you really trying to say here?" "I have a feeling you don't like this woman. Can you put it into words?" Answering her questions, I'd find myself saying things I hadn't even known I thought. The process never changed: Memoir or novel, it was exactly the same. Even fictional characters were so real to Susan that she wanted to know what they were feeling, doing, wearing, even when they stepped off the page. A few years ago, as we were working on the final draft of my novel, Susan stopped at a crucial moment and asked what a minor character was thinking. I said I didn't know. "Of course you do," she replied. And just like that I saw the scene, heard the dialogue. It was so vivid that I picked up my computer, found an empty desk and spent the next half hour putting it all down. When I went back to Susan's office, she read the pages and said triumphantly, "I knew you knew." But the truth is that I don't think it would have come to me had Susan not pushed so hard, been so relentless. These marathon sessions lasted several hours and often sent me straight back to zero. But no matter how brutal the process, I always left in a state of euphoria, itching to get back to work. Susan's greatest gift was her ability to make you believe in yourself. "It's going to be a wonderful book," she'd say as you walked out the door. "I can't wait to read it." I've saved piles of Susan's manuscript notes, because they're such a fascinating example of how an editor shapes a book. "It's like a master class in writing," I told her. She shot me a derisive look: "Please. I'm just doing my job. You're the writer." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
A bit of sugar on the tongue may help distract a baby from the pain of an injection, and cuddling and cooing probably helps, too. But according to a new study, the most effective way to reduce the infant's pain is to apply lidocaine cream at the injection site as well. Researchers randomized 352 babies under a year old to four regimens: a placebo (telling parents to do what they think best); an educational video about infant soothing; the video plus orally administered sucrose; and the video, sucrose and topically applied lidocaine to numb the pain. The study is in the Canadian Medical Journal. Parents calculated the infants' pain on a zero to 10 scale based on facial grimacing, crying and body movements. With injections at ages 2 months, 4 months, 6 months and 1 year, the group that got the lidocaine swab consistently had lower pain scores. Scores in the groups that got sucrose and videos did not differ from those in the placebo group at any age. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
In the engaging but ultimately rudderless Filipino noir "Dead Kids," a band of teenage misfits cooks up a plan to kidnap the school bully for ransom. Clad in the starchy white uniforms of their ritzy prep school, the boys seem giddy about the hefty reward sum. But for them, the money is merely a symbol. It is the transgressive power trip that holds far more intrigue. Now streaming on Netflix, the movie follows Mark Sta. Maria (Kelvin Miranda), a withdrawn teen known to classmates as a "dead kid" a wallflower and wet blanket. In school he is both the brainiest and the poorest; he earns money by completing his wealthy peers' homework for a fee. He is a familiar character type, as is his tormentor, the vain golden boy Chuck (Markus Paterson), who enjoys partying and doling out swirlies. When three students approach Sta. Maria, as they call him, with a plot to take Chuck hostage, the lure of fast cash and vigilante revenge are enough to pry him out of his strait laced shell. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
A huge amount of the world's audio has been digitized, but many veterans of the Analog Age still have out of print albums, lectures and other content locked on vinyl records, cassettes and CDs. Converting the audio to digital formats for personal use is much simpler than it used to be, though, thanks in part to gadgets that connect to a computer's USB port. In addition to making files that play on your smartphone or media server, digitizing your analog audio creates an electronic archive you can store online for safekeeping. The steps for converting your old recordings vary on the formats and equipment you have, but here's a general outline of the process and the equipment you may need. No matter what type of analog media you're converting, you need software to digitize it. Capturing the audio to a computer has been a common approach for decades, and free programs to do the job include Apple's GarageBand for Mac and the open source Audacity (for Windows, Mac and Linux), which has its own guide for converting records and tapes. Commercial software is also available, like Roxio's 50 Easy LP to MP3 or the 40 Golden Records from NCH Software. Choose a digital format for recording. Uncompressed or lossless formats like WAV, FLAC and AIFF preserve more of the original audio for higher quality sound, but compressed formats like MP3 create smaller files. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
In expanding households, where the number of children grows to exceed the number of available bedrooms, a bunk bed can make the most of existing space. But shoehorning siblings into tight quarters isn't the only reason to have one. Simply put, "they're fun," said Christine Markatos, a Santa Monica based interior designer, who frequently puts bunk beds in her projects. "Often, we find that we're doing bunk beds in a room for one child, but it's really about having space for a sleepover." They can also provide overflow sleeping space for adult guests, especially in second homes, Ms. Markatos said, adding that she has recently noticed a trend of "bunk rooms in beach houses and bunk rooms in ski houses." Of course, there are some rooms where bunk beds just won't work. "Ceiling height for the top bunk is your number one consideration," she said, because the person sleeping there needs to be able to "sit up without bumping their head." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
new video loaded: Eluding Death by Design in a Tokyo Loft | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Before embarking on an overnight kayaking trip, five girls at a camp in the Pacific Northwest sing, "And I shall love my sisters / for ev er more." The camp promises a vision of wholesome sisterhood that seems unaware of the complexities of young girls' lives, a vision skillfully complicates in her new novel, "The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore." The girls are led by a veteran counselor whose decision to change their camping destination foreshadows the tragedy to come. Though Fu relates the girls' dramatic efforts to rescue themselves, her focus is on the aftermath of the trip. Siobhan Dougherty, who yearns to be "more like the heroines of the books she liked," wonders, of her fellow campers: "Who would they become? What would they get to do and see? Who would they love?" The novel alternates between short chapters about the camping trip, which takes place in 1994, and longer, character driven chapters about the girls' lives post Forevermore. The result is a multilayered exploration of how class and culture inform the girls' actions and alliances during the trip, and how the trip then affects their relationships and choices in adulthood. Fu, the author of the novel "For Today I Am a Boy," is a propulsive storyteller, using clear and cutting prose to move seamlessly through time. Before Forevermore, Isabel Wen had a "happy child's narcissism, a solid belief her parents would return in the evening." For Andee Allen, a scholarship recipient with "ferocity in her eyes," Forevermore barely registers on her list of childhood traumas. Nita Prithi, who bullies Siobhan, is called a genius by her teachers and excels at school, but is socially awkward. Dina Chang, who dreams of being a movie star, remembers Forevermore as "purely sadistic torture, a punishment for nothing she could recall." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
I admit that I approached "Chappaquiddick" with a measure of skepticism and a tremor of dread. The ongoing, morbid fascination with all things Kennedy is an aspect of American culture I find perplexing and somewhat dispiriting. Compulsive Kennedyism encourages our unfortunate habit of substituting mythology for history, of dissolving the complexities of American political life into airy evocations of idealism and tragedy. The lives and deaths of Kennedy family members provide grist for endless conspiracy theorizing, tabloid salaciousness, celebrity worship and superstition. A movie about one of the sadder, tawdrier episodes in the saga could only feed this syndrome. But it turns out that "Chappaquiddick," directed by John Curran from a script by the first timers Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan, is more diagnosis than symptom. Forsaking sensationalism for sober, procedural storytelling, the film examines the toxic effects of the Kennedy mystique on a handful of people involved in a fatal car crash in the summer of 1969. The basic facts are hardly obscure. Late on the night of July 18, an Oldsmobile driven by Senator Edward M. Kennedy ran off a bridge on an island near Martha's Vineyard and plunged into a pond. Mary Jo Kopechne, a former aide to the senator's brother Robert, died inside the car. Kennedy waited until the next day to report the incident and provided an account that was, to put it mildly, less than fully credible. Exactly what happened remains unknown, and the gaps and ambiguities in the record provide the filmmakers with room for speculation and embellishment. (A recent article by Jenna Russell in The Boston Globe performs a sensitive and thorough fact check.) In this version, Kopechne (played by Kate Mara) stays alive while trapped in the car, fighting for air as Kennedy (Jason Clarke) dawdles. Nothing beyond a close collegial friendship between them is implied. They were drawn together by shared grief over the death of Robert Kennedy, who had been assassinated the year before, and left a party together for a heart to heart talk. At the center is Kennedy himself, whom Mr. Clarke plays as a decent, thoughtful man never quite comfortable in his own skin. That is partly because he has been denied possession of an independent identity. The last surviving Kennedy son, Ted lives in the shadow of his three dead brothers, Joseph, John and Robert. His weekend of sailing and party going coincides with the Apollo 11 moon landing, a reminder of John Kennedy's legacy and of Ted's inadequacy. Before the accident, he shows himself to be a bit of a bumbler, steering his sailboat into a buoy during a regatta and freezing up during a television interview. He is more at ease with his friends Joe Gargan (Ed Helms) and Paul Markham (Jim Gaffigan), who will also be called upon for damage control when things go wrong. The question of Ted's possible presidential candidacy hovers in the air, and comes up in his conversations with Mary Jo and her colleague Rachel Schiff (Olivia Thirlby). The film tries to make Mary Jo an equal participant in the story more than just a victim or a mystery woman and succeeds in individualizing her enough to underscore the horror of her death. What happens afterward is in some ways even more disturbing. Once the management of Ted's case is turned over to his father's inner circle, Mary Jo's humanity is quietly but decisively erased. She is treated as a problem rather than a person. The villains in "Chappaquiddick" are Robert McNamara (Clancy Brown); Ted Sorensen (Taylor Nichols); and Ted Kennedy's father, Joe (Bruce Dern), a fearsome patriarch even though he has been paralyzed by a stroke. He humiliates his son and turns matters over to a squad of fixers in suits who manipulate the local authorities and the news media to protect Ted's political viability and the family's power. Which is not to say that the movie lets Ted Kennedy off the hook. Its portrayal of his weakness his cowardice, his self pity, his lethal indecisiveness is devastating. It offers a partial explanation for these failures without excusing them, and also without denying some of his better qualities. When Ted first calls his father, the old man has one word for him: "alibi." For a time, "Chappaquiddick" explores an alternative meaning, the possibility that Ted, rather than saving his career and reputation, will take advantage of disgrace and free himself from a role he never really wanted. His guilt would excuse him from the burdens of family expectation. What happened was more complicated, and Mr. Curran and Mr. Clarke honor that complexity. Ted Kennedy never became president, but the people of Massachusetts re elected him to the Senate seven more times. His political career was longer and arguably more consequential than those of his brothers. That isn't to say he redeemed himself, or that anything he accomplished diminishes the awfulness of Mary Jo Kopechne's death. Redemption and damnation are the stuff of mythology. This is just a sad piece of history. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Sleep that absurd, amazing habit of losing consciousness for hours on end is so universal across the animal kingdom that we usually assume it is essential to survival. Now, however, scientists who repeatedly disturbed the sleep of more than a thousand fruit flies are reporting that less slumber may be necessary for sustaining life than previously thought, at least in one species. A handful of studies involving dogs and cockroaches going back to the late 19th century suggest that being deprived of sleep can result in a shortened life span. But the methods behind some of these studies can make it difficult to say whether the test subjects were harmed by sleep deprivation itself, or by the stress of the treatment they were given such as being shaken constantly. The new study took a milder approach, in hope of seeing the true effects of sleep deprivation. The automated system the researchers developed for monitoring the flies kept track of their movements with cameras, scoring any extended period without movement as sleep. When they were not being awakened repeatedly, the males slept about 10 hours a day, females about five on average. To keep the flies awake, the researchers equipped the system with tiny motors that would gently tip the flies any time they went still for at least 20 seconds. With this method, researchers deprived flies of rest over the course of their entire lifetimes, tipping them hundreds of times a day such that if they were snoozing during those periods of stillness, they might have been able to sleep around 2.5 hours a day on average. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
On offer are tremendous voices. We hear Callas sing "Ah! non credea" from Bellini's "La Sonnambula," rapt in hurt. We hear Franklin close with "Never Grow Old," her tone focused, her phrasing transcendently free. In both films, passing details that bring these giants to human life are what catch your heart: Aretha putting on her makeup before going on the second night; her clasping the Rev. James Cleveland's hand behind her back while she sings; a jokey glance from Callas as she walks backstage; blurry fragments of Bellini's "Norma"; the charmingly fervent testimonials from young gays waiting hours outside for tickets for her return to the Met in 1965. (No, I don't know they're gay, but come on.) The baritone Mariusz Kwiecien, an audience favorite at the Metropolitan Opera, fell ill during the opening night of Bizet's "The Pearl Fishers," and had to pull out after the first act; his understudy, the baritone Alexander Birch Elliot, stepped in. As my colleague Corinna da Fonseca Wollheim reported, during the fraught scene when Zurga chews over his longtime friend Nadir's betrayal, Mr. Elliott "tore into the music with heated intensity," winning cheers. Mr. Kwiecien eventually withdrew from the remainder of the run, and I heard Mr. Elliott in a complete performance on Wednesday. This 32 year old South Carolina native made a strong impression in an exceptional cast featuring Javier Camarena and Pretty Yende. His virile singing had rich colorings in softer passages and ringing top notes. Handsome and a good actor, he seems set to go. Here he is, not that long ago, singing Figaro's signature aria from "The Barber of Seville" with a pianist in a studio at the Portland Opera. Even in this modest setting, Mr. Elliott's robust voice and playful swagger come through. ANTHONY TOMMASINI I wish I could tell you about the music at Anthony Roth Costanzo's recital extravaganza "Glass Handel," but I didn't hear any of it clearly until the final song. There were three sections inside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine devoted to the event: one with a screen for music videos (by the likes of James Ivory and Tilda Swinton); one with a platform for dancers (performing choreography by Justin Peck); and another with a screen upon which George Condo painted live and a stage for the ensemble the Knights and Mr. Costanzo, wearing costumes by Raf Simons. Whew. A small army of assistants picked up seated audience members with dollies to wheel them from area to area. But on Monday, the only vantage point that offered acceptable acoustics was the one directly in front of the stage, where I ended up, at last, for Philip Glass's electrifying "The Encounter." Elsewhere, Mr. Costanzo's voice was a tad too thin to penetrate the orchestra and fill the cavernous space. Not that music seemed to be really the point of "Glass Handel." It wasn't about an insightful juxtaposition of works by two composers at opposite ends of the countertenor repertory (though that comes through more cogently on Mr. Costanzo's recent album "ARC," which you can stream with each track's accompanying music video on iTunes). But it was a major event self consciously so, with a playbill full of hashtags and social media handles. It was as if the space had been double booked for a concert and a Fashion Week show; the scene was chaotic, and no single element, not even the singing, stood out amid the spectacle. Though I was impressed by the creativity, collaborative effort and sheer audacity of "Glass Handel," I found the mix of elements somewhat arbitrary. The piece never quite came together. It was like a three ring circus, with the surreally costumed Mr. Costanzo, backed by the Knights (conducted by Eric Jacobson) singing on a central platform; four dynamic dancers off to one side; and a screen showing music videos off to the other. During the performance, patrons were moved actually lifted up in their seats from once section to others. I sort of enjoyed the ride, but was never placed particularly close to Mr. Costanzo and the orchestra, which was frustrating. I get a better sense of the musical resonances he detects between Glass and Handel from his singing on his new recording. Here, for example, he sings "The Encounter" from Mr. Glass's 1988 melodrama "1000 Airplanes on the Roof." ANTHONY TOMMASINI One of the newest arrivals to the growing ranks of exciting countertenors is the Polish born, Juilliard trained Jakub Jozef Orlinski, who turns 28 next week. A year ago he impressed me with a melting performance of Paola Prestini's "Prelude and Aria" (from her opera "Gilgamesh") with the American Composers Orchestra. This spring at Carnegie Hall, in more standard repertory, he was splendid as Eustazio in a concert performance of Handel's "Rinaldo." It turns out this charismatic singer is an accomplished break dancer! He is also an inquisitive musician whose latest, very fine Erato recording, "Anima Sacra," presents a program of Baroque sacred arias by little known composers, including Nicola Fago and Domenico Sarro, all touted as premiere recordings. Listen to Mr. Orlinski in Fago's sublime "Tam non splendet sol creatus." ANTHONY TOMMASINI | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
MOURA, Portugal Portugal is finding that increasing exports is the way to pull its economy out of a recession. For 127 years, Herdade de Manantiz has been producing olive oil, mostly for the domestic market. But having suffered through recession like thousands of other traditional businesses, it has started overhauling its operations and searching for customers outside Portugal. In February, Manantiz installed its first irrigation system, an investment of 197,000 euros, or 263,000, that is meant to help quadruple production. In May, the company completed its first overseas sale to a Brazilian retailer that bought 504 bottles of oil. It is pursuing buyers in Sweden and Japan for its oil made from galega olives, which are unique to Portugal. "It's difficult to change direction for very small companies like ours, but there comes a point when there is really no other choice," said Antonio Morais de Almeida, who is part of the fifth generation of the family that owns and operates Manantiz. Portugal is clearly hitting its export stride, a step that economists view important not only in a Portuguese rebound but in the revival of other parts of Europe. Small businesses like Manantiz cannot on their own mend Portugal's long suffering economy. But as many of the country's businesses have accepted that true growth must occur beyond the country's borders, the economy is beginning to improve. Portuguese authorities said this month that rising exports were the main reason Portugal posted the strongest growth in the second quarter among the nations of the European Union. The country's gross domestic product rose 1.1 percent from the previous quarter, according to data from Eurostat, the union's statistics agency. Struggling euro zone countries cannot make themselves globally competitive by devaluing the local currency to make their exports cheaper because they belong to the currency union. But Portugal's unexpected increase in G.D.P., which followed 10 consecutive quarters of contraction, "shows that you can increase export competitiveness even without the option of an exchange rate devaluation," said Luis Cabral, an economics professor at New York University. Like other Portuguese economists, Mr. Cabral warned against overstating Portugal's turnaround. Its economy is still expected to contract over the full year, partly because the second quarter results were buoyed by seasonal factors like better prices for petroleum. Further drag on the economy is expected because the government is likely to introduce further austerity measures to help meet its budget deficit targets. Still, Mr. Cabral suggested that Portugal had reached "if not the end of the recession, at least the beginning of the end of the recession." Further indications of whether a broader euro zone recovery is taking shape might come on Friday, when data including the region's July unemployment rate will be released. Lisbon continues to have financing difficulties despite the bailout worth 78 billion euros it negotiated in 2011 with international creditors. Several of the country's banks have possible capital shortfalls, say analysts at Barclays Capital in London. Barclays cited the continued deterioration of the loan portfolios of the six largest Portuguese banks, estimating that their ratio of nonperforming loans would rise to 15 percent by the end of next year, from 11.2 percent in June. That could leave those banks, which account for four fifths of the country's banking sector, with combined losses of 20.5 billion euros, or 9 percent of all their loans, exceeding their existing reserves by 6.6 billion euros. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. Miguel Morale de Almeida, another member of the olive producing family, said Manantiz had wanted its irrigation system in place earlier in the crisis, but was unable to arrange an affordable bank loan. Eventually, Manantiz managed to tap into European and Portuguese rural development subsidies to cover 40 percent of the construction cost. The rest of the financing came from the savings of family members, which Mr. Morale de Almeida called "a significant personal sacrifice, but a controlled risk." Previously, Manantiz had relied on rare rainfall to water its 30,000 olive trees, planted across 529 acres of parched land in one of southern Europe's driest regions. Over all, after falling about 9 percent in 2008 at the onset of the financial crisis, Portugal's olive oil exports have more than doubled since, according to data from Casa do Azeite, an industry body. Last year alone, olive oil exports rose 20 percent. Mariana Matos, secretary general of Casa do Azeite, estimated that Portugal had added about 20,000 hectares of olive trees over the past five years, in part because of investors from countries like Spain, Italy and Switzerland. Manuel Costa Reis, an economist at Present Value Consulting in Lisbon, which advises Portuguese banks and other corporations on asset valuations, said that Portugal's export competitiveness was "without a doubt a very surprising and positive outcome of this crisis." "Portugal had been one of the losers in the globalization process because most of our industries were competing directly with the emerging markets," he said. He said that the economic crisis had forced companies to start producing higher quality products that can be marketed at a higher price. Manantiz is a good example of that. Its initial shipment of olive oil to Brazil sold at 60 reais, or nearly 26, a bottle, four times what is sells for in Portugal. Portuguese exports rose 6.2 percent in the second quarter from the comparable period in 2012, according to data this month from Portugal's national statistics institute. Exports of fuels and lubricants soared 37 percent, as a result of the upgrade of the Port of Sines refinery operated by Galp Energia, the Portuguese oil company, which has turned Portugal into a net exporter of diesel fuel. Exports of food and beverages rose 11 percent in the quarter, while capital goods excluding transport equipment climbed 6 percent. Mr. Costa Reis cited, among other positive economic indicators, recent increases in business confidence and industrial productivity. Portugal's unemployment rate also fell back to 16.4 percent in the second quarter, from 17.7 percent in the previous one, the first quarterly decline in two years. In a twist, it was Portugal's high jobless rate that played a part in persuading the family owners of Manantiz to double down on their agricultural business. Antonio Morais de Almeida, 27, became exports director, in charge of finding clients overseas, after being let go earlier this year by a Lisbon based bank where he had traded currencies. His 48 year old aunt, Cristina, has also devoted more time to the family business since losing her job last December as a compliance officer at another bank. Many businesses have shuttered, but the remaining producers have emphasized more efficient production and pursued outside markets more aggressively. The value of Portugal's furniture exports, for example, topped 1 billion euros last year, rising for a third consecutive year. That was 10 percent above pre crisis levels. "We've been through a very bad time, but I think that everybody has now understood that, without exports, no company in Portugal is certain to survive," said Mario Silva, chief executive of AM Classic Furniture, which has annual revenue of about 7.5 million euros. Mr. Silva said his company, which was founded by his parents in the northern town of Pacos de Ferreira, had in the past four years added three new export markets: Germany, Russia and China. It raised productivity by about 15 percent, notably by switching to just in time production, whereby its furniture is made only to meet demand. For this year, he is forecasting an increase in exports of 20 to 30 percent. "I am positive that we have reached the bottom and this is the beginning of a recovery, although not a fast one whatsoever," said Mr. Costa Reis, the economist. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
MYSTIC, Conn. When Chad Floyd took on the task of designing a major new exhibit hall for Mystic Seaport, the maritime museum here, he did not take his cues from the architecture in the museum's recreated 19th century village. Instead, he looked for inspiration in the sea. A partner in Centerbrook Architects and Planners, in Centerbrook, Conn., Mr. Floyd studied the curved hulls of old wooden sailing ships like the Charles W. Morgan, the last American whaler and a main attraction of the museum. He thought about the spiraled shell of the nautilus, "the curvilinear movement of the waves, and sails blown full of wind." Then, with these forms in mind, he drew a 14,000 square foot building unlike anything else on the museum's 19 acre campus. The structure's contemporary wood and glass design is defined by a roof slanted like the sweeping curve of a wave, and supported by spectacularly long laminated timber frames, to be left exposed like the ribs of a wooden ship's hull. The building will double as a visitor center at the northern end of the campus, its striking facade marking the gateway to the museum for visitors driving in on Route 27. A radical departure for the museum and its first major physical change since the 1960s, the 11.5 million building will greatly expand exhibit capabilities upon its completion in September 2016, helping to make Mystic Seaport more of a year round attraction, says Stephen C. White, the museum's president. "We wanted a building that would say, 'Come on in. Something's happening here. Things are moving forward,'" Mr. White said. Established in 1929 to preserve the country's fading maritime culture, Mystic Seaport is on the Mystic River, where shipbuilding thrived before the 1900s. The museum invites visitors to stroll through its historical village, with craftspeople and storytellers, climb aboard the Morgan and numerous other fishing vessels, observe the workings of a functioning shipyard, and glimpse portions of the museum's extensive collections in one of several small exhibit halls. But like many living history and outdoor museums, Mystic Seaport has had to constantly explore new ways to keep up attendance. Such attractions were at their peak in the 1970s, when more families tended to take car vacations, shopping centers were closed on Sundays, and children's organized sports did not consume so much time, said Tom Kelleher, the vice president of the Association for Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums, and a historian and curator at Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. Faced with declining attendance and increased competition, many of these museums are becoming more creative with special events programming, Mr. Kelleher said, "trying to find ways to engage the public to meet them where they are, rather than saying, 'If they'd only pay attention, they'd realize how historically authentic we are.'" The exhibit hall will claim 5,000 square feet, "a big room by any museum standard," Mr. Floyd said, with movable walls and high ceilings to maximize flexibility. The lighting is designed by George Sexton Associates, the Washington firm whose list of museum credits includes the Museum of Modern Art. In addition to housing a reception lobby, ticketing center and gift shop, the building will be the anchor for a newly designed quadrangle with a center green flanked by smaller existing galleries. The reconfiguration required the demolition of three buildings, including the museum's former library. The books are now housed at the climate controlled Collections Research Center. The center houses varied collections, including ship figureheads, models, some 1,500 pieces of scrimshaw, shipbuilding tools, paintings, more than a million photographs, logs, sailors' journals, charts and textiles. Most are seen infrequently, since the museum currently lacks the space to display more than 10 percent of the items at any one time, said Paul O'Pecko, the vice president for collections and research. The new building will enable the museum to show off more of its holdings, allowing multiple exhibits at one time and providing more generous dimensions. For example, Mr. O'Pecko said, the high ceilings will allow for the unfurling of ships' banners, some of which stretch to 50 feet, and the display of larger figureheads, which can weigh as much as 1,000 pounds. In addition, the building's high security and its temperature and humidity control will make it easier to bring in exhibits from outside, like an exhibition of J. M. W. Turner's sea paintings produced by the National Maritime Museum in England and displayed last year at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. "There was no way we could get that exhibit here for two reasons: space and security," Mr. O'Pecko said. "But we'll be able to really get some drop dead things here now." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Adapted and directed by Marc Acito (Broadway's "Allegiance"), who also helped write the lyrics, the story mainly concerns Tom's farcical romps with the fairer sex, with a subplot about the search for his father. Our winsome scamp loves all women, from scullion to lady, though his heart belongs to the plucky Sophia, who is given can do determination by Elena Wang. That Sophia is here pronounced to rhyme with Mariah (Carey) may be interpreted as a jokey allusion to Ms. Wang's powerful soprano. But then everything in the show can be interpreted as a jokey allusion, especially when Tom's servant, Partridge (Rene Ruiz), is around. Doubling as narrator, Partridge is like that uncle who spouts inappropriate jokes at weddings at one point, he taps Tom's peg, as if testing a mike, and asks "Is this thing on?" (Unlike Theater Breaking Through Barriers' recent revival of "The Artificial Jungle," which doesn't draw attention to the cast's physical disabilities, "Bastard Jones" is very much upfront.) Mr. Acito mostly succeeds in turning the Cell company's limited resources into an aesthetic choice. The main element on the bilevel set is a table, and the biggest props are ropes, bringing to mind Fiasco Theater's economical productions of "Into the Woods" and "Cymbeline." Harder to overcome are the venue's trying acoustics, which make it difficult to fully appreciate the score by Amy Engelhardt, a former member of the a cappella group The Bobs. The five piece band alternately sounds tinny and muddy, but you can still tell that catchy songs, reminiscent of Andrew Lloyd Webber's pop rock catalog, are lurking in there. Fans of the 1963 movie adaptation will miss the scene illustrating certain bivalve mollusks' aphrodisiac properties, but they will get a kick out of Lady Bellaston (Crystal Lucas Perry) delivering "Have Another Oyster, Dear" while being entertained by a gentleman. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Iain Bell and Mark Campbell's "Stonewall," which premiered on Friday at the Rose Theater, recounts the June 28, 1969, police raid and uprising at the Stonewall Inn. My favorite scene in the recent documentary "Maria by Callas" is when, after a seven year absence, the world's most famous diva returns to the Metropolitan Opera in 1965. A TV journalist visits the theater to interview young men who have been waiting hours overnight, even for tickets. And while none of them are explicitly gay, it's no secret that they are. There's Dennis, with beaming eyes and extravagant phrasing, crowning Callas as "the greatest"; and Lex, dead serious in claiming that to miss her performance would be "a crime." A third guy can't stop smiling as he says she'll receive a 30 minute standing ovation, even if he has to be the only one standing (though he's sure he'll have company). Company, indeed. This heartwarming moment is a postcard from the past, preliberation gay men unintentionally announcing to the present: We have always been here. If you don't think so, just read the hyperbolic diva worship in Walt Whitman's poetry from the 19th century. But opera, an art form that has existed for several hundred years, has only recently begun to reflect the lives of some of its most ardent fans with contemporary works that tell the stories of gay men, as well as the rest of the lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. The latest example is Iain Bell and Mark Campbell's thin but often charming "Stonewall," which premiered on Friday at the Rose Theater in a production by New York City Opera. Read all of The New York Times's Pride 2019 coverage. "Stonewall" commissioned by City Opera to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the June 28, 1969, police raid and uprising that have come to signify the birth of the gay rights movement is also the most recent installment in the company's initiative to present an L.G.B.T. themed production every year during Pride month. Last season was Charles Wuorinen's bleakly strident "Brokeback Mountain"; before that, Peter Eotvos's "Angels in America," a streamlined and spare adaptation of the Tony Kushner play. What could come next? Increasingly, there are options to choose from beyond the euphemism and tragedy in classics by, say, Britten or Berg. In the late 1990s, "Patience and Sarah," by Paula M. Kimper and Wende Persons, brought a lesbian love story to the opera stage. And, in 2016, Gregory Spears and Greg Pierce's wrenching "Fellow Travelers" homed in on a doomed romance caught up in the McCarthy era "lavender scare." Like that opera, "Stonewall" aspires to tell a human story amid historical sweep. But it's a nearly impossible undertaking because Stonewall, which was more of a nebulous moment than a self conscious flash point, defies the simplification opera demands not least of all because the bar catered to everyone on the queer spectrum, and they all deserve representation. But how to tell all of their stories within a single opera one with a running time of less than 90 minutes? "Stonewall" tries, by giving the many principal singers brief arias that characterize them with pointedly telling details, but it ultimately doesn't have the space to push any one role beyond mere archetype. And the baldfaced emotionality of Mr. Bell's otherwise sophisticated score often abandons a human scale for something more like hagiography. The opera opens with a spoken homophobic slur on the subway. (Riccardo Hernandez's set consists of fluidly mobile walls covered in tin tile like a bar's ceiling, decorated with thin strips of LED light that illuminate in different configurations for each scene.) The insult sparks a loud, dissonant chord that sets the opera in motion with a chugging, Sondheimian rhythm and restless momentum, vigorously conducted by Carolyn Kuan. Maggie (Lisa Chavez), the butch lesbian, is on the receiving end of the slur; but she insults the man back and isn't bothered, not with the evening she has planned: "Tonight downtown/I'm kissing a dozen girls,/And hope to take one home." What follows is a long montage that recalls both the "Tonight" quintet from "West Side Story," though a whole lot gayer, and the "I want" song trope of musical theater, with each major character briskly offering an introduction and aspiration. Mr. Campbell's plain spoken and lucid libretto, smoothly conveyed through Leonard Foglia's direction, touches not only on public harassment, but also blackmail, conversion therapy, discrimination and admirably the shady background of the Stonewall Inn, an unsanitary, Mafia run bar that thrived on bribery. Some singers appear too briefly. There's barely any time, for example, to take in Brian James Myer's buttery baritone voice beyond the passing scene of his character, a Dominican American teacher named Carlos, getting fired from his Catholic school job for what the principal calls "your lifestyle." Yet Mr. Bell's music lingers a little too long on Renata (Jordan Weatherston Pitts), a drag queen whose introduction is underscored with exoticizing percussion that verges on problematic. It doesn't really matter, though, how well you get to know anyone, not once the tide of history sweeps into the Stonewall Inn. There the principal singers, whose characters are never really developed further, blend with the crowd as they dance to wonderfully fun jukebox songs written by Mr. Bell and Mr. Campbell, and sung by Darlene Love before being interrupted by the police, portrayed with simplistic villainy and led by the big voiced tenor Marc Heller. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Ron Perranoski, who was one of baseball's leading relief pitchers of the 1960s, appearing in three World Series for the Los Angeles Dodgers, died on Friday at his home in Vero Beach, Fla. He was 84. His death was confirmed by the Dodgers, who did not cite the cause. Perranoski was the third former Dodger to die within a week, after outfielders Jay Johnstone, who played for Los Angeles in the 1980s, and Lou Johnson, known as Sweet Lou, who hit a home run in the Dodgers' 2 0 Game 7 victory over the Minnesota Twins in the 1965 World Series. The Dodgers of the early and mid 1960s are remembered chiefly for their future Hall of Fame pitchers Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. But Perranoski, a left hander who relied on sinkers and curveballs, played a key role in backing them along with the rest of the starting staff. "Very often people will talk about tiredness in pitchers, about mental tiredness," Perranoski told Sports Illustrated in April 1964. "There should be no mental tiredness if your arm is awake." He added: "I seem to like it better with a couple of guys on." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Christie's has won on consignment the majority of art the architect I.M. Pei and his wife, Eileen, collected over their lifetimes, including works by Barnett Newman, Jean Dubuffet, Zao Wou Ki and others. The collection is set to be auctioned in November and December after a global tour, and Christie's expects the works could fetch more than 25 million. Before he died in May at 102, Mr. Pei designed buildings around the world, among them the Louvre's glass pyramid, the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar. The Peis developed close friendships with artists, architects, gallerists and museum directors over their 72 years of marriage. Those relationships, along with Mrs. Pei's strong curatorial eye she studied art and landscape architecture allowed them to develop a sophisticated private collection. She died in 2014. "Many collectors have advisers who assemble an excellent and diverse collection of art that appeals to them, that represents a certain period of work," one of the couple's sons, Li Chung Pei, known as Sandi, said in a phone interview . "In the case of my parents, these were all people they knew. These were people they associated with, people they were friends with. And as a consequence, many of these pieces were actually gifted to them by the artist, and that makes the collection very, very special and very personal." The 59 piece collection includes two works by the Color Field painter Barnett Newman, which were gifts from the artist's wife, Annalee. The works, "Untitled 4, 1950" and "Untitled 5, 1950," are from a series of paintings, some of which are in museum collections. The body of work also includes sculptures and paintings by the French artist Jean Dubuffet, who was a close friend of the couple. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The most intriguing of these four artists is the eldest. Yuki Kimura, an artist based between Kyoto and Berlin, removed three custom built wardrobes from her childhood bedroom; she has reinstalled them in various configurations in shows worldwide, and integrated them here into the architecture of Artists Space's new home. One of these empty armoires stands flush against a white gallery wall, while an extended piece of drywall fuses the minimalist furniture into the cast iron building. Tender and memory haunted, Ms. Kimura's intervention makes the gallery into a domestic space. She also offers a simple display of 21 stainless steel circular vessels, modestly positioned on the floor and suggesting an act of hospitality. Duane Linklater, from Moose Cree First Nation in northern Ontario, contributes a pair of large sculptures that redeploy indigenous materials into wordless, melancholy formations. A gravity defying cone of 12 tepee poles has been screwed into the wall, its cover drooping to the floor; other poles stretch up from the basement, wrapped in mink and rabbit fur coats that recall tourniquets. Mr. Linklater's mixing of hard and soft surfaces finds an interesting (if less precise) counterpoint in the assemblage sculptures of the New York artist Danica Barboza, this show's most junior figure. She bundles old computers, televisions, shower curtains and sex dolls into disjunctive units that recall the mashed up sculptures of Isa Genzken. The young artist Jason Hirata, from Seattle and New York, has strewn a room with digital projectors displaying only a default start up screen, while throughout the galleries are found drink bottles filled, sorry to say, with human urine. These slacker gestures, aggrandized with an eye rolling statement from the artist that the "artworks are finished when they have been returned," undercut the ambition of the other three participants. Still, Artists Space is a place with room for missteps, where connections can be uncertain and young practitioners don't need to obtain preapproval of dealers or grantmakers. In a high pressure art world, where judgments are ever faster and prices ever higher, that may be its most valuable function. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Bobbins filled with steel wire at the Insteel factory in Houston. With the prospect of higher steel prices, the company fears losing business to foreign competitors paying less for raw materials. President Trump's announcement that he planned to impose steep tariffs on imported steel and aluminum delighted some blue collar industries he had championed. "Enthusiastic and gratified are probably understatements," said Michael A. Bless, the president of Century Aluminum. Behemoth steel buyers like Boeing and General Motors weren't as pleased. Their shares fell on the news, and the most obvious aluminum dependents the brewing giants Anheuser Busch and MillerCoors warned about the risk of job losses. "The jobs that we have are good jobs," Mr. Woltz said. "Our guys make a lot of money." Now his business calculus is being upended. A tariff on imports also allows domestic steel and aluminum producers to charge higher prices, affecting manufacturers across the United States. As industrial America sorts out the tariffs' prospective impact, one thing is clear: The divide between the metal producers and their customers slices directly through Mr. Trump's blue collar constituency. Mr. Trump argues that free trade has hollowed out America's industrial base and saddled the country with huge trade deficits. He has promised to recover lost ground with an "America first" trade policy. The mills and smelters that supply the raw material, and that would directly benefit from the tariffs, have been shrinking for years. Today, those industries employ fewer than 200,000 people. The companies that buy steel and aluminum, to make everything from trucks to chicken coops, employ more than 6.5 million workers, according to a Heritage Foundation analysis of Commerce Department data. Mr. Woltz, who is based in North Carolina, counts himself among hundreds of specialized businesses that will bear the brunt of the tariffs. He pays around 20 an hour on average, and he has been able to increase his payroll despite stiff competition from abroad. If you have seen a bridge being hoisted over a highway in the last 20 years, he said, you probably caught a glimpse of Insteel's handiwork. The wire product he makes is not unique, though, and he fears that if he has to charge commercial builders more, he will lose business to foreign competitors paying much less for their raw materials. "If the customers have the option of purchasing from Malaysians or Colombians, who don't have to pay that extra cost, that's what they are going to do," Mr. Woltz said. Right now, he pays around 600 per ton of steel wire rod. The impact of a 25 percent tariff would add 150 to that price. He makes only 40 in profit per ton, though, so the math would destroy his balance sheet. 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. It is not clear yet whether employers like Mr. Woltz will cut jobs because of the tariffs. Economic growth has been strong, and the corporate tax cut will give companies more cash to work with. "We think the dial won't move that much," said Atsi Sheth, an economist at Moody's Investors Service. "You are likely to gain jobs in a few sectors, but lose them in others." President George W. Bush imposed tariffs of up to 30 percent on steel imports in 2002, intending them to last three years, but lifted them earlier than expected after European trading partners threatened to retaliate. One retrospective study found that higher steel prices cost more jobs than the number of people employed in the industry at the time. In the long haul, tariffs may also hurt the industries they're supposed to prop up, Ms. Sheth said. "Even the sectors that are protected over time become less efficient because they have to work less hard," she said. The tariff on aluminum, prospectively 10 percent, would allow Mr. Bless to restart some production of high purity aluminum for military use at Century's plant in Hawesville, Ky., which it partly shut three years ago, he said. He plans to hire 300 people this year on top of the 1,850 he already employs and invest more than 100 million in the smelting operation. "These are jobs that are sorely needed," Mr. Bless said. That is the kind of response that labor unions have been waiting for. Leo W. Gerard, the president of the United Steelworkers union, which also represents aluminum workers, said his members were tired of enduring layoffs because of an onslaught of artificially cheap steel and aluminum produced by "cheaters" in China. "Some of these idiots that say we are going to start a trade war well, we are in a trade war now, and we are just sitting back," Mr. Gerard said. His union represents more than 200,000 Canadian workers, though, and Mr. Gerard said he hoped Mr. Trump would not apply the tariff to Canada. "We didn't want to and didn't ask the administration to alienate those countries that don't cheat," Mr. Gerard said, citing Canada and European countries among the virtuous. Economists say it is unlikely that the tariffs would lead to a steel hiring boom. The industry has hemorrhaged jobs over the last half century, but research suggests that is largely because of technological innovation. Mr. Johnson runs a family business out of Nashville, Mid South Wire Company, which his father founded 51 years ago. He has 150 employees, who all get a 401(k) retirement plan and health insurance. They tend to spend their careers at the company, turning hot rolled wire rod into dishwasher racks, shopping carts and bucket handles. Mr. Johnson used to make a lot of barbecue grills, he said. Then Chinese manufacturers got into the game, flooding the market with cheap alternatives. Char Broil grill production moved from Georgia to China. Others followed. Mr. Johnson had to find new products to replace that business. "You can hardly find an American made barbecue grill now," Mr. Johnson said. "They are all imported." The experience taught him that his hold on the market would last only as long as his price advantage, which would slip away with tariffs. "When you have a situation like this, that creates the opportunity for these products to go offshore," he said. If his sales are badly hurt by the tariffs, Mr. Johnson will lay people off, notwithstanding any tax cut benefits. "I have to make money to pay taxes," he said glumly. To him, it feels as if the administration cares only about the people melting and hot rolling steel, and not those turning that material into the racks at a hardware store or the products sitting on them. "We are steel workers, too," he said. "Our jobs and our livelihood are centered around steel just as much as the steel mills." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Gale Sayers, the will o' the wisp running back who in a short but brilliant career with the Chicago Bears left opponents, as they used to say, clutching at air, died early on Wednesday at his home in Wakarusa, Ind. He was 77. His stepson Guy Bullard said the cause was complications of dementia and Alzheimer's disease. In March 2017, his family revealed that Sayers had dementia after he had publicly displayed symptoms of it for four years. He joins a growing list of football players who developed dementia and died of brain damage. Though his career was cut short by knee injuries, "Sayers is the greatest halfback I ever saw," Ernie Accorsi, who was general manager of three National Football League teams, wrote in an email in 2017. "I never saw anyone who could be at full speed, stop on a dime and, in one step acceleration, be at top speed again," Accorsi said. "I saw runs he made that if it was one handed touch football instead of tackle they couldn't have caught him." As Sayers himself said of ability to elude tacklers in close quarters, "All I needed was 18 inches." Sayers's fame reached beyond the football field in 1971 with the broadcast of the Emmy Award winning television movie "Brian's Song," based on his friendship with his teammate Brian Piccolo, who died of cancer at 26. A consensus all American at the University of Kansas where he was called "the Kansas Comet" Sayers chose to play for the Bears of the established N.F.L. over the Kansas City Chiefs of the upstart American Football League in 1965. He went on to have one of the greatest rookie seasons ever. He led the league in all purpose yards (rushing, receiving and runbacks) with 2,272 yards; scored 22 touchdowns, six of them in one game; and was named to the all league team for the first of five consecutive years. His six touchdown day as a rookie was one of the greatest displays of offense by a single player in football history, matching a feat accomplished by two earlier players. No pro player has scored six touchdowns since. Sayers did it against the San Francisco 49ers during an all day rain on Dec. 12, 1965, in the mud of Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, running on slippery patches of temporary turf covering the stadium's baseball diamond. The touchdowns came on an 80 yard screen pass play, runs of 21 and 7 yards, a 50 yard romp in the third quarter, a 1 yard spurt early in the fourth quarter and an 85 yard punt return as the Bears rolled to a 61 20 victory. Years later, Sayers noted that nobody on the Bears' bench had known that he had tied the record when the venerable coach George Halas sat him down and sent in subs with the game clinched. Had he stayed in the game, Sayers said, he might have had eight touchdowns. Sayers was already a legend in 1967 after two pro seasons, when Rick Volk, a safety from the University of Michigan, tried to defend against him while a college all star team was training at the Bears' camp. "He was amazing," Volk recalled in 2017. "He was running off tackle, and I was the safety and came up to fill the hole. I was two or three feet from him. I was right there. He made a couple of moves whoo hoo! I had him dead to rights. He was so quick." Another meeting came in 1968 after Volk was established with the Baltimore Colts. "I was playing right safety, and he was running a sweep to his right my left," Volk recalled. "Mike Curtis came up and Gale reversed to his left. We had him stopped. But he reversed again, and I had an angle on him, but I couldn't catch him." Sayers later likened his 59 yard touchdown run to a slapstick movie chase and claimed he had run past Bubba Smith, the huge Baltimore defender, three separate times. Sayers called it "the greatest run of my professional football career." Asked to describe his strategies and techniques, Sayers told Sports Illustrated in 1965: "I have no idea what I do. I hear people talk about dead leg, shake, change of pace, but I do things without thinking about them." It all came crashing down on Nov. 10, 1968 Sayers's fourth season when Kermit Alexander of San Francisco tried to take out Sayers's lead blocker. When the player moved, Alexander crashed into Sayers's right knee. "It's gone," Sayers told Alexander, who stayed to comfort him. "It was my fault, all my fault," Alexander said. "God, you never want to hurt a player, never. Especially a great player like Gale." Sayers exonerated Alexander. But 1969 became a somber season. For two years the Bears had matched players by position when they shared hotel rooms on the road. Sayers, who was Black, was paired with his backup, Brian Piccolo, who was white apparently the first time a Black and white player had shared a hotel room for an N.F.L. team. The two men bonded, partly through racial jokes. But that November Piccolo was found to have embryonic cell carcinoma of the lungs. Sent to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, he underwent surgery to remove a malignant tumor, but doctors found that the disease had spread to other organs. The following May, Sayers was given the George S. Halas Award, which recognizes the league's most courageous player. In his acceptance speech, he said: "I love Brian Piccolo. I might have received this award tonight, but tomorrow I will take it to Brian Piccolo at Sloan Kettering. When you hit your knees tonight, please pray for Brian Piccolo." Piccolo died on June 16, 1970, at 26. Sayers was a pallbearer at his funeral. Sayers's account of his friendship with Piccolo became the basis of the TV movie "Brian's Song." Sayers chronicled their friendship in the book "I Am Third," written with the help of Al Silverman and published that November. It became the basis of the hugely successful "Brian's Song," with Billy Dee Williams playing Sayers and James Caan as Piccolo. (A lesser remake, with Mekhi Phifer and Sean Maher, was broadcast in 2001.) Gale Eugene Sayers was born on May 30, 1943, in Wichita, Kan., the middle of three sons of Roger Sayers, a car mechanic, and Bernice Ross Sayers. The family moved from Kansas to Omaha, where as a high school standout Gale received, by his account, 75 college scholarship offers before choosing the University of Kansas. He played three varsity seasons there 1962, '63 and '64 and was a consensus all American selection in his two final seasons. After his playing career ended, Sayers briefly worked as a television commentator and stockbroker and then for his alma mater, Kansas. He was the athletic director at Southern Illinois University for five years before resigning in 1981. He had several business ventures, including a computer supply company in the Chicago area. He said he had applied to every N.F.L. team for a front office job but never received an interview a source of sadness for him, according to friends. Sayers was married to Linda McNeil in 1962, during his freshman year in college; they were divorced in June 1973. That December he married Ardythe Elaine Bullard. She survives him. In addition to his stepson Guy, he is also survived by a daughter, Gale Lynne, and two sons, Timothy and Scott, from his first marriage; two other stepsons, Gaylon and Gary; two brothers, Roger, a former track and field star, and Ron, who played eight games as a running back for the San Diego Chargers in the N.F.L.; and seven grandchildren. Since 1987, Gale and Ardythe Sayers had a home in Wakarusa, a small rural town. They had been active in the Ardythe and Gale Sayers Center for African American Adoption, part of The Cradle, an adoption center in Evanston, Ill. (His son Scott was adopted.) Sayers began to suffer memory loss around 2013 and was examined at the Mayo Clinic. The family decided to address his condition publicly in March 2017. "People see him, and people began to wonder what was wrong with him," Ms. Sayers told The Chicago Sun Times. The news elicited calls from former teammates like Dick Butkus and former N.F.L. players like Paul Hornung of the Green Bay Packers, Paul Warfield of the Cleveland Browns and Earl Campbell of the Houston Oilers. Sayers sued the N.F.L. in 2013 in federal court in Chicago, contending that the league had not done enough to protect him from "devastating concussive head traumas." He said he had sometimes been sent back into games after suffering concussions. It's not clear if or how the matter was resolved. "Like the doctor at the Mayo Clinic said, 'Yes, a part of this has to be on football,'" Ardythe Sayers told The Kansas City Star in 2017. "It wasn't so much getting hit in the head. It's just the shaking of the brain when they took him down with the force they play the game in." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
"We get excited by books and we want to put them in other people's hands," said Louise Erdrich, the National Book Award winner who owns Birchbark Books Native Arts in Minneapolis. Birchbark Books Native Arts, owned by the novelist Louise Erdrich, provides indigenous language guides, literature and crafts and the latest best sellers. MINNEAPOLIS Look up when you enter Birchbark Books Native Arts and you'll spot a handcrafted canoe hanging above the table of current and favorite books. An intricately carved Catholic confessional hugs a wall, although according to the store's frequently asked questions page, it was renamed a "forgiveness booth" after it was rescued from becoming a bar fixture. At Birchbark, located at 2115 West 21st Street in Minneapolis's Kenwood neighborhood, there is much to see even before you start browsing its stacks and shelves. "It's one thing to have algorithms keep suggesting the same books to you, but it's another thing to walk in," said the store's owner, Louise Erdrich. "People are looking at you, and you're looking at actual books, so that you can be inspired and attracted by a physical book." Erdrich, 65, has a wide range of experience with physical books. For one, she's written many of them: a memoir, children's books, poetry collections and 15 novels, including "The Round House," which won the 2012 National Book Award for fiction. An admirer of bookstores with personalities since her college days, she started Birchbark because she wanted to do something with her daughters. "It was the year 2000, and they were at these great ages where they were very excited about books," she said. Though she had no idea how to start a bookstore, she jumped in and opened Birchbark in 2001. The store sells mainstream fiction, nonfiction and children's books, but Native American titles, crafts and culture are its specialty. Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians (her grandfather was its tribal chairman). She gave a shout out to Native people in Ojibwe during her National Book Award acceptance speech, and her daughter, Persia, is an immersion teacher in the language. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. "A large part of our mission has to do with uplifting and supporting Native communities," Carolyn Anderson, the store's operations manager, said. "We purchase contemporary and traditional art prints, cards, jewelry, crafts, skin care and food items directly from Native American artists and artisans usually from this region." The shop's decor also incorporates genuine birch trees. As Erdrich recalls, her contractors found a batch of blown down birches in Wisconsin and transported them by pickup truck to Minneapolis to be put up in the store much to the confusion of the local avian population. "We've had birds just fly in," she said. "We've had woodpeckers come in and try to figure out why there are trees in the space." Many of those resurrected trees can be seen in the store's loft area, designed as a toy filled nook where children can play while their adults browse the shelves. On those shelves, Birchbark dedicates a section to keeping indigenous languages alive through learning guides and dictionaries. It mainly stocks instructional materials for Dakota, Lakota and Ojibwe, three tribes local to the region, Anderson said, but also sells pocket size dictionaries in Cree, Oji Cree, Dene and Inuktitut. Anderson, a Dine/Navajo member whose mother went to an American Indian boarding school, feels that the exposure to indigenous culture and community through stores like Birchbark has helped people become more curious and aware of perspectives outside the mainstream. Those resources also provide comfort for Native Americans, she said. "One of those tools for healing is through research, writing, storytelling, learning our traditions, our history and our languages." The Birchbark website is managed by the store's book buyer, Nathan Pederson, selling mostly Native American related adult and children's titles for those who can't make it to Minneapolis. The store supports Native authors through book events, poetry readings and musical performances, often at the nearby Bockley Gallery. Looking to explore the town after a round of shopping? Check out "36 Hours in Minneapolis." Erdrich, who has a new novel called "The Night Watchman" scheduled for spring, pops into the store occasionally, but she leaves the day to day business to Anderson, Pederson and her other colleagues. When she's not writing her own books, she does take time to contribute to Birchbark's handwritten recommendations, taped to shelves all over the store. "That's the thing about bookstores," she said. "Bookselling becomes a way of life and something you do as a human being." Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Sarah Patterson, a 27 year old nurse, suffered four miscarriages over the last four years because of several medical problems, including a condition that causes cysts to form on the ovaries. After her second loss, she said, her husband asked for a divorce because he could not handle the stress. "I was heartbroken and devastated," said Ms. Patterson, her voice quavering as she began to cry. "It took me about six months or so before I decided I am going to be a mom, whether I am on my own or whether I had a partner by my side." Though young, Ms. Patterson said she felt a sense of urgency because one of her conditions had the potential to deplete her egg reserves. Her doctor recommended in vitro fertilization, in which an egg is fertilized with sperm in a lab and transferred into the uterus. Her health insurance, through the California exchange, does not cover infertility, so she is working extra shifts to save the estimated 15,000 to 25,000 it will cost her for just one cycle of I.V.F. She said transferring two embryos into her uterus at once could improve her chances of becoming pregnant and perhaps save her money. But carrying multiple babies has extra risks. "A high risk pregnancy scares me," said Ms. Patterson, who lives in Southern California. As many people with fertility issues quickly learn 7.4 million women used infertility services from 2006 to 2010 few employers and insurers pay for many procedures, including in vitro fertilization. Though 65 percent of businesses with more than 500 employees will pay for an initial evaluation by a fertility specialist, just 27 percent cover in vitro fertilization, according to a 2013 study conducted by Mercer, a consulting firm. (That number was 23 percent in 2012.) Drug therapies were covered by 41 percent of large employers, according to the study. And although 15 states require insurers to provide some degree of infertility coverage or offer the option of coverage to those buying plans, many of those mandates impose restrictions on who can qualify, raising questions about who should be covered by infertility insurance. In Arkansas, Hawaii, Maryland and Texas, for instance, coverage is required only if a woman's eggs are fertilized with her spouse's sperm, according to Resolve, a consumer advocacy group, which lists all of the states' requirements. So single women, unmarried partners, men with sperm issues and married lesbians with medical conditions causing infertility are excluded. Some large insurers' standard definitions of infertility appear to be more inclusive. They cover people regardless of their relationship status, as long as their infertility is the result of a medical problem. One common definition says a patient is deemed infertile if she fails to achieve or sustain a pregnancy after a year of trying naturally, or through a certain number of attempts at artificial insemination at her own expense. (Aetna makes women try a dozen times if they are under 35, while Cigna requires six attempts.) But these insurers do not go as far as covering, say, women without fertility problems who for one reason or another are using donor sperm. And plenty of insurance policies exclude gay couples and single women particularly those who have trouble getting pregnant through artificial insemination because they define infertility as an inability to become pregnant through sexual intercourse, according to Cathy Sakimura, family law director and supervising lawyer at the National Center for Lesbian Rights. (But she said some medical procedures, like correcting a blocked fallopian tube that compromised fertility, would often be covered.) Of the states that mandate coverage, only eight Arkansas, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island require some level of coverage for in vitro fertilization, according to Resolve. (All of the state mandates typically apply only to health plans regulated by the state. Large employers, which are typically self insured, are not subject to the rules because they are federally regulated.) Some states also make patients wait very long and seemingly medically unsound periods before qualifying for benefits for a condition in which the passage of time can be damaging. Hawaii requires a five year history of infertility, according to Resolve, while several other states require a two year history. And in New York, fertility patients must be covered by their insurance for at least a year before receiving coverage. (Group policies are required to cover certain diagnostics, but New York does not require insurers to cover in vitro fertilization.) The mandates "are really old, outdated and they need attention," said Barbara Collura, chief executive of Resolve. The Affordable Care Act did little to expand infertility coverage, experts said. While exchange plans require coverage of certain essential benefits, the act allows the states to define those terms. "In states that do not require plans to cover infertility, they rarely do," said Karen Davenport, director of health policy at the National Women's Law Center. "They are mostly doing the minimum." The lack of insurance coverage often leads some women to take risks that will increase their chances of becoming pregnant, fertility experts say. Not only are they aching for a successful pregnancy, most do not have limitless money to spend on multiple in vitro fertilization cycles. So some women choose to transfer more than one embryo a cycle (which may be recommended for older women), hoping that at least one will be successful. But in the long run, some infertility experts say, this costs the insurers more money because women may choose clinics or options, like transferring too many embryos, which may not necessarily produce the best results. Having multiple babies increases health risks for the mother and children and often requires more costly medical care after birth. "If you are paying out of pocket, you are pretty desperate to have that cycle work when you've paid 15,000 into an I.V.F. cycle," said Dr. Bradley Van Voorhis, director of the division of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. "Although it appears to be an attractive proposition, what many couples fail to understand are the risks of prematurity, including long term health consequences and large increases in health care costs." But some employers may be beginning to think longer term as they see higher cost claims associated with multiple births, which carry a higher risk of prematurity, cesarean sections, a need for neonatal intensive care and other complications. Brenna Haviland Shebel, a director at the National Business Group on Health, a membership organization of large employers, is researching infertility coverage on behalf of large employers. Some of those employers are thinking about adding coverage or at least providing services that help members select providers. The reason, in large part, is to help control costs and improve results, she said. Employers may steer their employees to high quality infertility clinics, including those that favor implanting only one embryo in hopes of producing a single, healthy baby. Aetna introduced a program along those lines last year for women whose policies already cover in vitro fertilization. The insurer said it would cover the entire cost of the first I.V.F cycle if one embryo was transferred instead of two or more. If that attempt fails, it will cover the cost of a second attempt using a single frozen embryo. (If the woman's plan limits the number of cycles covered, the second attempt will not count against that limit.) The insurer said this approach tried to strike the right balance between success and safety. That is precisely the balance most people are trying to strike as well, while shouldering the costs entirely on their own. "What is the role of insurance?" asked Ms. Collura, of the advocacy group, Resolve. "Those are ethical questions. Those are medical questions. Those are societal questions." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
WASHINGTON The Interior Department announced on Wednesday that it was grounding its entire fleet of drones out of concerns that Chinese parts in them might be used for spying, making exceptions only for emergency missions like fighting wildfires and search and rescue operations. The move, an extension of an order made last year, reflects concerns that drones made in China could expose sensitive data. Unease is growing in Washington about potential security vulnerabilities presented by Chinese technology, though Chinese companies have denied that their products pose a security threat. Last year, pending an internal security investigation, the agency temporarily grounded its drones, which are used for surveying critical infrastructure like dams, collecting information about endangered species, conducting search and rescue operations and tracking wildfires. The new order, signed by David Bernhardt, the secretary of the interior, says the current fleet of 810 drones will remain grounded "while we ensure that cybersecurity, technology and domestic production concerns are adequately addressed." The order does not explicitly mention China, but a senior administration official said it was "without question" aimed at drones made or assembled in China. DJI, a privately held Chinese company whose drones are used by the Interior Department, said in a statement that it was "disappointed" with the new order and accused the Trump administration of political motives. "This decision makes clear that the U.S. government's concerns about DJI drones, which make up a small portion of the D.O.I. fleet, have little to do with security and are instead part of a politically motivated agenda to reduce market competition and support domestically produced drone technology, regardless of its merits," Michael Oldenburg, a DJI spokesman, said. The grounding order does not apply to private drones used for personal or commercial purposes. A senior administration official said the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies would assist the Interior Department with a review of its drones that would include a "significant tear down" to the nuts and bolts of the machines. In the meantime, the agency will allow drones to be used for emergency situations like disaster monitoring, and will make exceptions for training flights. According to the Department of Interior, since the agency grounded its fleet in October, it has conducted 12 drone flights, all related to firefighting missions or flood monitoring. The new order does not define what will be included in emergency operations, but one official said it could include monitoring for cracks in dams, which would be considered a safety issue. Other drone missions, like conducting geological surveys, studying habitats and monitoring the breeding grounds of the sage grouse, an imperiled ground nesting bird that is found across millions of acres of oil and gas rich sagebrush lands, will be conducted by airplane or helicopter, the official said. The move is the latest by the federal government to target Chinese technology firms. In recent years, regulators have cracked down on Chinese wireless network equipment and expressed concerns about the national security implications of Chinese companies' operation of consumer mobile applications in the United States. They have also made it difficult for American companies to supply certain Chinese firms. DJI's drones which are popular with both hobbyists and public safety officials have been one persistent point of contention. The company is seen as the market leader, with analysts at times estimating its market share at 70 percent or higher. In 2017, federal officials said they were worried that DJI drones were sending data back to China, which the firm strenuously denied, and the Army ordered its employees not to use the company's products. The fear is that the Chinese government is seeing what the United States government is seeing through DJI drone flights. The company has taken steps since then to reassure American officials. Last year, it announced that it was moving a small part of its production to Cerritos, Calif. It also rolled out a version of its drone specifically for government use. Mr. Oldenburg said the company's technology designed for United States government agencies had been "independently tested and validated" by security consultants and federal officials, "which proves today's decision has nothing to do with security." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
President Trump, in a series of early morning Twitter posts on Tuesday, attacked Google for what he claimed was an effort to intentionally suppress conservative news outlets supportive of his administration. Mr. Trump's remarks and an additional warning later in the day that Google, Facebook and Twitter "have to be careful" escalated a conservative campaign against the internet industry that has become more pointed since Apple, Google and Facebook removed content from Alex Jones, a right wing conspiracy theorist who runs the site InfoWars and has been a vocal supporter of Mr. Trump. "Google search results for 'Trump News' shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media," Mr. Trump said on Twitter at 5:24 a.m. "In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me others, so that almost all stories news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent." Mr. Trump added that "they are controlling what we can cannot see. This is a very serious situation will be addressed!" Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council and a longtime advocate of deregulation, appeared to back Mr. Trump when asked by reporters later on Tuesday whether the administration would be pursuing more regulation of Google. "We'll let you know," Mr. Kudlow said. "We're taking a look at it." In a statement, Google said that its search service was "not used to set a political agenda and we don't bias our results toward any political ideology." The president's tweets landed at a difficult moment for the tech industry. There is a growing sense across the political spectrum in the United States and in other countries that something must be done to rein in their influence. Executives from many of the largest internet companies will face questions next week at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing about their efforts to prevent foreign meddling in the midterm elections in November, a follow up to congressional hearings held after the 2016 elections. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, and Twitter's Jack Dorsey are scheduled to testify in front of the committee. Google has also been called to testify. Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina and the chairman of the Senate committee, has asked Google to send Sundar Pichai, its chief executive. So far, the company has offered to send Kent Walker, its senior vice president of global affairs. Mr. Burr said he was unlikely to subpoena Mr. Pichai to testify, but that his absence would signal that Google was choosing "not to participate" and be "part of the solution." Interfering in how companies like Google and Facebook present information would be a notable departure for the federal government, which has mostly taken a hands off approach to the internet. Free speech scholars said companies like Google and Facebook were free to operate with few restrictions thanks to a 1996 law called the Telecommunications Act. "That law pretty much removes free speech liability for Google and Facebook," said Roy Gutterman, director of the Tully Center for Free Speech at the Newhouse School. "That being said, I think it'd be a major leap to believe that the people behind Google are writing algorithms to discriminate against content." Last month, regulators in Europe fined Google 5.1 billion for antitrust violations. After the European fine, Mr. Trump said Google was "one of our great companies." What sort of pressure regulators in the United States could exert is not entirely clear. The Justice Department, under both the Trump and Obama administrations, has shown little interest in pursuing antitrust cases against Google or its parent company, Alphabet. Mr. Trump has often raised antitrust questions about another tech giant, Amazon, but little has come of his threats. 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. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, has suggested that if internet companies are not a "neutral platform," they should not be protected by a law known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives companies broad legal immunity for what people put on their services. Appearing in front of reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Trump offered a vague expansion of his earlier criticism, saying that social news platforms were actively "taking advantage" of people. "We have tremendous, we have literally thousands and thousands of complaints coming in. And you just can't do that," Mr. Trump said. Mr. Trump's claims of bias appeared to be inspired by a segment Monday night from Lou Dobbs, a host on the Fox Business Network. Mr. Dobbs highlighted an article by a conservative website, PJ Media, that said that it had conducted what it called an unscientific study in which 96 percent of Google search results for the word "Trump" were articles from "left leaning sites." The piece was also featured on the website Drudge Report, whose operator, Matt Drudge, was an early supporter of Mr. Trump. Search engine experts said Google uses many factors in its search algorithm including how often a web page is linked to by other sites and how often certain words appear on a page and that formula is constantly being updated. "Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high quality content in response to users' queries," the company said. "We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment." Even longtime Google critics disagreed with the premise of the PJ Media article. "The industry should have plenty of concerns with Google, particularly antitrust and data collection practices, but this isn't one of them," said Jason Kint, the chief executive of Digital Content Next, an online publishing industry group. "The president's tweets this morning are flat out absurd." Long before Facebook, Apple and Google had removed InfoWars from their sites, conservatives were zeroing in on Big Tech as a new enemy in the political culture wars. In February, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Md., guests packed a ballroom for a discussion called "Suppression of Conservative Views on Social Media: A First Amendment Issue." Although it provided a target for those in attendance, Google was a sponsor of the conference. The company held a reception for conference attendees, with an open bar and a roaring outdoor fireplace. Peter Schweizer, a right wing journalist known for his investigations into Hillary Clinton, has followed a similar line of attack as a writer and producer of a new documentary, "The Creepy Line," which argues that Silicon Valley is stifling conservative content. The Daily Caller, a conservative news and opinion website, recently posted the trailer. During the presidential election, Trump campaign officials claimed Google was manipulating search results to favor Hillary Clinton. But right after the election, the top Google search result for "final election vote count 2016" was a link to a story that wrongly stated that Mr. Trump, who won the Electoral College, had also defeated Mrs. Clinton in the popular vote. Since then, Google has updated its search algorithm to surface what it calls "more authoritative" news sources. The internet companies find themselves caught between conservatives who say they are being heavy handed and others who say they are not doing enough to police their sites. Twitter only suspended Mr. Jones's account, for example, and was condemned by some of its own employees and many on the left for not being tougher. But the move by other tech giants earlier this month to ban Mr. Jones drew condemnation from a range of conservatives even some who say they do not care for Mr. Jones. "Who the hell made Facebook the arbiter of political speech?" Mr. Cruz said in a tweet. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
One of the pleasures of a life filled with dance is the way, at the end of the day, a performance can force the mind to change course, to quiet down. William Forsythe's program at the Shed, "A Quiet Evening of Dance," which opened on Friday, takes that to another level. Mr. Forsythe has created a setting not completely silent, but nice and hushed that encourages listening with both the ears and the eyes. The last thing you would want to hear under such conditions? A beep, buzz or, God forbid, the marimba ringtone. Putting our cellphones in airplane mode was the easy part ; more difficult was grasping the poetry of this two act program. And that wasn't because of the sound or lack of it. Actually, it isn't completely quiet. The second half features a lively dance set to to Jean Philippe Rameau, and in the first half, there are bird sounds and a spare composition by Morton Feldman. For the most part, though, it's up to the dancers to create the score with their steps and breathing, and for the audience to absorb it. Certainly, there are moments to admire and respect. "A Quiet Evening" has the rigor that Mr. Forsythe always brings to the stage; there's just not enough transcendence. In part, that could have been because of an injury to a leading dancer, Christopher Roman. (Four others were brought on to fill in; during the curtain call, Mr. Forsythe said that they had learned their parts in three days.) But there is also a sameness to the material, and that makes the less experienced dancers stand out in an unfortunate way among the Forsythe veterans. "A Quiet Evening," with new and reworked choreography by Mr. Forsythe, pays homage to ballet's European roots while attempting to bring it into the present. Mr. Forsythe is more than qualified for such a choreographic endeavor. An American based for many years in Germany, where he directed Frankfurt Ballet, he did much to guide ballet into a new era with his extreme take on classicism, paired with stark lighting and, frequently, the bold synthesized sounds of the composer Thom Willems. The next phase of Mr. Forsythe's career landed him in a more experimental world of theater and dance; but recently, he's fallen back in love with ballet. While the Shed program affords the pleasure of becoming lost in his swirling, finely executed steps how did that hip end up there? taken as a whole, it starts to feel arid. And at times, the attempt to look at the future of ballet seems more contrived than organic, like the appearances of the street dancer Rauf Yasit. Also known as RubberLegz, he demonstrated the elasticity of his limbs with floor work that knotted him up like a pretzel, but as the night wore on, it seemed like we were seeing the same sequences on repeat. Chirping birds introduce Act 1, which begins with "Prologue." Parvaneh Scharafali and Ander Zabala, wearing evening gloves and sneakers covered with socks, perform a crisp, stately duet it's a labyrinth of limbs with joints as loose as soft spaghetti. (The socks over the sneakers remind me of the way figure skaters pull their tights over their boots not my favorite look.) More intriguing is "Catalogue," featuring the velvety dancing of Jill Johnson formerly a principal dancer with Ballet Frankfurt, she is still astonishing alongside the newcomer Brit Rodemund. Here, it's as if they are illustrating the development of ballet starting with simple shapes, some awkward, others pedestrian. This dance is in silence, which begins the moment they each extend an arm and touch palms. At the start, they draw invisible lines along the perimeter of their torsos with their hands. As they increase their force and expand spatially, the dancers' elbows and shoulders tell a tale of Mr. Forsythe's intense study of epaulement, or the carriage of the arms. Eventually their isolated movements morph into ballet steps and shapes. When their palms touch in the center once again, and the music Feldman's "Nature Pieces From Piano No. 1" starts, so does "Epilogue," in which the cast of seven continues the story of some of Mr. Forsythe's most recognizable contributions to dance: his use of torque, speed, articulation and counterpoint. It's handsome in parts and confounding in others: Why include even a second of the ever popular floss dance? Is it meant to be playful? It feels like a throwaway. "Dialogue (DUO2015)," the final piece in Act 1, pairs Brigel Gjoka and Riley Watts an extraordinary dancer with silky athleticism in a frisky duet of physical reverberations. This and "Catalogue" reveal much about Mr. Forsythe's lineage and achievements both spoke of scale and intimacy but as informative as the first half of "A Quiet Evening" is, it's also rambling. Steel yourself. If Act 1 is about revealing the raw ingredients that make up Mr. Forsythe's classicism, Act 2 is the meal in the form of a stand alone dance: "Seventeen/Twenty One," to Rameau's "Hippolyte et Aricie: Ritournelle" from "Une Symphonie Imaginaire." It explores ballet's evolution from the 17th century to the 21st, flooding the previously quiet space with full bodied dancing and baroque music. This is a dance, charming in moments, that is hungry for movement. By the end, it creates a sweet and simple sense of community a group of people just dancing together that comes to a joyful close as they suddenly clasp hands and run to the front of the stage for a bow. But the most consistent pleasure is from one dancer: Ms. Johnson brings an unassuming clarity and articulation to Mr. Forsythe's movement that feels like it comes from the deepest of places. All night long, her quiet radiance was the loudest thing in the room. Through Oct 25 at the Shed, Manhattan; 646 455 3494, theshed.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
How will these tax proposals affect the economy? The economic logic is straightforward and time tested. Better incentives like lower tax rates, being able to write off investments, taxation only on earnings in the United States will encourage innovation, investment, hiring and pay raises. These incentives increase the accumulation of capital, whether in physical equipment or intellectual know how. This capital deepening having more and better capital for each worker reverses recent trends and raises productivity growth. More rapid productivity growth, in turn, raises the real wages of the middle class and restores upward mobility to a stagnant labor market. There is nothing wrong with the idea that reducing a tax on capital will spur investment, which should increase worker productivity and, eventually, wages. But these models ignore important features of the real world, the tax code and the proposed tax law changes. First, the current tax system already encourages debt financed investment, but that incentive actually diminishes under the proposed changes. Second, we are already living in a world awash in capital; a shortage of capital supply is not the problem holding back investment. Companies have historically high levels of after tax profits. Why do we think giving an even larger windfall to shareholders will suddenly fuel investment? For companies to seek new investment, they need a healthy middle class. Perhaps that is why so few C.E.O. hands went up at a recent event when asked if they would use tax cuts to increase investment; few companies plan new investments in response. What will be the impact on the deficit? The bills' backers conveniently assume away the deficits that finance these tax cuts; such deficits are likely to either raise interest rates or increase borrowing from foreigners (such that more of the country's income flows abroad in the future), or do both. Even estimates accounting for growth effects, by nonpartisan entities such as the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Tax Policy Center, find that the bills increase deficits by 1 trillion to 1.25 trillion over 10 years. Those factors will be a drag on the growth of American living standards. While the backers of the bill emphasize its supply side benefits, the growth effects of these tax bills are being vastly oversold. Future taxpayers will be left with both increased income inequality and higher debt burdens. By 2027, the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates, 84 percent of households will face either a tax increase or a tax cut that is smaller than 100. This will be small consolation for the future taxes needed to pay off debt. A fair concern has been raised over the need for additional federal borrowing as a result of the proposed reform. Certainly the level and trajectory of the federal debt are a troubling issue, and a revenue neutral approach would have been preferable. But it is important to get the right order of magnitude of any impact. Of the additional 1.5 trillion of additional deficits permitted by the reconciliation rules, roughly 500 billion will occur in any event, either as part of the reform or when expiring tax provisions get extended. Of the remaining 1 trillion, somewhere between 400 billion and 600 billion will be offset by additional growth. That means the Treasury will need to finance another 40 billion to 60 billion more each year. This is a drop in the bucket of the Treasury market, with inconsequential implications for the overall level of interest rates. Is it worth a tax break to bring home profits booked overseas? American businesses have booked roughly 3 trillion overseas to avoid paying United States taxes. Under the Republican plan, they would get a tax break worth about 500 billion in return for bringing the money home. Republicans argue that the money would be used to create jobs. Critics say the proposal would reward companies for tax avoidance strategies without based on past cases an economic dividend. The bill would stipulate that on a certain date every dollar of overseas earnings will be deemed to have been repatriated and corporations will owe their respective tax. At that point, firms face the real economic choice bring the money back or not not influenced by taxes . This is very different from past repatriation holidays and should be expected to have much better results. The same pro growth incentives that influence domestic investors will apply to the overseas earnings. Can Americans expect to see benefits in their paychecks? These tax cuts are unlikely to spur large increases in wages; careful cross country evidence fails to find benefits to wages from corporate tax cuts. If we truly wanted to help the middle class, we would focus on its needs directly, by providing it with the lion's share of any net tax cuts, and by ensuring that the government has the revenue needed for important infrastructure, education and health care needs as well as the flexibility to respond to the next recession. This bill has been promoted as a boon for the middle class. Does it fulfill that promise? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
In Cathleen Schine's 1998 novel "The Evolution of Jane," a young woman unexpectedly runs into her childhood best friend in the Galapagos. Three cheers for fiction writers who bother to get their facts straight. If there's a special place for them in heaven, it needn't be very large. The laws of nature are routinely broken and bent to artistic whim as the heroes of novel and film carry on in bucolic scenes where plants bloom and birds nest out of season, often on the wrong continent altogether. We should rejoice, then, in a rare book like Cathleen Schine's novel "The Evolution of Jane," in which a character named Jane and the principles of evolution are rendered with equal care. The book is a beautifully descriptive travelogue of the Galapagos, loaded with mini lectures on natural history, evolutionary theory and Darwiniana, wrapped around a rollicking family saga tinged with hints of sexual intrigue. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
LONDON Before we get to the apocalypse implicit in the title of "Death of England," Clint Dyer and Roy Williams's furious play at the National Theater through March 7, spare a thought for the vocal cords of its tireless lone performer, Rafe Spall. Spewing 100 minutes of frequently enraged reports from the front line of grief, Spall is asked to sustain a level of vitriol that must be as wearing on his larynx as it risks becoming for the audience. Playing Michael, a verbally uninhibited Londoner in mourning for a father whom he loved, but whose pro Brexit politics he found abhorrent, Spall animates a racially fractious landscape with a near maniacal vigor that I've not seen before from this gentlest seeming of actors. "Death of England" comes from two of Britain's leading black theater practitioners (Dyer doubles as the director) and is an expansion of a micro play first commissioned from Williams by the Royal Court Theater and the Guardian newspaper in 2014. In the Dorfman Theater at the National, the stage takes the shape of a St. George's Cross that cuts through the audience, allowing Spall's Michael to interact with playgoers at random ("Did you drop something?" he asks a spectator early on) even as he tells us he is talking through the hazy filter of drugs and booze. Performed without an interval, the production gains visual energy from the sudden appearance of props, embedded in cubbyholes to the side of the set: a roast dinner here, a record album or two there. Through it all, Michael attempts to accommodate the memory of a man about whom he feels as divided as the country in the play's title. The narrative may not always add up: Michael's father is revealed to have had a secret life in the company of a local Indian restaurateur, Riz, the details of which aren't remotely plausible: Would this man really be seeking literary sustenance with the also unseen Riz in the predawn hours? The ending, too, takes a lurch toward the sentimental that Michael, of all people, would surely resist. But you have to hand it to the creative team not least the hardworking sound designers Pete Malkin and Benjamin Grant for carrying a full on assault of this sort straight across the finish line, to co opt the language of sports deployed by the play. Credibility poses a more significant problem in a longer, more populous play, "The Haystack," which has been extended at the Hampstead Theater in North London through March 12. Marking the full length playwriting debut of Al Blyth, the production is the first at this address from the Hampstead's artistic director, Roxana Silbert, who acceded to her post last fall. Telling of a surveillance state in which our every move is monitored, the careering narrative devolves into a nasty revenge drama, by which point you've lost sympathy for both the hotshot intelligence expert Neil (Oliver Johnstone) and the emotionally damaged journalist, Cora (Rona Morison), on whom he alights first professionally and then romantically. She, for her part, gives scant respect to professional benchmarks like fact checking and attribution. It's a measure of clunky dramaturgy when a play resorts to lapsing into direct address for no other reason but to impart information or gain a spurious relevance. At one point, we're given a vivid recapitulation of recent terror attacks in London that only distracts from the tortured courtship at the play's core. The play takes its title, you guessed it, from the proverbial image of a needle in a haystack, but at a running time of nearly three hours, "The Haystack" is at least one bale too many. Compression, not to mention more logical plotting, would seem to be the noninvasive remedy here. What happens when the world at large simply proves too much? One answer is on compelling view in "Collapsible," an hourlong play that was a hit at last summer's Edinburgh Festival. The director Thomas Martin's keen eyed production has been extended until March 21 at the Bush Theater, the West London venue devoted to new writing that is on a roll between this and the New York bound "Baby Reindeer." The cunning design by Alison Neighbour tips you off to the precarious state of the internet addicted Esther, or Essie, whom we find perched atop a plinth of sorts from which she seems about to tumble. (The stage floor looks like gravel but is in fact a mix of various materials including charcoal and cork.) Having lost both a job and a partner, Essie lets rip with a fusillade of language to match Michael's in "Death of England," the difference being that Breffni Holahan's Essie speaks even faster than Spall, if more quietly. The Bush's studio space seats only 60, which allows for greater intimacy. Essie's thirst for news "the planet bucking like a horse trying to throw us all off and out into space," as she describes the state of things provides a daily catalog of woe writ small as well as large. A Sky television modem, we're wryly informed midway through a litany of far more terrible disasters, has not yet arrived. Margaret Perry, the play's Irish writer, keeps the images pouring forth in a lava flow of language that the superb Holahan navigates with confidence. There's a dark comedy to be found in Essie's various job interviews, as well as her reckoning with friends and family, from whom she is forever requesting the one word that might best describe her before she slips into a mental abyss. "Smart," replies her father. "That's your ration of compliments for the year." Both author and performer achieve a neat trick in the closing moments that shouldn't be revealed here beyond a change in perspective that catches the audience unawares. That is followed by a haunting exchange of the word "OK," though whether Essie or the world she inhabits really is remains movingly up for grabs. Death of England. Directed by Clint Dyer. National Theater / Dorfman, through March 7. The Haystack. Directed by Roxana Silbert. Hampstead Theater, through March 12. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
ALBANY In the moments after Connecticut advanced to the Final Four on Sunday for the 12th year in a row, blue, yellow and orange confetti rode the waves of Coach Geno Auriemma's undulating hair. The pieces dusted the shoulders of his blue suit jacket and hid inside the top of his unbuttoned shirt. For Auriemma, the caretaker of the most dominant women's basketball program in history, this could get old. In some years, it has. In those years, the 65 year old Auriemma would like to point out, people seemed to forget how hard it can be to march through an N.C.A.A. tournament. UConn's invincibility was perceived to be as simple as an uncontested layup. Perfection was expected. This is not one of those years, at least by UConn's preposterously high standards. For Auriemma, then, the celebration that followed Sunday's 80 73 victory over No. 1 seeded Louisville in the Albany Region final the confetti, the long embraces, the snips of the net brought about a joy that even his usual sarcasm could not suppress. With wins by Oregon and Connecticut on Sunday, half of the women's Final Four field is set. The Ducks will face the winner of Monday's game between Baylor and Iowa, while the Huskies will meet the winner of the game between Notre Dame and Stanford. "We've been to a bunch of Final Fours in a row, and if you had seen this team the moment the buzzer sounded, you would think this is the very first time UConn has went to the Final Four," Auriemma told the crowd just before the region's all tournament team was announced. "And that's exactly how it's supposed to be." The Huskies (35 2) are headed to a record 12th consecutive Final Four and shooting for their 12th national championship. "I don't think people understand the pressures that go with playing at UConn, that the expectations are so unrealistic, and at the same time, very realistic, because we keep delivering on them," Auriemma said. His star senior Katie Lou Samuelson, still recovering from a back injury, led the Huskies this time, shaking off a lackluster performance in the regional semifinal to score 29 points against Louisville. In advancing, the Huskies avenged a regular season loss to the Cardinals. "Coming into this game, we all felt like there was a little bit of unfinished business from the last game," Samuelson said. "There was a little bit of extra motivation." It didn't come easy. Every time the second seeded Huskies stretched their lead to double digits, Louisville fought back. With 1 minute 47 seconds remaining and UConn holding an 11 point lead, the Cardinals cut the deficit to a single basket at 75 73 with 26.6 seconds left. But in the dying seconds, the Cardinals' own star, Asia Durr, missed two free throws, and Louisville's chance at a comeback slipped away. Louisville (32 4) entered the game suffused with the confidence earned by defeating the Huskies in January, but beating UConn twice in a season doesn't happen very often. The last team to do that was Notre Dame, in 2013. The Huskies could face the Irish in the Final Four next weekend in Tampa, Fla., if Notre Dame beats Stanford in the Chicago Regional final on Monday night. In the locker room after the victory, Auriemma said he told his players that they reminded him of his first Final Four team in 1991. "They all looked at each other, and none of them had been born, obviously," Auriemma said. The other time Auriemma experienced such unadulterated joy, he said, was in 1995, when the program won its first national title. "I'm glad that at my age I'm getting to experience this because I don't ever want it to become you know how the world is 'What did you do today?' 'We're going to the Final Four.' 'Good job, man,'" Auriemma said, fist bumping the tournament official sitting next to him at the postgame news conference. "It's still got to mean a lot," he said, "and you still have to feel it in your soul." UConn listened to all the talk about the increased parity in women's college basketball this season and seemed to feed on the supposed postseason slights: the star player Napheesa Collier's being excluded from the list of finalists for the Naismith Trophy, awarded annually to the country's best player; the Huskies' receiving a No. 2 seed for the first time since 2006. But methodically, and at times with difficulty, they continued to advance. "I have felt everything about this team all year long," Auriemma said. "I've loved them. I've hated them. I wanted the season to end. I wanted the season to keep going. I wanted 10 guys to transfer. I only wanted to coach one guy. I wanted to have them over for dinner every night. I wanted to I wish they'd never eat again the rest of their lives. "Every single emotion, every single thought you could ever imagine was in my brain all year long, to a point where you know, I can't even I don't have any more brain space." With that, Auriemma stood up from his chair and headed to the locker room. He was off to celebrate another victory with another group of players, another trip to a familiar place his 20th Final Four as if it were the very first time. OREGON 88, MISS. STATE 84 Thanks to another stellar performance from Sabrina Ionescu and a lift from a home state crowd, Oregon is heading to its first women's Final Four. Ionescu had 31 points, 8 assists and 7 rebounds, and the second seeded Ducks beat No. 1 seed Mississippi State in Portland, Ore. Satou Sabally had 22 points and 7 rebounds for the Ducks (33 4). At the final buzzer, Ionescu jumped into her teammate Ruthy Hebard's arms, and Coach Kelly Graves flashed an "O" with his hands to the crowd. The Ducks had been eliminated in the round of 8 the past two seasons. Teaira McCowan had 19 points and 15 rebounds in her final game for the Bulldogs (33 3), who had played in the N.C.A.A. title game for the past two seasons. Two of Mississippi State's losses this season were to Oregon the first one a true road game. (AP) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Leatherback turtles can travel thousands of miles through the ocean each year. Yet when females are ready to nest, they somehow manage to return to the same beach again and again. Some studies have indicated that their palm size hatchlings orient themselves to Earth's magnetic field. A study published in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B finds that the turtles may use the field to navigate in adulthood, too. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tracked 15 leatherback turtles with GPS tags from August 2007 to September 2009. The turtles swam from their feeding grounds off the coast of Massachusetts to the western Atlantic subtropical gyre, a great swirl of ocean currents circulating from the Equator almost to Iceland and from the East Coast to Europe and Africa. The researchers found that despite being in the currents, the turtles were able to keep moving south. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
And yet, no matter how much money he made or how much caviar and Champagne essentials in the business of "being Richard Avedon" he consumed, Avedon longed for "something purer and more universal": "recognition ... as an artist inventing a visual language that would become ever more coherent in time." Throughout his life, he kept close and envious tabs on those of his contemporaries to whom critics and museum curators did grant such recognition, be they gritty New York School photographers like Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus and (an honorary affiliate of the group) Robert Frank, or iconoclastic young painters like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. A number of these acknowledged visionaries were Avedon's acquaintances and friends; some even posed for his camera. At best, keeping company with them gave Avedon access to the most audacious and "transgressive energies then animating and shaping American culture," in the words of a former director of the Richard Avedon Foundation. Perhaps less helpfully, it encouraged him to measure his artistic standing against theirs "Dick thought of himself ... as a peer of people like Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg," his gallerist notes and that comparison would dismay him for a good half century. Only in 2002, when the Metropolitan Museum staged a high minded exhibit of his portraiture, did the validation he had yearned for finally come his way. He died two years later at the age of 81. To explain the art world's longtime disregard for Avedon's oeuvre, Gefter ventures several theories. One is that, because Avedon not only worked for magazines but also shot advertising campaigns and accepted lucrative portrait commissions, his reputation suffered from "the taint of commerce": a career killer, we are told, at a time when "the barrier between art and commerce was ... as impermeable as that between church and state." A related hypothesis is that "'fashion' was a ghetto within the world of commerce, so he was doubly scarred." Still another holds that the art establishment shunned photography more generally. ("He wanted to be taken seriously as an artist but was foiled by the bastard medium he embraced ... which made the struggle to be seen as an artist that much more encumbered.") In the end, though, none of these explanations rings altogether true, if only because Gefter himself provides so much evidence to refute them: from the sensational artistic triumphs of Warhol (miraculously unhindered by commercialism's "barrier" and "taint") and Arbus (not in the least bit "foiled" by her medium) to the venerable reputation that Avedon's chief rival in the fashion photography business, Irving Penn, enjoyed among art world insiders. (When presented with a proposal for an Avedon show at the Whitney, Leonard Lauder, the revered collector then serving as the museum's board president, "quietly uttered, 'It couldn't be Penn?'") These counterproofs do not strengthen Gefter's case for Avedon's "towering stature as an artist of the 20th century." Even so, his account is valuable for its cleareyed, if not always clearly expressed, understanding of the innovations Avedon brought to his chosen genres. For starters, from the outset of his career as a fashion photographer in the mid 1940s, he infused daring new life into a moribund visual idiom, characterized by staid models stiffly posed against uninspired backdrops. Working first for Harper's Bazaar and then for Vogue, Avedon created fanciful, engaging compositions alive with youthful irreverence, spontaneity and fun. At the same time, his pictures conveyed a strikingly mature, exquisitely lyrical sense of gesture and movement. In Gefter's parlance: "Avedon asserted into the world a 'gesture' in the form of an idea about being alive joyfully, pleasurably, beautifully that would remain embodied in the implication of his name." This approach generated some of the most iconic photographs in the entire history of fashion. "Dovima With Elephants, Evening Dress by Dior, Cirque d'Hiver, Paris" (1955), to take just one example, is a study in quirky balletic grace, capturing the harmony of sinuous lines achieved by the model's elegantly upraised arm and outstretched leg, her gigantic sculptural sash and the exuberant lift of one elephant's trunk. Gefter does not cite this fact, but in 2017 Time magazine named "Dovima With Elephants" one of the 100 "Most Influential Images of All Time." It was the only fashion photograph on the list. Avedon's portrait photography enjoys comparably towering status in modern visual culture. To some extent, this is due to the staggering range of social, political and cultural luminaries who sat for his camera. Rudolf Nureyev, Dorothy Parker, Malcolm X, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan, Marella Agnelli, Marian Anderson, Samuel Beckett, Audrey Hepburn, James Baldwin, Jasper Johns, Leontyne Price, W. H. Auden, Alberto Giacometti, Shirley Chisholm, Truman Capote, Steve McQueen, Bianca Jagger, Ezra Pound, Katharine Graham, Jerome Robbins, Isak Dinesen, Charlie Chaplin, Sophia Loren, Willem de Kooning, Janis Joplin, George H. W. Bush, Brigitte Bardot, Norman Mailer, Nastassja Kinski, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, President Kennedy and his smiling first lady, the Duke of Windsor and his scowling Duchess ... Avedon snapped them all, and many, many more. He always claimed, however, that the identity of the sitter mattered little to him; and indeed, he produced countless, equally artful portraits of obscure and "ordinary" folk. Ultimately, he said, he cared about nothing but mapping "the geography of the face the emotional geography as revealed through what I see on the face." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Ashley Gruber and Jeph Mwaituka were married March 21 at the home of Ms. Gruber's brother, Cory Gruber, in Pelham, Ala. Ashley Gruber always made a point of paying attention in church. This helped salvage her wedding. Ms. Gruber and her fiance, Jeph Mwaituka, had planned to be married March 21 before 230 guests, some traveling from as far as Tanzania, when group gathering restrictions because of the coronavirus started tightening in Alabama. "It went from 50 to 25 to recommendations for fewer than 10 in a matter of days," said Ms. Gruber, 33. By March 15, "things were starting to look bad, and I realized we might be in trouble," she said. Then she remembered hearing that Oak City Church, the church Mr. Mwaituka introduced her to in 2018, was accommodating parishioners unable to make services. "They livestream on Sundays," Ms. Gruber said. "I started thinking, let's see if we can livestream the wedding." Much would be lost: the collective tears shed in the packed church, the hugs and kisses from loved ones at the receiving line, the crowded dance floor and clinking of champagne glasses during the reception. But what both thought of as the most important part wouldn't have to go. Ms. Gruber and Mr. Mwaituka met in 2018 on the dating app Tinder. Ms. Gruber, a native of Birmingham, had recently returned from working overseas with the nonprofit organization International Relief and Development, which was at a Yemeni refugee camp. Since graduating in 2008 with a degree in nutrition from the University of Mississippi, she had spent several years abroad doing service work, including two years in Madagascar teaching expatriate children. In between stints overseas, she was a nanny for local families. Altruism, she said, was a calling. She grew up Methodist with her parents, Connie and Tim Gruber, and a younger brother, Cory, and then became a Southern Baptist in college, before giving that up to join Mr. Mwaituka at the nondenominational Oak City. "The only way I can explain my wanting to help people is that it comes from the Lord," she said. "He's given me the ability to live in hard places." Her 2018 return from abroad was prompted by a desire to help others more expertly. After working with a midwife at the refugee camp, Ms. Gruber said, "I saw how much more she could do than I could, and I figured I could help more people if I became a nurse." She graduated from Jefferson State Community College with a nursing degree at the end of April. Signing up for Tinder while taking nursing classes and working full time as a Medicare recovery specialist for a subsidiary of Blue Cross Blue Shield, her current job, was more an afterthought than a priority. "I know this is going to make me look weird, but the few times I got asked out through the years it didn't seem right to me," she said. A handful of first dates did not turn into second ones. "I think as women we go through phases. Sometimes I would be, like, 'Nobody loves me, I'm all alone.' But most of the time I was cool with being alone. I thought, I'm going to be productive." Staying single had the benefit of nurturing a sense of adventure and of oneness with the world. After college, she went to Australia for a summer of church work. Later she traveled to the Philippines to teach English. Before she left for Madagascar in 2012, she visited Thailand to volunteer with the nonprofit Compassion International. Always, she kept in touch. "I made really good relationships everywhere I went, and now I have extra families around the globe," she said. Mr. Mwaituka, 29, didn't need to leave his Birmingham home to develop an appreciation for other cultures. His parents, Helen and Fred Mwaituka, and younger brothers, John and Jerry Mwaituka, arrived in the United States in 1995 from Tanzania, after years of unrest in that country. Since then, their home has been a refuge for visiting family members. Some have stayed weeks. Some for years, including a cousin who is now like a sister, Hellen Mathias. "Growing up, it was always that way," Mr. Mwaituka said. "Now I care for people from other places and people who need help by nature." For a while, the aim of his helping instinct was spiritual. After graduating from Thompson High School in 2008, he went to Birmingham Metro Master's Commission, a local Bible college. But less than a year into a position as a youth pastor, he switched professional gears, taking jobs in sales and as an electrical apprentice. Since 2018, he has been a groundskeeper at a local apartment complex. Before he met Ms. Gruber, he tried a few dating sites. "I was on Christian Mingle, and then I tried Bumble, but nothing was happening," he said. He deleted both accounts after what he called a lot of false starts. "Of course I had the desire to be in a relationship, but after a while I learned how to be on my own." Romantically, anyway. "We were just really comfortable with each other," Ms. Gruber said. So much so that the waitress who served them assumed they were in love. "She thought we were a full swing couple because we were so natural together." Mr. Mwaituka was hoping that was the way it would stay. "Ashley was really direct, and she loved to laugh, and she got my silly side, and it was just a hit," he said. For Ms. Gruber, the ability to be herself felt freeing. The few dates she had gone on before Mr. Mwaituka had been a lesson in playing coy, or in needing to reel herself in. "I had to figure out, how much should I hold in? How much do I need to give to connect with somebody?" she said. "With Jeph, I stopped doing that. I was just like, 'Hey, this is me, this is who I am. If you're going to play a game, that's on you.'" "It was dating with a purpose," Ms. Gruber said. After she told him she loved him that spring, they started talking about marriage. Mr. Mwaituka was in no rush. "I wanted that to be the goal," he said. But a walk down the aisle didn't feel pressing until he started sensing Ms. Gruber's anticipation. "Finally I said to myself, 'Look, Jeph, you're not going to meet another person like this.'" October brought a trip to the Grand Canyon. Ms. Gruber was expecting a proposal there, but she wasn't discouraged when it didn't happen. They had already gone ring shopping at Diamonds Direct, so she knew it was a matter of time. Mr. Mwaituka was waiting for the perfect moment. "You know how they say men don't listen?" he said. He had been listening. "I knew she didn't want to do it in public in some crazy way. She wanted it to be just me and her." After attending a friend's engagement party on Nov. 22, he suggested they go to Brixx for pizza. On their way in, he dropped to one knee, pretending to tie his shoe. When Ms. Gruber turned to him, he produced a blue topaz ring they had chosen. "Will you marry me?" he asked. On March 21, with their hundreds of distant guests watching via Facebook Live and their parents, siblings and handful of friends seated in folding chairs on Cory Gruber's deck, they were married by the Rev. Jonathan Henderson, the lead pastor at Oak City Church. Ms. Gruber walked with her father down a short makeshift aisle. She wore a cap sleeved white dress with a long train from Bella's, a bridal boutique in Hoover, Ala. "I waited 33 stinking years to wear that dress," she said. "That part I wasn't going to change." Alesia Pruitt, a friend since middle school, stood by her side. Mr. Mwaituka wore a navy suit. Mr. Ledlow and another friend, Jeremy Smith, served as groomsmen. After a prayer, Mr. Henderson saluted Ms. Gruber and Mr. Mwaituka for their perseverance. "Love never gives up," he said. "We've seen that this week." On the livestream video, birds could be heard singing in nearby trees as Mr. Henderson encouraged the couple to be fruitful and multiply. Just after he pronounced them husband and wife, they threw up their hands in victory. Cheek to (Single) Cheek At an intimate reception, couples used the deck as a dance floor. They all proceeded with caution. Because of social distancing, "nobody changed partners," Mr. Ledlow said. Leftovers A wedding cake for 250 from Daughters Baking was too far along to be canceled, so a portion was brought in for the scaled down reception. The rest was frozen. "We're going to be eating a ton of cake," Ms. Gruber said. Post Wedding Pack Up Throughout their courtship, Mr. Mwaituka had been living with his parents. Just after the wedding, he planned to move into Ms. Gruber's townhouse in Birmingham. Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
An Israeli investor has bought this corner six story 1920 Harlem walk up with 21 apartments and five commercial tenants, including a Chinese takeout restaurant, a barbershop and a clothing store. 111 West 17th Street (between Seventh Avenue and Avenue of the Americas) A wedding photographer, who has been working out of a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, has signed a seven year lease for a 1,600 square foot loft on the third floor of this five story Chelsea building. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
When Two Bunnies Love Each Other Very Much, and Troll the Pences This is the story of a little gay bunny. A little gay bunny who belongs to Vice President Mike Pence. A little fictional gay bunny whose book is beating the memoir of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, on the Amazon best seller list. This is the story of Marlon Bundo, the Instagram star and real life pet of the vice president's family, who is also the subject of two dueling children's books released this week. The first, "Marlon Bundo's Day in the Life of the Vice President," is a picture book written by Mr. Pence's daughter Charlotte that focuses on the bunny's observations of the vice president, with illustrations by his wife, Karen. The other, "Last Week Tonight With John Oliver Presents a Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo," is a gay romance between two bunnies that was the brainchild of the HBO comedy host John Oliver. So far, that is the more popular of the two. Mr. Oliver revealed the book, which was written by Jill Twiss and credits the titular bunny as a co author, on his weekly late night show on Sunday. He described it as a mocking rebuke of the vice president's longtime opposition to gay and transgender rights. "Please buy it for your children, buy it for any child you know or buy it because you know it would annoy Mike Pence," Mr. Oliver told his viewers. Parody aside, he assured them, "This is a real book for children." Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. And buy it they have. By Tuesday the book, which beat Ms. Pence's to Amazon by two days, had risen to the No. 1 spot on the website's best seller list, knocking pre ordered copies of the upcoming memoir by James Comey down to No. 2. Ms. Pence's book on Marlon Bundo had reached No. 4 on the list by late afternoon. Mr. Comey's book, "A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership," has been highly anticipated for potential insights it could provide into the tumultuous Trump White House and Mr. Comey's abrupt dismissal as director of the F.B.I. last year. Dueling tweets over the weekend between President Trump and Mr. Comey appeared to have propelled enough advance orders to lift Mr. Comey's memoir to the top spot. The memoir, scheduled to be released on April 17, has been advertised as a frank account of Mr. Comey's "never before told experiences from some of the highest stakes situations of his career." Mr. Oliver's book is very different than that. In it, Marlon Bundo, a snappily dressed bunny with a penchant for bright bow ties, falls in love with a bespectacled boy bunny named Wesley. Things seem to be going pretty well for the two lovebirds (love bunnies?) until a powerful stinkbug who bears a striking resemblance to Mr. Pence decrees that male bunnies cannot marry each other. In the grand tradition of children's literature, the story ends on a happy note. An image released by the book's publisher, Chronicle Books, shows Marlon Bundo and Wesley standing in a field, wearing tuxedos, as a cat in clerical garb marries them. The tale also comes in the form of an audiobook voiced by a string of celebrities including Jim Parsons as Marlon Bundo and John Lithgow as the stinkbug, as well as Ellie Kemper, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and RuPaul. On Tuesday, it also beat Mr. Comey's audiobook to be the No. 1 best seller on Audible. Mr. Oliver played clips from a cartoon version of the audiobook on his show on Sunday. In it, Marlon Bundo introduces himself to Wesley as "BOTUS." "It's short for Bunny of the United States," he says, with typical first date awkwardness. "It's a long story." Ms. Pence's book is more sober children's fare. It is not known if it identifies Marlon Bundo's sexual orientation at all. Charlotte Pence seemed to take the John Oliver parody in stride. "His book is contributing to charities that I think we can all get behind," she said in an interview with Fox Business Network on Tuesday. "We have two books giving to charities that are about bunnies, so I'm all for it really." Some of the proceeds from her book will be donated to A21, an organization that fights human trafficking. Mr. Oliver said all of his book's profits would be donated to The Trevor Project, a charity for L.G.B.T. youth, and AIDS United. That was a pointed jab at Mr. Pence, who is a longtime opponent of L.G.B.T. rights, which he opposed as both governor of Indiana and a member of Congress. Last year, Mr. Pence described James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, which teaches that people can vanquish same sex attraction if they "cooperate with God in the process of becoming more like Jesus," as "a friend and a mentor." Mr. Pence has also long been dogged by claims that he supports anti gay conversion therapy due in part to language contained on the website of his 2000 campaign for Congress. A spokesman for Mr. Pence said in 2016 that he does not support the practice, which has been denounced by the medical community. The success of Mr. Oliver's book marks the second time in recent months that criticism of Mr. Pence's record on L.G.B.T. rights has turned into a pop culture moment. In January, the figure skater Adam Rippon, the first openly gay American man to qualify to compete in the Winter Games, attracted wide media attention and became an overnight gay icon when he denounced Mr. Pence's gay rights record and refused to meet with him during the Games. The vice president's staff said Mr. Rippon had misrepresented Mr. Pence's views. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Gloria Allred, the feminist lawyer, seemed exactly in her element on Saturday morning in this ski town as she led hundreds of Sundance Film Festival attendees at a Women's March rally. It was only 22 degrees, and heavy snow was swirling around her. But Ms. Allred charged forth, determined to keep the heat on Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and other powerful men accused of sexual harassment and assault. The moment neatly summed up an evolving Sundance. This is no longer Mr. Weinstein's freewheeling festival, the one he blasted into the public consciousness with eye popping deals to bring male gaze entries like "Sex, Lies and Videotape" and "Reservoir Dogs" to theaters. Sundance is now a prime showcase for women films directed, produced and written by women; films with female protagonists; special events focused on female empowerment. And most of the distribution deals involve TV sets. "Seeing Allred," a documentary about Ms. Allred's life and labors that was directed by Sophie Sartain and Roberta Grossman premiered at the festival on Sunday. Netflix owns it. The film will arrive in living rooms on Feb. 9. Mr. Weinstein's presence still reverberates at Sundance. His usual seats in the back right corner of the Eccles Theater seem a bit forlorn without his swaggering entourage camped in them, and people (reporters, mostly) keep talking about his absence. Fired from his company, ousted by the film academy and under investigation by police, Mr. Weinstein is missing his first Sundance in memory. His company is trying to sell itself to avoid bankruptcy. But most longtime attendees will tell you that the festival feels no different because the Weinstein Company, with its theater focused business model, long ago ceded the Sundance marketplace to Netflix and Amazon. Last year, those two streaming services, both official Sundance sponsors, snapped up at least 14 movies, including spending 12 million for "The Big Sick" and 12.5 million for "Mudbound," accounting for more than a third of total festival acquisitions. The Weinstein Company bought nothing. Reed Hastings, Netflix's chief executive, is now the person who reporters for Hollywood trade publications track through the snow. John Cooper, Sundance's director, acknowledged in an interview that his festival's 35 year history will be forever intertwined with Mr. Weinstein, who reached a settlement with the actress Rose McGowan after a 1997 festival encounter that she has since described, on Twitter, as rape. (Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Weinstein has repeatedly denied "any allegations of nonconsensual sex.") But Mr. Cooper also said that the fallen mogul's impact on Sundance had long been overstated. "Nobody on the ground here ever gave him a crown," Mr. Cooper said. "He was just the loudest and the media followed and built him up." Tom Bernard, the co founder of Sony Pictures Classics, who has attended Sundance since its inception and shepherded such celebrated indie films as "Whiplash" and the current Oscar contender "Call Me By Your Name," said in an interview that the festival had matured and diversified in ways that the news media often ignored. "Sundance coverage tends to play into a mystique that just isn't true anymore," Mr. Bernard said. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Sundance's anything goes aura was established in the 1990s and the 2000s, when independent film reigned as the epitome of cool. Fueled by the DVD boom, almost all of the big studios created specialty divisions and poured money into Sundance distribution deals, leading to all night bidding wars in luxury condos around Park City. Marketers for fashion labels, cellphone companies and vodka brands scrambled to capitalize on the heat, setting up gifting suites that attracted celebrities with no connection to the festival. (Paris Hilton, most infamously.) Films took a back seat to the circus. There is still plenty of hot tub hopping. But the festival, which attracted 71,600 attendees last year, has matured into middle age. The swag suites are largely gone. Creative Artists Agency, which threw a Sundance party in 2013 featuring lingerie clad women pretending to snort prop cocaine and exotic dancers outfitted with sex toys, has not had an event the past two years. A newly implemented Sundance code of conduct states that the festival can kick out anyone engaging in "harassment, discrimination, sexism and threatening or disrespectful behavior." A lot of gray hair can be seen on the festival shuttle buses; people who started coming here in their 20s are now in their 40s. As for those bidding wars, this year's Sundance opened on a quiet note. By Sunday afternoon, four days into the 11 day festival, only one significant distribution deal had been struck. Bleecker Street, founded in 2014 with backing from Manoj Bhargava, the 5 Hour Energy drink entrepreneur, and 30West, a company financed by the Texas billionaire Dan Friedkin, teamed up to pay roughly 5 million for distribution rights to "Colette," a costume drama starring Keira Knightley as the French novelist Sidonie Gabrielle Colette. (Amazon was also a bidder.) "There are two different worlds intersecting, one that is traditional and focused on ticket sales and one that only cares about signing up more subscribers," said Peter Broderick, a film distribution strategist. "Traditional distributors have a lot of challenges. So many are looking backward what has worked for us before. At the same time, they are being priced out of the market for the better films." Distributors, including relatively new players like A24, Neon and Annapurna, may be erring on the side of caution. Some sales agents cited the dampening effect of "Patti Cake ," a rap infused drama that sold to Fox Searchlight for an estimated 10 million last year and ended up taking in just 800,148 in theaters. But the mix of movies this time around could also be a factor; some distributors complained that films that premiered early in the festival were flawed, including the opening night selection, "Blindspotting." "It's not as big of a marketplace for finished films as it was in the '90s and early 2000s," said Mr. Bernard of Sony Pictures Classics. "But it's still an enormous marketplace for talent: Casting people looking for actors, producers looking for directors and cinematographers." (One example from recent years: After gaining attention at Sundance for quirky films like "Hunt for the Wilderpeople," Taika Waititi went on to direct "Thor: Ragnarok" for Disney.) This year's primary festival lineup 122 feature length films culled from 3,901 submissions includes many movies that examine race. "Blindspotting," starring Daveed Diggs, best known for winning a Tony for "Hamilton," is a raucous, hip hop infused story of racism, stereotypes and gentrification. (Mr. Cooper, Sundance's director, called it "fun, to the point of being sassy" as he introduced it. Reviews are mixed.) Other selections addressing race include "Sorry to Bother You," about a thirtysomething black telemarketer who climbs rungs by finding his inner "white voice," and "Monsters and Men," about a Puerto Rican man in Brooklyn who witnesses a white police officer wrongly gun down a black resident. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Kara Nortman's path to owning a professional women's soccer team began in Vancouver, British Columbia, when she went looking for a women's soccer jersey during the 2015 Women's World Cup. Nortman found some, eventually, without players' names on the backs. "I just didn't understand why it was so hard," Nortman said. "I was trying to get people to take my money. Why could nobody take it?" A Southern California native from a sports driven family, Nortman, a venture capitalist, soon became devoted to women's soccer, following the top division in the United States, the National Women's Soccer League, and talking about the game with anyone who would listen including the actress Natalie Portman, whom she met at a fund raiser. Both soon became active supporters of the U.S. women's team's fight for equal pay, and after last summer's Women's World Cup, they decided it was time to involve themselves more personally in the game. "Natalie texted me three times, just one line: 'Let's bring a team to L.A.,'" Nortman said. On Tuesday, their dream became a reality when the N.W.S.L. announced that it would expand to Los Angeles in 2022, with a team bankrolled by an ownership group that includes not only Nortman and Portman, but also the tennis star Serena Williams and her husband, the tech entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian; the media consultant Julie Uhrman; and more than a dozen former members of the U.S. women's team. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Brook Ledge Horse Transports vans, left, carry Kentucky Derby contenders from Ocala, Fla., to Churchill Downs, where Angel Trumper, above, arrives on Wednesday after an overnight trip. American Pharoah, left, a Triple Crown winner in 2015, and his lead pony, Smokey, fly in style aboard an animal transport plane called "Air Horse One." Like Nyquist, American Pharoah and California Chrome, the horse that wins Saturday's Kentucky Derby will be covered in a blanket of roses. And whether or not it appreciates it that horse will bask in the adulation of the finely turned out spectators at Churchill Downs. But the horse won't be lingering in Louisville for very long. It needs to get to Baltimore to run the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico two weeks later. And if all goes well, it will head up to New York for the Belmont Stakes, which concludes the Triple Crown, in June. Not to worry: The horse will be traveling in style and ease. For that horse, getting from one track to the next will be about as comfortable a trip as anyone could imagine and it won't be cheap. Horses are famously expensive animals to buy, board, feed, ride and enter into competitions. But moving them from place to place be it in trailers, long haul moving vans with air ride suspension, or specially outfitted airplanes can take expense and luxury to a new level. A one way van ticket from California to Kentucky for a horse whose owner wants him to have the whole trailer to himself could cost as much 10,000. Chances are that the horse would fly, which would run the owner about 6,000 one way for the same route. American Pharoah, left, a Triple Crown winner in 2015, and his lead pony, Smokey, flying in style aboard an animal transport plane called "Air Horse One." But not all of these champion horses live in the United States. To fly one from, say, Dubai to Kentucky could run upward of 28,000. If, however, the owner were willing to cram three horses into one pallet for that trans Atlantic flight, the cost would be 12,000 to 13,000 but that's for each horse. Part of what owners are paying for is transportation experts who know their equine customers. "Sometimes horses don't travel great, just like people don't travel great," said Chris Santarelli, treasurer and a partner at Mersant, which transports horses internationally. "Some horses get into the stall and go. Others get anxious and get shipping stress." Mr. Santarelli said his company flew the horses that finished first, second and third at this year's Dubai World Cup, a premier event with a 10 million purse. "They were very comfortable on the flight," he said. "A lot goes into understanding the temperament of the horse." What the owner gets for the money is more than just a flight. The stall is lined with the hay or shavings that the horse prefers. Grooms guide the horses on and off the flight. Veterinarians tend to be on hand when a horse arrives to ensure its health and do any tests needed for it to clear customs. And whereas commercial planes have gotten less luxurious over the years, planes carrying horses have improved. Charlie Fenwick, who won several major obstacle races in the 1970s and 1980s, remembers flying his horse Ben Nevis to England in 1978 to compete in the English Grand National, a steeplechase race that dates to 1839. "This was a cargo plane, with no air conditioning," he said. "Everything was put on a 12 by 12 pallet. Ours had a horse on it. Others had generators on it or bags of seed." Mr. Fenwick said he remembered his prized horse being lifted off the plane on a forklift in Hamburg and stored overnight in a warehouse before finishing the trip to England the next day. "It was purely a commodity," he said. But after losing the Grand National on his first attempt, Mr. Fenwick rode Ben Nevis to victory in 1980, becoming the second American jockey to win the race. Now his horses enjoy better travel conditions: He recently paid 12,000 to have a horse flown from Ireland to New York and then put on a van down to Maryland. Planes for flying horses domestically are specially designed to accommodate passengers of different sizes, with stalls that can be configured for the size of the horse or the comfort level prescribed by its owner, from standing up to being able to graze as if it were on the farm. H. E. Tex Sutton Forwarding, an equine transport company based in Lexington, Ky., flies a Boeing 727 with "First Class Equine Air Travel" emblazoned on the body. It makes about 200 flights a year with anywhere from 10 to 21 horses on the plane; the biggest destinations are the horse centers of California, Kentucky, Florida and New York. Greg Otteson, sales manager for Tex Sutton, said the company recently flew a horse named Arrogate, which holds the North American earnings record at over 17 million, and California Chrome, his racetrack rival, who won the 2014 Kentucky Derby and Preakness, home from the Pegasus World Cup Invitational. "They rode next to each other," Mr. Otteson said. Both of them are well bred animals, he said, "so getting along wasn't an issue." Some star horses prefer to fly with an entourage. American Pharoah, who won the Triple Crown in 2015 the first horse to do so since Affirmed in 1978 travels with his lead pony, Smokey, next to him. (Smokey's day job is to lead American Pharoah out for training in the mornings, but clearly the job has perks.) "You want to keep these horses as comfortable as you can, particularly when you're spending 1 million on them," said Bob Elliston, vice president of racing and sales at Keeneland, a horse racing and breeding company in Lexington, Ky. Its annual yearling sales draw horse owners from around the world. "You'd want to keep it as you'd keep any other 1 million asset," Mr. Elliston said. Vans involve a longer trip, but still a luxurious one. While they look like moving vans, they're equipped with air ride suspension, so the horses don't feel the bumps, and systems to keep the air circulating even if the van is sitting in traffic. "You don't want a horse who's been on a long trip to be stressed out about anything," said Curt Lange, manager of accounts receivable at Brook Ledge Horse Transportation of Oley, Pa. "You want him to be in the same environment as at home." The company offers three sizes of stalls, from ones in which the animal stands upright to one called a box stall, where the horse can turn around and lie down as it wants. For the company's regular routes, prices range from as little as 1,100 for a single stall from New York to Florida to 2,200 for a box stall. But the prices go up in high season or if a horse needs to be somewhere at the last minute. "Horses are just like a little kid," Mr. Lange said. "They have a natural propensity to stick their nose in places it doesn't belong. You need to create an environment where they have nothing where they can get in trouble." Mark Leone, a horse trainer and former top rider on the elite hunter jumper circuit, said that during his sport's high season, he could have 60 horses on the road at one time. (The season starts in January or February in Florida and moves with the warmth like golf so by summertime, it's in the northeast.) Annabelle Gundlach, who sponsors the Postage Stamp Farm polo team in Wellington, said the trailers she uses fit about 15 polo ponies side by side. "It comes down to the economics of it, but it's also the history of how it's always been done," she said. "Many of these polo people aren't wanting for cash." The truck and trailer combination can cost 150,000 and up. On a long trip, there are risks greater than traffic jams and stalled trailers. Trainers say they worry about horses getting upset or sick en route and developing a fever. If their stall is too small for the distance, they can also develop circulatory problems, said Linda Rice, a top trainer at Belmont Park. Another risk is a logistical one: Putting hormonally charged colts and fillies too close together can spell trouble. "Fillies have to be loaded on the back of the bus, so the colts don't catch wind of them," Mr. Lange said. "Otherwise, you can have fireworks. Shipping horses is not like shipping cabbages or toilet paper." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
SUNRISE, Fla. Hordes of eager young fans burst into spontaneous songs of grief and celebration on Wednesday afternoon at an arena here in South Florida, where they had gathered to honor the life of the controversial 20 year old rapper and singer XXXTentacion, who was shot and killed in an apparent robbery last week. The public memorial, organized by the rapper's family, included an open coffin viewing onstage at the BB T Center capacity 20,000 in Sunrise, Fla., about 25 miles from where XXXTentacion (born Jahseh Onfroy) was killed in his BMW sports car on June 18, halting what had been a meteoric 18 month rise and raising knotty questions about his legacy. "He considered you all family, and I wanted to do something special for you all," Cleopatra Bernard, the rapper's mother, wrote on Instagram about the service. XXXTentacion, dressed in a blue denim jacket under soft lighting, laid in a dark polished coffin at center stage, surrounded by a spray of black flowers with metallic accents. Images of him, along with quotes from his interviews, clips from his music videos and even coverage of a chaotic memorial in Los Angeles last week, played on screens above the crowd as fans waited to pay their respects. A messianic youth culture figure whose online notoriety was driven in part by allegations of horrific abuse against a girlfriend, XXXTentacion muscled his way from the SoundCloud underground to the mainstream with a raw mixture of rap, rock and punk music, along with a near constant stream of fan interaction on social media. His most recent album, "?," opened at No. 1 on the Billboard chart in March, and following his death, his song "Sad!" jumped to the top of the Hot 100 singles chart. But XXXTentacion, in death as in life, has also been seen by some as a pariah for his alleged abusive behavior and his tendency to make light of the charges he faced, including aggravated battery of a pregnant victim, false imprisonment and witness tampering. Fans present at the memorial said they could not judge XXXTentacion for his alleged crimes. "There's always two sides to a story, but I can't really decide," said Anthony Castillo, 19, who drove four hours alone to attend. Shon Phillips, 20, said XXXTentacion inspired such loyalty in his fan base because the rapper used his own struggles to connect with listeners. "They're so cultist because he went through depression, and he interacted with fans about that," Mr. Phillips said. The mood was solemn and subdued as those in attendance filed peacefully through a zigzag of stanchions filling the center floor. As mourners quietly bobbed their heads to the music and brushed away tears, a teenage boy in a Young Thug sweatshirt began to cry, and a woman in the row next to him reached out to touch his arm in comfort. Mourners had begun gathering under the blazing Florida sun as early as 7 a.m. for the event, which opened at noon and was scheduled to last until 6 p.m., with tight security, including metal detectors, and a strict no cellphone policy inside. By 3 p.m., representatives for the arena estimated that 8,000 people had passed through, including XXXTentacion's young hip hop peers Lil Yachty, Lil Uzi Vert and Denzel Curry. Santino Coccia said he and two friends had driven 18 hours from Philadelphia in a minivan to be first in line. "We wanted to say our last words and show our respect 'cause he helped us so much," Mr. Coccia, 19, said. "His music was something to relate to when there was nothing else." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
A decade after transforming Celine into the favored label of power women everywhere and beginning a new era of minimalism in fashion, Phoebe Philo, its artistic director, has announced she is leaving the house. She is the fourth and best known designer to exit a job this month, adding a final twist to 12 months of dizzying change for the industry on both the creative and corporate sides. In a brief statement announcing the news, Ms. Philo thanked her team, and Bernard Arnault, chairman and chief executive of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the luxury group that owns Celine, said: "What Phoebe has accomplished over the past 10 years represents a key chapter in the history of Celine. We are very grateful to Phoebe for having contributed to the great momentum of this Maison. A new era of development for Celine will now start, and I am extremely confident in the future success of this iconic Maison." Ms. Philo, who first came to prominence as the designer at Chloe, made Celine matter in a way it never had before. LVMH acquired the house in 1996, naming Michael Kors designer the following year, and though he gave it a jolt of glossy jet set relevance at the start, he left in 2004, and it quickly sank into confusion with a revolving door of designers. When Ms. Philo joined in 2008, Celine had ceased to be a real part of the fashion conversation. With one collection, she changed all that. Remaking the brand in her own image, one that catered to the female gaze, she stripped away fuss and frippery. Her Celine was a Celine of the mind, rather than of the Plaza Athenee, and it was a resounding success. Unlike many designers, she did not pay lip service to the house DNA or past styles, preferring to insist that while she was designer, Celine would be what she made of it. She also stayed away from playing the celebrity game. Her first ad campaign famously did not include the heads of the models, ensuring the focus would be on the clothes and bags. Though LVMH does not break down sales of individual brands, analysts estimate Celine's annual revenue at 700 to 800 million euros ( 949 million). A late entrant to the digital world Ms. Philo was not a fan of social media, and often expressed her feeling that her work should be experienced in person, rather than online Celine nevertheless had 682,000 Instagram followers after joining the platform only in February. But Ms. Philo, who was given to musing backstage about the allure of disappearing into the countryside, was long rumored to be restless in her job though the brand and LVMH consistently denied there was any truth to the talk. She had left Chloe in 2006 after five years as creative director and after the birth of her first child (she was the first high profile designer ever to take an official extended maternity leave), and she was always ambivalent about re entering the industry. It took two years for Mr. Arnault to convince her to come back, and in order to do so, he agreed to allow her to remain based in Britain, where her family lived, and commute to Paris as necessary, going so far as to create a satellite Celine atelier in London for her. But when the Celine chief executive Marco Gobbetti left for Burberry earlier this year, and shortly thereafter Burberry's chief creative officer, Christopher Bailey, announced his resignation, speculation soared that Ms. Philo would replace him. Citibank even issued an analysts' note supporting the idea. Though no indication was given as to Ms. Philo's future plans, and she presumably has a noncompete clause in her contract that will prevent her from joining another brand immediately, her departure from Celine is sure to give renewed momentum to the suggestion. For the moment, Ms. Philo joins an increasingly long list of enormously respected yet unemployed designers that includes Alber Elbaz (formerly of Lanvin), Hedi Slimane (ex YSL), Riccardo Tisci (ex Givenchy), Stefano Pilati (ex Zegna) and Peter Copping (ex Oscar de la Renta). A replacement as artistic director at Celine was not named, meaning that speculation will now turn to who gets that job, and the whole increasingly messy game of musical chairs will continue into 2018. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
A portrait shortlisted for this year's Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize features a clear skinned young woman gazing out of the frame with a slight smile. She looks shy but a little playful, almost as if she's keeping a secret. Her name is Erica, and her secret is that she is not human. Erica is an android, and her inclusion in an international portrait competition is stirring up questions about the nature of humanity and what it means to be alive. The portrait was taken by the Finnish artist Maija Tammi. Ms. Tammi often collaborates with scientists, and her photographs and sculptures feature themes of death, decay and regeneration. Her work has included a photo series contrasting pictures of a rotting rabbit with those of cancer cells, and images of semen and breast milk that, seen up close, look like starry universes. In the shortlisted portrait, Erica looks decidedly lifelike. The photograph, titled "One of Them Is a Human 1," is part of a wider series by Ms. Tammi featuring androids. "I was curious to see if the time was ready for an android portrait," Ms. Tammi said. She hopes that the photograph will provoke thought and conversation about what makes us human. "I know that some people believe very strongly that a portrait of someone shows the viewer a deep psychological insight of the person who isn't in the camera," Ms. Tammi said. "We make the story of what we see in the portrait." Erica is the creation of Hiroshi Ishiguro, a professor at Osaka University's Intelligent Robotics Laboratory in Japan. She was designed to have natural conversations with humans, integrating voice recognition and body language like blinking and head tilting. But for now, her conversational responses are limited and she is unable to move her arms or walk. "Erica is, I think, the most beautiful and most humanlike autonomous robot in the world," Mr. Ishiguro said in a 2017 documentary film by The Guardian. The decision to include an android's portrait in the shortlist is controversial. The rules for the international competition, hosted by the National Portrait Gallery in London, say that the picture "must have been taken by the entrant from life and with a living sitter." The rules define portraits as "photography concerned with portraying people with an emphasis on their identity as individuals." Laura McKechan, a senior communications manager at the National Portrait Gallery, said that the gallery had decided against barring the portrait from the competition, though it would consider whether the rules need to be changed in the future. "It was felt that the subject of this portrait, while not human, is a representation of a human figure and makes a powerful statement as a work of art in its questioning of what it is to be alive or human and asks challenging questions about portraiture," Ms. McKechan wrote in an email. "The ambiguity of this portrait makes it particularly compelling." The portrait's inclusion in the shortlist is timely as the debate about how best to advance and regulate artificial intelligence intensifies. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, and Stephen Hawking, the celebrated physicist, have cautioned the public about the potential dangers of A.I. Recent science fiction films like "Ex Machina," "Her," and the HBO TV series "Westworld" have also confronted the ethics and potential consequences of creating artificially sentient beings, whose motivations might not align with those of the humans who built them. Ms. Tammi spent half an hour with the android, accompanied by a researcher who helped position the android for the photograph, adjusting the tilt of the head or moving the eyes. "The researcher told me that Erica had said that she finds Pokemon Go scarier than artificial intelligence," Ms. Tammi said. Erica's portrait will compete for the top prize with Cezar Dezfuli's portrait of a migrant in the Mediterranean Sea and Abbie Trayler Smith's portrait of a young woman fleeing from the Islamic State. The winner will be announced on Nov. 14. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Harriet Frank Jr., who collaborated with her husband, Irving Ravetch, on provocative screenplays that explored the social conflicts and moral questions of postwar American life in movies like "Hud" and "Norma Rae," died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 96. Her death was announced by Michael Frank, her nephew. To film industry peers and moviegoers who paid attention to the credits, the wife and husband team of Ms. Frank and Mr. Ravetch, who died in 2010, stood out among Hollywood's most successful and literate script writers. The two generated 16 screenplays from 1958 to 1990, many inspired by the works of William Faulkner, William Inge, Larry McMurtry, Elmore Leonard and other best selling authors. Ms. Frank and Mr. Ravetch dramatized the charms of a brawling, arrogant Texas rogue (Paul Newman) in "Hud" (1963); the struggles of a teacher (Jon Voight) against the effects of poverty and racism on black children in a South Carolina island school in "Conrack" (1974); and the union fight of a worker (Sally Field) against labor injustices in a North Carolina cotton mill in "Norma Rae" (1979). "Salvation is not an abstract concept it's a three year contract," Vincent Canby wrote in his review of "Norma Rae" in The New York Times. "These are sentiments that Martin Ritt, the director, and Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., his screenwriters, understand and fervently evoke in their often stirring new film." The moment of truth in the actual battle for a union took place in a J.P. Stevens textile mill in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., in May 1973, when Crystal Lee Sutton (her married name at the time was Jordan), who was about to be forcibly removed by management men, stood up on her worktable with a scrawled "UNION" sign and slowly turned to show fellow workers. One by one, the roaring mill machines shut down until the vast room was silent. "Norma Rae," based on Henry P. Leifermann's 1975 book, "Crystal Lee, a Woman of Inheritance," and "Hud," from the 1961 McMurtry novel "Horseman, Pass By," together won five Academy Awards. Both Frank Ravetch screenplay adaptations were nominated for Academy Awards. For "Hud," they won screenwriting awards from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Writers Guild of America. (They never won an Oscar.) Though not a major commercial success or an award winner, "Conrack," adapted from Pat Conroy's autobiographical novel, "The Water Is Wide" (1972), was a memorable portrayal of a young teacher's struggle to bring hope to the children of poor black families on an isolated sea island where the Gullah dialect rendered his name as Conrack, and where fears of the outside world seemed insuperable. Collaborative page to screen adaptations are opaque to the public, and often hard to achieve, given the complexities of reducing a book to two hours of plot, character and dialogue. But Ms. Frank and Mr. Ravetch were nearly ideal partners. They debated every scene and sentence, took liberally or lightly from source materials, and wrote screenplays that were largely works of their own invention. "It's really a pure collaboration in the sense that we get together, we talk out the problems at great exhaustive length, we do some kind of an outline together, and every word is really thrown up in the air for approval from one to the other," Mr. Ravetch told Patrick McGilligan for his book "Backstory 3: Interviews With Screenwriters of the 60s" (1997). "The script is not so much written as it is talked onto the page." They knew and loved books. They adored the films of Ettore Scola, Vittorio De Sica, Marcel Pagnol and Ingmar Bergman. They believed character was more important than plot, wrote pauses into the action to let audiences linger over ambiguities and poignancy, and thought that scripts should aspire to literature and that films should carry the weight of novels. They met as young writers in training at Metro Goldwyn Mayer, were married in 1946 and wrote westerns and light comedies separately for a decade before they began to collaborate. Once they started, their focus shifted to more ambitious projects, exploring moral issues and unfolding social changes. Studios like 20th Century Fox and Paramount recognized their talents and gave them wide latitude to alter books and articles whose rights the studios had purchased. Thus Hud, a minor character in Mr. McMurtry's novel, became the film's title character and dominant antihero, a symbol of the rapacious greed and materialism that the screenwriters saw spreading in America. "Faulkner was uniquely gifted," Ms. Frank added, perhaps assuaging the guilt. "Also, because he had been a screenwriter himself, he was a very tolerant man where other writers were concerned. He knew what laboring in the field was like. He was very realistic about letting go of his work." Harriet Frank was born Harriet Goldstein in Portland, Ore., on March 2, 1923, one of three children of Sam Goldstein, a shoe store owner, and Edith Frances (Bergman) Goldstein, who went by her middle name. Harriet and her brothers, Peter and Marty, attended schools in Portland. Harriet's mother, a Berkeley educated lover of literature, had a Portland radio program, "Frances Frank Speaking Frankly." She not only changed the family name to Frank; upon arriving in Hollywood in 1939, she also changed her own given name to that of her daughter, becoming Harriet Frank Sr., and making her teenage daughter Harriet Frank Jr. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1939. Harriet Frank Sr. became a story editor for MGM, reading books and advising which ones, or which parts, might make good movies. Harriet Frank Jr. and Mr. Ravetch both attended the University of California, Los Angeles, but graduated in different years and did not know each other there. With her mother's help, Ms. Frank was hired as a screenwriter trainee at MGM, where she met Mr. Ravetch. They married, and discovered on returning from their honeymoon that they had been fired. They went to Warner Bros., where he became a screenwriter and she wrote dialogue for romances and westerns. In addition to screenwriting, Ms. Frank wrote scores of stories for The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's and other magazines, and two novels: "Single" (1977), about four women finding and losing love, and "Special Effects" (1979), about a movie studio story editor who keeps her equilibrium when all those around her are falling apart. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Since he was hired in mid 2012, Johan de Nysschen, the president of Infiniti, has been leading a comprehensive remaking of Nissan's luxury brand. A largely non Japanese management team has been brought in, featuring some key executives snatched from German automakers. These include Michael Bartsch, from Porsche, who is now vice president of Infiniti Americas; Mr. de Nysschen himself arrived after serving as president of Audi of America. Infiniti's headquarters has moved to Hong Kong from Japan; on Oct. 2, the Infiniti brand became an autonomous subsidiary of Nissan. Plans are well underway to create an entirely new lineup of vehicles; to expand production to North America, Britain and China; and to expand on strategic agreements with Daimler to jointly develop vehicle platforms and powertrains. Infiniti will even share an engine and a platform with Mercedes: The Q50 will eventually get a turbocharged Mercedes 4 cylinder, and a Q30 compact car, currently in development, is based on the new Benz A Class. With Infiniti aiming to develop a business model more in line with the ones German automakers have successfully executed, Mr. Bartsch was asked if something of a "Germanification" of Infiniti was underway. "Infiniti is now free to pursue a separate business model," Mr. Bartsch said in an interview at the Los Angeles Auto Show last month. "The business model we are pursuing is more closely aligned with the premium luxury segment. The people who do that best are the Germans." Henner Lehne, an analyst for IHS Global, said in a recent email: "Fact is, that the three key global premium players in this segment are German, and therefore they are the main orientation point for Infiniti. If they want to grow in the premium segment successfully they need to closely watch what the Germans are doing and maybe adopt here and there certain behaviors." But expect Infiniti to pursue exclusivity rather than the sales volume approach taken by the German juggernauts of BMW, Mercedes and Volkswagen Group. Mr. de Nysschen, a native of South Africa, says he thinks he can use the Germans' strengths their sales growth and expansion into more and more vehicle segments against them. "We do not strive to be the biggest," Mr. de Nysschen said in an email last week. "We strive to be a highly regarded aspirational brand, which is the domain of those who seek a different expression of their personal station in life, than that communicated by the mainstream premium brands." He added, "In effect, the definition of exclusivity has come the full circle, back to the original meaning namely, for the select few, not for everyone." Mr. Bartsch said Infiniti would not be among the industry's so called "fast followers" who ape the products of the pacesetters. He expects authenticity to be a guiding principle in Infiniti's engineering and design. "You have to stand for something," he said. "You need differentiators. As recently as three years ago, Infiniti was still trying to be all things to all people. That was the brand's Achilles' heel." Indeed, while Toyota's Lexus division, which is essentially the same age as Infiniti, has followed a similar path, it has been relatively more successful at it. Mr. de Nysschen likes to make a comparison among high end watches the large Swiss brands Breguet, Chopard, Patek Philippe and so forth with IWC, a bit of an outlier in that industry. "IWC also makes very nice, very luxurious, but also somewhat different watches, for a smaller, more defined audience than some of the larger luxury watchmakers," he said. "Why can't Infiniti find a niche like that in the premium car market?" Mr. de Nysschen also rejects the volume oriented thinking that permeated past product plans, which some have derided as "Nissan plus" neither exclusive nor luxurious enough. He has tossed out sales goals of hundreds of thousands of units in favor of building far fewer vehicles, but ones with more substance. "From that, ultimately, comes volume," he said. But it may take up to 15 years, he added, to realize his ultimate goals for Infiniti. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
The Hungarian State Opera's production of "Billy Elliot," previously popular, was attacked before its summer revival by a columnist in a pro government newspaper. The article said that the musical's message of "Dare to be yourself" referred "of course" to being gay. The Hungarian State Opera on Thursday canceled over a dozen performances of the musical "Billy Elliot," after a newspaper columnist accused the production of being "gay propaganda." The award winning musical about an English coal miner's son who discovers a taste for ballet opened at the opera company in 2016 to critical acclaim, and was even credited with inspiring fresh talent to train in the nation's top ballet school. But, before a revival of the show began its summer run in Budapest, an article on June 1 in the pro government daily newspaper Magyar Idok accused the production of corrupting young people. Zsofia N. Horvath said that the musical's message of "Dare to be yourself" referred "of course" to being gay. "How can such an important national institution as the opera go against the objectives of the state and use a performance made for young people around 10, at their most fragile age, for such pointed and unrestrained gay propaganda?" she asked. "Promoting homosexuality cannot be a national objective in a situation where the population is already aging and decreasing, and our nation is threatened by foreign invasion," she added. She said the Hungarian government promoted the family, but that "Billy Elliot" encouraged young people to take a different direction. Perhaps they "wouldn't have taken this direction on their own," she added. Others in the pro government media followed Ms. Horvath's lead and condemned the show. The director of the Hungarian State Opera, Szilveszter Okovacs, replied on June 2 in an article in the same newspaper. "Just because something that is an undeniable part of life appears onstage at the opera, it doesn't mean we are promoting it," he wrote in defense of the production. The Hungarian State Opera announced the cancellation of 15 shows on Thursday. In an email on Friday, Mr. Okovacs said he decided to cancel them because of Ms. Horvath's attack on the production, which had caused an unprecedented fall in audience numbers. Other performances of the production are to go ahead as planned. The newspaper Magyar Idok is known as an unofficial organ of Prime Minister Viktor Orban's nationalist government. It routinely accuses and shames public figures who act or speak against the government. Since its election in 2010, Mr. Orban's government has worked to reshape Hungary's culture so that it fits with his signature brand of nationalism and what he calls "illiberal democracy," which rejects western liberalism and its values. Mr. Orban is known for his populist ideology, for his staunch stance against migration and for stigmatizing sections of the population, like the homeless or those aiding migrants. He has not criticized homosexuality himself, but homophobic insults go mostly unsanctioned in public speech and conservative, government friendly personalities have spoken out against what they call the tyranny of political correctness and the promotion of homosexuality. To Noemi Herczog, a theater critic for Elet es Irodalom, a literary review, the exchange of articles between the columnist and the opera director in Magyar Idok recalled the atmosphere of Hungary's communist past. "It summons the same feelings," she said in a telephone interview. "And people are now talking about censorship and how this column was written on command." Ms. Herczog added, however, that it was still possible to present diverse political positions onstage in Hungary's theaters, even in large ones funded by the state. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
It's absurd, of course, but in "I Cure" a reference to Apple devices that help you tune out the rest of the world if you block out suffering, your own suffering will end. As Mr. Dimchev flows from one story to the next, scampering across the floor, singing about healing energy and engaging in sexual acts, a monitor behind him features scenes a beach, a waterfall, a cheetah. A man from the audience performs fellatio on Mr. Dimchev could this be the catharsis he's after? and then the image of feces appears on the screen. What if, as Mr. Dimchev asks, you were to examine it with a microscope? "It's so intense," he says. "It's like 'Star Wars'!" Mr. Dimchev may push taboos in his work, but his timing, his hushed, whispery asides and the two way conversations uttered under his breath are virtuosic even reminiscent of Robin Williams. Animalistic one moment, delicate the next, he meshes darkness and lightness with verbal and physical dexterity. Early on, he notes, "Sometimes I feel like a dead mother with two dead children lying on the street in a very low resolution." Sex, defecation what's left in this quest for release? Mr. Dimchev's rant switches from humor to horror as the sight of two bloody children and a mother appear on the screen. Contorting his body, he says: "It's so disgusting! I can't even look at it." How can you cure an unfeeling world? His only escape is a blackout. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
I was 9 years old, hanging on as tightly as I could to my father's legs as he dangled over the edge of a gigantic sea cliff on a tiny little island off the west coast of Scotland. He was trying to see whether the bird's nest some 15 feet below was being inhabited by a white tailed sea eagle or a buzzard. The answer was important to my father. Sea eagles had only just been reintroduced into the Hebrides, and a nest would be a sign that they might be able to re establish themselves in that part of the world. What was more important to me was that the gale whistling briskly off the Atlantic sea should not blow us off the cliff entirely: If I lost hold of my father's legs, he would plunge to his death on the rocks below. I remember wondering, as the cold rain lashed my face and the wind tore at my flapping anorak: "Why on earth is my father so unconcerned? What would make him trust his life to my puny little 9 year old arms? How can I possibly be related to this wonderful but crazily fearless man?" When a sudden gust of wind made him sway a few moments later, my heart stopped. I could feel myself losing my grip on his legs. The adventure on the cliff top was just one of many exciting but terrifying experiences in my gloriously wild childhood. There was the time my father accidentally tied the boat to a lobster pot instead of a buoy and we were blown out to sea. There was a trip out in a storm where the waves turned into great hills, and we had to bail out the water coming over the side of the boat. When I was a child, these experiences had been scary. But when I look back as an adult, I realize how much I owe to the freedom to explore nature that my parents allowed and encouraged. It troubles me that children of today do not have that same freedom. What might that mean for their future creativity and their relationship to the natural world? As we face the threat of the climate crisis and the slow destruction of habitats around the world, we must give children the opportunity to interact with nature in a "wild" way, so that they learn to preserve the natural world around us. The sea wilderness of the Scottish Hebrides, the woods of the English South Downs and the windswept marshlands of eastern England these are ancient landscapes that have been inhabited by human beings and their stories for so long that you might not be terribly surprised to meet a Roman legionary striding across the hillside, or to see a Viking ship nosing its way down the coastline. I spent a great deal of time as a child on a tiny, uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland. The island had no roads or electricity just a storm blown, windy wilderness of sea birds and heather. My family and I would be dropped off like castaways on the island by a local boatman for the summer holidays and picked up again weeks later. While we were staying on the island, we had no way of contacting the outside world. The climate, and the world, are changing. What challenges will the future bring, and how should we respond to them? What should our leaders be doing? Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, finds reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency. What are the worst climate risks in your country? Select a country, and we'll break down the climate hazards it faces. Where are Americans suffering most? Our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths in the U.S. What does climate devastation look like? In Sept. 2020, Michael Benson studied detailed satellite imagery. Here's the earth that he saw and the one he wants to see. Because there wasn't any electricity, the house was lit by candlelight. Without a telephone or a television, I spent a lot of time drawing and writing stories. In the evenings, my father told me and my siblings tales of the Vikings who invaded the island 1,200 years before, of the quarrelsome ancient British tribes who fought one another and of dragons who were supposed to live in the caves in the cliffs of the island. That was when I first started writing stories about dragons and Vikings, way back when I was 9 years old, by candlelight on that little island. These were the stories that later turned into "How to Train Your Dragon." My siblings and I growing up in the 1970s had a freedom children today do not. "Bye kids, come back when you're hungry," our parents said as we walked out the door for our adventures. "Don't fall off a cliff!" Ah, what unimaginable liberty. On other holidays, roaming unaccompanied on my bicycle near my grandmother's house in the English countryside, I used to play on the top of an Iron Age hill fort called the "Trundle." The view was extraordinary I could see for miles and miles and I had a strong feeling of what J.R.R. Tolkien called "the heart racking sense of the vanished past." It made me wonder: Who were the people who lived here, long ago? What were their lost histories? From the hill fort, I had a good view of Levin Down, an extraordinarily eerie, wondrous place that we called the "Fairy Hill." It stood out from the quiet country fields around it in an ominous and striking fashion, like the back of a whale surfacing in the ocean. The trees had blown there by chance, rather than being planted by human hands, and some were yew trees: I was warned not to touch them. There were places I could not go and "Beware" signs (which I always found exciting) because the area had been used as a training ground during World War II. To a sensitive child like myself, it was easy to believe that this hill was enchanted. It was intriguing, eerie, exciting and beautiful all at the same time. The hill was covered with strange grassy mounds about the size of molehills. The adults had no idea what they were which was very exciting to me, realizing that there were things in the world that not even the adults understood. So I filled in the blanks for myself and decided they must be burial mounds for fairies. This was the magical landscape that inspired my book "The Wizards of Once." For the wildwood in that book, I took particular inspiration from the ancient wood of Kingley Vale in Sussex. Its trees have gnarled, expressive faces, and roots that embed into the earth with an almost visceral power. The more you learn about trees, the more magical you realize they are. Did you know, for example, that trees can communicate with each other through their roots, even when they are many miles apart? Trees grow throughout children's books. From "Peter Pan" to "A Monster Calls," "The Lord of the Rings" to "Harry Potter," trees are refuges, prisons and symbols of nature's potency. They can be a friendly home, like the Hundred Acre Wood in "Winnie the Pooh," or give a sense of menace, like the snowy forest in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." They can also be symbolic, like the cement filled dying tree in "To Kill a Mockingbird." The writers I loved when I was a child were similarly inspired by magical landscapes and nature: Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, L. Frank Baum, Diana Wynne Jones, Lloyd Alexander, Robert Louis Stevenson, T.H. White and so many others. Today, children have much less unsupervised access to the countryside. I worry that they may never know the magic of the wilderness, the power of trees and the thrilling excitement of exploring nature without an adult hovering behind them. And so I write books for children who will never know what the freedom of my childhood was like. My father never found out whether the nest in the cliff belonged to a white tailed sea eagle or a buzzard. The gust of wind that scared me brought him to his senses, and he scrambled back up the side of the cliff before I could lose my grip. We staggered back through the gale to the little stone house on the island where, in the candlelight, we dried out in front of the fire. Cressida Cowell ( CressidaCowell) is the author and illustrator of the "How to Train Your Dragon" and "The Wizards of Once" series of children's books. 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 |
Three steps to starting college: Meet roommate. Unpack in dorm room. Then, sometime during orientation, hear music, see a student start dancing, watch as more dancers join in, and join the campus flash mob. (Or if you miss the actual event, watch it over and over on YouTube, to see how many people you recognize.) Outbursts of seemingly impromptu dance numbers were so common at orientations this year that BostInnovation, a Web start up chronicling Boston life, ran a contest asking readers to watch the YouTube videos and vote for the local campus Wellesley, Merrimack or Emerson with the best welcome. (Wellesley won.) There was even a flash mob to greet new students at a medical school, the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The college sponsored performances, which have grown to feature coordinated costumes and appearances by tweedy officials, sometimes suggest the dance equivalent of the school fight song, a far cry from the roots of the genre informal gatherings hastily called via social media. "There's definitely a cool factor to flash mobs," said Kevin Kruger, associate executive director of Naspa, a national association of student affairs administrators. "It's something students will talk about, and it can help colleges brand and market themselves. It's a way to hook students, and build community and pride in place. It gets new students superconnected, right from the start, which is one of the goals of orientation. For students, I think part of the appeal is that it goes on YouTube, and you get to watch yourself, which is a kind of self promotion this generation likes." While flash mobs have been known to have a darker side in Philadelphia, the police imposed a curfew after a violent confrontation on campus, it is all about dancing. And not just at orientation. Last week at U.C.L.A., there was a flash mob wedding proposal, in which the whole crowd dropped to one knee. Fraternities and sororities have sponsored them, as have residence halls. And they are becoming de rigueur for celebrating new programs, or big anniversaries: Portland State University had one last month at the opening of Electric Avenue, a street dedicated to electric vehicles, as did M.I.T.'s 150th anniversary celebration and the University of Minnesota School of Mining's 75th anniversary. The large official events may lack the somewhat spontaneous, almost surreptitious feel that originally characterized the genre. The Minnesota mob, for example wears gold and maroon T shirts, and is joined by both Goldy Gopher, the school mascot, and Steven Crouch, its dean. At California State University San Marcos, orientation leaders wearing blue "I (Heart) CSUSM" T shirts are joined by not only the mascot but a campus police officer as well. Mascots, like the Rose Hulman Institute of Technology's adorable little elephant, or the University of Mary Washington's large dancing eagle, were much in evidence at orientation flash mobs. But more modest midyear efforts, like a lunchtime dance at Bowdoin College, remain true to form. The campus performances get enough attention that GoEnnounce.com, a online graduation announcement business, used them as an advertising vehicle, sponsoring student produced flash mobs where the dancers (at the University of Michigan, wearing caps and gowns) finish by holding up large cards spelling out G O E N N O U N C E. While college flash mobs vary enormously students at the College of Charleston held a yoga flash mob most start with one or two dancers, and a group of quietly bewildered onlookers, who laugh, cheer and pull out their cellphones to record the whole thing, as more dancers arrive. The initial participants are usually good dancers, but those who join in tend to be more awkward, occasionally leaning the wrong way, or flailing their hands a bit behind the beat. For orientation planners, it adds up to a cheap tool for boosting school spirit. "We thought it would engage a lot of people from different parts of the college, and send a nice message about what it is to be part of the Wellesley community," said Lori Tenser, dean of the first year class at Wellesley. "I knew it was going to be good after a long rehearsal, when one of the students said, 'If I were a first year, and I saw this on my second day, I would be so happy, and feel I'd come to the right place.' " The Wellesley group, using Katy Perry's "Firework" probably the flash mob top pick this year, along with Taio Cruz's "Dynamite" rehearsed for six hours during the student leaders' training week, and posted the moves on YouTube for those who needed more practice. Buffalo State College went further, putting a short instructional video teaching the Wobble, a line dance that was a central feature of the flash mob, on its Facebook page for the 3,000 incoming students. "We wanted to pull in as many people as possible," said Daigi Ann Thompson, a theater major who taught the dance on video. "The Facebook page got the freshmen all excited. All they knew was that at some point in orientation, they'd be asked to do it." Robert Mead Colgrove, Buffalo State's orientation director, said he spent less than 100 on the whole project, the only costs being sound equipment and a D.J. Ms. Thompson and others worked on the choreography all summer, and held hours of rehearsals, official and unofficial, in the days leading up to orientation, with residence advisers, orientation leaders, office assistants and administrators all trying to learn the dance. "They rolled up their sleeves and loosened their ties, and I had the vice president of student affairs doing the Wobble right next to me," Ms. Thompson said. "It was a big success. We've been asked to perform it again, at a couple other things, so we're rounding up more students." But while many institutions have a college song, sung year after year, the prospect that a flash mob could become the college dance, or even a regular part of the orientation schedule, raises a metaphysical question, one that is already plaguing some orientation directors: Without the element of surprise, they wonder, would the spirit of the flash mob be destroyed? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
LOS ANGELES African American art history resources could be described as something of a diaspora: Early letters by an important artist might be held at one university, her most prominent exhibition materials filed away at a museum, and notebooks and sketchbooks still stashed away in the artist's studio. Today the Getty Research Institute is announcing a new program to help bring the pieces together: The African American Art History Initiative. At its heart are plans for the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the academic branch of the J. Paul Getty Trust, to strengthen its African American holdings through key archival acquisitions, and it has begun by collecting the papers of the pioneering assemblage artist Betye Saar, who lives in the city. Kellie Jones, a Columbia University art historian who will be a senior consultant on this project, calls the Saar acquisition a strong start: "Saar is one of the major African American artists in the region, somebody whom artists like John Outterbridge and David Hammons look up to. And she was born in 1926, so to start with something this wide ranging is wonderful." With an initial budget of 5 million, the Getty has committed to hiring a curator and bibliographer in the field to help make new acquisitions and develop research projects, subsidizing two postgraduate fellowships in the field each year and partnering with educational institutions and museums to help them preserve, digitize and make public their own archives. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The birds of the Galapagos Islands are still playing a role in helping us understand evolution. When Darwin visited the islands, it was the wide variety of finch beaks that helped him understand how one species could evolve into many. Now the Galapagos cormorants, the only species of cormorant to have lost the ability to fly, have enabled scientists to pin down the genes that led to this species' split from all other cormorants about two million years ago. They are genes that are present in birds, mammals and most animals, including even the worm often studied in laboratories: C. elegans. In fact, they are even present in some algae. Their ultimate effect varies, however. In humans and in the cormorants, the genes affect bone growth. But mutations in humans can cause some dreadful diseases; in the birds, they caused smaller wings, which were not effective for flight, and a weaker breastbone. Alejandro Burga, who analyzed the DNA of these and other cormorants with his colleagues, is a researcher in the lab of Leonid Kruglyak, the chairman of human genetics at U.C.L.A.'s medical school. He said he and Dr. Kruglyak were discussing how they might use the increasing power of modern genetics to investigate how new species develop. "We have very little idea how these things happen in nature," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
I was in the dressing room at Domenico Vacca, wearing linen. White linen. A white linen shirt with blood red trim ( 550). It fit beautifully, with just the right amount of stiffness, which is to say halfway, and just the right amount of translucence, which is to say halfway. It was tucked into a pair of sleek floral pants, with elegantly drawn blossoms atop a muted navy base ( 520). Music played over speakers in clothing stores tends to be either motivational or aspirational. In fast fashion stores, the endless thun thun thun of contemporary dance pop serves as a reminder to go, go, go and buy, buy, buy. Sometimes, though, the music serves as transportation, not just a soundtrack to an act of commerce but a representation of heretofore unknown lifeblood available to you. It offers a momentary glimpse at an alternate self not better, necessarily, but perfectly collated. So here I was, dressed like an Italian playboy in search of a handful of pomade and a beach party, and the store began speaking to me in what it presumed my native language would be: deep house. Like, exceedingly deep house, but of the hard, springy variety. "You've got kisses sweeter than honey/and I work seven days a week to give you all my/pride and joy," a man sang, in a thin soul voice that exuded genuine delight. On it went, for several minutes, this oceanic bliss. Shazam revealed the song to be Nora En Pure's "You Are My Pride (Croatia Squad Remix)," which is exactly the sort of name you would expect of a song best paired with linen. (What does Shazam exist for if not to teach us the secret to instantly accessing a mood we didn't know was available to us?) For a few minutes, I looked in the mirror and believed I could emerge in this outfit and never turn back a life of committed leisure, in which the most pressing decision I'd have to make is whether I'd have breakfast at sunrise, when I got home from the club, or the following afternoon, when I finally woke up and was ready to start again. That's Domenico Vacca in the summertime. In the fall, he's all sleek suits designed for assassins with standing reservations at Terrazza Brunella. But in the heat of the sun, he's an adventurer. The top three buttons of his shirt are unbuttoned. His loafers are pastel suede ( 580). The new Vacca store just off Fifth Avenue is a playground: a shop for men and women (and now the designer's sole New York retail outpost), a cafe, a hair salon and barbershop and a private club; and on the higher floors, a short stay pseudo hotel, where private Vacca club members presumably people not inclined to stay at the Peninsula or the St. Regis just up the block can avail themselves of Vacca furnished apartments for rent. Who are these people? Video screens throughout the store played an endless loop of footage from the store's recent opening party. Mr. Vacca himself pulls up in a Maserati. The room is full of well tanned men in excellent double breasted suits and gorgeous women who towered over them, all of them not quite dancing. That is how the outfits stay crisp, one imagines. Thanks to the attention of the salesclerk, a spectacularly dressed gentleman with the most phenomenal idiosyncrasy one exquisitely bent strand of hair shooting out several inches from the rest of his bushy beard I did my best to imbibe the lavish life. Luckily, I have a predisposition to florals, and at Vacca they were sprouting all over, from the aforementioned pants which I narrowly escaped purchasing, though their pull remains strong to a handful of joyous sport coats ( 1,415 single breasted, 1,452 double breasted). The theme extended to the walls, where a pair of flower paintings by Domingo Zapata hung, and were for sale ( 40,000 each). The jackets, especially, pulled off the delicate balance of maintaining structure while molding to the body, especially the plaid one I was offered with double track stitched pockets, and for which only one is for sale in each size ( 2,700). Matched with the peacockish spread collar shirt in the softest denim ( 550), and the black lace ups with a knuckle for a toe ( 912), you'd have yourself a look worthy of a short term rental, replete with Vacca branded crocodile motif plates and candy dishes. For good measure, slip on the soft purple smoking jacket ( 3,700). Which is the point, after all. At its best, a clothing store is less about clothes than the way those clothes should make you feel. It is a swaddle, designed to provide you with a safe place to dream. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Like a pyramid, a city is built from many blocks. Since it's almost Election Day, here's a look back at the little and endless daily labors of the first four years of Mayor Bill de Blasio. JULY 2014: New York City announced its 2,000th beneficiary of the Business Acceleration program, a diner in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, called Emeline's. DECEMBER 2014: The city agreed to no longer "punitively segregate" people under 21 in city jails. (That means keeping people alone in a room for 23 hours a day.) JANUARY 2015: The city announced it had received a record number of 311 calls in the previous year: more than 28 million. That's more than 76,000 a day on average. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
With doctors, nurses and other health care workers facing acute shortages of protective masks, the Food and Drug Administration announced on Friday that it will allow use of a more widely available mask that meets Chinese standards instead of American ones. Hospitals across the United States are running out of N95 masks, which filter at least 95 percent of particles that are 0.3 microns or larger, including the new coronavirus. N95 masks are tested and certified by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, a research agency that is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On Friday, the F.D.A. issued an emergency use authorization for KN95 masks. Regulated by the Chinese government, they are almost identical in performance to N95 masks. There are slight differences in their specifications, like a variation in the maximum pressure the masks must be able to withstand as a person inhales and exhales. The C.D.C. lists KN95 masks as a suitable alternative when N95s are not available. The F.D.A. said KN95 masks were eligible for authorization if they met certain criteria, including documentation that they were authentic. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
FRANKFURT The European Central Bank left its main interest rate unchanged Wednesday, choosing to put the onus on political leaders to address increasingly dangerous tension in the euro zone. The central bank kept its benchmark rate at 1 percent, where it has been since December. Noting the stress in Europe and signs of flagging economic growth, the central bank promised to continue providing banks with effectively unlimited low interest loans at least through the end of the year. While most analysts had not expected the central bank to cut rates at its monthly meeting on Wednesday, there was growing speculation that the governing council might cut below 1 percent for the first time in an attempt to restore confidence in the euro zone. The bank and its president, Mario Draghi, appear to have decided to wait at least another month in order to discourage complacency by political leaders. Mr. Draghi and other top central bank officials have repeatedly stressed that they lack the tools and the mandate to address the underlying problems in the euro zone. Mr. Draghi said the central bank had no "silver bullets" for what he acknowledged was a worrying situation. "Some of these problems in the euro area have nothing to do with monetary policy," Mr. Draghi said at a news conference after the monthly meeting of the bank's governors. "I don't think it would be right for monetary policy to fill other institutions' lack of action." In a statement, Mr. Draghi noted "increased downside risks to the economic outlook" and said that, judging by futures prices for commodities, annual inflation rates should fall below 2 percent again in early 2013. By keeping its firepower in reserve for now, the central bank put pressure on political leaders to weave the euro zone more closely together, for example by sharing the cost of bank bailouts and giving up more control over government spending. While few analysts expected the central bank to cut rates, many still expect a cut in coming months. Mr. Draghi said that a few of the 23 members of the bank's governing council had argued for a rate cut and left open the option of a cut later on. "We will stand ready to act," 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. Many analysts said the effect of a cut would be mostly psychological because short term interest rates are already close to zero. In an attempt to reassure financial markets, the central bank pledged to continue providing banks with low interest credit, but stopped well short of promising another blast of cheap, three year loans like the ones it offered in December and March. At the news conference, Mr. Draghi seemed to be groping to appear neither alarmist nor complacent. He said the current level of tension was not as bad as it was last fall, or at the end of 2008 after the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers. He said Europe should not take all the blame for slow economic growth in the United States or other parts of the world. But he also described the interbank lending market, which is crucial to the functioning of the financial system, as "dysfunctional," and acknowledged anxiety among investors. On Wednesday, the European Commission announced a plan for more coordinated oversight of large banks, in part to prevent problems at one institution from spreading. The plan would shift the cost of bailouts to the banking industry and bondholders, though the measures will not be in place in time to help Spain deal with Bankia. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
At the midpoint of the Giants' 2020 season, they had lost seven of their eight games, with four of those defeats by four or fewer points. Asked to characterize his team, Giants Coach Joe Judge had answered: "I see a lot of improvement." As a rookie head coach in the N.F.L., Judge is given a little slack for maintaining his optimism in a dreary situation. But Judge is nothing if not a no nonsense guy. He was tutored for nearly a decade by the Patriots' Bill Belichick and Alabama's Nick Saban, who are royalty in the blunt speaking category. Sunday, after the Giants' 17 12 road victory over the Seattle Seahawks, one of the biggest upsets of the N.F.L. season and the fourth consecutive victory for the first place Giants, Judge's message had changed in only one minor way. He still talked about the ongoing improvement he sees, then he added: "I'm glad to see some tangible results for all the hard work." Most surprising, the Giants did not claim their most meaningful victory in several years with skulduggery or a novel game plan that knocked Seattle off its usual, efficient rhythm. The Giants pushed the Seahawks around on both sides of the line of scrimmage and focused on a conservative, run first approach, especially in the second half when they scored all their points. Along the way, the Giants rushed for 190 yards and sacked Russell Wilson, Seattle's elusive quarterback, five times. McCoy had only 105 yards passing with one interception after a deflection, but as the Giants were building and then protecting their second half lead late in the game, McCoy completed a series of pivotal third down passes to extend drives. 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. Or, in the (few) words of Judge: "Colt really stepped up." To keep things in perspective, the Giants are only in contention for a postseason berth because they play in the dreadful N.F.C. East, where a losing record that is only two games under .500 is good enough to make them the division's headliner, a game ahead of a Washington team that will face undefeated Pittsburgh on Monday. But, consider this bit of progress or improvement, as Judge would say: Sunday the Giants became the first N.F.C. East team this season to beat a team with a winning record. "They were really tough and gave us a hard time all day long," Seattle Coach Pete Carroll said. "We didn't move the ball well it's kind of an uncharacteristic feeling." Most prominent in the Giants' defensive effort was the team's pass rush, which hounded Wilson throughout the game. Beyond the sacks, Wilson, who completed 27 of 43 passes for 263 yards with one touchdown and an interception, was forced to hurry multiple throws and was frequently on the run as he passed. The Giants' Leonard Williams, the former Jets defensive lineman, had two and one half sacks Sunday, which gives him a career high eight and one half sacks for the season. When the Giants used their franchise tag to sign Williams in the spring, Giants General Manager Dave Gettleman took some criticism for the transaction. Williams has been a highly disruptive force for opposing quarterbacks in nearly every game this year. Or, as Judge said Sunday evening: "The dude is a man." Another rising Giants star, running back Wayne Gallman, had a stellar game, rushing for 135 yards on only 16 carries. Replacing the injured Saquon Barkley, Gallman has given the Giants' offense stability and taken a lot of the pressure off of quarterbacks Daniel Jones, who missed the game with a hamstring injury, and McCoy. Although Gallman had rushed for 94 yards in the Giants' previous game against Cincinnati, Carroll seemed a bit startled by his performance Sunday. "They ran some basic stuff and got away from us," Carroll said of the second half when Gallman had 129 of his rushing yards. Trailing Seattle 5 0 at the half, a 60 yard dash by Gallman on the Giants' second possession of the third quarter set up a 4 yard touchdown run by Alfred Morris. A successful 2 point conversion attempt gave the Giants an 8 5 lead. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
I knew that the creative process for "bend the even," the latest project by the improviser and choreographer Jennifer Monson, involved rehearsals on a prairie at dawn. So when the work, which opened at the Chocolate Factory on Tuesday, began in silence and dim light, I settled in for a meditative experience, a slow reveal. But the first sound came as a shock: a floor shaking rumble that felt like the start of an earthquake. I shouldn't have been surprised. Ms. Monson, who has been a revered figure in experimental dance for decades, has lately been known for researching outdoors and for bringing a sense of nature inside. But while her nature studies incorporate much stasis and quiet, her vision of nature is of forces larger than herself wild, powerful forces that can unexpectedly erupt. That initial rumble comes from the sound artist Jeff Kolar, who tweaks the dials and levers of his electronics onstage, making visible his technological manipulation of radio waves, storm surges and cricket chirps. The lighting designer Elliott Cennetoglu also works in full view of the audience, brightening and dimming the world, shading it blue and green. The musician Zeena Parkins is sometimes onstage, brushing a microphone against her clothing, connecting sound with touch. She also plays her harp next to viewers' seats. Her music can be dulcet, as you might expect, though other times it sounds and feels like heavy metal. Joining Ms. Monson is the dancer Mauriah Kraker, an effective foil younger and more svelte. Although it can be difficult to take your eyes off Ms. Monson, Ms. Kraker is essential. Some of the dance is in unison, all of it interactive. Early on, the two women wrestle, grappling with hooked ankles rather than hands. Near the end, they transfer the activity to their arms, seeming at once to desire entanglement and to push each other out of the way. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
In his new book, he set himself the challenge of writing political poems in the guise of love poems. Each one is distinct: Some are sermons, some are swoons. They are acrid with tear gas, and they unravel with desire. In some poems, the assassin of the title is that most prolific killer of all, time itself. Others address Donald Trump directly "Mister Trumpet," "Humpty Dumpty," "failed landlord with a people of color/Complex." Hayes revisits lifelong obsessions: the cage of masculinity, the gulf between fathers and sons ("Christianity is a religion built around a father/Who does not rescue his son. It is the story/of a son whose father is a ghost"). There are paeans to the beauty of Jimi Hendrix and Prince. One sonnet addresses "Seven of the ten things I love in the face/of James Baldwin." But his inquiry also deepens and turns more daring. One narrator addresses the president: "Trumpet I can't speak for you but men like me/Who have never made love to a man will always be/Somewhere in the folds of our longing ashamed of it." There's a saying attributed to Flannery O'Connor, that to be a painter, you must first love the smell of paint. Hayes loves language; he loves the round vowel and crisp consonant. He loves to stuff a line full of sound ("the lunk, the chump, the hunk of plunder"), to write for the ear as well as the eye. His words call to be read aloud, to be tasted. The collection may be, as one sonnet puts it, "a record of my raptures," but it's also a chronicle of ambivalence, attuned always to "the scent of rot at the heart/Of love making." And nothing so invites ambivalence for this poet as America: "It is not enough/To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed." The sonnet has long been a home for Hayes; it's the form he has returned to most often. "As a person raised by a soldier and a prison guard it would make sense that I would like boxes and structure a little too much," he has said, half jokingly. His highly contained poems invariably comment on the idea of containment. From the new book: There's a direct line between the sonnet and the body in Hayes's work. Just as the sonnet, derived from the Italian "sonetto" for "little song," can contain, in its courtly way, immensities of experience and feeling so does the body, until the point of breaking. These poems play with different registers, but they return to lamentation, to annihilating grief for "all the black people I'm tired of losing," one narrator says. "All the dead from parts of Florida, Ferguson,/Brooklyn, Charleston, Cleveland, Chicago,/Baltimore." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
In celebration of Art Week, Dover Street Market will host an open house on Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m. The photographer Ari Marcopoulos will be on hand to sign copies of "Epiphany," a documentary style photography book published by IDEA, which showcases Gucci's prefall 2016 women's and men's collections ( 35). The jeweler designer Charlotte Chesnais will debut her fine jewelry collection, which includes Saturn earrings in gold with white diamonds ( 12,800). And Maison Margiela will unveil an installation consisting of a mount of chairs all cast in white, highlighting a Maison Margiela silver sponge painted top handle handbag ( 4,380). At 160 Lexington Avenue. Need a last minute present for Mom? The Tibi designer Amy Smilovic will be at Bergdorf Goodman on 5F on Thursday from 3 to 5 p.m. to introduce a capsule collection of signature off the shoulder tops ( 295) that are being reissued in fabrics from the Tibi archive. The cashmere brand Naadam is hosting a multibrand shopping evening on Thursday from 6 to 9 p.m. where you'll find a range of fun gifts, including Lizzie Fortunato blue lapis cabochon superstition earrings ( 105) and cheeky greeting cards ( 5). At 139 Fulton Street, Suite 400. On Saturday from 2 to 6 p.m., the Giles Brother designer Philip Crangi will be at the SoHo Banana Republic store offering free custom engravings on his signature cuffs ( 70). At 550 Broadway. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
"Dear Evan Hansen" was the big winner of the night, winning best new musical at the 2017 Tony Awards on Sunday. "Oslo," a crackling drama about the little known back story behind the 1993 Middle East peace talks, won the hard fought competition for best new play. The new musical "Come From Away" won a prize for its director Christopher Ashley, while Rebecca Taichman won a directing award for the play "Indecent." Cynthia Nixon, of "Sex and the City" fame, was recognized for her role in "The Little Foxes," while Laurie Metcalf, best known for "Roseanne," won for "A Doll's House, Part 2." "Dear Evan Hansen," a daringly unflinching exploration of loss, lies and loneliness in a high school community, on Sunday won the 2017 Tony Award for best new musical, completing its journey from improbable idea to theatrical triumph. The challenging and cathartic show, about an anxiety racked adolescent whose social standing improves when he insinuates himself into the grieving family of a classmate who has killed himself, picked up six awards over the night, including a best leading actor Tony for the twitching and tender talk of the town performance by 23 year old Ben Platt in the title role. "To all young people watching at home, don't waste any time trying to be like anybody but yourself, because the things that make you strange are the things that make you powerful," Mr. Platt said while accepting his award. The victory by "Dear Evan Hansen" capped a night when Broadway, which has been booming, spread its top honors across several plays and musicals, in contrast to last year, when "Hamilton" swept the board. The ceremony, at Radio City Music Hall, was hosted by Kevin Spacey, who generally stayed away from politics, instead choosing to make fun of his own status as a late in the game and unexpected choice as host. An exuberantly nostalgic production of "Hello, Dolly!" won for best musical revival, and its adored star, Bette Midler, won as best leading actress in a musical her first competitive Tony 50 years after she stepped onto a Broadway stage in the original production of "Fiddler on the Roof." But the night belonged to "Dear Evan Hansen," which has already made stars not only of Mr. Platt, who previously was best known for appearing in the "Pitch Perfect" films, but also of its young songwriters, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who are already at work on multiple Hollywood films, and book writer, Steven Levenson, who recently inked a development deal with 20th Century Fox Television. In an era when Broadway often means big, "Dear Evan Hansen" is intentionally, insistently intimate the show has just eight roles and an eight piece orchestra, and it is being staged in a cozy 984 seat theater. Directed by Michael Greif, "Dear Evan Hansen" is also wholly original not based on a film, a book or a song catalog and is one of the first shows on Broadway to integrate social media into its depiction of communication and community. Since beginning performances at the Music Box Theater last fall, the show has been doing well at the box office it is grossing over 1.2 million a week, thanks in part to an average ticket price of 157, and it has succeeded in attracting a relatively youthful audience, which is a rarity on Broadway. A national tour is scheduled to begin in Denver in October 2018. Rachel Bay Jones, who plays the title character's worried single mother, took the Tony as best featured actress in a musical. Gavin Creel of "Hello, Dolly!" won best featured actor. Other musicals came up short. "Natasha, Pierre the Great Comet of 1812," the most nominated show of the season, won just two awards, for set and lighting design. "Come From Away," the Canadian musical about the welcome Newfoundland extended to diverted air travelers after Sept. 11, 2001, won just one: for best direction, by Christopher Ashley. And "Groundhog Day," an adaptation of the film, was shut out. "Oslo" defeated an aggressive competitor, "A Doll's House, Part 2," which campaigned vigorously for the attention of Tony voters, as well as two plays by Pulitzer Prize winners, "Sweat," by Lynn Nottage (the play won her a second Pulitzer), and "Indecent," by Paula Vogel. All four contenders were by American writers, and marked Broadway debuts for the authors, delighting champions of American playwriting. In one of the evening's big surprises, Rebecca Taichman, who helped conceive of "Indecent" while she was a graduate student, won the Tony for best direction of a play. And, surprising no one, Laurie Metcalf, best known for her role in "Roseanne," won her first Tony Award for her portrayal of a fiercely independent woman who had walked out on her family years earlier in "A Doll's House, Part 2." Kevin Kline picked up his third Tony Award, for his portrayal of a preening actor in a revival of Noel Coward's "Present Laughter." And Cynthia Nixon, an alumna of "Sex and the City," won her second Tony for her work in a revival of "The Little Foxes." "Jitney," by August Wilson, won best revival of a play. The drama, set in Pittsburgh in 1977, was the last of Wilson's 10 American Century plays to be produced on Broadway; the widely heralded production, which closed in March, was presented by the nonprofit Manhattan Theater Club and directed by Ruben Santiago Hudson, who fought long and hard to get it to Broadway. An emphasis on comedy, not politics. The evening's host, Mr. Spacey, was an unusual choice for an awards show unlike many of his predecessors (James Corden, Neil Patrick Harris and Hugh Jackman), he is not known as a song and dance man. Rather, this two time Oscar winner has been a riveting television presence portraying an underhanded president, Francis Underwood, in "House of Cards" on Netflix. But setting aside his dramatic persona to demonstrate his showbiz chops, he affectionately mocked the most admired new musicals on Broadway as he opened the awards. Distancing himself from hosts of other awards shows in recent months, Mr. Spacey did not focus on national politics, but instead poked fun at his own status as an unlikely host. He adapted lyrics and set pieces from each of the four shows nominated as best musical. He wore a cast on his arm, much like the title character in "Dear Evan Hansen," only to turn it into a knee brace, recognizing the injured lead actor in "Groundhog Day." He cradled an accordion, as did Josh Groban in "The Great Comet," and summoned a bizarre chorus line featuring the Rockettes and the cast of "Come From Away." None of the shows were particularly razzle dazzle in fact, he joked about the serious themes they explored but that didn't stop Mr. Spacey, who concluded with a tap dance number. He peppered the second half of the broadcast with impressions of Johnny Carson and Bill Clinton, aiming one of the few political barbs of the night at that former president's wife, Hillary Clinton. The most political moment of the evening, however, belonged to Stephen Colbert, who mocked President Trump as he introduced the award for best musical revival. Ms. Midler, among the best known stars of the theater season, did not sing; the producer of "Hello, Dolly!" opted instead to have her co star David Hyde Pierce perform a song from the show. But she made up for it with a filibustering acceptance speech when she won the best musical actress award, insisting that the band stop playing as she thanked multiple collaborators and, in her inimitable fashion, exulted about her show and poked fun at her age and even her romantic life. "I'd like to thank all the Tony voters, many of whom I've actually dated," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
A selected guide to dance performances in New York City. Full reviews of recent dance performances: nytimes.com/dance. A searchable guide to these and other performances is at nytimes.com/events. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (through Sunday) One of America's most popular dance companies concludes its spring season with five more performances. The "21st Century Voices" program includes works by Rennie Harris, Ronald K. Brown, Robert Battle and Kyle Abraham (Friday and Sunday afternoon). The "Bold Visions" program features a new work by Mauro Bigonzetti, one from Ulysses Dove, another by Mr. Battle and the Ailey staple "Revelations" (Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening). Saturday evening's program comprises dances from Mr. Battle, Mr. Brown, the Ailey muse Judith Jamison and, again, "Revelations." Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. with an additional 2 p.m. performance on Saturday. Sunday at 3 and 7:30 p.m., David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, 212 496 0600, davidhkochtheater.com. (Brian Schaefer) American Ballet Theater (through July 2) This weekend brings three more performances of "Swan Lake" as Ballet Theater's stellar women take turns in the dual role of the virtuous swan queen, Odette, and her devious doppelganger, Odile. Beginning Monday is Kenneth MacMillan's lavish production of history's most famous star crossed lovers. "Romeo and Juliet" features palatial sets and poetic pas de deux enhanced by Prokofiev's stirring score. Friday and Monday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., with an additional 2 p.m. performance on Wednesday. Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, 212 362 6000, abt.org. (Schaefer) Bryant Park Dance Series (through July 8) Over four consecutive Friday evenings this summer, the vast Bryant Park lawn becomes an open air dance theater and picnic hot spot with an annual series produced by the arts organization Inception to Exhibition. Each week, three companies take the stage for a two hour program; the presented works tend to be upbeat and more physically vibrant, the better to compete with the pulse of the city around them. This week, participating artists include Alia Kache/Kachal Dance, Barkin/Selissen Project and LaneCoArts. At 6 p.m., Bryant Park, Avenue of the Americas at 40th Street, 212 768 4242, bryantpark.org. (Schaefer) Jane Comfort and Company (through Saturday) New Yorkers, whether they know it or not, are dancing every day as they pass, evade and otherwise negotiate thousands of people on the sidewalk, subway or stairs. Jane Comfort, known for issue based dance theater works, translates this urban choreography to the stage in "You Are Here," presented by the American Dance Institute. Usually Ms. Comfort integrates words into her work; this time, she lets the encounters between bodies do the talking. At 8 p.m., the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, Manhattan, 212 255 5793, americandance.org/nyc. (Schaefer) Dances for a Variable Population (Saturday) Dance is often considered an art form of youth, but the body is profound at any age. Dances for a Variable Population is a multigenerational company and educational organization celebrating this fact. The company presents "The Phoenix Project," featuring works by veteran dancers such as Loretta Abbott, an early member of Alvin Ailey's company; George Faison, responsible for the moves in "The Wiz"; Jim May, who danced for Jose Limon; and others in their 70s, 80s and 90s. At 6 p.m., West Harlem Piers Park, Hudson River between 125th and 133rd Streets, dvpnyc.org. (Schaefer) Catherine Gallant (Thursday through June 25) These days, we call them disrupters the people who upend convention in a particular field. Around the turn of the century, Isadora Duncan's radical, barefoot, Grecian inspired dances disrupted the art form forever. The longtime dance maker Catherine Gallant, head of Dances by Isadora, has studied and "re animated" several of Duncan's works: "Beethoven No. 7," "Three Scriabin Etudes" and "Valse Brillante," all artifacts brought back to life. They will join four of Ms. Gallant's own works, performed by her company. At 8 p.m., Danspace Project, St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village, 866 811 4111, danspaceproject.org. (Schaefer) Jessica Lang Dance (through Sunday) War is a rare subject for dance, and a rare opportunity for dance to engage with our troubled world. Jessica Lang's "Thousand Yard Stare" depicts the struggles of veterans with a cast of nine in battle fatigue like outfits, set to a Beethoven string quartet. Her eclectic program also includes a work inspired by Shakespeare's sonnets, a solo and a duet, and "I.n.k.," in which projected splashes and splotches invite a physical response. Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, Manhattan, 212 242 0800, joyce.org. (Schaefer) Susan Marshall (Thursday through June 25) Very often, music inspires dance. Or stories do or sometimes historical figures. Not so much color. But in "Chromatic," the New York choreographer Susan Marshall, known for dramatic conceptual investigations, explores the many facets of color in collaboration with the visual artist Suzanne Bocanegra and the composer Jason Treuting. Drawing from the pioneering 1960s theories of Josef Albers, the three artists use themselves as canvases, and the stage becomes something of a studio and laboratory for multisensory experiments. At 8 p.m., the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 255 5793, thekitchen.org. (Schaefer) Elisa Monte, Molissa Fenley, Margo Sappington, Jennifer Muller (through Saturday) Four veteran New York choreographers share an evening of dance, much of it new. Elisa Monte created "Dextra Dei" in 1989 in response to the AIDS epidemic and has now added a new section; Molissa Fenley explores water as a resource and symbolic substance in "The Third Coast" and "Mali"; Margo Sappington takes her cue from Erik Satie in "Entwined," where bodies twist together; and Jennifer Muller examines the complexity of modern relationships in "Working Title." At 7:30 p.m., New York Live Arts, 219 West 19th Street, Manhattan, 212 924 0077, newyorklivearts.org. (Schaefer) Rioult Dance (Tuesday through June 26) For more than 20 years, the former Martha Graham dancer Pascal Rioult has been creating dances of fluid athleticism. His company presents two programs for its Joyce season. Program A is a trilogy honoring the Trojan War's famous women: "Iphigenia," about the doomed daughter of Agamemnon; "On Distant Shores," a reimagining of Helen of Troy's tale; and the premiere of "Cassandra's Curse," about the ignored prophet. Program B comprises a collection of works from the company's vaults, including "Bolero," Mr. Rioult's take on Ravel's celebrated score. Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 7 p.m., Thursday and June 24 at 8 p.m., June 25 at 2 and 8 p.m., June 26 at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, Manhattan, 212 242 0800, joyce.org. (Schaefer) River to River Festival (through June 26) This annual event is something of a performance inspired scavenger hunt around Lower Manhattan, both confusing and delighting unsuspecting passers by. This week, the witty Dance Heginbotham weaves through a harbor side business complex; the captivating Eiko Otake continues her multiyear project "A Body in Places" on Governors Island; Okwui Okpokwasili takes inspiration from Nigerian women in the 1920s; the hip hop dancer Ephrat Asherie collaborates with her jazz pianist brother, Ehud; and Will Rawls, left, nods to Balkan folklore. At various times and locations. lmcc.net/program/river to river. (Schaefer) 10 Hairy Legs (Thursday, June 24 and June 26) This New Jersey based, all male dance company, founded by Randy James, exhibits an appealing mix of virility and tenderness. It returns to New York with three new works: "Mark," by the veteran choreographer Doug Varone, set to Holly Herndon's cerebral electronic music; "Should We Go?," by Tiffany Mills, a loose interpretation of "Waiting for Godot"; and "Quadrivium," by Megan Williams, which combines boyhood games, male grooming and folk dance. Also on the program is David Parker's amusing "Slapstuck." Thursday and June 24 at 7:30 p.m., June 26 at 2 p.m., New York Live Arts, 219 West 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 924 0077, newyorklivearts.org. (Schaefer) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Though it probably gives their publicists heart palpitations, some best selling novelists are choosing to enter the political fray on social media. J.K. Rowling has long used her Twitter feed to address social and political issues; so has the romance powerhouse Sarah MacLean, who says, "Writing is always political, but now more than ever, it's important for those of us who have a platform to use it to draw attention to what's happening in the world." Stephen King whose novel "The Outsider" is at No. 3 this week is doing just that, tweeting almost daily about government policies, gun control and even specific politicians: "Hey, Texas do I really have to look at Ted Cruz for another six years? Assuming I even live that long?" This past week , whose latest beach blockbuster, "The Perfect Couple," enters the list at No. 2, addressed the Sarah Huckabee Sanders restaurant controversy. "If Sarah Huckabee Sanders came through my line to get her book signed, I would sign it: 'To Sarah, the greatest fiction writer of our times. All best, ,'" she tweeted. She also alerted people coming to a Pennsylvania book signing: "I know you're looking for a way to escape the news. But I am going to start my talk with two sentences: Unlike me, you live in a swing state. You can fix this by voting." When a fan implored, "Don't be political ... just sign your books," she tweeted back, "I don't want to live in a country where everyone thinks like me. I love intelligent debate on issues. In my world, every individual is entitled to a thoughtful opinion." This week a memoir has elbowed its way onto a hardcover list glutted with inside the Beltway books: David Lynch's autobiography "Room to Dream," which enters the list at No. 14. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Other winners on Sunday included "Groundhog Day," which won best new musical and best actor, for Andy Karl; "Jesus Christ Superstar," which won for best musical revival; and "Yerma," which picked up the prize for best play revival and best actress, for Billie Piper's performance. "Harry Potter," a two part play that audiences can watch over two days or in a single, marathon day, takes place about two decades after Harry's years at Hogwarts, as a middle aged Harry ships off his son Albus for his first year at the wizarding academy. J. K. Rowling wrote the story for the play with its playwright, Jack Thorne, and Mr. Tiffany. In going 9 for 11, the show missed only in the categories of theater choreographer, which Matthew Bourne won for his stage adaptation of "The Red Shoes," and outstanding achievement in music, which it lost to the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical "School of Rock." In his acceptance speech, Mr. Bourne apologized to "Harry Potter" fans, apparently referring to the fact that he had broken the show's winning streak. "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" is running in London and is expected to open at the Lyric Theater on Broadway in the spring of 2018. No casting has been announced. "Groundhog Day" is in preview performances on Broadway. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The N.C.A.A. on Thursday updated its guidelines for bringing back college sports this fall, and they included universal masking on all sidelines, daily coronavirus symptom checks and social distancing on and off the field. But if there are going to be sports this fall, the pandemic has to be more under control. And it's not looking good right now. "Today, sadly, the data point in the wrong direction," Mark Emmert, the president of the N.C.A.A., said in a statement. "If there is to be college sports in the fall, we need to get a much better handle on the pandemic." The organization's third iteration of recommendations notes that previous guidelines were written while the spread of Covid 19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, was trending downward. The coronavirus outbreak has surged in states that relaxed stay at home advisories in recent weeks, especially in the South and the West. More than 3.5 million people in the United States have been infected; at least 138,000 Americans have died. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The Danish choreographer Ib Andersen, who first performed in "Napoli" as a child of 7, has been Ballet Arizona's artistic director since 2000. He has become a true ballet master: I've traveled to Phoenix to see his stagings of Balanchine (he was a luminary of New York City Ballet from 1980 to 1990) and his own productions of "The Nutcracker" (one of America's best) and "Cinderella." Now there are tiny Arizona children playing the parts that he and his contemporaries once did in Denmark, and the stage of Symphony Hall in Phoenix is full of committed talent, evoking both Naples and Copenhagen at the same time. In the often revised Act II, Mr. Andersen's version has very effectively changed geometries for the corps, and makes Golfo (Brian Leonard) chilly even in his abusive desire for Teresina. "Napoli" requires that performers gesticulate gorgeously. (I find few human acts more sensuous to behold than a Neapolitan in full flow; Bournonville evidently felt the same, since his Act I often has at least six unrelated mime conversations unfolding at the same time, even when only one of them, center stage, is vital to the narrative.) For the dancers, the work demands long, suspenseful, action packed phrases of jumps and turns, now hitting the beat in midair, now pouncing to land on it and then take off again. There are sustained adagio sequences of linear grace and perfect decorum. We see not just the Neapolitans' energy but also the importance they accord to basic elegance and, despite strife and quarrels, courtesy. Though much of this is far from home for American dancers, it's astonishing what they achieve here. Only in peripheral roles did mime sequences look stiff. Giacomo the macaroni seller (Carlos Valcarcel), and Peppo the lemonade seller (Roman Zavarov) were naughtily funny, and the street singer Pascarillo (Ilir Shtylla) a source of bubbling hilarity. The two leading roles, Gennaro and Teresina, were taken in a performance I saw by the handsome and engaging Alejandro Mendez and Arianni Martin, who both joined the company in 2013 after defecting from Cuba. The other Teresina was Jillian Barrell, who since 2007 has become a central artist here. Her radiance, though marred by a tendency to play the role with her mouth hanging open, acquired a fresh vitality. Best of all was the Gennaro of Nayon Iovino, a Brazilian who joined this troupe in 2012. In his entrance, his grand jete en attitude (a leap with rear leg bent at the knee), sailing toward the audience, and his broad grin lighted up the stage at the same time. In later scenes, his acting was so full bodied and so naturally timed that it seemed not that he was responding to the score but that the music illustrated his every thought. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
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. Too Young for the Job After a series of disappointing results in the Democratic primaries, Elizabeth Warren announced the end of her presidential campaign on Thursday. "In spite of her experience, her track record and her skills in the debates, American voters ultimately decided she just didn't have what they were looking for in a president, which is a penis." JIMMY KIMMEL "Yeah, after a lot of thought and reflection, Warren realized she was overqualified for the job." JIMMY FALLON "Yeah, apparently, America isn't ready to have a president who's only 70." CONAN O'BRIEN "Honestly, I can't say I blame Elizabeth Warren for dropping out. If there was ever a time you'd want to stop shaking millions of hands, this might be it." JIMMY FALLON | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
It has been nearly three months since the first cases of a new coronavirus pneumonia appeared in Wuhan, China, and it is now a global outbreak. And yet, despite over 80,000 infections worldwide (most of them in China), the world still doesn't have a clear picture of some of the most basic information about this outbreak. In recent weeks, a smattering of scientific papers and government statements have begun to sketch the outlines of the epidemic. The Chinese national health commission has reported that more than 1,700 medical workers in the country had contracted the virus as of Feb 14. (That's alarming). The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that some 80 percent of those infected have a mild illness. (That's comforting). Earlier this week, a joint W.H.O. China mission announced that the death rate in Wuhan was 2 to 4 percent, but only .7 percent in the rest of China a difference that makes little scientific sense. In recent days the W.H.O. has complained that China has not been sharing data on infections in health care workers. Earlier this month, the editors of the journal Nature called on researchers to "ensure that their work on this outbreak is shared rapidly and openly." Much more could be known and, in all likelihood, some scientists out there have good, if not definitive, answers. And yet, the lack of consistent, reliable and regularly updated information on the key measures of this outbreak is startling. In an era when we get flash flood warnings on phones and weekly influenza statistics from every state, why is data on the new coronavirus so limited? Science, politics and pride have all, in various ways, conspired to keep potentially vital, lifesaving knowledge under wraps. That is problematic at a time when more information is needed to be strategic about preparedness. It began early in the course of the epidemic. On Dec. 30, a Chinese doctor, Li Wenliang posted about a small number of people with an unusual pneumonia on social media. Though scientists in labs were already sequencing the virus, he was "warned and reprimanded" by local officials for rumor mongering and the "illegal activity of publishing false information online." (Dr. Li later died of the illness.) There is a tradition in China (and likely much of the world) for local authorities not to report bad news to their superiors. During the Great Leap Forward, local officials reported exaggerated harvest yields even as millions were starving. More recently, officials in Henan Province denied there was an epidemic of AIDS spread through unsanitary blood collection practices. Indeed, even when Beijing urges greater attention to scientific reality, compliance is mixed. On Feb. 13, the Communist Party secretaries of Wuhan and Hubei Province lost their jobs over their botched initial handling of the crisis. But damage had been done. As the virus was taking hold, doctors were not wearing proper protective equipment. Sick people, thinking they just had a cold, didn't seek medical attention. And travelers continued to board cruise ships spreading a new pathogen. "Early on, management was less than optimal in Hubei and they're paying for that now," Dr. Ian Lipkin, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health who has been working in China and advising the Chinese government since the SARS outbreak, told me. There were, of course, some genuine barriers to understanding what exactly was happening in Wuhan: Pneumonias are not unusual in winter, and there was no way to know that there was a novel virus. (Dr. Lipkin's group is working on building a new test that distinguishes between different cause of viral pneumonias, with a researcher headed to China next week for testing.) Lest Americans feel that it could never happen here, Dr. Lipkin points out that it took many months for health officials in the United States to acknowledge and recognize H.I.V. as a new virus, despite the fact that gay men were turning up at alarming rates with unusual pneumonias and skin cancers. Scientific competition has also slowed reaction and response, experts fear leading to the extraordinary editors' plea in Nature. For a young researcher, a paper in Nature or the New England Journal of Medicine is gold in career currency. Scientific prestige may encourage perfecting data for peer review, but preparedness requires rapid dissemination of information. While federal officials in the United States warn Americans to be ready for the virus, there are some important aspects of its spread about which we have little information even though they have likely already been studied by scientists and officials, in China, in Japan and elsewhere. Scientists in various countries are presumably gathering large amounts of data day by day and the world deserves to see more of it. "Were there patterns around infections, places, procedures? Maybe that is being collected and readied for the medical literature. But it would be hugely important to know," said Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which studies epidemics. For example: Of the more than 1,700 health workers who were infected in China, did those infections occur before they knew to wear protective equipment? Were they doing procedures that might lead to exposure? Those answers would quell fears about how the virus spreads and how to protect front line workers. Likewise, there were hundreds of people who tested positive aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship and were transferred to the hospital. But there has been little public information released about what shape they were in. How many in the cohort were really sick, how many just had minor symptoms and how many just needed isolation? Does the pattern of infection suggest a role for transmission via plumbing on the ship? Finally, the world's public health researchers need much more transparency about how officials are monitoring this epidemic. What exactly is China's surveillance strategy among the general population? To gauge the actual death rate of Covid 19, researchers would need to know how many people actually have it, even if they have only mild symptoms. In country surveillance may reveal a very large pool of people with mild or no symptoms at all. Dr. Lipkin noted that because cases noted early in an epidemic are the most severe, early mortality estimates tend to be high. As more information comes out, the death rates are likely to fall. "We're probably six months out from having a good picture and when we do I'd guess the mortality will drop dramatically," he said. Compared with the situation in 2003, when it took about five months for the Chinese central government to publicly acknowledge a deadly crisis associated with SARS, the flow of information has clearly improved. But since then, travel and commerce between China and the rest of the world has increased manifold. The spread of information about emerging infectious diseases needs to keep up with that new reality. 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 |
Does the house go with the Rolls Royce, or does the Rolls Royce go with the house? Shawn Elliott, owner of Shawn Elliott Luxury Homes and Estates in Woodbury, N.Y., is opening an office next month inside Rolls Royce Motor Cars Long Island's 9,200 square foot showroom in Jericho, which also displays Bentleys and Lamborghinis that can cost as much as, or more than, a small house. He believes it will be the first residential real estate office inside a car dealership in the country. Under the banner "Shawn Elliott Elite," superluxury car shoppers will be able to view the Gold Coast broker's cache of 5 million plus listings. If one catches their fancy, they can tour the neighborhood and check out the property in what else? a Rolls Royce. What Mr. Elliott calls a "strategic alliance" grew out of invitation only soirees and mansion showings where Antoine Dominic, dealer principal of Rolls Royce Motor Cars Long Island and chief executive of its parent company, the Bespoke Motor Group, helped stage Mr. Elliott's over the top listings by parking a 475,000 Rolls Royce Phantom Drophead coupe or a 398,000 Lamborghini Aventador in the motor courts. "It adds dimension," Mr. Elliott said. "You put a Rolls Royce in front of a home and it creates more excitement for a home. The perception is the home is worth more." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Their stories came out slowly, even hesitantly, at first. Then in a rush. One female entrepreneur recounted how she had been propositioned by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist while seeking a job with him, which she did not land after rebuffing him. Another showed the increasingly suggestive messages she had received from a start up investor. And one chief executive described how she had faced numerous sexist comments from an investor while raising money for her online community website. What happened afterward was often just as disturbing, the women told The New York Times. Many times, the investors' firms and colleagues ignored or played down what had happened when the situations were brought to their attention. Saying anything, the women were warned, might lead to ostracism. Now some of these female entrepreneurs have decided to take that risk. More than two dozen women in the technology start up industry spoke to The Times in recent days about being sexually harassed. Ten of them named the investors involved, often providing corroborating messages and emails, and pointed to high profile venture capitalists such as Chris Sacca of Lowercase Capital and Dave McClure of 500 Startups. The disclosures came after the tech news site The Information reported that female entrepreneurs had been preyed upon by a venture capitalist, Justin Caldbeck of Binary Capital. The new accounts underscore how sexual harassment in the tech start up ecosystem goes beyond one firm and is pervasive and ingrained. Now their speaking out suggests a cultural shift in Silicon Valley, where such predatory behavior had often been murmured about but rarely exposed. The tech industry has long suffered a gender imbalance, with companies such as Google and Facebook acknowledging how few women were in their ranks. Some female engineers have started to speak out on the issue, including a former Uber engineer who detailed a pattern of sexual harassment at the company, setting off internal investigations that spurred the resignation in June of Uber's chief executive, Travis Kalanick. Most recently, the revelations about Mr. Caldbeck of Binary Capital have triggered an outcry. The investor has been accused of sexually harassing entrepreneurs while he worked at three different venture firms in the past seven years, often in meetings in which the women were presenting their companies to him. Several of Silicon Valley's top venture capitalists and technologists, including Reid Hoffman, a founder of LinkedIn, condemned Mr. Caldbeck's behavior last week and called for investors to sign a "decency pledge." Binary has since collapsed, with Mr. Caldbeck leaving the firm and investors pulling money out of its funds. The chain of events has emboldened more women to talk publicly about the treatment they said they had endured from tech investors. "Female entrepreneurs are a critical part of the fabric of Silicon Valley," said Katrina Lake, founder and chief executive of the online clothing start up Stitch Fix, who was one of the women targeted by Mr. Caldbeck. "It's important to expose the type of behavior that's been reported in the last few weeks, so the community can recognize and address these problems." The women's experiences help explain why the venture capital and start up ecosystem which underpins the tech industry and has spawned companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon has been so lopsided in terms of gender. Most venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are men, with female entrepreneurs receiving 1.5 billion in funding last year versus 58.2 billion for men, according to the data firm PitchBook. Many of the investors hold outsize power, since entrepreneurs need their money to turn ideas and innovations into a business. And because the venture industry operates with few disclosure requirements, people have kept silent about investors who cross the lines with entrepreneurs. Some venture capitalists' abuse of power has come to light in recent years. In 2015, Ellen Pao took her former employer, the prestigious venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, to trial for allegations of gender discrimination, leveling accusations of professional retaliation after spurned sexual advances. Ms. Pao lost the case, but it sparked a debate about whether women in tech should publicly call out unequal treatment. "Having had several women come out earlier, including Ellen Pao and me, most likely paved the way and primed the industry that these things indeed happen," said Gesche Haas, an entrepreneur who said she was propositioned for sex by an investor, Pavel Curda, in 2014. Mr. Curda has since apologized. Some of the entrepreneurs who spoke with The Times said they were often touched without permission by investors or advisers. At a mostly male tech gathering in Las Vegas in 2009, Susan Wu, an entrepreneur and investor, said that Mr. Sacca, an investor and former Google executive, touched her face without her consent in a way that made her uncomfortable. Ms. Wu said she was also propositioned by Mr. Caldbeck while fund raising in 2010 and worked hard to avoid him later when they crossed paths. "There is such a massive imbalance of power that women in the industry often end up in distressing situations," Ms. Wu said. After being contacted by The Times, Mr. Sacca wrote in a blog post on Thursday: "I now understand I personally contributed to the problem. I am sorry." In a statement to The Times, he added that he was "grateful to Susan and the other brave women sharing their stories. I'm confident the result of their courage will be long overdue, lasting change." After the publication of this article, Mr. Sacca contacted The Times again to amend his original statement, adding: "I dispute Susan's account from 2009." Many of the women also said they believed they had limited ability to push back against inappropriate behavior, often because they needed funding, a job or other help. In 2014, Sarah Kunst, 31, an entrepreneur, said she discussed a potential job at 500 Startups, a start up incubator in San Francisco. During the recruiting process, Mr. McClure, a founder of 500 Startups and an investor, sent her a Facebook message that read in part, "I was getting confused figuring out whether to hire you or hit on you." Ms. Kunst, who now runs a fitness start up, said she declined Mr. McClure's advance. When she later discussed the message with one of Mr. McClure's colleagues, she said 500 Startups ended its conversations with her. 500 Startups said Mr. McClure, who did not respond to a request for comment, was no longer in charge of day to day operations after an internal investigation. Rachel Renock, the chief executive of Wethos, described a similar situation in which she faced sexist comments while seeking financing for her online community site. While she and her female partners were fund raising in March, one investor told them that they should marry for money, that he liked it when women fought back because he would always win, and that they needed more attractive photos of themselves in their presentation. They put up with the comments, Ms. Renock said, because they "couldn't imagine a world in which that 500,000 wasn't on the table anymore." Ms. Renock declined to name the investor. Wethos raised the 500,000 from someone else and is still fund raising. Wendy Dent, 43, whose company Cinemmerse makes an app for smart watches, said she was sent increasingly flirtatious messages by a start up adviser, Marc Canter, as she was trying to start her company in 2014. Mr. Canter, who had founded a software company in the 1980s that became known as Macromedia, initially agreed to help her find a co founder. But over time, his messages became sexual in nature. In one message, reviewed by The Times, he wrote that she was a "sorceress casting a spell." In another, he commented on how she looked in a blue dress and added, "Know what I'm thinking? Why am I sending you this in private?" Mr. Canter, in an interview, said that Ms. Dent "came on strong to me, asking for help" and that she had used her sexuality publicly. He said he disliked her ideas so he behaved the way he did to make her go away. Some entrepreneurs were asked to not speak about the behavior they experienced. At a start up competition in 2014 in San Francisco, Lisa Curtis, an entrepreneur, pitched her food start up, Kuli Kuli, and was told her idea had won the most plaudits from the audience, opening the door to possible investment. As she stepped off the stage, an investor named Jose De Dios, said, "Of course you won. You're a total babe." Ms. Curtis later posted on Facebook about the exchange and got a call from a different investor. He said "that if I didn't take down the post, no one in Silicon Valley would give me money again," she said. Ms. Curtis deleted the post. In a statement, Mr. De Dios said he "unequivocally did not make a defamatory remark." Often, change happens only when there is a public revelation, some of the women said. In the case of Mr. Caldbeck and Binary, the investor and the firm have apologized, as has Mr. Caldbeck's previous employer, the venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, which had received complaints about him. "We regret we did not take stronger action," Lightspeed said on Twitter on Tuesday. "It is clear now that we should have done more." Lindsay Meyer, an entrepreneur in San Francisco, said Mr. Caldbeck put 25,000 of his own money into her fitness start up in 2015. That gave Mr. Caldbeck reason to constantly text her; in those messages, reviewed by The Times, he asked if she was attracted to him and why she would rather be with her boyfriend than him. At times, he groped and kissed her, she said. "I felt like I had to tolerate it because this is the cost of being a nonwhite female founder," said Ms. Meyer, who is Asian American. But even after she reached out to a mentor, who alerted one of Binary's investors, Legacy Venture, to Mr. Caldbeck's actions, little changed. Legacy went on to invest in Binary's new fund. Binary and Mr. Caldbeck declined to comment. "We failed to follow up on information about Mr. Caldbeck's personal behavior," Legacy said in a statement. "We regret this oversight and are determined to do better." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The illuminated sign, with its alternating time and temperature readings, crests along the skyline just beyond the Brooklyn Bridge, proclaiming the world headquarters of the Jehovah's Witnesses, the religious group that is better known for its door to door evangelism than for its substantial real estate holdings in Brooklyn. Now that the 733,000 square foot headquarters complex and two other nearby properties, all owned by the Witnesses, have been offered for sale to the highest bidders, a contest that is expected to bring in as much as 1 billion, the sign glows with new meaning a beacon for development. "It's a huge asset sale," said Samvir Sidhu, the chief executive of Megalith Capital Management, which is developing, with partners, two luxury residential buildings on former Witnesses sites in Dumbo and plans to bid on at least one of the properties that have just come on the market. "That is a testament to how astute they are, not just as real estate owners but also investors and sellers. There is obviously an aspect of market timing here." The first property the Witnesses put up for sale was 360 Furman Street, which sold for 205 million in 2004. Now a luxury waterfront condo called One Brooklyn Bridge Park, it is home to a penthouse on the market for 32 million, one of the priciest listings in Brooklyn. The Bossert Hotel in Brooklyn Heights, which once hosted the Brooklyn Dodgers, and was used by the Witnesses as residences for staff members and out of town guests, sold for 81 million in 2012. It is being turned back into a hotel. The Witnesses sold three properties in Dumbo, including a former Brillo factory on Water Street, for a total of 30.6 million in 2013; they are on their way to becoming luxury apartments. And six former factories near the base of the Brooklyn Bridge that sold for 375 million, also in 2013, are being renovated into chic offices for tech start ups and trendy businesses like Etsy, WeWork and the jeweler Alexis Bittar. The latest wave of offerings, which besides the headquarters, includes a residential building on the promenade in Brooklyn Heights and a massive parking lot in Dumbo, comes as the Brooklyn real estate market has surged. While these are not the last properties the Witnesses hold there are about a dozen more they are among the most coveted by developers. Dumbo is now one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Brooklyn. And developers are swarming. "Everyone in the world will be taking a look at them," said Tucker Reed, the president of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, a local development corporation. "The barrier to entry for a lot of those folks will be how high land values have gone. I'm sure they will fetch a very high sales price." Mr. Reed estimated the value of the three properties being marketed as "somewhere between 850 million to 1 billion." The prize, perhaps, is 85 Jay Street, at present a parking lot of roughly three acres. Directly across the street from the York Street subway stop, a main gateway to Dumbo, it comes with nearly a million square feet of development rights. The mixed use site is "as of right," which means that it is not subject to a public review process. "Eighty five Jay is a blank slate. That's what makes it so interesting," said A. J. Pires, a partner in Alloy Development, which is behind the nearby luxury condominium One John Street, in collaboration with Monadnock Development. A penthouse at One John Street, in contract for about 8.8 million, is poised to set a record at closing. Alloy is preparing to bid on at least one of the Witnesses' properties. Development of the parking lot could bring more than 1,000 residents to the neighborhood, a 20 percent surge in Dumbo's population, which the Dumbo Improvement District puts at 5,000 residents. The Witnesses acquired the site in the 1980s and 1990s, stringing together a series of old factories and ailing buildings that were eventually demolished. In 2004, the group secured a change to residential from industrial zoning with a plan to build four towers there to consolidate its housing. Then plans changed. But the most ambitious part of the rethought strategy was a new headquarters on a 253 acre forested plot in Warwick, N.Y., that the Witnesses bought in 2009. Now, construction for a self contained campus across 45 acres is well underway, with completion expected sometime this year. The headquarters will have four residential buildings, with 577 units for approximately 1,000 residents, a waste separation facility, a vehicle maintenance building, administrative offices, a commercial grade kitchen, a laundry, an infirmary and more. The compound will be a more cohesive and pastoral version of the city campus that had been scattered across two neighborhoods and nearly 40 buildings in Brooklyn. The sale of the properties in Brooklyn is crucial to completing that plan. The current headquarters, a hulking five building complex at 25 30 Columbia Heights, spans nearly two city blocks at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, where brownstone Brooklyn Heights meets Dumbo's Belgian block streets. Faint letters in dark brick along a smoke stack hint at the original owner of the complex, E.R. Squibb. Stepping out onto the roof deck during a recent tour, Mr. Devine, the Witnesses' spokesman, took in the view. "This kind of gives you an idea of the geography," he said, standing before a stunning panorama of the Lower Manhattan skyline including the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, and all of New York Harbor out toward Staten Island. Inside, most of the building houses administration offices. Vibrant paintings depicting biblical scenes line otherwise institutional beige walls, including a version of paradise where people frolic with pandas. There is a museum documenting the history of the Witnesses, a large dining hall and a kitchen that provides noon and evening meals for nearly 2,000 congregants who come from around the world to volunteer to work at the Brooklyn complex, called Bethel or House of God. "I don't know if this has any interest to future developers," Mr. Devine said, swinging open the door to an immaculate stainless steel facility where aproned chefs were preparing a loaf of bread the size of a tire. More stunning vistas are on offer at the residential building that is for sale, 124 Columbia Heights, with 152,000 square feet, and an enviable perch at the start of the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. The esplanade wraps around the building on two sides, clearing the way for sweeping views of the bridge and Manhattan from its small studios and one bedroom apartments, some with balconies. An underground passageway for transporting supplies leads to other apartment buildings owned by the Witnesses, complete with a bodega like underground commissary. The Witnesses pay fees to the city Department of Transportation to keep the tunnel system open, though a new owner of 124 Columbia Heights may opt to shut down its section of tunnel. Originally, a four story brownstone parsonage used by the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, the pastor of Plymouth Church, was on the site. It was one of the first buildings acquired by the Witnesses in 1909, when they moved their base to Brooklyn from Pennsylvania. That building was demolished in the 1920s to make way for the current structure, which has been expanded over the years. The departure from Pennsylvania was inspired by proximity to both shipping and the New York publishing industry for the production and distribution of the Watchtower magazine and other literature. "Brooklyn was also known as the borough of churches," Mr. Devine said. "It had a reputation of being a center of religious thought." Many credit the group for helping to bring stability to the area during the city's 1970s fiscal crisis and the rough years that followed. "Those were some of the bad old days," recalls Mr. Devine, who arrived from Detroit in 1979 at the age of 19. "The city was falling apart. Services were being cut to the bone. Trash and graffiti were everywhere. The Dumbo section you never walked through there," he said, adding that feral dogs were a common sight. "It was kind of a scary place." While many fled the city, the Witnesses remained. "Brooklyn real estate hasn't always been so frothy," said David Kramer, a principal of Hudson Companies, which developed the J Condominium at 100 Jay Street in Dumbo, directly across the street from the Witnesses' parking lot. "I think they get credit in that during the tough years, they were investing in the neighborhood and keeping their facilities in beautiful shape." But when Dumbo became a full fledged live work neighborhood, people began to grumble about the Witnesses' insular focus, complaining that they held back development that might bring more stores and housing. "There has been very little interaction with the neighborhood," said Alexandria Sica, the executive director for the Dumbo Improvement District. "The defining characteristic of the Witnesses has been giant fences under lock and key." In December, after the most recent sale was announced, a group of elected officials and community leaders sent a letter to the Jehovah's Witnesses calling on the group to make good on a promise to renovate a dismal park across the street from 85 Jay Street that was made when the property was rezoned back in 2004. While the Witnesses have since pledged 5.5 million toward the project, community leaders say they are not satisfied. "That is a drop in the bucket for the amount they are going to be walking away with," said Ms. Sica, noting that as a nonprofit entity, the Witnesses do not pay taxes on their properties. "Now, you have a situation where land prices in this part of Brooklyn have grown so quickly and they are so high that it's not a great situation for the future development for the neighborhood," Mr. Lombino said, noting that Two Trees' first condos sold in the late 1990s for 300 a square foot. To make a profit on 85 Jay Street, he said, a developer would need to get at least 2,000 a square foot. "At those prices, there is only one possible use, and that's luxury condominiums. So you're talking about a different kind of buyer." For their part, the Witnesses do not view themselves as being in the real estate business. "Real estate is incidental to our mission," Mr. Devine said. "We've never bought properties on speculation. When we no longer need them, we sell them." Because he has called Brooklyn home for so long, his move upstate will take some getting used to. "It's quite a bit different atmosphere," said Mr. Devine, who has been splitting his time between the construction site in Warwick and the headquarters in Brooklyn, which are about 50 miles apart. "At first, it was a tough transition for me and my wife," he said. "We missed the city when we left." Then, putting his spokesman hat back on, he added, "We're not sentimental as an organization, though we love our history in Brooklyn. We need to do what's practical for our work." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
LAGOS, Nigeria Cars snaked out from the hideous traffic and deposited the city's elite, dressed to impress, at the Civic Center, a concrete and steel edifice fronting Lagos Lagoon . Women exuding Vogue beauty and power paused on the patio to give television interviews. Art X Lagos was living up to its reputation as a happening. Not just collectors, but the hip, the curious, the Instagram crowd, thronged West Africa's principal fair in November. They packed the venue to hear the keynote talk by the distinguished British Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, back for the occasion. The Ooni of Ife, a Yoruba king, showed up, escorted by praise singers. Conversations carried over from gallery openings around town and from the Art Summit, a two day convening, where the celebrated painter Kehinde Wiley, flown in by the United States consulate, was a special guest. This enormous city with no official census, population estimates range from 13 million to 21 million is dynamic by disposition. Yes, the roads are clogged, political corruption is rampant, and the power cuts trigger armies of generators spewing noxious fumes. But Lagosians who are proud of their "hustle," a mix of effort, imagination, and brash optimism will turn any challenge into enterprise. Commerce, music, fashion, have long thrived amid the chaos. And now, with its solid collector base and thickening web of galleries and alternative spaces, the art "ecosystem" the word everyone uses is achieving critical mass. "The city still has that negative reputation," admitted Tokini Peterside, the founder of Art X and one of the energetic arts entrepreneurs predominantly women powering the scene. "We hope to redeem some of that image by providing a good reason for people to come to Lagos. It may have challenges, but it's a pretty exciting place." Nigeria has had art movements before the Zaria Rebels, who unleashed Nigerian modern art in the late 1950s, or the Yoruba modernism of the Osogbo school, to say nothing of sculpture, textile and performance traditions. Recently, Nigerian contemporary artists have found success abroad. Works by the painter Njideka Akunyili Crosby, based in Los Angeles, have sold for upward of 3 million. The Berlin based sound and installation artist Emeka Ogboh was a finalist for the Guggenheim Museum's 2018 Hugo Boss Prize. The Lagos scene, however, joins homegrown artists with those who lived or studied abroad but moved back, inspired to create amid the energy of the city. "You have more people who know they can actually survive as artists," said Victor Ehikhamenor, a painter and sculptor who returned here from the United States in 2008, somewhat ahead of the curve. Gerald Chukwuma, a Nigerian sculptor in his 40s, showed new work at the fair with the Ghana based Gallery 1957, which has a Pan African roster. His theme was Igbo Landing the story of enslaved people from what is now Nigeria, who, upon disembarking from the Middle Passage in the Sea Islands of Georgia in 1803, walked back into the ocean in their chains rather than submit. Mr. Chukwuma said few Igbo in Nigeria know the story. "We have to retrieve this culture," he said. At the booth for Artyrama, a Lagos gallery, Ayobola Kekere Ekun showed paper and textile portraits of Yoruba goddesses as googly eyed reality TV stars. Oba, wife of Sango, was persuaded by her conniving co wife, Osun, to cut off an ear as a show of devotion. "So much drama," Ms. Kekere Ekun said. "I found it interesting how Oba was willing to mutilate herself to hold onto her man." Art X is of comparable scale to the Africa focused contemporary art fairs 1 54 (held in London, New York and Marrakesh) and AKAA, in Paris. But whereas those fairs address international collectors, Ms. Peterside, who holds an M.B.A. and is the daughter of a prominent banker, began the Lagos event as a cultural investment in the city and a business bet on Nigeria's burgeoning collector class. In a glamour move, the fair displayed "Tutu," the 1974 painting by Ben Enwonwu of an Ife princess that disappeared for decades before turning up in a London apartment. It set an auction record for a Nigerian modern work at auction last year, selling for 1.67 million. (The buyer, said to be a collector from Nigeria, remains anonymous.) "Mad Horse City," a project by the Brooklyn artist Olalekan Jeyifous and the Lagos writer Wale Lawal, invited visitors into a speculative vision of 22nd century Lagos with a video projection, a graphic novella, and a virtual reality experience. "The first thing was to develop the culture of looking," Ms. Peterside said. "And go a step further to say that you can play." GENERATIONAL RENEWAL and art world globalization are shaking up habits in the Lagos gallery scene. Galleries here traditionally worked with artists in nonexclusive arrangements. Some are tucked away in fancy residences or open by appointment. It made for a small, in the know collector base and left artists feeling vulnerable to dealers' whims. Augury of change came in 2007, when the curator Bisi Silva founded the Center for Contemporary Art, which pioneered contemporary exhibitions and residencies. The next year, Kavita Chellaram, a collector from a prominent Indian business family, opened Nigeria's first art auction house. Its sales made prices visible for the first time. Now, young gallerists like Adenrele Sonariwo, at Rele Gallery, and Caline Chagoury, at Art Twenty One, are engaging with their artists' careers, and encouraging new audiences. Ms. Sonariwo operates on multiple fronts. She holds an annual Young Contemporaries showcase of artists she scouts herself; this year's edition is currently on view. In 2017, she was a curator of Nigeria's first pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The Art Summit was her initiative as well an effort, she said, to gather the "ecosystem" around a sense of shared interests, centering on the artists. "At the end of the day this industry exists because of the artists," Ms. Sonariwo said. "Respecting that, and the artists respecting themselves, was very important to me." At Olu Amoda's workshop in the Maryland area, a residential tangle on mainland Lagos away from the city center, an enormous work in progress hung from a 20 foot gantry. Mr. Amoda sculpts intricate geometric works using reclaimed metal, from keys and springs to industrial pipe. His assistants work nearby. Two are deaf mute. "They teach me patience," he said. Like many veteran artists in Lagos, his practice is in effect a small business, with staff and contractors often supporting families in the countryside. Artists like Mr. Amoda, who is 60, remember a relatively functional Nigeria of the 1970s, but began their careers later, under dictatorship and economic crisis. By 1999, when democracy returned, many had scattered or changed professions out of necessity. Some toughed it out, among them Mr. Amoda and his friends, the painters Rom Isichei and Kainebi Osahenye, whose studios are nearby. This generation takes in the current buzz with a level of detachment. "I'm working now just for my daughter, and for my studio," said Mr. Amoda, who is collected locally but has fallen short of major international recognition. Nevertheless, he has entrusted his sales to Art Twenty One. Mr. Osahenye said he avoided thinking about money. "There are times you sell a piece and the next day it's in an auction at 10 times the price," he said. AMONG THE MANY HURDLES is the lack of institutions. State support for the arts disappeared in the 1980s. The National Museum is a hollow shell. It rents out space where anyone who pays can hold an exhibition. "The movement is purely private sector oriented," said Gbenga Oyebode, a lawyer and major collector. "I don't see public art, I don't see government museums. When I do go to museums, they are so badly kept that you have to ask yourself what happened." A museum sponsored by Yemisi Shyllon, one of Nigeria's biggest collectors, is under construction at a private university. "Once one is built, the others will follow," Mr. Oyebode said. Other complaints involve logistics. Customs is a hassle. The traffic can turn a simple delivery into a nightmare. But the problems also exercise a creative draw. Sprawled between lagoons and the sea, Lagos faces high risks from climate change. The artist Temitayo Ogunbiyi is collecting flora from the lagoon to use in environmental pieces. She is designing playgrounds, with equipment inspired by the shapes of elaborate Yoruba hairstyles to remedy the lack of public leisure spaces. The painter Nengi Omuku, whose works of abstracted, fragmented self portraiture explore mental health and fractured identities, is organizing the renovation, by artists, of a building at the city's main psychiatric hospital. Though she has lived in England, Ms. Omuku said she couldn't imagine staying there. "I felt like some sort of alien," she said. "I feel most inspired in Nigeria." A BACK STAIRWELL in a shopping mall hosts one of Lagos's sharpest artist run spaces: The Revolving Art Incubator, in the Victoria Island business area. It is a vertical project, making an exhibition and event site of steps and landings. Lately a gargantuan wood figure wearing a cap has dangled three stories down in the stairwell, with small counterparts on the landings. They represent the "godfathers," or bosses, who dominate Nigerian politics. Hundreds of comments found on Twitter on the state of Nigeria were fastened on slips of paper to a wall. Upstairs, old televisions ran footage of each of Nigeria's past heads of state. Their sound was off. Instead, speakers played clips of animated bus stop debates. Seven floors above the busy Awolowo Road in Ikoyi district, Wura Natasha Ogunji has turned her airy apartment in a worn middle class complex into The Treehouse, an art space with a sweeping view. Ms. Ogunji, who is Nigerian American, moved to Nigeria in 2011, despite barely knowing that side of her family. "I had a sense of a magical life," she said. She began to host dinners and eventually, art happenings. Once, the photographer and conceptual artist Rahima Gambo hauled up 45 palm trees, complete with dirt. Another time, Tito Aderemi Ibitola, a performance and video artist, enacted a five hour endurance piece. Ms. Ogunji puts out the word on social media. "It's always a different crowd," she said. Later this year, the Lagos Biennial will return. Its first edition, the fever dream of the photographer and curator Folakunle Oshun, took place at a railway yard that was underused because of the city's anemic train service. It was a decidedly edgy affair . "I think we are mutants in this town," Mr. Oshun said. " We have learned to create a totally different approach to existence, and just make this madness work." People were squatting in train cars. Security involved negotiating with "area boys," street toughs who control neighborhoods. The state government tried to clear out the informal settlement. "Of course the people went back," Mr. Oshun recalled. This year the biennial will return in a new location, perhaps slightly tamed, with three Nigerian curators based in Chicago, London and Lagos. Its theme is the metaphor, found in a poem by Akeem Lasisi, of the lagoon flowing out of a bottle of wine. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? David Streitfeld, a technology reporter in San Francisco, discussed the tech he's using and not using. For a tech journalist, you don't use a lot of tech. One of the great victories of the tech industry was insisting that if you didn't love its products, and by extension the companies themselves, you were not fit to cover it. I never understood how that edict gained traction. We don't think that crooks make the best crime reporters. I took my inspiration from writers I admired Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Don DeLillo, Barry Malzberg. They were all low tech people. Le Guin didn't drive. DeLillo doesn't do email. Dick barely left his apartment. Malzberg lives in New Jersey. Yet they foresaw how technology would reshape society better than any of the geniuses in Silicon Valley. "What technology can do becomes what we need it to do," DeLillo said. Le Guin observed: "The internet just invites crap from people." Those quotes sum up the last 20 years. What tech do you actually use? That's not enough? Another illusion promoted by Big Tech is that everyone is using it. After all, everyone in America is on Facebook, right? Everyone with an opinion is on Twitter. But most of the people I know aren't on either. They live in the real world. I exaggerate a bit. For all Twitter's resemblance to the last chapters of "Lord of the Flies," it's a remarkably good way to find unusual stories and fresh viewpoints. My method: I select someone who just posted a hot take, and then I read backward through his or her tweets while also reading the replies to them. If he or she is a prolific tweeter, you quickly end up in his or her brain for better or worse. I generally do this after midnight, fortified by a glass of gin. I rarely tweet myself, because my only followers are Russian bots and my editor, who is contractually required to read everything I write. You've written about Amazon since the beginning. Sometimes you give it up as a subject, and yet you're always drawn back. They want to take over the world, and they want to keep it all secret. What could possibly be more alluring for a reporter? Amazon is the first 21st century company, an attempt to become the interface between you and everything else, starting with your nearest and dearest. Just watch the rollout film for the Echo from 2014 it's all there. Amazon will mediate every one of your desires. Unless Google gets there. The Amazon Google War will define our era. What piece of book technology do you use every day? ViaLibri.net is an excellent book search engine. It doesn't sell you the book, but tells you, for free, who is selling a copy or, for really obscure stuff, the closest academic library with a copy. I use it the way other people use Google. The volume of material out there still amazes me. Even leaving aside e books, the internet has changed reading forever. You used to have to struggle to find books by, say, the baroque fantasist Avram Davidson or Harry Stephen Keeler, the early 20th century novelist whose bizarre stories eventually alienated his audience completely. Now their entire works, and everyone else's, can be painlessly found by anyone who wants them. Literary culture is fragmenting and deepening in front of our eyes. What's the No. 1 question you're asked about buying books on the web? "Is it possible to buy used books on the internet without buying from Amazon?" It's certainly not easy. People sometimes tell me they've given up Amazon for AbeBooks, a virtual storefront for a worldwide network of dealers. They don't realize it is owned by Amazon, something Amazon certainly does not go out of its way to point out. Are there other book sites you like? The Book Depository is a British bookseller that is in some ways the anti Amazon. It has a clunky website that feels trapped in 2003. But the store has one great redeeming feature: It does not charge for postage, which is considerable across the ocean. A copy of Le Guin's latest nonfiction collection not published in America would cost me 30 from Amazon.co.uk. From the Book Depository, it is 17. They either have a sweet deal with the United States Postal Service, which delivers their packages, or they take a bath on every order. Did I mention that the Book Depository is owned by Amazon? You and your wife raised your 8 year old daughter in a largely tech free household. How? For the first couple of years, our girl never saw any tech at home more complicated than a blender. She did not see her first video until she was 4, on a holiday weekend when she was sick. Instead there were a lot of books around, and they got heavy use. She turned out to be a great reader, confirming the old notion that kids become either just like their parents or like their nightmare opposite, which in my case would have meant a "declutterer" like Marie Kondo. She devoured the "Oz" books, even the ones by Ruth Plumly Thompson. We read aloud E. Nesbit's hilarious "Treasure Seekers" series about a late Victorian family of dim bulbs, and she brought in "Moby Dick" for show and tell. For a while we were pretty smug parents. She picked up on the playground all sorts of information about Katy Perry and Taylor Swift, and now demands 10 minutes of YouTube songs a night that often mysteriously expands to half an hour. Technology is creeping in on many fronts. On trips she listens to audiobooks that we get through Overdrive. She tunes her violin with an app and practices Hebrew via Duolingo. I am bracing myself for the teenage years. Her favorite phrase is "How dare you." She's a natural for Twitter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Denee Benton, in white, as Natasha, with other members of the cast of "Natasha, Pierre the Great Comet of 1812." Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'AS YOU LIKE IT' at the Delacorte Theater (performances start on Sept. 1). The Public Works project of the Public Theater does what it will with this enchanting Shakespeare comedy. The composer Shaina Taub and the director Laurie Woolery have adapted the play for a cast of more than 200 performers, from seasoned professionals to school age amateurs, with cameos from the Bronx Wrestling Federation and the Sing Harlem Choir. Performances are free. publictheater.org 'A CLOCKWORK ORANGE' at New World Stages (previews start on Sept. 2; opens on Sept. 25). If ultra violence in the real world has left you eager for more, consider this London import, a stage version of the futuristic Anthony Burgess novel. In Alexandra Spencer Jones's production, Jonno Davies stars as a young man with some marked antisocial tendencies and a penchant for suspenders. 212 239 6200, aclockworkorangeplay.com 'KPOP' at A.R.T./New York Theaters (previews start on Sept. 5; opens on Sept. 22). Have you ever dreamed of rock 'n' roll stardom and the deathless adoration of millions of preteen girls? Then step inside this immersive musical, a collaboration among Ars Nova, Woodshed Collective and Ma Yi Theater Company. The director Teddy Bergman, the playwright Jason Kim, and the composers Helen Park and Max Vernon take audiences inside a South Korean hit factory. 212 352 3101, arsnovanyc.com 'MARY JANE' at New York Theater Workshop (previews start on Sept. 6; opens on Sept. 25). Amy Herzog, a playwright with a genius for character and a sense of moral urgency, reunites with the director Anne Kauffman for this new work. Carrie Coon ("Fargo," "The Leftovers") stars as a single mother caring for a sick child. With Liza Colon Zayas, Danaya Esperanza, Susan Pourfar and Brenda Wehle. 212 460 5475, nytw.org 'THE TREASURER' at Playwrights Horizons (previews start on Sept. 6; opens on Sept. 26). Max Posner's last play, the sibling comedy "Judy," was set a couple of decades in the future. He bounds back to the present with this tale of a free spending aging mother and the grown son assigned to keep control of her purse strings. David Cromer directs Deanna Dunagan and Peter Friedman. 212 279 4200, phnyc.org 'HAMLET' at the Public Theater (closes on Sept. 3). Cue the flights of angels as Sam Gold's revival of Shakespeare's most famous tragedy, starring Oscar Isaac, is sung to its rest. Ben Brantley praised the "gloriously involving" production and the "majestically impudent" Mr. Isaac, writing, "the show's intimidating four hours pass as quickly as a night at a bar with some of the best storytellers you've ever met." 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'NATASHA, PIERRE THE GREAT COMET OF 1812' at the Imperial Theater (closes on Sept. 3). Dave Malloy's adaptation of a chunk of "War and Peace," with immersive direction by Rachel Chavkin, is falling out of its Broadway orbit. The Times described this "rapturous" pop opera, about love affairs among a group of Russian nobles in the age of Napoleon, as "a witty, inventive enchantment from rousing start to mournful finish." 212 239 6200, greatcometbroadway.com 'VAN GOGH'S EAR' at the Pershing Square Signature Center (closes on Sept. 10). Gather up those irises and sunflowers as this multimedia piece about the life and death of Vincent van Gogh finishes its run. In his review, Ben Brantley said that this "animated tone poem," written by Eve Wolf and directed by Donald T. Sanders for Ensemble for the Romantic Century, exuded "an uncanny beauty and emotionalism." 212 279 4200, romanticcentury.org 'WOODY SEZ: THE LIFE AND MUSIC OF WOODY GUTHRIE' at the Irish Repertory Theater (closes on Sept. 10). Having roamed and rambled, this musical celebration of the works and days of Woody Guthrie follows its footsteps to the end of its summer run. As performed by four actor musicians and directed by Nick Corley, "the songs and high spirits come in a bracing torrent," wrote The Times's critic. 212 727 2737, irishrep.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In March 1982, "Beauty and the Beat" that classic, effervescent, catch a wave of pink champagne debut by the Los Angeles band the Go Go's made history: It became the first record by an all female group who wrote its own songs and played its own instruments to hit No. 1 on the Billboard album chart. Thirty eight years later, it's hard to decide what's more of a shock: That it took so long to happen, or that it hasn't happened since. "People automatically assume we were probably put together by some guy," the lead singer Belinda Carlisle says in Alison Ellwood's spirited new documentary "The Go Go's," which airs on Showtime this weekend. "But we did it all ourselves." Of course, the Go Go's were hardly the music industry's first commercially dominant girl group (with their dozen No. 1 singles, the Supremes rivaled the Beatles' popularity in the mid 1960s) nor were they the first gang of guitar slinging women to "do it all themselves" (the hippie rockers Fanny and the British punks the Slits were just a few of the feminist minded bands forging disparate paths in the 1970s). But the Go Go's fused those two impulses together most seamlessly for mass consumption. "Beauty and the Beat" was, in the words of the bassist Kathy Valentine, "a pop record with a punk rock ethic." "There never would have been the Go Go's without the punk rock scene in Los Angeles," the guitarist Jane Wiedlin says, placing the group within the context of local peers like X, Bags and the Eyes (the band that a mop topped blonde named Charlotte Caffey would eventually leave to join the Go Go's.) While honing their chops, the Go Go's toured the United Kingdom opening for the underground heroes Madness and the Specials, braving the jeers and spit of angry skinheads. When we first meet Carlisle in the doc, she's not wearing cheery MTV ready pastels, but a caustic Elvis sneer and a plastic garbage bag as a dress. Caffey was "terrified" when she first brought the group a demo tape of a little ditty she'd written called "We Got the Beat": "I was thinking, man, these girls are going to throw me out of this band, because it was a pop song." But her bandmates knew a great tune when they heard one, and the track's aerodynamic momentum perfectly matched the Go Go's' increasingly skyward ambitions. (The film is a treasure trove of archival footage; one memorable clip shows Carlisle singing an early, punky version of "We Got the Beat" in a dingy club and taunting the crowd to dance: "Come on, don't be too cool.") Plenty of journalists fixated on the creation myth that the Go Go's "couldn't play their instruments" when they started out though the same sort of scrappy, D.I.Y. energy was often seen as a sign of authenticity for male punk bands. And it wasn't entirely true: Caffey was an accomplished multi instrumentalist who'd studied classical piano in college; the tough talking Baltimore transplant Gina Schock the group's insistent, thumping heartbeat was a drummer to be reckoned with from the day she joined the band. "The genuine exuberance of our music gave people an escape and a respite from the meanness and greed defining the era," Valentine wrote in her excellent recent memoir "All I Ever Wanted," with the crisp clarity of cultural hindsight. In their casually charismatic music videos, the Go Go's offered the allure of rakish, why so serious fun. ("We Got the Beat" had the cosmic luck of coming out a month before MTV went on the air.) Their take on gender equality meant not only playing and writing just as well as the guys, but partying as hard (or harder) than they did, too. At their most bacchanalian, one inebriated Go Go received the dubious honor of being kicked out of Ozzy Osbourne's Rock in Rio dressing room no small feat. Ellwood, to her credit, doesn't avert her eyes from the uglier parts of the Go Go's story, like the firing of the founding bassist Margot Olavarria, a dyed in the wool punk who objected to the band's increasingly polished, melodic sound. "It wasn't just about the music, it was the sense of being packaged into a product," Olavarria recalls. "It was becoming less about art and more about money." Prophetic words. What plenty of people found most "empowering" about the Go Go's they write their own songs! created, behind the scenes, a complicated power imbalance that accelerated the band's collapse. Because Caffey, Wiedlin and Valentine were the group's primary songwriters, their share of the profits were considerably larger than Carlisle's or Schock's. That's probably what motivated Carlisle to pull the biggest power move she could muster: going solo. "I've wondered many times how it would have been if part of the whole deal had been to keep everyone happy," Valentine writes in her book. If the group had contributions from all members, "we could have supported each other and granted space for each of us to grow instead of confining ourselves to a formula with a limited shelf life." But the same personal chemistry that fueled the group's rocket ship ascent is also what made them combustible. Since that first split in 1985, the Go Go's have broken up and reformed more times than the documentary has time to chronicle. Most recently, Valentine parted ways with the group in 2012, but she's back in the fold now. The beat goes on. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Art is what binds us. It illuminates the human condition. It's good for the soul. Those are the kind of arguments you usually hear when artists and cultural institutions ask for money. The advocacy group Be an ArtsHero, which was created this summer by four New York theatermakers, takes a different approach. "We are an industry, not a cause," one of the volunteer group's four organizers, the writer director Matthew Lee Erlbach, said of the arts sector in a recent video interview. "According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, we generated 877 billion. It's more than agriculture and mining combined." Yet, he pointed out, there's no federal department of arts and culture, while transportation and agriculture have spots in the cabinet. Erlbach and his Arts Hero founding colleagues the actors Carson Elrod and Brooke Ishibashi and the writer director performer Jenny Grace Makholm are not cultural mucky mucks used to the corridors of power. When the performing arts shut down, what was on their mind was their own survival. Ishibashi said the campaign began simply as a way to rally the sector to advocate for the extension of Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation that was due to expire in August. "We started by cold calling people and building out assets and saying, 'Here's a tool kit, please spread the word.' We lobby differently because we lobby for ourselves and our own desperate need. We are all worried about how we're going to pay our rent and our mortgages." The unemployment compensation wasn't extended at the time, but Be an ArtsHero forged ahead. They started creating economic reports for members of Congress in a joint conversation, Ishibashi and Erlbach referred casually to relief efforts the group is backing, an alphabet soup of acronyms like CALMER (Culture, Arts, Libraries and Museums Emergency Relief) and DAWN (Defend Arts Workers Now). Following up on the lobbying efforts of long running organizations like Americans for the Arts, the group has pushed to help shape legislative language so bills include relief to artists and workers, not just institutions. Erlbach's widely circulated open letter to the U.S. Senate arguing for emergency relief drew 16,000 signatories, including rank and file members of the culture sector and celebrities, institutional and union leaders, and advocacy groups. The letter hammered the group's essential point: The arts matter because they represent a lot of money and they create jobs. "We're here to change the conversation so arts workers can understand their intrinsic value because it's tied to an economic worth, a dollar amount," Ishibashi said. "Those numbers are unimpeachable." Erlbach added, "Ironically, the arts has a story problem in this country." "We are here to become a legislative priority, and part of doing that is reframing the paradigm that we are labor," he said. "Whether you're an usher, a milliner, a museum docent, an administrator or a publicist, you're an arts and cultural worker. " Erlbach, who leads the group's political outreach team, says that Be an ArtsHero has met with representatives from dozens of House members and over 60 Senate offices. "It felt like the legislative process is something someone else does," he said. "Now that's something that we do." The stimulus bill just passed by Congress delivered some good news for the arts, including weekly unemployment supplements. "At 300, what passed was not enough," Be an ArtsHero said in an email statement. "But it was something, and we are proud to have lent our voice to the cause of getting it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In a historic theater in a part of New York City far from the usual runway haunts, in front of thousands of ravenous fans (including some very famous ones) who stood in lines around the block waiting for admittance, in a room swollen with the voices of a 65 person choir, expectation and glamour, a fashion week force gathered critical mass. No, I am not talking about the Apollo Theater in Harlem, where Tommy Hilfiger and Zendaya showed their latest see now buy now collaboration in front of a faux Harlem street of brownstones at the service of a live stream. I am talking about the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn, where Kerby Jean Raymond of Pyer Moss unveiled the last in a series of three collections conceived to re examine some of most basic American pop culture tropes through an African American lens. In February 2018, it was the cowboy; last September, it was family time and the backyard barbecue; and this season, it was rock 'n' roll. And it is at the service of actual life. Each time, he pulls in multiple collaborators (artists, formerly famous black brands) to expand his community, and in all cases the point was as the writer Casey Gerald said in an oration before the show that called out the anniversary of 1619 and the arrival of the first slaves in America to reclaim black history and the stories we tell ourselves about how we got here. Mr. Jean Raymond isn't trying to change the shape of clothes (he's not Rei Kawakubo, challenging the definition of "garment"); he is trying to change how we think about clothes and who gets to be a part of making that myth known as "American fashion." It's been a long time since a New York designer displayed real riotous ambition ambition that doesn't have anything to do with Instagram or likes or serving here today gone tomorrow desires. A long time since one took on the national conversation with nuance and a lack of fear. "Diversity and inclusion" have become buzzwords of the moment (they are included in the handout at practically every show), but this wasn't about that. It was about ownership. So, for example, this collection, titled "Sister," began with the history of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a "queer black woman in the church," according to Mr. Jean Raymond, who also happened to be the "founder of rock 'n' roll" though her contributions are often unacknowledged. To celebrate that, he reached out to Richard Phillips, a black artist who was wrongfully imprisoned in a Michigan jail for 46 years (he was exonerated of homicide charges in 2017), as well as Sean John, the clothing line founded by Sean Combs, the first black designer to win a Council of Fashion Designers of America award. The models had been found during an open casting on Instagram, and it took place in the Kings Theatre, because the surrounding neighborhood, East Flatbush, is where Mr. Jean Raymond grew up. He was opening up his doors and bringing everyone home. Literally and metaphorically. That's a lot of meaning to sew into clothes, and sometimes it weighed down the results. Mr. Jean Raymond has what is starting to look like a signature silhouette zoot suit shouldered jackets cropped at the waist atop liquid trousers for both men and women but hanging a little piano keyboard at the hem of the jacket flirted with kitsch. Better were the broken keyboard pen and ink prints, and the curving cuts of the jacket lapels, which just hinted at the curves of a guitar, seizing them back from the skinny white rockers of legend. Also the painterly silk tee dresses with portraits by Mr. Phillips, the swishing long shirts over skinny trousers, the pleated soul goddess gowns in gold and periwinkle, with trainlike sleeves. Not to mention the Reebok collection, with its graffiti led cool. (Mr. Jean Raymond was recently named artistic director of Reebok Studies, charged with making a kind of creative hub for the brand.) Fair enough. But his choice of subject matter has the effect of making the poetically self conscious color wheel stylings of Sies Marjan and the creased cocktail florals of Jason Wu, both pretty as they are, seem increasingly narrow and small in focus. At least Prabal Gurung's 10th anniversary show, which had the pertinent and somewhat flammable title, "Who Gets to Be an American?" (inspired by both a 2018 Time magazine cover and a disheartening conversation the designer had with a financier), dared grapple with a bigger question. That Mr. Gurung chose to answer it by settling on a hodgepodge of stereotypical fashion tropes white cotton, denim, seersucker, red, white and blue, power suiting, benefit circuit dresses and then reinterpreting them his own way, adding flounces to the denim, hippie tie dye to the flag waving, and peacenik pastel florals to the suiting, frittered away some of the point. The connection between identity and dress was the right one, but there was too much focus on surface. By contrast, Mr. Jean Raymond is preoccupied with essence, with an ability to make it personal. He was willing to sit a season out, as he did last February, because he needed more time to map out his ideas, and because he thinks consumers need time, too, to save money to buy clothes. But he won the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund award last year. He is outside the system and also of it . In a post show interview backstage at King's Theatre, he said thought he could use fashion to correct the record because "I don't care about selling clothes" and, in the same breath, that "I want to make money." It sounds absurd, but in his world, those two realities can coexist. The ability to not worry about the one lays the groundwork for the second. It could be a genuine game changer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
"Moby Dick" was published in 1851, but The New York Times didn't review it. In fact, The Times didn't mention Herman Melville until 1861 in a review of somebody else's book, "Adventures in the South Pacific." "The author has borrowed bodily, without giving credit therefor, from Melville's 'Moby Dick,'" the paper complained, while conceding it was a theft the publisher, "the Harpers, may have sanctioned, as they hold the copyright of both books." In 1876, The Times reviewed Melville's work for the first time a two volume, 600 page poem about the Holy Land, "Clarel," declaring tartly: "It should have been written in prose. ... Verse is certainly not the author's forte." In 1890, the paper reported that Melville had slipped so far into obscurity that most New Yorkers did not realize he was still alive. "There are more people to day who believe Herman Melville dead than there are those who know he is living. And yet if one chose to walk along East Eighteenth Street, New York City, any morning about 9 o'clock, he would see the famous writer of sea stories stories which have never been equaled." When Melville died on Sept. 28, 1891, the paper barely noted it, listing him after "one of the founders of Navesink, N.J.," "a civil engineer," "a special partner in the picture importing firm of Reichard Co.," "the best known criminal lawyer in Connecticut" and "the oldest resident of the Oranges," to name a few. It also misspelled the title of his most famous book. "Herman Melville died yesterday at his residence, 104 East Twenty sixth Street, this city, of heart failure, aged seventy two. He was the author of 'Typee,' "Omoo,' 'Mobie Dick' and other seafaring tales, written in earlier years." Several days later, in lieu of a longer, more formal obituary, The Times ran an appreciation of Melville. "There has died and been buried in this city, during the current week, at an advanced age, a man who is so little known, even by name, to the generation now in the vigor of life that only one newspaper contained an obituary account of him, and this was but of three or four lines. Yet forty years ago the appearance of a new book by Herman Melville was esteemed a literary event." The paper pointed out that most of Melville's books were out of print, and added, "When a visiting British writer a few years ago inquired at a gathering in New York of distinctly literary Americans what had become of Herman Melville," no one was able to tell him anything, despite the fact that Melville "was then living within a half mile of the place of the conversation." A letter to The New York Times Book Review described what it was like to be friends with Melville: "Though a delightful talker when in the mood, he was abnormal, as most geniuses are, and had to be handled with care. He seemed to me to hold his work in small esteem, and discouraged my attempts to discuss them. 'You know,' he would say, 'more about them than I do. I have forgotten them.'" "Moby Dick" has "had to wait long for an adequate illustrated edition," The Times said in a 1930 review of the novel's famous Rockwell Kent edition. The paper liked Kent's drawings well enough ("the drawings which he made for this edition are among the best he has ever put between the covers of a book"), but found fault with the typography and called the book itself a "squat, bulky volume." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
PARIS A decade into his stint at Dior Homme, Kris Van Assche is plainly doing something right. Even before the days of revolving door designers, a term of employment that long might have qualified Mr. Van Assche for a gold pocket watch. It happens that Christian Dior spent the same amount of time at the storied house that bears his name. In those years the designer completely altered the history of postwar 20th century fashion. Mr. Van Assche, by contrast, has effected surprisingly little change, either in the broader culture or even his own style. Season after season he creates commercial men's wear that alludes to risks he largely sidesteps, makes obligatory reference to a youth culture at some distance from his actual customers and all but shuns color in a house that, more than any other, was built on its magic. Still, the formula must be working. The suits the designer claimed to be reinventing in a monochrome show held inside the bombastic 19th century Grand Palais made over with sod and pendant black plastic fronds to evoke a nighttime field into which some young rowdies are headed will most likely look pretty much like those from last season once they hit the selling floor. That must work for the Dior Homme consumer. There were waistcoats over this season's ubiquitous gym shorts, notched at the sides and cut as high as the ones you wore in fifth grade; sleeveless vest jackets; figure eight suits seamed to follow the lines of the body; binding tape woven with the rue de Marignan address of Dior's men's wear atelier worn as scarves, ribboning jackets, turned into an overall pattern and, in a flash of wit, left as labels sewn on the outside of jacket sleeves. If the familiar is a safe space for Mr. Van Assche, a more adventurous designer like Olivier Rousteing, of Balmain, explores cultural deja vu as a thrilling danger zone. For a show so chauvinistic in its orientation it was a wonder he didn't screen Jerry Lewis movies afterward, Mr. Rousteing seemed determined to remind everyone of his deeply rooted Frenchness. Yet what does it mean to be French at a time when a brilliant young technocrat is elected president on his promises to restore a flagging economy and mend a fragmented polity? Can the inclusive and modernized country imagined by Emmanuel Macron be found compatible with the nostalgic France the innovative French chef Alain Senderens once derided as stuck in "tra la la and chichi"? Mr. Rousteing seemed to choose for the latter in a show whose soundtrack featured hoary tunes by Brigitte Bardot and Serge Gainsbourg and models of either sex strutting the catwalk in fussily ornamented clothes that, even when they overtly referred to Americana, did so in a way that brought to mind Top 40 hits in nutso translation. It was delightful, if mystifying, the designer's largely monochrome array of leather tunics, semitransparent Breton stripe sweaters, Old Glory tunics, studded motorcycle jackets, steel tip boots and stretchy black jeans with meek peekaboo slits at the knees. As a demonstration of French craftsmanship it was impressive. As an example of image making it seemed strangely anachronistic, yet another attempt at resuscitating the giddy look of Paris night life circa 1978, when people still frequented spots like le Palace, le Bronx or le Sept. As someone who danced away part of his youth in those very places, I understand Mr. Rousteing's impulse. Though at 31 he would know better than I, my hunch is the kids don't party that way anymore. "We show our women's here and it feels right to be here for men's," Sarah Burton, the Alexander McQueen designer, said before a show of couture style men's wear returning the male side of this label's business to the Paris schedule and its show to a 19th century orangery set inside the Luxembourg Gardens. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
When I was a student of art history, the textbooks offered a simple, tidy and wrong story of painting after 1945. The first years after World War II were taught as a clean baton pass from Picasso to Pollock: The New York School led the way; Europe got a brief and sometimes sneering look; and begrudging attention was paid to the avant gardes of just a few rich non Western nations (the Concretists of Brazil, the Gutai artists of Japan). Slowly, too slowly, museums are now taking up the task of rewriting the history of art since 1945 as more than just a "triumph of American painting," as the veteran critic Irving Sandler called it. That kind of revision was the animating force of "Postwar," the epochal 2016 17 show that Okwui Enwezor curated for the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and the last few years have also included significant shows of postwar painting from Cuba, Mexico, Poland, the Soviet Union, Turkey and South Korea in Western museums and galleries. It's the animating force, too, of "The Progressive Revolution: Modern Art for a New India," a new exhibition at Asia Society that showcases the leading avant garde painters of India in the first years after independence. From 1947 to 1956, in the roiling atmosphere of post Raj Bombay (now Mumbai), the dozen or so painters of the Progressive Artists' Group, drawing on sources from Asia, Europe and the United States, forged a rebellious, forward looking new style that could serve as the artistic model for a new, secular republic. Some of the dozen artists here are familiar to New York audiences; the abstract painter V. S. Gaitonde, for one, had a small retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 2015, while the artists M. F. Husain and Tyeb Mehta now command million dollar amounts on the auction blocks of London and New York. Others are little known in the United States, and this is the first American show in more than three decades to examine the Progressives' entire collective postwar output, as well as their later, independent careers. The Progressives were founded in 1947, a few months after India's declaration of independence and its partition, and in their manifesto they castigated the academic style taught at British art colleges, vowing to create a "new art for a newly free India." They favored bold, fractured depictions of bodies rather than the elegance of the earlier Bengal School, making use of hot color and melding folk traditions with high art. The painters came from different castes, different regions and different faiths: Hindu, Muslim and Roman Catholic. What they all wanted, as they discussed during walks along Marine Drive or over dinner at the Chetana restaurant (Mumbai's answer to the Cedar Tavern, and still in business), was an art that embodied the potential of a secular India, with one eye on local matters and the other on the globe. Sometimes that art took the form of direct social engagement: Souza and the painter K. H. Ara brought rare psychological acuity to paintings of beggars, while Ram Kumar's "Unemployed Graduates" (1956) depicts four young men in Western suits too big for their famished bodies, their bulging oyster eyes pleading for recognition. Husain, by contrast, propounded a more mythological art, as in his magnificent painting "Yatra" (1955), a country scene whose bull, monkey and washerwomen drew equally from Mughal miniatures and the outlined figures of later Picasso. One goal of Asia Society's exhibition is to combat the abiding prejudice that accounts for these painters' absence from my introductory art history textbooks: the idea that their works were "derivative," belated imitations of Picasso, Klee and other Western modernists. (It's an animosity shared by Western snobs and by Indian nationalist conservatives, who are quick to label the Progressives and painters like them as rootless sellouts.) First, such dismissals erase the considerable debt Western Modernism owes to African and Oceanic art, as well as the critical influence of Hindu and Buddhist spirituality on the postwar American avant garde. Second, they ignore how the Progressives quite intentionally drew from Western examples while also looking at Asian ones, and went out of their way to fuse these diverse traditions into a politically engaged, passionately secular new art. This show therefore includes older works of Asian art, like a pair of Tang dynasty terra cotta horses and a 10th century sandstone sculpture of a Rajasthani dancer, to emphasize the cross cultural sources of the Progressives' artistic revolution. A 1962 abstraction of silver and blue murmurs by Gaitonde, who is equated with Mark Rothko in some lazy Western formulations, hangs here next to a 16th century Japanese scroll painting of a bird on a snowy branch and, indeed, this Indian painter had copies of similar Zen works in his Mumbai studio. Mehta learned from Picasso and Barnett Newman when he painted simplified, stylized lovers whose bodies were slashed by bold diagonals; he drew just as much inspiration from Rajasthani miniatures, like the 16th century example here whose depiction of Krishna at war also makes use of flattened figures in solid color. For these artists, then, Western art was not a paragon to be imitated, but one practice equal to many they could draw on in the creation of a new Indian vocabulary. And to leverage European and American examples involved no colonial inferiority complex, for, as the British Jamaican cultural theorist Stuart Hall once wrote, "The promise of decolonization fired their ambition, their sense of themselves as already 'modern persons.'" This cosmopolitanism became a liability in later years, especially for Husain, a Muslim, whose shows were vandalized more than once by Hindu nationalists; he left the country, became a Qatari citizen and died in London in 2011. This show's curators are Zehra Jumabhoy, a professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and Boon Hui Tan, the director of Asia Society's museum. They have also edited a strong catalog, whose contributors wrestle on a global scale with the tensions between art and nationhood, the promise and disappointments of secularism, and the seductive fiction of cultural "authenticity." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
For more than two decades R. Kelly, the multiplatinum R B idol repeatedly accused of sexual misconduct, has outrun his reputation. In the age of MeToo, it may finally be catching up to him. Since the first major newspaper investigation by The Chicago Sun Times into allegations of abuse by the singer in 2000, Mr. Kelly has consistently denied that he has been violent and sexually coercive with women and young teenagers even as he has settled lawsuits, dating to the mid 1990s, with accusers. In 2008 he was acquitted of child pornography charges despite videotape evidence that, prosecutors contended, showed him urinating on and having sex with a 13 year old girl. Before, during and after, he sold out concerts, gave defiant interviews and, with the support of a major label, put out smash albums featuring hit singles like "Bump N' Grind," "I Believe I Can Fly" and "I'm a Flirt." Seemingly Teflon to scandal, R. Kelly has skirted most consequences legal, financial, social relying on a sturdy back catalog, a steady team of employees and a legendarily loyal fan base. But in recent months, following a women led movement against abusers that has halted the careers of Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Russell Simmons and many other powerful men, cracks in the R. Kelly veneer are beginning to show. Since the start of the grass roots social media and on the ground protest campaign called MuteRKelly last summer, 10 of his concerts have been canceled, including one scheduled for Saturday in his native Chicago. A lawyer, a publicist and an assistant all parted ways with the singer recently. And on Monday the Time's Up organization, which aims to combat sexual misconduct and support its victims, threw its considerable celebrity weight behind the MuteRKelly hashtag, releasing an open letter calling on corporations tied to Mr. Kelly to cut him off. In a statement from and addressed to women of color, Time's Up wrote: "The scars of history make certain that we are not interested in persecuting anyone without just cause. With that said, we demand appropriate investigations and inquiries into the allegations of R. Kelly's abuse made by women of color and their families for over two decades now." Among those who have expressed public support for the campaign are the director Ava DuVernay, the Chicago born writer and actor Lena Waithe, the singer John Legend and Tarana Burke, the woman who created MeToo. The Time's Up letter cited RCA Records, a division of Sony Music that has released R. Kelly's last four albums; Ticketmaster, a division of the mega promoter Live Nation, which sells tickets to his concerts; Spotify and Apple Music, the popular streaming services; and the Greensboro Coliseum Complex, a venue scheduled to host the singer this month in North Carolina. (RCA and Apple declined to comment. Spotify, Ticketmaster and the Greensboro Coliseum did not respond to requests for comment.) Representatives for Mr. Kelly replied in a statement on Monday. "R. Kelly supports the pro women goals of the Time's Up movement," they wrote. "We understand criticizing a famous artist is a good way to draw attention to those goals and in this case, it is unjust and off target." Calling the campaign "a greedy, conscious and malicious conspiracy to demean him, his family and the women with whom he spends his time," the statement continued: "R. Kelly's music is a part of American and African American culture that should never and will never be silenced. Since America was born, black men and women have been lynched for having sex or for being accused of it. We will vigorously resist this attempted public lynching of a black man who has made extraordinary contributions to our culture." After years of touring and new music from R. Kelly that passed without much incident, interest in the allegations against the singer picked up again last summer after a series of articles by the longtime Chicago music journalist Jim DeRogatis. One article, for BuzzFeed, reported the existence of homes in Chicago and Atlanta that three of the singer's former associates described as housing a cult in which Mr. Kelly "controls every aspect of their lives: dictating what they eat, how they dress, when they bathe, when they sleep, and how they engage in sexual encounters that he records." A second article detailed a cash settlement paid to a woman, Jerhonda Pace, who said she was 16, a year below the age of legal consent in Illinois, when she began a physically and mentally abusive sexual relationship with the singer. The articles last year also resurfaced claims about R. Kelly such as the brief marriage to his musical protege, Aaliyah, in 1994, when she was 15 and he was 27 which, when combined with the new information, galvanized Ms. Odeleye, an Atlanta resident, to start what would become MuteRKelly. "After reading the history and realizing he was doing it in my backyard, I remember sitting at my computer and feeling furious and overwhelmed," she said. "I decided to start a petition to get him off the radio. If the police can't seem to arrest this man, we as a community can at least say we're not going to give him our money." (The Fulton County District Attorney's Office in Georgia said it was not currently investigating Mr. Kelly over any allegations.) Ms. Odeleye soon joined forces with a local activist, Kenyette Barnes, who helped to organize local petitions and protests wherever R. Kelly had concerts scheduled. "He is a man of power the king of R B," Ms. Barnes said. "You don't become the king without a very strong fan base and support system. We wanted to dismantle that." Ten concerts were called off, and while promoters cited various reasons including low ticket sales, Ms. Odeleye and Ms. Barnes said they had no doubt that their protests had worked. And within months the women's mission began to dovetail with the growing chorus of those saying MeToo, and momentum for MuteRKelly picked up. A BBC documentary that aired in March, "R Kelly: Sex, Girls and Videotapes," added to the growing discontent. "Within the African American community, unfortunately, the issue of child sexual abuse is very, very taboo," Ms. Odeleye said. "We have a tendency to try to separate the child from the abuser, but we will not kick the dangerous person out of homes, out of our communities. That's just not good enough." The activists scored a win over the weekend when Ticketmaster announced that R. Kelly would no longer be performing at the "Pre Mother's Day Love Jam," a concert scheduled to take place May 5 at the UIC Pavilion, a venue overseen by the University of Illinois at Chicago. With the support of MuteRKelly, students and staff at the school gathered more than 1,300 names for a petition against the singer. (A representative for the university, Sherri McGinnis Gonzalez, said that the school had rented the venue to an outside promoter and had not booked the concert.) Trevian Kutti, a former spokeswoman for the singer, confirmed on Monday that she and a personal assistant, Diana Copeland, were no longer affiliated with him, citing only "unfortunate circumstances." Still, Ms. Kutti spoke admiringly about the singer. "I am no longer successfully able to represent Mr. Robert Kelly," she wrote in an email. "Mr. Kelly is 'The World's Greatest.' I am grateful to have had the experience of representing him." Linda Mensch, a lawyer who recently represented the singer, said she resigned in February but declined to comment further. Despite the rash of accusations, Mr. Kelly is not known to be facing any investigations for sexual abuse. Susan E. Loggans, a lawyer who has negotiated at least three settlements with women who said they were victimized by the singer, said that criminal prosecution continued to seem unlikely. "I feel that since he was already tried, already acquitted," she said, referring to the 2008 case, "that state's attorneys are reluctant to do it. It costs millions of dollars, would drag on for a long period of time and there is a general skepticism about whether it would be successful." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
It begins with a body, a woman lying curled and motionless onstage, possibly asleep. There's a suggestion of story in the sparkly dress she wears. When she stirs, she moves languorously, and when, still reclining, she strikes an over the shoulder pose, you think of the odalisques of art history. The association is far from random. "Remains," the latest work by the veteran choreographer John Jasperse, which had its debut at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday, is stocked with images from canonical paintings. The woman (the always excellent Maggie Cloud) is soon joined by two others, who draw her into human daisy chains that instantly recall Botticellian Graces. A turn of the head, and they're having a quick lunch on the grass with Manet. The dancers, who also include three men, calmly fold in Pietas and the decapitations and stabbings prevalent in biblical and historical subjects. More obscurely, they allude to choreography: some Martha Graham, maybe some Lucinda Childs, some previous Jasperse for sure. And Hollywood, too: I thought I recognized the hunchbacked gait of Igor from Mel Brooks's "Young Frankenstein." This rummaging through remains is a meditation on collective memory, a dryly sophisticated and cerebral work. The visual design, by Mr. Jasperse and Lenore Doxsee, is highly elegant, with asymmetrical framing lines and reflective flooring that can glow like gold leaf under Ms. Doxsee's lights. The music, by John King and others, colors the choreography with suspenseful drama and does its own sampling of the past, crossfading into more up to date beats. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The Fairlane occupies a former bank building in downtown Nashville that dates back to 1973, so perhaps it is not a total surprise that when the New York design team of Reunion Goods Services converted the space into an 81 room boutique hotel, they drew inspiration in part from the shagtastic '70s. The property, owned by the Nashville based Oliver Hospitality group, opened in March, and is part of a wave of some 5,000 hotel rooms being added to booming Nashville this year. The Fairlane's modernist highlights include terrazzo floors, original oak paneling, colorful seating areas in the lobby and a Scandinavian style fire pit in the penthouse. Set within Nashville's Arts District, the hotel stands around the corner from Printers Alley, a storied block for the city's night life. Saloons filled it until Prohibition, when they were converted to speakeasies, then later to clubs. The present day music and entertainment in the alley's lounges can run risque; at Skull's Rainbow Room, the "French night" the bar's doorman mentioned to me turned out to be a burlesque show. On the more wholesome side, the hotel sits not far from the Tennessee State Museum and a few blocks from the state capitol. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Each Saturday, Farhad Manjoo and Mike Isaac, technology reporters at The New York Times, review the week's news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Farhad: Hello, Michael. Boy, this was another relaxing week in newsland, wasn't it? I just wish something would happen. The world has gotten so boring and predictable. I'm falling asleep. Mike: I'm too tired, shellshocked and busy looking into the Times's insurance policies around therapists who treat news PTSD to acknowledge your sarcasm right now. Farhad: O.K., let's run through what happened in tech this week. As usual, there was a lot of Trump related stuff, but let's start with a few items that had nothing at all to do with our new president. First: Snap (the maker of Snapchat) finally unveiled its I.P.O. documents. It's been years since a big American consumer tech company went public, so everyone on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley has been salivating over Snap's debut on the market. And what we learned can be boiled down to two sentences: Snap is making a whole lot of money. And it's losing even more. Mike: Also, they used the words "sext" and "poop" in the S 1 filing. That's a big win in my book. Farhad: O....K.... The company, which makes its money from ads that appear in its app, said that it sold 405 million in ads last year. But it lost 514 million at the same time. Another interesting data point was the size of its user base. Snapchat has about 160 million daily users. That's not small! But it's not that big, either, compared to Facebook and Instagram. It's more in line with Twitter, which is not doing all that well. This seems to be the main question Snap will have to battle as it tries to attract investors: Is it the next Facebook, or the next Twitter? Mike: I'm kind of wary of Snapchat, to be honest, at least as a stand alone public company with long term, major growth prospects. I honestly could have seen it as a part of Facebook, but I don't think Evan Spiegel, Snapchat's C.E.O., had any interest in reporting to Facebook's chief, Mark Zuckerberg. I do think it'll have a successful I.P.O., though. Here's Snap's problem. Part of what made companies like Facebook so successful is this economic term and Silicon Valley buzzphrase: network effects. Essentially, the larger a network gets, the more people tend to find value in it. Facebook is the classic example of positive network effects strengthening the site over time. Snapchat has a bit more difficult time doing that. It doesn't have a follower model similar to Facebook's, which means it takes a bit more effort to find new or interesting people to interact with on Snapchat. Also, content posted by people who aren't your friends isn't easily discoverable, another issue of keeping people engaged, in my mind. A lot of folks compare Snapchat to Twitter, which I think is a pretty apt way of looking at it. Both companies really rely on brand advertising basically, high dollar accounts from huge advertisers rather than a bunch of smaller accounts that make up the long tail of revenue and that seems to pale in comparison to the advertisers that go with, say, Google or Facebook. And, as Facebook will tell you all day long, advertisers love targeting data, which Facebook has in droves. Snapchat, less so. Farhad: Let's turn to Trump. The tech industry continued to be roiled by clashes with the new administration. The war expanded to a number of fronts. First, there was immigration. Lots of tech workers protested President Trump's executive order banning travel from a number of Muslim majority countries. Employees at Google staged a walkout this week, not in opposition to the company's management but sanctioned by it. Sergey Brin, Google's co founder, and Sundar Pichai, its C.E.O., who are both immigrants, spoke out in support of the protesters. And even though some of them initially dragged their feet, by early in the week just about every other tech leader had come out in strong opposition to the immigration ban. This is moving much faster than I thought it would. I'm not surprised Silicon Valley is a liberal bastion; I am surprised that workers here reacted so strongly to the new order. Were you? And where do you think this goes? Mike: Honestly, I wasn't shocked. It seemed like a national backlash, and people mobilized almost immediately. Besides being quite liberal, tech has many, many workers here from Asia and the Middle East and this directly affects them and their families. I would have been surprised if they had all stayed quiet. I do think the Uber phenomenon around this was interesting. Almost overnight, Uber became the target for outrage, as people were upset at the continued willingness of Uber's chief, Travis Kalanick, to be on Trump's economic council. As hundreds of thousands of people deleted their Uber accounts and employees internally voiced concerns, Travis stepped down from the council. And to your earlier point, the speed of how people mobilized so quickly was indeed breathtaking. I think a lot of it had to do with a feeling of helplessness among people that I heard about quite a bit. They wanted to do something, hence the protests, but also deleting and boycotting Uber felt satisfying to many, like they were taking a stand. We'll see if that blows over now that Travis is off the council. Farhad: On the other hand, Elon Musk, Tesla's chief, decided that he's not quitting the Trump advisory council. In a statement, Musk said he didn't like the immigration order, but that he'd use his position on the council to suggest changes to the policy. The funny thing, though, is that Musk already seems to be limiting his ambitions. He suggested on Twitter this week that he didn't think he could press Trump to retract the order. That ship had sailed! But yes, this is still a man who wants to colonize Mars. Guess some things are easier than others. Mike: Sending a man to Mars is more feasible than changing Donald Trump's stance on immigration. This is the part where I would normally use the thinking face emoji if we were texting each other. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Maria Perego, an Italian puppeteer and the creator of Topo Gigio, the l ovable mouse who became famous to American audiences as a frequent guest on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in the 1960s and early '70s and was known worldwide, died on Thursday in Milan. She was 95. Her death was announced on her official Facebook page. Ms. Perego, who worked alongside her husband, Federico Caldura, came up with the 10 inch tall Topo Gigio in the late 1950s. Topo Gigio was a sort of cross between a puppet and a marionette; three puppeteers, hidden in a black background, moved its body parts with rods. According to "Sundays With Sullivan: How 'The Ed Sullivan Show' Brought Elvis, the Beatles, and Culture to America," a 2008 book by Bernie Ilson, Mr. Sullivan saw a tape of the puppet from Italian television and booked Topo Gigio for a series of appearances on his popular Sunday night CBS variety show. The first, the book said, was on April 14, 1963. Ms. Perego and two other puppeteers were on hand to impart the movements, and a fourth provided Topo Gigio's voice but, Mr. Ilson wrote, Mr. Sullivan had not realized that someone would also have to serve as the puppet's straight man. Mr. Sullivan, who was famously wooden on camera, stepped into that task for the initial appearance, figuring he would arrange for a professional comic to take over for later ones if the bit caught on. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
This is an article from Turning Points, a special section that explores what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. Even I, who pay almost no attention to anything, can see that this year has been a nightmare. While thinking about the state of the world, I came across two old photos of mine, 20 by 24 inch Polaroids made in 2005. The model in both photos is Mazzy, a blue Weimaraner who belonged to my assistant, Marlo Kovach. I have never met a dog who liked being photographed more than Mazzy, and I worked with her often. She was addicted to bright light, to the blast of illumination from the strobes that surrounded her on the set. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
J. Paul Getty was once said to be the richest man in the world, which sounds like a covetable title. At the very least, it should be nice to be his offspring, if not the man himself. But J. Paul Getty had five sons and according to "Trust" none were very happy about it. Episode 7 provides a deeper look into why, as we're finally given the back story for J. Paul Getty II, father to little Paul, whose suffering under Getty Sr. led to despair, addiction and the collapse of his own family. Much of the episode takes place as a series of flashbacks, and we're dropped into them through reels of 8 millimeter Kodachrome film, many of which were shot by Paul III. Big Paul sits and watches them in 1973 at his home in London, narrating them in the dark to his girlfriend, Victoria. He has just learned that his son's kidnappers have not killed little Paul after all, and it prompts him down memory lane, in which he revisits a brief period when his own life and his family's future seemed full of promise and money. It's a far cry from the remorseful and desultory state of existence he currently lives. What Paul doesn't know yet is that Getty has negotiated a deal with the kidnappers to return little Paul for 5 million. The start of the episode shows what's happening behind the scenes: mounds of ransom cash being prepared; Gail in her kitchen with Fletcher Chace, baking a cake for little Paul, who coincidentally is due to be returned on his birthday; and Paul III bathing and dressing in fresh clothes, given to him by the kidnappers. They don't want the world to think that they were just a bunch of Calabrian peasants, after all. As the preparations are made, we're brought back to the very beginning of this mess through the Getty home films. They're cinematic and pretty, but they're a little hard to watch because of what we already know about how hard the family will fall. First we see Paul Jr., Gail and a very young little Paul living in California; Paul is pumping gas for the family business. They were poor but happy, Paul Jr. tells Victoria. And with that, the action switches to the past, amid those poor and happy days, when a fateful letter arrives from Paul Sr.: It's time that Paul Jr. come to Rome to discuss his future. Paul Jr. and his young wife and child board one of Getty's private planes excited and all dressed up and make their way to Italy. In Rome, Getty takes Paul and his family on a welcome tour, showing them some famous Italian art. It is not exactly a fun field trip for a boy, but Getty is oblivious to everything around him and beckons little Paul over to explain Caravaggio's "Crucifixion of Saint Peter." "They took a hammer and some nails and they banged them straight through his hands and his feet to that piece of wood there bang, bang, bang," he tells little Paul, who is his captive audience. Then, he continues, they left him hanging there until he was dead. Paul Jr. and Gail stand behind listening, squeamish. But it proves to be an allegory for what Paul Jr. is about to endure: being crucified by his father while working for Getty Oil. The men have dinner to discuss Paul's promotion. Getty tells his son the secret to his own success. "Drink, food, sex appetite," he explains, with a crazed glint in his eye. "You need that to succeed." It's an uncomfortable speech to hear a man give to a son. But Getty says he knows Paul has an appetite because he caught him eyeing a pretty waitress. Still there's one kind of appetite that trumps them all, Getty continues, and it's an appetite Paul Jr. hasn't truly tasted yet: the appetite for power. "A bit of it makes you want a lot of it, and a lot of it makes you want all of it," Getty explains. His expression is almost maniacal, just thinking of the concept. "Heh, you want some?" he chortles to his son. It's a disturbing, detailed window into Getty's soul; this man does not work like most people. At first Getty seems to toy with Paul intentionally when he offers him a job running Getty Oil in Saudi Arabia. ("Saudi's not much of a place you know," he tells Paul. Too much sand, not enough sex.) But then out of nowhere he course reverses, telling Paul Jr. that he can take over operations in Rome instead; Paul's brother Gordon, whom Getty appears to think less of, can take Saudi Arabia. Getty shares this decision as he drinks a white wine he seems displeased with, sitting outside with Paul, Gail and little Paul, whom Getty has just thrown off a dock in order to teach him how to swim without warning and without his parents' consent. Getty wheezes with schadenfreude like pleasure picturing Gordon in the Middle East. In Rome, Paul will be tasked with making a bloated Italian operation lean and profitable, which for now sounds better than contraband moonshine and veils in Saudi Arabia. Paul and Gail look at each other, hardly able to contain their excitement over their blessed future. Which, of course, is not how things play out. Instead, Getty sets up Paul Jr. for assured failure. He provides no useful tutelage or insight for Paul, who toils away in the dark, making business decisions that Getty overturns every time. Fueled by rage at his father's treatment, Paul spirals into coke driven despair and neglects his work. Getty watches his son's nose dive placidly, as if he'd been waiting for it to happen all along. The way Gail explains it to Chace, "there's a slice of pure animal in the old man." It doesn't include what most people rely on for sanity, she continues: love, care and compassion. "There's a switch in him that clicks" she snaps her fingers "and it's gone." The switch had indeed flipped. Getty fires Paul. The family's unraveling accelerates. Paul and Gail stay married for a while, but Gail had been lonely while Paul worked those late, tortured hours, and they each start relationships with other people. Little Paul watches his parents fall in love with new partners, and he seems to run free with scant oversight. He starts down his own freewheeling, drug dabbling trail. So much for being an heir to the richest man in the world or to this one in particular, anyway. Back in 1973, Paul and Getty meet inside a museum after hours to finalize the terms of the ransom payment that Getty has negotiated with Don Salvatore. Getty brags to his son that they've agreed to 5 million far under asking price and that he'll pay it with money from the Getty Trust. Paul is beside himself. This is the first apparent act of kindness his father has ever given him, the first time he's given him anything. For a moment, decades of hurt begin to dissolve. But then Paul looks at the contract; it's not a gift, it's a loan that Paul has to pay back, and it's saddled with a 4 percent interest rate. Paul flies into a rage. "You're going to make a profit off the kidnapping of your own grandson," he shouts, tearing up the contract. He cannot believe he thought his dad might have some kindness in him yet. As the episode nears a close, Chace informs Gail in her kitchen that little Paul won't be coming home yet after all. Primo, meanwhile, who has been waiting with little Paul in his car for the ransom money, finally realizes the money isn't coming. Paul spots a newspaper and tells Primo it's his birthday. Primo, about to go into a standard Primo rage, can't believe it. "It's your birthday," he repeats to Paul, and then screams back at him, "It's your death day as well." Getty fan fiction! As Getty shoots clay pigeons on the Sutton place lawn, he is informed (by some kind of private investigator/accountant like character played by Rob Delaney) that Penelope is having an affair. Getty's aim is dead on, and he hits every clay pigeon. He appears distraught, but he quickly uprights himself and makes a ruthless power move. "Take her out of the will, not a single dollar!" he commands. "No, one single dollar just one." It's textbook Getty: Push them down, and then kick them while they're there. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. The champagne was flowing. HBO had just capped off another triumphant night at the Emmys, and it was time to party in the courtyard of the mammoth Pacific Design Center. At every turn, there was another show celebrating on Sunday night. The cast of "Game of Thrones" convened for one last time to toast another win for best drama, its Emmy record tying fourth victory in the category. John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" overwhelmed his late night competition to win best talk show for a fourth straight year. "Chernobyl," HBO's unexpected gem of a limited series about the 1986 nuclear reactor disaster, took home best limited series. And the network topped Netflix for most Emmy wins over all, reclaiming sole bragging rights after tying with the streaming service last year. "Unparalleled," said John Stankey, the chief executive of Warner Media, HBO's parent, as he stood right in the middle of the party. "Absolutely unbelievable." Read about the best and worst moments at the Emmys. See the full list of winners. Now comes the hard part. HBO, after years of dominance, is at a crossroads. With fierce competition from the likes of Netflix, Disney and Apple and a relatively new parent company with no track record in entertainment, can it possibly maintain the hegemony it has held over the television industry for so long? Mr. Stankey wanted none of that. "That's a narrative I don't subscribe to," he said. "We invested more money in HBO because we believe it's a mainstay cornerstone of what we're doing going forward. It's going to be critical to the service. Our commitment this year, our commitment next year, is going to continue to demonstrate that." Still, "Game of Thrones" and "Veep" are both off the air. Many of HBO's top executives, including its chief executive, Richard Plepler, have left in the last year. The top producers for "Game of Thrones," David Benioff and Dan Weiss, the last people to give a speech from the Emmys stage on Sunday night, are leaving, too. They signed a nine figure deal last month to go to Netflix. There are other issues. Warner Media has a streaming app, HBO Max, that will enter the marketplace next year with a monthly price at least 15 more than double what competing services from Disney, Apple and others will cost. Then there's the drama surrounding HBO and Warner Media's parent company, AT T. This month, the investor Elliott Management issued a blistering 24 page report that was critical of the "alarming executive turnover" at Warner Media and questioned the company's foray into the entertainment space. It does not help matters that AT T also has 149 billion in net debt. Not far away at the Amazon party, a rival in the battle for streaming supremacy was celebrating. It was a boisterous, loud and sweaty affair at the Chateau Marmont. There was Jon Hamm accidentally stumbling into the photo booth area. Stephen Colbert, Jane Lynch and Amy Sherman Palladino, the creator of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," made the rounds. The man responsible for the entire operation, Amazon's chief executive, Jeff Bezos, was sequestered in a reserved corner of the party space. He stood with his son and a stream of well wishers who needed permission from the two bodyguards manning the area to get through to shake his hand. But he was not the star of the night. The '90s hits blaring from the D.J. booth were no match for the applause that erupted when Phoebe Waller Bridge, the star and creator of "Fleabag," made her way into the party with her boyfriend, the writer director Martin McDonagh, in tow. From the second she walked in, Ms. Waller Bridge was so besieged by well wishers that she could barely get a bite of food or even light her cigarette. No wonder. "Fleabag" upset the HBO awards show juggernaut "Veep" for best comedy, and Ms. Waller Bridge claimed three Emmys over all. She beat Julia Louis Dreyfus to win best actress in a comedy, the first time in the show's seven seasons that Ms. Louis Dreyfus did not win. 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. "We had a great night," Mr. McDonagh said. "I was hoping for one. Who knew?" Amazon has had the reputation in Hollywood for being a sleeping giant. It spends plenty and has seemingly infinite resources, but, despite the earlier success of shows like "Transparent," its overall impact has been muted. Now, between "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" and "Fleabag," it has back to back Emmy comedy winners. And it is a sign that there are plenty of competitors particularly from the tech world ready to go toe to toe with HBO. With all that, HBO is not pushing the panic button just yet. "I have the benefit of being here for 15 years, so I've heard this over and over again," said Casey Bloys, HBO's president of programming. "This is the world we live in, and our formula of curation and betting on people we believe in and doing the hard work, it pays off. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
You know how to Google, how to Uber and how to Netflix and chill. Now, can Jeff Bezos get you to Zoox? That's the plan. On Monday, the Amazon owned Zoox is unveiling an electric autonomous vehicle as part of what will likely be an aggressive attempt by the company to make robo taxis a thing. That effort has had a rocky start for Zoox as well as for Google, General Motors, Uber and several Chinese companies. They have spent billions of dollars over the last decade and suffered all kinds of setbacks, including management upheavals, technology snafus and tragic accidents, all in a quest to remove the driver from the front seat. Like a lot of pioneers, Zoox has had its share of challenges, but progress slowed quickly when the pandemic hit. The chief executive, Aicha Evans, and the chief technology officer and founder, Jesse Levinson, told me in an interview last week that the company was forced to temporarily shut down all on site operations for a while then had to do so again more recently. The company also needed capital to survive either from new investors or a sale. "We definitely thought we could be dead," said Ms. Evans, referring to when the pandemic hit. "But a crisis like that can also focus you to seek out investors who have a long term mind set that this kind of technology requires." Enter the e commerce giant. And the 1.2 billion that Amazon paid for the ambitious car company now looks like a bargain. "In a nutshell, we want to eventually move people around a city," said Ms. Evans, who once held a top strategy job at Intel. "It's purpose built." Zoox isn't the only company taking steps forward. Many are hoping to bring fleets of robotic taxis into the mainstream within the next few years, and a number of them have been making headway in recent months. The Chinese driverless service AutoX has rolled out in Shenzhen. Google's Waymo has done the same in a small town in Arizona. The Chinese company Baidu got a permit to test some cars on public roads in heavily trafficked Beijing. General Motor's Cruise is testing in San Francisco. And Aurora, run by a former Google autonomous executive, acquired Uber's Advanced Technologies Group for 4 billion (and the car sharing giant is investing 400 million in the company). These advances are more interesting in the context of a pandemic. Public transportation, like buses and subways, have seen massive declines in usage. And the Uber investments are particularly noteworthy, since the idea of climbing in a car with an Uber driver has become a much more dicey proposition. (Uber also had some safety and labor problems, as it faced demands to treat drivers like traditional, full time workers.) When masks, open windows and other safety precautions are necessary, the idea of a private autonomous car in which you and your family can ride alone has certainly become more appealing. I have always liked the idea of autonomous vehicles, at least since Chris Urmson, the Aurora executive, first showed me the possibilities of robo taxis six years ago while he was at Google, in a demo of that company's tiny experimental vehicle. Looking like a clown car and moving around in a parking lot at Google's Mountain View headquarters, the car went very slowly and felt like a children's ride, going around and around in circles. Yet Mr. Urmson was determined: He stood directly in front of the moving vehicle as we headed toward him to show it was safe to do that. (You can watch a video of that encounter here.) I took a ride in Zoox's car earlier this year in San Francisco it was the first time I saw driverless technology in action in the wild. The Dr. Seuss like name is perfect for the odd looking box of a car that resembled a Lego on steroids. My spin felt like a ride at Disneyland, with two seats facing two others in a spacious cabin and doors that opened automatically. We toddled around the hilly city on a prescribed route that the company had been using for tests. People used to seeing all manner of crazy tech inventions rolling around the streets pointed and gave us a thumbs up. It was a big step up from my first outing in the Google car. Zoox offered a smooth ride and little of the herky jerky stops and starts of some autonomous travel. And the Zoox car is less threatening than the cars we see on the road today it's all smooth edges and rounded corners, taking us adults back to our Little Tikes days. Still, I have always felt nervous about fully autonomous transportation no steering wheel, dashboard, pedals or any means of control by the passenger. Up until now, autonomous vehicles have mostly been like retrofitted cars, with a driver at the ready to intervene in case of emergency. Yet, fears aside, my bigger problem is that I don't want to buy a car, so I really want these robo efforts to work. As regular readers of this column may remember, I gave up on car ownership almost two years ago. Since then, I have tried all sorts of ways to get around my urban environment, using everything from e scooters to electric bikes. Whether the robo taxi trend will be accelerated, so to speak, depends on a lot of factors, although just moving past the concept stage has been quite a leap. One concern, beyond safety, is that driverless cars may eat away at public transit, making more transportation private and on demand. Yet, while all the autonomous efforts are being billed as robotic versions of taxis, these companies are aiming to appeal to a broader range of users over the longer term. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Daniel Ezralow may be a champion of dance, but he's not elitist about it. He choreographed the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics, Julie Taymor's "Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark" and, in February, a version of "The Rite of Spring" for the Russian rhythmic gymnastics team at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. "I put the stage in the middle of the audience and surrounded it with people," Mr. Ezralow, 58, said of his "Rite" in a recent interview. "I had projections from the top onto the floor. The girls came out of a wheat field. It was a trip." Mr. Ezralow's latest endeavor seems just as ambitious: "Pearl," a dance theater spectacle opening at the David H. Koch Theater on Thursday that is based on the life of Pearl S. Buck, the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning writer. The daughter of missionaries, Buck (1892 1973) grew up in China and is credited with changing American perceptions of that country through her humanizing depictions of peasant life in "The Good Earth" and other works. So how do you make a dance show about a writer? As he pointed out, he may be a director and choreographer, but he's not George Balanchine. "It's a revered place," he said of the Koch Theater, which is home to New York City Ballet and was designed to Balanchine's specifications. Since, however, "Pearl" is neither a City Ballet piece nor a ballet in the Balanchine tradition, Mr. Ezralow is altering the performance space, by adding that river, for one thing. "It's one of those ideas that is crazy, but makes sense," he said. Other changes: There are no wings. The stage will be expanded over the orchestra pit, which creates ample space for more than 30 dancers, Chinese and American, including five Pearls played by performers from 7 years old to 62. There are floor to ceiling projections and slacklines, or flexible cables, on which the dancers balance. As for the river, it's 150 feet long and six feet wide and uses 4,200 gallons of water. "I went to Zhenjiang and saw where Pearl Buck lived," Mr. Ezralow said. "It's on the Yangtze River. You realize, how do I ever put something onstage that has any essence of this woman, what she was about and what this river meant to China? It's the divide that Pearl constantly had in her life. It's the river of life. So in a sense, it was everything. It's a protagonist. But I use it delicately. I don't splash a lot." "Pearl" also takes inspiration from an eighth century Chinese poem, "Spring, River, Flower, Moon, Night," by Zhang Ruoxu. The idea for the production came from Angela Xiaolei Tang, the executive producer, whose desire was to bridge the East and the West through Buck's life and the poem, which evokes the Yangtze riverscape. Her aim, she explained, was to loosely echo the five themes of the poem with the events of Buck's life. "I did not want to produce a show only about her bio," Ms. Tang said. "The poem is all about the seasons and how life changes," he said. "We come and go, but the rock and the river are still there. It allowed me to be abstract. Dance, if it's not going to be Broadway, has to be." Buck lived in the United States as an adult; the "moon" section reflects her homesickness for China as well as the way her writing reflects out into the world. In that section is a dance in which Buck, portrayed by the Canadian choreographer and dancer Margie Gillis, is suddenly surrounded. "All the dancers start gravitating to her like magnets," Mr. Ezralow said. "I wanted to show how she could unite." Ms. Gillis, a fan of Buck since childhood, said her depiction evokes the time in the writer's life when she was examining her legacy. "As we age, our thinking becomes more global," Ms. Gillis said. "We're more interested in larger pictures, and so it's about that period of life her moon, her night." The only text in the show is two essays by Buck, including "Roll Away the Stone," which Mr. Ezralow sums up as "extraordinary, positive writing about our humanity and that we have a choice to be conscious and intelligent and respectful." The cost of the production, which features an original score by the Japanese composer Jun Miyake, is around 4 million; it will tour Europe and China starting early next year. "It's not like I needed to do something big," Mr. Ezralow said. "I did the Olympics. But this is its own thing. It's very hard for me to define it and say, dance audience, come. Visual audience, come. Film, come. I do this unusual hybrid of many different things that come to me, and I try to be honest with them." His interest in interpreting Buck's life through dance theater has less to do with what she left behind her books, her essays and more with her perpetual curiosity. "When doors shut we get fearful," Mr. Ezralow said. "Pearl kept those doors open." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times As marijuana becomes more elite, cannabis inspired objects and decor are moving way beyond images of gnarly buds and lava lamps. When Brett Beldock, a Manhattan based furniture designer, was growing up in the city in the early '70s, she would buy "the grooviest jeans in the world" at the Different Drummer, a boutique whose advertising poster was designed by Peter Max, the psychedelic artist. Ms. Beldock's new capsule collection of marijuana themed wallpaper, titled Dispensary, recently put her in mind of that old store, but its look was certainly not modeled on the hippie emporiums of yore. Instead, inspired by the comfortable Victorian parlor of a medical marijuana dispensary she visited in San Francisco, Ms. Beldock created designs based on antique botanical drawings but the plant is pot. Two of the patterns, Botanical Weed and Botanical Ganja, use the sedate shades typical of Farrow Ball paint colors; a third, Mary Jane, references the ornate foliage in the artist Kehinde Wiley's portrait of President Obama. With dozens of states having legalized marijuana for medicinal or recreational use, or both, in recent years, designers like Ms. Beldock are seizing the opportunity to define the look of a growing industry and lifestyle. And as the drug loses its outlaw, declasse status, going from "weed" to a "flower," the design around marijuana is similarly shedding its head shop past and becoming more elevated. Some nouveau marijuana designs make winking reference to old school pot imagery, like the ashtrays and vessels printed with red lips and leaves that Jonathan Adler created last year for the Manhattan flagship of Higher Standards, a retail shop. Sometimes it's about treating pot in an unexpected way, as with Ms. Beldock's old English specimen drawings. Often, it means creating an altogether fresh design vocabulary. Whatever the case, being a pot smoker is not a requisite. As Mr. Adler told The New York Times last year, "I don't smoke or do any drugs, but you can get a decorative dirty frisson." She installed nice display cases, painted the walls and made other simple fixes. There was so much room for improvement that customers began telling her "they felt like they were shopping at the Tiffany's of dispensaries," Ms. Stone said. She added: "This was still the era of bulletproof glass and bars on the windows. There are a ton of professional people that use cannabis every day, and we're in this place where we're a little embarrassed because we're not hippies and stoners." Back then, the only thing Ms. Stone could find online pertaining to marijuana and design was an article about Sparc, a Bay Area dispensary designed by Larissa Sand that won an architecture award. "Dispensaries were a space that had never been touched by design," Ms. Stone said. Her firm has designed about 50 dispensaries in 16 states. Every space is different, owing to the noncorporate, patchwork nature of the industry, but in all of Ms. Stone's projects, she aims for a polished, handcrafted look. She brings in a millworker for custom cabinetry and is big on contrasting colors and textures. While she avoids stoner cliches, Ms. Stone does try to "blow minds," usually with an eye popping design feature. For Maitri Medicinals, in Uniontown, Pa., she created a 14 foot high lobby wall covered in historical documents like the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 that she reprinted on hand pressed paper. To dress up the ubiquitous A.T.M., Ms. Stone hung more than 1,400 colored ribbons from a wire mesh frame to create a tunnel that customers walk through. "It's functional and provides privacy," she said, "but it's memorable and provides a living art piece in their showroom." Bruce E. Teitelbaum, the chief executive and founder of RPG, a design/build firm for brands and retailers, said he adhered to the same design principles for the medical marijuana provider Columbia Care, for which RPG created a dispensary in Manhattan in 2016, as he did for clients like Barnes Noble College, which runs campus bookstores: "We followed the philosophy of good taste, good design, good customer navigation." Like Ms. Stone, Mr. Teitelbaum avoided showing up close photos of gnarly buds, a la High Times, and instead kept any references to the product for sale artistic, and subtle. He installed terrariums with succulents and other potted plants. "That was a touch to the natural quality, the growing quality," Mr. Teitelbaum said. "It's like going into a great bakery and understanding they must have a beautiful kitchen and beautiful process of baking bread when you just see the front end." The activity of marijuana smoking has always had its gear, and this too has gotten a design upgrade in recent years. Higher Standard sells pipe cleaning products like finely milled rock salt and "ISO Pure" solvent in packaging that looks as if it came off the shelf at Sephora. The company Apothecarry Brands specializes in "high quality organizational systems," like a 300 airtight, odor resistant, lockable home storage case. Ms. Beatty said she designed the attractive wood case because she couldn't find any on the market at least none that spoke to her self image as a successful businesswoman and mother. "I love tie dye as much as the next person. But I'm living a Pottery Barn lifestyle. I do not need a stereotypical cannabis store item." Products like the Apothecarry Case point the way to the home as the next frontier of marijuana design. One can imagine herb humidors instead of wine cellars, dedicated smoking rooms instead of basement hide outs for getting high. The walls of these spaces could be covered in Mary Jane, Ms. Beldock's wallpaper. "Unfortunately, it's not scratch and sniff," she joked. "Then it would be a real success." But perhaps the true vanguard of marijuana design and a sign of how subtly it will be incorporated into our everyday lives can be found at the Desert Hot Springs Inn, in California's Coachella Valley. The boutique hotel has become popular for its welcoming attitude toward cannabis. John Thatcher, the manager, is "pushing 60" and of the generation that remembers lava lamps, beaded curtains, black light posters and all the hoary design once associated with smoking pot. At the hotel, he said, there is none of that stuff, because "the guests are not looking for that." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
It was less than a year ago that Jeffrey Cirio joined American Ballet Theater as a soloist. But on Friday, as he wrapped up a season at the Metropolitan Opera House in which he had breakout performances in several roles, he was promoted to the rank of principal dancer. The promotion of Mr. Cirio, 25, who was previously a principal with Boston Ballet, was announced by Kevin McKenzie, the company's artistic director. Mr. McKenzie also promoted Blaine Hoven, 30, who joined Ballet Theater in 2004, to the rank of soloist. When Mr. Cirio danced the role of Colas at the Met this spring in Frederick Ashton's "La Fille Mal Gardee," Alastair Macaulay noted in his review in The New York Times that it was his first full length role at the Met, but that "apart from a little fumbling with props, you'd never have known." He called him "a remarkable artist." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
WUPPERTAL, Germany The dancers lay in darkness on the floor of a studio here. Although a video was playing, they closed their eyes and focused on listening: to the fervent, intense voices of Bartok's opera "Bluebeard's Castle," and to sounds of breathing, screaming, silence, laughter, sobbing and the sibilance of rustling leaves. They were listening to a performance of Pina Bausch's "Bluebeard. While Listening to a Tape Recording of Bela Bartok's 'Duke Bluebeard's Castle,'" created in 1977 and not performed since 1994. For most of the dancers, almost half of whom joined the Wuppertal Tanztheater after Bausch's death in 2009, these were the sounds of the past. They evoke a world of brutality and tenderness, irrationality and sadness, familiar to anyone who has seen Bausch's powerfully dramatic, dreamlike works, which have come to define the genre of tanztheater, or dance theater, over the last 40 years. But when Bausch created "Bluebeard," there was no concept of tanztheater. This mixture of dance, theater, fragmented music and patchworked scenes was new and a turning point in her career a departure from straightforwardly expressive dance pieces, like "The Rite of Spring," which she had created after taking over the Wuppertal company in 1973. "It was wonderful! I loved the struggle between the audience and the dancers," Jan Minarik, the originator of the Bluebeard role, said. (The work drew similarly violent responses as well as praise, when Tanztheater Wuppertal brought it to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1984 on its first American tour. Arlene Croce, writing in The New Yorker, called Bausch's work "the pornography of pain.") The company had to stop performing the piece in 1994, said Bettina Wagner Bergelt, the director of Tanztheater Wuppertal, because the Bartok estate which initially had no complaints objected to Bausch's use of the music, which is played on a tape recorder that the Bluebeard figure turns off and on. Now that the score has moved into the public domain in Germany and other places, the work can be performed again. (But not everywhere: Each country has its own copyright laws; France will have to wait another 15 years. England has to wait only till February, when the company will perform it at Sadler's Wells. ) When the company began thinking about a revival, nobody really knew if "Bluebeard" could be pieced together, Ms. Wagner Bergelt said. Bausch died in 2009 and "we weren't sure if people remembered the choreography well, and videos aren't always reliable." She enlisted Mr. Minarik and his wife, Beatrice Libonati, who performed the role of Judith soon after joining the company in 1978. Together with Barbara Kaufmann and Helena Pikon, veteran company members, they have painstakingly reconstructed the piece from memory and from film, and taught a new generation of dancers the work. "It is a beautiful process the way they have taught people who are brand new, some very young," she said. Because many of the Wuppertal dancers are older and can't perform such a physically demanding piece, they enlisted freelancers and students from the Folkwang University of the Arts to make up part of the ensemble. "We need 12 couples in addition to the central pair, and it demands huge energy and technique, particularly in the partnering," she said. In Bausch's piece the opera's libretto, by Bela Balazs, forms a loose counterpoint to the actions. The score features just two singers (Bausch used a German language version with Dietrich Fischer Dieskau and Hertha Topper), the curious bride Judith, and the homicidal Bluebeard, who is reluctantly persuaded by his new wife to open the locked doors of the castle, until at last his murdered wives are found, frozen in his memory. In Bausch's version, the characters and the ensemble represent multiple versions of the couple's gendered battle, repeatedly enacting the violence, fear, sexual obsession and love that animate the relationship. "All the men are Bluebeard and all the women are Judith," Ms. Kaufmann said. The action is set in an empty room with tall French windows and a floor covered in shriveled brown leaves. Here, men and women are yanked roughly along the floor, set upon mercilessly, hurled against walls, swung into the air, piled upon each other's bodies and forcefully pushed away. It all plays out in endless cycles of repetition. And long, painstaking rehearsals. At the Lichtburg, a disused cinema where Bausch created pieces for her company, Mr. Minarik and Ms. Libonati took three couples through the sequence in which Judith falls through Bluebeard's outstretched arms to the floor. (Ten times.) "Hold, hold then down!" Ms. Libonati called out, stressing the suspended moment before Judith falls on her back. Although Mr. Minarik said later that there was no literal interpretation of the words, Bausch uses images and content from the libretto to generate movement, here echoing Judith's plea to enter the castle, or to lie down and perish on its threshold. Like the protagonist of Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape," Bluebeard is trapped by his memories, stopping the tape to stop time, replaying passages, lines or words or pausing the narrative for long moments. (This extends the hourlong opera into almost two hours of performance.) When "Bluebeard" was created, the company was still part of the Wuppertal Opera, performing in the corps de ballet of various productions. "We were rehearsing 'Carmen' at the time, and so we started working on the new piece at my home," Mr. Minarik said. At the time, Ms. Libonati said, the company was in a state of flux, with many dancers discontented about the theatrical direction that Bausch had started to take in her previous piece, "The Seven Deadly Sins." Those who wanted to continue working with her, she added, "were the people gathering at Jan's place." There was no in depth discussion of the new piece although they read different texts about Bluebeard, Mr. Minarik said. "We talked about themes love, hate, dreaming but we never explained anything to one another because we had a similar way of thinking about it. We liked to sit in cafes and observe people. That was how Pina built her images." His contribution to the piece, he said, was the tape recorder. "I had one in my studio, and we would stop and start it to make the reactions between Judith and Bluebeard clearer," he said. By incorporating that into the work, Bausch found a new form of structure. Effectively, it's a precursor to the musical collages that would become a feature of her pieces. At one stroke, she freed herself from both narrative and musical constraints, moving toward the hybrid idiom that would become her signature. Ms. Libonati said that what's most difficult to explain about Bausch's creative process was her gift for "drawing out of people an authentic way to express themselves, so that they believed it from inside and could convince an audience." This is also the most difficult aspect of transmitting her work, Ms. Kaufmann said. "The first sentence that Jan said to us was that 'Bluebeard' isn't a performance, it's a state of being. Of course you have to teach the steps, the timing, the form. But something important in Pina's work is that feelings are very precise too." "They tried to let us find our own experience of learning the work, rather than copying from a video," said Stephanie Troyak, a Canadian American dancer with the company. "What's important is the reason behind the steps, and other things too, like a sequence in which the women laugh for a long time. Physically practicing that, allowing yourself to go to a place of hysteria is really interesting if you try to work out where it comes from." The movement vocabulary of "Bluebeard" is pivotal in Bausch's development; it looks back to the ensemble energy of "The Rite of Spring," and to formal ballet classicism, but also forward to a more naturalistic, expressive, unfinished style, with the entwining, circling arms and mobile upper body that would characterize her mature style. "The technical aspect is very present," said Christopher Tandy, a Welsh born company member who is performing the role of Bluebeard, during a break in the rehearsal. "But for my character, there is a lot of space to travel psychologically and emotionally, a lot of time where Bluebeard is sitting and thinking and feeling." And then, he added, Bluebeard has the additional task of operating the sound, stopping, and restarting the music. "You can't mess that up," he said with a grimace. There are other early pieces that the company would love to reconstruct, Ms. Wagner Bergelt said, including "Renate Emigrates," "The Piece with the Ship" and "Legend of Chastity." "Our identity is still about Pina," she said, adding that generating new work was also important. (Commissions from five choreographers will be presented in June, and more are pending for next season.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
NEWTON, Mass. A 210 year old seminary here that is in the process of joining Yale Divinity School is coming under fire from federal regulators for failing to follow a law designed to ensure the return of sacred and other special artifacts to Native American tribes. The Andover Newton Theological School has a collection of 158 Native American items, including locks of hair, wampum belts, "peace pipes" and finely beaded ceremonial garb, mostly gathered in the 19th century by Christian missionaries. For about 70 years, the artifacts have been housed at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. But the museum alerted the United States Department of the Interior two years ago when the Newton school, which is struggling with low enrollment, proposed selling some items to raise money. Officials quickly warned the school that a sale would violate a federal law that says any organization that receives federal funding must make every effort to return any spiritual or culturally significant items it holds to the tribes. Last week, federal officials sent another warning letter to the seminary because it still has not complied by sending inventories of the items to tribes, as required. "Is Andover being negligent or incompetent?" David Tarler, a federal official tasked with enforcing the law, said in an interview. "Are they confused about the law but acting in good faith? I can't answer that question." School officials said they "abruptly pivoted" after the initial warning in 2015 and decided that no sale would take place. They blame delays on the difficulty of searching spotty historical records to determine which objects might belong to what tribes. "We're trying to play catch up and do the right thing," said the Rev. Martin B. Copenhaver, the seminary's president. He said the school intends to return items when the research is completed. Gregory E. Sterling, the dean of the Yale Divinity School, said in an email that the university supports the "proper treatment of Native American artifacts and respect for Native American culture and dignity." Under the federal law known as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, only sacred items, objects of cultural significance, funerary items and human remains must be returned to the tribes. More everyday items like a pair of moccasins do not need to be returned. But the full inventory must be completed and sent to the affected tribes for their review. The seminary has inventoried about half of the 158 items, building on earlier work done by the museum. Mr. Tarler acknowledged that the law could be a burden for institutions that were "short staffed or not experienced" with ethnographic research. Tribes have long been frustrated by the pace of repatriation under the law. Museums, scholarly institutions and other organizations continue to retain possession of 182,000 items classified as human remains, as well as untold millions of ritual artifacts, according to federal records. Many objects were collected decades ago by archaeologists, missionaries and souvenir hunters; others were unearthed during industrial excavations or reclamation projects on lands inhabited by native tribes. Rosita Worl, a Tlingit tribe member and president of the Sealaska Heritage Institute in Alaska, said her tribe is seeking the return of a halibut fishhook that it deems sacred and that is now part of the seminary's collection. She said she had contacted the seminary several times in 2015 to urge it to "act in accordance with their own stated mission in recognizing our spiritual beliefs," but "never received a single, direct response." Andover Newton, just outside Boston, is the oldest graduate seminary in the country. Its notable graduates include Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, the founder of education for the deaf. It is selling its prime hilltop real estate to move to Yale's campus where it will function as a "school within a school" and focus on training candidates for Congregationalist ministries. Dean Sterling declined to comment on whether Yale, as a condition of its partnership with the seminary, would end up assuming control of the collection. Displaying ceremonial artifacts is a particular affront to tribe members. "We shouldn't have to go to some big city museum to view our stuff behind glass," said Donovin Sprague, an archivist and member of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe, which has requested a hair lock from the Newton seminary's collection. Some museums, mindful of tribal sensitivities, exhibit only so called everyday items like clothing, headdresses and cook pots, while others still showcase ritual items that have not been claimed under the act. In 2015, when the seminary had the Native American items appraised, Peabody Essex museum officials objected to the proposed sale, which Dan Monroe, the museum director, called a "break of trust" between the institutions. He said the museum had spent roughly 700,000 curating the artifacts over the years, including photographing them. Mr. Monroe has told the seminary that it must remove the artifacts from the museum soon. It is unclear what will happen to the collection then, but the seminary said the artifacts would be safeguarded as it worked to repatriate them. Mr. Copenhaver said that Andover Newton has considered donating the artifacts and has been in discussions with two institutions that he declined to identify. Mr. Tarler said that even if the collection were transferred, Andover would still be responsible for complying with the federal law to track the items and possibly return them to the tribes. The seminary would not comment on the appraised value of the collection, but one of the more valuable pieces would appear to be a wampum belt that has already been claimed by the Onondaga tribe. Similar wampum belts held by private collectors have fetched nearly 100,000 at auction. In a 2015 letter to federal officials, the seminary said it planned to reach out to the tribe about returning the belt, but the tribe's representative, Tony Gonyea, said they have not heard from the school as yet. When the missionaries first collected the artifacts, Mr. Monroe said, "The attitude was: They worship this mask, they think this fishhook is important. They're quaint and primitive and thank God we're here to save their souls." But times have changed, said Mr. Sprague of the Sioux tribe. There is more respect these days for tribes reclaiming their cultural heritage from museums and federal repositories. Still, the process isn't easy, he said. Mr. Sprague said the Sioux have been working with the seminary for roughly a year on returning the hair lock. "At one point, it was all green light come and get it, but it's a strange case," he said, adding "it's still limping along." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The Preakness Stakes, normally run on the third weekend in May as the second leg of thoroughbred racing's Triple Crown, will instead take place this Saturday, becoming the final race in the 2020 series because of schedule changes related to the coronavirus pandemic. There will be no Triple Crown on the line Saturday at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, because the Belmont Stakes winner, Tiz the Law, was upset by Authentic in the Kentucky Derby, which was run on Sept. 5 this year instead of the first Saturday in May as the second leg instead of the first. There will also be no rematch: Tiz the Law is sitting out the Preakness to rest for the Breeders' Cup Classic on Nov. 7. Still, there are story lines to follow, including Swiss Skydiver's attempt to become only the sixth filly, and the first since Rachel Alexandra in 2009, to win the race in its 145 runnings. A win by Authentic or Thousand Words would give the Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert a record eight victories in the race. The Preakness horses are listed below in order of post position, with comments by Joe Drape and Melissa Hoppert of The New York Times. The morning line odds were set by Keith Feustle of Pimlico Race Course. How to watch: Coverage on Saturday begins on NBC at 4:30 p.m., Eastern time. Coverage will also be streamed on NBC Sports Live. Here's how we see the field: Drape: This late runner's best races are on wet, sloppy tracks. This long shot needs a deluge. Hoppert: He will be making his first start since having a knee chip removed after a second place finish in the Rebel Stakes in March. He has won once in nine career starts. Pass. Drape: He is the best closer in the field and is racing for the third time since returning to the track in July, the kind of circumstance that tends to brings out a peak performance. He has a chance. Hoppert: He pulled off an upset in the Oaklawn Stakes in April, then finished sixth in the Blue Grass Stakes in July. Then he surprised again in the Kentucky Derby, finishing third. Not sure which horse will show up. Drape: Drury, a Louisville, Ky., native, scratched his talented colt the week before the Kentucky Derby because of a minor foot injury. That took guts; he will be rewarded for that decision here. Hoppert: Unbeaten in four starts this year, Art Collector was among the favorites heading into the Derby when he was scratched because of a minor foot ailment. I can't wait to see how he fares. Drape: This filly has never run a bad race, and she finished second to Art Collector in the Blue Grass. I'm rooting for her. Hoppert: She has run 10 races in her career, finishing in the money in nine of them, including in the Blue Grass, where she took second against the boys. But has this aggressive campaign taken a toll? Drape: He finished nearly 30 lengths behind Mr. Big News in the Oaklawn Stakes and turned around and beat the talented Honor A.P. to win the Shared Belief Stakes. Which one shows up? Your guess is as good as mine. Hoppert: It was a shame that he reared up in the paddock and had to be scratched from the Derby, because I was eager to see if he could build off his impressive wire to wire win in the Shared Belief. I know one thing for sure: Never count out a Baffert horse. Drape: This colt tries hard, but is getting into deeper water here. An upset is not likely. Hoppert: The third place finisher in the Jim Dandy Stakes in September, Jesus' Team has taken on a lot of the Preakness horses already and has yet to close the deal. Drape: This colt did not run a lick in the Derby, finishing a well beaten eighth. He did work nicely this week. Up to you. Hoppert: He has hit the board in seven of his 10 races, but his Derby performance did not exactly inspire confidence. Drape: He finished third in the Belmont and the Travers Stakes, and fifth in the Derby. He tries hard enough to hit the board. Hoppert: He is the only horse that will have run in all three Triple Crown races, and he has always been in the mix at the end. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Imagery and energy keep changing throughout "Numerator." Here you're held by geometries, here by body language of both ecstasy and ritual, here by arm gestures. Some of the simplest inventions are among the most enchanting, like a supported somersault (one man holds another's parted hands, creating a hoop through which the second one turns forward and over). "Dance," the fifth and final section, begins with a sensational explosion of six contrasting, rapidly pulsating simultaneous solos; but before you've had time to appreciate the individual dances, the men have begun to create one harmony after another, first in spatial terms and then in canonic sequences. In a final chain sequence, each one's steps include a cartwheel. The program's opener was "Pacific," made to the third and fourth movements of another trio, this one for violin, cello and piano. (Mr. Liu and Mr. Smith were joined by the cellist Francesca McNeeley.) In this work, the nine dancers, male and female, are in patterned flowing skirts of various colors; the men are bare chested. Among the many choreographic resources Mr. Morris shows here gesture, rhythm, line, grouping, not least the originality and fluency of his stage geometries are especially impressive. The opening is startlingly asymmetrical, with dancers all on one side of the stage, but in patterns that mysteriously answer the music's sonorities. A later, more symmetrical image briefly shows the dancers in two close horizontal rows five women almost overlapping with four men just before the dance takes off into three trios. "Serenade" (2003), vividly and vigorously danced by Lesley Garrison, is a five part tour de force to Mr. Harrison's Serenade for guitar with percussion. Different percussion instruments a gong, drums, castanets accompany the music's five sections and are answered onstage by different props for the dancer: hand bells, a long cylinder, a fan. The guitarist Robert Belinic and the percussionist Marcelina Suchocka were quietly joined for the last section by Mr. Morris himself, unannounced but playing castanets. (When "Serenade" was new, he was its dancer and played his own castanets.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Because of safety concerns, AstraZeneca paused late stage trials of its coronavirus vaccine, which is being tested in locations like Sao Paolo, Brazil. The pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca halted large, late stage global trials of its coronavirus vaccine on Tuesday because of a serious suspected adverse reaction in a participant, the company said. It is not yet known whether the reaction was directly caused by the company's vaccine or was coincidental. The pause, which was first reported by STAT, will allow AstraZeneca, a British Swedish company, to conduct a safety review and investigate whether the vaccine caused the illness. How long the hold will last is unclear. Drug companies are racing to complete a coronavirus vaccine that could bring an end to a pandemic that has already claimed more than 890,000 lives globally. AstraZeneca is a front runner, with late stage clinical trials underway around the world, and has said it hoped to have a vaccine ready before the end of the year. If the cause of the reaction turns out to be related to the vaccine, those efforts could be derailed. Late stage vaccine testing remains crucial, as large trials can turn up rare but serious side effects that would surface only if many thousands of people received a vaccine. "This is the whole point of doing these Phase 2, Phase 3 trials," said Dr. Phyllis Tien, an infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco. "We need to assess safety, and we won't know the efficacy part until much later. I think halting the trial until the safety board can figure out whether or not this was directly related to the vaccine is a good idea." President Trump has repeatedly pushed for the approval of a vaccine by Election Day, Nov. 3. On Tuesday nine companies, including AstraZeneca, made a joint pledge to "stand with science" on coronavirus vaccines, reaffirming that they would not move forward with such products before thoroughly vetting them for safety and efficacy. In a statement, AstraZeneca described the trial's halt, which was instituted voluntarily, as a "routine action which has to happen whenever there is a potentially unexplained illness in one of the trials, while it is investigated, ensuring we maintain the integrity of the trials." The company said that in large trials like the ones it is overseeing, participants do sometimes become sick by chance "but must be independently reviewed to check this carefully." The company said it was "working to expedite the review of the single event to minimize any potential impact on the trial timeline," and reaffirmed its commitment "to the safety of our participants and the highest standards of conduct in our trials." A spokeswoman for the Food and Drug Administration declined to comment. A person familiar with the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the participant who experienced the suspected adverse reaction had been enrolled in a Phase 2/3 trial based in the United Kingdom. The individual also said that a volunteer in the U.K. trial had received a diagnosis of transverse myelitis, an inflammatory syndrome that affects the spinal cord and is often sparked by viral infections. However, the timing of this diagnosis, and whether it was directly linked to AstraZeneca's vaccine, is still unknown. A Canadian senator has died after being hospitalized for Covid. Several moves by the U.S. over the last week aim to shift the course of the pandemic. When can the Covid masks finally come off? Transverse myelitis can result from a number of causes that set off the body's inflammatory responses, including viral infections, said Dr. Gabriella Garcia, a neurologist at Yale New Haven Hospital. But, she added, the condition is often treatable with steroids. AstraZeneca declined to comment on the location of the participant and did not confirm the diagnosis of transverse myelitis. "The event is being investigated by an independent committee, and it is too early to conclude the specific diagnosis," the company said. Some said the company's halt was evidence that the process was working as it should. "At this stage, we don't know if the events that triggered the hold are related to vaccination," said Dr. Luciana Borio, who oversaw public health preparedness for the National Security Council under Mr. Trump and who was acting chief scientist at the F.D.A. under President Barack Obama. "But it is important for them to be thoroughly investigated." AstraZeneca's vaccine uses a viral vector that ferries coronavirus genes into human cells. The viral vector in this case is a modified chimpanzee adenovirus, altered to render it harmless to people. The coronavirus components of the vaccine are intended to spark a protective immune response that would be roused again should the actual coronavirus try to infect a vaccinated individual. In a paper published in The Lancet in July, researchers behind AstraZeneca's formulation reported that the majority of participants in the vaccine's Phase 1/2 trials, which are designed to assess the product's safety, had experienced some mild or moderate side effects, including muscle aches and chills. None of the reactions, however, were considered severe or life threatening, and resolved quickly. The vaccine was deemed safe enough to proceed to further testing. AstraZeneca's vaccine is in Phase 2/3 trials in England and India, and in Phase 3 trials in Brazil, South Africa and more than 60 sites in the United States. The company intended for its U.S. enrollment to reach 30,000, and started its American trials on Aug. 31. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
One thing not mentioned in Mr. Pichai's email is whether the company will require employees to take the coronavirus vaccine before returning to the office. Google has said it recommends that employees obtain the vaccine when their health care provider or local public health authority has told them it's available to them, said Gina Scigliano, a Google spokeswoman. Google has said it is looking for opportunities in mid to late 2021 to help make Covid 19 vaccines available to its workers, but only after high risk and high priority people globally have received the vaccines. The timing of Google's plan to roll out the flexible work schedules is still up in the air, because of the different state of the coronavirus in different countries. And the new schedules may not apply to some Google employees, like workers who spend lots of time with customers or employees at its data centers or labs. In March, Google was one of the first companies to tell employees to start working from home before other corporations had a grasp on the risks of working together in enclosed offices. It has repeatedly delayed the timing on when it expects employees to return to the office from January 2021 to July and now, September. After such a long period of remote work, companies are wrestling with how best to transition workers back into offices. Last month, ViacomCBS told employees that it expects most of its employees to divide their time between working at home and in its offices. In doing so, the company said a hybrid model would allow more flexibility for employees, while reducing its real estate needs and keeping costs down. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
This weekend in Raleigh, N.C., some 8,000 runners are expected to line up for a road race, run through town and eat doughnuts. "Disgusting" and "gross" is how Sarah Gilbert, 43, a book publicist from Raleigh describes how she felt after completing the Krispy Kreme Challenge in 2012, in which she downed four doughnuts during the five mile race. The Krispy Kreme Challenge is on a growing list of running events around the United States and beyond where runners don't so much focus on time or even health but instead on getting to the finish line while completing a food related feat of bravura. "It blew up from there," said the race director, Maggie DeWeese, a junior at the university. The event is now a fund raiser for UNC Children's Hospital, run through a charity that pays for the doughnuts, since it has no official affiliation with Krispy Kreme. Ms. DeWeese said typical event participants are college students. "It's just something you do before you graduate," she said. Last year, 40 percent of runners opted to take on the full, 12 doughnut challenge, in which runners attempt to run two and a half miles, eat 12 doughnuts, then run back in under an hour. Another division, The Casual, allows runners to eat however many doughnuts they choose, with no time goal. And new for this year, the No Doughnut, for runners who want to leave the food out of it though given the propensity of race participants to toss their cookies (or in this case doughnuts) during the race, they still will need to watch where they step. February seems to mark the beginning of the food racing season around the country. In a few weeks, Indianapolis runners will compete in the Circle City Donut Dash, where participants must consume a dozen doughnuts at the halfway point. To improve race completion rates, the race organizers this year decided to offer "smaller doughnuts." Racers now must eat a dozen doughnut holes at the halfway point rather than larger doughnuts. "We want more people crossing the finish line completing the challenge," says the race website. Next month, runners in Sacramento compete in the Donut Dash, billed as four doughnuts over four miles. A "lite" division allows competitors to eat just six doughnut holes during the run. The Duluth Donut Dash in Minnesota this fall is a bit tamer the race offers every runner a doughnut and coffee. There's more on the race menu than fried dough. At the Bacon 5K Challenge in Allentown, Pa., in September, competitors ate a half pound of bacon at the halfway point and celebrated the finish with chocolate covered bacon. . Registration has already opened for the July 8 Brain Freezer 5K in Burlington, Vt., during which racers down a full pint of ice cream at the halfway point (3.1 miles, one pint of ice cream). The COBS Cinnamon Bun Run 8 Miler in the Canadian province Alberta requires participants to stop twice and down a cinnamon bun. Participants in the more healthful sounding Millarville Run to the Farmers' Market, held at the same time, also have the option to eat cinnamon buns if they wish. The race expects to give away 1,800 buns this year. Those living in or visiting New York City this fall have their choice of the New York City Pizza Run (two miles, three slices of pizza) or the New York City Cupcake Run (5K, three cupcakes). Runners with more discerning palates can enjoy six wine tastings per lap at the Surrey Bacchus Marathon in England this fall, and, leave it to the French, wine, cheese, oysters, steak, ham and ice cream at the Marathon du Medoc, north of Bordeaux. In September, Bob Tona put on the first Mac Cheesesteak 5K in Wilmington, Del., in which runners down a mac and cheese steak a cheese steak stuffed with mac and cheese at the end of the race. Mr. Tona came up with the idea after running the Jog 'n Hog in Yardley, Pa., in which runners had their choice of eating a pint or quart of ice cream in the middle of a 5K (the race is no longer active), and a number of beer miles, in which runners drink a beer at the start and again at every quarter mile split. ("For whatever reason, when there's beer at a race, there seems to be more runners," he said.) The Mac Cheesesteak 5K had 89 finishers, about what Mr. Tona expected for a small, first year race. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
My assignment, as I chose to accept it, was to review a performance called "Topologie" at the Chocolate Factory Theater in Queens. In the theater's lobby on Thursday afternoon, I found a map of the area with a geometrically elaborate route outlined in red. Soon, Inkyung Lee walked in, traced her finger along the map and left. I followed her out onto the misty street. She ran. I took up the chase. For the next 90 minutes, I trailed Ms. Lee around Long Island City along sidewalks and medians, across many streets, over walls, down back alleys, through garages and gas stations, in and out of stores and offices. Occasionally, Ms. Lee slowed down, but never for long. It was the best exercise I've ever had as a dance critic, and some of the most fun. My little adventure, though, was not exactly what Annie Vigier and Franck Apertet, the creators of "Topologie," intended. The work, which has been staged in various European cities, is not strictly meant for an audience. In Queens, for the French American Danse festival, Ms. Lee and four other performers each followed an itinerary several times each day. Checkpoints had to be reached at certain intervals. Hence Ms. Lee's haste. She had lots of space to cover in not much time. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
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