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Janet Mock was already famous for her work as a magazine editor and trans rights activist when she added writer, director and producer to her resume with the debut of "Pose," a TV show about the lives of gay and trans people in New York in the late 1980s. The second season premiered June 11 on FX. Ms. Mock divides her time between Los Angeles, where "Pose" is written, and New York, where it's filmed. She's a New Yorker at heart, she says, but L.A. feels more like Hawaii, where she's from. She goes back once a year to see family, and to eat her favorite comfort food. "I'm so basic, I go straight to Zippy's, which is a chain in Hawaii, and I get a chili chicken mixed plate. It has a scoop of rice and macaroni salad, which is classic Hawaii mixed plate local food, and then I get the fried chicken with a side of the homemade chili. I scarf that down within 15 minutes and then I go straight to Leonard's. It's a local spot where they make these Portuguese doughnuts. My grandfather is Portuguese so it's very much comfort food for me. So those two things paired up, and I'm good to go." When she takes a vacation, she prefers an all inclusive resort, where she can unplug, lounge on the beach all day and, as she puts it, "just get my life off of me." She limits herself to two pina coladas per trip, though. "They're too many calories. You have to be disciplined; you cannot gain weight on your vacation!" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
This week's Popcast covers them all. Mr. Caramanica talks about Ms. Dacus with Joe Coscarelli, the Times's pop music reporter, who checked in with her regularly over the last year as she was recording "Historian" and emerging from obscurity into an indie rock star in the making. Ms. Dacus has developed a kinship with Julien Baker, another female singer songwriter who is deeply thoughtful about how her music is received, who the Times's chief pop music critic, Jon Pareles, profiled last year. Mr. Caramanica and Mr. Pareles also discuss Soccer Mommy's LP, which comes after a string of self released albums and which Mr. Pareles writes "greatly expands the scope of Ms. Allison's songs in both words and music." Soccer Mommy is currently touring with Phoebe Bridgers, another powerful singer songwriter and obvious kin to Ms. Dacus. And the Times's pop music editor Caryn Ganz discusses the Breeders then and now, as well as similarities between the current female indie rock generation and that of the early 1990s. Email your questions, thoughts and ideas about what's happening in pop music to popcast nytimes.com. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Javier de Frutos choreographed "The Most Incredible Thing" to a score by the Pet Shop Boys. The ballet has its American premiere this week in Charlotte, N.C. CHARLOTTE, N.C. When he was 8, two decades before he became the singing half of the British pop duo Pet Shop Boys, Neil Tennant wanted to be a ballet dancer. The Royal Ballet had visited Newcastle, England, where the Tennant family lived, so he saw "Giselle" and (he thinks) "Coppelia." He was so impressed, he checked out "Teach Yourself Ballet" from the library and attempted to learn at home with his younger brother. "We used the radiator as a barre," Mr. Tennant, now 63, said on the phone from London. The impulse, though, didn't last. "I moved on and decided I wanted to be an actor," he said. "And then I thought I might have the potential for being a pop star." That last career choice turned out well. In 1986 the Pet Shop Boys, his partnership with Chris Lowe, hit No. 1 in the United States with their debut single, "West End Girls," and the group went on to release 13 studio albums of literate, melancholy dance music. Mr. Tennant never mastered the grand plie, but he didn't give up on the ballet altogether: "The Most Incredible Thing," with a Pet Shop Boys score and choreography by Javier de Frutos, has its American premiere on Friday with Charlotte Ballet here. The Pet Shop Boys have always been interested in theater and the classical arts, name checking Debussy on the 1988 single "Left to My Own Devices" and in 2004, scoring Sergei Eisenstein's silent film "Battleship Potemkin." When they decided to write a ballet, Mr. Lowe was reading Hans Christian Andersen stories and was struck by one about a king who offers half his kingdom and his daughter in marriage to the creator of "the most incredible thing." Mr. Tennant said composing a ballet score wasn't a huge transition: "We've always written dance music. That means club or pop dancing, but nonetheless, it's dancing." They aren't the first pop musicians to explore the possibilities of concert dance, but "The Most Incredible Thing" was unusual in its ambition. "It's not like three act narrative ballets come along every day of the week," Mr. Tennant dryly noted. Mr. Tennant and Mr. Lowe did "Battleship Potemkin" in eight bar sections, as if constructing a pop record. Now, working with a scenario written by the playwright Matthew Dunster, they pushed themselves to write longer melodic lines, each Pet Shop Boy revising and extending the work of the other. "The Most Incredible Thing" had its debut at Sadler's Wells Theater in London in 2011. (Its limited run sold out and received an Evening Standard Theater Award.) But the lavish multimedia production proved too expensive to tour and hasn't been performed since 2012. Justin Peck, also inspired by the Andersen story, made a one act dance for New York City Ballet, with a score by Bryce Dessner of the National. When Hope Muir, the new artistic director of Charlotte Ballet (formerly of Scottish Ballet), was looking for interesting family fare, she negotiated the revival, with most of the same creative principals but scaled down slightly. Some changes have been made. Instead of the 60 piece symphonic orchestration, the Pet Shop Boys' electronic score will be used. And projections of shadows that Mr. de Frutos had conceived as a tribute to Pilobolus Dance Theater now actually have been done by Pilobolus (and will be shown on film). On a recent Tuesday in Charlotte, a man with a bald head and a mischievous expression slipped off his sneakers to lead two dozen dancers through a rehearsal. This was Mr. de Frutos, 54, who was revising his choreography for the American production. He was working on a scene involving Josh Hall as the clockmaker and Chelsea Dumas as the princess who wins his heart, guiding them through a dance in which they are reunited and the princess proposes marriage. Caught up in the emotion, Ms. Dumas waited too long to pivot her body and missed a cue. She apologized to Mr. de Frutos, who reassured her: "It's absolutely fine. It's about getting the right feeling." He grinned. "Now feel it faster." "Acting is action," Mr. de Frutos likes to tell the dancers. He has taught them that when their movements tell the story, they don't have to do anything with their faces. "You write what you want it to be, and then you listen to the actors and they lead you in a different way," he said on a break from rehearsal. In his studio at the McColl Center for Art Innovation, where he is an artist in residence, he sat on a couch he had painted with a Maya Angelou quotation. When he's not busy choreographing, he makes visual art. "London is a place where the national sport is pigeonholing," he said of his dual career. "I don't like pigeons and I don't like holes." Mr. de Frutos, born in Venezuela, has worked with one foot in the mainstream (British revivals of "Carousel" and "Cabaret," the pilot for "Game of Thrones") and one foot in the avant garde ("London Road," a documentary musical about the murder of five prostitutes, which he largely choreographed to the dialogue). Although he made his reputation dancing in the nude, his most notorious piece was "Eternal Damnation to Sancho and Sanchez" (2009), which depicted pregnant nuns and the electrocution of a deformed pope, leading to audience walkouts and the cancellation of a planned BBC broadcast. "Those were the works that I needed to make at the time," he said. Still, he bristled when the worried producers of the British production of "The Most Incredible Thing" reminded him once too often that it was going to be a family ballet. They "made me feel like they were putting this in the hands of somebody that didn't understand what a family was," he said. Despite that background, he says he is less cynical than the Pet Shop Boys expected; they learned to respect his romanticism. Mr. Tennant said that the first time he attended a performance of "The Most Incredible Thing," he burst into tears, overcome by the emotion of the ballet and the knowledge of how much work had gone into it. Remembering the moment, Mr. Tennant confessed he was starting to tear up again and said that the Pet Shop Boys found the ballet all the more remarkable because they weren't onstage for it. "I'm looking forward to sitting in the theater in Charlotte and seeing what it sounds like," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
After months of tumult in Viacom's leadership, it came as little surprise that the company had a bad year. The entertainment company reported on Wednesday a 25 percent plunge in profit and a 6 percent drop in revenue for its fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30. The results put stark numbers on what was a difficult period for Viacom, which included a fierce fight for control that led to the ousting of the company's chief executive. Now, the company's board is considering a proposal from the Redstone family to reunite with CBS. The ailing 93 year old media mogul Sumner M. Redstone and his daughter, Shari Redstone, control about 80 percent of the voting shares in Viacom and CBS through National Amusements, the private theater chain company. In a conference call on Wednesday, Viacom executives said that the company was continuing to operate for the long term, even as its board continued to work with its advisers to explore a combination with CBS. "With new leadership across the company, continued investments in new content, technologies and targeted acquisitions, and an expanded board of directors, I have great confidence in Viacom's next phase, as the company explores the exciting possibilities ahead," Thomas E. Dooley, Viacom's outgoing interim chief, said in a statement. Net earnings from continuing operations attributable to Viacom were 1.4 billion in the fiscal year, down from 1.9 billion the previous year. In the most recent quarter, Viacom's profit declined 71 percent to 252 million. Viacom is the owner of networks including MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, as well as the Paramount Pictures film and TV studio. The TV and film sides of the business both returned dismal results; total revenue for the year was down to 12.5 billion, from 13.3 billion the previous year. That trend accelerated in the most recent quarter, when total revenue tumbled 15 percent. "If Viacom purposely scheduled their E.P.S. report the morning after the election, hoping their financial results would get lost in other news, they got their wish," Todd Juenger, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein Company, said in a research note. "Given the dislocations across the markets that will begin today and last into the future, we doubt many of you are in the mood to read about Viacom results, any more than we are in a mood to write about them." The latest blow to Viacom TV networks came this week when Sony announced that it was cutting Viacom networks from its PlayStation Vue web based TV service. Sony framed the move as a value cost calculation. "We have determined that removing the bundle of channels from Viacom is the best way for us to continue to offer the most compelling value to our fans," Dwayne Benefield, head of PlayStation Vue, said in a blog post on Tuesday. During the conference call, Mr. Dooley framed the news as "an ongoing negotiation" and said that he was "highly confident and comfortable that Viacom's channels will be on the successful" streaming platforms in the future. The company's results included a pretax charge of 206 million for the quarter related to exit packages for Viacom's ousted leadership team. That included 138 million for separation payments and 68 million for the acceleration of equity based compensation. Philippe P. Dauman, Viacom's former chief executive, left the company this summer with a total severance package valued at about 72 million. Mr. Dooley, a longstanding partner to Mr. Dauman who stepped in to lead the company after his ouster, is leaving the company next week. He stands to receive 62.4 million upon his departure. Last week, the company named Robert M. Bakish as its new interim chief executive. Mr. Bakish, who started at Viacom in 1997, most recently served as chief executive of the company's international unit. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
All footage of the great tap dancer Baby Laurence is rare. Though he was hugely influential in the 1940s, adapting tap to bebop, this Charlie Parker of the feet was never very famous. Apart from a documentary filmed shortly before his death in 1974, the best and only surviving documentation of his art is an astonishing album he recorded in 1959 the only documentation, that is, besides a clip you can find on YouTube. It's from a 1967 appearance on the television variety show "Hollywood Palace." In the full episode, also available on YouTube, Sammy Davis Jr. introduces his guest as "the greatest tap dancer in the world" and as proof "that tap dancing is not a lost art." Then Laurence, in his mid 40s, proves that he hasn't lost it. Riding an easy swing, he compresses and stretches the beat into soulful surprises. He's a musician, but his moves are far from incidental the wound up hesitation before a turn, the way a foot tries to make a skittering getaway and he delivers them with a majestic cool. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
La MaMa will begin its next season in a state of transition: Its original theater is undergoing renovation, and will not host any shows for the first time in 55 years. But in its new spaces, the avant garde theater's lineup will be as diverse and politically fiery as always, with highlights including a Tennessee Williams adaptation and a visit from the Belarus Free Theater. That troupe, which has been banned from its homeland for its politically charged works, has performed at La MaMa over the years. This time it will present the New York premiere of "Burning Doors," which features Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot. Ms. Alyokhina and other band members were imprisoned for protest performances in Russia, and this production (Oct. 13 22) will dramatize her story, as well as those of other persecuted artists. On Nov. 2 19, La MaMa will celebrate Charles Ludlam, an absurdist actor, playwright and director who died of AIDS 30 years ago, and who staged many of his works at La MaMa. His 1967 play, "Conquest of the Universe, or When Queens Collide," will receive a full revival, with Everett Quinton a longtime member of Mr. Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company directing. A production of Tennessee Williams's "Kingdom of Earth" will run Oct. 4 8, with direction from Fred Abrahamse. And the dance series La MaMa Moves! will return in May, with an emphasis on emerging gay and transgender choreographers of color. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Three shows in New York are inspired by a transgressive art form. For Parla, it's a mode of aesthetic innovation; for JR, it's a jumping off point and a pretense; for Martins, it's a way to connect past and present. It's been refreshing to see the recent bursts of full car subway graffiti in New York, a kaleidoscopic jolt of anarchy that recalls the city before glass towers, before subway countdown clocks, before the street art gallery at Hudson Yards. The huffing and puffing that greeted these trains also served as a reminder that graffiti is both a disruptive aesthetic choice and a disruptive social practice where it happens is just as crucial as what it looks like. That's especially important to remember given that five decades or so after the first taggers raided New York, graffiti or at minimum, its spirit is finding its way into museums. The often electric "Jose Parla: It's Yours," at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the overly blunt "JR: Chronicles," at the Brooklyn Museum, demonstrate the vastly differing shapes that infiltration can take intricate vs. plain, abstract vs. literal, textured vs. trite. For Mr. Parla, a former tagger, graffiti remains his fount. His show begins in the lobby, with "It's Yours: The International Illegal Construct Against Indigenous People," an oversized piece consisting of layered canvases that cover most of the outer wall leading to the main exhibition and slither around the sides and into the room itself. It gives the impression of being wrapped onto the museum, or more aptly, peeling off it. The most contained and successful of these pieces is his "Writers Bench 149th Street and Grand Concourse." (The title is a tribute to a famed 1970s graffiti hangout not far from the museum.) Colors range from hazmat orange to bruised eggplant, and the interruptions between torn paper and splattered paint feel especially dramatic. At the center are two huge bluish gashes that from a distance suggest eyes, or wounds. Nearby, "No Color Supersedes 'Cause The Balance is Right," at 20 feet long, is a full narrative in action, coalescing toward tension in the middle Mr. Parla's wispy tag descendant linework is elegant, and his chipping and dripping paint is a stark contrast to the peeled segments. "Agree For Your Mind To Be Free," heaving with chalky yellow, captures the jaundiced earth tones of a collapsed city. The smaller framed works here are, as a rule, less powerful than the larger ones. And in general, Mr. Parla's free standing totem walls, done in a similar style but in a way that looks as if they've been chiseled off an abandoned building, are more moving than the canvases he's showing here. His many small details get activated when the context is huge. Parla is loose with his fields of color, but never splenetic. There are also signs of written life throughout scrawls about cuts in government services, the Fania Records logo and, on "It's Yours," Mr. Parla adds tags from older graffiti writers, including Coco 144 and Chino BYI, a gesture that bonds the painting not just to the museum, but to the streets outside. When Mr. Parla was a young graffiti writer, his tag was Ease some of his old books and tools are displayed here in vitrines. Even though he's long been deliteralizing his work, it still captures the structural recklessness of the best graffiti. The impatience of the paintwork juxtaposed against the permanence conveyed by the representation of decay is a backdoor way to capture the graffiti impulse and make sure it's never erased. (For the last few months, the museum's other main exhibition space has held a bounty of Henry Chalfant's '70s and '80s subway graffiti photographs, the original way to capture graffiti permanently.) Early in JR's exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum there is a set of photos and videos of his early years as a graffiti writer, a means of establishing his bona fides. But that quickly recedes when the show arrives at the meat of his work, which has learned one crucial thing from graffiti but maybe just one the impulse to be seen and to interject new narratives into environs that aren't naturally receptive. JR is a photographer, activist and social engineer who made his name in the mid 2000s by photographing residents of Les Bosquets, a housing project in a Paris banlieue, up close and with a sense of whimsy, then wheat pasting those images around the city, a subversive sort of quasi advertising. This has become JR's primary mode capturing the overlooked and forcing people to gaze upon them. It is, without doubt, noble. In JR's projects, which take place around the world, he is both interloper and collaborator; a recurring refrain in this show is the question of what the communities he collaborates with will gain. In a video documenting the artist's work in Kibera, a slum in Nairobi, Kenya part of his Women Are Heroes series one resident plainly describes the appeal: "It is like marketing," he says. But the most impressive part of JR's practice is, in truth, the logistics. The photography itself is adequate, and not always revealing. As his works get grander in size, they do not get grander in idea spreading one large image across several buildings or passenger trains or shipping containers or leotards on the bodies of dancers feels like an optical trick. In one work, he erects a huge billboard of a Mexican toddler at the U.S. border, peeking over the wall into this country it's cute, which is the point. Over the course of this exhibition, JR comes to seem like an N.G.O. Christo and Jeanne Claude, organizing hundreds of people and months of effort in the hope of pulling off an epic stunt which, when photographed, will travel far and make noise. Generously, his approach recalls Tibor Kalman's work on Benetton's Colors magazine. More truthfully, though, it recalls the work of branding agencies. His visual language is crisp, unambiguous, hard to misinterpret, if it requires interpretation at all. Since JR's art is often wheat pasted, and therefore ephemeral, what is displayed here is documentation of its creation. One of the more powerful images is from his 2013 return to Les Bosquets, where he wheat pasted images inside a housing tower due to be demolished the following day. In the photo, that building, half collapsed, has JR's loopy pictures band aiding the wound, a tragicomedy. There are some echoes here with Parla both respect decay, and want to counter it. But to Parla, decay is messy and vital. To JR, it's whimsical and inconvenient. Parla and JR are friends and collaborators, too. In JR's show, there is a video of them working together on a commission in Havana JR is the appeaser, and Mr. Parla, in service of their art, is an agitator. In JR's early work, at least, the mere act of documentation was a radical and consequential gesture. But his more recent work shifts from individual photos into grand murals incorporating hundreds of people. The show's centerpiece is "The Chronicles of New York City," a gigantic four wall scene containing more than a thousand New Yorkers there are tablets where you can zoom in on each one and hear them speak. It's cheerful and utterly limp Jason Polan would have conveyed more about these people with just a few pencil strokes. Looking at the work for a minute is just as revealing as looking at it for an hour. Which isn't to say that simply documenting a community can't radiate emotional immediacy. The graffiti legend Kunle Martins Earsnot of the IRAK crew was a fixture on New York walls in the late 1990s and 2000s. His fine art work, as seen over the past year, is sentimental and studious. At 56 Henry, he's showing several diptychs, graphite renderings of loved ones on dirty found cardboard. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Cherise Boothe (center) finds herself back in a Brooklyn she hoped to leave behind in Lynn Nottage's comedy "Fabulation, or the Re Education of Undine." Jay Gatsby (ne James Gatz) came from North Dakota. The actress Carrie Wheeler was Caroline Meeber or just Sister Carrie back home in Wisconsin. By the time they each hit it big in New York, they'd wiped out their former identities and shed a fair share of attachments as well. But they've got nothing on Undine Barnes Calles. Undine's family, way back in Brooklyn, knew her as Sharona Watkins. After disappearing from their lives to become a fierce public relations diva, she didn't shed them so much as expunge them, telling everyone they'd died in a fire. So goes the classic American reinvention story as repurposed by Lynn Nottage in "Fabulation, or the Re Education of Undine," which opened on Monday at the Pershing Square Signature Center. The production itself is a reinvention, or at least a revival; writing about its premiere at Playwrights Horizons in 2004, Ben Brantley called it a "busy, robustly entertaining comedy." It still is, but the world around it has changed so much that the comedy feels, if just as busy, less robust. Especially at the beginning, when we meet the 37 year old Undine (Cherise Boothe) at the precipice of a disaster that will start her downward spiral, the play's tone seems somehow too blithe for the times. In picaresque fashion, Ms. Nottage (who likewise lives in Brooklyn) puts Undine through humiliations that mark her fall while serving as satires of familiar theatrical tropes. She visits a Yoruba shaman slash M.B.A., despairs of the down market lifestyle of her Lotto playing parents, discovers that kindly Grandma has an unexpected vice. Next floor down in her descent is a drug bust and jail. Last stop: the line for benefits at Social Services. What's new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter The relentless pace of her degradation may remind you, oddly, of "Mlima's Tale," Ms. Nottage's haunting play about an elephant brought low by the ivory trade. But as Undine's fortunes bottom out, something unexpected happens: She becomes self critical, and incrementally kinder. Downward mobility proves to be upward morality. For this is not the comedy of deracination it at first seems; it's a comedy of re racination, of discovering one's authentic self by stripping away the disfigurements of ambition. That's a tricky stance to take if you believe in bootstraps. To make it work, prelapsarian Undine must be as awful and single minded in her pursuit of success as possible; Ms. Nottage has said that she got a bead on the character after reading a profile of Condoleezza Rice. That may be why the beginning isn't funny, despite all attempts by the director Lileana Blain Cruz to will laughs into existence. Only as Undine's enamel shell dissolves Ms. Boothe is especially good at rendering the change via body language and vocal inflection do we begin to enjoy her and the surrounding characters fully. (There are 26 of them, deftly dispatched by seven quick sketch artists.) Her encounters with a pregnant teenager and a stereotypical homegirl now working for J. P. Morgan tenderize her further. By the time she mistakenly winds up in rehab with the impossibly nice Guy (Ian Lassiter, as charming now as he was oily as Herve), we think she may even deserve him. In its lightheartedness, "Fabulation" is something of an outlier for Ms. Nottage, though the Signature Theater is reviving her 2011 Hollywood satire "By the Way, Meet Vera Stark" in January and producing a new comedy next season. It's no accident that her two Pulitzer Prizes for "Ruined" in 2009 and "Sweat" in 2017 went to works that are fundamentally naturalistic and tragic. Perhaps that's why "Fabulation," and thus Ms. Blain Cruz's production, feel most accomplished the farther away they get from spoof and closer to reality. But reality invites uncomfortable questions. Are we meant to understand that Undine's return to Fort Greene perhaps a comedown in 2004 but home to million dollar apartments today is a salutary form of racial re education, a way of recentering her blackness? Was her fall the result of having bought into a fabulated, "white" idea of ambition? Is she worth loving only if she embraces being a mother? Harsh judgments, perhaps, but not as harsh as those delivered to Gatsby, Sister Carrie and, for that matter, Undine Spragg, the Edith Wharton heroine for whom Ms. Nottage's character is named. They must scratch their way up society's cliff face forever, or die in the process. What makes "Fabulation" a comedy, albeit one with a bitter edge, is that our heroine is at least allowed to approach her happiness, once she stops trying to be a success. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
One morning not long ago, I plopped down on a sidewalk in Maradi, Niger, alongside an Islamic judge who was hearing divorce cases at his sidewalk court. He was barefoot and sat on a sheepskin rug as he strained to hear the complainants over the bleating of passing flocks. Women came forward with gripes about cheating husbands and deadbeat dads, sexless marriages and one husband who had brought home ordinary potatoes, infuriating his wife. He had promised to buy her yams. As an American journalist, I didn't imagine I would have much in common with many of these women, who live in a society where arranged marriages and even child marriage remain common. But I found myself nodding when Zalika Amadou talked about sending her husband out for medicine when she was sick, only to have him return home, hours later, having forgotten to buy any. That evening after I interviewed Ms. Amadou, I returned to my hotel room and was just putting away my notebook when I got a FaceTime call from my 10 year old son who was at home, thousands of miles away in Dakar, Senegal, where my family had moved so that I could work as West Africa bureau chief for The New York Times. "Where's Dad?" my son said, flustered, his big head filling the screen. I paused. "What do you mean, 'Where's Dad?' Isn't he with you?" "No, he left to go surfing about an hour ago." "He did what?" I fumed. My husband left our three elementary age kids home alone to go ... surfing? I fired off the most measured email to my husband that I could, informing him that our young son had contacted me in the middle of my work assignment in rural Niger looking for his dad. An hour later, he replied. "Don't judge," was all the email said. I wanted to rage. I started to write back with a stinging critique of his parenting. But I took a breath, tried my best to take his advice and then went back to interviewing other angry women, all of us with our different ideas about how a wife and mother should be. I was in West Africa in the first place after finding my own family stuck in an increasingly familiar global phenomenon: the dual career, work life rut. Our life had become a blur of birthday parties, soccer games, after bedtime conference calls and frantic subway commutes to be on time for school pickup. American women have been trying for decades to figure out how to strike the right work life balance. We've received head spinning advice: Have babies early and then start your career. Have babies later once you're secure in your career. Quit your job once you have a baby. The working world is finally accommodating mothers with 10 working days of paid leave and lactation rooms in a closet. We haven't managed to come up with any magic formula. Each of us ends up in the same place at some point: making tough decisions that tilt that balance of work and family back and forth, because all of us still live in a world designed by and for men. My family's problems were familiar, and so was my husband's suggested solution: He wanted us to move to the suburbs. Instead, I persuaded him to move to Senegal. When we landed in Dakar to start my new job, my husband took on fewer responsibilities at his workplace so that he could be the lead parent for our children. In our new setting, my family role was clear: I was now the breadwinner. In Dakar, this made me an anomaly among the other Western international families and Senegalese families alike. Every working parent has trouble leaving the work at the office at the end of the day and focusing on family life. But in Senegal, where my work trips took me away for weeks at a time, reintegrating to home life could be particularly jarring: After meeting with children forcibly recruited into fighting a war by Islamic extremists, I came home to my own children whining about not getting a lead role in a school play and gripes about their father using the wrong kind of Band Aid to cover their skinned knee. I didn't shy away from telling my kids about the stories I had reported, hoping they would see the juxtaposition on their own. I was pushing ahead in my career, and my husband, as the parent who mostly stayed behind, got to know our kids better than he ever had. But my children became hardened to me being gone. They came up with a name for me, a result of correcting themselves when their first impulse was to call out for their dad: To them, I was Daddy Mommy. One evening I walked in the door to our house, relieved to let down my guard after tracking illegal gold miners in rural Senegal who were keen to show me the finer points of mining with plastic explosives. I entered the living room, where the kids were sitting on the floor engrossed in a board game with my husband. They didn't even look up. It made me feel bad, but I also knew that just outside my door, women were up against a much more rigid set of gendered expectations. Many of the societies I covered were so patriarchal that women weren't allowed to own land. In many families, men made all the big decisions and women were expected to stay home and cook and clean. This was a message broadcast by the most powerful men in society. Muhammadu Buhari, the president of Nigeria, once publicly proclaimed that his wife "belongs to my kitchen." Yet women here, too, were finding new ways to thrive. In the most cosmopolitan of cities, Lagos, Nigeria, I met with young women bucking societal expectations that they marry and have children in their 20s. Instead, they were focusing on their careers. This was such an affront to expectations that Nigerian mainstream media mocked them by calling them "old cargo." I spent a day shadowing Toyin Sanni, then one of the few female bank chief executives on the entire continent, as she conducted meetings from her corner office in a skyscraper along the Wall Street of Lagos. She had married another banker at a competing institution but like many successful career women, Ms. Sanni didn't divulge her salary to her husband, a simple and effective way to avoid denting the male ego. I met career women too busy to have a social life who had turned to dating websites to find love. One told me when she finally walked into the home of the man she'd been flirting with online, she saw that he had groceries and cleaning supplies waiting for her to test her domestic skills. These women were part of something bigger happening across West Africa. Education rates there are still low for women and girls, but more of them are in school than ever before. Prodded by economic hardships created by war and migration, more women are pursuing careers outside the home and changing family dynamics as a result. Many of these women, without any blueprint to guide them, were embarking on figuring out how to manage the mad juggle of work and family in circumstances far different from those in the United States. I'm paying attention to see if they come up with a better solution. On one of my last assignments in West Africa, I camped in Nigeria with herder families who shepherded their cattle for miles searching for grazing land in places being squeezed by development and dried out by a changing climate. Their lifestyles have remained essentially the same for centuries. Yet from a Western perspective, they had the most modern of relationships. Yes, women were in charge of cooking and cleaning, but they had herds separate from their husbands, giving them financial independence. They were able to hand down an inheritance of their own to their children. My favorite time with the herders was in the morning, when over bowls of fresh, warm milk and pots of rice slathered in melted homemade butter, the men and women would greet one another with a long list of questions. "How was your night? How is your tiredness? How is your body? How is the dew? How is the cold? And how is your patience?" The last question they ask because no one ever has everything they want in life. So, they want to know, how is your patience with not having it all? Dionne Searcey is the former West Africa bureau chief for The New York Times and the author of "In Pursuit of Disobedient Women," from which this essay is adapted. 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 |
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. With President Trump preparing to meet with North Korea's leader, Kim Jong un, in Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital, Jimmy Kimmel said there was something ironic about the president who avoided military service in Vietnam attending a diplomatic meeting there. "Donald Trump is almost 8,000 miles away from us. applause He arrived in Vietnam this morning, reporting for duty only about 50 years late." JIMMY KIMMEL Kimmel and Conan O'Brien both made light of the pomp and circumstance surrounding the meeting. "Trump and Kim Jong un will meet tomorrow night for what is being called 'a small dinner.' Already, I don't believe it. Neither one of those two has ever eaten a small dinner." JIMMY KIMMEL | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Murray Olderman, Who Both Wrote and Drew About Sports, Dies at 98 Murray Olderman, who chronicled the sports world as what he called a "rare double threat," turning out nationally syndicated cartoons while also writing features and columns in a career of more than 60 years, died on Wednesday in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 98. His daughter Lorraine Olderman confirmed the death, at a retirement community. She said he had recently had a heart attack. Supplanted by television, the internet and the decline of newspapers, sports cartooning is a dying art. But Mr. Olderman thrived when caricatures were featured attractions of the sports pages. His work was syndicated by the Newspaper Enterprise Association, a Scripps Howard service, and appeared in as many as 750 newspapers from the early 1950s to the 1980s. His books, most of them about football, usually included his drawings, and he wrote for national magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post and Sport. As a young man in Rockland County, N.Y., north of New York City, Mr. Olderman was fascinated with the sports cartoons of Willard Mullin, whose Brooklyn Dodger "Bum" ran in The New York World Telegram, and of Leo O'Mealia of The New York Evening Journal and later The Daily News. His talent for drawing arose "from doodling in class," he recalled in his memoir, "Mingling With Lions" (2004). "I could draw a line no straighter than the next guy," he wrote. "I just liked the looks of a cartoon on a sports page. And I was willing to put in the time to try to learn the art." He often drew athletes, either in head and shoulder images or in the midst of action, accompanied by text blocks citing their exploits. But he also sought a more creative touch. He poked fun at football jargon by caricaturing the broadcasters Chris Schenkel and Pat Summerall, with Mr. Schenkel citing arcane defensive strategies that stymied the quarterback Y.A. Tittle, followed by Mr. Summerall's simple summation: "He got thrown for a 3 yard loss." But Mr. Olderman generally stayed away from a hard edge satirical approach at a time when sports pages and their cartoons were more entertaining than critical. "In portraying these people, most of the time I couldn't help but emphasize their heroic qualities, often romanticize them," he wrote in his memoir, in which he sought to portray what the athletes he knew "were really like." Murray Olderman was born on March 27, 1922, in Manhattan, a son of Max and Jennie (Steinberg) Olderman, immigrants from Russia. His father worked in Manhattan's garment district, and his mother was a homemaker. He grew up in Spring Valley, in Rockland County. At a time "when pennies were scarce," as Mr. Olderman told it, his father brought home daily newspapers, with their sports cartoons, that had been left behind on buses by his fellow commuters. Mr. Olderman graduated as a journalism major from the University of Missouri. He received another bachelor's degree from Stanford, where he studied French in a World War II Army program and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. After the war, he obtained a master's degree from Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. He worked briefly at The Sacramento Bee and The Minneapolis Star before the Newspaper Enterprise Association hired him in 1952 to develop a daily sports comic strip. But that idea never panned out. Working out of the syndicate's New York office, he began turning out general sports cartoons, columns and features instead. Mr. Olderman became the syndicate's sports editor in 1964 and its executive editor a few years later. He gave up his executive post in 1971 and moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a roving columnist and again as a cartoonist for the syndicate. He twice won the National Cartoonist Society's award for best sports cartooning before retiring from the syndicate in 1987. In addition to "Mingling With Lions," his books included three illustrated volumes on pro football for Prentice Hall, "The Pro Quarterback," "The Running Backs" and "The Defenders." He also wrote "Just Win, Baby" (2012), a biography of Al Davis, the Oakland Raiders' owner and coach; and "The Draw of Sport" (2017), which combined his full page illustrations of some 150 sports figures with his remembrances of them. Mr. Olderman ranged beyond the sports world as well. Serving as a lieutenant in the Army, he arrived in France two days before Germany's surrender in May 1945. Fluent in German as well as French, he took part in the interrogation of suspected Nazi war criminals in the prelude to the Nuremberg trials. While on a trip to Europe in 1970 with fellow editors from the Newspaper Enterprise Association, he interviewed Albert Speer, the architect of Hitler's war machine, who was living in Heidelberg, Germany, following his 20 year imprisonment. Mr. Olderman wrote of those conversations in syndicated articles. He also wrote about his travels to the Soviet Union to meet with an aunt and cousins whom his family had thought had perished in the Holocaust. In addition to his daughter Lorraine, he is survived by another daughter, Marcia Linn; a son, Mark; a sister, Diane Morton; five grandchildren; and three great grandchildren. His wife, Nancy (Calhoun) Olderman, died in 2011. A few sports cartoonists, like Bill Gallo of The Daily News in New York and Drew Litton of The Rocky Mountain News, still flourished in Mr. Olderman's later years. But he observed in his memoir that "a new breed of editor came in, with emphasis on glitzy photo layouts and a penchant for downsizing." "The sports cartoon as we knew it was virtually extinct," he lamented. "In its place was that halftone of a runner sliding into second base." Mr. Olderman reflected on his long career in a personal vein when he was interviewed in 2017 for the community news publication The Columbia Missourian, in which he had published his first illustration in 1941 as a junior at the University of Missouri. "There were a lot of guys who could write, and there are a lot of guys who could draw," he said. "But very few who could do both." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Hunter College, part of the City University of New York. "Greater transparency is going to empower the consumer," said Senator Charles E. Grassley, who is co sponsoring bills with Senator Al Franken to help students compare costs. Once upon a time, paying for college was a relatively simple task. Parents who could often did. Teenagers with parents who lacked either the ability or the willingness to pay worked their way through school, which was easy enough to do at many schools before 1985 or so. But then came rising costs and student loans, of which there are countless iterations, from the federal government and state agencies and private entities. Repayment plans proliferated, too, depending on your income and profession and the type of loan you had. And many colleges split their own grants and discounts into those based on financial need (where the aid offer is sometimes predictable) and ones based on academic merit (where the offers are often unpredictable). Most of the professionals who added these features to the system did so for reasons that made perfect sense at the time, but their collective effort has left us with a process of inordinate complexity. It is so bad, in fact, that it has inspired a little noticed burst of bipartisanship in Washington designed to fix some of the mess. This unlikely buddy act stars Senators Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, and Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa. They are co sponsors of three pieces of legislation designed to make the cost of college clearer before applying to a school, before picking one and on a continuing basis while trying to complete a degree. Each law would impose new rules on colleges and universities. Attempting to add regulation is not a standard Republican reflex. But given that federal loans and financial aid formulas sit at the center of much of the confusion, Senator Grassley believes this is a market that the government created, at least in part. So legislators owe it to their constituents to improve the way it functions. "A student is a consumer of the product of education," he said in an interview this week. "Greater transparency is going to empower the consumer." The pair's efforts could also provide a road map for people who do not want to be tripped up by the complexity, and it starts with the Net Price Calculator Improvement Act. These calculators, which allow college shoppers to input data and get a rough sense of how much financial aid a school might offer them, have not been warmly embraced by many colleges. As I've reported in the past, some have even blocked third party efforts to make it easier for families to compare the results that the calculators spit out. To the senators, these calculators are vital, given that too many families dismiss colleges with high sticker prices out of hand, without realizing that few people pay the sticker price at many private colleges anymore. So their bill would force schools to put the calculator on the same webpage where families look for cost and admission information. Plus, it would encourage the Department of Education to develop a universal calculator containing the data of every college, which would make comparisons easier. Bill No. 2 is the Understanding the True Cost of College Act, but a better name for it might be the Colleges Don't Write Very Clear Financial Aid Award Letters Act. When a college offers you aid before you've decided whether to attend, it sends you a letter with a bunch of numbers that purport to explain it all. These letters, however, are often so badly crafted that some of Senator Franken's constituents complained that they could not tell whether they were being offered grants (which they did not have to pay back) or loans (which they generally did). Part of the problem comes from industry jargon. There are descriptive terms or loan names that financial aid administrators believe they must use to comply with regulations, and others, like "Fed Direct Unsub Loan," that simply exist nowhere else in the English language. Yet they stuff the letters full of them and send them off to teenagers. "Most financial aid administrators mean well," said Brendan Williams, director of knowledge for uAspire, which helps students and others decode the financial aid system. "But sometimes they lose sight of where students are when getting these letters. It's a foreign language almost." The True Cost bill would mandate the use of a standard template for award letters, so that recipients would have a clear sense of what college would cost, how much money they might have to borrow and how much grant money was being offered, free and clear. "Let people compare apples to apples instead of apples to oranges," Senator Grassley said. This could and should have happened a long time ago, for it's not a new issue. In 2007, Kim Clark, who was a colleague of mine at Fortune Magazine 20 years ago, used a fellowship to set up a website explaining just how confusing many award letters were. Her "decoder" feature translated a handful of actual letters so that people could cut through the muddle. Several years after that, a clear as day sample letter appeared on the Department of Education's website, but schools were not forced to use it. Many refuse to do so to this day. Why is this? "They don't want to make it easy to understand the true costs and to compare them," said Ms. Clark, who now works for the Education Writers Association. Tweedy traditionalists, after all, don't want a price war to get in the way of the gauzy appeal of reputation, tradition and other things that are hard to put a value on. Mr. Williams, whose organization would not exist but for the absurd complexity of the system, has some sympathy for the writers of said letters. "It's their job to communicate with students, and, let's be honest really, to try to get students to enroll at their college," he said. Still, he has no patience for common practices like formatting letters to count loans as "awards," as if the school were doing families some kind of a favor. "It drives me bonkers," he said. The third bill, the Know Before You Owe Act, co sponsored with Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, is aimed at giving students a running total of their debt and its ramifications during each year at school. Currently, students get some loan counseling on the way in and some more on the way out, but that's it, and it's often not very good. If this bill passes, the annual check in will include an explanation of students' projected debt to income ratio based on the average salary for people in their major. Borrowers would also have to manually enter the amount of federal loans they wished to use, so that they'd be making a conscious decision about debt and not simply checking a box to grab everything they were eligible to borrow. These bills will probably not get much of a hearing on their own, so they're more likely to be included in the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Whether that will happen (as it is supposed to) in the next year or so is anyone's guess. In the meantime, there is nothing stopping you from doing all of the things that these bills would make the schools do for you. Use a search engine to find the net price calculator for the schools that interest you, as some schools hide them on their sites. You can also go to College Abacus's website to compare the results from different schools, if the schools haven't blocked College Abacus's tool, that is. Once the award letters start arriving, consult Ms. Clark's letter reading advice that ran in Money Magazine. You should also look at the Institute for College Access and Success' tips for interpreting the documents and the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators' glossary. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Way back in 2001, the York Theater Company staged a concert production of "Carmen Jones." Anika Noni Rose, then 28, was cast as the angelic ingenue Cindy Lou, who sees the sensuous title character seduce her fiance, Joe. At the time Ms. Rose had only one Broadway credit under her belt, hadn't developed her voice enough to realize she was a soprano, and looked, she said, "like a 10 year old." She knew she was cast as the character she fit best. But the whole time, there in the background, she was wondering: Are you sure you don't want me to be Carmen Jones? Are you sure? "I don't ever remember not being aware of the show," Ms. Rose recalled over a recent lunch at a Union Square hotel. She'd seen the movie version, starring Dorothy Dandridge ("my mother's idol") many times. And she knew Georges Bizet's opera "Carmen," the source material for Oscar Hammerstein's adaptation, too. Right now it's hard for musical theater fans not to be aware of Ms. Rose, thanks to her acclaimed performance in that long dreamed for title role of the Classic Stage Company production, which runs through Aug. 19. John Doyle's intimate rendition is the first full New York production of the show since its 1943 Broadway run. In those seven decades, "Carmen Jones" went into a sort of obscurity, marked by the very oddity of its essence: it's Hammerstein without Rodgers, and an opera meant for Broadway. In casting Carmen, Mr. Doyle initially thought about actors he'd worked with in his Tony winning revival of "The Color Purple." But when Ms. Rose's representatives called to say she wanted to meet with him, he knew he'd found his star. "You don't audition people of her caliber," he said. "I knew this was her first time back in a major profile role in a musical in the city," he added. "I also sensed the intelligence with which she leads her life. She waited and made a choice to do something that would presumably stretch her, shine her in a different light, singing in a way people don't expect." Has Ms. Rose read her reviews, some of the best of her career? She confessed she hadn't. "I know they're positive but I don't need to know exactly what they say, so don't tell me," she answered with a grin. "Her language is sex whether it's being had or not, it's the potential promise of sex, the energy of sexual dalliances past," Ms. Rose explained. "But she doesn't owe Joe one thing. She doesn't even say there will be something for him at the end of that train ride." Ms. Rose, who was reluctant to talk about her personal life to preserve her family's privacy, grew up in Bloomfield, Conn., deeply influenced by a grandmother who instilled in her a love of history. They regularly read from "The Black Book," Toni Morrison's compilation of events both painful and glorious in the African American experience. As an actress, she's embodied women who convey both from her Tony Award winning breakout as the daughter of a Southern maid who feels the stirrings of the civil rights movement in the 2004 musical "Caroline, or Change," to her portrayal of the slave Kizzy in the 2016 remake of "Roots." She's also played a 1960s pop star in the film adaptation of "Dreamgirls," the president of a historically black university on "The Quad," a ruthless lawyer on "The Good Wife," and an evil kingpin in "Power" (a role she thinks her grandmother would have enjoyed). And young fans still look up to her as the voice of Princess Tiana in the animated film "The Princess and the Frog." Ms. Rose said she was proud to be part of a project that gave children of color a Disney lead to identify with. But it wasn't until she saw "Control" era Janet Jackson that she felt a deep connection to an entertainment figure, an identification that set her on the path to a theater degree from Florida A M University, and further studies at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. "I did all the lip syncing, learned all her moves," she said. "I had a yearning to be a part of things, but I don't think I recognized it as such at the time." When it had its premiere, "Carmen Jones" was among the most ambitious all black musicals of its time, but it also drew criticism for vernacular language that reinforced stereotypes about African Americans. Mr. Duncan referred to this "crudity" as a product of its time, and like Ms. Rose, he put his confidence in Mr. Doyle. Beyond the language, Ms. Rose thinks people feared reviving the musical because it shows a sexually empowered black woman. It's "messy, dirty, lush, sweaty and human" she said. The show remains a timely reminder of what men expect from women, she added. She described a recent encounter with a stranger who approached her on the street. "Why are you so close to me?" she asked. "I thought we were walking together," he replied. She crossed the street as a cab was approaching. "I could hear anger in his voice as he said, 'Don't get hit by that cab,' like that would be my punishment for running away from him," she recalled. Mr. Duncan and Ms. Rose first met four years ago in a workshop of the musical "Shuffle Along," which made its way to Broadway in 2016, but without the actress. (Her only appearances there since "Caroline, or Change" have been in revivals of the plays "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "A Raisin in the Sun"; she was Angelica in one "Hamilton" workshop, too.) "I still haven't found who that person was and I still want to, because I thought that's the most punk ass thing to do to somebody," she said. "It's so ugly, weak and disgusting." In the final scene in "Carmen Jones" when she looks into the eyes of the man who is about to kill her character, she thinks about a pain beyond her own. "What I want in that time is to allow myself to feel every fear, every hurt, and to let it move through me, and don't let any of that close off for all the women who have had to, and will have to," she said. There are no plans for "Carmen Jones" to continue beyond Classic Stage, and Ms. Rose is thinking about her next challenge, which she hopes will include producing. She pointed to Jordan Peele, Young Jean Lee and Donald Glover as inspiring artists who follow their own instincts. "I'd like to be able to put my filter on the story, put my lens on it," she said. "Who can I bring along with me? How can I bring women to the forefront? "How can I show us just living just moving through life and growing?" she added. "Being knocked over by the wind and picking ourselves up? How many ways can I do that?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
President Trump has threatened to withhold funds from the United States Postal Service. The new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, has embarked on cost cutting measures to eliminate overtime and remove sorting machines. These actions have created worries that Americans, reluctant to walk into voting booths because of Covid 19, will be unable to vote by mail this year. I served as a regulator of the Postal Service for nearly 18 years under three presidents and I urge everyone to be calm. Don't fall prey to the alarmists on both sides of this debate. The Postal Service is not incapacitated. It is still fully capable of delivering the mail. The focus of our collective concerns should be on how the Postal Service can improve the speed of delivery for election mail. First, the president is wrong about the Postal Service's finances. While the agency indeed has financial problems, as a result of a huge increase in packages being sent through the system and a credit line through the CARES Act, it has access to about 25 billion in cash. Its own forecasts predict that it will have enough money to operate into 2021. The Postal Service's shaky financial situation has to do in large part with the drop in first class mail (typically used for letters), about 30 percent less than a decade ago. But the service's expensive, overbuilt infrastructure can absorb the addition of more mail in 2020 including election mail that is mailed to and sent back by every voter in every state. The new postmaster general's management team still includes many knowledgeable and seasoned executives. And the Postal Service has over 500,000 employees who are remarkably honest, dedicated and used to working through emergencies: hurricanes, snow storms, social unrest and pandemics. While the Postal Service has contemplated many different approaches to modernizing and improving efficiency, there has not been a consensus on how much the service should reduce costs. It is not at all surprising that Mr. DeJoy's choice of particularly visible cuts has raised alarms. The Office of the Inspector General of the Postal Service has agreed to a review of the changes. And Congress has been called back to conduct its own review next week, restore trust in the institution and ensure that voting by mail proceeds smoothly. Given that there is enough money and perhaps more if the president agrees to additional bailout funds; that there is plenty of capacity in the system; and that voting by mail can alleviate a health threat to the nation, the Postal Service should be made to handle all election mail as if it were first class mail. This is where the policy discussions surrounding the Postal Service should settle. Most election related mail is sent at nonprofit rates. The 1993 National Voter Registration Act requires the Postal Service to charge state and local election offices the same price for postage as nonprofit mailers. The Postal Service has a history of providing extra care and attention to election related mail, on the level of first class mail: usually two to four days for delivery. A special logo and bar code identifiers were created so that mail sorters were able to pull election mail out from the routine mail stream to be sure it was delivered as soon as possible. But a recent letter sent by Thomas J. Marshall, the general counsel for the Postal Service, to election officials around the country seems to suggest that election mail will now be treated like regular nonprofit mail (typically three to 10 days for delivery) and may take as long as 15 days. This is not acceptable. The Postal Service has the capacity to ensure that ballots sent to voters arrive on time and that ballots dropped into the system by voters are postmarked and delivered in times that accord with state and local guidelines. In their meeting with Congress next week, the leaders of the Postal Service should guarantee that election mail will continue to be treated as first class mail. The Congress should agree that there will be no additional financial support for the Postal Service without this promise. But state and local election officials must also recognize the possibilities of delays and plan for earlier mailings so there will be more days for ballots to be returned. Voters must be reminded to send in requests for ballots, change of address, voter registration forms and especially filled out ballots as early as possible. The Postal Service does indeed need a bailout from Congress so that it can be counted on to deliver the mail, medicines and other vital products for years to come. It needs funds to rebuild its more than 30,000 post offices and aging vehicle fleet to reduce its reliance on temporary workers and to broaden the range of services it provides. But these problems do not affect this year's election. Americans must continue to support the Postal Service, whose existence is enshrined in our Constitution, by using its vote by mail services to save lives now and to protect our democracy in the future. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
How an Anxious Adolescent Musical (No, Not That One) Found Its Fans Before "Be More Chill" even starts previews at the Pershing Square Signature Center on July 26, it will already be one of the most popular new musicals in America, with a passionate fan base that dwarfs the number of people who have ever seen the show. All this after a barely noticed monthlong run in New Jersey three years ago. And a little cast album that could. When the show's songwriter, Joe Iconis, and co star, George Salazar, did a joint cabaret evening at Feinstein's/54 Below this month, audience members flew in from Paris, Berlin and London. A dad got behind the wheel to ferry his daughter from Michigan. A pair of friends drove from Florida. Annalise Heffron, 13, and her mom, Amy Cobb, spent 17 hours on a bus from their home in Cincinnati. "She picked that over the school trip to Chicago," Ms. Cobb said by telephone later. Still, even musical theater aficionados may be asking: What exactly is "Be More Chill"? Based on a 2004 novel by Ned Vizzini, the pop rock musical, with a book by Joe Tracz, tells the story of a high school junior, Jeremy Heere, who ingests a pill size supercomputer that makes him cooler. Its only professional production came in June 2015 at New Jersey's Two River Theater, which commissioned the show. The New York Times review was tepid, and despite Mr. Iconis's spirited score and growing track record he contributed the cult classic "Broadway, Here I Come!" to the TV show "Smash" no commercial producer came knocking. The chill looked like rigor mortis. And yet less than three years later, the cast album has passed 100 million streams in the United States. This, of course, is nowhere near the 2.3 billion clocked by "Hamilton," but just under half of the streams for the vastly more established "Dear Evan Hansen" (211 million), and a lot more than another teen oriented show, "Heathers: The Musical" (23.4 million), which ran Off Broadway and has had numerous regional productions. So it's not a total surprise that on Friday, a producer announced a commercial Off Broadway run, only the second professional production so far. "Knowing that people in such large numbers are connecting to it felt like a perfect opportunity," said Gerald Goehring, whose credits include "A Christmas Story: The Musical." It's hard to tell what ignited the frenzy, but about a year and a half after "Be More Chill" closed, the sci fi tinged story of the teenage dork and his friends somehow started getting traction. Newbies would discover videos in the "recommended" column on YouTube, usually after they'd clicked on "Hamilton" or "Dear Evan Hansen" videos, and the internet helped link fans all over the world. "I was getting tagged in fan art, then I started noticing people were writing fan fiction about my character and Jeremy," Mr. Salazar said by telephone. "I was dumbfounded by all of it." Nowadays, even a show with a short run outside New York can get a cast album that may go viral. "For shows that don't have productions, it's a very easy way to get to a wide audience," said the producer Ken Davenport, whose "Once on This Island" is now on Broadway. "And then the licensing companies respond." Indeed, Rodgers and Hammerstein picked up "Be More Chill" in July 2017 and made it available as a licensed show to schools and amateur companies. The fan phenomenon was picking up velocity. The recording entered the Billboard Cast Album chart's Top 10 a whopping 97 weeks after its release, by Ghostlight. "Right after I discovered 'Michael in the Bathroom,' I decided to try drawing an animatic for it, even though I still didn't know what the musical was about," Claudia Cacace, a 22 year old who lives near Naples, Italy, said by email. "I just related to the character so much that I felt the need to draw the scene." In turn, Dove Calderwood, 27, discovered Ms. Cacace's art and commissioned her to animate the entire musical. "It was something I wanted, and it was something I knew the fans wanted, because we didn't have any visuals for the show," Ms. Calderwood said by telephone from her home in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Another popular take on "Michael in the Bathroom" is an inspired cosplay performance (that is, lip synced in character and in costume) by a 20 year old who goes by "Jack or Aless, depending on the situation" and hails from Toronto. "Everyone I've ever talked to about this musical has told me that they've been in the situation Michael was in," Jack said in an email. "Being in such a vulnerable moment in your life, and then listening to a song that has a character that knows what it's like to go through it, it really does make you feel that you're not alone in this." Ms. Heffron, the Cincinnati teenager, prefers the score's "The Pitiful Children" and "The Squip Song" to "Michael in the Bathroom," which, she said, "is really good but a little overrated." Still, she made sure to seek out Mr. Salazar during a meet and greet after the 54 Below concert that went on longer than the show itself. She had brought him a Pac Man toy because his "Be More Chill" character has a Pac Man tattoo. (The show, "Two Player Game," has a few more performances through the end of May.) There is no denying that fans are committed. They turned up in droves for an amateur production of "Be More Chill" in November at New Jersey's Exit 82 Theater. "It was the most insane attention any of my shows has ever received," said Mr. Iconis, still sounding slightly stunned. "We needed security for a talkback at a community theater. Security!" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Joe Carrotta for The New York Times The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Joe Carrotta for The New York Times Credit... The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Joe Carrotta for The New York Times Louise and Leonard Riggio at their Bridgehampton home with "Untitled" (1986) by Isamu Noguchi. Home Is a Sculpture Garden, but the Art Doesn't Stop at the Door A 300 ton steel sculpture by Richard Serra snakes across the lawn of Leonard and Louise Riggio's Tudor style mansion in Bridgehampton, N.Y. "The Serra has become a landmark here," Mr. Riggio, executive chairman of Barnes Noble, said of the Minimalist serpentine structure clearly visible from the road. When people wander onto the grounds to peer up close, he will often come out and invite them to look out back at some two dozen other sculptures integrated into the 12 acre landscape by artists including Isamu Noguchi, Donald Judd, Maya Lin, Walter De Maria and Louise Nevelson much to the dismay of his wife, who has concerns about privacy. "I told her I want to open it up to the public. She almost killed me," he chuckled. Their collecting began 35 years ago with inexpensive prints and posters for their walls. The pursuit turned more serious in 1994 with the acquisition of a figurative painting by Alberto Giacometti that hangs in their Park Avenue apartment, alongside other works of midcentury modernism by Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Arshile Gorky and Joseph Cornell. Mr. Riggio, a self made entrepreneur from Bensonhurst who opened his first bookstore in 1965 at age 24, described the "transformational" experience of walking into Dia in Chelsea in 1997 and discovering Serra's three monumental "Torqued Ellipses." "I saw infinite possibilities," Mr. Riggio said, explaining the visceral connection he felt to the imposing steel sculptures. He purchased them on the spot as a gift to Dia and later served as its board chairman, contributing more than 30 million to the building of Dia:Beacon, which opened in 2005. "I began this journey with Dia, and then, all of the sudden, we're fascinated by Minimalism and into Judd, Dan Flavin, Fred Sandback and on and on." The couple's focus has expanded to embrace the Italian Arte Povera movement that was contemporaneous with Minimalism in the 1960s and '70s. Dominating the walls of the Riggios' expansive Bridgehampton home are vibrant tapestries by Alighiero Boetti, distressed canvases by Alberto Burri, numbers from the Fibonacci sequence in blue neon by Mario Merz and reliefs in salt and Elmer's glue on lead by Pier Paolo Calzolari, including one etched with Italian words meaning "When the dreamer dies, what happens to the dream?" "For me, it becomes fun to try to grasp these riddles and complex issues the artists were looking to solve," said Mr. Riggio, who is retiring soon. (Barnes Noble was sold last month.) The Riggios are being honored on July 13 at the Parrish Art Museum in nearby Water Mill for their longtime support of that institution. Following are edited excerpts from the conversation. How does the collecting work between you two as a couple? LEONARD RIGGIO I've been more of the scout and go to more galleries. I found the auctions really important, because it gave me some sense of relative value and what was going on in the world. Oftentimes, I ask her for a nod of approval, but we both have to love the art. Do you always have to agree on things? LOUISE RIGGIO No. But if we're going to live with the piece, then, yes. Len can be a little more adventurous in his office. There have been times when I've walked into his office, and I've taken something out and put it in the house. He'll say, "She's stealing my art again!" Boetti seems to be claiming the most wall space in the house. MR. RIGGIO Boetti designed these works, and they were made by weavers in Afghanistan. This one's called "Tutto," meaning all the things in the world including some naughty things. His most famous works are these Mappas of the globe. To me, this speaks of Boetti's ecumenicalism. All the things and the people in the world are together. We share the planet. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
People have written poems about it. It has been imitated by candles and air fresheners. At least one person has even fought in court for the right to produce it naturally. Some atmospheric chemists like that scent, too. In a paper published this year in Environmental Chemistry, researchers examined line dried towels at the molecular level, to try to pinpoint the source of their specific fragrance. Silvia Pugliese led the research while she was a master's student at the University of Copenhagen. When Ms. Pugliese was a child, her mother line dried laundry, and she still does it whenever she can. "The fresh smell reminds me of home," she said. So she was excited to rigorously pursue such an everyday research subject. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
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. 'CARMEN JONES' at Classic Stage Company (previews start on June 9; opens on June 27). Oscar Hammerstein's adaptation of Bizet's opera may be set in a parachute factory, but don't expect too many happy landings. In John Doyle's revival, Anika Noni Rose stars as a femme fatale with David Aron Damane and Clifton Duncan as the other points in this love triangle. 866 811 4111, classicstage.org 'EVERYONE'S FINE WITH VIRGINIA WOOLF' at Abrons Arts Center (in previews; opens on June 12). Who's afraid of Elevator Repair Service? A devised theater company with an affectionate and mutinous approach to great American classics, E.R.S. returns with Kate Scelsa's new play, a feminist explosion of the Edward Albee four hander. John Collins directs Annie McNamara, April Matthis, Mike Iveson and Vin Knight. 866 811 4111, abronsartscenter.org 'GIRLS BOYS' at the Minetta Lane Theater (previews start on June 12; opens on June 20). Every marriage is a double act, but as the actress Carey Mulligan says in this one woman show, "I am, of course, just giving you one side." This monologue, scripted by the "Matilda" book writer Dennis Kelly and produced by Audible, moves from domestic comedy to tragedy, asking if certain forms of violence are innate or learned. 800 982 2787, minettalanenyc.com 'IVANOV' at New York City Center (performances start on June 14). Before there were seagulls, sisters, orchards or late night vodka confessionals, there was Anton Chekhov's 1887 play about a superfluous man torn between his tubercular wife and his landowner's daughter. Russia's Theater of Nations presents a revival, directed by Timofey Kulyabin, as part of the Cherry Orchard Festival. 212 581 1212, nycitycenter.org 'RED HILLS' at 101 Greenwich Street (in previews; opens on June 13). Walk into a financial district office building, take an elevator to the ninth floor and enter the Rwandan genocide. En Garde Arts presents this collaboration between the American writer Sean Christopher Lewis and the Ugandan playwright Asiimwe Deborah Kawe. Katie Pearl directs. 866 811 4111, engardearts.org 'TEENAGE DICK' at the Public Theater (previews start on June 12; opens on June 20). Before Richard III was a pile of bones buried underneath a parking lot in Leicester, England, he was a 16 year old at Roseland High. More or less. In Mike Lew's adaptation of the Shakespeare history play, directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, Richard (Gregg Mozgala) is a junior with cerebral palsy and a fondness for iambic pentameter. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'SAINT JOAN' at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater (closes on June 10). Joan of Arc puts down her sword as Manhattan Theater Club's revival of George Bernard Shaw's play concludes. Jesse Green wrote that Daniel Sullivan's "thoughtful if mostly becalmed staging," with star Condola Rashad at its center, finally pays off in its trial scene. 212 239 6200, saintjoanbroadway.com 'SINGLET' at the Bushwick Starr (closes on June 12). In Erin Markey's playful exploration of identity and friendship, Ms. Markey and Emily Davis play teenage girls, coaches and various relatives. Ben Brantley wrote that both actors "bring a gymnast's vigor and precision to all their interpretations. They also, occasionally and charmingly, allow us glimpses of the giddy pleasure they derive from their performances." 866 811 4111, thebushwickstarr.org 'TIME'S JOURNEY THROUGH A ROOM' at the A.R.T./New York Theaters (closes on June 10). Toshiki Okada's play, about a man wrestling with private grief in the wake of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan, ends its run. In an enthusiastic review of the Play Company production, Laura Collins Hughes wrote, "it is a chronicle of healing, with all its pain and awkward humor and halting steps." 866 811 4111, playco.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Young adults all connected through smartphones together, but separate, in a public place. The Pew Research Center on Thursday defined millennials as those born from 1981 to 1996. Are You 21 to 37? You Might Be a Millennial Here we go. This article is about millennials. Are you a millennial? Like it or not, you might be. It's a roughly defined group, but on Thursday, the Pew Research Center tried to impose some order on the chaos. If you were born between 1981 and 1996, the group said, it will consider you a millennial. That definition is slightly more restrictive than the one used by the United States Census Bureau, which sets the cutoff years as 1982 and 2000. But it still may come as a shock to some who considered themselves part of the earlier or later generations, Generation X or ... whatever we call people born after 1996. No one has figured that part out yet: The New York Times tried to crowdsource an answer to that question in January, but the results were inconclusive. The latest cohort is often called Generation Z, but few of The Times's respondents seemed to like that name. But who could blame these youngsters for not wanting their generational brand sullied by association with the dreaded millennial? According to the news media, we have ruined things from marmalade to motorcycles. Not even Halloween has been spared our wrath. Paula, a 21 year old in New Orleans who responded to The Times's online question about what to call the next generation, wrote that she was tired of "hearing about the infantile antics of millennials." (Unfortunately for her, both Pew and the Census Bureau classify her as one.) "We are trying to step out from under the shadow of millennials by working hard and not expecting the world to fall in our laps," she said. "We are realistic but determined to succeed." So how do you decide where to draw the line between one generation and the next? It's not an exact science, and the determination may rely in part on intuition. After all, the center said, at the ripe old age of 37, "the oldest millennials are well into adulthood, and they first entered adulthood before today's youngest adults were born." According to the Census Bureau, millennials were the largest American age group in 2015, with 83.1 million Americans born from 1982 to 2000. That exceeds the number of baby boomers (those born from 1946 to 1964, who numbered 75.4 million) and members of Generation X (those born from 1965 to 1980, who numbered 65 million). In a more systematic view, the events that shaped a person's early life and whether he or she can remember them are a primary consideration, Ruth Igielnik, a research associate at the Pew Research Center, said in an interview. For example, millennials as well as some people born after 1996 were alive during the Sept. 11 attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the latest recession and the 2008 presidential election. But while millennials came of age and became politically and socially conscious against the backdrop of those events, members of the younger generation may not remember them at all. And the impact of those events on their lives may have been muted, she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
After their wedding and honeymoon in September, Brian and Stephanie Cashin turned their attention to an apartment hunt. They were living in her one bedroom walk up on East 14th Street, paying 2,500 a month. Mr. Cashin had moved there from a one bedroom in a Hoboken walk up, where the rent was 1,500. They wanted to cut expenses, so their monthly budget for a one bedroom in the city for them and their dog, Madison, was in the low to mid 3,000s. The 500 square foot unit, with good closet space, was on the small side. And the Cashins realized they weren't excited about an amenity free walk up. They wanted a change a high rise with a helpful staff and a hotel ambience. Hunting online "was probably the biggest waste of time," said Mr. Cashin, who is from Tallahassee, Fla. "It was way too much, so many options, so much to think about," along with inaccurate information. So he contacted Chip Peoples of Urban Compass, a good friend and a classmate from DePaul University in Chicago. Mr. Peoples knew that the kind of building they sought abounded in Midtown West. He suggested River Place on far West 42nd Street, where one bedrooms were in the mid 3,000s. But the couple were not comfortable with the location, almost at the Hudson River. Mrs. Cashin, who is from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, works north of Times Square. She walked the route, dodging tourists, passing the Port Authority Bus Terminal and then trudging through the more desolate areas toward the Hudson. "Those are long blocks," she said. "There are no restaurants. There is nothing there." In her first job, fresh out of St. John's University with a degree in accounting, Mrs. Cashin then Stephanie Orine had the Related Companies as a client. Back then, the company was building the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. She told herself, "Someday I want to live in one of their buildings." Mr. Peoples suggested MiMA, also on West 42nd Street, but closer to Tenth Avenue. It happened to be a Related building. Though it was near the Port Authority, it was within easier walking distance of Mrs. Cashin's office, so she thought she might change her mind about the neighborhood. But the couple were overwhelmed. "The amenities are unreal," Mrs. Cashin said. "There was a movie theater with a popcorn machine. It was nonstop. It was like Disney World. It was just too much energy, too much going on." MiMA was over budget, too. One bedrooms started at around 4,500 and studios at more than 4,000 a month. And "it was such a weird experience" to exit on the gritty street with its parade of buses, Mrs. Cashin said. The Westport, however, which she saw on the Related website, seemed suitable. In the far West 50s, it was in a less frantic area than MiMA. Rents were lower, too, though by now their budget had risen to the high 3,000s. There, for 3,810 a month, they saw a nice south facing one bedroom of around 670 square feet. "We still had a wandering eye," Mrs. Cashin said. "Speaking with friends, it didn't seem that we had seen that many apartments." They had a showing scheduled at Emerald Green in the garment district on West 38th Street. One bedrooms there were in the mid to high 3,000s. As they took the long walk through the lobby to the elevators, "the first thing that came to my mind," Mrs. Cashin said, "was coming home, and I have to walk Madison; she is not going to make it outside." The pet policy was of concern, too, with Madison, at 22 pounds, weighing in over the limit. "She is not a Great Dane; she is a cocker spaniel," Mrs. Cashin said. They were concerned the dog's size could be a problem. And the layout, with the bathroom far from the bedroom, didn't work for them. "Let's say you are getting ready and having company over," Mrs. Cashin said. "Sometimes you're rushing, and you're taking your shower and walking through the living room in a towel to get dressed. It was odd that they had the bathroom away from the bedroom and the washer dryer near the bedroom, so if you put in a load before bed you are probably not going to have a good night's rest." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Downtown, try any of the ramen joints on Robson Street. Or, go for the cutting edge Royal Dinette (905 Dunsmuir Street; royaldinette.ca). The smoked Castelvatrano olives alone justify the visit. Push east down Hastings Street to La Taqueria (322 West Hastings Streetlataqueria.com). De cachete. De lengua. Atun. The real deal. In Kitsilano, the hot spot is AnnaLena (1809 West First Avenue; annalena.ca), where the chef Michael Robbins plates innovative explosions of flavor: bison tartare with puffed grains, seared scallops with pork jowl and pickled apples. At the osteria Savio Volpe (615 Kingsway; saviovolpe.com) rustic Italian fare includes salumi, tortelli with dandelion and ricotta, crispy pig's head. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Norma Desmond was right, the pictures got small. Once cinema filled your field of vision, but in this century, as ever cheaper digital displays have replaced projection technologies, we have grown accustomed to smaller and smaller movies. The old movie palaces, with their 50 foot silver screens, have mostly shut down. The multiplexes are in trouble. You probably watched your last movie on a 55 inch TV set, a 21 inch computer monitor, or, feel free to admit, a 6 inch cameraphone screen. But in the 1960s, experimental artists and filmmakers were convinced that the future for cinema wasn't to shrink down; it was to scale up, spread out, and get off the screen entirely. They wanted an expanded cinema the term is Stan VanDerBeek's that could be projected in empty lofts and packed nightclubs, on multiple screens or on moving backdrops, and which implicated viewers' bodies as much as their eyes. Expanded cinema was a global phenomenon, practiced and theorized by pioneers such as VanDerBeek and Robert Breer in New York, Malcolm Le Grice and Lis Rhodes in London, Valie Export in Vienna, Helio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro. And whether they projected high minded abstractions or hippie conversant psychedelia, these experimental film artists had a '60s optimism that new media could shape a new society and a new consciousness. Some of the most significant work took place in Tokyo, where a coterie of young, cheeky, countercultural artists pushed the movies off screen and into real life. Right now New Yorkers have a rare opportunity to discover painstaking restorations and recreations of projected artworks by three of the most significant names in Japanese expanded cinema. The most impressive is at the Museum of Modern Art, which is staging the first American museum presentation of the multimedia artist Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver. His "Cinematic Illumination," first installed in a Tokyo nightclub in 1969, now infuses MoMA's new double height Studio with a festival of projected imagery, flickering lights, long hair and rock 'n' roll. The screen is a 360 degree ring on which 18 slide projectors, positioned on a suspended central bollard, throw up a sequence of more than 1,400 scenes that envelop you in the hipster substratosphere of '60s Tokyo. The slides cycle past close ups of the young artist's face as he smiles or smokes, through trippy poster art and a beaming Marilyn Monroe, to Tokyo street reportage shot in the gritty style known in Japanese as are bure boke: "rough, blurred and out of focus." One subject repeats throughout: a shadowy young man, standing on a gangway, strides through a scrubbed white space, his features rendered invisible through backlighting. A disco ball bespittles the circular screen with a thousand points of light, while the click and clack of the slide projectors provides a beat. And a continuous soundtrack of American, British and Japanese guitar rock completes the installation, soldering the images and light effects into an immersive total work of countercultural dreamland. Tokyo commuters stride past as David Bowie drones through "Space Oddity," and rail thin hippies laugh and smoke to the tootling of Jefferson Airplane. Though these are still projections, they become "cinema" through the performative choreography of the flickering projectors and disco ball which, like the spinning slits of an old style zoetrope produce the sensation of moving pictures. Colored gels, too, pop up and down in front of the projectors, tinting Tokyoites and the faces of MoMA spectators with soft green, blue and red light. What you feel, after half an hour or so, is the youthful certainty of an artist and a generation taking its new prosperity for a test drive, for whom partying could be the most valuable freedom of all. The mid to late '60s saw a particular vogue for multiscreen projections at World's Fairs and other public amusements, where companies who could foot the research and development bills pitched their corporate visions of the future. (Think of the Eameses' 22 screen "Think," made for IBM, which spectators at the World's Fair of 1964 in Queens watched while strapped into a moving "people wall" or the mirrored and smoke clouded screens that populated Expo '70 in Osaka.) Gulliver's "Cinematic Illumination," by contrast, was done on the cheap, and made a virtue of the projectors' limited abilities. It dispensed with start and end times, and with fixed spectatorial viewpoints. It left the viewer free to construct one's own cinematic experience or to just let the images wash over oneself, to get drunk and dance. Mr. Azuchi was only 19 when he made "Cinematic Illumination." He was born in 1947 into a ruined, Americanizing Japan, and before he was out of his teens he was joining in happenings and performances with The Play, an Osaka based collective. (He took the sobriquet "Gulliver" during those teenage years, and uses it now as an artist's name.) He hitchhiked to the capital in 1967, where he presented experimental movies both in art centers and in nightclubs. One was Killer Joe's, a hipper than hip Ginza discotheque whose patrons were encouraged "to drown ourselves in love and liquor." "Cinematic Illumination" was a one night only event. But the nightclub's Stones listening, Sartre quoting revelers were hardly uncritical lovers of the West. Tokyo in 1968 and 1969 was a city of barricades, as students shut down Tokyo University and occupied the streets of Shinjuku in protest against the Vietnam War and the U.S. Japan security treaty. You can get a fuller sense of the political and cultural ferment at Pioneer Works, in Brooklyn, where other restorations of Japanese expanded cinema, by two filmmakers a decade older than Gulliver can be seen by appointment. One is Motoharu Jonouchi, a leading voice in Japanese avant garde film, who began to pivot to expanded cinema techniques during an earlier outbreak of student protests. His "Document 6.15," first made in 1961 62 and now reconstructed from a negative, edits together black and white footage of students affiliated with the Zengakuren, Japan's left wing student movement. There are horrible close ups of a bloodied protester, his head crushed to the concrete by an officer's club; rain falls on the Diet, and cars burn in front of "Welcome Eisenhower" posters. Still, the silent, digital reconstruction here only hints at the lost original of "Document 6.15," which Mr. Jonouchi initially screened with blasting audio and balloons floating in front of the screen. The other filmmaker is Keiichi Tanaami, whose expanded cinema also screened at Killer Joe's prefigures his later, Peter Max ish blend of art and commerce. His two screen short "4 Eyes," with nude pin up girls and patterns of pink and white dots, is a rather thin piece of psychedelia. More intriguing is "Human Events," which chops a nude model's body into disconnected parts across two screens. But it, too, is missing accompanying music and performances, and you can only get a hint of its original countercultural force. The fragmentary nature of the restorations at Pioneer Works makes it a show mainly for specialists. But it's worth the timed ticket wait to view Gulliver's "Cinematic Illumination," whose restoration on authentic, discontinued analog slide projectors represents a major achievement by MoMA's media conservation team and by Sophie Cavoulacos, an assistant curator of film, who organized the presentation. (Both shows have arisen from a partnership of scholars and curators called Collaborative Cataloging Japan, committed to preserving expanded cinema.) Gulliver's work hits especially hard now, in a moment where America is as agitated as late '60s Japan, but where no equivalent experimentation in art is taking place. Hard to imagine that once upon a time, in Tokyo or in New York, the kids made their own revolution. Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver's Cinematic Illumination Through February at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; 212 708 9400, moma.org. Timed tickets are required. More Than Cinema: Motoharu Jonouchi and Keiichi Tanaami Through Nov. 22 at Pioneer Works, 159 Pioneer Street, Brooklyn; pioneerworks.org. Open by appointment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Is there any time better than summertime? Summer is vacations. It's rooftop cocktails and backyard parties. Also, you can swim and grill things. It's pretty great. Except, of course, when it's not. Depending on where you live, there's a chance you'll get to do few or none of those things this summer because of the pandemic shutdown. Luckily, there's TV. But what if you've already watched "Tiger King" and "The Last Dance"? Maybe now is when you tackle that big show you never made time for in summers past. You know, because you were too busy having fun. Unofficially, 99 days of summer lie ahead, counting from June 1 through Labor Day. That's already two nines, so we decided to make it a trend by finding nine great series for you to binge this summer at roughly one episode per night. I'm feeling inspired to rewatch one of my favorite series, "Mad Men." My boss, Jeremy, seems very excited about "The A Team." We seem to be in different moods. Its central character, Larry, is a loosely fictionalized version of the deeply flawed but lovable man who plays him, Garry Shandling, making it the forebear of many an auto fiction comedy ("Curb Your Enthusiasm," "Louie," "Fleabag," "Better Things"). He hosts a late night talk show, a show within a show concept that prefigures series like "30 Rock" and "The Comeback" but also TV mockumentaries like "The Office," which take the audience inside a fictitious production. Along the way, it drew A list comedians and actors to play lightly fictionalized and even self parodying versions of themselves. It was, as our chief TV critic, James Poniewozik, wrote, "one of those sitcoms that you've seen even if you never watched it," creating "the visual vocabulary (fly on the wall naturalism) and voice (scathing) for a generation of comedy. What are Armando Iannucci's 'The Thick of It' and 'Veep' but the 'Sanders' ization of politics?" Want more reminders that humans can be overrated? "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (100 episodes) and "Arrested Development" (91 episodes) deliver lots more cringe inducing humor and hilariously terrible people. CONSIDINE Stream "The Larry Sanders Show" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm" on HBO. Stream "Arrested Development" on Netflix; Seasons 1 to 3 are on Hulu. Because none of your plans are coming together But "The A Team" was also a fun mayhem machine, as a crack team of disgraced (wrongly, of course) former Vietnam commandos whipped up complex schemes to help the downtrodden. "The A Team" was at the leading edge of the '80s pop culture obsession with the Vietnam War, and also revived the career of George Peppard, who starred as Hannibal the ringleader. But who are we kidding? The show is notable mainly for turning Mr. T, a mohawked and blinged out former bouncer, into a phenomenon, with a cultural footprint that included a cartoon, motivational videos and his own breakfast cereal. As B.A. Baracus, Mr. T was the A Team's muscle and drove the van, while the crew was rounded out by Dirk Benedict as Faceman, the handsome one, and Dwight Schultz as Murdock, the crazy one. With its disguises, explosions and consequence free violence, "The A Team" is the TV equivalent of Doritos salty and addictive, with little nutritional value. Wrongs will be righted. Plans will come together. Fools will be pitied. But if you're weary of total societal disruption and want to spend your summer seeing things work out for a change, you could do worse. Want more vintage capers? Try "Charlie's Angels" (115 episodes) for a different kind of elite team, though the truly elite lineup of Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith and Farrah Fawcett lasted only one season. "Starsky Hutch" (92 episodes) and its Gran Torino pioneered the action attitude awesome car formula. Note: All of these series show their age in various socially benighted ways, so consider yourself warned. JEREMY EGNER Stream "The A Team" on Amazon. Stream "Charlie's Angels" on Hulu. Stream "Starsky Hutch" on Amazon and Crackle. Bernie Mac, who died in 2008 at 50, was an explosively hilarious comic whose act generally veered deeply into blue territory. So it was a surprise when his sitcom, which debuted on Fox in 2001, found him portraying a father figure taking care of his troubled sister's three children. But it worked, thanks to Bernie Mac's gift for expressing the kind of flabbergasted exasperation most parents know well, especially during these days of quarantine cabin fever and remote schooling. "America," he frequently said, addressing the camera, "I'm going to kill one of them kids." He spent much of most episodes breaking the fourth wall, a format that played to his strengths as a veteran standup. He starred as a version of himself, and his celebrity resulted in an array of fun cameos over the years, including comics (Chris Rock, Don Rickles), entertainers (Ice Cube, Isaac Hayes, Penn Teller), athletes (Shaquille O'Neal, Sugar Ray Leonard) and others best filed under "random famous people" (Hugh Hefner, Dr. Phil). But for all the bluster, kindness and joy were at the core of "The Bernie Mac Show." The child actors gave endearing performances (the kids make or break family sitcoms), especially Jeremy Suarez as the nerdy Jordan. Inevitably all the lamentations to "America" would take on a softer tenor as the cranky comic's gruff facade crumbled to reveal his inner family man. Want more mash ups of sharp edges and non saccharine sweetness? "Jane the Virgin" (100 episodes) used the plot devices and wild emotion of telenovelas to tell one of TV's most charming stories of self determination and familial love. EGNER Depending on your taste and perhaps your geography and social circle the advent of short shorts season was maybe something you were looking forward to. Fair enough: It's been a long couple of months. But for Lt. Jim Dangle (Thomas Lennon) of the Reno Sheriff's Department, short shorts are appropriate year round. No matter that he's on duty. And no matter that they seem a bit ... constricting. Absurd? Most assuredly. But "Reno 911" is a ridiculous show for ridiculous times, and Dangle's shorts pair nicely with the other apparent necessities of "Reno" style law enforcement, which include aviator sunglasses, handlebar mustaches, excessive firearm use and a lot of doughnuts. And drugs. And inappropriate sex. A mockumentary style spoof of police reality series like "Cops," "Reno 911" doesn't require much attention, which makes it a perfect summer binge episodes are more like strings of short, off color vignettes than concrete stories. Fans of the cult '90s sketch comedy series "The State" and "Viva Variety" will recognize much of the cast, including Lennon's co creators, Robert Ben Garant and Kerri Kenney Silver. Others in the ensemble include great comic actors like Niecy Nash, Cedric Yarbrough and Wendi McLendon Covey. And cameos abound, turning each episode into a game of Spot Your Favorite Comedian. Want more badly behaved essential workers? Try "Childrens Hospital" (86 episodes) for more demented riffs on a different hoary genre. CONSIDINE Horrified? Probably just pick a reason. But at least some forms of horror have clear beginnings and ends. When Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, the creators of the flamboyant teen musical dramedy "Glee," first debuted their horror series, reviews were mixed ("the Gleeks should feel perfectly at home," The Times's Mike Hale noted, before warning of "a certain hollow theatricality"). But there was one bit of consensus: This show was exuberantly over the top in a way that fixed it within a long tradition of ultra gory horror camp the stylish Italian art house horror of Dario Argento is an obvious influence and left a certain type of viewer appalled and another, well, gleeful. "A.H.S." is a seasonal anthology series, which means that each of its nine seasons (and counting) tells a different story, often playing with some distinct subgenre of horror. Season 1 is about a haunted house; Season 8 involves a nuclear apocalypse. The most recent season, titled "1984," went all in on the conventions of '80s slasher movies like the "Friday the 13th" and "Sleepaway Camp" franchises. Many of the cast members stay on from one season to the next, or drop out and then reappear, notably Jessica Lange, Dylan McDermott, Denis O'Hare, Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters and Emma Roberts. As Hale noted, "The cast alone makes the show worth checking out," and part of the fun is watching the actors take on different roles over time. Think Vic Mackey would wear a mask and maintain social distance? Definitely not, but not out of any sense that his personal liberties were being infringed. As one of the most corrupt cops in the history of television, Vic Mackey did only what was good for Vic Mackey, wetting his beak all over Los Angeles and brutalizing (or arresting, or both) whoever got in his way. A pandemic era Mackey would have hijacked a mask shipment and bloodied anyone who refused to buy them at a steep markup. Created by Shawn Ryan, "The Shield," which premiered in 2002, reinvented the gritty cop show for the prestige TV era and helped establish FX as basic cable's answer to HBO. The supporting cast is uniformly great, especially Walton Goggins as Mackey's sidekick and CCH Pounder as one of the few honest cops in the precinct. But the reason to watch is Michael Chiklis, who played Mackey as a volatile but cagey pit bull, quick to violence but also two steps ahead of everyone else. He was frequently appalling but almost impossible to root against, entertaining us with his shenanigans while making us ponder why we're so susceptible to vulgar bullies who play by their own rules. "I think there's something comforting about having somewhere you can go in your head," says the British spy Helen Flynn (Lisa Faulkner) in the pilot episode of "MI 5" (also known in Britain as "Spooks"), thus echoing the sentiments of everyone who is stuck at home with other people right now. (Of course you love them. That's not the point.) Among a group of spy shows that emerged after 9/11 ("24," "Sleeper Cell" and later "Homeland"), "MI 5" stands out as distinctly less focused on Islamic terrorism than most and distinctly less inclined toward Islamophobia than some. Debuting in 2002, the series began with a terrorist bombing by anti abortion activists led by an American religious extremist. Episode 2 is about white supremacists and politicians fond of pushing a racist "both sides ism" agenda a reminder (and a statement, perhaps) that terror has many faces. The changes wrought by the global War on Terror are ever present. The show's focus on homegrown terrorism is in part a function of the role of MI 5, which is confined to domestic counterintelligence, but 9/11 is the backdrop against which the agency operates, and the show nicely captures its fight for resources, its complicated relationship with the Yanks and the thorny politics of a multicultural society whose tensions are running high. "Orange," which premiered in 2013, was the first great Netflix series. ("House of Cards" went off the rails quickly and for any "Lilyhammer" die hards out there ... jeg beklager.) It packs an enormous amount of plot and character development into seven seasons, as the inmates clash, rebel, give birth, die, escape, reunite and otherwise try to get by inside Litchfield, the show's penitentiary. Along the way "Orange" fulfilled its stated goal of getting underrepresented faces and stories on television, not coincidentally introducing many terrific actors in the process, including Laverne Cox, Uzo Aduba, Danielle Brooks, Ruby Rose and Asia Kate Dillon. The show's structure relies heavily on flashbacks that fill in the stories of its various characters, a device that both deepens the world of the show and pointedly restores humanity to its prisoners. It kept up its critique of the corrections industrial complex throughout its run. Management corruption, guard brutality, racial discrimination, overcrowding all made it into the story at some point. A private corporation eventually buys Litchfield, and the company's callous oversight results in a season long revolt. Later an ICE detention center figures into the action. But the heart of the show was always the story of the women, their struggles and victories, rivalries and redeeming bonds. "Orange" could be the funniest, harshest and most heartbreaking show on TV, sometimes all within the same episode. (It was sometimes more heartbreaking than it should be some fans will never forgive the show for killing off spoiler redacted .) Other shows have created larger worlds, but none have been more immersive or empathetic. Want more drama behind bars? For more of a lockup thrill ride, try "Prison Break" (90 episodes), which got more mileage out of its premise than anyone would have predicted, thanks to layered performances by Wentworth Miller, Dominic Purcell and Sarah Wayne Callies. EGNER Stream "Orange Is the New Black" on Netflix. Stream "Prison Break" on Hulu. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Shoppers at the Cherry Creek mall in Denver. Consumer spending rose 3.3 percent in the quarter, even during a harsh winter. The American economy grew by 2.6 percent in the final months of 2013, the Commerce Department said on Thursday, a slight uptick from its previous estimate but still well below the pace of growth recorded in the third quarter. The revised data for last quarter, in what was the government's third and final estimate of economic growth for the period, reflected slightly healthier consumer spending than first thought. The previous estimate for the months of October, November and December, reported in late February, was 2.4 percent. Thursday's slight upward adjustment was in line with expectations among economists on Wall Street. The pace in the third quarter was 4.1 percent. Still, the 3.3 percent increase in personal consumption expenditures last quarter was the healthiest showing since the fourth quarter of 2010, when consumption rose 4.3 percent. It also came despite wintry weather in many parts of the country during the final weeks of the holiday shopping season, which prompted some economists to conclude that underlying consumer behavior was somewhat more robust than recent data had suggested. "The number for gross domestic product is good," said Lawrence Creatura, a portfolio manager at Federated Investors in Rochester, N.Y. "It is not the exciting number that is typical of postrecession recoveries, but it is good enough. This has been a stumbling sort of recovery all along, and this number is a continuation of that pattern." One part of the economy that has grown over all in recent years, the housing sector, seems to be slowing markedly. The National Association of Realtors reported on Thursday that its index of pending home sales dropped 0.8 percent in February to 93.9, the eighth straight monthly decline and the lowest level for the index since October 2011. The drop, showing demand for previously owned homes rather than new construction, reflects the impact of cold weather as well as the rise in interest rates since the spring of 2013. As the Federal Reserve gradually eases up on its stimulus efforts and reduces the pace of its monthly bond purchases, 10 year note yields have crept up, pushing up rates for most mortgages. Housing was crushed in the recession of 2007 to 2009, but has rebounded in many parts of the country more recently. Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. One headwind for the economy in the first half of 2014, at least in terms of the picture provided by coming economic data, will be from the aftereffects of the big inventory gains recorded by businesses in the third quarter of 2013. Unless demand turns out to be stronger than expected, those stockpiles will be drawn down gradually, reducing the rate of reported growth now. On the other hand, some experts believe that consumer activity has been inhibited by the cold so far in 2014, so some catching up might help growth as shoppers venture out again in April, May and June. The sharp drop in federal spending, which shaved a full percentage point off growth in the fourth quarter of 2013 amid the government shutdown in the fall and the automatic budget cuts imposed by Congress, should also moderate in 2014 because of a budget deal reached on Capitol Hill in January. That budget agreement also provides a bit more certainty for businesses in terms of what Washington will be laying out, something that has been lacking over the past few years because of repeated standoffs over government spending and the federal borrowing limit. In a separate report, the Labor Department said on Thursday that initial claims for unemployment dropped by 10,000 last week to 311,000 on a seasonally adjusted basis. Economists had been expecting a slight increase in initial claims, so that figure represented a potential bright spot for the labor market. The four week moving average for unemployment claims, which tends to be a bit more reliable than the more volatile week to week numbers, fell to 318,000, also an improvement from previous weeks and the healthiest rate in six months. For the quarter, many economists predict the economy will expand at an annual rate of 1 to 2 percent. Corporate profits rose by 2.2 percent in the fourth quarter, but for the year were up 4.6 percent, which suggested companies continued to improve profits at a slightly faster rate than overall economic growth, thanks in part to efficiency gains. While the stock market and corporate profits have been healthy in recent years, those gains have not translated into the kind of hiring experienced in previous recoveries. With the arrival of spring and better weather, the thinking goes, the economy's momentum could pick up slightly. One indicator of what lies ahead will come next week, when the Labor Department reports figures for job creation and the unemployment rate in March. Job creation was anemic in December and January, and came in well below expectations, but picked up a bit in February. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The sculptor Rachel Feinstein at "Maiden, Mother, Crone," her exhibition at the Jewish Museum. Her works, including "Madonna" (2015) in the background, balance the fanciful and the grotesque. If Rachel Feinstein had a spirit guide, it would probably be Sleeping Beauty. For the artist known for her extravagantly detailed fantasy sculptures, installations and paintings the fairy tale princess may be the most relatable of the otherworldly creatures that animate her work. "When I was younger, I was asleep for a long time, my ideas kind of germinating," she said recently, as she steered a visitor through "Maiden, Mother, Crone," her exhibition at the Jewish Museum. At Columbia University, where she studied religion and art, and during the early years of her marriage to the artist John Currin, "I was this really disorganized person who would lie in bed all day long," she recalled. "I had this notion that time was never ending. I would daydream; that's what I needed to make art." Traces of that dreamy sensibility have filtered into the 30 year survey of Ms. Feinstein's work and her first American museum retrospective. But there is a discernible tension, as well, between clashing impulses: passive and active, ethereal and earthbound, polished but often unnervingly raw. Ms. Feinstein's drawings, murals and towering sculptures many of which are on view at the museum are invested with elements of the supernatural and religious iconography. Some are interlaced with American pop cultural references, among them Sleeping Beauty and Victoria's Secret Angels, feminine mythology and the influence of 18th century European craft, in particular the Meissen porcelain figurines she has reimagined in outsize form. An erotic charge runs though her work, and alongside it, the specter of encroaching ruin. "If you look at Old Dutch still life painting," she said, "all of these beautiful chalices, fruits and lobsters these things are letting you know that their time is amazing right now but that all of this is going to decay." These are edited excerpts from the conversation. "Maiden, Mother, Crone" is an evocative title. What exactly did you have in mind? In each stage of your life, there is something great and something not. When you're a maiden, the whole world wants you. You're on fire. But you have no idea what you're doing at all. Now that I have three kids, I'm aware of what I'm doing. But I'm tired, and things are starting to shift in my body. I'm moving toward the crone stage, where what's going on is getting clearer and clearer. But by then, you're more tired. What is the chief impulse that drives you? It's always been a story or some type of out of body experience. That's why I'm interested in the fairy tale. I'm curious about why some ideas get cemented in story form as fact, and others do not. I think about Lilith. She was Adam's equal and she came before Eve. But Lilith complained too much, so she was written out of the story. I've always been fascinated by women who are loudmouthed, who have something to say, and how that's been a problem in history. Are there moments when excess and aggression take over your imagination? The way I think of it, the right hand of your body is the doer side; the left hand is the passive side. The right hand is phallic, pushing out into the world, and it's dry. The left side is moist, and it's the taking, the receptive side. You need both to become whole. Your imagery can be fanciful, but there are also elements of the sinister and grotesque. Where did those come from? My dad, who died in August, was very extreme. I absorbed his idea of a brutalistic life. His attitude was very much: "Toughen up, get over it." What did growing up in Miami contribute to your outlook? There is an aspect of Florida that's a rotting jungle. Our house was on a landfill in Coral Gables. It was part of a mangrove forest that stank of festering weird stuff. Once, there was a trail of hundreds of ants crawling on walls. There were flying palmetto bugs eating the ants, and a lizard eating the palmetto bugs. Those things all spoke to me. You're not squeamish in your work about incorporating kitsch. I used to go to Disney World in Orlando maybe 10 or 12 times a year to accompany my dad to medical conventions. We'd go every time to Cinderella's castle. I learned later that the castle was based on an American concept of Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany, which was in itself a fantasy, a romantic interpretation of the Middle Ages. That's what started my interest in the European baroque and rococo. In 2000, I visited the Nymphenburg palace in Bavaria, and Amalienburg, a baroque hunting lodge in the Nymphenburg Park. Walking into those places changed my life. I became fixated on 18th century European architecture, figurines and sculpture. It changed everything I thought about the rococo. I was seeing the real version, not the Liberace version. What in your mind sets the real version apart? It is the use of positive and negative space, the roundness, the curves and waves that are balanced by sharp points. That's something I recreate on purpose in my art. Do you think about your own shelf life? Definitely. These things have to do partly with looking at the images of the paintings John has done of me over time. There is one of me in braids. I was maybe 25. In more recent paintings, I can see myself aging. When did you first become aware of your sexuality? I was probably a teenager. In Miami, I was friends with Bruce Weber. He was shooting Calvin Klein Obsession ads with all these male models. I went clubbing with those guys. I was 14, and I saw how amazing it was that they were very aware of their beauty and their image. I was shy until I was 18, and then I started to feel more confident. How did you express that? I would wear a see through plastic skirt that I bought at Patricia Field, and I would stuff a black wig under it, a big pubic merkin. I would walk around New York City like that. I also had a T shirt that was very tight, that I would wear with no bra. It said, "I'm a satisfier." What impact has that relationship had on a your stature in the art world? You're a wife, a mother, an artist, a fashion person. But you can't be all those things. People don't think of you as serious. But you haven't turned your back on fashion. You can be excessive in fashion. You are not allowed to be excessive in contemporary art, and that's been a real issue for me. The contemporary art world has gone so much toward minimalism that I actually have been embarrassed at certain times by what I've made. But I had to keep doing it. Quite a few of your pieces are life size or larger. Do you feel more entitled as you mature to take up space? Men I'm thinking of Richard Serra historically have been the ones to take up space. It's a version of man spreading. But if you're a woman, you cross your legs. As a female sculptor, it's strange to be pushing things out into the world, to be using that aggressive, punch it out phallic side. I worry that a piece may be too big, that it's going to cost too much to move it. I know Richard Serra doesn't think about that at all. He thinks, "I'm going to make this and make it as heavy as I possibly can, and it's going to cost millions of dollars to get it across the bridge, but I don't care. I'm a great artist." Do you feel competitive with other artists, and with your husband in particular? I would say yes. You feel competitive in a way where you want to blow people's minds. The feeling is, "I need to make the best thing I've ever made in my whole life." My father worked hard. As a first generation American, he worked his ass off. From him, I learned that I've got a limited time on this planet and I've got to do something. I can't be sleeping. Through March 22 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The title character in Douglas Stuart's debut novel, "Shuggie Bain," at one point finds his mother passed out in their Glasgow apartment. He gently turns her head to the side so that she doesn't choke on her vomit, places a bucket by the bed and sets out three mugs next to her one with tap water for her dry throat, one with milk for her sour stomach, and one with flat, leftover lager to ease her shaking limbs. "He knew this was the one she would reach for first," Stuart writes. It's a wrenching realization. But Shuggie's almost maternal tenderness toward his emotionally volatile mother, and his love for her despite her failures, helps him endure their hardscrabble existence. Stuart based the novel on his own childhood in Scotland, as the lonely youngest son of a single, alcoholic mother. Still, he sees Shuggie's story not as a tragedy, but as a tale about unbreakable filial bonds. "For me, 'Shuggie Bain' is a love story," Stuart, 44, said during an interview on a drizzly day in downtown Manhattan this month. "It's about love before it's about addiction." When the book came out in February, it had a warm but rather quiet reception. Now, it is being celebrated as one of this year's most accomplished debuts. It was named as a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Booker Prize, two of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world. It has drawn comparisons to D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Frank McCourt. Stuart, who lives in the East Village with his husband, Michael Cary, a curator at Gagosian who specializes in Picasso, said he is "absolutely stunned" by the novel's success. When he first started writing more than a decade ago, Stuart was working 12 hour days as a senior director of design at Banana Republic, jotting down scenes and bits of dialogue in his spare time almost as a form of therapy. A portrait of a struggling city, community, family and woman, "Shuggie Bain" unfolds in the economic and social stagnation of 1980s Glasgow, after the region's shipbuilding, mining and steelwork industries collapsed. Stable, working class communities became destitute, leading to widespread poverty and addiction. In this harsh world, Shuggie feels like an outcast. His mother is ostracized by the local women and preyed upon by the men; Shuggie is bullied by his classmates for being gay. The novel caused a stir in Scotland. "New York fashionista uses Glasgow's Sighthill as inspiration for novel," the Daily Record, a Scottish newspaper, trumpeted in August. Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, tweeted a photo of the book, and congratulated Stuart on his Booker nomination. The Scottish American actor and writer Alan Cumming, who became friendly with Stuart after reading "Shuggie Bain," said he was struck by how Stuart drew on the Scottish literary canon but expanded it by writing from the point of view of a gay boy and his wayward mother. "Douglas is incredibly entrenched in that great Scottish working class tradition of storytelling, but he's coming at it from being an outsider in your own country," he said. "He's bringing a queer sensibility to it." As a boy growing up in public housing, Stuart rarely saw books at home. His mother had shelves of what looked like leather bound classics, but they were decorative, faux leather cases for video cassettes of movies and soap operas. Then, this fall, awards nominations began to pile up, and "Shuggie Bain" got a second life. In September, it was listed as a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and made the cut as one of six finalists for the Booker Prize, over works by celebrated authors like Anne Tyler and Hilary Mantel. Booker judges called it "an amazingly intimate, compassionate, gripping portrait of addiction, courage and love." In October, it was named one of five fiction finalists for the National Book Award. Grove moved up the publication of the paperback edition from December to Oct. 13 and has printed 30,000 copies, with another 10,000 on the way. If Stuart wins the Booker or the National Book Award in November or, in an unprecedented coup, both Grove plans to print another 50,000 copies. Stuart dedicated "Shuggie Bain" to his mother. In a roundabout way, she was the first person who encouraged him to write. Some nights when she was drunk, she would dictate her autobiography for him to take down, he said. She never got past the dedication, which she always made out to one of her role models, Elizabeth Taylor another glamorous, melodramatic woman who was unlucky in love. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
FLORENCE, Italy In December 1929, Irving Berlin published a song with an irresistible but notoriously complex rhythmic pattern and lyrics about the custom in Harlem of putting on one's Sunday finery to parade up and down Lenox Avenue, "Spendin' every dime/For a wonderful time." Issued by Columbia, Victor and the Brunswick record labels (which had a No. 1 hit with it), "Puttin' on the Ritz" was eventually sung on film by Fred Astaire and Clark Gable; revised by Berlin to replace the lyric's resplendent black people with rich whites strutting down Park Avenue; and definitively entered pop culture as easy shorthand for dressing to the nines. To understand how durably Berlin's tune permeated pop culture, consider the story of Matteo Gioli, a 28 year old musician from Pisa who played banjo, guitar and double bass in a retro style swing band until 2010. It was then he went looking for headgear as resplendent as that worn by the Harlemites of eight decades ago. And when Mr. Gioli couldn't find what he was searching for, he and his girlfriend, Veronica Cornacchini, impulsively decided to go into the hat making business. First knocking on the doors of what few traditional milliners remain in this Renaissance city, they eventually apprenticed themselves for a year and soon were turning out the first models bearing the label "SuperDuper Hats," a phrase from the song. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
In recent months, as I've written about the vagaries of the federal public service loan forgiveness program, I've heard from scores of people who have been tearing their hair out trying to qualify and get their loan servicer to give them coherent status updates. In theory, millions of borrowers are eligible to have their debts forgiven after a decade of public service work. In practice, the program has produced a litany of frustrations. One doctor was flummoxed enough that she handed the mess off to her lawyer who also happened to be her mother to try to make sense of it, to no avail. Another lawyer who actually works at the federal Department of Education, which administers the program, has also run into brick walls. But there is at least one person who has made the 120 qualifying payments and now has a zero balance as a result, thus joining a very small club of the forgiven. He is Michael Mitchell, a 47 year old New York City musician turned clinical social worker and counseling psychotherapist. For years, he also had a proofreading side hustle, which helped him turn the interpretive back flips necessary to analyze the program at its birth in 2007. In the ensuing years he navigated a system so confounding that it recently drew 350 million of additional federal money to help the many people in incorrect repayment plans who were stymied by the complexity. How did Mr. Mitchell do it? It took him over two hours to tell the story sitting in his apartment in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, with his husband, Ted Altschuler, filling in some details. Between them sat a two inch stack of loan documents and an iPad containing the list of electronic files that document Mr. Mitchell's loan history. Mr. Mitchell had set out to change careers, not become a pioneer. A professional musician with debt from graduate school, he turned to social work and got a master's degree from Hunter College in 2006. His debt from all of his degrees was about 129,000 by then. While searching the internet for information about state loan forgiveness programs for social workers, he stumbled onto a website for financial aid professionals about a fledgling federal public service loan forgiveness program. It was still a proposal, but Mr. Mitchell tracked it through its passage. Then he did what very few people seem to have done: He printed out the entire bill that made loan forgiveness the law of the land and read it. Then he read it again, over and over and over. "I read it like a proofreader," he said, having spent years doing that professionally for books ranging from a cultural history of the penis to parts of "The Joy of Cooking." The forgiveness program seemed simple at first glance: Work 10 years as a public servant and the federal government will forgive your loans. But deep, repeated, near Talmudic parsing of the words revealed the following: Borrowers need to be in exactly the right kind of federal student loan. They need to be in the right kind of repayment plan. They need to pay on time in exactly the right way. And their full time work has to qualify as proper public service. Mr. Mitchell already had the right kind of direct federal loan. He was also in the right repayment plan, namely one tied to his income. As for sorting out the rest of it, he was entirely on his own in those early years of repayment. The Department of Education wasn't issuing much detailed guidance. And when he called his loan servicer for advice, his requests were often met with silence or confusing advice that made him doubt that he was on the right track. "I'd come away thinking that I'd better go over the law again to make sure I'm as clear about this as possible," he said. "So I would pull it up and reread it every six months or so, and sometimes I'd read it and think, 'That looks different now.'" The anxiety was warranted. Like many people in income driven repayment plans with modest salaries and large amounts of debt, Mr. Mitchell was making monthly payments that were so low they weren't even covering all the interest each month. So his balance was going up, not down, and rather quickly. Any mistake could lead to enormous financial consequences. In 2012, he had a good scare when the Department of Education introduced its employer certification forms. Borrowers needed to fill them out to make sure their job qualified for the program and that their payments were counting toward the required 120 months. At first, the word back was that he had made no qualifying payments at all. Only later did it become clear that his two jobs at the time did indeed add up to full time employment. So Mr. Mitchell marched ahead, biding his time and crossing his fingers. "It would be Saturday morning, and I would be reading The Times and he'd be in bed looking at regulations like some treasure was going to pop up," Mr. Altschuler said. "And I'd be thinking, 'Thank God I don't have to do this, because I'd never have the patience.'" By 2016, it was clear that few people had made as much progress as Mr. Mitchell. While the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has estimated that one quarter of the United States work force could potentially qualify for the forgiveness program, only 139 people had made at least 97 qualifying payments toward their goal of 120 as of 2016, according to figures that the Department of Education presented at a conference. This lack of successful uptake represents a huge systemic failure, and as Mr. Mitchell surfed the internet for more information and started reading horror stories about the administration of the program, he became more determined not to mess anything up. He began recording all his phone calls with FedLoan, which services loans for people trying to qualify for forgiveness. He left a comment on a column of mine from last year, and we became email penpals. And as he approached 120 months, he also asked for a complete accounting of all of his payments, to check for any discrepancies between his records and FedLoan's. His diligence and follow up eventually prompted an internal review, causing his payment count to temporarily fall into the 50s, wiping out years of credit. "I had no idea what was going on," Mr. Mitchell said, while replaying his call to FedLoan for me. "You can hear my heart beat faster." "You freaked out and didn't sleep all night," Mr. Altschuler added. All turned out to be fine, and FedLoan restored the payments and submitted his account to the Department of Education for one last review. Weeks passed. Mr. Mitchell kept making monthly payments, just in case something was awry. And on the day I visited his apartment, he logged in and saw the magic number for the very first time: Zero. There was no balance left; after making just over 24,000 in payments over a decade, the federal government had wiped away his balance of roughly 170,000 tax free. As long as the public service loan forgiveness program continues to exist, there should be fewer high wire stories like Mr. Mitchell's. Awareness will spread further, and people will find their way into the program sooner and face fewer obstacles later on. That will probably take many years, however. Mr. Mitchell said he felt a bit weird about being one of the few successes so far. He knows he was lucky that he had the right loan and repayment plan at the outset and lucky, too, that he did not have distractions, like children, that might have kept him from devoting so much time to staying on track. But it should not have been this hard. "I'm always helping my patients figure out how to tolerate uncertainty and not freeze up in an uncertain world," he said, "and that's one of the things that has gotten me through this. I didn't stick my head under a rock because it was freaking me out. I leaned into it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Dr. Pamela Ling and Judd Winick, who this summer celebrated their 15th wedding anniversary, had people rooting for their relationship long before they started dating. They met in 1994 after they were chosen to be among seven roommates on "Real World: San Francisco," the third season of MTV's pioneering reality program. She was a medical student, and he was an aspiring cartoonist. The show's producers had hoped that romance would blossom on air between the two (they even compiled footage for a potential episode, "Judd's Search for Love"), but that was not to be. Mr. Winick compared his relationship then with Dr. Ling to a 747 ready to take off that had been grounded on the runway. "We were in the friend zone because she had a boyfriend and we were on a television show," he said. That the romance got started after the finale may be a key to their success, given the lack of longevity of many reality show pairings. Their wedding was chronicled in a Sept. 9, 2001, Vows column in The New York Times. Mr. Winick cautions would be lovers appearing on reality shows that waiting to connect is the wiser course. "I can't imagine you're completely you when you're on camera,'' he said. "It's when the camera stops that you finally get to assess." Off set, Dr. Ling and Mr. Winick bonded over their mutual geekiness. "She's kind of shockingly nerdy," he said. It is a description that she accepts with pride: "I went to astronomy camp, and I went a year earlier than anyone else." Early on, they were immersed in "Star Wars" films. And even today, Mr. Winick said, "We still love and get obsessive about things together." Their shared fascinations include goofy earworm videos by Parry Gripp, musicals like "Rent," "Avenue Q" and "Hamilton" and television shows like "Game of Thrones" and "Project Runway." They cite these common interests as one of the ways they have managed to keep their relationship fresh and exciting. The of the moment compulsions are constantly replenished. "It happens every year," Mr. Winick said. "Something new will come down the pike that becomes part of our zeitgeist and vocabulary. The kids pick up the baton and run with it." Dr. Ling, 48, and Mr. Winick, 46, who live in San Francisco, have been careful about keeping their son and daughter from the public eye; they have avoided posting photographs of them on social media and asked that their names not be used in this article. They want their children to be able to choose for themselves, if the time comes, whether to enter the spotlight. But Mr. Winick joked that, with reality TV more prevalent than ever, their children may have to participate in a show one day as part of some sort of public service: "They pay for college, but you have to do three seasons on the E! network." After "Real World," both Mr. Winick and Dr. Ling have enjoyed successful careers. He is now a veteran comic book writer and graphic novelist; Dr. Ling is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Her focus is studying how tobacco is marketed to young people, and her goal is to "make trouble for tobacco companies," she said, and to "help hipsters quit smoking." Together Dr. Ling and Mr. Winick help oversee the Pedro Zamora Young Leaders Scholarship, which gives small endowments to students committed to AIDS education. It is a way of honoring Mr. Zamora, their MTV roommate and AIDS educator who died of complications from AIDS in 1994. "I only wish we had 10 times the money to give away," she said. (The bond between Dr. Ling and Mr. Winick deepened after they both flew to Miami to be at Mr. Zamora's side before he died.) If there could ever be said to be any strain in their marriage, it may arise out of their mutual devotion to work. Dr. Ling mentioned a period of creative malaise for Mr. Winick when he was writing comics for Marvel and DC, but he was longing to get back to his cartoonist roots. " 'Judd is not always a happy person' is the kind way to say it," Dr. Ling said. How did she deal with this blue period? "I let Judd watch television. This is something his parents started when he was a kid. You can't fight nature. It's his opiate of choice." Mr. Winick found his path again illustrating and writing "Hilo," a graphic novel about a boy who crashes to Earth. "He's still the same Judd, but 30 percent less angry just because the work is a better fit," Dr. Ling said. The couple's most trying period came over a decade ago, when Mr. Winick was working outside San Francisco on "The Life and Times of Juniper Lee," an animated TV series he had created. "I was flying down to Burbank three days a week while Pam was up here, still working and pregnant with our son," he said. It should have been a magical period, but the work and commute were a drain on them and stressed the relationship. All Mr. Winick wanted to talk about was the animated series, and Dr. Ling was understandably less enthusiastic about discussing the very thing that was keeping them apart. As the due date neared, Mr. Winick chose to spend less time at the show to make sure he was there for the birth. Each of them shared a few insights on how to make a relationship work. Dr. Ling said: "Embrace your differences or complementary characteristics. I'm externally motivated, while Judd is internally motivated. I'm left brain, while Judd is right brain. I write science, while Judd writes stories." For Mr. Winick, "Communication is key," he said. "Know that you're human. Know that sometimes it isn't about you; it is the other person. And know that sometimes it is about you." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
PARIS Throughout Europe's long debt crisis, Germany has prescribed the same strong remedy to its troubled neighbors: a stiff dose of fiscal discipline. As long as the patients were southern European countries like Greece and Italy, seen as victims of an unhealthy lifestyle, northern tier nations like France, Austria and the Netherlands have been willing to go along with Germany's prescriptions for reducing debt in the name of economic health. And they were willing to support Germany's insistence that the European Central Bank not be a lender of last resort to indebted governments by actively buying their bonds. But suddenly, as investors' fears mount that many euro area nations are about to tip into recession, even countries like creditworthy France are finding it much more expensive to borrow money in the open market. And with that development comes a dawning realization: that austerity, rather than making it easier for them to pay down their higher debts, could make it harder and more expensive. The exposure of the United States, and in particular its banks, to Europe's debt problems caused a sharp sell off in stocks Wednesday in the final two hours of trading. The Standard Poor's 500 stock index, flat on the day by about 2 p.m., lost 20.9 points, or 1.66 percent, to close at 1,236.91, after the rating agency Fitch warned that United States banks were vulnerable if Europe did not solve its crisis quickly. As investors worried about the European sovereign debt held by banks and their vulnerability to stress in the European financial system, bank shares led the declines. Goldman Sachs lost 4 percent to 95.50. Morgan Stanley closed down 8 percent at 14.66. Citigroup lost about 4 percent to 26.90. "All this underscores the ongoing nervousness about Europe generally and the banking sector specifically," said Barry Knapp, head of American equity strategy at Barclays Capital. In Europe, as France's borrowing costs become increasingly divergent from Germany's, so might its attitude toward having the European Central Bank step in. Already, French officials are openly disagreeing with Germany on the policy. On Wednesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany continued to speak out against the idea of the central bank buying bonds, while the French finance minister, Francois Baroin, was arguing just the opposite. Mr. Baroin called for the support of all European institutions, including the central bank, to respond to the crisis. "But Germany, for historic reasons, has closed the door to the direct involvement of the E.C.B.," Mr. Baroin said in an interview with the French business newspaper Les Echos. Mr. Baroin's remark was a reference to Germany's deep seated fears over the inflation that could result if the central bank pumped more money into the region's economies. The so called yield gap the premium that investors demand for holding French 10 year government bonds, rather than German ones rose Wednesday to a new high since the euro began of nearly two percentage points. It later eased back somewhat, to 1.9 percentage points. That is still not close to the yield gap of nearly 5.2 percentage points that beleaguered Italy has with Germany, but it is a disturbing new trend for France. Austria and Netherlands are also experiencing widening yield gaps with Germany, and Spain has become a new source for concern. The central bank was more aggressively in the market buying the bonds of Italy and Spain on Wednesday to stabilize the situation, traders said. It bought about 146 million euros, more than the 28 million euros it had bought over the previous two days, according to TD Securities. That helped lower yields earlier, but the effect didn't last and interest rates rose again later. In Spain, which holds elections this weekend, the 10 year yield rose to 6.4 percent up from 5 percent just five weeks ago, and back to the levels that first prompted the central bank to begin its current relatively low level bond buying program in the summer. In its warning, Fitch said United States banks "could be greatly affected if contagion continues to spread beyond the stressed European markets." The banks' exposure to European countries' debt and to European banks was "sizable" then "unless the euro zone debt crisis is resolved in a timely and orderly manner, the broad outlook for U.S. banks will darken." Another agency, Moody's, downgraded several German lenders, adding to investors' jitters. Italy continues to be a major source of bond market worries, despite the announcement Wednesday by its new prime minister, Mario Monti, of a new cabinet stocked with academics and people from the banking industry and the upper reaches of the civil service. Italian 10 year yields were back to nearly 7 percent, the level at which analysts say financing the country's 1.8 trillion euro ( 2.4 trillion ) debt mountain becomes unsustainable. But the market anxiety has moved well beyond Italy, as the specter of a regionwide recession is making investors realize that if every country is tightening its belt at the same time, few will be able to grow their way out of the problems any time soon. So far, France, the Netherlands and Austria have been among Germany's allies in the crisis. France, eager to show that the French German axis is thriving, has even backed Germany's stance on central bank lending. The question now, though, is whether other countries will start to resist Germany's policy prescriptions. "The Germans have been able to rely on the French, the Dutch and the Austrians," said Simon Tilford, the chief economist at the Center for European Reform in London. "But if they get dragged into this and their borrowing costs continue to rise, that could influence whether they continue to back Germany and the line taken on the euro zone crisis." On Wednesday, the French government showed a clear sign of divergence. It called on the central bank to help calm the crisis by buying the bonds of Italy, Greece and other governments whose borrowing costs are surging. "The E.C.B.'s role is to ensure the stability of the euro, but also the financial stability of Europe," said Valerie Pecresse, the French budget minister. Mr. Baroin, the French finance minister, went further, alluding to the German fear of inflation, which many historians say helped Hitler's rise to power. Indeed, much of Germany's response to the current economic crisis is rooted in a desire not to let history repeat itself. Mr. Baroin said that the United States Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan had intervened in their bond markets with little fear that they were being influenced politically. "But Germany has a history, a memory about inflation and overindebtedness," he said. The central bank is also being sought out by banks that are desperate for cheap financing to offset losses. The chief executive of UniCredit, one of Italy's largest lenders, urged the European Central Bank to increase access to central bank borrowing for Italian banks, the Italian press reported. Berlin fears that allowing countries to rely on the central bank as a white knight would make them lazy about fixing their own finances. On Monday, Jens Weidmann, president of the German Bundesbank and an influential member of the European Central Bank's governing council, said it would be illegal to use the bank to solve government budget problems. "The increasing demand being placed on monetary policy is dangerous," Mr. Weidmann said. "Monetary policy cannot and may not solve the solvency problems of governments and banks." Analysts, though, say the time for insisting on ideology is quickly running out. Because European policy makers still have not started up the main bailout fund for Europe the European Financial Stability Facility there are virtually no other tools besides austerity to whittle down debts and deficits. But, said Mr. Tilford, the euro zone "is going to crack unless E.C.B. enters the picture soon." If the central bank really starts carrying out the lender of last resort function, then the crisis can still be reined in, he and others said. The question is whether the central bank is engaging in a strategy of brinkmanship to extract as many reforms from governments before it intervenes, or whether it genuinely intends to resist pressure to be a lender of last resort. "If it's a game of chicken, then it's a very risky one," said Mr. Tilford. "If they are resisting becoming a lender of last resort, then the future of the euro zone is very much in doubt." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
David Caspe turned 8 in 1986, a year (almost to the day) before the stock market crash that is the ostensible subject of his new Showtime series, "Black Monday." I mention that because, watching the show, it often feels like you're seeing the '80s through the eyes of a precocious youngster glued to the television. Designer jeans, Rae Dawn Chong, "Diff'rent Strokes," Grandmaster Flash, Marion Barry, Michael Jackson, cocaine buffets. Cartoonish characters living large in cartoonish clothes. The barrage of period allusions functions as a connective tissue binding the disjointed parts of "Black Monday," which tries to stitch together an over the top comedy of the go go '80s and a tut tutting, cautionary morality tale, fitted out with appropriate music, fashions and hairstyles. What it doesn't supply is an actual feel for the period, or a coherent point of view about it, or anything more than cliches for the show's talented stars Don Cheadle, Andrew Rannells and Regina Hall to play. The half hour series, which begins Sunday, is clearly meant to satirize something, but the target is elusive. Caspe (who created "Black Monday" with Jordan Cahan) is best known for "Happy Endings," a short lived early 2010s network sitcom with a small but rabid fan base. "Happy Endings" charted the intertwined lives of a group of six besties, but it was really about an idea of communal post college friendship in the post "Friends" era. In a similar way but with a premium cable license for smuttier and colder jokes "Black Monday" seems to be satirizing an idea of 1980s Wall Street excess, rather than anything that actually existed. A subplot in the early episodes (three of 10 were available) even involves a writer trailing the show's main character, the trader Maurice "Mo" Monroe (Cheadle), to gather material for an Oliver Stone film. ("Wall Street," one of the best timed movies ever, came out two months after the real Black Monday.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
It was around 7:15 on a recent Tuesday morning when I realized, arms linked through his and lying, face up, on his back, that I had known this man his name was Dijon, and he was wearing leggings for only 10 minutes. We were in the middle of a partner yoga session at one of the San Francisco editions of Daybreaker, an early morning dance party that descends, every month, on an increasing number of cities around the world. There wasn't much time for reflection. A massage train was forming in the center of the increasingly brightening Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. People rubbed shoulders and had their shoulders rubbed. "You're a good masseuse, man," a shirtless guy in Aztec print swim trunks said to the dude in front of him, whose shoulder length hair shook back and forth as he dug in. Stretched and soothed, the crowd dispersed for coffee and acai bowls in a lobby that recalled the entrance to a high school gym. "It's not going to get full blown for a little while," said Marc Rochman, 39, a Daybreaker veteran who woke up at 5:45. "The other one I went to was on a boat." But soon, revelers were thronging the coat check, shrugging off backpacks saddled with MacBooks and reusable water bottles. House music thumped from the main room, and near the D.J., Teresa Young, 27 and rocking Sasquatch esque furry boots, formed a circle with 10 of her friends. "It's hard to motivate people, 10 people, to go out to anything these days, but surprisingly the amount of people that will wake up at the crack of dawn to do yoga and dance massive!" she exclaimed, beaming. She works in digital marketing and planned to go from the party to her office. "I might sneak in the back way with my leg warmers and everything on, go in the shower and then walk out, you know, normal." Near her, a redhead grooved in a lime green tutu and matching Nike sneakers. A man in green suspenders and a bow tie had forgone a shirt. Andre Bach, 30, was one of the rare specimens in a dress shirt and khakis. "I don't have any great ideas for any fancy costumes, so I didn't bother to do anything for that," he said. "I just really like dancing in a kind of uncoordinated, jumping up and down like a crazy person kind of way." This, its founders say, is why Daybreaker was created: to give people who genuinely enjoy dancing an outlet to do so without alcohol, drugs, cover fees, bottle service or all of the usual accouterments of night life. Two friends in New York Radha Agrawal, 36, the founder of Super Sprowtz, a children's nutrition company, and Matthew Brimer, 28, a founder of the adult education school General Assembly came up with the concept two years ago over late night falafel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. "We were talking about how the morning space in general is pretty boring, people have their routines and that's about it, and the night life scene in New York is so dark and synthetic and not community driven," Mr. Brimer said over the phone. "You know when you leave a nightclub and feel depleted? We wanted to turn that concept on its head." Daybreaker holds regular events in not only San Francisco (in places like the Yerba Buena Center and Supperclub), but also in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, London and Sao Paulo, Brazil. The cost: generally 20 to 40 a person, depending on whether you opt into predance party yoga or not. And, sure, while you could down a few beers before a bash "I imagine not everyone here is completely sober, if I was a betting man," Mr. Rochman mused the emphasis at the San Francisco party was on consciousness, mindfulness, purposefulness and othernesses that generally necessitate being neither drunk nor high. There were benefits. "I actually remember everything," said Alisha Outridge, who worked at Facebook at the time and said she was in her late 20s. Instead of shots, props brought people out of their shells. Around 9 a.m., select partyers hoisted luminescent jellyfish models above the crowd, a recurring theme at Daybreaker events. ("That was a participatory art installation I came across at Burning Man a couple years ago," Mr. Brimer said.) Judy Tuan, 32, wore a cheerleader's uniform and shook a pair of red pompoms. "Usually I do red ribbons, but I thought I'd do something different," she said. "People light up when you hand them a prop. It gets them into it." She broke off, running to embrace a man in a zebra print onesie. Adrian Santos, 26, showed up alone in American flag print pants and a sling (he had recently dislocated his shoulder). "When you go to bars and clubs, there are a lot of people standing against the wall, and the people who are dancing look like they're strung out and stuff," he said. "I'll still go out and party all night, but this is more fun." By 9:30, things were winding down. Red faced and sweat streaked, some revelers retreated to the bathrooms to swap out sequined crop tops for business casual button downs. Lana Baumgartner, 28, contemplated how many calories she had burned: "I'd much rather be dancing with all these people than in a gym." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The Beastie Boys' Michael Diamond (Mike D), left, and Adam Horovitz (Ad Rock) took a shot at defining their own legacy in their "Beastie Boys Book."Credit...Brad Ogbonna for The New York Times The Beastie Boys' Michael Diamond (Mike D), left, and Adam Horovitz (Ad Rock) took a shot at defining their own legacy in their "Beastie Boys Book." The story begins or maybe ends with three guys in their early 50s hanging out on a beautiful late summer afternoon, drinking iced coffee and talking about how much they love the Clash, and how weird it is that the celebrity clogged hotel where they're sitting is just up the block from where CBGB was way back when. Dad stuff. Two of the dads, though, are the surviving members of the Beastie Boys: Adam Horovitz, with upswept gray hair and a white T shirt with a faint graffito on the front; and Michael Diamond, wearing a bright red button up, his hair still dark, his face creased and tan from years living in Southern California. Ad Rock and Mike D, in other words. The third Beastie, Adam Yauch MCA, the conscience, shaman and intellectual backbone of the group died in 2012 after a three year battle with salivary gland cancer. His absence, six years later, is a palpable fact in the room. His name comes up a lot in the conversation, as it does in the new book Horovitz and Diamond have written. Called "Beastie Boys Book" (though the front cover might lead you to believe that the actual title is "PIZZA"), it's a 571 page doorstop and a tombstone, a compendium of anecdotes, recipes, impish riffs and shaggy dog stories and a heartfelt elegy to a much missed friend. The volume, full of old photographs and comics, with a riot of fonts and layouts, is a nonmusical summa of Beastie aesthetics. Personal history, tour bus folklore, studio geekery and a generational drama that summons an impressive roster of witnesses, including the writers Jonathan Lethem, Ada Calhoun and Colson Whitehead, the comedian/actress Amy Poehler and assorted fellow musicians. Some scores are settled, some beef is squashed, and no doubt some ugly business gets airbrushed or skipped over. Bad behavior is acknowledged; feminist ally bona fides are upheld. Since there won't be any more new Beastie Boys music, this scrapbook will help to consolidate a sprawling and complicated legacy. Monument building isn't something you necessarily expect from the Beasties, who built their career out of irreverence, slyness and low key cool. In the beginning, in the early 1980s, the name was an acronym for Boys Entering Anarchistic States Toward Internal Excellence, Diamond writes, and the lineup included a girl, Kate Schellenbach. The group migrated from hardcore to hip hop when rap looked more like a fad than like a dominant force in pop culture. They were puerile and profane and then somehow, by the '90s, serious musicians with something to say and startling innovations to contribute. Yauch was a Buddhist and an outspoken feminist. Their 1994 "Sabotage" video, directed by Spike Jonze, was a goofy retro throwaway that helped transform the genre. Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder. The Beasties practiced cross platform brand extension before those awful words became cultural currency. They were fashion conscious, food conscious, and into graphic design, found art and weird old "physical media" just as the digital kind began to sweep it away. "I'm listening to wax/I'm not using the CD," Mike D boasted in "Sure Shot" in 1994, anticipating the millennial reclamation of vinyl supremacy by a solid decade or more. Around the same time, they started a magazine called Grand Royal that was also sort of a record label and also sort of a lifestyle consumer emporium and also sort of a clubhouse where you could feel simultaneously like a noob and a savant. It was like a website, but on paper. Silly and do it yourself, it had the disarming, off the cuff, look what I found sense of artistic integrity that is central to the Beastie legacy. That legacy between hard covers doesn't much resemble a standard rock star memoir. In apt Gen X fashion it's funnier and more modest than the best sellers by the musical heroes of the baby boomers. The three of us talked about that, and about a lot of other things. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. DIAMOND Yauch, when we were kids growing up, he loved "The Kids Are Alright," the Who documentary. It was like an obsession. And so he was interested, when we were working on "Hot Sauce Committee" or even a little before that, on gathering up archival material into a documentary type project. Then there was talk of somebody doing a book on the band so we were sort of like, we should get our act together and do it. Then Yauch died and we were too sad and it was definitely not the time for us to touch it. And then we got back into it and it went through different manifestations. We started with the idea of getting people who were around the band and our friends and people who were involved at different points telling the story. What did you most want it not to be? DIAMOND We definitely most did not want it to be like a typical rock autobiography. "I got on the bus one day and there was a boy playing guitar and it turned out to be John Lennon." HOROVITZ Although that would be great in a story about the Beastie Boys. We didn't want to do the thing where these autobiographies are just like a bunch of stuff, and then a few pictures, and more stuff, and more pictures. DIAMOND Here's 20 pages of us when we were growing up. Here's 20 pages when we're getting famous. Here's 20 pages when we're famous and here's 20 pages after we couldn't stand each other and now I've written all this libelous stuff about the guys I used to be in the band with. HOROVITZ In 2018, you can just Google all that stuff and write your own book. We also didn't want to have stories about really personal things, or outrageous stuff or expletive that's nobody's business. Were there places where you remembered things differently? HOROVITZ No. It was more like: Do either of us remember? How do you remember that now the music you listened to, and what gave you the idea that it was something you could do? HOROVITZ We were like 15 years old, and we'd go see bands, and a lot of the bands were like hard core punk bands. I had a guitar, and I knew a couple chords, and you realized you could play that Ramones song, and it's like, Jesus, every Ramones song is just that? I could do that. The only accessible music that we could possibly do would be hard core. Even punk seemed sophisticated. DIAMOND The point of entry was there. Prior to that, big rock bands were on the stage and that was unattainable. But if you went to a club like A7, the whole club was maybe the size of this hotel room, and there was literally a couch like this couch on the side of the stage. The barrier between audience and band didn't really exist, and most people in the audience were in bands. Another interesting thing that was happening when we started going out to clubs as teenagers whether it was Mudd Club, or Danceteria or wherever was this culture of everybody doing something. If they weren't in a band they were trying to sell you their little fanzine of poetry or trying to be the next visual artist. Everybody had some creative hustle. Did that put pressure on you to do something different? DIAMOND At first we were a hard core band like everyone else. Except maybe we had a sense of humor about it. HOROVITZ And then we started rapping. We were like the downtown rappers. There was no one else rapping downtown. Right? The bridge was that we met Rick Rubin. We were all going to the same clubs but he was a little bit older and he had a drum machine. DIAMOND And we kind of reached a burnout moment with hardcore. Rap 12 inches started coming out, and that seemed like a really exciting thing to jump to. "Sucker M.C.'s" by Run D.M.C. was really the record that smashed it all apart, it was this stripped down, minimal ... this is what rap was going to be. HOROVITZ That era of rap felt really punk for some reason. Something was connectable as far as us wanting to make rap records, besides just loving rap records. Were you at all self conscious about being white kids working in the rap idiom? HOROVITZ Well, we were from downtown, so we were rapping in Danceteria, in these white downtown clubs, really. Nobody downtown was rapping. Nobody we knew was rapping. So we were like, we should do it. We weren't making fun of it, we loved it and we wanted to be part of it. After a minute we got matching Puma suits, and we were wearing do rags, and we played at this club in Queens called the Encore, and everyone's making fun of us. They turned the fluorescent lights on when we came on doing our two songs opening for Kurtis Blow, and we were like, man, we look stupid. DIAMOND We all felt like such expletive after that gig. But we were still determined to make rap music because that's what we loved doing. We somehow realized we had to be our own version. A lot of kids are growing up now in a Beastie created world, where music, sneakers, clothes, food, so much of what they consume is connected and cross branded. And you were pioneers in that kind of thing. How did that grow out of the music? DIAMOND That was the great lesson of punk and hardcore. That you could self publish anything. To play gigs you were stealing access to a Xerox machine and making fliers. HOROVITZ Punks don't hire people to make their record cover. Punks do it all themselves. That's what real punk is about doing it yourself and building a community where people share ideas and share creativity. I feel like we always tried to get back to that. Grand Royal started because we were on the Lollapalooza tour and we wanted to send this message to people that the mosh pit is corny. Stop doing that. MTV has ruined it, and it's dangerous, and girls are getting hurt. So Mike had designed this whole thing and we passed it out at Lollapalooza and then we're like, let's just make a fanzine and put it out. And then it just went to the next level. We got lucky that we had the money. DIAMOND And that we had the audience. The fact that we actually had a larger audience for these things we made is still a minor miracle to me. When I think of you guys, I think of two moments. The first one, the early and mid 80s, we were talking about. But then there's also the early and mid 90s, a decade later, when there's a creative flowering in hip hop and the indie rock moment. Somehow you were in both of those places. How do you think you got there? HOROVITZ Well, it probably just goes back to loving the Clash. They had punk rock songs, and reggae songs, and melodic songs, and they just followed what they wanted to make, right? One thing that was definitely true of the early Beastie Boys was the playful, obnoxious persona. There was the inflatable penis onstage at your shows. And already, probably 20 years ago, you distanced yourself from some of the most offensive parts of that. At the moment, across the culture, there's a lot of reckoning going on about misogyny and homophobia, past and present, and I wonder if that came up again working on the book? DIAMOND All of us, growing up, either had the experience of behaving badly, or doing a bad job of how we treated others in any kind of relationship. For us of course a lot of that was within the public persona that we created. That was something inspiring about the book, it was this opportunity to open up and delve into it and be able to say, "We were expletive . We really could have handled this better. But maybe we had to be expletive to learn our lesson." HOROVITZ I mean you can't not bring that up. It's a big part of our story to us. Because for a long time we didn't play "Fight for Your Right to Party," we didn't play any of those songs. "Licensed to Ill" was like a cold, and we took so much vitamin C that we'd never get that cold again. But then we realized that you can separate good from bad, that it's not all, what's the expression, cut and dried? DIAMOND It didn't seem as binary anymore. HOROVITZ Oh now we're using fancy words. DIAMOND What opened the door was Yauch's lyric in the late '90s on "Sure Shot" about "the disrespect of women has got to be through." As we evolved into having that voice, we could be comfortable going back and playing one of those songs, saying now we're clearly established enough as something else that we can play that music without becoming that. There's something bittersweet about this book, because of Yauch's death. HOROVITZ It's expletive sad. There's no way to get around it. How are you supposed to end this book? Me and Mike sitting here? Me and Mike going to the movies? There are so many Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson movies we haven't seen yet. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Credit...Paul Rousteau for The New York Times The collection of Sylvio Perlstein is a relic of a recent time that already feels remote. For more than five decades he has bought avant garde 20th and 21st century art, comprising both iconic masterpieces and recondite curiosities. Mr. Perlstein's assemblage of paintings, sculptures and photographs fills every wall, niche and corner of his large house on the outskirts of Paris. The collector, who is in his 80s, accumulated his art gradually, like a snail extruding a shell. "Money was not interfering," Mr. Perlstein said on a recent visit to New York, where he maintains an apartment on the Upper East Side. "It was not a business. In the '80s, everything was almost free. Today it is all about money." He was propelled by his instincts and guided by the advice of old school, deeply knowledgeable dealers as well as by the artists themselves. "It's not a collection," he protested. "In Portuguese, the word is 'esquisito,' things that are strange and unusual." A selection of 380 pieces from the Perlstein collection will fill all three floors of the Hauser Wirth Chelsea gallery in New York from April 26 through July 27. (Nothing is for sale.) Unlike the leading collectors of our day, who hire professionals to track the market as assiduously as hedge fund managers, Mr. Perlstein follows his nose through the bewildering maze of modern art. He says that he pounces when he sees "something not normal." His collection includes Dada and Surrealism (Max Ernst, Man Ray, Dora Maar, Rene Magritte, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle); American minimalism and post minimalism (Donald Judd, Ad Reinhardt, Brice Marden, Fred Sandback); and land art (Richard Long, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Gordon Matta Clark). Here are some of the best known artists and themes, and how he came to collect them. Like many collectors of contemporary art, Mr. Perlstein prizes his relationships with artists. He met the man whose work arguably forms the core of his collection at a gallery in Vence, in the south of France, in 1969, when he and a friend decided to salvage a rainy day by driving to an exhibition that bore the intriguing title "Les Invendables" ("The Unsellables"). When they arrived, they saw a man leaning against the door. "What are you doing here?" he asked them. "What do you want?" He had such a strong American accent that Mr. Perlstein offered to switch to English, but the mysterious stranger insisted on French. It was the American expatriate Man Ray, whose drawings, gouaches and watercolors made up the exhibition. Mr. Perlstein bought several works. Man Ray invited him to pay a call when he was back in Paris, and so began a friendship that continued until the artist's death in 1976. Mr. Perlstein said, "He wasn't giving lessons, but when you see somebody every third week, you learn." Among other things, Man Ray explained the process of making what he called "rayographs," where he placed objects on photosensitive paper and produced a photographic image without the intervention of a camera. Mr. Perlstein acquired many of them. "No one wanted them," he says. He also acquired a selection of Man Ray's iconic images, such as a woman's bare back decorated with the f holes of a violin, and an arresting portrait of the iconoclastic (and psychologically tormented) theater artist Antonin Artaud. When traveling on business, Mr. Perlstein would make detours to visit pioneers of Dada and Surrealism, who were now well advanced in years and not otherwise receiving much attention. "With Hannah Hoch, I went to Berlin, and I didn't have an appointment with her," he said of the Dada artist known for photomontages she made during the Weimar period. "It was an old house, and she was a very old woman. She said, 'What do you want?' " When Mr. Perlstein told her, she invited him inside. "She showed me everything she had. From the real Dada, there was not a lot left. I bought two works." One is a crowing rooster cut from newspaper clippings. The other, like a Barbara Kruger print (she is another artist in the collection) more than half a century in advance, displays the words "looks beautiful" in German, in bold letters emblazoned across a fractured landscape. As befits a devotee of Surrealism, Mr. Perlstein often seems to be guided by his subconscious. For example, he has a curiously large number of works that feature women's hair (or hair look alikes), by such artists as Tunga, Pierre Boucher, Harry Callahan, Magritte and Maar. Although Maar is best known these days for her relationship with Picasso, she was a highly original artist. Her photograph in the Perlstein collection of a three sailed ship in a sea of hair, and another one of a tiny chair in a bare sunlit room, are memorably strange. Mr. Perlstein likes to buy early work, before an artist's fresh impulses have ossified into a reproducible style. He owns Cy Twombly, Roy Lichtenstein and Brice Marden from the mid 60s, and his youthful pieces by the downtown New York artist Keith Haring, notably a 1981 Mickey Mouse with a sexually suggestive snout, feel exploratory and vital. "It's the point of view of an anarchist, who looks at the 20th century totally from the radical expression of its time," says the dealer Daniella Luxembourg, a friend who has sold him art. "That makes it a great collection that is not about him. Certain collections are done to glorify their owners. In this collection, he was really interested in the radical gesture it might be with artists who never made it or with artists who made it a lot." The French Fluxus artist Ben Vautier, who goes by BEN, appealed to Mr. Perlstein because he produced paintings in the early '60s that consisted of written words. "He was the first to write on canvas," the collector said. Whether he was truly the first is arguable, but what is undeniable is that BEN never fulfilled the promise Mr. Perlstein saw in him. "Today he is repeating," Mr. Perlstein said, somewhat sadly, because he still likes the man. The Perlstein fortune which is modest compared with the assets of prominent modern art collectors like Eli Broad, Mitchell and Emily Rales, Steven A. Cohen, Peter M. Brant and David Geffen derives from gemstones. Mr. Perlstein is the third generation of his family to own a diamond cutting firm in Antwerp, Belgium. In 1939, when he was a child, his Jewish family fled Belgium in the face of the Nazi menace, finding refuge in Brazil. There, Sylvain became Sylvio and learned Portuguese. He loved growing up in Rio de Janeiro, spending much time playing soccer on the beach. In a flower store on the way to the ocean, he became smitten at age 15 or 16 with a painting that was "colorful and strange." The proprietor didn't want to sell it, but he persisted. It was his first art acquisition. A few years later, Mr. Perlstein reluctantly followed his parents to Antwerp, where he eventually took over the family diamond business. Ronny Van de Velde, a venerable modern art dealer in that city, was an important adviser. His collection contains many Belgian modernists Magritte, Marcel Broodthaers, Pol Bury, Leo Dohmen. Brazilians also have found their way into his holdings: Ernesto Neto, Vik Muniz, Miguel Rio Branco, Marepe. But he attributes the growth spurt of his collection to the frequent trips he made to New York in the '70s to call on the firm of the jeweler Harry Winston, for whom he cut and polished rough diamonds. Hanging out at Max's Kansas City, he met many artists, who would invite him to their studios and would give him works or offer to trade. (In Paris, Man Ray was always looking for diamonds for his wife, Juliet.) "The artists were not interested in selling, and you could call and speak to them," he said. "Today, you have to go through the secretary who gives you another secretary. You speak with 10 people to learn that they're not in town." A widower with two adult daughters, Mr. Perlstein spends most his time in Paris with his companion, Simone Swaab. He has become enamored of New York and would consider relocating, but the art that surrounds him is confining as well as uplifting. Still, last winter, as he faced the imminent denuding of his walls, he was mournful. Asked how he would feel seeing the crated art exit his home, he said, "I'm going to cry." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
WASHINGTON Senate investigators said Tuesday that government officials had "exercised minimal oversight" of the risks posed by three Chinese telecom companies that operate on American communications networks. Federal agencies failed to properly follow up on some agreements meant to protect national security, did not provide adequate workers to vet the Chinese companies and operated through a "disorganized" process, according to a report from the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The report looked into a group of officials from the Homeland Security, Justice and Defense Departments, known as Team Telecom, that has historically advised the Federal Communications Commission on the possible national security risks of foreign involvement in American networks. The findings could put pressure on officials at those agencies and embolden politicians from both parties who argue that the United States must move quickly to sever any links between its communications networks and Chinese companies. The Trump administration has cracked down on Chinese telecommunications companies that operate in the United States, arguing that the Chinese government could use their equipment to hear and read American communications on their networks. Huawei, a Chinese manufacturer of telecom networking gear, has been one of the administration's top targets, and has pushed back against the accusations. Last year, the Federal Communications Commission turned down the application of China Mobile, a wireless carrier, to operate in the United States. But other Chinese companies with ties to the country's government are still licensed to operate on American networks, and the Senate report said the Team Telecom agencies had failed to keep an adequate watch on three of them: China Unicom Americas, China Telecom Americas and ComNet (USA). All three are part of Chinese state controlled companies. The report said that while the agencies had established security agreements with China Telecom and ComNet in 2007 and 2009, they had visited the companies only twice each to ensure they were complying. It said the agencies had never entered into a similar agreement with China Unicom, "meaning Team Telecom has no oversight authority to assess the company's operations in the United States." The agencies have already taken steps to respond to critics of the system for reviewing foreign entrants into domestic networks. This year, Team Telecom recommended that the Federal Communications Commission revoke China Telecom's and China Unicom's licenses to operate in the United States. The White House also issued an executive order to replace the process with a more formal one. China Telecom said in a statement that it had fully complied with its agreement with the government and cooperated voluntarily with the Senate's investigation. The other two Chinese companies did not comment on the findings. The report also criticized the resources devoted to oversight of the companies. The Homeland Security and Justice Departments assigned fewer than five employees to field applications for Team Telecom reviews and check whether companies were meeting the terms of their agreements with the group, the report said. The subcommittee also said there were flaws in the way the review process was set up, noting that it operated on an ad hoc basis because it was not explicitly authorized by Congress. Members of the subcommittee's staff told reporters on a call on Monday that they expected to discuss legislation addressing the issue with the agencies. "We look forward to reviewing the contribution of these senators and committee staff to this important national security work," a spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission, Will Wiquist, said in a statement. The Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
If the next time you are in New Orleans, you find yourself wondering who will make you dance during your visit, the local rapper Big Freedia has your answer. "I'm that queen that'll make you bounce!" she crows on one of her best known songs. You can hear Big Freedia's music playing in cars as they pass beneath the live oaks, or in French Quarter corner stores when you're picking up a drink, or in darkened neighborhood bars between the band's sets. Her version of bounce music, a New Orleans genre of hip hop, is hypnotic, and her dance parties are some of the rowdiest party scenes in this rowdy party city. The success of Big Freedia (birth name Freddie Ross Jr.) in the Deep South might seem surprising: She is a 40 year old gay black man who dresses in regal wigs and dangly earrings and uses the pronoun "she." For many people here, Freedia represents the new New Orleans, the real New Orleans, where what matters most is not what you look like, but how funky you get down when the music turns up. We asked her to share five favorite places in New Orleans. "Morrow's is a new spot in New Orleans, run by a young black entrepreneur who used to be a club promoter. His mom is the chef. It's another place with authentic cuisine, with a menu really off the chain. My favorite is their crawfish pasta. It comes with fried fish on top and garlic bread scrumptious!" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Below, edited excerpts from a conversation with Mr. Bon Jovi. You and Jesse visited Languedoc Roussillon for your wine project. What was your impression of the region? I have been to the Cote d'Azur at least 30 times before but never to this region, which is also in the south of France. It's a storybook area with castles and ruins and rolling hills, and I really loved the architecture the medieval castles were in such good shape. Also, you're not really going to find any chain restaurants there. We dined at all tiny, family run places, and I ate a lot of seafood, especially shellfish. Americans haven't discovered this part of France yet, and it was a pleasure to discover. Growing up in New Jersey, I've been preaching my whole life that you have to get out to find the beautiful places in this world. How much are you on the road for work? Rock 'n' roll is cyclical. You do a record and you support it by going on tour , and then it could be two years before you're out on the road again. When you're on tour, what kind of hotels do you like to stay at? I don't need opulence. I need simplicity because I'm in a different hotel every day so the biggest suite is a waste because I can't use it. But I do need a hotel with a gym and a humidifier for my room. I also don't want any flowers in my room because they give me allergies. Do you have a favorite hotel? The Peninsula in Chicago is my favorite in the U.S. Everything about it is awesome the gym, the bar, the restaurant and the beds in the rooms. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday asked companies to stop selling all forms of the heartburn drug Zantac, after concluding that a potential cancer causing contaminant can build up in the drug when stored for long periods. The agency also recommended that consumers who use over the counter forms of the drug, also known as ranitidine, stop taking it and that they should dispose of any tablets or liquid that they have. People who take prescription forms of the drug should speak with their doctors about other options before stopping treatment. Most manufacturers withdrew their products from the market several months ago, after an outside pharmacy raised the alarm about the drug last year. Large pharmacy chains, including Walgreens, Rite Aid and CVS, had also removed all of the products from their shelves. The F.D.A. said in September that the contaminant was a type of nitrosamine called N nitrosodimethylamine, or NDMA, which is believed to be carcinogenic in humans and is found in a variety of products, including cured meats. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Zosia Mamet, who stars in "The Flight Attendant," with her horse, Ten: "She's the love of my life (don't tell my husband) so just being with her makes me happy." When Zosia Mamet auditioned for "The Flight Attendant," Kaley Cuoco unexpectedly booped her on the nose. Mamet reacted by swatting her hand away, and a relationship was born. "We had this immediate chemistry," said Mamet, who is best known as the "Girls" naif, Shoshanna Shapiro, "and the scene, just like lava, flowed out of us." In "The Flight Attendant," the zingy thriller on HBO Max that just finished its first season, Cuoco plays the booze swilling Cassie Bowden, who picks up a passenger on a flight then wakes up in Bangkok with his dead body in bed beside her and no memory of the night before. Mamet is her best friend, Annie Mouradian, a stony faced lawyer who keeps the F.B.I. at bay using skills she cultivated while representing mob wives. The barn is about a 25 minute drive from our house so I normally either do NPR, Howard Stern, music or a podcast. I love a good podcast. Today was the new Whitney Cummings with Alison Brie. I didn't get past the opening but that alone was killing me. They were talking about the frustration with stores putting stickers on things that you can't get off, and it leaves this horrible residue. The struggle is real. My horse, Ten, sadly has a boo boo in her front right foot, so she's currently on what's called stall rest, which is basically the equivalent of bed rest for a human. I've been gone for almost a month, and she's developed this very sweet silly habit of trying to nibble on every part of me. Yesterday it was my beanie. Today it was the arms of my jacket. But she's the love of my life (don't tell my husband) so just being with her makes me happy. Evan is still in Pittsburgh shooting a new Netflix show called "Archive 81," so we chatted on my drive home. We like to stay as much a unit as possible. I went out there for three weeks, and then I came home a little bit earlier than him because I wanted to be with Ten. The minute I found out she got hurt, he was like, "If you need to go home, I'll understand." My best friend, Emma, claims that I was an elf in a previous life. I do all the Christmas shopping for both of our families and all of our friends, so I'm currently set up in our living room surrounded by presents, my Christmas 2020 Excel spreadsheet, wrapping paper, scissors, ribbon, tape. All the essentials. I listened to Alabama Shakes. Evan proposed to "I Found You," and sometimes when I miss him, I put them on. I'm in bed with a hot water bottle because I'm 90 and watching "The Queen's Gambit." I'm trying to savor it because I just think it's so good. No, I have not learned chess. A card game like rummy, that's my jam. Chess is too much for my brain to handle. I have a book problem, and there is a stack on my bedside probably 10 books high. I'm currently halfway deep into the latest David Sedaris, "The Best of Me," and loving every second. I adore him. I've read almost all of his books and also listened to a lot of them on tape. His writing is so wonderful to begin with, but then when you hear him reading his writing, it just elevates it to the next level. Evan is the one that got me into the routine of putting music on first thing in the morning. It sets the tone for the day. Whitney Cummings mentioned the Lone Bellow the other day on her podcast, and I hadn't listened to them in forever, so that's what was on this morning. Spotify very kindly made me a 2020 playlist of the things I'd listened to most, so I put that on my drive to the barn. It was cold but sunny, so it was more of a sing at the top of your lungs with the window slightly down than listen to a podcast kind of day. A few faves on the playlist: Red Hearse, Lucy Dacus, Billy Joel, Fleetwood Mac, Phoebe Bridgers. Portugal. The Man is also on there; Nathaniel Rateliff, who came out with a solo album this year that's super beautiful and lovely. Oh, there's this great album that I love called "Trio." It's Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. Sometimes when I'm cleaning the house, I'll listen to it on repeat because their harmonies sound like angels. I got to the barn and first had to say hi to Tenny because she's my princess unicorn, so she needs treats and kisses. Then I got to ride a Polly Pocket size pony named Snickers. I had my lesson with my amazing trainer Vanessa. I got to ride one of our barn's trusty steeds named Junior, who gave me a run for my money. My husband is like, "How do you spend six hours at the barn?" Well, we have to untack the horse. When we jump them, we wash their legs and spray them with liniment that keeps their legs healthy. Then we clean all of our tack. It's part of the process that I love just as much as the riding the care of the horse, the care of my tack. I stopped at Michaels because I needed a wreath hanger for our door. In middle and high school, there are horseback riding teams called Interscholastic Equestrian Association , and there's a whole show circuit. Our barn has one, and each year they take old horse shoes and paint them red, blue, green, silver or gold, and they make wreaths and sell them to raise money for the I.E.A. team. So I got one. I spent a little time decorating. I love Christmas more than anything. My maternal grandmother had this way of making Christmas exceptionally magical. There were all of these traditions, and the house was full of smells and sounds and lights. We always decorated the tree together. I've been enamored with magic since I was little, and what is more magical than Christmas? I'm the person who will sit on the stairs with all the other lights off at night and just watch the tree. I finally realized I was starving so I went with tacos. I listened to Phoebe Bridgers's new holiday album, which is heartbreaking and gorgeous and sadly only four songs, so I had it on repeat for a bit. Then I put on "The Prom," which was delightful, while wrapping presents. Elf duties. I love Marc Maron's podcast, and a friend recommended his episode with Glenn Close, so I finished that up on the way to the barn. What an epic human. What a crazy life. I had no idea she was in a cult! There are a few podcasts I'm obsessed with. I love "You Must Remember This," which is all about old Hollywood. On the drive to Pittsburgh, I listened to "Dr. Death." Oh my God, it's crazy and fascinating. It's about this surgeon who keeps botching all of these spine surgeries, but everyone's too afraid to report him to the medical board. So he just keeps moving from hospital to hospital and paralyzing people. It's very dark, but it was a six hour drive, so it kept me entertained. I'm about to start wrapping more presents while watching "Let Them All Talk." Then it's a pit stop for some of my banana bread that is my favorite thing ever. It's gluten and dairy free with like five ingredients and yes, I know Covid/lockdown/banana bread but I've been making this literally for years. So please, no judgment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The Week in Tech: Worried About Screen Time? A Dose of Big Tech Data May Help Each week, we review the week's news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here. Hi, I'm Jamie Condliffe. Greetings from London. Here's a look at the week's tech news: I do it. You do it. We all do it: Look at screens. The. Whole. Time. Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google who co founded the Center for Humane Technology, recently issued a battle cry against the potent cocktail of data and algorithms that he said tech companies had designed to hijack human attention. He claimed that they were "downgrading" our attention spans, relationships, civility and more. There's growing moral panic about our reliance on screens and the content, in particular social media, they display. My colleague Kevin Roose felt it, and forced himself to detox. (Spoiler: He liked it.) But while researchers I've spoken with said the way we used devices could be troubling, they also said we didn't fully understand the problems or how to solve them. Dr. Henrietta Bowden Jones, the Royal College of Psychiatrists' spokeswoman on behavioral addictions, pointed out that not all screen time was equal. "You can do all kinds of things on a phone," she said. "The addiction is to the activity gambling, gaming, watching porn." Much of our time with screens can be a healthy, she added, analogous to, say, reading a book. A problem is that we lack granular insight about how people use their devices, making it hard to understand how damaging our relationships with them are. As we've conducted more of our lives online, "the amount of human behavior we can directly observe has been shrinking," said Andrew Przybylski, an experimental psychologist and director of research at the Oxford internet Institute. "As time has gone on, the ability to formulate meaningful questions and then ask them of good data has diminished." Except, some people do have access to such data: They work at companies like Facebook, Google and Apple. These companies all collect troves of information all locked away about how we use technology. Inspired by our panic, Google and Apple have introduced tools to help users manage their digital activity. But should we trust tech companies to help curb tech use? My colleague Jack Nicas reported that, since launching such tools for iPhones, Apple had purged other smartphone addiction apps from its App Store. Apple said it was over privacy violations; app makers said it was because their software could hurt Apple's business. If the app makers are right, Apple is cornering the market on access to iPhone use data. That would be troubling. If other companies and researchers had access to such data along with Facebook's likes, Netflix's streaming figures, Google's browsing histories and more they could study it to more accurately understand what is genuinely problematic about relationships with our devices, and develop meaningful interventions to overcome problems. There are problems with this idea. Getting tech companies to give up data is hard, probably requiring regulatory intervention. Use of the data would obviously need to be closely policed. And it's slower than an intervene first think later approach. But if we're going to stop using screens, let's do it based on sound evidence. "I know that we don't exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to put it lightly," Mark Zuckerberg told the crowd at Facebook's annual developer conference on Tuesday, a smile on his face. He paused, perhaps expecting laughter. He pushed on, describing a new, more private Facebook a bid to overcome the privacy and data scandals that have dogged his company. My colleague Mike Isaac explained what this would look like: more sharing in private groups, ephemeral content and encryption by default on messaging services. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. Sounds promising! So why the silence? One reason, excepting Mr. Zuckerberg's delivery, was panic. Facebook is entering uncharted territory, and Mr. Zuckerberg isn't sure what the future looks like, according to an interview he gave to The Washington Post. Here are some takeaways: His business plan is hazy. "I don't know how good of a business it will be, but I am confident it will be good," Mr. Zuckerberg said. He can't say how long the pivot will take. "The next five years at least, maybe even the next 10 years, is building out the private platforms with the richness that the public platforms have had to date," he said. And impending regulation from all corners, perhaps the biggest threat to Facebook's future, is largely beyond its control. The developers listening to Mr. Zuckerberg were aware of this, and the upheaval that the shift could cause them. Excuse them for not laughing. What keeps Uber up at night? Uber spent the week on a roadshow, trying to persuade investors to buy its shares ahead of its initial public offering. As Mike Isaac reported, Uber's pitch draws parallels to Amazon: a do anything juggernaut that will aggressively invest and diversify. Investors have reportedly been asking hard questions about the rid hailing company's growth, competition and market share. Which is reasonable, given that Uber dedicated 35,000 words in its I.P.O. prospectus to what could go wrong. Here are some of its biggest nightmares: Employees. Uber labels its drivers contractors, not employees, to avoid paying a minimum wage. More than 60,000 drivers have filed or plan to file for arbitration to change that, a shift that could cost it billions of dollars. (It will be heartened by the Labor Department's recent decision to exempt an unspecified gig economy company from that fate.) Competitors' autonomous cars. Robo cars are essential to Uber's profitability: They'll allow vehicles to offer rides 24 7 without human drivers, who currently share the takings. But if competitors like Waymo crack the technology first, Uber could be ruined. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
MILAN The coming of the robots; the end of work as it was previously understood; the lonely, hollow ring accompanying the virtual noises ceaselessly sent into the ether, sounds without echoes: These were some of the unlikely themes linking a bunch of disparate designers here over the past week. And surprise! philosophy and politics are of concern even to those who favor sling back sneakers and satin for day. Consider the case of Miuccia Prada, a designer whose sometimes banal efforts come dressed in big ideas. For her show on Sunday, she and her collaborators at Rem Koolhaas's research and design studio, AMO, restructured and decorated the exhibition space at her headquarters with Ollie Schrauwen and James Jean's large scale illustration rushing locomotives, giant ants from a '50s horror movie, an ape beaming cosmic rays inspired by graphic novels. Ms. Prada's metier dictates that hers is an image language. This is a challenge, since, in the stories she tells, translation is often required. There is a limit, of course, to how much one can read into a topcoat. That there were a number of these in herringbone, camel, bird's eye tweed, in a show of summer men's wear, was a tale all its own. Perplexing in other ways were the trousers with high gathered paper bag waists, vaguely emasculating short shorts, creepy Cliff Huxtable cardigans tucked into waistbands, fanny packs worn at the small of the back, shirts with popped collars reminiscent of Ming the Merciless. Blanche McCrary Boyd, a gifted novelist pal sometimes obliged, like most writers, to take on the occasional well paying bit of journalism, used to joke of those pieces that they were "not for the collected works." "Many jobs are vanishing," Silvia Venturini Fendi said before her show on Monday. "But new jobs are going to emerge." She was in TED talks territory, that messianic digital realm of manufacturing supplanted by thought work, making with coding, storytelling with aggregation. "We have a Skype look," said Ms. Fendi, the rare designer to include neckties among her offerings this week. "It's only waist up." Since all that matters in the world of videoconferencing seems to occur above the horizon line of a desk, you could be naked below the waist and no one would care. Correspondingly, Ms. Fendi showed shirts and ties and subtly colored jackets over shorts, the aforementioned sling back sneakers, various wardrobe pieces ostensibly adapted to open space working, hot desks and hoteling, although presumably the successful venture capitalists able to afford her genuinely beautiful and ornately costly designs may eventually arrive at that vanishing luxury: a corner office with a door. "Androids will take the old jobs," Ms. Fendi said. "But the only thing that they can't replace is our creativity and our minds." Well, that and our quiddities. Among the key collaborators on Ms. Fendi's spring/summer 2018 collection was the artist Sue Tilley, a contributor and biographer of the Australia born British performance artist Leigh Bowery, the depths of whose intensely transgressive work are only now being plumbed. Renowned among the portrait sitters for the painter Lucian Freud, Ms. Tilley is an artist in her own right and, in her longstanding day job, a benefits supervisor at a London employment center. For the Fendi show Ms. Tilley devised a number of ornaments (leather Martini glass brooches, for instance) reminiscent of the costly luxury goods oddments another fringe Punk era British artist, Judy Blame, created some seasons back for Louis Vuitton. Credit the English both for respecting creative people obliged to live marginal lives and also Ms. Fendi (and the gifted Louis Vuitton men's wear designer Kim Jones) for seeing to it that they will not have to live out their dotage housed in a refrigerator box. "What would Leigh say about all this?" Ms. Tilley asked backstage at the Fendi show. "He'd be jealous of everything that's happened," in terms of her recognition and celebration, she said. "He'd have wished he could have been here to enjoy it himself." Leigh Bowery died in 1994 of AIDS, at 33, outliving by more than a decade Sergio Galeotti, the life partner of Giorgio Armani. It is speculative, surely, to say of Mr. Armani that something in his creative spirit may have been arrested at that tragic moment. All the same, it is hard to resist the intimation that the intense nostalgia suffusing his designs is rooted in an ancient grief. So many elements of Armani shows are backward looking that it is often as if one were peering through the wrong end of a telescope. The show was titled "Made in Armani" and, given that Mr. Armani's ancestry is Italian Armenian, it can seem as if he is designing uniforms for his own imaginary nation state. The softly tailored jackets; the sensual knit sweaters; the penumbral colors; the mannered insouciance of models disporting themselves on the runway; the summery legerity of a passage of white garments; the sense of a particularly romantic form of gay eroticism, soon to merge with mainstream culture, can be laid to Mr. Armani as part of his legacy. If those things can occasionally seem anachronistic, it is worth remembering particularly in an age of Tinder, Grindr and PrEP, and shifting national boundaries that fashion is rooted in Eros and that both the easy sensuality of which he is an author and the tragedy of which he is an inheritor are inevitably elements of his creative truth. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
DISCWOMAN at MoMA PS1 (Sept. 1, noon). For the museum's last 2018 Warm Up show, female D.J.s will take center stage. The local Discwoman collective, which represents 13 female D.J.s and producers from around the world, is behind the headliners. They include Juana, who spins eclectic mixes that draw from R B and funk as easily as house, and Riobamba, who specializes in reggaeton and other varieties of Latinx club music. Yaeji, a D.J. and singer songwriter whose breathy, understated songs have garnered her a sizable following, will also appear. 718 784 2084, momaps1.org ELECTRIC ZOO at Randalls Island Park (Aug. 31 Sept. 2). New York City's largest electronic music festival is celebrating 10 years with some of the world's best known D.J.s. Tiesto, Alesso, Martin Garrix, Kaskade, Porter Robinson (billed as Virtual Self) and Marshmello are headlining, while across the festival's five stages, a roster of supporting acts as daunting as the bathroom lines will likely be are also scheduled to perform. On the festival's smaller stages, you'll find fewer pyrotechnics and confetti cannons but slightly more aesthetic diversity from artists like the Australian D.J. Anna Lunoe, BBC Radio's Pete Tong and the New Jersey club party starter Uniiqu3. electriczoo.com SEUN KUTI AND EGYPT 80 at Le Poisson Rouge (Sept. 5, 8 p.m.). As the youngest son of the Afrobeat superstar Fela Kuti, Seun Kuti not only performs in the genre that his father made global like his brother Femi but actually leads his father's band, Egypt 80. However, the result doesn't sound like a history lesson: Seun Kuti recently released "Black Times," a fresh, vibrant iteration of classic Afrobeat grooves that features both politically minded lyrics ("Corporate Public Control Department") and the guest artists Carlos Santana and Robert Glasper. It's a fitting tribute in that the music is as intuitive, modern and undeniable today as it was some 50 years ago. 212 505 3474, lpr.com FESTIVAL OF NEW TRUMPET MUSIC at various locations (Sept. 5 12). The trumpeter (and, at this festival, organizer) Dave Douglas has assembled a stylistically ambitious lineup for this year's Festival of New Trumpet Music, welcoming some of the best known trumpeters in improvised music as well as fresher faces. Things begin on Wednesday and Thursday with consecutive shows at Dizzy's Club Coca Cola featuring the rising trumpeters Linda Briceno, Michael Rodriguez and Rachel Therrien. That weekend, Sept. 7 9, a smorgasbord of top talent is at the New School, including Jeremy Pelt, Jaimie Branch and Tom Harrell, the recipient of the festival's 2018 Award of Recognition. On Sept. 10, the Jazz Gallery hosts a double bill, with three rising trumpeters David Adewumi, Adam O'Farrill and Davy Lazar in one band, followed by Nabate Isles's group. fontmusic.org MILFORD GRAVES AND SHAHZAD ISMAILY, MARINA ROSENFELD, AND CHARMAINE LEE at First Unitarian Congregational Society (Sept. 6, 8 p.m.). At 77, Mr. Graves an influential drummer and experimentalist with a billowing, shadowy style is enjoying a kind of personal renaissance. Just this year, there's been a documentary ("Full Mantis," directed by Jake Meginsky), fresh attention from the visual art world and a few standout performances, particularly at the Big Ears Festival this past spring. He appears here with Mr. Ismaily, a flexible but rock solid bassist and multi instrumentalist. The sound artist and composer Marina Rosenfeld and the experimental vocalist Charmaine Lee will also perform. This event is presented by Issue Project Room. issueprojectroom.org 'LESSONS FROM OUR MASTERS' at Dizzy's Club Coca Cola (Aug. 31 Sept. 2, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). Three tenor saxophone greats perform on consecutive nights as part of Jazz at Lincoln Center's "Lessons From Our Masters" series; each will be joined by impressive younger accompanists. On Friday, the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master George Coleman performs with the pianist Emmet Cohen and his trio. On Saturday, Billy Harper takes the saxophone chair in a quintet led by the trumpeter Josh Evans. And on Sunday, Houston Person heads his own quartet. The series is part of the continuing Generations in Jazz Festival, with shows at Dizzy's through Oct. 7. 212 258 9595, jazz.org/dizzys CHARLIE PARKER BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION at Smoke (through Sept. 2; 7, 9 and 10:30 p.m.). Gary Bartz and Vincent Herring, two esteemed alto saxophonists, pay tribute to the instrument's greatest hero, Charlie Parker, on the weekend after his birthday. Mr. Herring is a scampering, sunny toned player who holds fast to a classic bebop approach. Mr. Bartz, considered one of the instrument's leading active practitioners, is just coming off a couple of triumphant performances at the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival last weekend. Here they will revisit Parker's repertoire with a quintet featuring David Kikoski on piano, Yasushi Nakamura on bass and Carl Allen on drums. 212 864 6662, smokejazz.com AARON PARKS'S LITTLE BIG AND RAFIQ BHATIA AND CRAIG WEINRIB at Nublu 151 (Sept. 6, 9 p.m.). Mr. Parks is a deft and often dulcet pianist, who incorporates a wide array of contemporary influences. He sometimes likes to throw his clean articulation into contrast with rougher musical surroundings; on "Little Big," an album due this fall, he's working with a saw toothed, electrified quartet, and benefiting from the friction. Mr. Parks is joined at this show by a modified version of the band from that record: the guitarist Greg Tuohey, the bassist Matt Brewer and the drummer Tommy Crane. Opening for him is a duo of impressive young experimentalists: the guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and the drummer Craig Weinrib. nublu.net STEEL HOUSE at Jazz Standard (Sept. 4 5, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). Edward Simon, a Venezuelan pianist and longstanding member of the SFJazz Collective, recently released "Sorrows and Triumphs," an impressive album of adventurous orchestrations and smooth propulsion. It features the Imani Winds ensemble and a jazz quartet, but at its core is a standout rhythm section: the sturdy bassist Scott Colley and the stealthy, instigative drummer Brian Blade. In Steel House, Mr. Colley, Mr. Blade and Mr. Simon perform as a trio. 212 576 2232, jazzstandard.com GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO INSECT ARK at St. Vitus (Sept. 6, 7 p.m.). Seven years ago, Dana Schechter (Angels of Light, Bee and Flower) started this project as a solo experiment in transportive atmospherics, which she generated with a bass, a lap steel guitar and electronics. In 2015, she joined forces with Ashley Spungin to add extra electronics and some drums and to support the tour for Insect Ark's first full length album, "Portal/Well." Last year, the duo released another full length recording, "Marrow Hymns," a lush discordant pasture upon which there is no repose just wandering through a long, dark, enchanted night. Think the Dirty Three with heavy metal biceps. 877 987 6487, saintvitusbar.com DANIELLE DOWLING | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
You Didn't Touch These Jellyfish, but They Can Sting You With Tiny Grenades None The cloudy matter floating above and to the left of the jellyfish is a mucus that they exude that cause swimmers and prey to be stung without coming into contact with these jellyfish. Jellyfish are very sneaky about stinging. Most are silent. Some have venom that kicks in on a time delay. Many species even manage to get in a few zingers after they're dead. But according to research published Thursday in Communications Biology, the stealthiest stinging strategy belongs to Cassiopea xamachana, a species of upside down jellyfish found in the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and warm parts of the Western Atlantic like the Florida Keys. When disturbed, this creature acts like a space movie mother ship it emits tiny balls of stinging cells that then swim around on their own, zapping anything in their path. These "self propelling microscopic grenades," which the researchers have named cassiosomes, also appear to stun and kill prey for the jellyfish, said Cheryl Ames, an associate professor at Tohoku University in Japan and lead author of the study. The finding is "paradigm shifting" and will change how researchers think about how jellyfish eat and sting, said Angel Yanagihara, a jellyfish envenomation expert at the University of Hawaii who was not involved with the study. Upside down jellyfish don't seem threatening. They move very little, and spend most of their time on the ocean floor, nestled in sea grass or the roots of mangrove forests. Thanks to a symbiotic relationship with a marine algae, most of them are soft shades of pink, blue, brown or green. And as their name suggests, they orient themselves differently than other jellies, resting on their gelatinous heads while their frilly arms stretch upward. "They're beautiful," Dr. Ames said. But looks can be deceiving. Dr. Ames, who usually studies deadly box jellyfish, always covers up completely for dives. Even so, she noticed that when she and her colleagues admired the upside down jellies, they often came out of the water covered in "itchy and irritating" stings, she said. Others were experiencing the same phenomenon even when they were "just handling the water" of an aquarium that these jellyfish had been in, she said. One aquarist told her he had repeatedly replaced the heater in an upside down jellyfish tank, assuming a faulty wire was shocking him. The U.S. Navy has long been curious about difficult to source jellyfish stings, said Gary Vora, the deputy laboratory head within the Center for Bio/Molecular Science and Engineering at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and another author of the paper. Navy divers will sometimes get in what looks like clear water, and end up "lit up like a Christmas tree," he said. "You have evidence of a sting, but you never saw what stung you." Dr. Ames, Dr. Vora and their colleagues took a closer look. Because upside down jellyfish can't move, they release clouds of mucus that trap prey. When the researchers put this mucus under a microscope, they found it was studded with "self propelling, jelly filled packages of stinging cells," Dr. Ames said. In most jellyfish, stinging cells are part of the tentacles. But these packages were swimming on their own, propelled by waving hairs called cilia. They looked like "pieces of popcorn that were moving around," Dr. Ames said. After brine shrimp swim into a field of cassiosomes, they are stung to death. The researchers named the strange clusters cassiosomes. Through more lab experiments, they found that cassiosomes are formed in small pads on the upside down jellyfish's arms. Hundreds of thousands of them, at least, are released at a time. They can sting a brine shrimp to death on contact leaving it in the mucus for the jellyfish to suck back up. And in the lab, the sting packs survived on their own for up to 10 days. Each cassiosome also contains a bit of the same symbiotic algae that lives within the main body of the jellyfish, although researchers don't yet know why. The researchers also discovered similar cassiosomes in four related jellyfish species. If this turns out to be a popular strategy, that might explain other mysteries, such as why salmon in aquaculture pens are sickened and sometimes die during jellyfish blooms without ever coming into direct contact with the jellyfish, said Dr. Yanagihara. Dr. Vora hopes to figure that out quickly while the upside down jelly is a nuisance at worst, a ranged attack from a stronger stinger would be no joke. "We're very interested in who else does this," he said. "There are other jellyfish we're much more worried about." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
New York is often cited as the birthplace of postmodern dance, but California deserves credit. "Radical Bodies," an exhibition at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, explores these Golden State roots through the relationship of three pioneering women with strong ties there: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer. The exhibition covers 1955 1972, when Ms. Halprin formulated her task based communal works in the Bay Area and shared them with Ms. Forti and Ms. Rainer, who became influential figures in the New York scene in that period. (Through Sept. 16; nypl.org.) In 1967, Ms. Halprin's seminal work "Parades and Changes" was performed at Hunter College and subsequently banned for its nudity. On Wednesday, May 31, the UCSB Dance Company performs a section of the work, "The Paper Dance," a ritualistic bonfire of flesh and parchment, along with "Chair/Pillow" by Ms. Rainer, and Jose Limon's "Isadora Dances." Ms. Forti is a guest artist. On June 4, Ms. Forti also performs at Cathy Weis's "Sundays on Broadway" series. (Kaye Playhouse; cathyweis.org.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
WASHINGTON For 10 days, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, has been under increasing pressure from lawmakers and regulators to answer questions about the improper harvesting of data of 50 million Facebook users by a British political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica. Now Mr. Zuckerberg plans to go to Washington to explain himself. The chief executive has agreed to testify in at least one congressional hearing over the social network's handling of customer data, according to people familiar with the decision. Specifically, he plans to appear next month before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the arrangements were not public. Mr. Zuckerberg may make other appearances; he has also been asked to testify before the Senate and House Judiciary and Commerce Committees. His appearing on Capitol Hill could create a spectacle that is replayed online and on television for years to come, especially amid a backlash against the power of tech behemoths. Late last year, executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter showed up at congressional hearings to discuss Russian meddling online in the 2016 presidential election, putting faces to the tech platforms during criticism of their misuse. Congressional testimony by Silicon Valley chief executives is rare, and their appearances have each set off a media circus. In 2013, Apple's chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, addressed senators about his company's tax practices. In 2011, Google's chairman at the time, Eric Schmidt, spoke about the company's search practices in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. And in 1998, Bill Gates, who was Microsoft's chief executive, defended his company against lawmakers' assertions that he was building a monopoly an argument he eventually lost in court. "The committee is continuing to work with Facebook to determine a day and time for Mr. Zuckerberg to testify," said Elena Hernandez, a spokeswoman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee. CNN earlier reported that Mr. Zuckerberg had decided to testify in front of Congress. He has been under pressure to appear before Congress since reports on March 17 that Cambridge Analytica improperly obtained and used the data of 50 million Facebook users. The revelations immediately sparked a furor on both sides of the Atlantic, with regulators in Britain and the United States calling for Mr. Zuckerberg to discuss what happened. Those calls haven't subsided, even though the chief executive issued a public statement last week outlining the steps that Facebook was taking to prevent improper harvesting of the data of its 2.2. billion users. On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission confirmed that it was investigating how Facebook handles information about its users. Politicians including Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, have also pressed for Mr. Zuckerberg to appear on Capitol Hill. Mr. Zuckerberg has turned down some requests to go before lawmakers. He declined to appear this week before the British Parliament and answer questions about data privacy. Facebook staff have held marathon meetings and phone calls with staff from congressional committees over the past week, according to Facebook employees and others briefed on the matter. Rob Sherman, Facebook's deputy chief privacy officer, and Molly Cutler, its associate general counsel, have met with staff from the House and Senate Commerce, Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, they said. Mr. Zuckerberg initially resisted speaking to Congress, and had asked if a senior Facebook executive could be sent to represent the company in his name, two Facebook employees familiar with the conversations said. Christopher Wylie told British lawmakers that President Trump's election made him realize the wider impact of the techniques used by the data analytics firm he helped found. "After I left Cambridge Analytica, very shortly after that, I got threatened with legal action and had a very aggressive team of lawyers coming after me. So I signed an undertaking of confidentiality, which would mean that if I did break that, I could be sued into oblivion by Robert Mercer. And so 2016 was, you know, where I started looking at what this company was actually doing in the United States. And, you know, coming to appreciate that the projects that I was working on may have had a much wider impact than I initially anticipated it would. And after Donald Trump got inaugurated, very shortly after that, that's when I started working with Carole at The Guardian on reporting on reporting some of the things that the company is doing." "For you, Donald Trump's election sort of crossed a line? You felt that techniques that you were aware of had been used shouldn't have been used in a way that were used during the campaign, and therefore, you felt that you had to speak out about it: Would that be a way of characterizing it?" "Yeah, I wouldn't say I wouldn't say it's just because of Donald Trump. But Donald Trump kind of makes it click in your head that this actually has a much wider impact. I don't think that military style information operations is conducive for any democratic process, whether it's a U.S. presidential or a local council race." Christopher Wylie told British lawmakers that President Trump's election made him realize the wider impact of the techniques used by the data analytics firm he helped found. After the public outcry over Facebook's data and privacy settings, Mr. Zuckerberg was persuaded that he needed to appear, they said. In recent days, he told Facebook employees that he had come to understand he would have to testify. In an interview with CNN last week, Mr. Zuckerberg said that he would be "happy to" testify in front of Congress and that "it's the right thing to do." He added of Cambridge Analytica, "This was a major breach of trust, and I'm really sorry that this happened." Google and Twitter have also been called to testify before Congress on data privacy. The companies didn't respond to requests for comment. Lawmakers have been frustrated in the past by Mr. Zuckerberg's absence from hearings. Last year, Facebook sent its general counsel, Colin Stretch, to join lawyers from Twitter and Google to testify about social media's role in spreading disinformation during the 2016 election. Lawmakers noted the absence of senior executives, including Mr. Zuckerberg, and repeatedly challenged Facebook to send its leaders to answer questions. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Men menstruate. Some have even given birth. Women with penises and prominent larynxes walk the streets and use the ladies' restroom. Nonbinary people wear binders and use they/them pronouns. It's 2020. The Trump administration would like to turn back the clock. This month, the administration finalized a rule that would erase nondiscrimination protections for trans people in the provision of health care. The administration's mode of attack is linguistic. Trans people live in the space between "gender" and "sex," and the new rule aims to erase us by conflating the concepts. A full embrace of this new trans reality will mean leaving behind old vocabularies. Some changes are simple: We can speak of trans mothers and brothers and siblings as easily as of any other family member. Others are more contested. "They" as a singular pronoun is not without its detractors, Shakespeare aside. And some words will need to be reconfigured entirely. The "feminine products" aisle offers tampons and pads and diva cups tools for managing the biological function of menstruation. Again, some men menstruate. So why not simply call these menstrual products? "Sex" is a biological framework, a panoply of possibility on its own. "Sex" needs precise words like "male" and "female" and "intersex" to describe the origins, components and functions of bodies. But we can't maintain this precision if we use words about sex to describe gender the social and political roles and possibilities we take on as women, as men, as something else or none of the above. That is to say: Stop using "male" and "female" to refer to men and women. In fact, stop using sex based words to refer to people at all. They're words for bodies, not for people with hearts and souls and minds. Anti trans revanchists have centered their battles in wordplay if you can call it that. J.K. Rowling, in a recent tweet, noted that "people who menstruate" were once referred to as "Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?" (She meant "women." There's that wordplay.) She also argued, "If sex isn't real, the lived reality of women globally is erased" and "erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives." Ms. Rowling's linguistic wizardry cloaks her political goal, to assign gender purely by sex, and therefore relegate trans ness to a closet under the stairs. It should be noted that trans people do not generally believe sex is not real; indeed, discomfort with the sex of our bodies is a frequent challenge for trans people. Ms. Rowling knows this, since she knows what the word "trans" means. Words hold power, and it's no surprise that pushback to a rising trans presence has come in the form of definitional conservatism. But the battle extends beyond language, and Ms. Rowling's semantic battle has been taken to new theaters by the Trump administration. From our schools to our hospitals to the federal work force, the administration has pursued new rules that define trans people out of existence. This is an attack on trans lives. As with Ms. Rowling, the language of the proposed rules is the language of bodies: the social roles of "man" and "woman" are the only two available, and we are all assigned one at birth according to our bodies. (Intersex individuals will note that false binaries are not limited to social roles.) Last week, the judiciary offered trans people some relief. The Supreme Court ruled, "An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII," which prohibits employers from discriminating based on sex. Aimee Stephens, a trans woman and a plaintiff in the case, was fired after notifying her employer she would be transitioning. As the court argued, she was fired because of her sex. The logic is impeccable. The only difference between a trans woman and a cisgender woman is the sex assigned to her at birth: Firing a trans woman but keeping a cis woman must be discrimination based on sex, which is illegal. In finding for Aimee Stephens, the Supreme Court reinforced the centrality of bodies to the word "sex," while undermining the patriarchal belief that our bodies should determine our gender. Unfortunately, the protections depend on the language of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and remain as limited as the imaginations of its authors. While male and female people are protected classes, nonbinary or genderqueer people may not have enforceable rights say, to a gender neutral bathroom under the act. Clarity in language provides social and linguistic accommodation for those of us traditionally denied both. The battle for civil rights is the battle over words. Denying trans people passports because our gender doesn't match the sex assigned to us at birth limits freedom of movement. For trans immigrants and asylum seekers, this restricts access to families abroad. Denying trans people access to bathrooms on the basis of sex denies us access to public spaces. (Can you imagine spending a day at school or work without using the bathroom? If you can't pee, you don't have access.) When you use words like "male" as shorthand for those privileged by the patriarchy, you leave trans women uncertain whether you have our backs or like the Trump administration and J.K. Rowling you are trying to write us out of existence. It's impossible to dismantle the patriarchy while wearing a "pussy hat." The anti trans clique would pursue legal restrictions where nature has concocted something more anarchic. But we are already here, being trans, at your job, on your block, in your bathroom. And we deserve no less. Rooting our social possibilities in our bodies is an abandonment of our humanity in favor of mere anatomy. Devin Michelle Bunten ( devin mb) is a writer and an assistant professor of urban economics and housing at M.I.T. 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 |
How Much Watching Time Do You Have This Weekend? None Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Margaret offers hyper specific viewing recommendations in our Watching newsletter. Read her latest picks below, and sign up for the Watching newsletter here. This weekend I have ... a half hour, and I would love to dehydrate something Sohla El Waylly on her new web series "Stump Sohla." 'Stump Sohla' When to watch: Now, on YouTube. Sohla El Waylly was one of the stars of Bon Appetit's videos and one of the bravest voices in calling out the publication's racism. Now she has a new web series, part of the "Binging With Babish" extended universe, in which she takes on outlandish cooking challenges like making mac and cheese with 18th century techniques or preparing a seven course tasting menu from only bodega ingredients. Her cheer, imagination and expertise are in full force. If you like creative problem solving or consider "ooooh, a project!" to be a personal and special incantation, watch this. ... an hour, and I care about voting Tracee Ellis Ross, left, appearing on "The Dick Cavett Show" as the Voting Rights Act on "black ish." 'black ish' When to watch: Sunday at 10 p.m., on ABC. The new season of "black ish" doesn't start in earnest until Oct. 21, but in the meantime there's this two part election oriented special. When Junior (Marcus Scribner) discovers he's been purged from the voter polls, he gets a full history lesson on Black voter suppression and American democracy. In typical "black ish" fashion, that includes funny asides, like having Tracee Ellis Ross embody the Voting Rights Act. The second half is animated instead of live action, but the show's voice and rhythms are so well established now that it just feels like a solid episode of "black ish." Francesca Annis, left, and Stephen Rea on "Flesh and Blood." 'Masterpiece: Flesh and Blood' When to watch: Sunday at 9 p.m., on PBS. (Check local listings.) I wouldn't call this a British Murder Show(tm), but this four part mini series is British, and there is a murder or is it an accident? Think "juicy domestic drama with a dark side" rather than "bummertown crime times with occasional family chitchat." Francesca Annis stars as a widow with a new boyfriend, but her adult children aren't taking news of the romance very well. Still, who are they to judge? They're all deeply mired in their own messy mistakes which the audience learns about through a perhaps nosy, perhaps sinister, or perhaps merely observant neighbor, played by Imelda Staunton. You can hear the teacups clattering on their saucers from here. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
FRESNO, Calif. I've lived in the middle of California for more than 50 years, which is another way of declaring my share of natural disasters. I've seen the land around me dragged through four long droughts, five big floods, a half dozen earthquakes of 7.0 or higher and three of the 10 deadliest wildfires in U.S. history. I'm now sitting in my home in Fresno on the edge of another historic blaze, the Creek Fire, counting the days for it to peter out, waiting for our collective amnesia to set down again like ash, so that Californians can go on with the madness of building in the same path of wildfire. Figuring out this state isn't easy. I've written more than a million words of history, memoir, essay, biography and journalism trying to get close. I've come to understand that the question of disaster and rebirth exists at the heart of our experiment. We've spent the past 170 years erecting a most intricate system dams, aqueduct, canals, turbine pumps, power grids, roads, codes to dull, if not defeat, nature. Yet California remains one of the most calamitous places on earth. Drought, flood, wildfire, mudslide, earthquake it's a hell of a way to run through the seasons. When we're caught in the clutches of one disaster, we forget all about the possibility of another. We consider this failure of memory to be our resilience. It's a powerful force to behold. Yet Brewer had come to recognize the Californian's peculiar fortitude to outlast everything. "No people can so stand calamity as this people," he wrote. "They are used to it. Everyone is familiar with the history of fortunes quickly made and as quickly lost. It seems here, more than elsewhere, the natural order of things." My 22 year old son, Jake, has outlasted the virus, the heat wave, the blackouts, the smoke and six months of lockdown by reading Dostoyevsky and Saroyan. He wonders if the wildfires herald the arrival of climate change. We talk existentialism over the hum of four machines that change our household air from "very unhealthy" to "good." I remind him that California doesn't need climate change to suffer disasters. We produce them quite fine on our own. Now that climate change has hitched aboard, we'll see hazards we've never seen before. California has always been too big for its breeches. The people, first Spaniard, then white American, took from the Indians a land mass near 1,000 miles long and then called it one state. Highest mountain, lowest desert, longest coast, most epic valley, riparian forest, Redwood forest, wetland, grassland, inland sea each was its own state of nature. 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. When the lines of latitude cover 10 degrees, and the rain falls 125 inches on one end and seven inches on the other, and the people choose to live where the water isn't, what is a state to do? And so began the infinite tinkering to even out the differences. One of the most extreme alterations of the earth's surface in human history took place in the Central Valley, where I live. The hog wallows, home to the Yokut Indians, were flattened by a hunk of metal called the Fresno Scraper. By dam, levee, canal and ditch, the Sierra rivers were sent to places rivers never went. The farmer grabbed the snowmelt and erased the valley, its desert and marsh. Cotton barons, chased out of Georgia and Virginia by the boll weevil, drained Tulare Lake, the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi, and transplanted the plantation its mint juleps, its African American farmhands onto the dirt of California. Alterations no less grand transformed Southern and Northern California. When the first taking proved insufficient to the conceit of our remaking, farmers and housing developers installed pumps that reached hundreds of feet into the aquifer. They dug out ancient water as the Forty Niners had dug out gold. The orchards, vineyards and vegetable fields sprawled from good soil to bad soil. Suburbia crossed into the desert and then into the forest. It hardly registered that we were pumping so much water out of the earth that the earth itself was sinking; the aqueduct, canals and roads were sinking right along with it. This was the price to realize our dream: a world class city in the south, a world class city in the north, the world's most industrialized farm belt in the middle and a second valley on the other side of the hill given over to its own mad pursuit of a chip. You can look at the magnitude of this ambition and conclude that California is fated for apocalypse. That may be true. But it's also true that the scale of our invention, our genius and our tragedy, requires us to keep reinventing, and these reinventions become not just our future but America's future. It was in California where Luther Burbank, a horticulturalist known as The Wizard, bred the Santa Rosa plum, the Elberta peach and the Russet Burbank potato. It was here, in a bedroom and a couple of garages, where Apple, Hewlett Packard and Google were hatched. On a ridge top where gold mining gave way to logging, and logging gave way to apple growing, a suburb had arisen. If you counted the sprawl up the mountain, 40,000 people had been living atop a geologic chimney. Hemmed in by two river canyons, they were sitting in the path of inferno, but somehow they kept building scores of housing tracts without proper roads or sidewalks or spaces to defend against fire. The local politicians had allowed it. The state had turned a blind eye. When the spark arrived that morning, by way of a crumbling PG E power line, the people had no good way out. In that moment, the kindling of their houses met the kindling of the forest, an explosion 170 years in the making. In his 2001 book, "Fire in Sierra Nevada Forests," George Gruell, a wildlife biologist, documents changes to the mountain range since the discovery of gold. The photos from the 1850s show swaths of the Sierra with only a scattering of trees. Today, what was once sparse is now tightly packed with pine, fir, cedar and manzanita. A forest with 64 trees per acre in pre settlement times now boasts 160 trees per acre. Nature had been remade to fit the designs of the timber barons. "The landscapes of today may look attractively lush," Mr. Gruell writes, "but the thickening forest threatens us with several problems." I left the ridge top and headed west, into the Mendocino woods, where Richard Wilson was living alone on Buck Mountain surrounded by marijuana growers. An old cattleman, he had run the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection in the 1990s. The Indians had given us a healthy forest, he told me. "Much of it was patchy, and the trees grew to differing heights." This open ground and uneven canopy kept nature's fires from raging. Flames burned the scrub and lower branches, and then lost wind. This is how new trees were generated. This is how the next fire stayed tame. But in the 1980s, the big timber companies intensified the pattern of clear cutting old growth trees and planting new trees so uniform that when fire hit, it became a blowtorch. "The trees are nothing but matchsticks," Mr. Wilson said. "Get a spark up, and she's gone." In the early 2000s, a shift took place inside Mr. Wilson's old department. Rangers in their khaki uniforms and flat brimmed hats, assigned to manage the forest and carry out prescribed burns, began to disappear. Better paid firefighters dressed in blue took over. Today, California firefighting has been restructured into a disaster industrial complex with the warlike mobilization of all terrain fire engines, Black Hawk helicopters and C 130 Hercules cargo planes. Putting out fires in California is now a billion dollar a year enterprise. In the days after the Paradise fire, 25,000 residents fled the ridge, a few as far away as Florida, but most to nearby towns on the valley floor. Some told me they were never coming back, waving off the chamber of commerce signs planted along the main road, "Rebuild, Recoup, Recover." The six year drought had killed too many pines and cedar, making for easy kindling, they said. And the state's water delivery system, once a world marvel, couldn't keep up with the wild shifts of weather and competing demands of nearly 40 million people. The system was cracking under the pressure of relentless growth. They wondered if California had finally reached its limit line. The obits for California were premature, others said. How many times had the state been written off? California kept on reimagining and reinventing, and the people committed to the ridge would do the same. Kathy Peppas, who had watched her house and the houses belonging to a half dozen family members go up in flames, believed they owed it to the 85 dead to fashion a smaller community better designed to handle wildfire's peril. Rebuilt houses might require metal roofs and sprinkler systems. The fees to local government for proper roads would need to be higher. So would their insurance premiums. "I know the danger can never be completely taken out of the ridge," she said. "But this is my home." As of last week, new ash pouring down from a fire just miles away, they were building a new Paradise. Mark Arax is a writer whose most recent book is "The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California." 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 |
Peter Martins, the longtime leader of New York City Ballet, has been removed from teaching his weekly class at the School of American Ballet while the two organizations jointly investigate an accusation of sexual harassment against him. The accusation against Mr. Martins, 71, was made in an anonymous letter, both organizations confirmed on Monday. Mr. Martins is the artistic director and chairman of the faculty of the ballet school. He has led City Ballet, the company founded by the famed choreographer George Balanchine, since the 1980s. "The safety and well being of our students is our absolute priority," the school said in a statement, adding that it "recently received an anonymous letter making general, nonspecific allegations of sexual harassment in the past by Peter Martins at both New York City Ballet and the school." "We, together with New York City Ballet, promptly engaged an independent law firm that specializes in such matters to conduct a thorough investigation, despite the anonymous nature of the letter and the lack of specifics," the statement continued. "Thus far, the investigation has not substantiated the allegations in the letter or discovered any reason to be concerned about student safety." City Ballet issued a similar statement, which said, in part, "the ongoing inquiry has not substantiated the allegations." Rob Daniels, a spokesman for the ballet, said on Monday night Mr. Martins remained in his position as head of the ballet. Reached by telephone on Monday, Mr. Martins said in response to the accusations, "The company has already addressed it." Asked if he had anything to add, he said, "At this point, no." The two organizations have retained a lawyer, Barbara Hoey, to conduct the investigation. Ms. Hoey, the chairwoman of Kelley Drye's labor and employment practice group, declined to comment. As part of the investigation, Mr. Martins is believed to have discussed romantic relationships he has had with female dancers, according to a former official at City Ballet with knowledge of the investigation who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. Mr. Daniels, the ballet spokesman, said that since 2010 the company "has had a policy precluding a reporting relationship between a supervisor and subordinate where a romantic relationship exists." Along those lines, Jed Bernstein was forced out last year as president of Lincoln Center which has such a policy after an anonymous complaint revealed that he had been involved in a consensual relationship with a woman who worked for him, and whom he had twice promoted. In recent interviews, two former City Ballet dancers and three former students at the school described a culture in which Mr. Martins was known for sleeping with dancers, some of whom received better roles because of their personal relationships with him. The world of ballet is a fuzzy area, those involved say, in which people are regularly touching one another through choreography and instruction. An artistic leader like Mr. Martins looms large particularly among up and coming, young dancers as a producer who decides which ballets are performed; as a casting director who determines which dancers land the best parts; and as a father figure who designates dancers for promotion. Balanchine, who was known as Mr. B, wielded tremendous power over the lives of the dancers in his company. He famously discouraged female dancers from marriage and from having children; he insisted that their boyfriends leave them at the stage door not enter the theater and that dancers wear different perfumes so that he could easily identify them. In a 2012 article on Balanchine in Psychology Tomorrow, Wilhelmina Frankfurt, a former City Ballet dancer, said: "The only way that Peter rivaled Mr. B. was as a Casanova. However, where Mr. B. was charm incarnate, Peter was a basher." In 1992, Mr. Martins was charged with third degree assault against his wife, Darci Kistler, then a principal dancer in the company. Ms. Kistler told the police that her arms and legs had been cut and bruised. The misdemeanor charge was later dropped. In 2011, Mr. Martins was arrested on New Year's Day and charged with driving while intoxicated. Mr. Martins was a star of the Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen when he joined City Ballet in 1970. In 1983, he became co ballet master in chief with Jerome Robbins, taking over that role entirely in 1990. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
There's a statistical likelihood that your image of Steve Carell is based primarily on "The Office," and on the films "The 40 Year Old Virgin" and "Anchorman" before that. In the streaming age it wouldn't even be surprising if one of those venerable comedies was the last thing you watched him in. What are the odds that when you think of Carell you think of "Welcome to Marwen" or "Battle of the Sexes" or "Last Flag Flying," recent movies whose box office ranged from poor to dismal? It's too bad, because he was great in all of them, in ways that went beyond his considerable skills as a comedian. Carell's reinvention of himself as a dramatic actor, beginning roughly with "Foxcatcher" in 2014, has been remarkable. That's why "Space Force," his new 10 episode series on Netflix (beginning Friday), is particularly disappointing. If we're going to get five hours of Carell onscreen, did it have to be such a step backward? "Space Force," which Carell created with the writer and producer Greg Daniels, his collaborator on "The Office," tries to do a couple of things and doesn't succeed in any very interesting or funny way at either. The president of the show is unnamed and unseen but familiar. In addition to his Twitter habit, he presides over a chaotic administration and "has a name" for developing countries that can't be repeated. The show's humor largely flows from the scrambling, slapstick attempts of Naird and his team to satisfy the commander in chief's "boots on the moon by 2024" pledge, and to thwart his warlike impulses as other countries, most gallingly China, steal his thunder. Fused with the relatively up to date political burlesque, though, is another element that harks back to Daniels's heyday on "The Office" and "Parks and Recreation." It's a more sentimental workplace and family sitcom, focused on Naird's relationships with his wife, Maggie (Lisa Kudrow), and his teenage daughter, Erin (Diana Silvers), who resents the move from Washington to the space base in rural Colorado; and with his cynical science adviser, Adrian Mallory (John Malkovich). There's a workable comic framework in this bipartite structure. Naird seems designed to bridge a certain contemporary cultural gap. He exhibits traits that could be identified as Trumpian a tendency to browbeat and second guess the scientists who work for him, a readiness to question the loyalty of those with roots in exotic places like China or Belgium though the show correlates them with his gung ho military background rather than any political beliefs or ugly prejudices. At the same time he's pointedly portrayed as a caring father and husband, and someone who will, at the last extreme of presidential impetuosity, take a stand against needlessly provoking other nuclear powers. Like a lot of sitcom dads, he's a little deplorable, but he puts a human face on it. (In terms of "The Office," he has some Michael Scott in him but he's a lot more capable.) Carell has no problem making both sides of that equation believable and engaging he's a master of the quick shifts and reversals the part requires. But he's too good for the material, which never takes off. The loony parts aren't sharp enough, despite the efforts of Carell and crack performers like Noah Emmerich, Jane Lynch and Diedrich Bader, playing awfully broad stuffed uniform stereotypes as Naird's fellow joint chiefs. Malkovich is pleasingly louche as Mallory, and Silvers is funny as the angry daughter, but their scenes with Carell are bland and overly sincere and run on too long. (The episodes, at a full 30 minutes, generally feel padded.) The saving grace of the show could have been Kudrow, who, as always, can make you laugh anytime she wants, with a roll of her shoulders or a disgusted expression. But she's not onscreen much, and her character is barely sketched she's part of a running joke that may pay off if the show gets another season. Still, the funniest thing in 10 episodes of "Space Force" is a five second shot of her hair. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
STREET FOOD: LATIN AMERICA Stream on Netflix. After spending its first season exploring the food carts and stalls of Asia, this series, from the creators of "Chef's Table," heads south to Latin America. Each of the series' six episodes will travel to a different country from Mexico to Argentina and Bolivia to explore its unique culture of street food and to meet the interesting characters who serve it. DIRT MUSIC (2019) Rent or buy on iTunes, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. This film, based on Tim Winton's book of the same name, may appear to be a love story between two people adrift: Lu (Garrett Hedlund), a former musician mourning a tragedy, and Georgie (Kelly Macdonald), a woman unhappy in her relationship with a wealthy fisherman. But as the film progresses, more details about Lu and Georgie's histories are revealed, and the film shifts its focus to a story of grief and survival. In her review for The New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis wrote that the director Gregor Jordan's "infatuation with his setting, the stunning coastline of Western Australia (adoringly photographed by Sam Chiplin), is by far the most resonant emotion onscreen." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
We all know what sobriety used to be: sober, in all meanings of the word. It was a seltzer with lime instead of Bordeaux with a Michelin starred meal; a trip to the gym on Friday evenings while everyone else hit happy hour. For those with a serious alcohol problem, it was a worthy decision, maybe even a lifesaving one. It could even be fun, when it wasn't all amends and affirmations. But it had an air of privacy and quiet. Well, my friend, this has changed. It seems not even sobriety will be saved from enjoying a made for Instagram moment, with new hashtaggable terms like "mindful drinking" and "sober curious." No longer do you have to feel left out or uncool for being sober. You maybe don't even have to completely stop drinking alcoholic beverages? This is according to a new generation of kinda sorta temporary temperance crusaders, whose attitudes toward the hooch is somewhere between Carrie Nation's and Carrie Bradshaw's. To them, sobriety is something less (and more) than a practice relevant only to clinically determined alcohol abusers. Now it can also just be something cool and healthful to try, like going vegan, or taking an Iyengar yoga class. Anonymous? Hardly. No longer is the topic of sobriety confined to discreet meetings in church halls over Styrofoam cups of lukewarm Maxwell House. For these New Abstainers, sobriety is a thing to be, yes, toasted over 15 artisanal mocktails at alcohol free nights at chic bars around the country, or at "sober curious" yoga retreats, or early morning dance parties for those with no need to sleep off the previous night's bender. Many will tell you they never had a drinking problem. They just had a problem with drinking. The simple act of waving off wine at a dinner party used to be interpreted as a tacit signal that you were in recovery, "on the wagon," unless you were visibly pregnant or had known religious objections. That was fine if you identified as an alcoholic. But what about people like Ruby Warrington, 43, a British style journalist in New York who spent her early career quaffing gratis cocktails at industry events, only to regret the groggy mornings, stumbles and embarrassing texts that have long been considered part of the bargain with so called normal drinking? After moving to New York in 2012, Ms. Warrington tried 12 step programs briefly but decided that "Ruby, alcoholic" was not the person she saw in the mirror. Three years ago she started Club Soda NYC, an event series for other "sober curious," as she termed them: young professionals who were "kind of just a little bit addicted to booze." These gatherings featured panels on topics like "Sex, Lies, and Alcohol," as well as New Age icebreaker activities like "deep eye gazing" and Kundalini disco. "It just felt to me like there was a huge gray area, and a much wider acknowledgment now of the different categories of problem drinking," Ms Warrington said. She wrote a book called "Sober Curious" that was published in 2018, started a podcast and has staged subsequent Sober Curious events for what she calls the "Soho House crowd" at places like the Kripalu wellness retreat in Massachusetts, where participants also engage in heart baring, 12 step style testimonials. Their fellow travelers band together at early morning sober Daybreaker raves, held in 25 cities around the country. Then there are the more than 18,000 Facebook followers of a nonprofit called Sober Movement, which promotes sobriety "as a lifestyle," who post smiling pictures of themselves cartwheeling in the surf, or rocking ripped, beer binge free abs, appended with hashtags like soberissexy, partysober and endthestigma. Online, sobriety has become "the new black," asserts a recovery site called, yes, Hip Sobriety. Here's what to drink if you don't drink. The old idea that going dry is pretty dry would mean little to the 39,000 Instagram followers who feast on golden hour beach shots from adventure travel retreats for sober or sober curious "big life enthusiast" women in, say, Baja organized by The Sober Glow, a sobriety site run by Mia Mancuso, an accountability coach for women who consider themselves "gray area drinkers." Over in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, a D.J. named Tasha Blank runs the Get Down at House of Yes, as well as other nightclubs in New York, where no drinks are allowed on the dance floor. In Greenpoint, an alcohol free bar called Getaway opened in April, featuring an Art Deco inflected interior and a menu of nonalcoholic cocktails made from ingredients like tobacco syrup and rhubarb shrub. In Austin, Tex., a substance abuse counselor named Chris Marshall operates an event called Sans Bar, featuring sober glow in the dark disco, karaoke and '90s rock singalongs. Mr. Marshall, 36, began a national nine city Sans Bar tour this past January and plans to expand. While he stopped drinking more than a decade ago with the traditional 12 step approach, of which he remains an advocate, Mr. Marshall welcomes alternatives like Smart Recovery, SheRecovers and Tempest, available to people who, he said, "sit in meetings hearing words like 'powerless' and 'defects' and cannot identify with that." "When I got sober in 2007, there were two options: alcoholic or not," Mr. Marshall said. "There wasn't Instagram or Facebook, and meetings were the only space for people to frankly discuss unhealthy drinking. "Perhaps if I had today's options floating around my Myspace page," he added, "I may have stopped drinking before things progressed to massive anxiety, broken relationships and physical dependence." And while we're talking about today's options. ... It starts with a tingle of citrus, with notes of hibiscus and orange peel, then swells with a hint of syrupy bitterness, which, along with its blood red color, calls to mind a negroni. In place of the familiar ethanol kick, though, High Rhode, the creation of a New York distiller called Kin, delivers licorice, gentian root and caffeine, along with Goop ish additions like "nootropics" and "adaptogens" and a priceless mixture of sensuality and virtue. "We weren't interested in making another bubbly water or a flavored 'mockery,' just as we weren't interested in drinking them at our favorite bars," said Jen Batchelor, 34, the founder of Kin, issuing a subtle dig at the reviled term "mocktail." "We wanted to feel more, not less to wake up fresh and ready to take on the day, in full consciousness, clarity, peace of mind." She calls her spirits "euphorics," and, in a sense, High Rhode is to liquor what CBD is to marijuana: a buzz free buzz, vaguely akin to a CBD "body high." (Imagine dropping an Advil with a mug of green tea in a warm bath.) Ms. Batchelor enjoys wine with a meal maybe once a month. "I'm pretty resolute in my decision to consume with intention, or not at all," she said. But she is well cast to sell the idea of sobriety chic. An Ayurvedic herbologist and entrepreneur, Ms. Batchelor grew up in Saudi Arabia, where her father was a bootlegger who made his own sidiki (basically Gulf style bathtub gin). She recently opened Kin House, an invitation only sober destination in a West Hollywood bungalow, as well as a speakeasy style tasting room in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, inspiring Vogue to call her "the poster girl for L.A.'s zero proof party scene." Ms. Batchelor envisions High Rhode as a bracing alternative to an Aperol spritz for young professionals just like herself in those moments where "it's 4:30, you're looking at your calendar and you're like, 'Oh no, I have a drinks date in an hour and I'm just exhausted from the day, and I don't want to reach for that extra coffee, but I still want to feel a little something to recalibrate." These creators want to shatter the perception that alcohol free booze alternatives are, by definition, "penalty box in nature," said Bill Shufelt, a founder of Athletic Brewing, in Stratford, Conn. Started last year with a mission to create a nonalcoholic beer that would pass muster with actual beer snobs, Athletic features a head brewer and co founder, John Walker, who won awards during his time with Second Street Brewing, a highly regarded craft beer brand in Santa Fe. Mr. Shufelt said that three quarters of Athletic's customers are not sober, but rather belong to "a demographic we theorized was latent": light drinkers like athletes and harried parents who cannot spare the energy for hangovers. With beer sales sliding for five straight years, according to the Beverage Information Group, global beer brands are exploring alcohol free as a potential growth area. This past winter Heineken unveiled 0.0, with a Now You Can advertising campaign showing responsible adults enjoying its no buzz brews in work meetings, or even while sitting behind the wheel. In January, Coca Cola began test marketing a line of nonalcoholic cocktails, Bar None, with names like Bellini Spritz and Spiced Ginger Mule. And sober foodies need no longer feel left out for ordering a Diet Coke at critically lauded restaurants. Patrons at Cote, Daniel and French Laundry can now order nonalcoholic substitutes for a negroni or a dark and stormy from Curious Elixirs, a new line of individually bottled alcohol free craft cocktails. They are also available at nightclubs like House of Yes and Avant Gardner in Brooklyn (tagline: "shaken, not slurred"). "I've spent a lot of time in a lot of gin joints and been lucky enough to help start a few of them," said John Wiseman, a veteran of New York night life who started Curious in 2016. "But it got to be that I was just drinking too damn much. So I cut back on booze dramatically and started tinkering in the kitchen." His Curious No. 3 blend is inspired by classic cocktails like the Bee's Knees and the Cucumber Collins, but substitutes ashwaganda, the trendy plant based Ayurvedic supposed stress reliever, for vodka or gin, along with mocktail staples like lemon or cucumber juice. For those who want something even closer to gin, Seedlip, an alcohol free distiller located on a farm in North Lincolnshire, England, is offering Spice 94, a clear liquid blend that contains botanicals like Jamaican allspice berry, cardamom and citrus peel (although no juniper). It can be mixed with ginger ale or used as the core ingredient of a counterintuitive seeming concoction: the virgin martini. After all, James Bond never had to worry about likes. And in a virtue signaling culture, perhaps more status can be accrued advertising a gin free martini than one made with Grey Goose. According to a federally sponsored 2017 study on alcohol use in the United States published by JAMA Psychiatry, high risk drinking for women defined as consuming four or more drinks in a day on a weekly basis went from 5.7 percent to 9 percent, a rise of nearly 58 percent. For men, high risk drinking went from 14.2 percent to 16.4 percent, a rise of 15.5 percent. (The study also observed a "generally much greater" increase in drinking among minorities and poor people, perhaps because of what they described as "increased stress and demoralization.") Beyond the health risks, the booze that flows freely at fraternity parties or holiday mixers has started to look to some women like a tool of oppression in the age of radical consent. ("Can drunk sex ever be consensual?" a recent CBS News article asked.) Students of history will note that women, like Carrie Nation, who famously smashed up taverns with a hatchet, led the temperance movement of the 19th century, which eventually set the stage for Prohibition in the 1920s. "Historically, women have been taught they can't express anger; we've been taught to internalize anger, pain, shame, because anger in a women has equated to crazy, has equated to being unlikable and undesirable," said Erin Khar, whose sobriety memoir involving heroin, "Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies That Nearly Killed Me," will be published next year. Ms. Khar has taken issue with the MommyJuice memes that have proliferated on social media with harried women juggling the pressure of careers and family looking for salvation in goblets of chardonnay. To her there is nothing funny about the idea that booze is somehow necessary to get through life, or one's due. "What the MeToo movement has done is created an opening for women to speak the truth whatever that truth is," she said. "And I see more women being vocal about alcohol and substance use issues." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Published in 1965, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" was not, originally, Malcolm X's idea. But in 1963, Alex Haley, a writer who would later win the Pulitzer Prize for "Roots," convinced his skeptical subject to share the story of his life. During all night interviews in Haley's cramped Greenwich Village studio, Malcolm X recalled his Omaha upbringing by parents who decried racism and supported Marcus Garvey's Black nationalism; his turn to hustling and crime as a young man in New York City; and how he found, was transformed by and eventually departed from the Nation of Islam. The resulting memoir has become a foundational document not just in the history of American civil rights, but in 20th century thought. Asked to narrate its first ever unabridged audiobook recording, which Audible will release Sept. 10, Laurence Fishburne an Oscar nominated actor whose roles have included Nelson Mandela and Justice Thurgood Marshall knew he had a tall order ahead of him. "I don't think Malcolm was all that trusting of Alex Haley in the beginning," he said in a phone interview from his home in Los Angeles. "He had to earn his trust." But this narrative is a testament to the intimacy they developed over time. "If I've done my job well," Fishburne said, "the listener will come away feeling as if they're Alex Haley, and Malcolm is speaking directly to them." In your 50 years as an actor, this is your first audiobook role. How did the format compare to performing on the screen or the stage? It's great. Once upon a time in this country, there was this thing called radio. I liken Audible to radio theater. It's the reader and the listener engaged in this experience together. And of course, none of us are able to go to any kind of theater right now. No, but you can be in the theater of your mind. 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. You've said this role presented a "heavy responsibility" for you. What did you see as your greatest challenge in taking on this project? Trying to capture the essence of a personage like el Hajj Malik el Shabazz the name Malcolm X adopted in 1964, when he left the Nation of Islam is very, very big. He was a larger than life figure. As he was greatly loved, he was also greatly misunderstood. The responsibility I felt was to try and illuminate his humanity as much as possible. What a gift he gave all of us in the way in which he lived his life. To have the foresight to record his experiences here on Earth with the clarity that he had, after growing up the way he did, in that time and place and under those circumstances; after his experiences as a criminal living outside of the law, being incarcerated; being inspired and enlightened and liberated by the honorable Elijah Muhammad and Islam; and then having a change of mind about the world and the way in which he could be a part of changing it for the better. He was really an extraordinary individual. With every chapter of the book he becomes more and more human. The first ever unabridged audiobook recording will be released on Sept. 10. You began recording it before George Floyd was killed, before this year's Black Lives Matter protests. What was it like to perform Malcolm X's words in the new context of the civil rights movement today? The timing of this audiobook doesn't change my perspective so much as it amplifies it, and brings it into clearer focus. This has been the major theme of my life's work: the struggle of African American people to be treated as first class citizens in this country. When I started doing "Blackish," the question I'd often get would be, "Why is it now that people are ready for this kind of show?" And I used to say, "Well, you know, I've been Black all my life." I was asked to read his book almost 30 years ago, and for reasons beyond my understanding that didn't happen. Evidently the time is right. I just feel doubly blessed to have been asked to read his book at this moment. How did you tackle the difficulty of mirroring the escalation in Malcolm X's tone, as a man and as a narrator, over the course of the book? I was blessed with a gift for the dramatic art. So my job is just to use my instrument in the service of Malcolm, the brilliant thinker and political activist, and of this brilliant writer, the wordsmith, Alex Haley. The other secret weapon is Nicole Shelton, our director. She was my audience, and she was not just an avid listener, she was an active listener. She would stop me if even an inflection was a little wrong, and we would go back over it. We went back over things many times to get them right. When you were growing up, your father was a prison guard. How did your own upbringing impact your reading and perception of the police brutality in this book? Yes, my father worked with juveniles in the correctional system in New York City. His brother, my uncle, was a beat cop for years, and then he became a detective. The stress of the job was unreal my uncle died of a massive heart attack at the age of 49, and I think most largely due to the stresses of the job. My relationship to them, and to their father, my grandfather, who was also a civil servant he was a postal worker gave me a clear understanding of what was permissible and what was not. There was only a certain amount of trouble I could get into, let's put it that way. Can you remember the first time you read this autobiography? I remember reading this book when I was in my early 20s and feeling inspired by his journey. Someone who was so steeped in criminality, to be incarcerated as a result of a life of crime, and to use your incarceration to educate yourself? To come out a wiser, more well spoken, thoughtful man a full grown man with not just a fire in his belly but a real sense of mission to galvanize people, to open their eyes? That's really, really inspiring. Here's an unanswerable question for you: Do you think society has made progress since 1965? That's a very good question. If I were to ask you that question, what would you say? Right, so we can say that the answer to that question is really yes and no. We still live under systemic racism in this country. That is a fact. That has not changed. Things have changed within that system, but the system itself has not changed. And hopefully we are in a moment and this is partly why this book is so important now, and why it may have the ability to effect more change where it seems that more people are aware of just how much change needs to happen, and are willing to do what is necessary to create it. And that's where things have changed. This interview has been edited and condensed. Correction: Aug. 31, 2020 Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated when Malcolm X adopted the name el Hajj Malik el Shabazz. It was when he left the Nation of Islam, not when he joined. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
There's only one name in the title, but David Fincher's "Mank" (on Netflix) features a full gallery of movers and shakers from Hollywood's golden age. Set in the 1930s and '40s, the behind the scenes drama follows Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) through the Sturm und Drang of writing "Citizen Kane." The assignment was a big break for Mankiewicz, and the writer director Orson Welles (here played by Tom Burke) rocketed into the first rank of filmmakers with the artistry of his debut feature. As The Times raved about "Citizen Kane" upon its 1941 premiere: "It comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood." "Mank" connects the dots between "Citizen Kane" and its inspirations in Hollywood and politics. Flashbacks retrace the brash writer's steps through studio writing rooms and parties at the media mogul William Randolph Hearst's estate. Mankiewicz was a hard drinking transplant from New York, a former journalist and member of the Algonquin Round Table, but he moved through studio circles, trading gibes and gambling debts with writers, producers and executives. Hearst and his paramour, the starlet Marion Davies, also enjoyed Mankiewicz's sharp company, but the multimillionaire's riches and influence set wheels turning in the writer's brain, friendship be damned. So the story goes in "Mank," which also fleshes out some crucial political backdrop: a historic 1934 contest for California's governor involving the socialist writer Upton Sinclair. Here are some of the film's real life players: Hearst (Charles Dance) parlayed a family fortune in mining into a media empire that spanned the country. By the turn of the 20th century, his popular newspapers were known for rabble rousing, influencing world events like the Spanish American War. Hearst also ran for office, representing New York State in Congress but losing bids for New York mayor, governor and the Democratic presidential nomination. The rise and lonely fall of Welles's Charles Foster Kane in "Citizen Kane" draws on tales of Hearst's vast ambitions and wealth, including his Xanadu like estate in San Simeon, Calif. a pivotal location in "Mank." When the RKO studio sought to release "Citizen Kane," Hearst (who had shifted into more conservative views) mounted a brutal campaign to stymie its wide release, aided by his proxies. Davies (played by Amanda Seyfried) remains little known to many movie fans today and has long been considered the model for Charles Foster Kane's tone deaf second wife in "Citizen Kane." In fact, Davies was a charming comedian ("Show People," "The Patsy") and vivacious social presence, but Hearst, who rabidly supported her both financially and through his news empire, stubbornly envisioned her in serious dramas. Davies opted for retirement in 1937 (at age 40) and soon enough found herself helping Hearst when his fortunes went into decline; the pair remained together until his death in 1951. Davies cheerfully bonded with Mankiewicz and was reportedly unperturbed by "Citizen Kane." In New York, Houseman (Sam Troughton) had put on Welles's innovative productions as part of the Federal Theater Project and then the Mercury Theater, which the two founded. Houseman edited Mankiewicz's commissions for the Mercury Theater's radio programming, and in "Mank," Houseman shepherds Mankiewicz's writing of "Citizen Kane" in collaboration with Welles. Houseman consequently became a star witness in the decades long tug of war over credit for the screenplay, which won Oscars for both Mankiewicz and Welles. After working with Welles, Houseman produced films by Nicholas Ray, Vincente Minnelli and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Herman's brother. Later in life Houseman achieved a new fame for performing, winning his own Oscar for supporting actor for his turn as a law school professor in the 1973 drama "The Paper Chase," a role he also played on the subsequent TV series adaptation. (And, yes, he was the one in the Smith Barney ads who praised making money the old fashioned way.) Mayer (Arliss Howard) ruled over MGM in an era of tough as nails studio heads. From humble beginnings in penny arcades, Mayer helped create a golden age in Hollywood with stars like Greta Garbo and Clark Gable and classics like "The Wizard of Oz" and "Singin' in the Rain." Mankiewicz entered the employ of MGM as a screenwriter, only to lose the gig after failing to quit gambling: Supposedly, he leaned forward to place a bet at one game, looked up, and locked eyes across the room with his soon to be former boss. In "Mank," the imposing MGM capo plays benevolent patriarch to his staff of thousands and throws his support behind both Hearst and Frank Merriam, the Republican candidate for governor in 1934 against Upton Sinclair. Hailing from a family of Ukrainian immigrants, Mayer would grandly claim the Fourth of July as his birthday, a detail included in "Mank." Hecht (Jeff Harms) wrote the screenplays for "Notorious" and "Scarface" as well as co writing the play "The Front Page" (subject of several adaptations, including "His Girl Friday"). Hecht hailed from the quick witted New York circles once frequented by Mankiewicz, who telegrammed his friend an oft quoted invitation to Hollywood: "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots." In an ensemble scene in "Mank," Hecht and Mankiewicz join a murderers' row of contract screenwriters for a conference: the Broadway comic genius George S. Kaufman, the humorist S.J. Perelman, and two Hecht collaborators, his "Front Page" co writer, Charles MacArthur, and the youthful Charles Lederer, a nephew of Marion Davies. The group pitches Paramount producer David O. Selznick and "Joe" von Sternberg the director for whom Hecht wrote the pioneering gangster story "Underworld." Joseph Mankiewicz (Tom Pelphrey) directed "All About Eve," "The Barefoot Contessa," and "Cleopatra," among countless other credits as a writer or producer ("The Philadelphia Story"). He also happened to be Herman's younger brother, but although Herman helped him get his start in Hollywood, it was Joseph who rose to greater and more stable fame in Hollywood's firmament. He would go on to win four Oscars, two each for directing and writing "A Letter to Three Wives" and "All About Eve." Yet the brothers Mankiewicz shared the common experience of growing up with their exacting father, Franz, a Columbia professor. Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley) co founded MGM with Louis Mayer at the astonishingly young age of 24 (after running Universal Pictures at age 20). Aptly called the "boy wonder" of Hollywood, he died prematurely in 1936, having overseen hundreds of movies with a respected track record for success. In "Mank" he's shown wielding power alongside Mayer and coldly trying to bring Mankiewicz into line with the studio's support of Merriam for governor, an effort the writer resists. Thalberg did indeed produce faked newsreels purporting to portray ordinary people who were opposed to Merriam's socialist opponent, Upton Sinclair. As Oscar fans know, the executive is commemorated by the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for excellence in production. Sinclair (Bill Nye) is well known as the author of the meatpacking expose "The Jungle." (His book "Oil!" was freely adapted as "There Will Be Blood.") But Sinclair also ran for governor, campaigning on his EPIC platform (End Poverty in California) with proposals including a network of cooperatives. After warm up runs in 1926 and 1930, the best selling writer garnered more than 800,000 votes on his next attempt, in 1934, advocating socialist policies in a state reeling from the Great Depression. He lost to Merriam, who was aided by negative campaigning partly coordinated by Mayer. "Mank" spotlights Sinclair giving a stump speech that catches the attention of even Mankiewicz, who for once is struck silent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
A media company is expanding its newsroom. You read that right. The Atlantic plans to add as many as 100 employees to its staff over the next 12 months, its president, Bob Cohn, told employees during a staff meeting on Wednesday. The hirings will represent a 30 percent increase in personnel at the publication, with half the jobs going to newsroom employees. "We have great ambitions to grow The Atlantic and make it better and these are the ways we think we can do it," Mr. Cohn said in an interview on Tuesday. The ramping up comes six months after Emerson Collective, an organization run by the philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, acquired a majority stake in The Atlantic. The Atlantic's decision to go on a hiring spree is surprising at a time when legacy publications and recently established websites alike are cutting costs and shedding employees. The announcement of the hires came on a day when Vox Media said it would lay off some 50 staff members, with most of those targeted working in the social video departments at Racked, Curbed and SB Nation. The Vox Media move occurred, not coincidentally, after Facebook recalibrated its News Feed to drive less traffic to content produced by professional news organizations. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Ballets have been inspired by fairy tales, myths, poems, novels and Shakespeare plays, among other things. But never by a documentary that exposed the harrowing conditions at a state prison for the criminally insane. "Titicut Follies," Frederick Wiseman's landmark black and white documentary from 1967, took viewers behind the walls of a state prison hospital in Bridgewater, Mass., with unsparing scenes of strip searches, a psychiatrist interviewing a pedophile, a guard force feeding an inmate. It might seem like an unlikely subject, but with the help of a new ballet think tank, it is being turned into "Titicut Follies: The Ballet." The dancers ran through the two scenes, to an eerie score by Lenny Pickett, the saxophonist and composer best known these days as the bandleader for "Saturday Night Live." Mr. Sewell stopped them to tweak the choreography of the strip search. "I think when we get to the butt check circle," he said, "it needed to be slightly larger." The ballet which is to have its premiere this weekend in Minneapolis, where Mr. Sewell's company, James Sewell Ballet, is based had an unusual genesis. Mr. Wiseman, 87, said he had grown fascinated by dance and movement while making documentaries about American Ballet Theater, the Paris Opera Ballet and a boxing gym. But he said he found the subjects of most ballets less than compelling. "I got sick and tired of seeing ballets about relationships, or mythological forests 10 centuries ago," said Mr. Wiseman, who recently won an honorary Oscar for his half century of filmmaking. (Film Forum in New York presents a Wiseman retrospective April 14 27.) "Of the ballets I saw, very few of them were about the contemporary world. So I thought why not take an extreme subject like psychotics in a prison for the criminally insane and see if something resembling a classical ballet could be made out of their behavior, their movements, their tics, convulsions and obsessions." He shared his idea with Jennifer Homans, the dance critic and historian who in 2014 founded the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University; the center serves as a sort of think tank to dream up new directions for ballet, foster academic and artistic work, and connect dance to other fields. She invited Mr. Wiseman to be in the first class of visiting fellows, and put him in touch with Mr. Sewell whose work has grappled with other dark subjects, including Abu Ghraib, the prison in Iraq where Americans tortured detainees. "This is the whole point of the center: to encourage work like this," said Ms. Homans, whose 2010 book, "Apollo's Angels," traced four centuries of ballet but ended with the warning that "ballet is dying." The center, which has drawn fellows from many disciplines, got a new lease on life last fall when the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which helped establish it, gave it a second 2 million grant to keep it operating through at least 2019. Translating "Titicut" into a ballet one of the center's highest profile projects has been a challenge. (It will be performed in New York at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University, April 28 to April 30.) The film opens with a chorus of joyless, dazed, bow tied inmates singing "Strike Up the Band" in a nightmarish variety show with the guards. Mr. Sewell took that as the jumping off point for his ballet but he decided to switch the idiom. The guard acting as master of ceremonies in the film seemed to have "an Ed Sullivan complex," Mr. Sewell said. "He was into theater, and he had his theater company. We're a ballet company. So I kind of translated that he's now Diaghilev, he has a Diaghilev complex." He was referring to Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes. The skewed chorus became a skewed ballet. Mr. Sewell said he had tried to "deconstruct ballet technique" in places so that, say, the port de bras, or carriage of the arms, would not line up. Mr. Sewell said he tried to stay "within the ballet vernacular" there is dancing on point, though not much but allowed that "there are a lot of steps that you're not going to see in the ballet classroom." The dance is peppered with allusions to canonical ballets. A birthday party scene takes its inspiration from the Rose Adagio in "The Sleeping Beauty." An off kilter pas de deux pairs a swan that might have floated over from "Swan Lake" and the Faun from Vaslav Nijinsky's "Afternoon of a Faun." To stage the strip search, Mr. Sewell turned to one of the most famous scenes in classical ballet: the Kingdom of the Shades in Marius Petipa's "La Bayadere," with its entrance of a line of ballerinas in white. The strip search, he said, "is like the entrance of the Shades: coming in one by one, taking off the shirt and taking off the pants." Mr. Pickett's music for the scene echoes Ludwig Minkus's score for "Bayadere" if played as a sad, slightly sour Tom Waits meets Kurt Weill waltz. Surprisingly, it has been the documentarian urging the choreographer to feel free to stray from reality Mr. Wiseman told Mr. Sewell not to be too wedded to what his cameras captured 50 years ago. "In my view perhaps in no one else's there is a very abstract quality to all my movies," Mr. Wiseman said. "There's a literal track, and there's an abstract track. And in the ballet, the abstract track is more important." "Titicut Follies" caused quite a stir embarrassing officials by drawing attention to the horrifying prison conditions, but also raising questions about privacy for showing mentally ill prisoners stripped naked. It was banned for years by a Massachusetts court after a judge described it as "a nightmare of ghoulish obscenities" a phrase that, Mr. Wiseman said puckishly, he was tempted to quote for a cinema marquee. The new ballet risks offending other sensitivities, with dancers being asked to pretend to be mentally ill more realistically than, say, a ballerina dancing the mad scene in "Giselle." Mr. Sewell said that he had asked people with experience in the mental health field whether his choreography looked right. "The last thing we want to do is be making fun of people," he said. Mr. Wiseman had a different take. "The last thing I want is either psychiatric approval or disapproval," he said. "This is a fictional dance piece, and I really don't care what any psychiatrist, social worker or clinical psychologist thinks. Obviously, I hope they like it. But it's a fictional dance piece." Mr. Sewell said that he hoped that the ballet would retain the power of the film. "The emotional range of the movie is huge: It goes from the funny to the absurd to the tragic to the I can't hardly even look at that," he said. "When you finish watching the movie, there's this feeling that you've been through all these things almost sort of a shell shock from all that you've seen and been through," he said. "And can that feeling be given to an audience going out from the ballet? I don't know. I hope so." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
There are some lessons that can only be learned after your wedding day. We asked our readers to share some of what they had learned from their trips down the aisle. Here is a selection of tales of lost rings, ripped gowns and sweaty nuptials from former brides and grooms. 1. Cherish Time With Those Who Matter It's O.K. to not invite people. We stressed over the guest list for a long time, but by keeping it to close family and friends we were able to spend quality time with all our guests. Looking back, I know that the day wasn't just for us. It was also to celebrate the love and support of those who helped us get to this point in our lives, as a couple and as individuals. I was lucky enough to dance with my grandfather at my wedding. It was the last time we were together as a family, he passed a few months after. It will remain one of my favorite memories of that day. Our wedding rings were kept in one jewelry box that our best man was holding in his pocket. My ring had a bracket with the center engagement ring inside; my husband's ring was in the pocket of the box. We repeatedly told the best man that my ring was loose, so be careful opening the spring loaded box. Unfortunately, that advice wasn't enough. As I was coming down the aisle with my father, he opened the box to get the rings ready without looking at it closely. My ring popped out and fell to the deck of our Waterside Lake ceremony. The engagement ring popped out and fell into the lake! Our best man crashed to the deck, but couldn't save it. My husband thought he passed out from the 90 degree weather, but soon learned that my engagement ring had fallen into the lake. I didn't know this happened until the middle of the ceremony when my husband had the ring in his hand, and I whispered "Where's the other half?" He said, "Just roll with it." So the lesson learned: Have the rings in separate boxes or have them tied to a pillow. Fortunately, we had a successful ending with a ring retrieval. We used the photographers light and a very trustworthy friend in the lake. My ring was presented to me at the reception, and all was made good again. 3. How to Wine and Dine I wish I had stayed in close touch with the caterer the week leading up to the wedding. Because of a miscommunication, I walked into my reception to find the wrong entree on the tables. Check in all week long as you prep for the reception, and triple check the menu for any changes. My brother in law went out and bought a bottle of each of the wines the caterer had suggested for his daughter's upcoming wedding so he could sample them at home. This was a genius idea. You could taste them at a leisurely pace, and you can also know what they taste like an hour after they've been opened. 6. All the Wrong Things Make All the Best Stories Just as my then fiance and I stood up from this photo, he stepped on my dress and ripped part of the train. I'd been so careful to shield my dress from horses, dirt paths, unfinished wood, my own heels and grass. None of this was easy when you're getting married in a field outside of a ski lodge in Idaho. In one second, all of that work was rendered fruitless. I wish someone had told me that no wedding is perfect, that something is always going to go wrong. More likely, numerous things are going to go wrong. The hairstylist will get amnesia and forget what you agreed on (this also happened to me). The cake will fall apart. The flowers won't arrive until after the ceremony. People will give toasts regardless of your efforts to stop them from grabbing a microphone after a bottle of wine. That's just what weddings are like, and that's O.K. It's more than O.K. A perfect wedding is a boring wedding. It's the things that go wrong that become the stories you'll tell the most after the fact, especially when you're trying to comfort other brides. As a professional event planner, I thought I would handle my own wedding planning easily. In reality it meant that I overthought and second guessed every decision because I thought it had to be "perfect" in hindsight, I wish I had realized that "good" was fine! I sent my bridesmaids dozens of emails with ideas for which bracelet I should wear. I researched countless floral arrangements and color schemes. I meticulously sewed 100 napkins in vintage floral fabrics. And for what? I wish I'd just relaxed, and enjoyed the process, and stopped doing so much work to decide everything. I always joke with my brides now, "Did you keep dating after you got engaged, or did you stop looking for a partner? Were you able to meet every single available person out there, or did you stop when you found one you liked?" I wish I'd applied that lesson to my own event and looked at a floral arrangement and said, Yup, that works just fine. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Kaula Carr's job in Arizona disappeared in March when the restaurant where she worked laid off staff members in response to the coronavirus crisis. She and her young daughter are eligible for public assistance, ranging from food stamps to Medicaid, to help soften the blow. But after Ms. Carr spent hours filling out forms and uploading dozens of documents, the online system crashed. "I want to cry," she texted her aunt. "They make it impossible to actually get assistance." Ms. Carr is one of millions of Americans discovering the gap between the promise of public programs and the reality of their design, which makes it hard to get help. The short term result will be unmet needs, a stymied economic recovery and profound frustration. The long term result should be a reconfiguration of how we administer the safety net in the United States. We have previously documented administrative burdens in government programs, and it is all too apparent to us that a crisis response built on the existing system will fall short. The 2.2 trillion CARES Act relies on state unemployment systems that were immediately overloaded, leaving many people spending hours on hold or online only to face disconnected calls or crashing websites. At the best of times, unemployment insurance processes are difficult to navigate. Even before the coronavirus hit, one out of four people who were eligible did not receive benefits. Demanding eligibility rules exclude many more. Florida's unemployment benefit system exemplifies the problem. An adviser to Gov. Ron DeSantis described the system, designed by his predecessor, Senator Rick Scott, as intended to make "it harder for people to get benefits" and to keep unemployment numbers low enough "to give the governor something to brag about." One unemployed Floridian noted, "It's very obvious that this is a weaponized system to keep you from using your benefits." Florida is no outlier: Some applicants in New York were forced to fax documents as part of the process there. For too long, administrative processes have been designed to prevent claimants from incorrectly receiving benefits, rather than ensuring that those in need get help. The red tape and delays we place on people, onerous before the coronavirus outbreak, have become catastrophic in the midst of a pandemic. Just witness the 10,000 people waiting for hours at a San Antonio food bank. What's the solution? We need to flip the script. States should authorize unemployment benefits first and seek complete eligibility verification later. The government has extraordinary powers to claw back money improperly claimed. States could also reduce administrative burdens by relaxing weekly documentation of employment status. This would help relieve overloaded administrative systems, freeing up time to process new claims. Some may get money they shouldn't, but a national crisis compels us to prioritize helping millions of Americans put food on their tables. Small business owners face burdens similar to the unemployed, including broken websites, confusing instructions and the sense that the government doesn't really want to help. The recently created Paycheck Protection Program promises 349 billion in relief, but requires business owners to provide documentation of payroll, mortgage interest and rent payments, as well as utility costs for the eight week period following the loan. Additional complexity comes from private banks administering the loans. Concerned about being responsible for verifying eligibility, many banks are helping just existing small business customers, not also new clients. Only businesses with the connections and capacity to manage the paperwork stand to receive the limited funds. It doesn't have to be this way. Many European governments simply guaranteed payroll for employers so that businesses would stay afloat and workers would keep their jobs. The United States could still do the same thing. For example, Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington State, has proposed that the Treasury Department use previous tax return data to estimate three months of employer wage costs, and provide that money in the form of a grant to businesses that would continue to pay their workers. Employers would receive aid quickly, workers would keep getting their paychecks and state unemployment insurance systems would be less overwhelmed. Even the direct relief dollars allocated by Congress will exclude many who should be getting the money. Those 1,200 checks? Almost everyone who qualifies and files a tax return or gets a Social Security benefit will receive a direct deposit into his or her bank account. But many workers don't file a tax return because their earnings are too low, meaning they won't receive a direct deposit. Even if they figure out that they are eligible, and how to file for the benefit, relief may take as long as five months. Lisa Cook, an economist at Michigan State, offers a solution: use mobile payments to reach these people. If Congress wants to quickly deliver aid to the people who need it the most, expanding food stamps, officially now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, makes sense. Beneficiaries need not jump through any new hoops; the money simply appears on their beneficiary card. SNAP is a strikingly effective stimulus in a slowing economy. It helps individuals in need who spend the money quickly. Every additional dollar spent on SNAP generated 1.74 in economic activity during the early stages of the Great Recession. Congress can also protect SNAP by blocking a rule Trump proposed last year that will make it harder to receive benefits. Currently, 43 states use administrative data from other welfare programs to make enrollment in SNAP quick and easy. The Trump policy would limit how states use this "categorical eligibility" technique. In addition to immediately removing 3.1 million people from SNAP who have more than 2,250 in assets, the rule will cause additional benefit losses when 17.2 million households encounter a far more burdensome application process. Making coronavirus relief difficult is a political choice, one based on the assumption that administrative complexity is a virtue and ease of access a vice. Programs like Social Security reflect an alternative approach, delivering benefits with minimal burdens and minimal fraud. The costs of a dysfunctional administrative system are easy to ignore when they are imposed on other people. If there is a silver lining to this crisis, a public newly aware of administrative burdens will demand something better. Will our political leaders reconstruct the administrative state to deliver the help that we have been promised? Pamela Herd ( pamela herd) and Donald P. Moynihan ( donmoyn) are professors at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and the authors of "Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
They Left Public Radio to Try Their Fortunes on the Blockchain Manoush Zomorodi's eyes used to glaze over when she heard someone bring up blockchain. Now she talks about it all the time as the host of "ZigZag," a podcast that will go into its second season next month. Ms. Zomorodi, the former host of the WNYC technology podcast "Note to Self," created "ZigZag" with Jen Poyant, who was the executive producer of the WNYC show. It is the first of what the two hope will be many podcasts from the production house they formed this year in partnership with Civil Media, a new company built on blockchain technology. "ZigZag" chronicles their journey as they try to understand blockchain technology and its possible implications for journalism. And because they are living the very topic they are reporting on, the podcast is also about what it means to be working mothers who are trying to make a go of it as entrepreneurs as they stake their financial and professional stability on Civil's success. Through the first 12 episode season, which concluded last month, Ms. Zomorodi became an expert in explaining the much hyped but still arcane digital ledger to lay listeners. "If I, as a tech journalist, roll my eyes when I hear about blockchain, somebody is not doing a good job explaining this stuff," she said. "That's where the opportunity is for two women, two moms, who are going out on their own, who have to understand blockchain. There's your entryway to a podcast." They named the podcast "ZigZag" because they knew it would wend its digressive way from blockchain to entrepreneurship to their personal lives and back again. "We zigzag around, but all these issues are intertwined," Ms. Poyant said, "and if you are patient enough to stick with us through the narrative of the first season, you will start to realize how intertwined they are." Ms. Zomorodi, 45, and Ms. Poyant, 39, left WNYC in April, months after the station, owned by New York Public Radio, had cut ties with its longtime hosts John Hockenberry, Leonard Lopate and Jonathan Schwartz. The men departed after multiple station employees accused them of harassment. By the spring, the two women said, they had reached the end of their time at WNYC. They liked the idea of owning their own work and the MeToo accusations that swirled through the station caused them to see their former workplace in a new light. "Rebecca Traister wrote this beautiful line in her New York magazine article at the time, which was like, you look down and suddenly we can see all the scaffolding that we're standing on," Ms. Zomorodi said. "And it really felt like that for me." 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. Civil, a New York start up that now aims to help start 100 new journalism outlets by the end of the year, gave Ms. Zomorodi and Ms. Poyant grant money that came partly in the form of dollars and partly in the company's own cryptocurrency, CVL tokens, which will go on sale on Tuesday. Ms. Zomorodi and Ms. Poyant, who worked together for almost three years before starting the new venture, described themselves as creative soul mates. "We can kind of read each other's minds," Ms. Poyant said. Ms. Poyant is a single mother with a 7 year old son; Ms. Zomorodi has two children, 11 and 8, and is married to Josh Robin, a political reporter for NY1. The podcast doesn't shy away from going into how hard it is to be a working parent. "All of our kids are struggling a little bit right now, with the amount of work time that we are taking for ourselves, often in front of them," Ms. Poyant said in Episode 3. "There's a level of guilt that you feel when you're sitting on a computer and the kids are like, 'Mom, Mom, Mom,' and you're like, 'I told you I had to work. Go away.' There's definitely a sense of like, 'Is this kid going to, like, remember this as neglect one day?'" Ms. Zomorodi often records segments for the podcast on the fly. During a trip to upstate New York, she sat with a blanket over her head to record herself while her children were jumping on a trampoline. "It's a juggle, and it's exhausting," she said. Ms. Zomorodi got serious about explaining blockchain in the second episode of "ZigZag," and she did it with the help of a "Schoolhouse Rock" style jingle sung by the musician and podcaster Martin Zaltz Austwick. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Motel 6, one of the largest hotel chains in the United States, has introduced a policy forbidding its locations from sharing information on its guests with law enforcement unless they are compelled to. The policy comes in the wake of the revelation last week that employees at some Motel 6 locations in the Phoenix area regularly handed over information on hotel guests to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, prompting some to be detained and deported. Locations will give guest lists to the authorities only if it is compulsory, said Raiza Rehkoff, a spokeswoman for G6 Hospitality, the Texas based parent company of Motel 6. She cited subpoenas, warrants and imminent threats to public safety as exceptions to the rule. It is not illegal for hotels to turn over guest information but the expectation of privacy by guests is standard across the industry, according to Rosanna Maietta, the senior vice president of communications and public relations for the American Hotel Lodging Association, the national association representing all segments of the lodging industry, who said that no guest information should be turned over unless law enforcement requires it. But hotel brands aren't consistent in expressing their policies. Hilton, which includes Embassy Suites, Homewood Suites and Hampton, said that its policy is to not share information with law enforcement unless compelled to, but InterContinental Hotels Group, which includes Candlewood Suites and Holiday Inn Hotels Resorts, would only say that it abides by all laws, including privacy laws. The announcement by Motel 6 is the second attempt by the company to address the issue. Though G6 released a statement last week apologizing for the practice and said that senior management had not approved it, human rights groups, lawyers, comedians and the general public took to social media to express their outrage. The Houston based accident lawyer Rogelio Garcia was among those on Twitter who played off the brand's tag line, "We'll leave the light on for you." On both Facebook and Twitter, the American Liberties Civil Union asked readers to reach out to the group if they are aware of this practice happening again at Motel 6 or elsewhere. The group's Sept. 15 Facebook post read, "If you hear of Motel 6 or any other businesses reporting guests to ICE, please contact your ACLU affiliate." This new policy may have come too late to contain damage to the brand. There is already a dip in interest in the hotel, according to the data from the Conversion Wizards, a web analytics and consulting company based in Bellevue, Wash. Visitors to Motel 6's site are down after a temporary spike when The Phoenix New Times first reported the incident on Sept. 13. New policies and expressing concern doesn't cut it when it comes to restoring positive brand image, said Pam Moore, the co founder of the social media training and consulting company Marketing Nutz. "The negative chatter on social media is definitely hurting the perception of the brand, especially because what happened is such a human issue," she said. Rummy Pandit, the executive director of the Lloyd D. Levenson Institute of Gaming, Hospitality and Tourism at Stockton University in New Jersey, thinks that the company's business could take a hit. "I think customers are going to be hesitant to stay at a Motel 6 because they'll have concerns about their privacy being violated," he said. While what happened in some Phoenix area Motel 6 locations has riled the public and human rights groups such as the A.C.L.U., the hotel staff who handed over the guest information to ICE were not acting illegally, said Andrew J. Maloney, a lawyer at the New York City law firm Kreindler Kreindler who specializes in hospitality law. "There is nothing illegal about a hotel giving out information to law enforcement about its guests, including who is staying there and what they are doing," he said. "On the other hand, it's illegal for police to require the hotel for that information without a warrant." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
In medical school, as one of only 10 female students, I ignored Florence Nightingale assiduously. I didn't want to play any of the roles I thought she modeled for women obedient wife, caring sister, modest daughter. It wasn't until I was practicing medicine in an old fashioned hospital in San Francisco and learned that its comfortable open wards were "Nightingale wards" that I started to take an interest. Why were they called that? What I learned is that after the Crimean War from 1853 to 1856, in which thousands of British soldiers died from infections, Nightingale visited almost every hospital in Europe, analyzed them and then wrote up her findings in "Notes on Hospitals," which became the guide to hospital architecture for the next century. Its first sentences changed my idea of Florence Nightingale forever: "It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm. It is quite necessary, nevertheless, to lay down such a principle." As true today as it was 150 years ago acerbic, witty and clear. Then I got to the end of the book, where Nightingale lays out one of the first sets of hospital mortality statistics collected. Statistics had recently been applied to social phenomena by Adolphe Quetelet, and Nightingale was taken by them. "To understand God's thought, we must study statistics," she wrote. And to display her evidence, she came up with the polar pie chart, a visual way of understanding data we still use. It was that appendix which gave me the first inkling that this was a brilliant woman. How did I get her so wrong? So I began to read. There are more than 300 Nightingale biographies and 16 volumes of her writings. Her life (1820 1910) spanned the 19th century, that bridge between the premodern and modern worlds, and she stood with a foot in each, with premodern feelings and modern ideas. When she was born there was no anesthesia and no antisepsis, hardly a thermometer, and no oxygen, IVs or antibiotics. The best surgeon was whoever could amputate a leg in less than 90 seconds; appendicitis often meant death. By the time she died there was germ theory, the laboratory and vaccines against cholera, typhoid and plague. So she lived through a revolution in health care. Her family was wealthy in a "Downton Abbey" sort of way, with cooks, butlers and maids. Her father educated her at home; she learned Greek, Latin, French, German and Italian, history and music. Then she turned 17, and it was time to get a husband. She rebelled. She didn't want to marry; she wanted to work in hospitals as a nurse, taking care of the sick poor. In 1837 this was unheard of. Nursing was done by servants, and her family looked upon her idea, she wrote, as if she'd "gone to be a maid of all work." They fought it out for 15 years. She turned down every suitor; she took every opportunity for training as a nurse, and eventually she won. Her father granted her an annuity, and she took over a hospital on Harley Street where she put her ideas into practice. Then came the Crimean War. It was the first war with correspondents at the front, and they reported on the thousands of soldiers dying at hospitals from typhoid fever, cholera and dysentery. Nightingale, whose work was well known by then, was asked to go to the Crimean Peninsula. What she saw there the filth, the lack of food, bandages, even latrines stunned her, scarred her and energized her for the rest of her life. In that uncaring chaos, she had a vision of its opposite, of how things could be shining hospitals with professional nurses and medical care for everyone, especially the poor, "who, when they are sick, become our brothers." She spent the rest of her life making that vision a reality. She wrote "Notes on Nursing," which became a best seller and made her financially independent. She reorganized Britain's army hospitals and reformed the nursing in workhouses. She founded the first real school for nurses, and its graduates "Nightingales" carried her reformation throughout the world. She wrote on public health, sanitation, India and prostitution, and for 50 years she was behind most of the health related legislation in England. All this even though she was bedridden from chronic brucellosis, an infection she'd contracted in Crimea. In her lifetime, she was esteemed. Queen Victoria wished aloud that she had Nightingale in her cabinet; babies, buildings and streets were named after her. When she died, burial in Westminster Abbey was offered, though her family, respecting her wishes, turned it down. So much of what she fought for we take for granted today our beautiful hospitals, the honored nursing profession, data driven research. What would she have thought of the Affordable Care Act? She would have liked its emphasis on public health, on data and on adequate care for everyone. There's just one thing she would have missed her belief that caring for the sick is not a business but a calling. She didn't mean "calling" in a religious sense. She meant having a kind of feeling for one's work an inner sense of what is right, which she termed "enthusiasm," from the Greek entheos, having a god within. The opposite of a "calling" was "telling" that is, rewards, punishments and threats and she observed that without a calling, no amount of telling would satisfy. Which is what would have worried her about the Affordable Care Act. It relies on telling, on thousands of new regulations, rules and laws. There's no calling in it. Now, Nightingale understood the different goals of doctor, nurse, lawyer and economist. From her study of hospitals she'd concluded that patients get the best care when no single power is ascendant, rather when there is the "perpetual rub" between doctor, nurse and administrator. What would have worried her about the health care act is that its balance is off: It gives too much power to the telling of economists and lawyers and too little to the calling of doctors and nurses. Nightingale, however, was an optimist. God wants us to make mistakes, she believed; mistakes are the basis of evolution. She was also a fighter, so I imagine she would have seen the health care law as a work in progress, and what we have still to learn from her, even so long after her death, is her willingness to fight and her determination to get it right. She didn't accept being told in her own life, and she wouldn't have wanted us to accept it in ours. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Barnacles may have a small footprint, but their effect on global shipping is large. When ships' hulls get coated with barnacles and other creatures, they use more fuel and eventually must be hauled out of water and scraped clean, at an estimated cost of several billion dollars a year. Fuel burned by the shipping industry is a significant contributor to global carbon emissions, too. To keep barnacles off hulls, boats are coated in antifouling paint that kills barnacle larvae. Unfortunately, the paints' active ingredients also leach into the water and kill other things, like oysters, leading to bans on some formulations and a search for alternatives. Researchers who study the physics of sticky biological structures at Kiel University in Germany reported last week in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface that one option may involve texture, rather than chemicals. Covering surfaces with microscopic structures shaped like mushrooms, they find, keeps barnacles from getting a firm foothold. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
"I'm protective about my internal world now in probably a different way," says the actor Tom Hiddleston, making his Broadway debut in "Betrayal." Tom Hiddleston was posing for a portrait, and the face he showed the camera wasn't entirely his own. That had been his idea, to slip for a few moments into the character he's playing on Broadway, in Harold Pinter's "Betrayal": Robert, the cheated on husband and backstabbed best friend whose coolly proper facade is the carapace containing a crumbling man. And when Mr. Hiddleston became him, the change was instantaneous: the guarded stillness of his body, the chill reserve in his gray blue eyes. "It's interesting," Mr. Hiddleston said after a while, analyzing Robert's expression from the inside. "It gives less away." A pause, and then his own smile flickered back, its pleasure undisguised. "O.K.," Mr. Hiddleston announced, himself again, "it's not Robert anymore." He'll be here all autumn for the limited run of the production, a hit in London earlier this year, but he wasn't going to pretend that he'd settled in. "I literally have never sat in this room before," he'd said at the top of the photo shoot, in his cramped auxiliary dressing room, next door to the similarly tiny one he had been occupying. He'd had nothing to do with the space's camera ready decor. So there was no use making a metaphor of the handsome clock with its hands stopped at 12 ("Betrayal" is famous for its reverse chronology; far more apt if the clock had run backward), or of the compact stack of pristine books that looked like journals, with pretty covers and presumably empty pages: a bit off brand for Mr. Hiddleston, who at 38 has a model perfect exterior with quite a lot inscribed inside . Take the matter of fact way he said, in explaining that he'd first encountered Pinter's work when he studied for his A levels in English literature, theater, Latin and Greek: "It was a real tossup between French and Spanish or Latin and Greek. I thought, I can always speak French and Spanish, I can't always read Latin and Greek, so I'll study that and I'll speak the other two." Though, to be fair, he only said that because I'd teased him slightly about the Latin and Greek, and I'd teased him not a recommended journalistic technique because he was so disarmingly good humored and resolutely down to earth, chatting away as he waited for the photographer to set up a shot. It didn't seem like it would ruffle him. He laughed, actually. In this country, Mr. Hiddleston is mainly a screen star, known also for playing Jonathan Pine in the John le Carre series "The Night Manager" on AMC. There are plans, too, for him to bring Loki to Disney's streaming service in a stand alone series. But at home in London, he has amassed some impressive Shakespearean credits, including the title roles in Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet" and Josie Rourke's "Coriolanus," and a turn as Cassio in Michael Grandage's "Othello" a production that Pinter, saw some months before he died in 2008. That was the year Mr. Hiddleston won a best newcomer Olivier Award for Cheek by Jowl's "Cymbeline." Jamie Lloyd's "Betrayal," which has a staging to match the spareness of Pinter's language and a roiling well of squelched emotion to feed its comedy, is Mr. Hiddleston's Broadway debut. Likewise for his co stars, Zawe Ashton (of Netflix's "Velvet Buzzsaw"), who plays Emma, Robert's wife; and Charlie Cox (of Netflix's "Daredevil"), who plays Emma's lover, Jerry, Robert's oldest friend. Beginning at what appears to be the end of Robert and Emma's marriage, after her yearslong affair with Jerry has sputtered to a stop, it's a drama of cascading double crosses. First staged by Peter Hall in London in 1978 and in 1980 on Broadway, where it starred Roy Scheider, Blythe Danner and Raul Julia it rewinds through time to the sozzled evening when Emma and Jerry overstep the line. The most recent Broadway revival was just six years ago, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Daniel Craig as Robert, Rachel Weisz as Emma and Rafe Spall as Jerry. It might seem too soon for another, let alone one with sexiness to spare except that Mr. Lloyd's production is also marked by a palpable hauntedness and a profound sense of loss. Reviewing the London staging in The New York Times, Matt Wolf called it "a benchmark achievement for everyone involved," showing the play "in a revealing, even radical, new light." Michael Billington, in The Guardian, called Mr. Hiddleston's performance "superb." What's curious is that Mr. Hiddleston, so good at bad boys, isn't playing Jerry, the more glamorous role: the cad, the pursuer, the best man who goes after the bride. But Mr. Lloyd said that casting him that way was never part of their discussions. Last fall, when Mr. Lloyd persuaded Mr. Hiddleston to read a scene with Ms. Ashton for a one night gala celebration of Pinter in London, part of the season long Pinter at the Pinter series, there was no grand plan. Having asked Mr. Hiddleston about a possible collaboration for years, since "just before he became ridiculously famous," Mr. Lloyd said, this was the first time he got a yes. "I just really admired his craft of acting, the precision of his acting, as well as his real emotional depth and his real wit," Mr. Lloyd said. "And he's turned into what I think is the epitome of a great Pinter actor. Because if you're in a Pinter play, you have to dig really deep and connect to terrible loss or excruciating pain, often massive volcanic emotion, and then you have to bottle it all up. You have to suppress it all." This, he added, is what Mr. Hiddleston does in "Betrayal," where characters' meaning is found between and behind the words, not inside them. "Some of the pain that he's created in Robert, it's just unbearable, and yet he always keeps a lid on it," Mr. Lloyd said. The scene Mr. Hiddleston and Ms. Ashton read at the gala appears at the midpoint of "Betrayal": Robert and Emma on vacation in Venice, at a moment that leaves their marriage with permanent damage. Within days, Mr. Hiddleston told Mr. Lloyd that he was on board for a full production. Photos taken, back in the faintly more lived in of his Broadway dressing rooms, Mr. Hiddleston opened the window to let in some Midtown air and when you're as tall as he is, 6 feet 2 inches, opening it from the top of the window frame is easy enough to do. Then, making himself an espresso with his countertop machine, he sat down to talk at length. "I'm always curious about the presentation of a character's external persona versus the interior," he said. "What remains private, hidden, concealed, protected, and what does the character allow to be seen? We all have a very complex internal world, and not all of that is on display in our external reality." He can tick off the ways that various characters of his conceal what's inside: Loki, with all that rage and vulnerability "tucked away"; the ultra proper spy Jonathan Pine, in "The Night Manager," "hiding behind his politeness"; Robert, a lonely man wearing "a mask of control" that renders him "confident, powerful, polished," at least as far as any onlookers can tell. In "Betrayal," each of the three principals has an enormous amount to hide from the people who are meant to be their closest intimates. It's a play about power and manipulation, duplicity and misplaced trust, and what's so threatening about it is the very ordinariness of its privileged milieu. This snug little world that once seemed so safe and ideal the happiest of families, the oldest of friends has long since fallen apart. But to Mr. Hiddleston, Pinter's drama contains two themes just as significant as betrayal: isolation and loneliness. "The sadness in the play it's not only sadness; because it's Pinter, there's wit and levity as well but if there is sadness in the play," he said, "I think it comes from the fact that these betrayals render Robert, Emma and Jerry more alone than they were before." One on one, Mr. Hiddleston was more cautious than he'd been during the photo shoot, surrounded then by a gaggle of people affiliated with the show. Still, when I asked him about betrayal, lowercase, he went straight to the condition it violates. "To trust is a profound commitment, and to trust is to make oneself vulnerable," he said, fidgeting with a red rubber band and choosing his words with care. "It's such an optimistic act, because you're putting your faith in the hands of someone or something which you expect to remain constant, even if the circumstances change." "I'm disappearing down a rabbit hole here," he said, "but I think about it a lot. I think about certainty and uncertainty. Trust is a way of managing uncertainty. It's a way of finding security in saying, 'Perhaps all of this is uncertain, but I trust you.' Or, 'I trust this.' And there's a lot of uncertainty in the world at the moment, so it becomes harder to trust, I suppose." An interview itself is an act of trust, albeit often a wary one. And there was one stipulated no go zone in this encounter, a condition mentioned by a publicist only after I'd arrived: No talk of Taylor Swift, with whom Mr. Hiddleston had a brief, intense, headline generating romance that, post breakup, she evidently spun into song lyrics. That was three years ago, and I hadn't been planning to bring her up; given the context of the play, though, make of that prohibition what you will. Mr. Hiddleston, who once had a tendency to pour his heart out to reporters, knows that he can't stop you. "It's not possible, and nor should it be possible, to control what anyone thinks about you," he said. "Especially if it's not based in any, um " he gave a soft, joyless laugh "if it's not based in any reality." "And yes, I'm protective about my internal world now in probably a different way," he added, his tone as restrained as his words. He took a beat, and so much went unsaid in what he said next: "That's because I didn't realize it needed protecting before." Even so, he doesn't give the impression of having closed himself off. When something genuinely made him laugh, he smiled a smile that cracked his face wide open. And the way he treated the people around him at work with a fundamental respect, regardless of rank, and no whiff of flattery made him seem sincere about what he called "staying true to the part of myself that's quite simple, that's quite ordinary." That investment in his ordinariness, as he put it, is a hedge against the destabilizing trappings of fame, but it doubles as a way of protecting his craft. It's also of a piece with his insistence that vulnerability is a necessary risk to take, at least sometimes. "If you go through life without connecting to people," he asked, "how much could you call that a life?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Karen Asprea grew up in Bensonhurst and Marine Park, Brooklyn, and studied interior design at Pratt Institute. She moved briefly to Murray Hill in Manhattan, but a little over a year ago, she returned to Brooklyn. There, she rented a one bedroom in Park Slope for 2,350 a month, primarily as a base for hunting for a place to buy. Ms. Asprea planned a renovation of whatever she bought. "I wanted to be nearby while I renovated so I wasn't running back and forth," she said. With a budget in the low 600,000s, she knew a one bedroom would be small, so she wanted some kind of outdoor space, even if just a tiny balcony. She wanted a dishwasher and a washer and dryer, too. "I don't like dishes in the sink and don't always have time to wash them right away," said Ms. Asprea, 32, who is the director of Whitehall Interiors, an interior design firm. As for laundry, she had been sending it out or periodically carting it to her mother's house in Marine Park. She found a bright 400 square foot one bedroom in a lovely prewar building near Grand Army Plaza in Park Slope, listed for 387,000. Monthly maintenance was around 600. "The block was enchanting," she said, with rowhouses "looking like little castles." But the tiny bedroom was "unrealistically small," she said just six and a half feet wide. The co op board would let her move a wall and add a sliding partition. But a structural engineer told her the wall she needed to move was load bearing and thus alterations couldn't be made. Later, farther south in Park Slope, she visited a duplex studio loft of around 700 square feet in a small condo building. It included a small balcony. The listing price was 625,000, with monthly charges in the mid 200s. She loved the open space and the balcony. But "the finishes were fairly new," she said. "They were not my taste at all." The interior could easily be renovated. She was more concerned with the location of the sleeping area, just beneath the roof. "During the summer it would be incredibly hot and I would have to install a secondary air handling system," she said. The apartment later sold for 605,000. "That place wasn't for her," said the listing agent, Susan Little, a saleswoman at the Corcoran Group. "It didn't need a thing." Ms. Asprea decided to continue the hunt with Ms. Little's help. Nor did pictures show anything but the inside of a unit, and maybe a building's exterior. "You aren't seeing the dingy basement or the broken windows or the common spaces," she said. "Once you get there and all senses are engaged, that can make or break a place, too." Ms. Asprea instructed Ms. Little: "Show me the scary apartment nobody else is going to buy because they are afraid of a gut renovation." Last spring, a one bedroom with a backyard became available in a small prewar condo building in South Park Slope. "It was a whisper listing, which means it wasn't a full blown marketing launch," Ms. Little said. The listing agent was showing it for an hour. "It was an apartment in estate sale condition that needed everything," Ms. Little said. "It was old, old, old." The price was 579,000, with monthly charges of just under 500. "I saw the potential," Ms. Asprea said. She immediately offered the asking price, which was accepted. A month later, in San Juan, P.R., for a friend's bachelorette party, she met Ronald Masso Ferret, 33, at a bar. He was an interior designer, too, as well as a contractor. They hit it off and planned for him and his dog, Dara to join her in New York. Her apartment had been intended as a one bedroom for one person. "What kind of cosmic joke is this?" she said. "It's like somebody put a tornado in my life." He helped design the interior. Ms. Asprea apologized profusely to the neighbors for the disruption and had the work done as quickly as possible. The couple arrived in the fall. Ms. Asprea learned a few design lessons along the way. In the bathroom, she used a fixed piece of glass in front of part of the shower, instead of a shower door. But the stall is so narrow that water splashes out of the opening to get in and out. She plans to add a door. She also planned a shower head "at a normal human height, but I had to move it up eight inches to accommodate Ronald." The stacked washer and dryer are behind a pocket door in the hall. "I am in laundry heaven," Ms. Asprea said. "I tell my friends who don't have washer dryers, 'Do your laundry here.' I can offer that now." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
For a young artist, finding "your voice" is the ultimate quest. By the time midcareer rolls around should the artist make it so far that voice, long established, risks calcifying into something more like habit, what once seemed novel now overused, tired from repeated exertion. In "Within between," John Jasperse, who has been choreographing in New York for almost 30 years long enough both to break new ground and get set in old ways ventures to deflect his own voice, to disrupt his sense of belonging, to construct a work that is "both mine and not mine," as he explained in a news release. The project aspires to defy classification, though Mr. Jasperse is aware of just how aspirational this is. As he puts it, "In the end, everything begins to look like something." Parts of "Within between," which had its world premiere on Wednesday at New York Live Arts, do indeed look like something, as in something you can point to and name: a ballet warm up, a body slapping step dance, Release Technique, Jaspersian leaping. But you can never point for too long. A tendu collapses (thud), the exquisitely pointed foot now deflated on its side; slow, convoluted balances infiltrate the barrage of body percussion. Almost everything in this delightfully dizzying piece seems determined to upend itself, on the verge of imploding or exploding or sneakily metamorphosing. It all begins with a breaking more like prodding or puncturing of that old fourth wall, as Simon Courchel walks onstage, picks up a long steel pole, and extends it into the middle of the audience. Its tip discovers the head of one audience member and traces the outline of his upper body. You could call it a confrontation or a conduit a bridge between insiders and outsiders, the performers' world and ours. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom. The situation inside the nation's jails and prisons amid the Covid 19 pandemic has become the stuff of nightmares. Overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, shortages of personal protective equipment (not to mention soap) and restrictions on hygiene products such as hand sanitizer have turned detention facilities into a playground for the virus and a death trap for inmates many of whom, because of age or pre existing conditions, are at elevated risk for complications. And the threat extends far beyond the facilities themselves, endangering the families and communities that surround prison guards, nurses and other staff members. Currently, the nation's top five Covid 19 hot spots are all correctional facilities, according to data collected by The Times. The number of infected inmates and workers has topped 70,000 the count doubled between mid May and mid June and there have been at least 627 virus related deaths. Even these infection numbers are assumed to be an undercount, since testing for the virus remains inadequate and uneven. New York State has tested only about 3 percent of its 40,000 inmates, and more than 40 percent of those tested were confirmed infected. In Mississippi, Alabama and Illinois, fewer than 2.5 percent of state prison inmates have been checked. Some states, like Texas, have moved to ramp up testing, and their reported cases are soaring. Further complicating the count, some facilities do not make their testing numbers public. Inmates are scared and desperate, and tensions occasionally boil over. In April, more than 100 inmates at a prison in Washington State protested after six inmates tested positive for the virus, and a smaller uprising occurred at a Kansas facility after more than two dozen inmates and staffers tested positive. This disaster was not merely foreseeable, it was foreseen at least at the federal level. On March 26, with an eye toward easing the strain on the system, Attorney General Bill Barr directed the federal Bureau of Prisons to focus on moving vulnerable inmates out of harm's way and into home confinement. This would also serve to reduce crowding and the risk of infection for those left behind. Eight days later, Mr. Barr issued another memo declaring "emergency conditions" at several facilities hit hard by the virus, announcing that an expanded cohort of inmates should be considered for transfer and urging officials to speed up the decarceration effort. The bureau's response has been dysfunctional to the point of cruelty. In the three months since Mr. Barr's original directive, around 4,500 inmates have been moved to home confinement less than 3 percent of the federal inmate population. Another 500 or so have been granted compassionate release immediate release based on special circumstances not foreseeable at the time of sentencing according to the office of Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois. In most of those cases, the courts ordered the release over the objections of the Justice Department. The process has been hamstrung by policy chaos and bureaucratic sluggishness. Among other snafus, the bureau issued new, more generous eligibility guidelines in early April, then apparently rescinded them within days without a coherent explanation. This led to many inmates being cleared to go home and even placed in prerelease quarantine, only to then be informed that their release had been canceled, according to court filings. Even after the bureau moved to clarify its standards, confusion remained about which inmates were prioritized for release. The situation grew so disturbing that, in late April, Senator Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican, and Mr. Durbin asked the inspector general of the Justice Department to look into whether the bureau was "fully and expeditiously" working to move people into home confinement. The inspector general has pledged to issue public reports on many of the senators' concerns once the inquiry is complete. The courts have also expressed their dismay. One Federal District Court judge in New York, in ordering the immediate release of an inmate who had been stuck in prerelease limbo, denounced the bureau's process as "Kafkaesque." The prison claimed in court that the inmate was in "quarantine" ahead of his release. But the judge noted and the prison didn't contest that the inmate "remains in regular and close contact with other inmates and prison staff. ... He lines up with other inmates in proximity in order to receive food and medication multiple times per day. He also shares communal spaces like toilets, sinks, and showers with dozens of other people." The prisoner was not even housed in a cell by himself; he shared one with another prisoner. More notably, in response to a class action suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of four inmates at the Elkton Federal Correctional Institution in Ohio, another federal district judge ordered officials to transfer more than 800 older, at risk inmates out of the virus ridden facility through compassionate release, home confinement or transfer to other facilities. The Department of Justice appealed, and the inmates remain in limbo as the legal fight drags on and the virus continues its rampage inside Elkton. This week, Mr. Grassley and Mr. Durbin took a small stab at rationalizing the situation with the introduction of the Covid 19 Safer Detention Act. The proposal is modest, mostly aiming to fine tune existing laws affecting compassionate release and home confinement. It would, however, expand an existing pilot program that moves elderly inmates into home confinement, subject the bureau's decisions on such transfers to judicial review and establish vulnerability to Covid 19 as a basis for compassionate release for the duration of the pandemic. Lawmakers are correct that the system cries out for reform. But the current crisis was born of both policy shortcomings and a widespread failure of implementation, not to mention general dysfunction. As detailed in a June report by the Marshall Project, federal prison officials have failed to protect inmates and the staff in numerous ways. (State prison systems have their own share of horror stories.) The bureau has maintained that it's doing its best in an impossible situation. But closer scrutiny is clearly merited, and perhaps stricter oversight by Congress going forward. America's inmates have been sentenced to pay their debt to society. That debt does not include falling victim to a lethal virus because of official incompetence. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
I learned so much from this book. Elaine Sciolino is a graceful, companionable writer, someone who speaks about France in the most enjoyably American way. The French pride themselves on conversing on a lofty plane; when Americans start exchanging anecdotes or matching experiences, many French people raise an eyebrow and ask, "Eh, alors?" (What's your point?) They want to know the principle that can be drawn from all this real life trivia. Typically, the French (for whom philosophy is a high school requirement) can brachiate from abstraction to abstraction and might become disgruntled when we Americans say, "Give me an example." Sciolino, on the contrary, proceeds from colorful detail to revealing detail, gently informing even as she entertains. Full disclosure: The Book Review editors asked if I knew Sciolino before assigning me this review. I assured them I did not. She has lived in Paris, working for The New York Times, only since 2002; I moved there in 1983 and returned to America in 1998. Yet she says on Page 136 that we met. Regrettably, I'm afraid I have no memory of that occasion; she sounds as if she'd be the perfect American fellow traveler in France. Although I've written books about Paris or set there, I never researched the Seine and so never knew some of the many things Sciolino tells us: That the "team" who lit Paris bridges, monuments and boulevards with surgical knives of illumination in the 1980s was led by a single genius, Francois Jousse. That Paris spends more than 15 million a year on public lighting. That scores of people celebrate a fish festival every September on the island best known for Georges Seurat's masterpiece "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" (the inspiration as well for Stephen Sondheim's musical "Sunday in the Park With George"). That the coat of arms of Paris bears the image of a storm tossed ship and the Latin words Fluctuat nec mergitur, "She is tossed on the waves but does not sink," which became a slogan of resistance after 130 people were killed in 2015 during the terrorist attacks on the Bataclan concert hall and other sites. That the first Paris quay was constructed in 1312. That a monument near Rouen commemorates the transfer of Napoleon's ashes to a boat that carried them to their final resting place in Paris at Les Invalides. That when Roman Catholics slaughtered Protestants in 1572 and dumped the bodies into the Seine, the river turned red with blood. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
One day, the Japanese dancer Takao Kawaguchi had a vision. "It suddenly popped into my head: I want to become Kazuo Ohno," he recalled. Ohno, who died in 2010 at 103, was internationally celebrated as a founder of the emotionally intense dance form known as Butoh. Mr. Kawaguchi never saw Ohno perform, although Ohno danced past the age of 100, presenting solos in which he played both female and male roles. Mr. Kawaguchi eventually took vintage films of two of Ohno's most famous solos, "My Mother" and "Admiring La Argentina," which honors a great Spanish dancer, and duplicated them phrase by phrase with his own body. Mr. Kawaguchi's "About Kazuo Ohno" shares a program with Big Dance Theater, a New York group directed by Annie B Parson and Paul Lazar, who will offer "Resplendent Shimmering Topaz Waterfall," a tribute to Tatsumi Hijikata, a Butoh pioneer. (Friday, Sept. 16, and Saturday at 7:30 p.m., Japan Society; 212 832 1155, japansociety.org.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Sujay Jaswa forged his stellar career in Silicon Valley by relying on timing, instinct, a gregarious personality and an affinity for calculated risks. But in late 2012, when the successful tech entrepreneur spotted Dr. Eleni Greenwood at a charity event for San Francisco's young professionals, his act smart moves vanished. Known for his ability to talk to anyone about everything, he was suddenly stumbling over a single syllable. Dr. Greenwood exuded charisma and confidence and was unaware of the effect she was having on the handsome man across the room. But when he saw Dr. Greenwood migrating to the bar, he grabbed a wingman and slid into the drink line behind her. "I was well aware that I am capable of screwing anything up," said Mr. Jaswa, now 38, of his thinking at the time. But Dr. Greenwood, 33, who has flashing brown eyes, thought differently. "Sujay felt he was making progress, I felt it was an unremarkable encounter," she said. "I asked for white wine, he bought me red, and I moved on." Neither moved far. Their two groups of friends took over the dance floor. Mr. Jaswa's intent was clear so he was surprised at night's end when one of Dr. Greenwood's friends threw her arms around him. "Too bad nothing's going to happen with you and Eleni," said Sasha Buscho. She explained her close friend had a longstanding beau on the East Coast. "I could tell that I checked off Sujay's 'Indian boxes,'" said Dr. Greenwood referring to his obvious admiration of her educational credentials and of her. Dr. Greenwood, possessed ambition and smarts in addition to poise, beauty and wit. In 2007, Dr. Greenwood completed both a bachelor's degree in human biology and a master's degree in biological science at Stanford in just four years with a G.P.A. of 4.17. After graduating from Weill Cornell Medical College, at the time of meeting Mr. Jaswa, she was starting a residency in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco where she is now a fellow in reproductive endocrinology and infertility. Her father, Dr. Mark Greenwood, a retired pediatric dentist of Minneapolis, says his daughter always earned perfect grades. "Eleni is fierce and nothing if not determined," he said. Faced with a drastic loss, Dr. Greenwood took refuge in studying. "I saw I could use my brain to decide my future," said Dr. Greenwood, whose sunny demeanor never dimmed. Mr. Jaswa, initially drawn by a radiant smile, was impressed by Dr. Greenwood's academic resume, especially her successes at Stanford. Mr. Jaswa also sported an impressive educational pedigree, having earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Princeton in 2001 and an M.B.A. from Harvard in 2008, but he had been rejected at Stanford not once but three times. He now teaches at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, a position, he jokes, which has assuaged some of his angst at having never been accepted there. He learned in his career that timing was everything. He had worked for a media streaming company that started too early to be profitable and founded a beverage company that never made a single sale. Yet he landed on time, and on the money, when he joined Dropbox in 2010 and was named chief financial officer in 2014. He left the company in June 2015 and is now a founder and partner, with Jeffrey Katzenberg and others, at WndrCo, an investment and holding company focused on media and technology. With Dr. Greenwood, Mr. Jaswa decided to play a long game. "But Sujay talked about Eleni way too much for a woman then in a relationship," said Rahul Jaswa, his younger brother. Mr. Jaswa was strategic, and persistent. Occasionally he sent a text to Dr. Greenwood. (Sometimes it was just a single word, "Ola!" which she thought hilarious, though odd.) Their paths crossed rarely; Dr. Greenwood was often busy at the hospital. She was working the night shift and there were babies to deliver. Mr. Jaswa, unwilling to lose his momentum, pluckily suggested the next open time breakfast to which Dr. Greenwood arrived in running clothes having jogged the seven miles from the hospital to the cafe after her 14 hour shift. Over champagne for her and coffee for him, their connection sparked. "Eleni is brilliant and has the vision to make the world a better place but she is also a riot, someone who is great to watch a football game with," said Mr. Jaswa, who floated the idea of breakfast the following day, and the next, adding texts and calls to what quickly became a routine. "Sujay's strategy was to make sure I had no time for anyone else, but I wasn't in a hurry to get to my forever," Dr. Greenwood said. Over the next few months, in the scraps of time left from demanding careers, they socialized often and traveled, including a trip to Morocco that deepened their commitment. Both admit to suffering from a fear of missing out, which meant Dr. Greenwood often went sleepless. (Multiple friends, however, testify that it is Mr. Jaswa who customarily falls asleep at parties, not Dr. Greenwood.) For his Christmas gift to her that first year, Mr. Jaswa founded the Robin Beth Greenwood Foundation for Breast Cancer Research at the University of California, San Francisco. The tribute confirmed to Dr. Greenwood that she had fallen in love with the right man. A second ceremony was held the following afternoon, also in San Francisco, beginning at Huntington Park on Nob Hill. From there, Mr. Jaswa, riding a white horse and accompanied by drummers and a crowd of well wishers, went to the nearby Fairmont San Francisco Hotel, where another ceremony began. Before more than 500 family and friends, Rabbi Seth Castleman and Pandit Prabha Duneja, a Hindu priest, led intertwined Jewish and Hindu marriage rituals that underscored the similarities of the two religions and the couple's shared values of family, friendship and charitable deeds. "This is where America is going," said Rabbi Castleman invoking the diverse crowd; the Hindu priest deemed the guests "the global family." At the reception, the crowd swarmed the dance floor as Bollywood music played. Toasts and roasts delayed dinner by hours, but no one minded, including the groom's mother, who had waited years already for her son's wedding. Her smile never faded during the week's marathon of wedding activities. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
In London this weekend, visitors to the Old Royal Naval College headed to its reopened "painted hall," an ornate masterpiece called Britain's answer to the Sistine Chapel, and then went to the Sackler Gallery to learn its story. In Paris, at the Louvre, lovers of Persian art knew there was only one place to go: the Sackler Wing of Oriental Antiquities. Want to find the long line for the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Head for the soaring, glass walled Sackler Wing. For decades, the Sackler family has generously supported museums worldwide, not to mention numerous medical and educational institutions including Columbia University, where there is a Sackler Institute, and Oxford, where there is a Sackler Library. But now some favorite Sackler charities are reconsidering whether they want the money at all, and several have already rejected any future gifts, concluding that some family members' ties to the opioid crisis outweighed the benefits of their six and sometimes seven figure checks. In a remarkable rebuke to one of the world's most prominent philanthropic dynasties, the prestigious Tate museums in London and the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York, where a Sackler sat on the board for many years, decided in the last week that they would no longer accept gifts from their longtime Sackler benefactors. Britain's National Portrait Gallery announced it had jointly decided with the Sackler Trust to cancel a planned 1.3 million donation, and an article in The Art Newspaper disclosed that a museum in South London had returned a family donation last year. The Tate's statement noted the family's "historic philanthropy," then added: "However, in the present circumstances we do not think it right to seek or accept further donations from the Sacklers." Other Sackler beneficiaries, including the Metropolitan Museum and the New York Academy of Sciences, are reviewing their donation policies as a result of publicity and legal actions surrounding the family and its company, Purdue Pharma, the maker of the groundbreaking, enormously profitable and frequently abused painkiller OxyContin. Tufts University, which has a Sackler graduate school, announced on Monday that it had hired a former top federal prosecutor for Massachusetts to look into the university's relationship with the family. On Monday, as the embarrassment grew with every new announcement, a Sackler trust and a family foundation in Britain issued statements saying they would suspend further philanthropy for the moment. While the drug's potential for abuse has been known for two decades, only recently has Purdue's controlling family come under intense scrutiny. Their role in marketing the drug, despite its perils, was the focus of articles in The New Yorker and Esquire in 2017. Documents submitted in court this year in a lawsuit suggested that, far from being bystanders to the epidemic, family members directed company efforts to mislead the public and doctors about the dangers of abusing OxyContin. The Sacklers have denied the allegations, and on Monday, a spokesman for family members in the United States said in a statement: "While plaintiffs' court filings have created an erroneous picture and resulted in unwarranted criticism, we remain committed to playing a substantive role in addressing this complex public health crisis. Our hearts go out to those affected by drug abuse or addiction." The shunning of the family has also gone beyond the cultural world. The Wall Street Journal reported this month that a hedge fund, Hildene Capital Management, told the Sacklers last year it would no longer manage their money. Brett Jefferson, Hildene's president, told the newspaper that "an opioid related tragedy affected someone with a personal relationship to me and other members of Hildene." But for museums and other nonprofits, rejecting a regular patron is a far more momentous step, given their reliance on big donations. Alice Bell, the communications director of 10:10 Climate Action, a London based charity, said that cutting ties with Sackler donors last year meant a 40 percent hit to its budget. "There certainly were cuts," Ms. Bell said. The charity felt it had made the correct decision, but nonetheless, she said, "it's been frustrating to see ideas we could have started to work up into real world action stuck as sketches on our computers." The two Sackler organizations in Britain that announced a suspension on Monday gave out almost 160 million from 2012 to 2017 alone, according to charity records. A handful of Sackler foundations in the United States have given away tens of millions over the past two decades, and the family's giving goes back even farther, long before OxyContin was created, a point some institutions have raised in defending decisions not to strip the Sackler name from wings or buildings. The scrutiny of the Sacklers comes amid a broader reckoning in the museum world about who sits on their boards and bankrolls their programs. Adrian Ellis, director of AEA Consulting, which works with nonprofits in the United States, Britain and elsewhere, said that the rejections of Sackler money would put pressure on other museums to state what funding they will and will not accept. In Britain, there have been campaigns against the oil company BP's sponsorship of exhibitions, while in New York, there have been protests against the Whitney Museum because its vice chairman, Warren Kanders, runs a company that manufactures tear gas that was used to repel migrants trying to cross into the United States from Mexico. Notably, museums in Britain have been faster to distance themselves from members of the Sackler family than their counterparts in the United States, where opioid drugs including OxyContin are prescribed far more often and the crisis has been far more devastating, claiming more than 200,000 lives over the last two decades from overdoses. Some American institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum and Columbia, said they had reviewed, or were reviewing, their policies in light of the allegations against Sackler family members, but have not stated they would reject their gifts in the future. "We have re evaluated accepting donations from the Sackler family's philanthropies and are not taking gifts from them" at present, said Scott Schell, a spokesman for Columbia, declining to elaborate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Kick off Breast Cancer Awareness month this Saturday with a 9 a.m. Get Fit With Pink Yoga class, offered at the Bloomingdale's 59th Street and SoHo locations. The 10 fee will benefit the Marisa Acocella Marchetto Foundation and the Carey Foundation, which help patients and their families with cancer related costs such as transportation, child care and treatment. At bloomingdalesyoga.eventbrite.com. Missoni and Saks have teamed up on a zigzag print Key to the Cure T shirt ( 35). One hundred percent of the proceeds will be donated to 12 charities, including the American Cancer Society and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. And Alicia Keys stars in the campaign for Stella McCartney's new pink lace bralette ( 160) and bikini ( 90), which benefit the Memorial Sloan Kettering Breast Examination Center of Harlem. The center helps provide free high quality care to the community. At 112 Greene Street. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Henry Louis de La Grange, who was so captivated by a Mahler symphony he heard at Carnegie Hall in 1945 that he devoted the rest of his life to researching the tempestuous Viennese composer's biography, died on Jan. 27 in Lonay, Switzerland, near Lausanne. He was 92. His death was announced by the Mediatheque Musicale Mahler in Paris, a scholarly resource center that he founded with his fellow musicologist Maurice Fleuret. Professor de La Grange, the son of a French politician who was once held prisoner by the Nazis and an American heiress to a furniture store fortune, inherited the title of baron on his 21st birthday but dispensed with it. "I did not earn it," he said in 1989. "I was simply born to it. I use the title of Professor because the Austrian government has given me that title. I feel that I have earned it." Professor de La Grange began earning his scholarly credentials in 1973 when, after 15 years of research, he published Volume I of his biography, simply titled "Gustav Mahler." It became a heroic 3,600 page saga, still being revised, that distinguished him as the dean of Mahler biographers. He also went on to direct or collaborate on concerts, exhibitions, festivals, and film and television documentaries including one in 2015 on his own obsession with Mahler that prompted a critical rediscovery of the composer and a popular appreciation of his music by contemporary audiences. The cultural historian Carl E. Schorske, writing in The New York Times Book Review, described Volume I as "a massive chronicle" largely of facts rather than interpretation, in which the author's "conscientious positivism opens new avenues to the understanding of Mahler and his time." Professor de La Grange might never have become a musicologist had his parents gotten their way. They wanted him to enter the family furniture business. "My mother and father intended me for Harvard Business School," he told The Times in 1974, "but someone there had the very good sense to turn me down." Instead he was educated in France and later in the United States, in New York City and at Yale, and frequently traveled between the countries. He was in New York when he heard the symphony that piqued his infatuation with Mahler, an encounter that was completely by chance. He had decided to attend the Carnegie Hall concert on Dec. 20, 1945, the day after he returned from France with his family following World War II only because Bruno Walter, his favorite, was conducting. He was unaware that Walter, a Mahler disciple, would open the New York Philharmonic's program that evening with the composer's Ninth Symphony in D major, which Mahler wrote after the death of his daughter and after he had learned that he had fatal cardiac disease. Mahler died in 1911, a month after returning to Europe from New York and before the symphony's first public performance. Leonard Bernstein once likened the Ninth's nearly 90 minutes of mercurial music to an irregular heartbeat. He pronounced it "the greatest farewell symphony ever written by anybody." The day after the concert, the Times critic Olin Downes sanguinely concluded that "there is a degree of ostentation in this music which would be funny if it were not so vulgar." But 21 year old Henry Louis was enraptured. "His devotion to Mahler gradually grew into almost an obsession," Sybille Werner, the editor who is completing the revised biography, wrote in an email. In an interview on the website classicalsource.com in 2008, Professor de La Grange said that hearing the symphony for the first time had been a revelation. "I was extremely surprised, perhaps even shocked to hear a huge symphony in a style that was quite unknown to me," he said. "I couldn't understand how and why this music had been written in this way." He later wrote: "I believed in Mahler from the moment I heard his music. Something in me happened, and it made clear the fact that I work for him." Henry Louis de La Grange was born in Paris on May 26, 1924. His father was Amaury de La Grange, a French nobleman, military aviation pioneer, senator and, in 1940, an under secretary in Premier Paul Reynaud's cabinet. The Nazis held him prisoner for five years during World War II. His mother was the former Emily Sloane, whose grandfather, William, founded W. J. Sloane, the high end Fifth Avenue household furnishings store, in the 1840s. (He had a box at the old Metropolitan Opera House, for which he had supplied the upholstery.) Henry Louis attended the Lycee Francais in New York and, inspired by his sister's piano playing and discovering that he had perfect pitch, began taking piano lessons when he was 18. He graduated from the University of Provence in Aix en Provence and the Yale School of Music and studied piano in Paris under Nadia Boulanger and Yvonne Lefebure. Before embarking on his Mahler opus, he was a music critic for The Times and other publications in the early 1950s. Delving into Mahler's final years in New York, after the composer had left Vienna, where his daughter died and where anti Semitism was growing, Professor de La Grange was more forgiving than other Mahler authorities. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The actors Rebecca Hall and Morgan Spector met in rehearsals for the 2014 Broadway revival of Sophie Treadwell's "Machinal." The play opened. The play closed. Some months after that, they began dating. A year later, they married. "Machinal" is an expressionist drama that pictures marriage as so profoundly soul destroying that a woman's only recourse is to brain her husband. So as courtship stories go, this one is at least a little funny. Now Mr. Spector and Ms. Hall are onstage together again, playing Rachel and Tom, an English married couple at the heart of Clare Lizzimore's unsettling "Animal," which opens on June 6 at Atlantic Stage 2. A domestic drama, a psychological thriller and something of a medical mystery, "Animal" tracks Rachel, a career woman suffering from anxiety and depression and maybe something worse, and the husband who struggles to help her. This marriage is troubled; it is also deeply compassionate. No one gets brained. Describing the relationship between Rachel and Tom, Ms. Lizzimore, speaking by telephone from London, used the word "dogged" then apologized for the word's dowdiness. And trauma is thick on the ground here. Like the Young Woman in "Machinal," or Christine Chubbuck in the film "Christine," another recent star turn for Ms. Hall, Rachel of "Animal" is a woman skittering toward insanity. Ms. Hall, 35, an actress of nuance and ferocity, has a habit of taking on these roles. And Mr. Spector, 36, an exhilarating actor in his own right ("Russian Transport," the coming Spike series "The Mist"), has a habit of supporting her, onstage and off it, too. They first learned of "Animal" when the director Gaye Taylor Upchurch, who had overseen the play's 2015 world premiere in Washington, cast them in a reading. At the time, Mr. Spector was assigned the role of Dan, a threatening young man to whom Rachel feels an instinctual, pheromonal attraction. Ms. Hall signed on to the production, fascinated by the way it put Rachel's unstable, untrustworthy perceptions at the center. (Ms. Hall said that her "biggest fear is probably going insane," so perversely this is the kind of part that attracts her.) Mr. Spector thought he could do more with the role of Tom, a good man and a strong one who wants to help his wife through her ordeal, just as Mr. Spector wants to help his own wife through what he called "a beast of a role" and "crazy hard." "I'm almost glad I'm in the play so I can know how hard she's working in a real, visceral sense, what it's costing her to do it," he said. Ms. Hall acknowledged that cost. "If you fully believe that the world around you is that fractious and that fragile and that tenuous and that frightening, then your body feels that, too," she said. She was speaking in the restaurant of the Maritime Hotel, a bright tiled room across the street from the rehearsal space. So was he. But not at the same time. Though they often work together (Mr. Spector has had supporting roles in "Christine" and also in "Permission," a coming film about monogamy and its discontents starring Ms. Hall), they make strict demarcations between their personal and professional lives. They'll talk about one, not the other. They want to be judged as individual artists, not as a two for one special, and they insisted, in a manner forthright and justifiably exasperated, on separate interviews. "We work together, but our relationship is still ours," Ms. Hall explained. Mr. Spector had said the same thing in the same seat in almost the same words, just 20 minutes before. In case you're wondering, neither of them behaved fussily or self importantly, but like two people who would be a lot happier if they could keep their private lives to themselves and their cats. (Yes, gossip hounds, they both let slip that they have cats. Mr. Spector said that those cats get mad when they work late, "but not that mad.") They know that appearing onstage together makes curiosity inevitable, but as Ms. Hall said, the idea that "because we work together the world is allowed to have access to our relationship, that doesn't quite make sense to me." Yet that relationship does slink into the work. At a weekday rehearsal, while Ms. Hall, Mr. Spector and Ms. Upchurch were huddled together choreographing the final moments of a scene, Mr. Spector patted his wife's arm gently, rhythmically a gesture of camaraderie as they navigated a difficult passage. Ms. Hall noted that Mr. Spector "has a really tremendous instinct to help everyone around him do their best work," but this seemed more intimate. Ms. Upchurch welcomed this intimacy. With only a few weeks to stage a new play, hiring actors who come in the door with "that amount of trust already," is an advantage and a pleasure, she said. Still, trust doesn't necessarily make for identical styles of acting. Yes, both Mr. Spector and Ms. Hall are dynamic, intelligent and emotionally labile. Both, as Ms. Upchurch said, will "just kind of crash into a scene just to try it this way or that way." And Lyndsey Turner, who directed the pair in "Machinal," wrote in an email that "unflinching accuracy, a profound connection with language and a genuine curiosity about who we are and why we do the things we do" describes the work of both. But he's a Northern California dude part hardman, part goofball who feels comfortable describing a scene's "vibes," and she's hyperarticulate theater royalty, the daughter of the director Sir Peter Hall and the acclaimed soprano Maria Ewing. (It was in working with her father that Ms. Hall first began to put those work life boundaries in place.) More important, Ms. Hall seems to dissolve her lithe frame and fresh, freckled face into the roles she plays, while Mr. Spector seems to mold each one around his expressive grin and brawny physique. (Even in casual rehearsal wear, Mr. Spector has a body that suggests a passionate relationship with a biceps press, and he recently appeared as a young Sylvester Stallone in the boxing drama "Chuck.") "It's sort of like the difference between fission and fusion," said Brian Crano, the director of "Permission," pausing a moment to try to remember which nuclear reaction was which. Mr. Spector "is exploding out," he said, while Ms. Hall's characters tend to shatter internally, to devastating effect. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
One way to test a relationship is to travel together. There's nothing like a change of environment and the odd sudden surprise for revealing the structural flaws in a partnership, or knitting it closer together. When the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the conductor Daniel Harding took the stage at Carnegie Hall on Thursday and Friday the maestro and the musicians, touring together, may been wondering: Is this working for me? The Concertgebouw is one of the great orchestras in the world, and used to being wooed by stars. (As if to make the point, Friday's program included Strauss's "Ein Heldenleben," which the composer dedicated to the players of this Dutch orchestra in 1898.) Since its chief conductor, Daniele Gatti, was fired last summer over allegations of sexual impropriety (he denied the accusations), the orchestra has been searching for a new leader. When it tapped Mr. Harding, 43, an English conductor now mostly butterflying from one prestigious guest gig to another, to lead its American tour, many wondered if this was a first step toward something more lasting. Last week's performances showed that while the partnership is still far from symbiotic, it can, at its best, make thrilling music. The jitters were mostly felt during Thursday's program, which included Schumann's "Manfred" overture, Mozart's Symphony No. 40 and Brahms's Fourth. On Friday things came together gloriously in Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto with the pianist Pierre Laurent Aimard, "Heldenleben," and a new work by Guillaume Connesson. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Galleries and other commercial art spaces have begun to reopen in New York but some are still choosing to expand outside the city's limits to reach clients who have decamped because of the coronavirus pandemic. Phillips, one of the world's top auction houses, will open a new location in Southampton, N.Y., on Friday. Seeing how the pandemic has been "impacting our operations and our clients has really got us thinking about how to adapt the business," Edward Dolman, the chief executive for Phillips, said in an interview. "It made sense to take art that we would traditionally show solely in Manhattan out to where a lot of our clients decided that they were going to be spending much more of their time," he added. Phillips is not alone. Other major galleries and auction houses, including Sotheby's, Pace, Hauser Wirth, Skarstedt, Van de Weghe, Michael Werner and South Etna Montauk have opened in Eastern Long Island this summer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Most of the scientific investigations of Pluto by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft took place over the course of a single day, when it zipped within 8,000 miles of the dwarf planet in July of last year. Getting all that information back to Earth where scientists could study it took 15 months. The last bits of data an infrared scan of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, that tells something about the composition of the two arrived on Earth on Tuesday at 5:48 a.m. Eastern. "Well, you know, in our hearts, it's still there," Alice Bowman, the missions operations manager, said of Pluto, "but our data is on the ground." The spacecraft beamed back the highlights the next day, July 15 what the mission team cheekily called "The New York Times data set," because they expected breathtaking images that would be splashed across the front page of The New York Times. (They were right.) But scientists had to wait for the bulk of the data more than 50 billion bits because the radio signal from two 12 watt transmitters on a spacecraft more than three billion miles away is tenuously faint. In modern day computing terms, 50 billion bits is not much 6.25 gigabytes, or what easily fits on a cheap USB flash drive. Spread over 469 days, the effective data rate was about 1,200 bits per second, on par with computer modems of the early 1980s. New Horizons was actually pushing the data at a somewhat faster pace, but it could not do so continuously, because it had to share NASA's large radio dishes with other missions. Ms. Bowman said the scientists were checking one more time to make sure that they had everything, and then in a few weeks, a command would be sent to wipe the data memory banks clean. The New Horizons team is already planning for its next encounter on New Year's Day in 2019, passing within 2,000 miles of a distant clump of rock and ice known as 2014 MU69. So far, astronomers do not know much about 2014 MU69 beyond that it is tiny and red redder than Pluto though not quite as red as Mars and that it is part of what is known as the classical Kuiper belt, a disk of icy bodies beyond Neptune whose circular orbits appear undisturbed since the beginning of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. (Pluto by contrast, has been bullied by Neptune's gravity into an elliptical, tilted orbit with a travel time around the sun 1.5 times that of Neptune.) "We believe that they are the primordial remnants of the disk that formed the planets," Amanda M. Zangari, a researcher at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. working on the New Horizons mission, said during a news conference last week. S. Alan Stern, the principal investigator of New Horizons, declined to make predictions of what will be discovered. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Communities living in warmer places appear to have a comparative advantage to slow the transmission of coronavirus infections, according to an early analysis by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The researchers found that most coronavirus transmissions had occurred in regions with low temperatures, between 37.4 and 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit (or 3 and 17 degrees Celsius). While countries with equatorial climates and those in the Southern Hemisphere, currently in the middle of summer, have reported coronavirus cases, regions with average temperatures above 64.4 degrees Fahrenheit (or 18 degrees Celsius) account for fewer than 6 percent of global cases so far. "Wherever the temperatures were colder, the number of the cases started increasing quickly," said Qasim Bukhari, a computational scientist at M.I.T. who is a co author of the study. "You see this in Europe, even though the health care there is among the world's best." The temperature dependency is also clear within the United States, Dr. Bukhari said. Southern states, like Arizona, Florida and Texas, have seen slower outbreak growth compared with states like Washington, New York and Colorado. Coronavirus cases in California have grown at a rate that falls somewhere in between. The seasonal pattern is similar to what epidemiologists have observed with other viruses. Dr. Deborah Birx, the global AIDS coordinator in the United States and also a member of the Trump administration's coronavirus task force, said during a recent briefing that the flu, in the Northern Hemisphere, generally follows a November to April trend. The four types of coronavirus that cause the common cold every year also wane in warmer weather. Dr. Birx also noted that the pattern was similar with the SARS epidemic in 2003. But she stressed that because the virus outbreaks in China and South Korea began later, it was difficult to determine whether the new coronavirus would take the same course. At least two other studies published on public repositories have drawn similar conclusions for the coronavirus. One analysis by researchers in Spain and Finland found that the virus seemed to have found a niche in dry conditions and temperatures between 28.3 degrees and 49 degrees Fahrenheit (or minus 2 and 10 degrees Celsius). Another group found that before the Chinese government started imposing aggressive containment measures, cities with higher temperatures and more humid environments reported a slower rate of infection transmission early in the outbreak. But none of the studies have been peer reviewed by other scientists, and Dr. Bukhari acknowledged that factors such as travel restrictions, social distancing measures, variations in the availability of tests and hospital burdens might have affected the number of cases in different countries. The possible correlation between coronaviruses cases and climate should not lead policymakers and the public to complacency. "We still need to take strong precautions," Dr. Bukhari said. "Warmer temperatures may make this virus less effective, but less effective transmission does not mean that there is no transmission." Warmer temperatures might make it harder for the coronavirus to survive in the air or on surfaces for long periods of time, but it could still be contagious for hours, if not days, Dr. Bukhari said. Even seasonal viruses like influenza and the viruses that cause the common cold don't completely disappear during summer. They are still present at low levels in many people's bodies and in other parts of the world, biding their time until conditions are suitable for infections to spread again. Some viruses have the opposite pattern. Polio, for example, tend to spread faster in warmer climes. And some viruses may have no seasonal variation at all. It will take another four to six weeks before health officials will have a clearer picture of how weather patterns shape the trajectory of the coronavirus, said Jarbas Barbosa, the assistant director at the Pan American Health Organization, the regional office of the World Health Organization that focuses on the Americas. The fact that local transmission is happening across the global south signals that this virus may be more resilient to warmer temperatures than the flu and other respiratory viruses that spread across borders in the past. That is why W.H.O. officials still urge countries to act urgently and aggressively to try and contain the virus while case numbers are relatively low and close contacts can easily be traced and quarantined. "One of the big perils in assuming that the virus is less dangerous in warmer temperatures, among particular ages or for any specific group is complacency," said Julio Frenk, a physician who served as health minister in Mexico and is now president of the University of Miami. "If people fail to heed the warnings and recommendations of public health professionals, the results will be disastrous." But because high humidity and heat only align perfectly during mainly July and August in some parts of the Northern Hemisphere, Dr. Bukhari cautioned that the effects of warmer weather on reducing transmissions might only last for a brief period in some regions. "This suggests that even if the spread of the coronavirus decreases at higher humidity, its effect would be limited for regions above 40 degrees North, which includes most of the Europe and North America," he said. And because so much is unknown, no one can predict whether the virus will return with such ferocity in the fall. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
With an important source of revenue down and the flow of customers flattening out, one of the biggest businesses in Georgia its public university system is turning to a strategy of consolidations and mergers to improve efficiency and cut costs. The system has shrunk from 35 campuses to 28, helping compensate for a nearly 20 percent cut in state funding from 2008 to 2016 and an enrollment that this spring rose only two tenths of a percent over last year's spring semester. More consolidations are underway, reducing four of the remaining campuses to two. The universities are putting some of the resulting 24 million in savings into efforts to reduce the number of dropouts. That beefs up the bottom line, too: It's cheaper to help a student stay in school than to recruit a new one. Dramatic changes like these are essential, Chancellor Steve Wrigley told his Board of Regents in April. "We inherited a system largely conceived in the 1960s," Mr. Wrigley said. "But times, society and students have all changed dramatically." That is not only true in Georgia. Other colleges and universities across the country are also responding (albeit sometimes slowly) to challenges threatening their traditional role in society if not their survival. Because of a dip in the number of 18 to 24 year olds, among other reasons, for example, enrollment has been dropping for five years, meaning that there are about 300,000 fewer undergraduates to divvy up among America's campuses than there used to be. Changes to immigration policies, and resulting resentments, threaten the crucial supply of international students, which the consulting firm DrEducation predicts could cost universities in the United States a quarter of a billion dollars in the coming academic year. To fill seats, colleges are engaged in an arms race of discounts that they increasingly cannot afford discounts so deep that, while their sticker prices appear to be rising ahead of the inflation rate, the schools are actually seeing their net tuition revenue decline. Many small, private nonprofit colleges are giving away a record 51 percent of their tuition income in the form of discounts, according to new figures from the National Association of College and University Business Officers. One reason is that many states face large pension obligations for public employees, including those who work at universities; for some universities, the impact is becoming more immediate, as states shift this burden directly onto them. More than half of the 4.1 billion allocated for state universities and colleges in Illinois, for instance, now goes not to teaching or research, but to pay retirement costs, the Illinois Policy Institute says. "There's always been a kind of a wishful thinking that when the economy gets back to normal, things will get better. And that is not happening anymore," said James A. Hyatt, associate director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education and former vice chancellor for budget and finance at the University of California, Berkeley. On top of that, public universities face political pressure to keep tuition flat. And the Moody's bond rating agency calculates that long term returns from private university endowments are falling far short of what they need. A Department of Education list of financially troubled institutions now has more than 500 universities and colleges. All of these pressures mean something has to give, and that includes upkeep. Colleges and universities face a combined shortfall of 30 billion for needed repairs and renovations, according to the APPA, formerly the Association of Physical Plant Administrators. But in another bid to attract students, they keep building more, spending 11.6 billion last year on new construction, the private firm Dodge Data and Analytics says. That is adding not only more space the universities will have to maintain, but billions of dollars in debt on which someone will have to pay the interest. Meanwhile, universities' monopoly on credentials is being threatened by alternative forms of education like software coding academies. Some employers are rethinking whether going to college is even necessary: 14 percent of hires at Google have no college degree, according to the company's senior human resources officer. Nearly half of Americans surveyed last year by Public Agenda a nonpartisan policy organization that focuses on education and other topics said a higher education is no longer necessarily a good investment. And about the same proportion of graduates in a Gallup poll released last year said they were less than certain their degrees were worth the money. Fifty eight percent of colleges and universities surveyed by the business officers association said their number of students has declined. The problem is worst for small private, nonprofit and second tier public institutions in the Midwest and Northeast, where the college age population has fallen fastest. The slide is projected by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education to continue through at least 2023. This has sped up the practice of offering discounts to fill seats. "I don't think universities have a choice not to," said Luke Behaunek, dean of students at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. He presented a sobering paper about the trend in April at the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting. "The discount rate is a symptom of the larger things they're facing," Mr. Behaunek said. "The margins these institutions are operating at are much thinner than the public understands." Here's how thin: Thanks to rising discounts, small colleges reported an average revenue increase per freshman of just two tenths of a percent last year, which means they lost ground when inflation is accounted for. Ken Redd, director of research and policy analysis at the business officers association, said: "Are there enough students out there? Is there enough money out there in a time of declining enrollment to support all of those schools. Based on what we see now, you'd have to say the answer is no." Chief business officers on campuses agree with him. More than four in 10 don't think their current financing models are sustainable. "Hearing that from the chief business officers is very telling," Mr. Redd said. One solution they've tried: building or renovating space in the hope of luring students, especially high income ones. But many smaller institutions that borrowed money to do this have smaller enrollments now than they did then, meaning more debt and less tuition revenue to pay it back, according to the higher education construction consulting firm Sightlines. This even as their existing buildings need a collective billions of dollars worth of long postponed repairs, the company says. So universities and colleges are getting serious about other kinds of reforms. Some, as in Georgia, are dramatic and controversial. Several campus mergers there were announced only days before they were voted on by the Board of Regents, without enough notice for the public to sign up to comment. A similar proposal was put on the table in April by the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities (which does not include the University of Connecticut) in the wake of an enrollment drop and state budget cuts, only to be protested by faculty and students. "Change is not easy, particularly when you've got institutions that have been around for 100 years" said Charlie Sutlive, vice chancellor for communications and governmental affairs at the University System of Georgia. Some of this change is being pushed from the outside. Several higher education associations, with money from the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation, have set up a group of 31 colleges, universities and systems called the Frontier Set to exchange ideas that have worked to lower costs and improve success rates mostly around improving student retention, including through technology, which saves institutions money. He cites one program pioneered at Georgia State University that gives "microgrants" from a few hundred dollars to 2,000 to help financially struggling students overcome setbacks that often derail their educations. It costs the university 2 million, but more than pays for itself by avoiding the even higher price tag of replacing dropouts. (Retention rates nationally have edged up by two percentage points since 2009 as colleges and universities invest more resources in student support.) "We know what works," said Travis Reindl, senior communications officer at the Gates Foundation, "and we know there is a core set of diverse institutions with pockets of solutions and innovations going on, but they've never been brought together like this." Another such consortium, the University Innovation Alliance, ties together 11 public research universities that share ways to cut costs and raise productivity. Other universities and colleges in places where there are a lot of them Boston's Fenway neighborhood, for instance, and southwest Atlanta share administrative services, campus security, shuttle buses and even libraries, and are expanding offerings at a lower cost by doing it jointly or allowing cross registration. More such strategic alliances like these are likely in response to the "competitive and financial sustainability challenges" of higher education, a new report from the TIAA CREF Institute says. Even the organization that represents boards of trustees, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, has spun off a new division called AGB Institutional Strategies to help colleges come up with new forms of revenue, and The Guardians Initiative to encourage those trustees often successful private sector business executives to bring new ideas into their university boardrooms. Richard D. Legon, president of the association, said that fixing higher education "requires a collaborative partnership that benefits from some of the creativity and ingenuity board members bring to the table, working with institutional leadership to ensure that students, who are really in a customer mode, want to shop at your place." Not everyone is doing this work. "There are some colleges that are very realistic about the challenges they're facing," said Ms. Fitzgerald of Moody's. "There are others that still have their heads in the sand and think that things are going to get better." But the activity that is underway represents "a sea change," Mr. Mehaffy said. "There was an era when institutions sort of just moved on. The funds were relatively good, the students were standing in line. And today's environment is dramatically different. It is a time of enormous strains, but the good news is that it's a moment of growing action." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
WHILE I'm no professional event planner, I do play one in my personal life. Or at least on occasion, like last Saturday when my younger son had his bar mitzvah. I learned a great deal from my first son's bar mitzvah three years ago, which careful readers of this column may well remember. I wrote several columns, including one on selecting caterers and another on embracing tradition. I thought I had the party thing down pat. And yes, this one was easier than the first. (And it went off beautifully. Thank you for asking.) Now that I have emerged from what truly is a huge undertaking multiplied by 17 relatives visiting my house from California for Thanksgiving and by planning a Friday evening dinner for 23 at a local restaurant I thought I would share all I've learned. The good thing about having a second shot at planning any major event is that you have a better sense when it's important to spend money and when it's not. It's definitely worth hiring a good D.J. It can make the difference between a decent party and a great one. On games like air hockey and foosball to keep the boys entertained, no need to go overboard. But the 950 we spent last time for a professional videographer? This time, a few obliging relatives filled that role free. And like last time, we hired a neighborhood teenager who is good at photography to take the pictures. They're great and cost one tenth what a professional would have charged. For our first bar mitzvah, I was so entranced to see my older son in a beautifully tailored suit that we bought one, I'm embarrassed to say, for several hundred dollars. He wore it twice before outgrowing it. At least his younger brother used it through much of his bar mitzvah season. This time, we found a three piece suit for under 100 for the guest of honor. After all, it really only had to last the day. I also learned some life lessons this time around. At major events, we want our close friends and family to be there, but sometimes they can't make it for any number of reasons. And that can put a real strain on relationships. "It feels like a rejection it feels like being dumped ," said Irene S. Levine, a professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine. And "when it's an event like a bar mitzvah, it's not just about you but about your child." In fact, said Dr. Levine, who wrote the book "Best Friends Forever: Surviving a Breakup With Your Best Friend" (Overlook Press, 2009), failing to show up at a major event is one of the most common reasons friendships break down. The best thing to do if you can't make the special occasion is to tell the hosts sooner rather than later and be as straightforward as possible. "Sometimes people feel so awkward, they don't give a clear message about why they can't come," she said. But when someone says he or she can't come to an important event for what seems to be a minor reason, it "often means secrets are involved. It's like a puzzle with a piece missing," she said. "For example, someone might be having problems with a child and then has trouble celebrating a child's success." But, on the flip side, those of us who are throwing the big affairs sometimes fail to realize our events aren't always the No. 1 priority for others. And, yes, everyone is different. Some people think nothing of hopping on a plane to fly across an ocean to attend an anniversary party, while others may not have the inclination to drive a few hours away, Dr. Levine said. It's not necessarily a litmus test for who is the better friend. Aside from the emotional cost when people don't show up, there can be a financial price if someone drops out at the last minute. Thinking of that, here's a piece of practical advice: Make sure you can give the guest numbers to the caterer as late as possible. I was fortunate that we could do it the day before the party. What about those people who say they'll come and just don't show up? For one thing, you're out the money for food. Cara Davis, who recently updated and self published an eBook, "Cheap Ways to Tie the Knot," said it was worth finding out in advance if there was any way to donate the food to a local shelter so it did not go to waste. Because so much food is generally left over at most big events, she added, think about offering take out boxes at the end of the celebration. Of course, all that doesn't satisfy a desire to find out why some friends may have failed to show up. If you don't hear from them and want to make a point, feel free "to call and say, 'I hope you're not ill,' " said Judith Martin, the nationally syndicated columnist known as Miss Manners. "They'll come up with something." David Tutera, host of the television show "My Fair Wedding," said that every time he had been the host or had organized an event for clients, "there's always going to be someone who doesn't show up." He added, "You just hope they have the courtesy to explain." He also gave this sage advice: Don't do anything about the no shows until the week after the event. If you get into some sort of discussion or argument an hour before, or during, your party, it may ruin your good time. "If someone calls or texts that night saying, 'Sorry I can't make it,' don't respond that night or over the weekend," said Mr. Tutera, who also a plans parties for celebrities. "It's not your responsibility. Call the Monday or Tuesday after and give them a chance to explain. Take the high road and leave it open for closure." The trouble is, he said, there are so many ways now to hide behind texts and e mails and assistants without ever being forced to explain honestly. For Ms. Martin, all these questions are emblematic of "the breakdown of the host/guest contract," she said. "The guest should answer an invitation right away, and not assume that other people can be brought along. They should show up in appropriate dress for the occasion and socialize with others." The hosts, on the other side, "should supply refreshments for people, rather than asking people to bring their own food or drinks, introduce people and round up the wallflowers." A host should also not expect gifts. Nor, in Ms. Martin's opinion, should a guest give money. "We shouldn't pay people for passing milestones," she said. The question of money invariably comes up at these kinds of events because for many of us, they're expensive undertakings that can put a substantial dent in our banking account. For that reason, once we figured out what we would spend, I was taken aback to discover that some vendors expected sizable tips, which we had not expected. Our M.C. (part of a four person entertainment package) sent us a note along with the invoice before the party with suggested gratuities. Those suggestions were high, far more than we would ever tip. I asked Mike Forkos of ESP Productions, our M.C. (who did a fabulous job), why he sent out such suggestions. "Ninety five percent of people always ask," he said. "And some people are embarrassed to ask the question. So we send out an average of what most people tipped." But he agreed that in the future, maybe it would be best to wait to be asked. We're done with major parties, as least for now. We could celebrate my older son's high school graduation next year. But with college tuition being what it is, we will no doubt forgo an extravaganza. Anyone for a hot dog? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
LONDON Right now, it feels like time's been put on hold. Or so I thought one recent afternoon as I walked the quiet streets of London and passed my local playhouse, the Hampstead Theater. There by the entrance was an array of posters advertising a spring summer "Hampstead Classics" season, which won't be happening because of the coronavirus pandemic. Honoring the theater's 60th anniversary, the program would have included early Harold Pinter ("The Dumb Waiter"), a Pulitzer Prize winner (Marsha Norman's "'night, Mother"), Alfred Fagon's "The Death of a Black Man," and Tennessee Williams's lesser known "The Two Character Play." On further reflection, I realized that Williams's title actually applied to three of those plays, while Fagon's calls for three performers. How appropriate: Not only could social distancing be applied during rehearsals, but fewer performers means lower costs, and therefore somewhat less pressure to fill an auditorium. "It's complete coincidence, honestly, a complete fluke," said Greg Ripley Duggan, the Hampstead Theater's executive producer, in a telephone conversation. He and Roxana Silbert, the theater's artistic director, had simply chosen four titles from the theater's capacious back catalog; their diminutive size may turn out to be a bonus, making them easier to reboot. For the moment, though, Ripley Duggan added, "None of us, realist or optimist, knows anything." While theater openings are out of the question for now, when it comes time to start up again, it will be much easier for smaller productions than for large ones. The Hampstead Theater might just have stumbled on a model for recovery. Small doesn't have to mean inconsequential: Many writers deliver weighty plays with tiny casts. Pinter, for instance, the Hampstead's opening choice, seems just the ticket for now. The Nobel laureate's tightly focused plays mine the shifting social and sexual dynamics between individuals in their own emotional straitjackets (or psychic lockdowns, if you will), and such masterworks as "Betrayal," No Man's Land," and "Old Times" all require casts of four or less. ("Betrayal," as it happens, gets performed a lot.) Samuel Beckett, a great influence on Pinter, goes even further in such enduring classics as "Krapp's Last Tape," "Not I," "Rockaby," and "Footfalls," all written for a single performer. All we see in "Not I" is the lone actor's mouth. And this might be just the moment to revisit Alan Bennett's "Talking Heads," the octogenarian writer's wounding and funny monologues, originally written for TV, but also seen onstage on both sides of the Atlantic. This week, the BBC announced it would broadcast a new season of the 10 classic soliloquies, plus two new ones, all of which are presumably just waiting for an enterprising theater producer to snap them up. (The actors in the new lineup are almost all theater people first, film names second.) But does that mean that musicals and large cast plays are out? Not necessarily, if ingenuity and imagination play a part. Shakespeare, for instance, is infinitely elastic and adaptable. The actors Alan Cumming and Stephen Dillane have both recently offered one man versions of "Macbeth" in London or New York or both, each of which forced a re examination of the play. Might a solo "Lear" be next? And though the first tentative date in my diary for a return to the theater is for the Sept. 8 opening of a musical revival, "Hairspray," who knows if a such a huge production will really be possible by then. So I can imagine musical theater impresarios are now investigating more intimate options. Actor musician productions, where performers double as their own instrumental accompanists, have been proliferating of late and might be especially popular at a time when social distancing casts doubt on the viability of the orchestra pit. The British director John Doyle made his career about 15 years ago with a so called "actor muso" production of Stephen Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd" that fueled a mini industry in these stagings. Last fall saw a brilliant production of Sondheim's "Assassins," directed by Bill Buckhurst, in which the stage ensemble doubled as its own band. The production played regionally in England, and merits a London transfer. Or what about finding a newly exciting performer to take on "Tell Me on a Sunday," the solo part of Andrew Lloyd Webber's infrequently performed "Song and Dance," the story of a young English hat maker's romantic travails in New York? Southwark Playhouse in 2017 produced a one man musical, "Superhero," about a father's desperate love for his daughter, that deserves another outing, while the same theater could just pick up where they left off in March with Jason Robert Brown's musical "The Last Five Years," which calls for a cast of two. No show, though, whether it has a cast of two or 20, can exist without an audience. However closely you police what takes place in rehearsal or onstage, you still need a paying public, that may not want to sit cheek by jowl. What is the solution there? Take the playgoer's temperature upon entering the building? Sell every third seat? And how do you make the finances work, especially in some of those smaller venues (such as the Hampstead) where every ticket sale counts? Shakespeare's Globe, which has the capacity for 700 people standing in its open air yard, benefits from being able to readily reconfigure the space, but that's harder to do in London's more traditional playhouses. (That's leaving aside the more mundane but nonetheless real issue of how to deal with the crush going into a performance and for the restroom in the intermission.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Where pricing is no longer an obstacle to ownership, a new kind of engagement is born. The short biographies, or "vignettes," dropped between chapters sketch a relationship between a physical book and its owner. Barchas writes, "I simply chose these stray copies for their capacity to humanize my more general arguments." But they also challenge these arguments. Certain features, like stereotype plates, editions, impressions and reprints, belong to the history of books; others, like ownership marks and annotations, belong to the history of copies, and as such they are singular, nontransferable pieces of evidence. Barchas highlights David Gilson's indispensable 1982 "A Bibliography of Jane Austen," one of the records that she says glossed over "Austen's early diversity" in an effort to bring "order and discipline ... to a chaotic landscape," as nevertheless a "monumental" starting point for research. Inevitably, Gilson missed things; his listings are synoptic and dry. Barchas releases the compelling narratives inside his unyielding entries and supplements them with further hidden gems. One of the most provocative questions to emerge is: Who exactly owned those lost, cheap, tattered Austens? If some copies direct us, as Barchas supposes, to the daughter of an English sea captain, a Harvard law student, a Scottish immigrant to America, others point to Leonard and Virginia Woolf. It turns out that you both can and cannot judge a book, or its reader, by its cover. A vignette I am tempted to add to Barchas's collection would describe the presentation copy of "Emma," bound in red morocco gilt, that Austen reluctantly sent to the Prince Regent in 1815. Now held in Windsor Castle, it bears a pressmark that reveals it was at one time consigned to the servants' library, though its good condition suggests it may not have been much read upstairs or down. Thanks to Barchas's smart detective work, we now know that by the 1850s all at the castle were probably reading cheap Routledge reprints. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
A man in a ratty trench coat and a bowler hat slowly extracts a smooth pebble from his mouth, and then another and another and another. He holds the stones he's been sucking in his right hand, but with his left, he finds more stones in one of his pockets. What to do with those? Thus ensues a little comedy in the transfer of stones between cupped hand, pocket and mouth, a little routine about desire and dissatisfaction and existential absurdity that evokes the laughter of self recognition. This is the end of "Return to Absence," a work of physical theater that Arcane Collective presented (with help from the Irish Arts Center) at New York Live Arts last week. It is also a scene well known to aficionados of Samuel Beckett, borrowed from his novel "Molloy." In "Return to Absence" and a companion work, "Ebb," the Arcane Collective directed by the Japanese born Oguri and the Momix alumna Morleigh Steinberg takes inspiration, images and bits of stage business from "Molloy" and its companion novels, "Malone Dies" and "The Unnamable." Aspects of Beckett the playwright permeate Beckett's novels, making them promising sources for Arcane Collective's silent movie approach. The stone sucking routine, following Beckett's prose almost as if it were stage directions, comes closest to his spirit. But for much of "Return to Absence," the caroming digressiveness of Beckett's novels as monologues, as delightful as it is death obsessed, is replaced by a slow series of stage pictures. Many of those images are striking: the rumpled texture of hanging fabric, resembling the face of a cliff; the blank eyes of Andres Cochero, which make him look like a Claymation figure; Oguri shrinking inside his coat so that he seems to disappear, transformed into some half stuffed scarecrow. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The Suna family, which helped set the stage for the revival of Long Island City, Queens, in the 1980s by developing movie production facilities in a hollowed out industrial area, is hoping for a different kind of hit with its newest creation, a condominium. Called the Harrison, the 120 unit, 27 story red brick faced tower, at 27 21 44th Drive near Jackson Avenue, is rising from the site of a low slung garage in the Court Square area. The new high rise will help redefine the skyline, but the neighborhood is already used to reinvention. In 1981, Harry Suna bought a bakery under the Queensboro Bridge, about a half dozen blocks from the condo site, and converted it to Silvercup Studios, whose first production was a television commercial for Cool Whip, the dessert topping. Then, in 1998, the company, which today is run by Harry's sons Alan and Stuart, bought a nearby I beam manufacturing plant and turned it into studios, too. According to Alan Suna, the chief executive of Silvercup, the investments led to the repopulation of a district that had become emptied out and seedy. "We added a lot of bodies bodies that were coming in and out and not just sitting in an office all day," said Mr. Suna, who is also a principal of Silvercup Properties, the division of the company responsible for the Harrison and other residential projects. The developer of the Harrison the name of the building is a play on "Harry's Sons" also seems to be trying to take the area in a new direction. Instead of the steel and glass facades popular on condominiums and rental buildings across Long Island City, the Harrison will have a red brick exterior. Its casement type windows, trimmed in cast stone, echo nearby former manufacturing facilities. "It's a return to something that's less aggressive visually and more urbanistic," said David E. Gross, a founding principal of GF55 Partners, the architecture firm that designed the condo. The developer always sought to honor the area's industrial roots, initially planning to call the condo the Edison, in homage to the products made by the Eagle Electric Manufacturing Company, which had a large footprint across Long Island City, said Eric Benaim, the founder and chief executive of Modern Spaces, the brokerage handling sales. But the Hotel Edison in Times Square asked Silvercup to discontinue the name to avoid confusing potential hotel guests, according to Mr. Suna, who dropped the moniker last year. (There is another condo called the Harrison, on West 76th Street in Manhattan, but Mr. Suna said he had not heard from its management or condo board so far.) The apartments in Silvercup's building will range from studios, starting at around 465 square feet, to three bedrooms, starting at around 1,260 square feet, plus six penthouses. Fifty one of the units are two bedrooms, according to the development team. For decades, Ms. Zhang added, Court Square was known mostly as home to the Citicorp Building, the soaring office tower that opened in 1989. And "it was sort of desolate," she said. "But it's coming along." Other brokers pointed out that for years, most developments in the area were rentals developed by the Elghanayan family, a real estate dynasty that controls many tracts in Long Island City through the firms of Rockrose and TF Cornerstone. While early forays by the Sunas into residential projects mostly involved affordable housing, Silvercup Properties did build a market rate condominium in Long Island City. The 76 unit Industry, at 21 45 44th Drive, opened in 2011. Silvercup Studios continues to host productions in its soundstages, including television series for HBO like "Divorce," with Sarah Jessica Parker who also starred in "Sex and the City," shot there and "Girls." In addition, Silvercup West, a long planned mixed use project along the East River, is moving forward. Its polluted site is expected to be cleaned up by the end of 2017, Mr. Suna said. And branching out, the company last month officially opened Silvercup North, a soundstage in a former lighting warehouse in Port Morris, the Bronx, a gritty section that reminds Mr. Suna of the Long Island City of old. "We think the Bronx is the new land of opportunity," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
In this thought provoking journey of ideas disguised as a courtroom page turner, Pak and Young Yoo, recently arrived from South Korea, want nothing more than a better education and future for their teenage daughter, Mary. They've landed in Miracle Creek, Va., where they open a family business in the barn on their property: a hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) center, which they nickname the Miracle Submarine. (The therapy requires patients to be sealed in a pressurized chamber containing 100 percent pure oxygen. Though practitioners claim that this treatment helps with everything from autism to infertility, the F.D.A. cautions that HBOT has few proven benefits.) In the opening chapter, the Yoo family's HBOT capsule bursts into flames during a session, killing two people and gravely injuring four others. "Miracle Creek," 's debut novel, veers from immigration narrative to legal thriller as Elizabeth Ward the mother of an 8 year old autistic boy who died in the fire goes on trial for murder. In his opening statement, the prosecutor, Abraham Patterley, portrays her as the coolheaded killer of her burdensome son, and his first witness Matt Thompson, an HBOT participant that day as well as a medical doctor backs that up, deleting and shaping what he saw into an efficient narrative. Matt, convinced that Elizabeth is culpable, fixes his eyes on her and speaks "slowly. Deliberately. Each syllable punctuated, coated with venom." But as the trial continues and testimony unspools, Elizabeth's guilt looks less and less likely. It becomes clear that there are several people who have a reason to withhold the truth about the fire, including the Yoos, who are desperate to collect the insurance money. As people descend from "hero to murderer in an hour," "Miracle Creek" becomes a fascinating study of the malleability of truth in the courtroom. For the reader, learning the killer's identity matters less than parsing the moral compromises each character makes to guard his or her own version of truth. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Well, that didn't take long. This week, soon after social media went into a meltdown about United Airlines' dress code for its "pass travelers" (employees and their dependents traveling free on a standby basis) and the fact that said dress code did not include leggings (a rule that does not, let us remember, apply to the ticket buying public), Puma rode to the rescue of all leggings lovers by posting a special offer on Twitter: Present any United Airlines ticket and get 20 percent off all leggings at its stores in the United States. Quick! Run out and show your solidarity by shopping! And thus was the leggings movement commercialized. Can you blame them? Rebellion has long been made into merchandise. "I saw the story Monday morning, and didn't think much of it," said Adam Petrick, Puma's global director of brand and marketing. "But then everyone was talking about it, and it seemed like we could have fun with it, and it was easy to get behind. We're a sports brand, and come down clearly on the side that leggings are pants, and women of any age should be able to wear leggings any time they desire." Except, of course, none of this is really about leggings. Leggings are the excuse or the symbol. But to focus on them, which so much of the discussion has done since the news of the United ban broke, is to miss the point. The question at the heart of the issue is not whether leggings are appropriate for planes. The question is, as in all discussions of dress code: Who gets to decide? The individual or the group? The individual or the business? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
What do you call a Philly cheese steak with no cheese and no steak? It sounds like the setup to a punch line. But there's nothing to laugh at when it comes to eating vegan in Philadelphia, which, in the last few years, has blossomed into a dynamic universe of vegan food, from old school doughnuts to adventuresome tacos. Veganism is so hot that the city declared last Nov. 1 Philly Vegan Day. "There's a new energy here," said Mike Barone, the owner of Grindcore House, a vegan coffee spot in South Philadelphia, famously an Italian neighborhood that's undergone a restaurant renaissance near the grand Passyunk fountain. "You can go out to more places that are vegan. A lot of other places are accommodating, and that's snowballing." Philadelphia's vegan cheerleaders say what's happening comes from living in a food curious city where it's cheap to explore new ground. "It's affordable to live in and do business here," said Jeff Poleon, a co owner of Dottie's Donuts, a wholesale bakery where doughnuts are made with coconut milk and egg substitute, and the glazes are infused with homemade preserves and nut butters. "People are willing to try something new. The fact that it's vegan is almost secondary." Mr. Poleon opened a brick and mortar shop in March in West Philadelphia. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
ROBERT PHILLIPS lost his job in publishing eight years ago, and ever since, he and his wife, Kristine, a paralegal, have struggled to keep up with the mortgage payments on their home in Stratford. Mr. Phillips tried finding contract work, and has since switched to teaching, but he can't find a job that matches his previous salary. In 2006 they fell behind on their mortgage, and their lender, Wells Fargo, agreed to modify their loan. However, that adjustment only compounded the Phillipses' hardship, upping their payment by more than 200. They made some initial payments, but by 2009 their house was in foreclosure. Wells offered them a more affordable plan (under the federal Home Affordable Modification Program) on a trial basis. The Phillipses met the required first three payments, but Wells then claimed that an agreement with the investors backing the mortgage prohibited such a modification. "We did all the right things," Ms. Phillips said. But they only wound up more deeply underwater. Now, she and her husband are finally getting the relief they believe is long overdue. In April Wells Fargo, prodded by the Phillipses' lawyer at the Connecticut Fair Housing Center, agreed to reduce the principal due on their loan by 159,000. The reduction, along with a lower interest rate, cuts the Phillipses' monthly payment by 1,500, and gives them what they wanted all along: the ability to stay in their home. "We have a family, this is where we live," Ms. Phillips said. "We're in it for the long haul." According to Jeff Gentes, the Phillipses' lawyer and the managing attorney for the Fair Housing Center's foreclosure prevention project, 1 in 13 Connecticut homeowners with mortgages are "seriously delinquent," meaning at least 90 days behind or in foreclosure. The Phillipses, he said, are among the first to benefit from the state and federal governments' 25 billion settlement with the five largest mortgage servicers, announced in February. Negotiated by a coalition of state attorneys general and federal agencies, the settlement arose from an investigation into the "robo signing" scandal, in which servicers acknowledged signing off on thousands of foreclosure documents without verifying their accuracy. The bulk of the settlement funds (about 17 billion) must be put toward helping distressed borrowers remain in their homes. In addition to meeting the monetary terms, the five banks Ally Financial, Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo must also adhere to new mortgage servicing standards intended to forestall further abuse. According to the state attorney general 's office, Connecticut's total share of the settlement comes to 190 million. About 120 million of that is earmarked for loan modifications, primarily in the form of principal reductions on first and second lien mortgages. Under the terms of the settlement, not just anyone is eligible. Qualifying borrowers are behind on their payments and have loans serviced by one of the big banks. The deal does not apply to loans backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. The settlement also leaves it up to banks to pick and choose whom to assist, so even an eligible borrower isn't guaranteed to benefit. Mr. Gentes said his clients (including the Phillipses) had recently begun seeing principal reductions as large as 299,000. Although the banks don't always attribute their offers to the settlement, Mr. Gentes said he had noticed a shift since April. "If you have an eligible mortgage and you are underwater significantly," he said, "it's almost more likely than not that you'll be offered a principal reduction." Principal reductions are not new, but neither have they been easy to come by. Banks have argued that the practice will cause defaults among borrowers who can afford their mortgage payments, if they perceive defaulting as a way to get a lower principal. But housing advocates like Mr. Gentes argue that it is a more effective way of keeping people in their homes than loan modifications that don't get rid of negative equity. Bridgette Russell, the managing director of the New Haven Homeownership Center at Neighborhood Housing Services, said she also had begun to see sizable principal reductions, averaging 100,000 to 200,000. Additional settlement funds are reserved for refinancing programs for borrowers who are current on their payments but whose homes are worth less than they owe. Banks are also required as part of the settlement to put funds toward facilitating short sales, in which homes are sold for less than the mortgage balance due. Jonathan T. Hoffman, a lawyer in Stamford who specializes in foreclosures, has seen "some loosening" of bank protocol around short sales, particularly in his dealings with Bank of America. But generally, he noted, the process is still far from smooth, and subject to delays. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
"This is my first interview in nearly 10 years," David Lee Roth said one recent morning. The Van Halen frontman's trademark mane has been shorn to a bleach blond crop, but neither time nor the long interval between interviews has mellowed Mr. Roth much. He shoulder shimmied in the middle of Harry Cipriani and, in short order, suggested shots of Patron. Specifically, Mr. Roth had come to talk about his newly introduced skin care line, called Ink the Original, which was created for people with tattoos. He came up with the idea himself, he said a passion project born of his dissatisfaction with the options in the marketplace. And though he tends to vacillate between pithy slogans ("tattoos make the sidewalk much more entertaining," he said) and meandering anecdotes (his time as an E.M.T. in New York City in the 1990s contributed to who he is today, he said), it turns out that Mr. Roth is a man with fearsome focus. He worked with labs on various formulations to develop the products that make up the Ink line: an SPF stick ( 28); an SPF spray ( 24 and up); and a tattoo brightening balm with vitamin C ( 40). Moreover, he obsessed over the utilitarian packaging and clear satin finish, in part because of his stickler of a mother. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Alex Barker wasn't expecting Erin Smith to smile when they met in 2015 after almost two years of getting to know each other online. He knew he wouldn't either. Not because he wasn't sure he would find her wonderful, but because, like her, he can't. Mr. Barker, 46, and Ms. Smith, 39, were born with Moebius syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that causes facial paralysis and affects fewer than 20 in a million people. They had met only a handful of others with the disorder until Tim Smith, a man with Moebius from Remington, Va., created a Facebook community for the afflicted in 2013. But after a few Facebook Messenger exchanges neither Mr. Barker nor Ms. Smith (no relation to Tim Smith) doubted their compatibility went deeper than their condition. "When we started talking through the internet group, it suddenly became apparent that there was something more there than friendship," said Mr. Barker of Coventry, England. "I can remember the first time we Skyped in January 2015. I thought, she's quite nice looking." That wasn't the outcome Ms. Smith of Linwood, N.C., was necessarily looking for when she struck up a chat with Mr. Barker in 2014. "I was just going through all the different people on the group, looking around, when I found Alex. I was like, 'Oh, wow, he lives in England,'" she said. Ms. Smith had visited London as a recent high school graduate in 1998 and dreamed about one day returning. "I thought it would be kind of cool to have a friend there with the same condition," she said. When she sent her first message, a simple nice to meet you, she was surprised by how quickly he responded. "Then we just started talking all the time," she said. "We became really close." Ms. Smith, who worked as a medical assistant at Wake Forest Baptist Health's urgent care facility in Clemmons, N.C., wasn't used to making close friends outside Linwood, where she has lived on her family's 300 acre soybean, corn and hay farm since birth. Small town living suited her: People with Moebius attract strangers' attention with their expressionless faces and impaired speech another side effect of the damage to facial nerves and there are few strangers in Linwood, a town of about 5,000. "Obviously, growing up was sometimes difficult," she said. In addition to her facial paralysis, Ms. Smith was born with a club foot. (Limb abnormalities are common among people with the syndrome.) "But I wasn't really picked on at school because we all grew up together and everybody knew me and my background," she said. The closeness of the community helped steer her past the feelings of alienation and loneliness that often set in early for children with Moebius. Her temperament helped, too. It did. Mr. Barker's 2015 vacation, filled with local wine tastings and visits to the nearby Blowing Rock mountains, included a first kiss, and then a series of them. Mr. Smith had never seen his daughter so happy. And he had never seen her so unhappy about the prospect of waiting seven months for a reunion. The National Moebius Syndrome Foundation Conference in California, where the couple planned to meet next, wasn't until July 2016. So before Mr. Barker flew back to England, Mr. Smith pulled him aside. "He said, 'Son, I want you to come back,'" Mr. Barker said. "And I was like, what? Then he said he would pay for me to come back and surprise Erin for Valentine's Day." Mr. Barker didn't hesitate. He said yes to the offer. A party the Smiths arranged for more than 100 guests at the Wine Sellars Wine Shop and Bistro, in Lexington, N.C., on Feb. 13, 2016, was ostensibly to raise money to help send Ms. Smith to the Moebius conference in July. But "about two hours into the fund raiser, my dad decided to make a speech to thank everyone for coming out to support me," Ms. Smith said. "Then he said, 'Me and mom wanted to do something special for you, too.'" Courtney Mason, Ms. Smith's best friend since childhood, captured what happened next on video: Mr. Barker wanders into the crowded restaurant, and Ms. Smith lets out a shriek. She runs down the hall and throws her arms around him as party guests, many who have known Ms. Smith since birth, hoot their approval. For Mr. Barker, the Valentine's Day trip confirmed what he already knew. He was in love with Ms. Smith, and he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. "I never set out to fall in love with someone who has the same condition," he said. Like Ms. Smith, he had dated people without the syndrome. He was once engaged, briefly. "But actually I think it makes things so much easier," he said. "If there's one real connection between people with Moebius, it's the experience of being stared at. It can cause you to feel really isolated, because having a smile is so important. If you don't, people think you're unfriendly. Sometimes it's quite hard to meet people, because you become so self aware about how you look as opposed to how everyone else looks." With Ms. Smith, he added, "we've got this shared bond, even though Erin is quite a bit less affected by the syndrome than me," he said. Mr. Barker has two club feet, which affects his gait but doesn't slow him down. And "I don't have all my fingers and toes, so I find doing everyday things a bit more frustrating than she does." Mr. Barker's physical limitations didn't stop him from orchestrating a proposal someone without disabilities might have found daring. And stressful. In July 2016, Mr. Barker and Ms. Smith reunited, as planned, for the Moebius Conference in Long Beach, Calif. Before the conference started, they met for some sightseeing. On July 10, after taking in a baseball game, they sauntered around the Santa Monica Pier. Mr. Barker seemed nervous. Ms. Smith couldn't figure out why. "He wasn't acting right. I was like, 'Is something bothering you? What's wrong, honey?'" Ms. Smith said. He was on a slatted boardwalk with a diamond engagement ring in his pocket a family heirloom given to him by his godmother in England and he wasn't sure how the proposal would unfold, or if he would drop the ring between the wooden planks when he got down on one knee. "I've played the moment back again and again and again in my head," Mr. Barker said. "I said, 'Erin, will you be my wife?' And there was this moment of stunned silence. I was worried she was going to say no." Instead, she said, "Of course I will." "I was shocked," Ms. Smith said. But the shock gave way to love and gratitude. "It was an amazing moment. I called my parents right afterward. Some of my friends had said, he's going to propose in California." Even so, "I still couldn't believe it." The thrill of the engagement was followed by a dilemma: On which side of the Atlantic would they live as a married couple? For Ms. Smith, who spent the holidays in Coventry in 2016 and rung in 2017 there, the decision was difficult, but clear. "I love England, so that's where we're going to live, but only for two to five years," she said. After that, they plan to move back to North Carolina. Her parents are happy for her, she knows. "But I also know they're also sad I'm leaving." Mr. Smith said he worries his daughter will be homesick. But "Alex is going to take care of me and his parents are going to take care of me," she said. Brian and Florian Barker, Mr. Barker's parents, also live in Coventry; they welcomed her as warmly as the Smiths welcomed Mr. Barker when they first met him, and they consider her a daughter already. "Alex and Erin have this connection where they recognize each other. They see each other as complete people," Mrs. Barker said. On Nov. 10, Mr. Barker and Ms. Smith were married at the Smith family's church, Second Presbyterian in Lexington, N.C., by the Rev. Brian K. Rummage, the pastor. Ms. Smith, in a white cap sleeve ball gown with a lace train and her long brown hair piled beneath a rhinestone clip, walked down the aisle with her father. About 200 guests lined the pews and watched, smiling for her, as she carried a bouquet of roses and lilies in vivid autumn shades of red, gold and orange. Mr. Barker wore a bow tie in Ms. Smith's favorite color, purple also the color associated with Moebius syndrome awareness and a charcoal suit from Marks Spencer in London. Ms. Mason, Ms. Smith's lifelong best friend, shared matron of honor duties with another best friend, Holly Whitten. Both wore long violet dresses, and each fought tears as Ms. Smith approached. "I love them both to death. It's just the most wonderful love story," Ms. Mason said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
As concern rises over the effect of continuous use of headphones and earbuds on hearing, a new paper by federal researchers has found something unexpected. The prevalence of hearing loss in Americans of working age has declined. The paper, published on Thursday in the journal JAMA Otolaryngology Head Neck Surgery, used data from the National Health and Nutrition Survey, which periodically administers health tests to a representative sample of the population. The investigators, led by Howard J. Hoffman, the director of the epidemiology and statistics program at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, compared data collected between 1999 and 2004 with data from 2011 and 2012, the most recent available. Hearing loss in this study meant that a person could not hear, in at least one ear, a sound about as loud as rustling leaves. The researchers reported that while 15.9 percent of the population studied in the earlier period had problems hearing, just 14.1 percent of the more recent group had hearing loss. The good news is part of a continuing trend Americans' hearing has gotten steadily better since 1959. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
LONDON When Britain voted in 2016 to leave the European Union, its currency plummeted on world markets, reflecting agitation over the economic and financial disruption that seemed to lie ahead. Three years later, with Brexit still not achieved, trading in the pound has been telling a different story. After weeks of steady gains ahead of Thursday's general election, the pound jumped as exit polls suggested a victory of the Conservatives and Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who campaigned on completing the rupture with Europe. The pound held on to most of its gains on Friday, after official results confirmed that the Conservatives had indeed won a majority. In currencies, as in other markets, traders like certainty. "The market sees a Tory majority as the best outcome in the short term," said Lee Hardman, a currency economist at MUFG, a Japanese bank. "It gives you more clarity over the direction of Brexit." Global markets were buoyed on Friday by the results from Britain and the prospects of a partial trade deal between the United States and China. Asian and European stock indexes rose, with the Hong Kong's Hang Seng up 2.6 percent and London's FTSE 100 gaining 1.8 percent. On Wall Street, stocks eked out a tiny gain after Chinese officials said they had agreed to the text of an initial trade deal with the United States, marking a significant de escalation in the 19 month tariff war that has rattled the world economy. The pound, a barometer of Brexit confidence since the 2016 vote to leave, has risen on the likelihood that a government with a working majority will be able to wrench Britain's government out of its gridlock and spare the country from the potentially chaotic effects of leaving the European Union without a divorce agreement. With a majority, Mr. Johnson will be better able to push through Parliament the withdrawal agreement he negotiated in October with the European Union. The outcome also means that Britain is likely to formally leave the European Union with a deal at the end of January. The pound has gained more than 3 percent against the dollar since Parliament voted on Oct. 29 to hold a new election. A stronger pound can be a bad thing for British companies, making it harder for them to sell their goods in the eurozone and beyond and diluting the profits they bring back from overseas. Nonetheless, British markets have also risen since the campaign began, reflecting the prospect of a Conservative victory that would not only reduce the chances of a no deal Brexit but also avoid the nationalization ambitions of the opposition Labour Party. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The FTSE 250 is up more than 6 percent over that period, pushing the benchmark index of British stocks to a nearly 23 percent gain for the year. "The market has become less worked up about the chance of a Labour government, and also some hope that a good sized Conservative majority could kind of lift some Brexit uncertainty," Andrew Wishart, United Kingdom economist for Capital Economics, a consulting firm, said before the voting. Such signals have been a welcome development for the British economy, which has slowed since the 2016 referendum. Amid weak business investment and consumer confidence, economic growth fell to a 1 percent annual rate in the third quarter, the slowest pace in about a decade. While the pound rallied in recent weeks, it is roughly 10 percent lower than it was immediately before the 2016 referendum. Markets were unprepared for the result, and in the hours after the vote the pound plummeted by about 10 percent. That is the equivalent of an earthquake in the normally subdued foreign exchange markets. Daily moves of 1 percent are considered quite large for the currencies of rich nations like Britain. Likewise, yields on government bonds remain low, despite the recent increase. The yield on the 10 year benchmark government bond, known as gilts in Britain, was roughly 0.8 percent in recent days, implying subdued expectations for growth and inflation in the coming years. Analysts caution that any relief stemming from a Conservative victory may be short lived. "We think greater optimism about the 'divorce deal' being passed will soon give way to worries about the transition period," wrote Paul Hollingsworth and Michael Green, United Kingdom economists with BNP Paribas, in a recent research note. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Henry Hope Reed, the cranky genius of classicism who died last month, was expert at turning a phrase in favor of traditional architecture. In a town house entrance hall, he pronounced the gentle rise of the marble steps "the only stairway in New York fit for a cardinal." And of New York's most famous architects, he said, "Well, yes, McKim, Mead White were good, but they were certainly no York Sawyer." To him, Edward York and Philip Sawyer embraced the majesty of classicism but without the sense of play sometimes seen in the other firm. As did many architectural partnerships, that of Edward York and Philip Sawyer began in the office of McKim, Mead White, where they met in the 1890s. Responding to a request to submit plans for a building at Vassar College, York sent in drawings Sawyer had already prepared for an entirely different project and got the job; they set out together. "From that time on, commissions flowed in in an unbroken stream," wrote the critic Royal Cortissoz. It was not just luck: in a 1951 memoir Sawyer recalled that "York fastened himself upon the budget" of the Vassar job and the project came in below estimates by 1.75, for which the architects gave a check to the president of the college, who then gave it to the donor: John D. Rockefeller. Bankers find a kindred spirit in such a man, and a year later York Sawyer got the commission for the first of over 50 banks, a fortress of granite for the Franklin Savings Bank, at the southeast corner of Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street, demolished in the 1970s. A single story of classical detailing, this was perhaps the most rusticated work of architecture in New York the walls, the columns, the window lintels, the voussoirs, all cut in the classical manner. Together they gave the Franklin Bank the sense of a stronghold, the kind of building that could survive the siege of Stalingrad with just a few blemishes. In his memoir, Sawyer wrote that around this time, "we had been in business five years when Yorkie told me impressively: 'Sawyer, we have five million dollars' worth of work; we've more work than McKim, Mead White. Lend me a quarter, I want to go to lunch.' " Their success was due in part to their extreme care in design; before construction even started, each stone had been drawn over a dozen times. Even their nonbank commissions could look like banks, like Frank Gould's private riding ring of 1902 at 217 West 57th Street, the outside cut stone, the inside tanbark and bare brick, 45 feet high. Bank design in the 20th century was no simple thing, as Sawyer wrote in a 1905 article in The Architectural Review. For instance, the tellers' desks had to be right next to the bookkeepers', so that they could quickly resolve any question about a check. Otherwise those waiting in line behind the customer are likely to "exchange low remarks regarding our character." Sawyer recalled that, after a particularly sly but successful campaign to get a committee of bankers to go along with a particular design, York told him that he had adhered to two principles: "It is fatal to prove a client in the wrong" and "Say nothing when it is unnecessary to speak." Reed's favorite York Sawyer commission came in 1916, the old Brooklyn Trust Company, at Montague and Clinton Streets in the Heights. Modeled after a Veronese palace, it follows what might be called the high pockets school of design, in which the rusticated ground floor is taller than the office floors above. York Sawyer's greatest bank commissions came in the 1920s: the colossal Federal Reserve Bank at Nassau and Liberty Streets, nearly an entire medieval fortified town, and the old Central Savings Bank, now the Apple Bank for Savings, a Florentine palazzo at 73rd and Broadway. It has the mix characteristic of their mature work: an arched, coffered ceiling; a long, banking hall lighted on both sides; use of multicolored marble; and carefully modeled ironwork. So well established was their preference for the Florentine that in 1929 Architecture Magazine quoted an American returning from a trip to Italy as remarking, "Well, Florence didn't astound me so much; everywhere I looked I saw a building by York Sawyer." The Art Deco fuss passed them by with nary a ripple: Sawyer says that York called the Deco Chanin Building, at 42nd and Lexington, "the Chris'ly Awful Building." It was being completed when York died in 1928. York Sawyer's championing of the classical model made them dear to Reed's heart, and in a 1985 article in Avenue magazine he listed Brooklyn Trust as his favorite classical building in New York, ahead of even Grand Central Terminal. "They just turned out one masterpiece after another," he told me in 2005. In 1959 Reed deftly skewered the modernists in his book "The Golden City," in which he ran photographs of classical buildings opposite their modernist equivalents. Facing the Brooklyn Trust Company he placed a signature work at 43rd and Fifth by the firm Skidmore Owings Merrill, still lionized by the architectural establishment. It is the old Manufacturers Trust Company, the glass box with the vault door visible from the street, but without a scrap of ornament, just the kind of thing Reed called "naked." By comparison, the work of York Sawyer is Savile Row. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
RETIRING is challenging for almost everyone. But if you're a small business owner, preparing to hand your company to your children can create an even bigger knot of anxiety worries about financial security, the legacy of your life's work and the prospects for your offspring. The process can touch everything from spreadsheet driven company valuations to awkward talks about your children's limitations. It can demand the technical knowledge of a C.P.A. and the soft skills of a psychologist. "One of the first questions you have to ask yourself is, 'Do I have financial security if my kids run this business into the ground?' " said Kelly A. LeCouvie, a Toronto based consultant with the Family Business Consulting Group. "It's a possibility. You may have enormous faith in your children, and often that perception reflects reality, but sometimes it doesn't." More business owners may soon be faced with such uncomfortable questions. In a 2007 report, the United States Census Bureau found that a third of small business owners were 55 years or older and that about a quarter of small businesses were family owned. For people who want their children to take over their businesses, consultants like Ms. LeCouvie stress the importance of planning the further ahead, the better. Adequate time enables smooth succession and lets people compensate for deficits. Perhaps the parent needs a few years to put more money aside or the child needs to get more training or meet more customers. Too often, small business owners don't plan, and get blindsided, said Matt R. Allen, a professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College outside Boston. "Everybody thinks they're going to live forever, and then a heart attack comes unexpectedly and nobody's prepared," he said. Few people, of course, have the time or temperament to put into effect the sort of elaborate five or 10 year plan that a consultant might create. Plus, chance can play a role in succession as it does in so much of life. Even the best run businesses are buffeted by it, and sometimes they even benefit. Janet Briaud, founder of Briaud Financial Advisors in College Station, Tex., said she partly lucked into the succession plan that she and her daughter, Natalie Pine, have arranged. She had built her company, which specializes in advising college professors, over two decades. Ms. Briaud, who is 63, wasn't ready to retire, but she had begun to wonder what might happen to her clients when she did. She didn't foresee her daughter coming home because Ms. Pine had left to attend Rice University, vowing to build a big city career somewhere else. Ms. Pine and her husband, Roger Pine, did that in London, where she worked in finance, and he in energy consulting. "I thought the probability of her coming here was between 1 percent and zero," Ms. Briaud said. About eight years ago, Ms. Pine, 34, defied that expectation by announcing not only that she and her husband, 36, were moving back to Texas but that she also wanted to work with her mother. Ms. Pine soon became chief operating officer, handling tasks like upgrading the website and improving customer service and internal processes. A couple of years later, Mr. Pine, too, became a financial planner and joined the company. "Natalie felt a sense of duty. She didn't want to leave her mother hanging," he said. "You wouldn't do that for a snow cone stand, but Janet had built a good business." Another surprise came in 2010, when the Pines offered to buy Ms. Briaud out. "I wasn't ready," she recalled. "So Roger said, 'How about 60 percent?' I wasn't ready for that, either. But I talked to my husband, and he said, 'Isn't this what you really want?' I came back to them and said, 'Let's do 50/50.' " The Pines agreed to run the business and let Ms. Briaud focus on overseeing client investments. By not setting a date for Ms. Briaud's retirement, the trio did not follow a common bit of expert advice. Professor Allen of Babson said a parent who hung around could stymie a business because clients and employees don't know who's really in charge. "If possible, there should be a specific date," he said. When Edward J. Keohane, owner of Keohane Funeral Home in Quincy, Mass., handed his business to his sons he took a step to signal he was no longer boss: He moved his office to the basement. He also gave up the title of president and many of his duties, keeping only the part time job of managing the company's buildings and grounds. He made his sons, John and Dennis, co presidents. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' Mr. Keohane, who is 71, did this nearly a decade ago. He wasn't then ready to retire but suspected his sons needed him to cede control. "If I continued being boss, I was going to lose the boys. They were getting bored," he said. They had worked with him for about a decade. "You have to accept that your children aren't children anymore and that they're capable of running the business," he said. "At first, it was emotional for me. I didn't feel needed anymore a small business is your life. It took a few years to understand that it would succeed without me." These days, Mr. Keohane spends about half of his time on civic engagements and a quarter on his management duties. He didn't need his sons to buy him out immediately. Instead, they bought a life insurance policy on his behalf. They pay the premium, and the proceeds will enable them to buy his stock when he dies. "That way, my wife will have a livelihood," he said. Though consultants recommend orderly successions like Mr. Keohane's, handovers are often more casual. Craig W. Sheppard, owner of Sheppard's, a dealer and servicer of orchard and farm equipment in Hood River, Ore., said that he and his son, Ben, had improvised deciding who does what since Ben joined the business in 2006. "We're not that formal about it," he said. "As time goes on, Ben takes on more duties. It's been evolutionary." Ben Sheppard, 37, is more skilled with computers, so he handles those and manages the scheduling of the service crew. His father, 61, oversees the rest of the back office. Both of them do sales, with the elder Sheppard visiting the customers he has known for decades; a lot of the local orchards the region is known for its pears are family owned, too. If all goes as planned, the younger Sheppard will take over a business started by his great grandfather. Craig Sheppard bought it from his father over several years and said he envisioned his son doing the same. Like Mr. Sheppard, William H. Waite Jr., a builder in Bedford, Mass., aims to introduce his son, Ben, gradually to the responsibilities of running his business. Mr. Waite, 57, hopes to spare him the shock that he experienced when he took over from his father in 1988. His father gave him only a few months' notice and little training in management. "My father retired on Friday, and the guys then went to work for me on Monday morning," he said. "They showed up at my house instead of his house. It was one of the most bizarre days of my life." Ben Waite, 26, has worked for his father as a carpenter since high school, and they have recently started to talk about how the business might be restructured to reflect the realities of today's construction industry. William Waite employs a staff of carpenters, but, he said, "Because of the cost of insurance today, the business model my father gave me doesn't work as well anymore." "The guys who are making money are the ones with no employees" because they subcontract everything, he added. "I don't know what the changes will be, but Ben and I will have to figure that out together." He doesn't want to leave his son standing stunned on some Monday morning, wondering what to do next. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Start at PS299 pounds, or about 385, at current exchange rates. After an extensive monthslong renovation led by SHH Architecture and Interior Design, the Trafalgar St. James, formerly known as the Trafalgar hotel, reopened in August 2017 as part of Hilton's Curio Collection. The 131 room property has a storied past: it housed the offices of the Cunard Steamship Company in the early 20th century, and in 1912 was one of the first places where news of the Titanic's sinking became public. The hotel sits on the southwest side of the Trafalgar Square adjacent to Spring Gardens, a short, brick lined street near the Charing Cross rail station that dates back to the 16th century. With the National Gallery across the street and its proximity to Buckingham Palace, Green Park, Piccadilly Circus and the West End theaters, the Trafalgar St. James offers one of the most enviable locations in central London. Upon entering my Trafalgar King Room, I was greeted with a photo of a youthful Mick Jagger, a nice cultural touch. A large flat screen television and a Nespresso machine sat on the long dresser in the front of the room. On one of the night stands, there was a personal tablet where I could easily check the temperature, order room service and browse a guide to the city. The room also featured two comfortable upholstered chairs and a narrow workstation vanity table hybrid with a short round stool. The only drawback? The view from the window was of a nondescript office building, not the hotel's more historic surroundings. White wall tiles projected a retro look, while the vessel sink and a nearby mounted magnifying mirror added modern elements. The shower was spacious and slightly elevated from the floor, a design that helped prevent water leakage. There were an abundance of bathroom products by Molton Brown. There is free in room Wi Fi, as well as throughout the hotel. Every room contains a fully stocked minibar offering a variety of bottled waters, sodas and juices, which are all complimentary, a nice surprise. A 24 hour fitness center allows guests to enjoy a variety of workouts at their own leisure. The Trafalgar dining rooms, with views of its namesake Trafalgar Square, have a beautiful brasserie and all day dining options, ranging from a rosemary sourdough starter (PS5) to grilled Suffolk chicken with a garlic confit (PS22) and the hotel's variation on the traditional bubble and squeak (PS16). The first floor bar, with its plush bar stools, was classy and inviting. My breakfast, which featured pancakes and bacon with raspberries (PS10), was delicious. The Rooftop, accessible from the sixth floor, offers a separate bar and small plate menu with alfresco and indoor seating, accentuated by dramatic views of Trafalgar Square and the London skyline. Cocktails, ranging from an Espresso Martini (East London Vodka, coffee liqueur and espresso) to a Negroni, start at PS11. The Trafalgar St. James capitalizes on its prime location, providing personalized service and a high level of style. With subway access only a few feet away, London's cultural gems never seemed so close. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
SAN FRANCISCO The only thing changing faster than who is winning the race in the cutthroat world of ride hailing are the shifting behind the scenes allegiances between those companies and investors. At the moment, Uber, the ride hailing behemoth, is nearing a deal to receive billions of dollars in funding from SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the talks are confidential. SoftBank is one of the largest investors in Didi Chuxing, one of Uber's largest former foes. Didi also happens to be a major investor in Lyft, Uber's biggest American rival. And, according to three people familiar with the discussions, Lyft has held recent talks to raise funding from Alphabet, whose venture capital arm also happens to be a major shareholder in Uber. The tangled state of affairs has made for strange bedfellows, and has helped to forge occasional alliances between companies. But it has also put companies in difficult positions when they have to decide which investors to accept money from and what strings may be attached. "If you believe the ride share industry is big enough, you believe that even if you have a losing investment in one of the two competitors, the winner will be big enough to justify the loss," said Quin Garcia, managing director of Autotech Ventures, a firm that invests in ground transportation start ups and has invested in Lyft. Representatives of SoftBank, Uber, Lyft and Alphabet declined to comment. Bloomberg earlier reported Lyft's discussions with Alphabet. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported some details of the Uber and SoftBank talks. Uber's position is perhaps the most precarious. As the San Francisco based company has spent the past nine months grappling with scandal after scandal over its culture and business practices, competitors like Lyft and Ola have gained traction in key markets. Last month, Uber appointed a new chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, to help right the ship. Uber may see a lifeline in SoftBank. In recent weeks, the companies have been in discussions for SoftBank to take a large stake in Uber in the neighborhood of 17 percent or more with an investment of 10 billion, said the people close to the talks. The money would come from SoftBank's so called Vision Fund, a 100 billion fund that is used specifically to invest in technology start ups across multiple industries. Complicating the talks are the many strings attached to a potential deal. SoftBank is angling to invest in Uber at a steep discount to the company's nearly 70 billion valuation. SoftBank has agreed to buy some new shares at the same valuation, but would also participate in a tender offer sent to existing Uber investors, in which the Japanese company could potentially buy their Uber shares at a price that is cheaper than the ride hailing service's last valuation. For Uber, SoftBank could be a potentially powerful ally. SoftBank's new capital could aid Uber's expensive expansion efforts in regions like Southeast Asia and Latin America. The money could also go toward cashing out existing investors and employees, who have not been able to sell their stock since Uber is a privately held company. If no agreement is reached, SoftBank could also pose a significant threat to Uber. In a meeting with Uber investors this week, Rajeev Misra, leader of SoftBank's Vision Fund, said SoftBank would be willing to invest in a rival like Lyft if Uber did not agree to SoftBank's terms, according to two people familiar with the conversation. Those terms included demands like the heavily discounted share price, and two seats on Uber's board of directors. Lyft's recent fund raising activities have also complicated the calculus for Uber. Lyft closed a 500 million financing round in April, with support from Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the private equity firm. More recently, Lyft has held talks with Alphabet for a new 1 billion investment, according to people familiar with the discussions. It is unclear what the status of those talks are, though the discussions appear to be driven by Larry Page, Alphabet's chief executive, the people said. Lyft could use any new funding to keep pressure on Uber in its most lucrative market, North America, by offering subsidized trips to riders. An investment would also strengthen Lyft's relationship with Alphabet, which has emerged as one of Uber's most powerful foes. In May, Lyft reached a deal to work on a self driving vehicle pilot program with Waymo, Alphabet's autonomous vehicle subsidiary. Waymo sued Uber this year, claiming stolen trade secrets in driverless car technology. "Ride sharing is starting to look more like a business that will be regionally dominated by local duopolies and monopolies," Mr. Garcia said. "Until the winners shake out, the companies will use money from the same investors to cannibalize one another." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
For moneyed Americans, most of the past year has felt like 1929 all over again the fun, bathtub gin quaffing, rich white people doing the Charleston early part of 1929, not the grim couple of months after the stock market crashed. After a decade long stock market party, which saw the stocks of the S. P. 500 index create some 17 trillion in new wealth, the rich indulged in 1,210 cocktails at the Four Seasons hotel's Ty Bar in New York, in 325,000 Rolls Royce Cullinan sport utility vehicles in S.U.V. loving Houston and in nine figure crash pads like Aaron Spelling's 56,000 square foot mansion in Los Angeles (currently on the market for 175 million, more than double what it fetched just five years ago). Will it last? Who knows? But in recent months, the anxiety that we could be in for a replay of 1929 or 1987, or 2000, or 2008 has become palpable not just for the Aspen set, but for any American with a 401(k). Overall, stocks are down 1.5 percent this year, a fter hitting dizzying heights in early October . Hedge funds are having their worst year since the 2008 crisis. And household debt recently hit another record high of 13.5 trillion up 837 billion from the previous peak, which preceded the Great Recession. After a decade of low interest rates that fueled a massive run up in stocks, real estate and other assets, financial Cassandras are not hard to find. Paul Tudor Jones, the billionaire investor, recently posited that we are likely in a "global debt bubble," and Jim Rogers, the influential fund manager and commentator, has forewarned of a crash that will be "the biggest in my lifetime" (he is 76). What might prove the pinprick to the "everything bubble," as doomers like to call it? Could be anything. Could be nothing. Only time will tell if the everything bubble is a bubble at all. But, just a decade after the last financial crisis, here are five popular doom and gloom scenarios. Remember how the 2008 crisis was triggered by a bunch of people, who probably should not have been lent giant amounts of money in the first place, not making their mortgage payments? That was just the precipitating factor, but go back and stream "The Big Short" if none of this rings a bell. Then fast forward to 2018, where bad mortgages may not be the problem. Consider, instead, the mountain of student debt out there, which is basically a 1.5 trillion bet that a generation of underemployed young people will ever be able pay off a hundred grand in tuition loans in an economy where even hedge funders are getting creamed. Already, a lot of them aren't paying and can't pay. In a climate where "there are massive amounts of unaffordable loans being made to people who can't pay them," as Sheila Bair, the former head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, described the student debt problem in Barron's earlier this year, nearly 20 percent of those loans are already delinquent or in default. That number could balloon to 40 percent by 2023, according to a report earlier this year by the Brookings Institution. Now, lots of that debt is owed the federal government, so it's unlikely to poison the banking system, as mortgages did a decade ago. But this burden of debt is already beginning to wipe out the next generation of home buyers and auto purchasers. As a result, a generation of well educated and underemployed millennials, told to value a college education above all, could drag down an economy that never seemed to want them in the first place. You know who has racked up even more debt than hopeful 20 something ceramics studies grads in the United States? Here's a hint: It's a not exactly Communist country in Asia that has been on such a wild debt fueled building spree that it somehow used more cement in just three years earlier this decade than the United States did in the entire 20th century. Think about that. Now think about it some more. Over the past decade, China devoted mountains of cash to build airports, factories and entire would be cities now known as "ghost" cities, since the cities are populated by largely empty skyscrapers and apartment towers all in the name of economic growth. And grow it did. The result is a country with a supersized population (1.4 billion people) and supersized debt. Where things go from here is anyone's guess. Optimists might argue that those trillions bought a 21st century Asian equivalent of the American dream. Pessimists describe that massive debt as a "mountain," a "horror movie," a "bomb" and a "treadmill to hell," all in the same Bloomberg article. One thing seems certain, though: If the so called "debt bomb" in China explodes, it's likely to sprinkle the global economy with ash. And with President Trump teasing a trade war that already seems to be threatening China's massive, export based economy, we may have our answer soon. Say you lived in the suburbs, and one day your neighbor suddenly pulled up her driveway in a new 75,000 Cadillac Escalade. A week later, she was tugging a new speedboat. A few weeks after that, it was Jet Skis. You might either think, "Wow, she's rolling in it," or "Golly, she hates glaciers." (Hatred of glaciers may prove, actually, to be the real spark of the financial end times.) But what if it turned out that she bought all of those carbon dioxide spewing toys on credit, at crazy low interest rates? And what if those rates suddenly started to spike? The result would likely be good news for the polar ice caps and bad news for her, when the repo man (not to cave to gender stereotypes about repo persons) came calling. O.K., overstretched metaphor alert: The "neighbor" is us. Ever since the Federal Reserve started printing money in the name of "quantitative easing" to pull us out of the last financial crisis, money has been cheap, and seemingly any American with a pulse and a credit line has been able to fake "rich" by bingeing on all sorts of indulgences real estate (despite tighter lending standards), fancy watches and awesome gaming systems, to say nothing of the debt that corporations were racking up, which some market analysts think might be the biggest threat of all. The problem is: The whole system is now running in reverse. The Fed has been hiking rates and spooking markets in order to stave off inflation and other potential ills. Is this an overdue fit of fiscal sanity, or the equivalent of taking away the punch bowl just as the party was getting started, then dumping it on our heads? I know, it's a crazy thought: Imagine that a bunch of neighboring countries with wildly different languages, customs, values, and priorities somehow failed to get along? We don't have to rewind 70 something years to the last Pan European shooting war. Just witness the continuing problems in the European Union. Ever since Britain voted to leave the union in the Brexit referendum of 2016, Europeans have been engaged in a dark parlor game, speculating on who might be next. Might it be a "Frexit" spurred by nationalists in France? A "Nexit" stoked by the anti immigrant far right in the Netherlands? Lately, the fears have focused on Italy, where an "Italexit" or "Quitaly," if you can't help yourself has been bandied about by populist politicians as they threaten to abandon the euro, or leave the European Union altogether, over an ongoing tiff with European neighbors over deficit spending, migration and whatever else drums up votes. The turmoil has already sent ripples through global markets during the past year. In recent months, Italian populists are still making veiled threats to break up the coalition, and the official denials are not 100 percent reassuring. Following the latest budget squabble with Brussels, the Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte told news reporters: "Read my lips: For Italy there is no chance, no way to get 'Italexit.' There is no way to get out of Europe, of the eurozone." Was he aware that "read my lips" is American political shorthand for a "broken promise"? It could happen. Just sayin'. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
, who helped steer Comcast through its acquisition of NBCUniversal and also was instrumental in the attempt to take over Time Warner Cable, is leaving his post as chief financial officer to lead a new Comcast backed company with 4 billion in firepower for strategic investments. The unexpected management shake up was announced on Tuesday, and Comcast said that it was starting a search for a new chief financial officer immediately. Mr. Angelakis will remain in his position until a successor is found and later continue to work as a senior adviser to Comcast. The media conglomerate's proposed 45 billion deal for Time Warner Cable remains in regulatory limbo. Widely respected inside and outside of the company, Mr. Angelakis, 50, joined Comcast in 2007 and oversaw corporate development, strategic planning, investor relations and other financial and administrative areas. Brian L. Roberts, Comcast's chief executive, said that Mr. Angelakis had "helped transform Comcast into the media and technology company that we are today." The transition has been in the works for quite some time. Several months ago, Mr. Angelakis told Mr. Roberts that he was interested in setting up his own company. Mr. Roberts responded by suggesting that Comcast should not only invest with him but act as the sole investor. "I've seen my father and John Malone keep the entrepreneurial spirit going as they built their companies," Mr. Roberts said. "That is something that has worked extremely well in the past for Comcast and we want to keep this a strong part of our culture." Mr. Angelakis did not present Comcast executives with an offer to leave for another company, executives said. Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. "As we enter the final phase of the Time Warner Cable transaction, this is a great time to begin a transition, and I am excited to start this new entrepreneurial company," Mr. Angelakis said. Mr. Angelakis will become chief executive of the new company, which has yet to be named. The venture will have up to 4.1 billion in capital commitments. Comcast has committed 4 billion to the venture, and Mr. Angelakis is personally investing 40 million. Other funding is to come from the new company's management team. Comcast has an exclusive arrangement with the new venture for 10 years as the sole outside investor. The venture will focus on "growth oriented" companies in the United States and internationally. Other details remain unclear. Comcast already operates a venture group and previously has made investments in companies like the QVC shopping network and SpectrumCo, a joint venture for wireless spectrum licenses. Mr. Angelakis will help with the transition to the new chief financial officer and will help start the integration process for Time Warner Cable, if the deal is approved. Last week, Comcast said it expected government regulators to complete their review of the deal in the middle of the year. Previously, Comcast had expected the deal to close in early 2015. "As we enter the final phase of the Time Warner Cable transaction, this is a great time to begin a transition, and I am excited to start this new entrepreneurial company," Mr. Angelakis said. Before starting at Comcast, Mr. Angelakis was a managing director at Providence Equity Partners, a global private equity firm. He also is the deputy chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and a trustee at Babson College. Comcast decided to make the announcement on Tuesday because it was starting the public search. "It is a real loss for Comcast to see someone as talented as Mike decide that it is time to move on," said Craig Moffett, an analyst with Moffett Nathanson Research. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
PARIS There's no good way to write about fashion in the wake of the scorched earth event that took place Thursday in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington. No respectable segues into focusing on clothes. No agreed on manner in which to describe the bizarre collision of two realities: sitting outside in the courtyard of the Palais de Tokyo in the sunshine, and watching the American contingent huddled in groups of two and three over their phones, streaming C Span while waiting for the Rick Owens show to start. But you can't ignore it either. It was, after all, the backdrop against which a group of collections was viewed. It is the birth of the environment in which a lot of these clothes will ultimately be worn. It's why, when halfway through Mr. Owens's show a soaring Tatlin's Tower suddenly burst into flame and a wave of heat swept across the stands, it was impossible not to sit back with a jolt and think: yeah. Burn it all down. Why his sci fi witches in leather, canvas and denim robes of accordion diamond cutouts, some bearing torches to light the darkness; his insectoid generals in jutting triangular plates; and his high priestesses with wimples framing their heads that turned out to be T shirts, the neck hole pulled up around the face, the arms streaming down behind, thrummed with current events convergence. It was aggressively beautiful but it was also, on the Owens spectrum, unexpectedly wearable, especially the mini shifts of silken fringe in new dawn colors, and cathartic. Though it's tempting to dismiss thinking about clothes at all at such a time and on my social media feed, people did or to say "hey, it's my job," or to praise the virtues of an aesthetic respite, the truth is, they have a role to play. They can either make a woman (or man) feel protected and powerful or hobbled and exposed; they can communicate romance or fragility or adventure or art. They can express the deep fungibility of identity in its most immediate state. Though it does change the balance of expectations when it comes to a show. It demands more, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It frames the choice of Julien Dossena at Paco Rabanne to take the house's chain mail heritage on the Silk Road to mix it up with Indian prints, florals, lace and gold coin trim; to mix it in with a silver brocade Nehru collared pantsuit and drop open weave gold mesh over the top as escapism with a hardy (instead of hippie) edge. But it raises questions around what, exactly, the teeteringly decorative soldiers in Olivier Rousteing's Balmain army have to do with the mobilization of the female voice, trussed and bound as they are in voluminous paper bag pants and molded silver breast plates, sporting jackets with flying buttress shoulders so sharp they threaten to poke out an eye, and futuristic mosaic mini dresses with a portrait of the Sphinx front and center. What mystery, exactly, are they guarding? Was there a message in the black and white hieroglyphs on sweaters, the bandage dresses of shredded white chiffon, the shredded denim embedded with Swarovski and the stiff, scarab curves that stretched from the neck to the thigh? Maybe, but if so, it was obscured by the pleating, lost in the glare of the over the knee silver boots. The ingredients of relevance were all there: a celebration of musculature and achievement; a belief in the importance of functional freedom; a little frippery to lighten the tone. Yet the clothes skittered across the surface of each. Mr. Abloh is new to this game, and as he often says, he comes from a different kind of training camp (plus, he sure is busy), but this seemed like nothing so much as a kind of fashion karaoke. There's too much quoting, and not enough genuine creation. One thing that has become very clear: Words matter, and they linger, whether on a garment or televised to the world. Fill in the blank metaphors, not so much. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
If this hasn't been the worst year ever for truth in politics, I can't think of what was. Nor can anyone tell me. The Republican presidential nominee has produced more falsehoods than the major fact checking sites have identified from a major presidential candidate since they came into existence. The Democratic nominee hasn't come anywhere close to that. But she's not exactly dwelling in Honest Abe territory, either. It's almost at the point where "truthiness" Stephen Colbert's old word for the from the gut canards that helped to lead to the Iraq war would be preferable to what we have now: unsubstantiated nonsense and outright lies. In too many cases, they have taken hold as the basis for people's voting decisions. Traditional journalism has struggled to keep up with it all. It has been overwhelmed by the legion of assertions that scream out for fact checking; undercut, at times, by journalists' human failings and the economic imperatives of ratings and page views; and under siege from partisan attacks intended to bully it out of doing its job. The good news is that the debates are finally upon us, providing the fourth estate with a great chance to set the record straight and to nudge the presidential discussion onto the level ground of established facts. In other words, a chance to live up to its calling. And, yes, that is going to require the debate moderators to interject with the truth when either candidate makes an obviously false statement. Inexplicably, the pre debate debate has been dominated by the question of whether it is within the debate moderators' purview to do that. Donald J. Trump has said, as he did on Thursday on "Fox Friends," that the NBC anchor moderating Monday's debate, Lester Holt, should stay out of the way and leave it to him and Hillary Clinton to "take each other on" over the facts. That treats falsehood like a hockey puck being moved up and down the ice, and forces each candidate into goalie pads. What this political season really needs is a confident and credible referee, or a few thousand. Sites like FactCheck.org and PolitiFact, and news organizations like The New York Times and The Washington Post, will be there to separate truth from lies after the fact. But let's face it, their combined readerships won't come anywhere close to the size of the debate audience, which television executives and political strategists say could be as big as 100 million people. For many viewers, a well honed lie will stick to the candidate on the receiving end of it who, if past is prologue, is more likely to be Mrs. Clinton than Mr. Trump. 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. And the Commission on Presidential Debates will be failing in its own mission "to ensure that debates, as a permanent part of every general election, provide the best possible information to viewers and listeners." The commission has put its thumb on the noninterventionist side of the scale. When I spoke recently with the co chairman, Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr., he said that the moderator's job was "to be a facilitator to raise the issues and draw out the candidates and hopefully get them to interact themselves." That, he said, is different from a news program on which "you've got your notes of what so and so said: 'Governor, you said this three weeks ago and now you're changing the story.' That's an interview, not what's supposed to happen in a debate." In 1987, Mr. Fahrenkopf, then the chairman of the Republican National Committee, co founded the debate commission with Paul G. Kirk, who was chairman of the Democratic National Committee. And it is no small thing that they chose to put journalists at the center of the action. It was before interparty civility skipped town, and before internet enabled, ideology infused news sites and partisan press critics undermined the prominence and credibility of the mainstream news media. It was a time when a news outlet's success was dependent upon its track record of getting stories right, not on how far it was willing to go to make its coverage hew to the worldview of its readers. The gatekeeper role the news media used to play has been rightly criticized for stanching those views that fell outside its decidedly mainstream perspective. But it also meant that campaigns generally sparred within the confines of the same set of established and true facts. Take the second presidential debate between President Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter in 1976. Max Frankel of The New York Times pressed Mr. Ford on the Soviet Union's dominance of Eastern Europe, and responded with incredulity as he invited Mr. Ford to clarify his remark that the Soviets were not dominant there. The focus the next day was on Mr. Ford's politically catastrophic geopolitical misstatement, not on his inquisitor, Mr. Frankel. Had that exchange happened today, political operatives and Twitter provocateurs surely would have found a way to make it about Mr. Frankel whose follow up was actually an attempt to offer Mr. Ford a lifeline, he told me. And some American media voices would have sought to dispute the facts on the ground in Eastern Europe (perhaps even on a Russian financed American network like RT). In our current environment, half of Mr. Trump's voters can believe the false notion that Mrs. Clinton knew the 2012 Benghazi attacks were set to occur before they happened and chose not to act, as a Fairleigh Dickinson University poll found in the spring. In a more recent New York Times/CBS poll, roughly half of Trump supporters said they believed that undocumented immigrants were more likely to commit crimes than American citizens were. (The preponderance of research has found that the opposite is true.) Such findings should bring a new appreciation for fair minded journalists to those who care about having government policies that are based on the truth. As the historian Michael Beschloss put it during a phone conversation last week, "We are now in an age where there are so many fewer gatekeepers that you need what few are possible." Can the moderators this fall turn their debate stages into falsehood free zones? What does that look like in this election? Debate organizers say they want to avoid a situation in which the debate becomes one big fact checking or hectoring exercise and never gets to important policy differences. They also don't want the stage to be a hill for the moderator and thus the whole debate process to die on, amid charges of partisanship and a "rigged" system. The most common example that people point to is Candy Crowley's performance at a 2012 town hall style debate between Mitt Romney and President Obama, in which she disputed Mr. Romney's assertion that Mr. Obama waited 14 days to call the Benghazi attack an act of terror. Mr. Obama had more or less done so the next day, though, as Ms. Crowley sought to point out, his administration spent several days thereafter connecting it to protests against an incendiary, anti Islam video. PolitiFact called Mr. Romney's statement "half true," which gave more ammunition to Republicans who accused Ms. Crowley of singling out their candidate unfairly. But one clumsy attempt at fact checking, and the partisan attacks it drew, should not be used to muzzle this year's moderators. Yes, the candidates can challenge each other, but some things should not be left to a "he said, she said" stalemate and will require a moderator to weigh in like Mr. Trump's offensive attempts to claim he did not aggressively promote a campaign that questioned Mr. Obama's citizenship or Mrs. Clinton's mischaracterization of the F.B.I.'s assessment of her handling of email. Nobody wants a repeat of Matt Lauer's performance a couple of weeks ago when he let Mr. Trump's claim that he always opposed the Iraq war go unchallenged. Actually, scratch that. One person does Mr. Trump, who portrayed critics of Mr. Lauer as liberals seeking to push debate moderators to be tougher on him than on Mrs. Clinton. There's one way both he and Mrs. Clinton can avoid lopsided treatment: Tell the truth. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, called for moving the world into a "full speed recovery" at a news conference on Thursday at the opening of the fund's annual spring meetings with its sister institution, the World Bank. Ms. Lagarde, echoing an earlier warning, expressed concern about what she called a "three speed" global economy, with developing nations growing rapidly, the United States healing faster than most other advanced industrial countries, but Europe continuing to suffer from insufficient demand and incomplete government policies. "It's not the healthiest recovery," Ms. Lagarde said. But "we believe that we have avoided the worst, and the economic world no longer looks quite as dangerous as it did." She added: "The pickup in financial conditions, financial markets, is clearly not translating into a sustained pickup in growth and jobs." The news conference came shortly after news broke that a French court had ordered Ms. Lagarde to appear at a hearing on her handling of a financial scandal during her time as finance minister in Paris. Asked about the affair at the news conference, Ms. Lagarde said that she had known of the possibility of being interviewed by the investigative commission for years. "There is nothing new under the sun," Ms. Lagarde said, dismissing any concerns that the inquiry would affect her position as the head of the I.M.F. "I will be very happy to travel for a couple of days to Paris. I look forward to it." The investigation, which led to a police raid of Ms. Lagarde's apartment in Paris last month, concerns her decision in 2007 to refer to an arbitration panel a decades old dispute between Bernard Tapie, a wealthy friend of France's president at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the state owned bank Credit Lyonnais. The panel ultimately brokered a settlement that awarded Mr. Tapie, the flamboyant former owner of the Olympique Marseille soccer team, about 580 million, including interest. The court's summons of Ms. Lagarde could lead to the opening of a formal investigation of her role in the affair. But in France, being placed under formal investigation does not necessarily lead to charges and does not imply a presumption of guilt. Ms. Lagarde has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in the Tapie matter. At the news conference, Ms. Lagarde gave her blessing to recent actions taken by the Bank of Japan to help bolster growth. She also said that the European Central Bank had more room to aid the recovery in Europe, where many countries are still undergoing economic contraction, unemployment is still rising and the credit markets remain broken. "Of all the major central banks in the world, the E.C.B. is the only one who clearly still has room to maneuver," Ms. Lagarde said. Asked if Spain needed more time for fiscal adjustment, Ms. Lagarde replied that it did. She added that the country needed to put a budget tightening plan in motion, but that it need not be "upfront, heavy duty" fiscal consolidation. At a separate news conference, Jim Yong Kim, the head of the World Bank, which focuses on economic development, laid out his vision for a "two pronged approach for a world free of poverty." Dr. Kim has called for eradicating extreme poverty by 2030 and for fostering income growth for the bottom 40 percent in every country. "For that second goal," he said, "we also mean sharing prosperity across generations, and that calls for bold action on climate change." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
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