text stringlengths 1 39.7k | label int64 0 0 | original_task stringclasses 8 values | original_label stringclasses 35 values |
|---|---|---|---|
It's a year of anniversaries for Lizzie Grubman, the archetypal celebrity publicist known equally for making friends, enemies and headlines. Ten years of marriage. Twenty years since the founding of her namesake firm, Lizzie Grubman Public Relations Management. And 15 since the Hamptons auto accident that dominated the tabloid news cycle for a summer, turning her into one of the most notorious women in New York. Shortly after midnight on a July morning in 2001, Ms. Grubman ignited a tabloid firestorm when she backed her father's Mercedes Benz S.U.V. into a crowd outside the Conscience Point Inn, a Hamptons nightclub, injuring 16 people. "P.R. Gal's Nightmare Her SUV Plows Into Hamptons Club Crowd" and "Hard Fall for Rising P.R. Star; Crash Shatters Grubman's World" blared two typical New York Post headlines. It may be hard to believe now, but before Sept. 11, 2001, Ms. Grubman was one of the biggest news stories in the region. George Rush, a former gossip columnist who covered the accident and its aftermath for The Daily News, said the story played out as "a larger parable about class conflict." "For many readers, Lizzie was a vicious princess who was overdue for her comeuppance," he said. Now 45, Ms. Grubman has stayed out of the spotlight for a decade. Mellowed by marriage and two children, and energized by her firm's expansion into talent management and television development, she feels ready to talk about the remarkable roller coaster of her life, and lay to rest the ghosts of that infamous summer. "I do a lot of damage control, that's what I love in P.R.," Ms. Grubman said on a recent Sunday, sitting in her large corner office in the Flatiron district, which showcases "Rear Window" style views over a uniquely Manhattan hodgepodge of apartments, construction sites and artists' studios. "Just think of Olivia Pope in 'Scandal,' but for Hollywood." Her full client list is confidential ("I do divorces, I do arrests and cop situations, when someone is resigning or getting fired," she said), but her current publicity seeking roster includes the TV personalities Maksim Chmerkovskiy and Carole Radziwill, the rising hip hop producer C4 and the pop singer Inas X. Ms. Grubman was flanked by her sons, Harry, 9, and Jack, 7, and her husband, Chris Stern, executive creative director for the talent and management agency WME IMG. Mr. Stern is a chatty, gentle man with a fondness for Loro Piana cashmere sweaters. When together, the couple bring to mind a really expensive pair of new stiletto heels and the protective velvet bag that comes with them in the box. "Chris is my rock," said Ms. Grubman, pulling him close. "He's made me into a different person, and my children have, too. There's been some rough times." The family divides its time between their East 61st Street apartment (a triple combine duplex) and a five bedroom weekend home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., both designed by Mr. Stern. It's a life filled with children, grandparents and all the trappings of professional success. Yet even now, with a happy home life and thriving business, Ms. Grubman has difficulty discussing the events of summer 2001, when everything changed. Elizabeth Stacey Grubman was born in 1971 to Yvette and Allen Grubman, a man whom Newsweek once described as "perhaps the music industry's wealthiest and most powerful attorney with superstar clients like Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, U2 and Sean (Puffy) Combs." "The trials and tribulations that she went through, just like everybody else has gone through, she came out in a way that I'm very, very proud of," Mr. Grubman said. "Every so often, I'll bump into someone and they'll say, 'Oh, you're Lizzie's father.' I get a kick out of that." Mr. Grubman was a famously bad student, a trait he passed on to his daughter. She had brief tours at four New York City private schools, including Horace Mann, Lenox and Dwight ("my social life became a little bit more important than studies," she said), followed by a single semester at Northeastern University. "Nadine's list is not valuable, it's only valuable to Nadine," Ms. Grubman said. "I respect Nadine, I have nothing bad to say about her. She clearly does not like me." (Ms. Johnson did not respond to a request for comment.) In 1998, Ms. Grubman was one of three influential young female publicists featured on the cover of New York magazine with the headline "Power Girls." The article announced Ms. Grubman's arrival as a personality in her own right. It inaugurated a golden age for her business, but her tough as nails persona and moneyed background alienated some observers even as it attracted huge names to her client list, including entertainers like Jay Z, Gloria Estefan and Mr. Combs, and modish restaurants and nightclubs of fin de siecle New York, like Moomba, Spy Bar and Asia de Cuba. "She was there by my side and protected me when I was young and just getting into the spotlight," Britney Spears, a former client for whom Ms. Grubman still occasionally consults, wrote in a text message from Los Angeles. "I was so grateful to know that Lizzie always looked out for me." But the article also ruffled feathers, with its depiction of the subjects as privileged party girls, an early backlash to the "princess" image that would attend Ms. Grubman for years to come. "I get it," she said of the resentment at the time. "It would irritate me, too." But worse was on the way. On July 6, 2001, Ms. Grubman received the devastating news that her mother had late stage ovarian cancer. (She died three weeks later, at age 58.) In an emotional state, Ms. Grubman nevertheless went out that Friday evening to attend July 4 weekend festivities in the Hamptons. After a party at the home of Alex and Alexandra von Furstenberg, she drove the black Mercedes S.U.V. to the Conscience Point Inn, then a fashionable Southampton nightclub. Sometime after midnight, she got into an argument with a doorman who insisted she move her car. Instead, the vehicle lurched backward into a line of waiting patrons, injuring 16 people. Months of front page denouncements and 100 million worth of lawsuits (which were quietly settled) followed, culminating with a 38 day stay in the Suffolk County jail. Ms. Grubman publicly apologized to the victims outside the courtroom in which she pleaded guilty to felony and misdemeanor charges, but she has otherwise declined to discuss the incident. But her days of being tabloid fodder were not over. In 2005, she starred in an MTV reality show about her professional life, called "PoweR Girls," which flopped with critics and viewers, lasting six episodes. (Ms. Grubman has mixed feelings about it: "I think I gave away a lot of trade secrets, and I glamorized P.R. in a way that people didn't understand.") That same year, Page Six announced her relationship with Mr. Stern, who was married at the time to Joyce Sevilla, who happened to work for Lizzie Grubman P.R. The ensuing divorce was acrimonious (as were the human resources issues), but it freed the new couple to marry in March 2006. The gossip columns continued to needle, and it was an encounter with aggressive paparazzi that convinced Ms. Grubman that she needed to remove herself and her family from the spotlight. "One day, we're out walking, and these photographers are out for my son, and he was so scared," she said. "It hurt him so badly. We had problems in preschool with him taking class pictures." "Now, he's O.K.," she said, watching Harry gambol over her office furniture. "Now he has his own Instagram." If Ms. Grubman's critics were hoping she would collapse under the sheer weight of the schadenfreude directed at her, they will be disappointed. "I never properly mourned my mother. We'll leave it at that, you know why." In 2007, her husband decided to do something about it. "Understanding that Lizzie had a really tough time with Mother's Day," Mr. Stern said, "I decided, right after we had Harry, that I go to Barneys and walk around with a personal shopper and pick out the best shoes and the best handbags in the place, bring them to the apartment, and I proceeded to fill Harry's entire crib with all of these pretty special boxes of treats." "It was piled high," he said. "I just wanted to make it seem like Harry was giving her the gift." Ms. Grubman said, "He's changed Mother's Day for me, and he's helped me through it." The anecdote captures Ms. Grubman's uniquely contentious place in New York's pantheon of characters. It's a cherished and heartwarming memory for the family, but viewed from the outside, it will be perceived as overprivileged and materialistic enough to inspire a thousand mean tweets. Was Ms. Grubman prepared for such a social media response? "I've been there," she said, sounding momentarily battle weary. "I've been beaten, I've been killed in the media. But at this point in my life, my family, my kids and my clients are the most important people to me." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
With "The Irishman," Al Pacino, left, in the red tie, shown here next to Robert De Niro, appears for the first time in a Scorsese movie. The film, which spans decades, uses special effects to "de age" the actors. LOS ANGELES When Martin Scorsese signed with Netflix to make "The Irishman," the star studded epic scheduled to have its premiere on the opening night of the New York Film Festival next month, he put himself in the crossfire of the so called streaming wars. The film, which may represent Mr. Scorsese's grandest statement yet on the intersection of organized crime and American politics, is expected to be a strong contender in the 2020 Oscar race. He took his 159 million movie, with Robert De Niro in the lead role, to Netflix after his home studio of recent years, Paramount Pictures, balked at the budget. The full extent of the theatrical rollout remains up in the air. Where, exactly, moviegoers will be able to see "The Irishman" won't be clear until the discussions between Netflix and select major theater chains end. They have been dragging on for months. The negotiations are just the latest chapter in the conflict between the film industry's old guard and the tech driven upstarts. "The Irishman," a throwback to the 1990s Scorsese hits "Goodfellas" and "Casino," was announced more than a decade ago at Paramount, the studio where he made "The Wolf of Wall Street" and "Silence." Mr. Scorsese struck the deal with Netflix in 2017, and filming started soon afterward. The film, which makes use of "de aging" special effects to keep the actors looking the right ages in a saga that spans decades, is in the final stages of postproduction as the director works to get it done in time for its Sept. 27 festival premiere. In his ninth collaboration with Mr. Scorsese, Mr. De Niro plays the title character, Frank Sheeran, a hit man known as the Irishman who claimed he killed the Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, whose body has never been found, in 1975. He is joined in the cast by the "Goodfellas" and "Casino" alumnus Joe Pesci, who came out of retirement to play the mob boss Russell Bufalino. Al Pacino appearing for the first time in a film directed by Mr. Scorsese portrays Hoffa. Scott Stuber, the head of Netflix's film division, is leading talks for the streaming company with at least two large chains, AMC Theatres, which operates 11,000 screens worldwide, and Cineplex, the largest exhibitor in Canada, with over 1,600 screens, according to two people familiar with negotiations. Ted Sarandos, Netflix's chief content officer and Mr. Stuber's boss, has also taken part in the talks. The director has been pushing for a robust national theatrical release, two people with knowledge of Mr. Scorsese's thinking said. Adam Aron, the AMC chief executive, said in a statement, "Talks are underway with Netflix about our showing 'The Irishman' and other Netflix films, but the outcome of those conversations is not yet clear." AMC and Cineplex are negotiating with Netflix separately, the people familiar with the talks said. A crucial sticking point has been the major chains' insistence that the films they book must play in their theaters for close to three months while not being made available for streaming at the same time, which does not sit well with Netflix. Talks broke down in July, only to pick up again two weeks ago, the people said. Netflix, Mr. Scorsese and Cineplex declined to comment for this article. Because of the impasse over the three month theatrical window, Netflix has yet to give any of its films the kind of blockbuster theatrical releases that companies like AMC can provide. The streaming giant's reluctance to concern itself with weekend box office numbers reflects its laser focus on its main mission: delivering streaming video on demand to its 151 million subscribers worldwide. Having built itself into an entertainment powerhouse by keeping its subscribers interested and coming back for more, the company does not want to be distracted by the demands of the old style movie business, even as it makes deals with legendary filmmakers like Mr. Scorsese. "Netflix is in the subscriber happiness business," said Richard Greenfield, a tech and media analyst. "They need to attract more members and make current members happier. 'The Irishman' is really important." Many Netflix movies, like the Adam Sandler vehicle "Murder Mystery," which Netflix said had 78 million household views in its first four weeks, seem made for living room viewing. But Netflix has also come out with more ambitious offerings, like "Roma," the meditative black and white film from the director Alfonso Cuaron. "Roma" won praise from critics on its way to three Oscars this year, for best director, best cinematography and best foreign language film. For "Roma," Netflix went further, giving it a 21 day theatrical release at the independent and small chain theaters before its subscribers could watch it on devices or TV screens. Netflix has said there will be some kind of theatrical release for "The Irishman," but has so far resisted going much beyond the 21 days it granted "Roma," the people familiar with the talks said. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. When he agreed to make the film for Netflix, Mr. Scorsese was aware that a wide release was not guaranteed, but he chose the company because it was "actually making our movies, from a place of respect and love for cinema," he said in an email to The Times last year. The trailer for "The Irishman," released last month, has racked up millions of YouTube views, suggesting that it has greater commercial potential than "Roma." The potential box office revenue could be a boon for a company that has bet big on a single revenue stream, despite calls from Wall Street to diversify. Netflix stock fell by 12 percent last month after it reported its first decline in domestic subscribers since 2011. "While direct release of smaller budget films on Netflix makes economic sense, we believe franchise oriented films will need to include theatrical release on a large scale to optimize returns," the financial services company Barclays said in a January report. The coming Scorsese film also has a shot at the prize that eluded "Roma" despite Netflix's costly awards campaign on its behalf: the Academy Award for best picture. Oscar eligibility is not much of a factor in how Netflix handles the rollout. To qualify for the Academy Awards, a film must have a seven day run in a commercial theater in Los Angeles County, according to rules recently confirmed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' board of governors; it can even be shown on another platform at the same time. Still, there is an Academy contingent that may look askance at Netflix if it does not play by the old rules for a cinematic feature like "The Irishman." Despite its craving for Oscar gold, Netflix does not want to be distracted from its core business especially now that it will be challenged by the Walt Disney Company, which plans to unveil its Disney Plus streaming service Nov. 12, and Apple, which is starting its equivalent, Apple TV Plus, on an unspecified date this fall. Following those giants into the increasingly crowded digital video marketplace will be WarnerMedia and Comcast, among others. In an effort to stay ahead of its current and future rivals, Netflix spent 12 billion on original content in 2018. While the company has paid large sums to star television producers like Ryan Murphy, Shonda Rhimes and the "Game of Thrones" duo David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, it has not stinted on its movie division, which made 55 films last year, not counting documentaries and animated movies, and has brought aboard A list directors like Noah Baumbach, Ron Howard, Dee Rees, Steven Soderbergh and Guillermo del Toro. Even as it works to add subscribers, Netflix cannot afford to alienate top filmmakers. Mr. Stuber is mindful that the way to keep the talent happy is to get their work on the big screen. He recently bolstered the Netflix film arm by hiring two distribution executives from 21st Century Fox, Spencer Klein and Pablo Rico. AMC and other large chains worry that if they grant Netflix a shorter theatrical window, they will have to do the same for other studios. In his statement, Mr. Aron added that he would be "delighted" to show Netflix movies, but he had a caveat: "We can only do so, however, on terms that respect AMC's important and close relationships with our longstanding studio partners, including Disney, Warner Brothers, Universal, Sony, Paramount, Lionsgate and so many other filmmakers who are the lifeblood of our substantial business." Some Hollywood executives have said the theater chains must adapt if the cinematic experience is going to compete with the convenience of streaming. "Both the studios and the exhibitors have to look at every aspect of how we do business together and figure out different paradigms to move it forward," said Chris Aronson, the former chief distribution executive at Twentieth Century Fox. More than 95 percent of movies stop earning their keep in theaters at the 42 day mark, well short of the three month window demanded by major chains, according to Mr. Aronson. That suggests the need for change, he said. "The movie theaters feel that if they blink at all, it will all blow up," said Jeff Blake, the former chairman of worldwide marketing and distribution for Sony Pictures. Netflix's unwillingness to promise wide releases has come with a cost. The company lost out on the rights to "Crazy Rich Asians," the 2018 romantic comedy that grossed nearly 240 million at worldwide box offices. The director, Jon M. Chu, and the author of the novel it was based on, Kevin Kwan, decided to go with Warner Bros., saying they wanted the movie to play in as many theaters as possible. Netflix's stance has also put it at odds with the theatrical chain Regal, which said in a statement to The Times: "Currently, we are not in any discussion with Netflix on 'The Irishman' nor on any other movie. Of course, if Netflix will decide to respect the industry business model and release the movie with a proper theatrical window, we will be more than happy to discuss the booking of the movie in Regal theaters." Mr. Scorsese directed another film for Netflix, "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese," a playful documentary released simultaneously in select theaters and on the streaming service in June, but he plans to make his next film, "Killers of the Flower Moon," starring Leonardo DiCaprio, at Paramount. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Oprah Winfrey has dropped contributions by the hip hop mogul Russell Simmons from her latest book, its publisher said, after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct, including rape. "The Wisdom of Sundays," a spiritual advice book that has been on best seller lists since its publication last fall, features selections from conversations between Ms. Winfrey and her guests on "Super Soul Sunday," a TV series on the OWN network. The words of motivational speakers, religious leaders and authors including Deepak Chopra and Elizabeth Gilbert were excerpted. Mr. Simmons was featured in passages describing the impact meditation has had on his life, as well as musing on the soul, abundance and wealth; future editions of the book, available in stores starting in February, will not contain those segments, Marlena Bittner, a spokeswoman for the publisher, Flatiron Books, said. The publisher made the announcement in response to an inquiry from The New York Times. Ms. Bittner said the decision to remove the pages was made jointly by Ms. Winfrey and the publisher, but declined to say when they made that choice. Ms. Winfrey has lately been a vocal advocate of the MeToo movement, making a fiery speech promoting Time's Up, the Hollywood initiative to combat sexual harassment and discrimination, at the Golden Globes in early January. In the book, she also writes about being a victim and coming to terms with her own abuse by learning to confront it. "You can't win," she wrote, "if you're fighting the truth." Mr. Simmons has been the subject of intensifying misconduct allegations since last November; he has denied all the allegations but stepped down from his businesses and foundation soon after they were made public. Last week, a California woman, Jennifer Jarosik, filed a 5 million lawsuit against him, alleging that he raped her in Los Angeles in 2016. On Tuesday, Ms. Jarosik appeared on "Megyn Kelly Today" and described the incident as well as an earlier assault by Mr. Simmons in New York. She plans to press criminal charges in both cities, her attorney said. The police in New York began an investigation into the allegations against Mr. Simmons last year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO My Name Is Adam By Translated by Humphrey Davies Adam Dannoun, the protagonist of 's powerful new novel, calls himself a child of the ghetto. He does not mean the Warsaw ghetto although, growing up in the newly established state of Israel, he allows his university colleagues to make that assumption. He means the "ghetto" of the Palestinian town of Lydda, created by Jewish forces who uprooted tens of thousands of Palestinians on a death march in one of the bloodiest massacres of the 1948 Nakba. (That term, which Arabs use for the founding of the Jewish state, means "catastrophe.") Adam, a baby at the time, was one of those who remained. Through layers and levels of storytelling we are in familiar Khoury territory here, moving in and out of various narrations "Children of the Ghetto" ponders the silence of those who stayed in Lydda. To survive in the new state they lived "as invisible people." Why were they silent to avoid being killed? Because they had given up hope? Or because what they had gone through was unspeakable, an experience for which "silence is more eloquent than words"? Our first narrator, "," meets a falafel seller in New York whose nationality Israeli or Palestinian is unclear. This is Adam Dannoun, and the ambiguity is deliberate. After Adam commits suicide, his notebooks fall into Khoury's hands. Resisting his desire to plagiarize them, Khoury introduces the work as part aborted novel, part incoherent autobiography, which "mixes ... truth and imagination." We enter the notebooks. Adam begins with the poet Waddah al Yaman, who died silently in a coffer, hiding from his lover's husband. There is no way of knowing whether Waddah chose silence to protect his lover, or out of despair that love had died. For Adam, this makes Waddah a "cosmic metaphor" for the Palestinian Nakba. But when, in New York, Adam encounters a figure from his past, he abandons metaphors and turns his narration inward. He seeks to "write the unadorned truth, stripped of all symbols." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Facebook is taking its battle against fake news to Britain ahead of general elections next month. The social network published a series of advertisements in newspapers in Britain on Monday, giving advice to its millions of users in the country on how to spot misinformation online. It also said it had removed tens of thousands of possibly fake accounts in Britain, and had tweaked its algorithms in the country to reduce the amount of misinformation and spam that people will see in their Facebook news feeds. Despite the Silicon Valley giant's increased efforts to clamp down on how misinformation is spread, policy makers, journalists and others in Europe remain skeptical about the ability of Facebook and other technology companies to fight such digital falsities. Some politicians in the region have already called for hefty fines against social media networks when they fail to police false reports and hate speech online. And several European publishers have balked at participating in Facebook's fact checking efforts, saying it is the company's responsibility not theirs to determine what is false or misleading. "Facebook must recognize that it alone will remain responsible for what happens on its platform," Gruner Jahr, a German publisher, said in February when it declined to help Facebook with its fact checking initiatives. "Facebook must be prepared to immediately prevent the dissemination of news that has been clearly identified as untrue." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The American public collectively seems unable to break or divert our attention, even when we know it may be harmful to those who seek it. That seems to be the case with the recent fixation on Kanye West and his dubious presidential campaign and very public mental health breakdown. In an excellent essay, Andre Gee argued that Mr. West's personal turmoil isn't our entertainment (his wife argued similarly in an Instagram post on Wednesday), though many are treating it that way. Mr. Gee makes an important distinction that Mr. West shouldn't be coddled or absolved because of his behavior, but that we should not become complicit and feed the drama by indulging his campaign or gawking at and dunking on his manic tweeting. But because Mr. West is a towering figure in pop culture and a masterful attention seeker, we give in and give no thought to the consequences. "True resistance," the artist Jenny Odell wrote in her book "How to Do Nothing," is "the ability not just to withdraw attention but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it." What if the camp that believes cancel culture is an overhyped boogeyman followed Ms. Odell's advice and reframed the debate so that it centered more around the issues that matter to them: a more just, inclusive, equitable discourse? What does that even look like? What if we redirected our attention based solely on the consequences? Instead of constantly amplifying arguments we think are unworthy (simply because it feels good to mock them), what if we choose not to give them oxygen? Why not reframe the debate and set the terms of the conversation? If we want to talk about fired newspaper editors, then how about focusing on this stat: In the first six months of 2020, more than 11,000 newsroom jobs have been lost, according to Axios. We could continually amplify the work of journalists like Margaret Sullivan, who are sounding alarm bells about the imminent death of local news. We can argue about polarization of the Twitter discourse on the terms of those who spend all day glued to it, or we can focus on the polarization and alienation that come when communities lose their local news outlets. Want to talk about illiberal chilling effects and stifled speech? How about the global attack on the independent press, from Hungary to the Philippines? We can opine and argue with and stigmatize those who refuse to wear masks, or we can direct that time and energy toward empathetic work to understand the reasons Americans are choosing to ignore public health guidance and work to bring them onboard. We can engage and amplify essays and open letters perfectly calibrated to provoke rage, or we can bestow our attention on thoughtful, often overlooked perspectives like this one. We say we want to read and to elevate diverse voices, but we don't always vote with our eyeballs and our shares. Maybe this all sounds like a rendition of the cliche "Don't feed the trolls." Perhaps. But it's also hard to ignore the fact that the attention hijackers seem to be thriving off the attention they've generated. I could not imagine a worse outcome for the free speech defenders than for their open letters and blogs to be lost in the algorithmic sea of Facebook and Twitter, buried in a news cycle awash in chaos. The same goes for the president. And diverting attention from Mr. West's antics toward a meaningful conversation about mental health would be far more productive. Diversion, though, requires a short term sacrifice, often in the form of engagement. The media and popular culture thrive off attention hijackers. My Times colleague John Herrman described the phenomenon in a 2014 essay in The Awl, arguing that such spectacles generate "an enormous surplus of attention, much more than news can meet" and that "the internet's craving for sex and humiliation is effectively infinite. This throws the Content industry into a frantic generative mode." A self perpetuating attention machine. Throwing a wrench in its gears means not living off the output. That, as any columnist will tell you, is scary. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
IF you are among the multitudes of drivers recently baffled by an encounter with the basic controls of a new car, you're in good company. That sometimes confused cohort would include people like myself, whose livelihoods as automotive journalists depend on knowing about the latest models in showrooms. The confusion caused by fancy new, not always intuitive, features and functions has made headlines in recent days, on news that the vagaries of selecting the transmission's park position may have been a factor in the death of a young actor who was crushed by his 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee when it rolled backward down a driveway. Typically, the "how does this thing work" impulse does not lead to such disastrous outcomes. And certainly there's no shame in being flummoxed when trying to enter an address into a dashboard navigation system, or linking a Bluetooth smartphone for hands free operation. The Hydra Matic system was explained in a brochure. But shifting the automatic transmission into the desired gear didn't use to require a learning curve, as it too often does these days. (Pity the parking lot valet, who must confidently guide all varieties of today's exotic cars safely into port.) When General Motors gave the world fully automatic transmissions in 1939 with its Hydra Matic, the system used a shift lever on the steering column that clearly labeled each gear. It became the standard approach for decades. Generally speaking, the way we control our cars was for a long time pretty much a settled matter: A steering wheel governs direction. A pedal applies the brakes. Speed is regulated by an accelerator pedal. And a gear shifter puts the vehicle into Park, Reverse, Neutral, Drive or Low or PRNDL (pronounced per NUN dul) as it came to be known. That's not always a good thing, especially for those who drive a wide variety of new vehicles. I've found myself reaching for the phantom shift handle of a Lincoln MKC when I really should have been stabbing at the electronic push buttons that are placed in a vertical array on the dashboard. This design was the subject of a recall to change the position of the starter button, after complaints surfaced that a driver might accidentally shut off the engine while adjusting the radio. Likewise, it's taken me an extra beat to remember that a Mercedes Benz model uses a stalk on the steering column to choose drive. I've had trouble recalling which way to spin the rotary gearshift knob that rises from the console of a Jaguar. Using the electronic parking brake in new models, with their various designs, can require a moment of thought that was not needed when straightforward floor pedals or levers were typical. The plausible assumption by automakers is that owners particularly the gamer generation will adapt, learning how to use the systems in short order. That's probably reasonable for nonessential tasks like programming an audio system, just as drivers in the 1950s readily mastered Chrysler's dashboard push buttons, Edsel's Teletouch controls in the steering wheel hub or the 1956 Packard's push button cluster on a separate pod attached to the steering column. In the 1960s, it was a desire for a sportier image that combined bucket seats with the floor or console shift for automatic transmissions. Modern electronic versions include takeoffs on the joystick controllers of gaming devices as in the 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee and the increasingly common shifter paddles that enable upshifts and downshifts without the driver's hands leaving the steering wheel. The urge to market a new feature, as well as potential savings in parts and manufacturing costs, figure into automakers' offering of disparate gear selector methods. Inevitably, though, this can clash with the fundamentals of ergonomics: Good sense design principles have been cast aside as car controls made the transition from mechanical actuation to virtual engagement. Gone is the reassuring feedback of a confirming click when the transmission shifter engages the park position, or the comforting closure of yanking a parking brake lever to its stopping point. This disconnect in what's known as the human machine interface is much on the mind of industrial designers like Tucker Viemeister, whose work includes creating objects like the OXO Good Grip kitchen tools and Serengeti sunglasses. "It's good to have a physical, tactile interface like a gearshift knob as a physical connection," he said in a telephone interview. "A push button is not as good as a handle." Mr. Viemeister, whose father worked on the design of the Tucker automobile, likes to think beyond ergonomics the relationship between objects and human bodies to a discipline he calls psychonomics, or the link between products and minds. Properly designed, a product becomes intuitive, like operating the hand brakes of a bicycle. Natural, muscle memory actions result from predictable feedback, and let people cope with varying situations. "Say you're backing out of a driveway," he offered as an example to make the case that familiarity is vital to safe operation. "You're looking back, in a different orientation. How do you relate in that scenario?'' I'm not the only one who sometimes finds the challenges of cool new controls to be distracting. In a review of the 2016 Acura MDX, Car and Driver magazine found the push button transmission controls, mounted on the center console, off putting. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Ever since the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of the narcotic painkiller OxyContin for certain children in August, it has faced unabated criticism from lawmakers and public officials who are wrestling with devastating rates of prescription opioid abuse in their communities. Last week, Hillary Rodham Clinton brought the issue to the presidential race, calling the agency's action "absolutely incomprehensible." The crux of the issue is whether the agency's approval will lead to more prescriptions for OxyContin in young patients. For years, the powerful long acting drug has been prescribed off label to very sick children in severe pain from cancer or spinal fusion surgery. (Doctors can prescribe an approved drug to anyone and for any use they see fit regardless of specifications on the label.) The agency's approval means those doctors will finally have "information about how to do it appropriately," like dosage recommendations, said Dr. Stephen Ostroff, the agency's acting commissioner, in an interview. "We recognize this is a very nuanced issue," said Dr. Ostroff, when asked about Mrs. Clinton's recent comments. "It needs to be understood in the context of why this was done." Dr. Kathleen A. Neville, a pediatric oncologist at Arkansas Children's Hospital, routinely treats children with unremitting pain caused by cancer or sickle cell anemia. Her patients are the kind the F.D.A. envisioned would benefit from OxyContin, despite its "risks of addictions, abuse and misuse" as a warning on the new label says. Dr. Neville, who said she had no financial ties to makers of painkillers, applauded the agency's approval. "Just because OxyContin has been abused or prescribed inappropriately doesn't mean we should deprive the children who need the drug," she said, adding it is "our obligation to have the best level of evidence for its use in children." As for people who say no child should ever be prescribed OxyContin, she does not mince words: "Come be one of my kids whose pelvis gets eaten out by cancer." The new label specifies that OxyContin should be used only for children 11 or older in severe pain who have already been on an opioid for at least five days. That means it is not supposed to be prescribed to children as a first line opioid painkiller, and it is not meant for short term pain, like the kind that plagues teenagers after wisdom teeth are pulled. Some drug industry observers are skeptical that Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, shares the F.D.A.'s rationale. "Manufacturers don't pursue regulatory approvals simply to provide prescribers and patients with additional information," said Dr. G. Caleb Alexander, an internist and a director of the Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. "This approval allows Purdue Pharma to market and promote this product for use in children, and the obvious concern is this approval will change the pattern of use." In an emailed statement this week, Robert Josephson, a spokesman for Purdue Pharma, said, "We share Secretary Clinton's concerns about opioid overuse and abuse, which is why Purdue will not promote the new pediatric safety and dosing information for OxyContin to pediatricians or other physicians." In 2007, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty in federal court to criminal charges that they misled doctors, patients and regulators about OxyContin's potential to be abused. Some of the criticism stems from the way in which the F.D.A. made the approval. The agency routinely convenes an independent advisory committee to hear from outside experts on matters that are of significant public interest or are potentially controversial. In 2012, a committee discussed another long lasting opioid pain medication, Zohydro ER, and voted, 11 to 2, against its approval. Still, as it can do, the agency went against the panel and approved the drug. No such committee was called to discuss and vote on the pediatric approval of OxyContin. "I'm almost certain an advisory committee would have voted against a pediatric indication for OxyContin," said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, the executive director of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing. Dr. Alexander of the drug safety center, who is the chairman of another F.D.A. committee, said that "it's hard to imagine any scientific advisory board would have recommended approval of OxyContin for this purpose in the current environment." The agency asked Purdue Pharma to conduct studies as part of a broader effort to accrue evidence about how drugs work in children differently from in adults. "We did the right thing here," said Dr. Janet Woodcock, the director of the F.D.A.'s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. "There are children in need. It would be unethical not to have the right dose information." She continued, "It has been a real scandal that children in the United States receive drugs without proper evidence of their dosing and safety." Vickie Buenger said she was "really happy" that the F.D.A. laid out the right dosing for OxyContin, so that other families would not have to rely on a doctor's "best guess," as her family did. Her daughter Erin had cancerous tumors in her abdomen, pressing on her spine. Yet, in 2009, the year she died at 11, Erin wanted to go to school. OxyContin, which controlled her round the clock pain for 12 hour stretches, made it possible. "She couldn't lift her head, when she wasn't under pain medication," Ms. Buenger said. The F.D.A. has also required Purdue Pharma to conduct postapproval studies. One study requires annual reporting for three years of adverse events like respiratory depression, overdoses, accidental exposure in patients, ages 11 to 17. A comprehensive analysis of these side effects and medication errors is required. The company will also have to report nationally representative data on the volume of OxyContin prescriptions for children younger than 17, which types of clinicians are prescribing OxyContin and for what conditions. That way, Dr. Ostroff said, "we can have assurances that it's being used in pediatric patients based on the labeling indication. In effect, this will give us much better information regarding how this drug is being used in children than we would ever have gotten through prior practices in off label fashion." Dr. Ostroff and Dr. Woodcock promised that some of the data would be made public. That postmarketing data could prove revelatory and useful. "It's not a given, but it could help us better address the problem of prescription drug abuse in adolescents," said Dr. Neville, who is the chairwoman of the Committee on Drugs for the American Academy of Pediatrics. At the very least, she said, the F.D.A. will know if some doctors are inappropriately "prescribing OxyContin for pulled muscles." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The N.F.L. on Sunday ended months of uncertainty by officially announcing Maroon 5 and the rappers Travis Scott and Big Boi as the lineup for this year's Super Bowl halftime show. In an indication of how fraught the debate around the high profile performance has become, Scott released a statement on Sunday announcing that he and the N.F.L. will partner on a 500,000 donation to the social justice group Dream Corps a move that seemed to be aimed at stemming a backlash from groups that have criticized the football league's policies. Sources familiar with the N.F.L.'s Super Bowl plans had confirmed the rock band Maroon 5 as the headliner as long ago as September, and Scott emerged last month as a reported addition to the Feb. 3 halftime performance at Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta. Big Boi, the newest name on the bill, is a member of the Atlanta rap group Outkast. But the run up to this year's halftime announcement had turned into a skirmish over sports and politics, as artists and others criticized the N.F.L. over its treatment of Colin Kaepernick and other players who have taken a knee during the national anthem in protest of racial injustice. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The Google Translate site can convert pasted sections of text, uploaded documents or entire websites when you enter the URL into the box on the page. It can also translate speech. The mobile app version (available for Android and iOS) has even more features, with the ability to translate bilingual conversations, text in images and handwriting. The Android version of Google Translate now works within any app on the device so you do not have to paste text in and out of another program to convert it. Microsoft's Bing Translator page converts chunks of pasted text from a site, too. You can also paste a site's URL into the first box on the Bing Translator page and choose English as the destination language. When you hit the Enter key, the site provides a new link in the translation box that you can click to go read the entire site in English. Windows 10 users can use the Microsoft Translator add on for the Edge browser to instantly translate web pages, and a Microsoft Translator app for Android and iOS devices translates bilingual conversations and foreign language text in pictures. Microsoft's Skype program for video, audio and text chat has its own Translator tool you can use with the Skype software on Windows, Mac and Linux systems to translate real time spoken conversations in eight languages. Stand alone mobile apps and software for language translation are also available around the web. Keep in mind that the instant software translation between languages may not be perfect or as nuanced as what an experienced human interpreter can provide, but you should be able to get a general idea of what the web page or story is about. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
An affair shaped Joanie Lockhart's childhood. Now an affair of her own has upended her marriage. If the man involved is to be believed, that's more than just human nature it's science. The first episode of "The Affair" to take place entirely through the adult Joanie's point of view, this installment picked up right where we last saw her, at the grave of her father, Cole. There she meets E.J. ( Michael Braun ), a chatty, nosy scientist investigating the cemetery for his own reasons. (It's unclear if there's anyone left in climate ravaged Future Montauk but scientists.) E.J. is an epigeneticist studying the cyclical effects of trauma from one generation to the next. "Children of parents who have experienced trauma are more likely to be triggered by their own stressors than children of untraumatized parents," he explains after giving Joanie a ride. (His ebullience seems to flummox her right out of worrying about getting in a car with a strange man.) A scientist with his interests would naturally gravitate to the Lockhart family, with its history of murder, suicide and accidental death, with Joanie's mother's death among them. Ah, but to which category did her death truly belong? When Joanie flips through the police file at the abandoned station, the information is all a blur. But when E.J. pops up unexpectedly at her father's house to show her the super moon lighting up the sky over the ocean, she uses meteorological data provided by her smart glasses and discovers that the low tide the night of her mother's death would have made it difficult for her to drown if she'd simply jumped in to kill herself. Only later, after flipping through her father's files, is she reminded in a dream that the handsome ex Marine Ben Cruz (Ramon Rodriguez), with whom her father appeared to be obsessed, had been hanging around her mother before she died and may well have murdered her. All of this takes place surrounding two sexual encounters between Joanie and E.J. During the first, E.J. stops everything short when he realizes that Joanie's violent sexual proclivities may mean she inherited her parents' trauma after all. The second takes place after Joanie admits to her husband, Paul (Lyriq Bent), that she has been serially unfaithful, seemingly to torpedo their relationship. According to E.J., this kind of behavior, and the despair that drives it, stems from never properly grieving the people she loses. In a way, this episode feels like "The Affair" mourning its departed stars. Seeing Joshua Jackson's open, soulful face as Cole in flashbacks; hearing Ruth Wilson's ragged, bottomed out voice as Alison in voice over; watching Joanie wrestle with her memories of both parents as if those memories were living things she must defeat in order to survive ... all of it draws attention to the enormity of the contribution those actors and their characters made to the show, and the void left in their wake. After half a season of the Solloways and their circle of lovers, friends and family, the Lockharts finally get their due, and it's long overdue. The show runs a major risk in putting its missing pieces front and center, of course: It highlights how "The Affair" is no longer about half the people it used to be about. If you miss them, well, you're going to miss them even more after an episode devoted to how magnetic and fascinating they were. And the shortcuts required to bring them back to the forefront are noticeable. E.J., for example, feels like a plot contrivance as much as a character: His mile a minute garrulousness and his job as an epigeneticist both feel designed to deliver as much exposition as possible in the shortest amount of time. That he and Joanie jump into bed together the same day they meet at her father's grave site a connection that feels forced is partially explained by her serial infidelity. But a more convincing reason is simply that the writers, for whatever reason, decided that they needed this guy in order for Joanie to get to the bottom of her mother's murder. The same can be said of Joanie's use of futuristic technology to determine the tide was too low the night her mother died for her to have committed suicide. Is that really something only fancy sci fi glasses could determine? Wouldn't the timing of Alison's death and the weather and tide conditions at the time have been taken into consideration by the authorities of the day? I'm happy that Joanie is on a path to the truth, but her first steps along the way have been shaky. I'm more compelled by Joanie's depression; Anna Paquin's work never feels more raw and convincing than when she spills her guts to E.J. about the depths of her mental distress. The way she speaks about her constant thoughts of suicide, about her self destructive coping mechanisms, about how in her zeal to be nothing like her mother she has become just like her mother ... even though Joanie is a relative stranger to us, it still hurts to hear. It hurts worse when you realize how much of it is tied to the deteriorating state of the planet. Joanie has a life that revolves around death: the death of Montauk as an inhabitable place, the death of the Long Island coast as the sand washes away in storm after storm, the death of the expensive indoor garden her family uses to generate oxygen, the death of her children as they grow up to breathe the toxic air she is powerless to purify. How can anyone be expected to heal from grief while surrounded by so much more of it? None When Joanie pulls up the tidal data from the night of her mother's death, we see a date: Oct. 13, 2021. This means that everything we have seen over the past two seasons of the show (at least) takes place in the near future. This is probably the kind of thing you could piece together by tracking the ages of the Lockhart and Solloway children over the years, but it threw me for a loop nonetheless. None Catalina Sandino Moreno shows up as Cole's ex wife Luisa, now some 30 years older. Luisa was an interesting, underutilized character, and it's good to see her again, even if it's under a layer of less than convincing age makeup. None Joanie and Paul's two little girls are adopted, which explains why she, even as a mother, might refer to a planned pregnancy as a "carbon bomb." None Sometimes you can boil down an entire slew of anxieties into a single image. Joanie discovering that her garden's strawberries are rotten while her mental health, her marriage and her planet collapse is one of those times. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
In troubled times we often find some great book, or work of art, or film that helps put everything in context. And I'm a little worried that right now for Donald Trump it's "Mutiny on the Bounty." "Tell the Democrat Governors that 'Mutiny On The Bounty' was one of my all time favorite movies," Trump tweeted recently. "A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain. Too easy!" The Democratic governors' sin appeared to be their attempt to work together on a de escalation of our coronavirus stay at home rules. Everybody is obsessing about getting back to some semblance of normal. Most people who have been studying the situation think that would require a ton of testing and an elaborate system to isolate the infected. However, one person mulled over the situation and thought of "Mutiny on the Bounty." Now "Mutiny" is the story of sailors who rise up against a cruel, greedy and possibly crazy Captain Bligh, setting him adrift on a rowboat. A little weird that our commander in chief would be so enraptured. But so very Trumpian that he appeared to have no clue Bligh was the villain. Actual plot is not a presidential priority. Trump loved "Gone With the Wind," which I believe he remembers as the story of a sassy Southern spitfire who becomes the third wife of a handsome Yankee patent medicine salesman turned Confederate talk show host. The shelter in place rules certainly have fomented some rebellion in right wing circles, and Trump has had a rather shifting perspective. For a while he wanted to be totally in charge. Then he wanted the governors to take over. Then he began egging on protesters who want to force the governors to drop restrictions. Some governors didn't need any urging at all. Remember Kristi Noem in South Dakota? She spurned the stay at home drill as an exercise in "herd mentality." (Nobody knows herds like South Dakota.) When employees at a pork processing plant came down with the coronavirus, the governor preferred to talk about how she'd been working with Jared Kushner Jared! on a plan to test the power of Trump's favorite corona cure, hydroxychloroquine. ("It's an exciting day.") Since then, hydroxychloroquine's been flunking its tests and even Trump no longer talks about it. South Dakota, meanwhile, now has 1,858 coronavirus cases. Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp, is trying to drop as many constraints as possible, even as the state's list of coronavirus victims ratcheted up to 20,000, with 838 deaths. Kemp only started shelter in place earlier this month at which point he also confided that he'd had no idea people who don't look sick could still be spreading the virus. But that doesn't mean he's not qualified! Any more than Donald Trump doesn't deserve to teach cinematic history. Thanks to Kemp, on Friday Georgia will become open for businesses like gyms, tattoo parlors and bowling alleys. Even Trump doesn't think it's a good idea. And nobody can possibly discuss this without asking what convinced Kemp his state was in desperate need of access to tattoo artists. Really, governors, think about this stuff. You do not want to go down in history like Ron DeSantis of Florida, who will be remembered forever as the guy who decided professional wrestling was an essential business that needed to be continued during the shutdown. It'll probably be in his obituary. The other day at a press conference, DeSantis did attempt to set a good example by donning a face mask. Unfortunately, he couldn't figure out how to put it on. This might be the right time to mention that more than 4,000 Floridians have been hospitalized with the coronavirus. And that even if the rate starts to drop, it'll just come back again unless we really change the way we're handling the infections. "The thing to focus on is whether people want to avoid a second wave," said Danielle Allen, lead author of a report by more than 45 experts in health, science and economics for Harvard's Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Gabby Jones for The New York Times Trump has said that he wants to let the governors make their own decisions "because from a constitutional standpoint, that's the way it should be done." That certainly would have kept him off the playing field, except for the part where he added, "If I disagreed, I would overrule a governor, and I have that right to do it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Credit...Whitney Curtis for The New York Times More Wealth, More Jobs, but Not for Everyone: What Fuels the Backlash on Trade These costs have proved overwhelming in communities that depend on industry for sustenance, vastly exceeding what economists anticipated. Policy makers under the thrall of neoliberal economic philosophy put stock in the notion that markets could be trusted to bolster social welfare. In doing so, they failed to plan for the trauma that has accompanied the benefits of trade. When millions of workers lost paychecks to foreign competition, they lacked government supports to cushion the blow. As a result, seething anger is upending politics in Europe and North America. In the United States, the Republican presidential aspirant Donald J. Trump has tapped into the rage of communities reeling from factory closings, denouncing trade with China and Mexico as a mortal threat to American prosperity. The Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, has done an about face, opposing an enormous free trade deal spanning the Pacific that she supported while secretary of state. In Britain, the vote in a June referendum to abandon the European Union was in part a rebuke of the establishment, from laborers who blame trade for declining pay. Across the European Union, populist movements have gained adherents as an outraged response to globalization, imperiling the future of major trade deals, including a pact with the United States and another with Canada. "The trade policy of the European Union is paralyzed," said the Italian minister of economic development, Carlo Calenda, during a recent interview in Rome. "This is a tragic situation." The anti trade backlash, building for years, has become explosive because the global economy has arrived at a sobering period of reckoning. Years of investment manias and financial machinations that powered the job market have lost potency, exposing longstanding downsides of trade that had previously been masked by illusive prosperity. The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression has left banks in Europe and the United States reluctant to lend. Real estate bonanzas from Spain to Southern California gave way to a disastrous wave of foreclosures, eliminating construction jobs. China's slowdown has diminished its appetite for raw materials, sowing unemployment from the iron ore mines of Brazil to the coal pits of Indonesia. Trade did not cause the breakdown in economic growth. Indeed, trade has helped generate what growth remains. But the pervasive stagnation has left little cover for those set back by globalization. The North American Free Trade Agreement, or Nafta, exposed workers in the United States to competition with Mexico, but its passage came in the mid 1990s, just as investment was pouring into the web, creating demand for a range of manufactured goods office furniture for Silicon Valley coders, trucks for the couriers delivering e commerce wares. China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 unleashed a far larger shock, but a construction boom absorbed many laid off workers. The dot com boom is now a distant memory. The housing bubble burst. Much of the global economy is operating free of artificial enhancements. Lower skilled workers confront bleak opportunities and intense competition, especially in the United States. Even as recent data shows middle class Americans are finally starting to share in the gains from the recovery, incomes for many remain below where they were a decade ago. "The debates that we are having about globalization and the adjustment cost, these are the conversations that we should have been having when we did Nafta, and when China entered the W.T.O.," said Chad P. Bown, a trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. "There were people talking about these things, but they weren't taken very seriously at the time. There's a lot of policy regret." "We do need to have these trade agreements," Mr. Bown said, "but we do need to be cognizant that there are going to be losers, and we need to have policies to address them." But the fear and anger over trade are well founded. Vast numbers of laborers have lost jobs as imported goods from low wage countries arrived. Mills have closed, while strip malls fill with dollar stores and payday lenders. In the fallout, the United States maintained limits on unemployment benefits, leaving American workers vulnerable to plummeting fortunes. Social welfare systems have limited the toll in Europe, but economic growth has been weak, so jobs are scarce. All the while, automation has grown in sophistication and reach. From 2000 to 2010, the United States lost some 5.6 million manufacturing jobs, by the government's calculation. Only 13 percent of those job losses can be explained by trade, according to an analysis by the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University in Indiana. The rest were casualties of automation or the result of tweaks to factory operations that enabled more production with less labor. American factories produced more goods last year than ever, by many indications. Yet they did so while employing about 12.3 million workers roughly the same number as in 2009, when production was roughly three fourths what it is today. At APM Terminals, where Mr. Duijzers works, a symphony of motion greets every arriving container ship. Cranes rev, lifting containers. But people are scarce. "Robots Running Things in Rotterdam," proclaims an article on the company website. "Of the 74 machines operating in the yard, 63 run on their own with no human intervention." A blue Steelworkers union T shirt hugs his burly frame. His calloused hands attest to years of physical labor. Suddenly, his 2,000 biweekly paycheck shrank to a 425 a week unemployment check, plus some severance. In July, the unemployment checks stopped. He had reached the six month limit. He interviewed for a job as a supervisor at an Amazon warehouse, but it required computer skills that he lacked. So he took a position as a "fulfillment associate," working the night shift, pulling products off warehouse shelves and putting them in boxes. It paid 13 an hour a little more than half his United States Steel wages. His first night on the job, his knees gave out. He took painkillers. The next morning he could barely stand up. He called in and said he would not be coming back. He has an interview coming up for a forklift driving position at a warehouse. It pays 12 an hour, another step down. "I had to tell my son that he can't go back to McKendree for his junior year," Mr. Morrison says, straining to choke back tears. "He has to go to community college." He swallows hard. Tears emerge from the corners of his eyes. "It just crushes you," he says. "I didn't get to go to college. I wanted my kids to succeed. When you see the disappointment in your kids' eyes. ..." When Dan Simmons started working at the mill 38 years ago, talk centered on how to make steel. These days, he spends his days at a job for which he feels little prepared de facto social worker. Mr. Simmons is the president of the Steelworkers Local 1899, which represents 1,250 workers at the Granite City plant. On a recent morning, only about 375 of his people are employed. He sits at his desk inside the brick union hall, greeting laid off workers who arrive seeking help. One man wants guidance scanning online job listings. Another has hit a snag with his unemployment benefits. A night earlier, Mr. Simmons took a call on his cellphone from the niece of a high school classmate, a laid off millworker. He had shot himself to death, leaving behind two children. Trade Adjustment Assistance, a government program started in 1962 and expanded significantly a dozen years later, is supposed to support workers whose jobs are casualties of overseas competition. The program pays for job training. But Mr. Simmons rolls his eyes at mention of the program. Training has almost become a joke. Skills often do not translate from old jobs to new. Many workers just draw a check while they attend training and then remain jobless. A 2012 assessment of the program prepared for the Labor Department found that four years after completing training, only 37 percent of those employed were working in their targeted industries. Many of those enrolled had lower incomes than those who simply signed up for unemployment benefits and looked for other work. European workers have fared better. In wealthy countries like Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, unemployment benefits, housing subsidies and government provided health care are far more generous than in the United States. In the five years after a job loss, an American family of four that is eligible for housing assistance receives average benefits equal to 25 percent of the unemployed person's previous wages, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. For a similar family in the Netherlands, benefits reach 70 percent. If the mill does not start up again soon, Mr. Hahn is thinking about doing likewise. "Move down to the holler," he said. "I can always eat squirrel and rabbit." In China, farmers whose land has been turned into factories are making more steel than the world needs. In America, idled steelworkers are contemplating how to live off the land. The Bounty of the Sea Rotterdam has a history of looking across the water and finding things that can be turned into money. In the 16th century, it was herring. A burgeoning fleet set sail in pursuit. Merchants began salting and drying the catch in barrels for an emerging export trade. By the 17th century, local shipyards were clattering away, constructing vessels for the Dutch East India Company as it plied the spice routes to Southeast Asia. As waterways linking the port to the industrial communities of the Rhine were deepened and channelized, German automobiles and machinery began flowing through Rotterdam on the way to the rest of the planet. Offices filled with law firms, insurance agents and logistics companies. "The fortunes of this country have been built on trade," said Wouter Jacobs, a transportation economist at Erasmus University Rotterdam. "It's our lifeline." Yet even here, unease has entered the conversation. Jacob van der Vis is paid to promote trade. An adviser on international business for the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce, he advertises innovations playing out at the port. He speaks of trade with China as a golden opportunity. But Mr. van der Vis is skeptical of the enormous trade deal being negotiated between the United States and the European Union, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, better known as T.T.I.P. He singles out a provision that would enable multinational companies to sue governments for compensation when regulations dent their profits. Esso, a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil, the American petroleum company, has operations in the Netherlands. Suppose the government went ahead with plans to limit drilling to protect the environment? "They could sue the Dutch state," he fumed. "We are not so sure in the Netherlands whether we want to give the multinationals so much power. We are a trading country, but it's not always that trade should prevail against quality of life." Out at the docks, the longshoremen fret about robots. On a recent afternoon, the Mette Maersk, a Danish flagged behemoth, sat tethered at APM Terminals. Some 18,000 shipping containers are stacked like children's blocks on a deck longer than three football fields, bearing auto parts, scrap metal, electronics any conceivable thing made on one continent and sold on another. Robotic arms grip containers, lift them and deposit them on deck with thunderous rumbles. Trucks drive themselves. Yet to absorb this scene and conclude that robots are about to render humanity jobless is to miss something vital. At offices a few miles away, coders are designing the software powering the automated port system, earning wages they distribute through the economy. For the longshoremen still employed, automation has tamed their work. John Arkenbout remembers working through ceaseless wind and drizzle when he started at the port 25 years ago. He lifted huge bricks from a pile and dropped them into rope sacks that a crane operator lifted skyward. He saw three people die one crushed by a truck, two flattened by wayward containers. Now many longshoremen sit in glass fronted offices set back from the docks, controlling robotic arms via computer terminals. "Before, it was physically taxing," Mr. Arkenbout, 51, said. "Now it's more mental." Most longshoremen earn about 50,000 euros a year, or 56,000. Mr. Arkenbout works a maximum of 40 hours a week. But he sees the robots becoming more sophisticated. He hears from union leadership that as many as 800 jobs could be eliminated by 2020. The union held a rare strike in January, winning job guarantees while robots are phased in gradually. But labor is playing defense. The robots will win in the end, because robots never strike. Robots improve with time. Mr. Arkenbout scoffs at the notion that automation and trade are separate. The shipping companies are deploying robots to cut costs. Trade deals, immigrant labor, automation: As Mr. Arkenbout sees it, these are all just instruments wielded in pursuit of the same goal paying him less so corporations can keep more. "When they don't need me anymore," he said, "I'm nothing." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
"Darling, it's better down where it's wetter," sang the calypso crab to the fishtailed heroine of Disney's "The Little Mermaid" in 1989, hymning the joys of ocean floor habitation. Nearly 30 years later, another set of aquatic creatures, wearing homemade tulle seaweed and sequin scales, have shown up to acknowledge that life under the sea isn't so great these days. Then again, is life all that great anywhere on this dangerous planet? Does it harbor anything like a snug, secure place to call home? As the performers in the endearingly amateur "Little Mermaid" style musical pageant now at the Wild Project warble (a tad raggedly), imperfection and uncertainty are everywhere. So begins "Of Government," Alex Borinsky's seriously shaggy (scaly?) fish story of a play, which is enacted by a delightful all female ensemble of odd women out, and directed by Jeremy Bloom. But don't let yourself feel too at home with that community style underwater fantasy environment, charming though it may be. For no sooner does our latter day mermaid finish her aria of farewell than this aqueous dream world is dismantled before our eyes. (All of Carolyn Mraz's sets are am dram delights, as are Heather McDevitt Barton's costumes.) It's a chaotic process, and you may find yourself looking to the one person who seems to be in charge: that nice lady playing the upright piano just in front of the stage, who had earlier led us in a prologue of grade school chanting exercises. Her name is Ms. Marjorie Blain, and though as portrayed by Beth Griffith, she has the sweetest smile, don't expect too much in the way of guidance from her. Like that questing mermaid, and the succession of other uprooted women we will meet during the next 80 minutes or so of this second entry in the Clubbed Thumb Summerworks festival of experimental theater, you're entirely on your own. That means going with the flow of a globe crossing plot that is as twisty and slippery as a .... Well, I was going to say "an eel," but since that mermaid stuff is more or less ditched after the opening, I'd better find a new set of similes. True, the show's opening musical number will be referred to later in the play. In fact, a young woman who apparently saw the same production we did winds up reciting that entire mermaid scene, verbatim, partly under her breath. That's Heidi, who works for an Arby's in a small Montana town, and spends her down time creating flocks of origami birds (cranes, to be exact) bearing messages of peace; she also has plans to run for county commissioner. And as drolly embodied by the downtown veteran Emily Davis, Heidi glimmers shyly with sui generis eccentricities. Heidi also helps out Barb (Socorro Santiago), who presides over the one room Montana schoolhouse in which the second part of "Of Government" takes place. Sadly, that school is about to be shut down. In the meantime, the rudderless Debbie (Stacey Yen) has come to visit Barb, hoping to figure out her life in rural tranquillity. But there's no peace to be had, thanks to ominous interruptions by the crazy talking meth head Tawny (a scary Keilly McQuail) and a Debbie seeking drone. So onward, everybody, to a hotel in Switzerland, where Debbie is vacationing with her understandably worried mother, Sharon (Mia Katigbak). There they meet a seemingly proper and restrained Englishwoman, Joan (a wonderful Beth Dixon), who tells a woeful and epic length saga of small town grocery shopping. But wait! This mountain air idyll is interrupted by the arrival of a helicopter, bearing the insanely rich (and possibly just insane) Heather (Donnetta Lavinia Grays, hilarious). And then we go back to Montana, where Heidi meets a jogger from New York (Melle Powers, previously seen as our leading mermaid). "What had the point been? There must have been some point?" Those aren't my questions; they come from the epilogue of a song that concludes "Of Government." (And please don't ask me to explain that title here.) Me, I see a point in this play's amiable restlessness, or I think I do. It's something to do with both the insecurity and serendipity of the way we live now. And the meandering flow of the plot feels appropriate for the beginning of the silly season, when thoughts turn to fantasies of flight and contemplation of the ruts we're stuck in. "Of Government" has the appeal of one of those wayward trips to nowhere people find themselves craving when the weather turns warm, preferably in an open convertible at lazy speeds. You sit back as the scenery changes, sometimes quite unexpectedly, and get to meet a whole lot of interesting strangers along the way in this case, what is surely the most likably idiosyncratic assortment of women gathered on a New York stage. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
CHICAGO The "Cheer" star Jerry Harris will continue to be held in jail by orders of a judge who ruled Friday that he would be a potential "danger to the community" if released as his child pornography case proceeds. U.S. Magistrate Judge Heather K. McShain said Mr. Harris has "no control over his urges" and said it would be "impossible" to ensure he wouldn't violate the conditions of his release. Mr. Harris was charged with one count of production of child pornography on Sept. 17 and has been held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago since then. On Wednesday, four potential custodians testified that they would be willing to house Mr. Harris, 21, if he were released on bail. At that hearing, the mother of two teenage boys who sued Mr. Harris also testified, urging Judge McShain to keep him behind bars. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
What books are on your nightstand? "Sinatra: The Chairman," by James Kaplan; "Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839 42," by William Dalrymple; and "Leonardo da Vinci," by Walter Isaacson. Tell us about the last great book you read. Not long ago I reread "The Great Gatsby," and was impressed again by the beauty of the prose and the distinctiveness of the style. Fitzgerald told his editor he wanted to write "something new," and he did. Nearly a century later, it still reads as something new and different though its subject, the tragedy of desiring most what Ernest Shackleton called the "veneer of outside things," is an old one. What books do you think most accurately depict Washington? "Advise and Consent," by Allen Drury. The characters have mixed motives. Their personalities are complex and their actions nuanced. They're not all good or all bad, just as in real politics and real life. The story features foreign intrigue and scandal as do many fictional treatments of Washington but it's without the simplified, single dimension that fiction by writers from somewhere else often impose on human behavior in this company town. What's the best book you've ever read about governance? And the military? "The Best and the Brightest," by David Halberstam, for governance, and "This Kind of War," T. R. Fehrenbach's classic study of the Korean War. Both concern tactical and strategic mistakes by smart, experienced people, who had more confidence than humility and more intelligence than insight. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. What books do you think best capture your own political principles? Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls." It's my favorite novel of all time. It instructed me to see the world as it is, with all its corruption and cruelty, and believe it's worth fighting for anyway, even dying for. No just cause is futile, even if it's lost, if it helps make the future better than the past. What are the best books you've read about Vietnam? "Hell in a Very Small Place" and "Street Without Joy," by Bernard Fall, and "A Bright Shining Lie," by Neil Sheehan. Fall's two classics on the French Indochina War warned us about the mistakes we should have avoided making in Vietnam. Sheehan's book examining America's involvement in Vietnam through the experiences of John Paul Vann shows how we went about making them anyway. Are there books that to you are important that your children read? That all American children read? I'd like any child to read "For Whom the Bell Tolls" for the reasons I gave for loving it when I first read it as a child. I think I was about 12, and it had an immediate and lasting impact on me. I'd like them to read Twain, too, at least "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." It's funny and it's scary, and it teaches us to see past our differences to the inherent dignity we possess in equal measure. And which novelists do you especially enjoy reading? Hemingway, Fitzgerald and W. Somerset Maugham are my favorites. Hemingway for his sense of courage and adventure, and the power of his spare style. Fitzgerald's evocation of his time and the poetic quality of his prose. And Maugham's cosmopolitan sensibility, his feel for the personal and social dramas provoked by clashing cultures. They might not be the greatest English language writers of all time, but along with Faulkner, I think they were the best of their time. How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or several simultaneously? Morning or night? I'm old fashioned or maybe just old. I like to hold the book I'm reading, turn its pages, and clap it shut when I've finished it. I usually read them one at a time, but sometimes I'll set one aside for the time it takes to finish another that required my immediate attention. I read newspapers in the morning and books in the evenings and on airplanes. What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most? I read an awful lot as a boy. My father was a voracious reader, and he had a large library. My grandmother had a lot of books in her house, too. I was constantly raiding their collection for books my father had read as a child. My favorites were romantic adventures, like "Ivanhoe," by Sir Walter Scott; "The Romance of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table," by Thomas Malory; and "Treasure Island" and "Kidnapped," by Robert Louis Stevenson. I read and reread almost everything Mark Twain wrote but principally "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "Life on the Mississippi." If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? Carl Sandburg's "Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie and the War Years." If he doesn't have time to read all six volumes, he could make do with the one volume edition published in 1954. Despite the liberties Sandburg took with facts and legends, his portrait of Lincoln instructs the reader in the personal virtues that made Lincoln's an extraordinarily wise, decent and crucial presidency. Who would you want to write your life story? Mark Salter. He's been helping me write parts of it for 20 years. I think I can trust him to get the rest of it right, and, quoting Huck Finn, to tell the truth, mainly. What do you plan to read next? "Grant," by Ron Chernow. Historians began revising, some time ago, the earlier judgments of Grant as an unimaginative, bloody minded general and bumbling president. But some reviews of Chernow's new biography praised it as a thorough and insightful reappraisal of Grant, who was in truth an original and discerning military strategist, possibly the most influential in the history of the United States, and a brave and decent president. I'm looking forward to it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
'PHANTOM THREAD' WITH LIVE SCORE at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House (Feb. 24 25). Purists beware. All Radiohead fans, do not miss? The latest entry in Paul Thomas Anderson's gallery of impossible men ("Punch Drunk Love," "There Will Be Blood" and "The Master"), starring Daniel Day Lewis as an intransigent fashion designer and Vicky Krieps as the muse who finally gets him to bend, will screen with Jonny Greenwood's Oscar nominated score performed live by the Wordless Music Orchestra and members of the London Contemporary Orchestra, which played a similar event across the pond last month. Your ears will be dazzled, your eyes maybe less so. Note that for technical reasons, the movie will screen in HDCAM, which has a lower resolution than conventional digital projection. 718 636 4100, bam.org 'SEE IT BIG! BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY IN BLACK AND WHITE AND COLOR' at the Museum of the Moving Image (Feb. 24 March 11). Given the degree to which digital postproduction has blurred the line between cinematography and special effects, it may be time for the Academy to create a new Oscar. Call it Best Visual Design? Such a move wouldn't be unprecedented. For years, the Academy gave two cinematography Oscars, one for black and white and one for color. This series puts some of the winners head to head: The Technicolor "Gone With the Wind" and the black and white "Wuthering Heights," which both won in 1940, each screen on Saturday and Sunday. "Black Narcissus" and "Great Expectations," the winners in 1948, show the following weekend. 718 784 0077, movingimage.us | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
As an alumnus of the Buckeye Boys State of 1956 at Camp Perry, Ohio, I was disappointed to read of the bad experience of Rene Otero at his 2018 Boys State. My teenage experience at Boys State helped inspire in me a lifelong interest and participation in politics and a legal career representing and advising state and local governments. I do not recall the kind of activity and behavior that Mr. Otero recounts from his experience that seems to reflect the deterioration of our political atmosphere over recent decades. I hope that Mr. Otero will reconsider how he and his generation can help bring about civility in our political discourse. Will there be a documentary film about Girls State as there was for Boys State? Or Girls Nation? I attended both in 1957 at 17 (elected governor of New Mexico Girls State and selected to attend Girls Nation). I know that the seeds of feminism were planted during those two weeks. I am grateful to this day to the American Legion for continuing that great program. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
New York Fashion Week is comfortable caroming into its second half on Presidents' Day Monday. (You didn't think anything so slight as a national holiday would interrupt fashion week, did you?) By Thursday, many of the gathered fashion tribe will be heading to London to continue the international jaunt. But before then, there's lots to see. After a quick stop at The Row at 9 a.m., the party heads uptown, with an Upper East Side twofer: Carolina Herrera, who presents her new collection at the stately Frick Collection at 10 a.m., an appropriately tony venue for New York's grande dame of the white blouse and ball skirt. It will be tempting to linger after the show for a quick spin through the galleries, but time is short: Tommy Hilfiger's Hilfiger Collection follows directly, at the Park Avenue Armory at 11 a.m. Mr. Hilfiger's show will host fashion's first ever "Instapit": a tranche reserved only for Instagram photographers to snap to their hearts' content. Suggested hashtag: thewaywelivenow. Designers with a wilder bent own the afternoon. Rosie Assoulin holds her fall presentation at 1 p.m., followed by Jeremy Scott, fashion's perennial provocateur, at 2 p.m. Mr. Scott is calling his new collection "Cowboys and Poodles." The eagle eyed may already have spotted a Scott branded car emblazoned with a rocket riding cowgirl lolling Moynihan Station last week. Then it's off to Phillip Lim at 3 p.m., followed by New York's master of mise en scene, Thom Browne, at 5. Mr. Browne has ginned up surgical theaters, funeral processions and mirrored cubes in which to stage his shows. Up next? Only Mr. Browne, inscrutable and tight lipped until the curtain rises, knows. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Some of the N.B.A.'s biggest stars including Zion Williamson and Giannis Antetokounmpo and several team owners said they would help cover the lost income of everyday arena employees while the league goes dark for at least 30 days because of the coronavirus outbreak. The announcements have come in fits and starts as the 30 team league grapples with the abrupt pause of its season, and have turned a critical spotlight on the disparate circumstances of the billionaire team owners and the hourly workers they depend on to host games. "N.B.A. teams, arena owners and players are working together in partnership to support arena employees impacted by our season hiatus," N.B.A. spokesman Mike Bass said in a statement. "Within the last day, many have already announced their plans while others are in the process of formulating them." As of Friday night, roughly half of N.B.A. teams had announced or said they were finalizing plans to reimburse workers for lost wages. The employees range from ushers, concession vendors and ticket takers who work for the arenas, to part time employees like game night performers. Williamson, the Pelicans' star rookie, said in an Instagram post on Friday that he would cover the salaries of the workers at the team's home arena in New Orleans, the Smoothie King Center, for the next 30 days. "These are the folks who make our games possible, creating the perfect environment for our fans and everyone involved in the organization," Williamson said, adding, "This is a small way for me to express my support and appreciation for these wonderful people who have been so great to me and my teammates." A Pelicans spokesman said that team employees would continue to receive full pay. Antetokounmpo, the star of the Bucks, announced on Friday that he would donate 100,000 to the staff at the Fiserv Forum, the team's home arena in Milwaukee. Soon after, the Bucks said they would match his contribution. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, was one of the first N.B.A. owners to say that part time workers would be taken care of in some way. In a phone interview on Friday, Cuban said that all affected arena employees would be paid as if the Mavericks games were being played. Cuban owns half of the American Airlines Center, where the Mavericks play. He said that for him, there was no issue with any red tape, but for owners, there could be tax considerations. "There's issues of payroll taxes. Do you pay the payroll taxes if they don't work?" Cuban said. "There's issues of, 'What happens if the games are actually played in the future? Do we pay them twice?' I personally don't care. That's fine." Exactly how to take care of affected workers is often not as simple as the team's owners writing a check. The process is complicated by whether the team owns and operates the arenas it plays in, creating uncertainty about how teams who want to pay those employees should go about it. In Philadelphia, the home arena for the 76ers is owned by Comcast Spectacor. A spokesman for the team said on Friday that team employees would be compensated for the missed time; separately, Comcast Spectacor said that arena employees would be paid through March. In Sacramento, the Kings co own the Golden 1 Center with the city and said earlier in the week that its part timers would be fully compensated through March. Not all owners have the same financial considerations. Ted Leonsis, who owns the Washington Wizards, also owns the Washington Capitals of the N.H.L., and the Washington Mystics of the W.N.B.A., among other teams. In March, the Capital One Arena, which is owned by Leonsis, was slated to have about 500 part time employees to service 16 events, between games played by various teams and concerts. A spokeswoman said the Wizards would continue to pay the part time employees as if they had worked those events through the end of March. The schedules for these workers had not been set beyond this month. Some teams, like the Atlanta Hawks and Cleveland Cavaliers, do not own their arenas but operate them. Both the Hawks and Cavaliers announced plans to pay part time employees even if games weren't going on. Like Williamson and Antetokounmpo, some other N.B.A. players pledged to cover costs. Kevin Love of the Cavaliers was the first to announce that he intended to chip in 100,000. Blake Griffin, the forward for the Detroit Pistons, signaled his intent to donate 100,000 on Friday. The Pistons had already announced their plan to pay part timers for their lost work, but they do not own their home, Little Caesars Arena. "While we cannot speak directly for other companies that employ staff in the arena, we are hopeful of reaching accommodation protecting them as well," a team statement said. On Friday evening, the Golden State Warriors announced that their players, coaches and owners would donate 1 million to a disaster relief fund set up for arena workers by the franchise's community foundation. The team said it employs more than 1,000 part time workers for each game. Some other teams, like the Houston Rockets, said that they were working on plans but had not finalized them yet. Dianna Boyce, a vice president with the Indiana Pacers, said in an email that the franchise was "doing what we can to lessen the impact on our employees," but was not more specific. There is also the matter of concessions staffers employees who sell food and beverages for various chains at the arenas. Their fate remains unclear. They are often managed separately from the arena and the teams. Representatives for Aramark, the food and beverage company that, according to its website, services dozens of professional teams across multiple leagues, did not respond to a request for comment. After Spencer Dinwiddie, the Nets guard, posted a tweet on Thursday, saying, "Gotta take care of the non salary arena staff etc," Nets owner Joe Tsai responded, "Hear hear," and added that the Nets were working on a plan. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
"If we just wore these masks, the president's own advisers have told him, we could save 100,000 lives. And we're in a circumstance where the president, thus far, still has no plan, no comprehensive plan." "You also said a vaccine will be coming within weeks." "Yes." "Is that a guarantee? Is " "No, it's not a guarantee, but it will be by the end of the year. But I think it has a good chance there are two companies I think within a matter of weeks. And it will be distributed very quickly." "This is the same fellow who told you this was going to end by Easter last time. This is the same fellow who told you that, don't worry, we're going to end this by the summer. We're about to go into a dark winter, a dark winter. And he has no clear plan, and there's no prospect that there's going to be a vaccine available for the majority of the American people before the middle of next year." "President Trump, your reaction. He says you have no plan." "I don't think we're going to have a dark winter at all. We're opening up our country. We've learned and studied and understand the disease." "He says that we're, you know, we're learning to live with it. People are learning to die with it. You folks home who have an empty chair at the kitchen table this morning. That man or wife going to bed tonight and reaching over to try to touch their out of habit, where their wife or husband was is gone. Learning to live with it? Come on. We're dying with it." "I take full responsibility. It's not my fault that it came here. It's China's fault. And you know what? It's not Joe's fault that it came here either. It's China's fault. First of all, I've already done something that nobody thought was possible: Through the legislature, I terminated the individual mandate. That is the worst part of Obamacare. He's talking about socialized medicine, and when he and health care. When he talks about a public option, he's talking about destroying your Medicare " "Wrong." "Totally destroyed. And destroying your Social Security. And this whole country will come down. You know, Bernie Sanders tried it in his state. He tried it in his state. His governor was a very liberal governor. They wanted to make it work " "O.K, let's hear, let's let Vice President Biden respond " "It's impossible to work it doesn't work." "He's a very confused guy. He thinks he's running against somebody else. He's running against Joe Biden. I beat all those other people because I disagreed with them. Joe Biden he's running against." "Mr. President, your administration separated children from their parents at the border, at least 4,000 kids. You've since reversed your zero tolerance policy, but the United States can't locate the parents of more than 500 children. So how will these families ever be reunited?" "Children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels. And they're brought here, and they used to use them to get into our country. We now have as strong a border as we've ever had. We're over 400 miles of brand new wall. You see the numbers. And we let people in, but they have to come in legally." "These 500 plus kids came with parents. They separated them at the border to make it a disincentive to come to begin with. Big, real tough we're really strong. And guess what? They cannot it's not, coyotes didn't bring them over. Their parents were with them. They got separated from their parents. And it makes us a laughingstock and violates every notion of who we are as a nation. A black parent, no matter how wealthy or how poor they are, has to teach their child, when you're walking down the street, don't have a hoodie on when you go across the street. Making sure that you, in fact, if you get pulled over, 'Yes, sir,' 'No, sir,' hands on top of the wheel. Because you are, in fact, the victim, whether you're a person making, child of a 300,000 per year person or someone who's on food stamps." "I got criminal justice reform done and prison reform and opportunity zones. I took care of Black colleges and universities. I don't know what to say. They can say anything. I mean, they can say anything. It's a very it makes me sad because I am, I am the least racist person. I can't even see the audience because it's so dark, but I don't care who's in the audience: I'm the least racist person in this room." "He pours fuel on every single racist fire, every single one. He started off his campaign coming down the escalator, saying he's going to get rid of those Mexican 'rapists.' He's banned Muslims because they're Muslims. He has moved around and made everything worse across the board." "I have one final question " "Would he close down the oil industry? Would you close down the oil industry?" "By the way, I would transition from the oil industry, yes." "Oh, that's a big statement!" "I would transition it is a big statement." "That's a big statement!" "Because I would stop " "Why would you do that?" "Because the oil industry pollutes significantly." "Oh, I see!" "Here's the deal." "That's a big statement." "But you can't do that well, if you let me finish the statement because it has to be replaced by renewable energy over time, over time. And I'd stop giving to the oil industry, I'd stop giving them federal subsidies." "Ooh!" "He won't give federal subsidies to the gas, excuse me, to the, to solar and wind." "Yeah." "Why are we giving it to oil industry?" "Imagine this is your inauguration day. What will you say in your address to America, to Americans who did not vote for you?" "We have to make our country totally successful as it was prior to the plague coming in from China. Success is going to bring us together. We are on the road to success. But I'm cutting taxes, and he wants to raise everybody's taxes. And he wants to put new regulations on everything." "What is on the ballot here is the character of this country. Decency, honor, respect, treating people with dignity, making sure that everyone has an even chance. And I'm going to make sure you get that. You haven't been getting it the last four years." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Jean Paul Dubois won the Goncourt Prize, France's most prestigious literary award, in a ceremony on Monday at the Paris restaurant Drouant. Published in August, Mr. Dubois's novel "Tous les hommes n'habitent pas le monde de la meme facon" ("All Men Do Not Live in the Same Way") is a story narrated by a man languishing in a Canadian prison for an unknown crime. The Agence France Presse news agency called it "an affecting and nostalgic novel of lost happiness." The French magazine L'Obs called it "basically perfect." Philippe Claudel, one of the jurors, called the novel a masterpiece, "full of humanity, melancholy, irony." In a telephone interview, he said the North American setting of many of Mr. Dubois's novels reflected paradoxical French attitudes toward the continent: "We are fascinated by you, and at the same time we are very critical." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The number of justices on the Supreme Court is not fixed by the Constitution. Republicans denied President Obama his right to nominate a justice to the court using less than fair and honorable means. Joe Biden has the right to keep all his legal options open, and is trying to do what is honorable even as he sees how low his opponents go. Democracy requires in both political parties and in its citizens democratic habits of the heart, a spirit of compromise, decency and fairness beyond the antics of clever lawyers. Either both sides accept such boundaries, or all limits should be off until a balance is restored. Republicans seem to like the idea of applying "original intent" to constitutional interpretation, so let's step back for a minute and look at what the founding fathers actually did with the size of the Supreme Court. From 1793 until after the Civil War, there was, as a practical matter, one Supreme Court justice designated for each judicial circuit. In 1801, for example, when Congress officially fixed the number of circuits at six, there were six justices on the Supreme Court. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Nobody looks forward to having a cavity drilled and filled by a dentist. Now there's an alternative: an antimicrobial liquid that can be brushed on cavities to stop tooth decay painlessly. The liquid is called silver diamine fluoride, or S.D.F. It's been used for decades in Japan, but it's been available in the United States, under the brand name Advantage Arrest, for just about a year. The Food and Drug Administration cleared silver diamine fluoride for use as a tooth desensitizer for adults 21 and older. But studies show it can halt the progression of cavities and prevent them, and dentists are increasingly using it off label for those purposes. Silver diamine fluoride is already used in hundreds of dental offices. Medicaid patients in Oregon are receiving the treatment, and at least 18 dental schools have started teaching the next generation of pediatric dentists how to use it. Dr. Richard Niederman, the chairman of the epidemiology and health promotion department at the New York University College of Dentistry, said, "Being able to paint it on in 30 seconds with no noise, no drilling, is better, faster, cheaper." "I would encourage parents to ask for it," he added. "It's less trauma for the kid." The main downside is aesthetic: Silver diamine fluoride blackens the brownish decay on a tooth. That may not matter on a back molar or a baby tooth that will fall out, but some patients are likely to be deterred by the prospect of a dark spot on a visible tooth. Until more insurers cover it, patients also have to cover the cost. Still, it's relatively inexpensive. Dr. Michelle Urschel, an anesthesiologist, was happy to pay 25 to have Dr. Jeanette MacLean, a pediatric dentist in Glendale, Ariz., paint over a cavity that her son Knox, 4, had recently developed. But the liquid may be especially useful for children. Nearly a quarter of 2 to 5 year olds have cavities, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some preschoolers with severe cavities must be treated in a hospital under general anesthesia, even though it may pose risks to the developing brain. "S.D.F. gives us an opportunity to decrease the number of toddlers with cavities going to the O.R.," said Dr. Arwa Owais, an associate professor of pediatric dentistry at the University of Iowa. Dr. Laurence Hyacinthe, a pediatric dentist in Harlem, used silver diamine fluoride on eight uncooperative children whose parents wanted to delay a trip to the operating room. Dr. MacLean said, "People assume that parents will reject it because of poor aesthetics." But "if it means preventing a child from having to be sedated or having their tooth drilled and filled, there are many parents who choose S.D.F.," she added. Alejandra Bujeiro, 32, was delighted that her 3 year old daughter, Natalia, didn't have to have two cavities filled in the back of her mouth. Instead Dr. Eyal Simchi, a pediatric dentist in Elmwood Park, N.J., brushed silver diamine fluoride on the decay. Two front teeth, however, were drilled. Next time, Ms. Bujeiro said, she'd opt for silver diamine fluoride. "I would use it in baby teeth even if it's in front," she said. As for the discoloration? "You can't see it too much." Silver diamine fluoride has another advantage over traditional treatment: It kills the bacteria that cause decay. A second treatment applied six to 18 months after the first markedly arrests cavities, studies have shown. "S.D.F. reduces the incidence of new caries and progression of current caries by about 80 percent," said Dr. Niederman, who is updating an evidence review of silver diamine fluoride published in 2009. Fillings, by contrast, do not cure an oral infection. "There's nothing that goes on in an operating room that treats the underlying problem," said Dr. Peter Milgrom, a professor of pediatric dentistry at the University of Washington who was instrumental in receiving F.D.A. clearance for silver diamine fluoride and has a financial stake in Advantage Arrest. That's why some children must have dental treatment under anesthesia twice. Bacterial infections also cause acne, but a "dermatologist doesn't take a scalpel and cut off your pimples," said Dr. Jason Hirsch, a pediatric dentist in Royal Palm Beach, Fla. Yet "that's how dentistry has approached cavities." Dr. Hirsch has a Facebook page called SDF Action, where dentists can discuss individual cases. In January, Oregon became the first state to reimburse Medicaid providers for treating cavities with silver diamine fluoride. "It's a completely new paradigm" that offers "significant savings," said Dr. Bruce W. Austin, the dental director of the Oregon Health Authority. "You need only a drop to treat five teeth, and it comes out to pennies per tooth," said Dr. Scott L. Tomar, a University of Florida dentistry professor who treats some Medicaid patients. Toddlers in low income families sometimes have to wait a year for fillings in an operating room. The new alternative is "a huge deal," said Dr. Tomar, the chairman of the oral health section of the American Public Health Association. Silver diamine fluoride also may help nursing home residents, who often experience severe cavities if their teeth aren't routinely brushed. Transporting and treating frail patients, assuming they can afford to see a dentist, can be difficult. But now some patients can be quickly treated where they live. Still, silver diamine fluoride is no silver bullet. Patients with mouth sores or a silver allergy can't use it. Severe cavities huge holes that trap food and plaque still require fillings. At dental conferences, Dr. Tomar and Dr. Fontana lecture about the treatment. They ask audiences if they are using it; so far, just a few hands go up. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Press the Windows and I keys to open the Settings box (or click the gear shaped Settings icon in the Start Menu) and select the Privacy icon. On the left side of the Privacy box, select Activity History and turn off the box next to "Let Windows collect my activities from this PC" on the right side. If your computer was set to sync your activities with other devices online, also disable "Let Windows sync my activities from this PC to the cloud." If you eventually get separate accounts on the computer and one of you wants to use the Timeline feature, enable the data collection option in the Activity History controls again. In the "Show activities from accounts" area of the Settings box, flip on the switch next to the account wishing to use Timeline. Within the Activity History settings box, you can also wipe your activity history. To remove activities directly from the Timeline screen, right click the thumbnail preview and choose the Remove or Clear option. For those who find the feature useful and wish to use it, pressing the Windows and Tab keys opens the Timeline from the keyboard. You can also open Timeline by clicking its Taskbar icon next to the Cortana search box. Don't see the Timeline icon? Right click the Taskbar and choose "Show Task View Button." Personal Tech invites questions about computer based technology to techtip nytimes.com. This column will answer questions of general interest, but letters cannot be answered individually. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
AT its most basic, a deck is an extension of your house. You open your door, walk outside and there you are in what feels like an outdoor room. But let's be real: Some decks have become much more than that a manifestation of the homeowner's aesthetic taste, desire and ego laid out over vast expanses of wood (or products meant to look like wood), stone and lighting. Some decks could be mistaken for helipads if helipads had pergolas and open air kitchens. Any deck that aspires to be more than something that leads into your yard does not come cheap. Even the most basic wooden deck one now seen as passe can cost about 10,000. At the upper ends, decks can cost well beyond 100,000. Pete Ciaraldi, a deck contractor outside Boston, said he recently installed a multilevel, well lighted deck that cost 148,000 in Wilbraham, Mass., a modest suburb of Springfield. What surprised him wasn't the price of the deck he puts in lots of expensive decks but that the house it is attached to is worth only 485,000. "They want to make it like an outdoor extension of their home," he said. And it had better be, since the deck is now a quarter of the value of the entire home. While decks are becoming grander and more expensive, what are people getting for their money? And if you're like me, with an old wooden deck that needs to be repainted every couple of years, how and why should you think about upgrading? "There are three aspects to any deck," said Vic Araco, an owner of Decks Only, which serves Long Island and New York City. "One, it's got to look good. Two, it's got to be functional. Three, we have to build it to your budget." Aesthetics first. Pretty much any deck is going to look good when it is first built. But a lot happens in the first five years. If you listen to deck builders, at least in the Northeast, the only people putting in decks made out of pressure treated lumber are contractors trying to make some quick and easy money. The decks are comparatively inexpensive and look great for the first couple of years. But then, the maintenance starts. Paint chips and fades, wood warps, and mold and mildew discolor the boards. Marion Timberlake, a 63 year old retired Air Force fighter pilot who lives in Fredericksburg, Va., had a wood deck on a previous home. "We had to clean it, stain it and reseal it," he said. "We were on a two year cycle with the weathering and everything we were getting. With the seasons we have here, wood does its normal thing and bows and warps." Yet he had the time to do it himself. When he and his wife moved to their current home, it didn't have a deck. They added a composite deck. The leading makers of these decks are Trex and TimberTech, and they create the boards out of a combination of recycled materials, including wood and plastics. And while they have different product grades, they come with warranties against fading and warping that can last several decades. The benefit of these decks is that they are largely maintenance free. No painting or staining needed; they just have to be washed free of mold and mildew. But they are two to three times the cost of a wood deck, said Dave Toht, an expert who has written several books on decks. Deck builders said the added cost of the composite options would be made up in five to 10 years, largely in reduced upkeep expenses. "A deck takes more sunlight than any other part of your house," said Kevin Shevlin, a carpenter in Oxford, Conn., who installs only composite decks. "Most of our customers are older people who have had a deck before. They want maintenance free. They understand it costs more." The manufacturers of these decks also argue that their decks are durable. Nick Mitropoulos, who travels considerably for his job at a life sciences company, had a two story deck on his home outside Boston that had started to rot. It was his second wood deck since he owned the home. He decided to tear it down and pay for the top of the line Trex Transcend. (All the composite manufacturers have products at different prices.) Mr. Ciaraldi installed it with a gutter system so the first floor deck stayed dry in the rain. But Mr. Mitropoulos said what also impressed him was how solid the deck and railings were and how easily Mr. Ciaraldi could make adjustments to ensure the railings were secure. The look of a composite deck isn't for some homeowners, though. It's fake, after all, and some homeowners want real wood. The high end option is hardwood, like mahogany or ipe, a Brazilian wood. "Basically, you get the longevity of the composite with a hardwood, and it's gorgeous when stained and maintained properly," said Mark DeMarco, general manager for Decks Unique in Commack, N.Y. That elegance costs twice as much as composite decks, Mr. Toht said. And at that price, chances are you're going to pay someone to maintain it. And that's just for the basic deck. "There are so many options you can put on the deck outdoor kitchen, a pergola, hundreds of different railing options," Mr. DeMarco said, options that "can take a price of a deck from 10,000 or 12,000 to 40,000." Mr. Araco, who said his company recently installed a several thousand square foot deck, said many features were more expensive than people would imagine. He said an outdoor kitchen with a 15 foot granite top, stone backing, stainless steel grill and wine and beer coolers could top 20,000. A 12 by 14 foot pergola giving shade over the top could be another 20,000. And if someone wanted actual shades to pull down when the sun was shining, that could be 3,000 to 4,000 more. One defense of such spending, at least by the people selling these decks, is that it increases the value of the house. It's hard to say if the value of that home in Wilbraham, Mass., has increased to 633,000 because it now has a super deck. But some in the decking business say a well crafted deck can add about 80 percent of its cost to the resale value of your home. Whether homeowners expect to sell their home and profit from the deck, they can run into trouble with over the top design elements or add ons that they grow tired of. Mr. Toht said that one of the big regrets was installing a spa, which can cost from 2,000 to 10,000. "People use outdoor spas a lot for the first two to three weeks and then it becomes a maintenance headache," he said. "Limiting the bells and whistles is a good idea." Another miscalculation is lighting. "If you're in a buggy area, these lights are going to attract all the bugs," he said. "If you have a buggy season, maybe you want an enclosed porch with a proper roof to enjoy meals out of doors." Still, no matter how fancy the deck, it is an outdoor space. And when constructing one, Mr. Toht tells people: "Bear in mind what we don't like about the outdoors intense sun, bugs and darkness." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
California Travel Restrictions: What You Need to Know California has introduced new restrictions on travel and other aspects of daily life to combat the state's surge in coronavirus cases and prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. The Regional Stay at Home Order divides the state into five regions: Southern California, the San Joaquin Valley, the Bay Area, Greater Sacramento and Northern California. If a region's intensive care unit capacity drops below 15 percent, residents will be required to stay home for at least three weeks except for essential activities and outdoor exercise. Some areas of the state are putting these regional restrictions in place preemptively. The new restrictions, announced on Dec. 3, have led to confusion for residents and travelers alike about what is and is not allowed, especially when combined with the state's existing color coding system of county infection rates and closures meant to curb the spread of the virus. One thing is clear: People planning to vacation to or visit relatives in California are being asked to cancel those plans. Can I travel to and from California right now? Do I need to quarantine on arrival? Travelers arriving anywhere in California from another state or country are asked to self quarantine for 14 days on arrival. This is a request, so adherence is left to the honor system. There are no restrictions on leaving the state, but the California Department of Public Health encourages residents to avoid nonessential travel. If you are going to a United States or international destination, review any arrival restrictions and requirements there before you depart. Read our 2021 Travel questions and answers guide on restrictions, vaccination and more. What is essential and nonessential travel? Essential travel, which includes "work and study, critical infrastructure support, economic services and supply chains, health, immediate medical care, and safety and security," is allowed, according to the California Department of Public Health. Tourism and other recreational travel is considered nonessential and is not allowed. What if I already have a vacation booked at a California hotel? Currently, all California hotels and lodgings, including short term rentals like Airbnb, are prohibited from accepting or honoring out of state reservations for nonessential travel unless the reservation is made for the required minimum quarantine time and the guest will remain there until the required time expires. For the regions where I.C.U. capacity has dropped below 15 percent, additional restrictions are triggered, and hotels and lodgings are only allowed to open "for critical infrastructure support." The California Hotel and Lodging Association offers more detailed information in an information sheet online. In general, it is up to the guest to cancel the reservation the hotel does not know if the traveler is coming from in or out of state, or if the travel is essential. Large hotel chains will generally offer refunds for cancellations because of the coronavirus. Smaller properties may offer a credit instead. Travelers should contact the lodging directly to ask. Testing is not required to enter California, although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend getting tested before and after travel. Los Angeles International Airport is open. All passengers arriving from another state or country need to fill out and submit an online form acknowledging the state's request to self quarantine for 14 days after arrival. Failure to fill out the form could result in a fine of up to 500. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The Pac 12 Conference is joining the other four most powerful leagues in college sports in deciding to play football this fall, defying the risks of the coronavirus pandemic to salvage a season for fans and shore up the financial health of its schools. The Pac 12, which said last month that its teams would not compete until at least 2021, said Thursday that it would attempt to play as soon as Nov. 6. The decision came eight days after the Big Ten, which had also elected not to compete this semester, reversed its approach and announced that games would begin in October. Independent medical experts and even some college sports officials have questioned, in public and in private, the propriety of playing during a pandemic that is ravaging the country at large and, in particular, campuses. But the leading conferences, which have imposed testing mandates and other tactics to try to prevent the virus from spreading within their locker rooms, have increasingly insisted that they can manage the pandemic's risks and complications. Larry Scott, the Pac 12 commissioner, said Thursday that the league's recent contract for daily testing of athletes was "a game changer in enabling us to move forward with confidence that we can create a safe environment for our student athletes while giving them the opportunity to pursue their dreams." And the league's medical advisory panel said in a report released Thursday that it had agreed it was possible to play, in part, because of improvements in pandemic conditions. Under the Pac 12's plan, the league's teams, which include California, Oregon, Stanford, Southern California and Washington, will play seven game conference schedules. The league championship game is expected to be played on Dec. 18, two days before the College Football Playoff's selection committee is scheduled to release its final rankings. Beyond the Big Ten and the Pac 12, the other so called Power 5 conferences the Atlantic Coast, the Big 12 and the Southeastern have already begun play, or intend to this weekend. In addition to announcing a projected Nov. 6 start for football games with fans barred from venues that include Autzen Stadium and the Rose Bowl the Pac 12 said it planned to begin its men's and women's basketball seasons on Nov. 25, more than a month earlier than its initial timeline had permitted. Thursday's move by the Pac 12 restored a kind of reluctant unity to the Power 5 after they spent more than a month publicly fractured around football, and it left more than 30 states poised to hold college football games this autumn. The decisions by the leagues some publicly unflinching, others openly deliberating from one month to the next carry enormous implications for college athletics. By playing football, even without every stadium packed with fans, schools across the country will collectively earn hundreds of millions of dollars from broadcast rights and sponsorships that will prop up budgets that had been threatened with severe cuts. But they are also imperiling what remains of their public standing with the wager that they will be able to protect the students who play for them. Before some of their teams have played a single down this season, leagues have been accused of prioritizing money and power over health and safety. "These athletes are commodities and they're assets and they're not making any money staying at home and staying healthy.," said B. David Ridpath, a former president of the Drake Group, which seeks reforms in college athletics. "To sit there and say, 'We pulled it off and persevered,' is, to me, just P.R. hogwash. It's a business, and the financial house of cards kind of fell." Michael Schill, Oregon's president, asserted Thursday evening that money was "never once mentioned as a consideration" in the deliberations of Pac 12 leaders, and that the allure of millions of dollars "had no effect on our decision." The Big Ten's reversal last week was most often linked to medical advancements, but it came with the conference facing political pressure, litigation and outrage so widespread that top coaches were openly questioning the league. The Pac 12 confronted far less outrage after its announcement on Aug. 11, the same day the Big Ten postponed its season, that it would not play this fall. At the time, the league detailed its medical advisers' thinking, warning that "community prevalence remains very high in much of the Pac 12 footprint" and declaring that there needed to be greater testing capacity. It stifled any internal dissent, but the league's caution was helped along by public officials who imposed restrictions on gatherings, effectively forcing cancellations of practices. Last week, though, the atmosphere around the conference began to shift rapidly in the wake of the Big Ten's decision. Players lobbied Gov. Gavin Newsom of California to ease restrictions, and he and Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon agreed that the state governments would not impede the Pac 12. The local authorities also widely agreed to pave the way for athletics. Still, the hours before the meeting of Pac 12 leaders showed how turbulent the path to and through a season might be: Officials in Boulder County, Colo., home of the Colorado Buffaloes, restricted gatherings of people who are between the ages of 18 and 22 and specifically said that people in that age range could not participate in practices for intercollegiate sports teams. But the league was facing broader pressure to try for football, particularly since it was the lone Power 5 conference poised not to play this autumn. For instance, President Trump, who had been badgering the Big Ten but, according to conference officials, did nothing substantive to aid that league's plans, turned his public attention to the Pac 12 last week, after the Big Ten had relented. "You're the only one now," the president said of the Pac 12 last Wednesday. "Open up. Open up, Pac 12. Get going. Said the same thing to Big Ten and they did, and now I'm saying it to Pac 12. You have time. You really have time right now. Get going." By then, the league was already considering its options. And by the end of the week, it was beginning to telegraph the unanimous decision its chancellors and presidents made on Thursday. "I have been working hard all throughout the pandemic," Elijah Hicks, a senior safety at California, said in a statement released by the school on Thursday. "There are so many negative things happening in our country right now and to be able to play football again makes me happy." But amid the celebratory mood among conference officials and players, Schill acknowledged that the situation could still change. "We're moving forward now, but we're not moving forward with our eyes shut," he said. "We are going to be paying attention to what's happening, and if we start getting spikes that suggest that this is not sustainable, we will just stop playing." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
When Netflix signed a mammoth production deal with Ryan Murphy, one natural question was: Which one of him would they get? The big hearted storyteller of "Pose"? The gore splashing fabulist of "American Horror Story" and "9 1 1"? The drawn from life dramatist of "Feud" and "American Crime Story"? Judging by Murphy's teeming to do list series about Andy Warhol and Marlene Dietrich, a film of "The Boys in the Band," documentaries they're apt to get all of those and then some. But what they got first was "The Politician," appearing Friday, which recalls the Ryan Murphy of "Glee." Like that high school musical, to which "The Politician" is the jaded richer sibling, it's an acerbic Technicolor sketch of The Way Teens Live Now that gets lost in its hairpin story turns. "The Politician" is not a musical, though it stars Ben Platt ("Dear Evan Hansen") as the electorally ambitious teen Payton Hobart and is sensible enough to give him the occasional excuse to sing. But like "Glee," ("Nowadays, being anonymous is worse than being poor"), it opens with a clear thesis statement. "People like to think of their presidents as characters we see on TV," Payton says. Payton, ambitious and tightly wound, has his character arc meticulously planned: Become student body president of his palatial private school in Santa Barbara, Calif., attend Harvard, yada yada yada, serve two terms in the White House. First, that means defeating River ( David Corenswet ), a friend turned intimate rival; negotiating the politics sexual, racial and otherwise of his privileged peers; and confronting the possibility that he may just be a sociopath. Murphy, working again with his "Glee" partners, Ian Brennan and Brad Falchuk , has always made first class pilots. "The Politician" pops off the screen immediately; it's sumptuously appointed in production values and cast. (Gwyneth Paltrow plays Payton's nurturing adoptive mom, whose portrayal of a billionaire earth mother seems to play wryly off Paltrow's own wellness entrepreneur career. Bette Midler and Judith Light materialize late in the season.) Like "Glee" and last year's ill fated adaptation of "Heathers," the series plays fast and cheeky with identity issues. Payton and his rivals for the most part, rich and white cynically play the diversity card. Payton's advisers push him to choose a "differently abled" running mate. He settles on Infinity ( Zoey Deutch ), a working class student, whose exploitative grandmother ( Jessica Lange ) oversees her cancer treatments in a story line not a little reminiscent of Hulu's "The Act." As a production, "The Politician" is an heirloom apple: crisp, tart and expensive looking. But something feels unconvincing in the details, and not just because many of the actors seem to have aged out of high school years ago. The students still receive college notices by envelope and not by email. The pop culture references include Britney Spears . The student body election has more constant and granular polling than the current Democratic primary. Of course, that's if you take "The Politician" as a satire of politics, which in the end it may not be. What it captures most evocatively and viciously is the culture of overstressed, Ivy besotted student achievers and dumb money. Some of its teens are arrogant and cosseted by riches; in an age of college admissions cheating scandals, they can afford to buy their way in the old fashioned way. Others, surrounded by the evidence of a mind boggling wealth gap, are so determined to land on the right side of it that they burn out before they have a chance to glow. Payton wants an assured path to his future, and the unpredictability of reality stresses him so hard he practically hums. We find him unwinding by watching episodes of "Dr. Pimple Popper" because, he says: "I just like that it has a really clear narrative. Bad things are excised, happy ending every time." Platt almost sells it. His arc as an anxious teen getting in over his head from the desire to make the world love him so resembles his most famous role, you could call this "Vote Evan Hansen." But "The Politician" seems to grow quickly bored with itself, shifting tones and adding so many twists it starts to feel like improv. It asks you to take its characters seriously while pitching them into caricature. The plot moves constantly, but it doesn't really advance. By the last episode of the eight episode season, which upends and resets itself for Season 2, I was less certain what this show is about than when I started watching it. For all the confusion, there are plenty of ideas here. Often there seems to be nothing but ideas, raised and dispensed with, elbowing aside character, emotional momentum and story coherence. The series has enough wit and visual style, though, that it's a pleasure to watch in the moment just as long as you don't think beyond the moment. "The Politician" is a bright and talented student of a show, eager to pad out its resume with extracurriculars. It, and its audience, might be happier if it finds its focus. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
One need not agree with Christians or Muslims or Orthodox Jews or others on marriage and sexuality to see that such views are not incidental to their belief systems. They did not emerge out of a political debate, and they won't be undone by political power. In many cases, these beliefs aren't even, first of all, about sex or family or culture in the first place, but about what these religious people believe undergird them. In the case of 2,000 years of small "o" (and big "O," for that matter) orthodox Christians, this is the belief that sexual expression is confined to the union of a man and a woman because marriage is an icon of the gospel union of Christ and his church. That does not mean, in any way, that all Americans of deep religious belief agree on how to address these questions in the public square. One could find multiple views even in church pews about what, for instance, public nondiscrimination laws should be. It does mean, though, that such views are not peripheral to the missions of many religious institutions. One cannot simply uproot them and expect these people to adjust their consciences to fit the new cultural expectation. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson did not argue for the sort of robust religious freedom guarantees that we have in the First Amendment because my Baptist ancestors persuaded them with theological arguments. Jefferson thought people like me were so irrational that he literally cut out of the Bible everything he found incredible, leaving behind something that's more of a pamphlet than a canon. But these founders also knew that forcing people to violate their religious beliefs would result in a state so powerful that a majority could tyrannize an unpopular minority in the realm of something as personal and as inviolate as the soul. That's why those advocating for religious freedom have spent years arguing, for instance, that states and local governments shouldn't zone mosques out of existence just because Muslims are a minority in those communities, and that health commissions shouldn't ban circumcision as "barbaric" just because they can't understand Judaism's belief in the Abrahamic covenant. In every case of protecting religious freedom, the issue is not whether the group in question is popular in its beliefs. Unpopular beliefs are precisely what we as Americans seek to protect. The way forward, for Americans of faith and no faith, is not detente, but rather debate. We need to argue about such matters in the arena of persuasion, not state coercion. Yes, sometimes those debates will spill into legislatures and court rooms. But it would be tragic if secularists believed that they can somehow "win" through blunt political force untethered from the American principles of religious freedom and liberty of conscience. So let's have our cultural arguments, with conviction. Americans disagree on some important things not just on marriage and sexuality, but often on things as fundamental as God and the meaning of life. But, as we have those arguments, let's keep our First Amendment and our history of religious freedom intact. Without it, we will not be left with arguments at all, but just with the raw power of whoever has more votes at the moment. That's not what most of us want. But if you do, and you get it, trust me you'll hate it. Russell Moore ( drmoore) is the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. 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 |
A new president takes office with big plans, and needs a booming economy to help underwrite his promises. A Federal Reserve chief sees an economy starting to overheat, and begins warning of the need for higher interest rates. They were bound to clash: Lyndon B. Johnson, the new president, and William McChesney Martin, the longtime, fiscally conservative Fed chairman. It is a conflict from the 1960s with echoes in the present day. President Trump has criticized the Federal Reserve for raising interest rates, a rare rebuke by a sitting president that upends longstanding executive branch protocol to avoid commenting on monetary policy. Today, when the Fed's chairman, Jerome H. Powell, acts, we figure he is not doing Mr. Trump's bidding. But that independence was not always assumed in the Fed's early years, and Martin's standoff with Johnson provided a template for interactions between the Federal Reserve and the White House for decades to come. Johnson: Bill, I just want to thank you for your most thoughtful and generous letter and I appreciate it so much, and I feel quite comfortable and get strength from the knowledge that you're at that desk. Martin: Well, that's very nice of you, Mr. President. I'm just delighted to do anything I can to be of help. You can count on me completely. Johnson: Well, you just assume that you're starting out with someone who doesn't know much about your shop and then you start to tell me what I ought to know about it. Martin: Well, I certainly will help in every way that I can, Mr. President. I'm sure you know a great deal already, but I'll help in every way I can. Martin, named the Fed chairman by President Harry S. Truman, was overseeing an economic expansion that had begun two and a half years earlier, in early 1961. But he was keenly aware of the Fed's role of anticipating and preventing recessions. And he liked a good line. "The function of the Federal Reserve," he said, "is to take away the punch bowl just as the party is getting good." Johnson, the shrewd Texas lawmaker who had seemed out of sorts as Kennedy's vice president, had no interest in slowing growth. In his first major address after taking office, he called on Congress to pass the income tax cuts first proposed by his predecessor. "No act of ours could more fittingly continue the work of President Kennedy than the early passage of the tax bill for which he fought all this long year," he said, speaking to a joint session of Congress and a national television audience. A thunderous ovation followed. Less than a month later, Martin, caricatured by the political cartoonist Herblock as a tightwad with a stiff, high collar, said the prospect of a tax cut was causing "excessive optimism." Martin: What I said to the press was this, that I wanted to make it clear that we would not have raised the discount rate at this time if it had not been for the British action, that we had been for some time watching the possibility of inflationary pressures developing or some problems with the balance of payments developing, but that you had indicated that you wanted us to stimulate the economy in every way that we could. ... We have not the Federal Reserve given them any advice or had they asked any advice. We had informed them of what we were doing, but we had taken our action entirely independently, and as an insurance premium on behalf of the American dollar. Martin: I just wanted you to know. You know, you never can tell what the press will do with these things. Johnson seemed to appreciate how Martin used a news conference to calm any distress in the markets, but he had one question: Would the rate increase tighten the money supply in the United States? Johnson: You don't see in this any lack of availability of funds? Martin: I don't see any at all. We're watching it very carefully in the exchange market, and the market behaved pretty well today of course, this was before our announcement this afternoon. But my guess is that we can handle it and we're going to try to increase, actually increase over the next 10 days, the availability of money through the reserve mechanism. Johnson: That's wonderful, Bill. I hope you'll watch that and do everything you can. I'd hate for this to turn the other way on us. In Martin's eyes the situation was already turning, and in 1965 he began speaking publicly about his concerns. He was afraid the growing cost of the Vietnam War would force a devaluation of the dollar. He saw yet another budget deficit (there had been several in a row) at a time when budget deficits were still looked at askance. In a speech in May, he called it an era of "perpetual deficits and easy money" red flags among central bankers. Then in June, at Columbia University, he laid down the gauntlet in a speech that described "disquieting similarities" between the current economic climate and the years leading to the Great Depression: "Then, as now, government officials, scholars and businessmen are convinced that a new economic era has opened, an era in which business fluctuations have become a thing of the past." His words were heard. That afternoon the New York Stock Exchange had one of its sharpest declines since Kennedy's assassination, and the next day The New York Times reported on Page 1 that "Reserve Board Chief Compares Boom Today With That of 20's." Johnson, at his next news conference, went out of his way to dispel "gloom and doom" about the economy. Behind the scenes Johnson was viscerally angry over Martin's remarks. According to Robert P. Bremner in his book "Chairman of the Fed," Johnson asked his attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, to determine if a president could legally remove a Fed board member from office. (He was advised that disagreeing with administration policies did not constitute "termination for cause.") Fowler: We ought to really try to hold him back now. One, because it's not the right way to operate it's just not right for him to go ahead without knowing what the cards are. Number two, it makes the country feel that we're divided, and it makes the country feel there are two quarterbacks down here one fellow's playing one game and one fellow's playing another. And as I told him the other day, the country is entitled to have the assurance that its economic and financial policies are being determined by a sensible group of reasonable men sitting around together. On the morning of Friday, Dec. 3, the day of the Fed's policy making meeting, Martin again called Fowler to tell him of the imminent rate increase. Johnson, at his Texas ranch recovering from gallbladder surgery, was livid that his calls for a delay were being ignored. Speaking to Fowler by phone, he made a historical reference going back nearly 150 years: the so called Bank War when President Andrew Jackson whipped up a populist frenzy against Nicholas Biddle and his Bank of the United States, a predecessor of the Federal Reserve. Johnson: Then, Henry, you all got to think of around the clock, too, before you get sick as to where we can get a real articulate, able, tough guy that can take this Federal Reserve place. Martin resisted the appeals. At the Board of Governors meeting that afternoon, he called for a vote to raise the discount rate a half percentage point, to 4.5 percent. But before the vote, he conceded that raising the rate would essentially wave a red flag before the critics of an independent Federal Reserve, in Congress and in the White House. "We should be under no illusions," he told his colleagues. "A decision to move now can lead to an important revamping of the Federal Reserve System, including its structure and operating methods. This is a real possibility and I have been turning it over in my mind for months." The vote was 4 to 3. Martin cast the deciding ballot. In Texas, Johnson was enraged. Joseph Califano, an aide (later a cabinet secretary under President Jimmy Carter), recalled Johnson's "burning up the wires to Washington, asking one member of Congress after another, 'How can I run the country and the government if I have to read on a news service ticker that Bill Martin is going to run his own economy?'" Despite their differences, Johnson renominated Martin to the Fed chairman's job one year later. Martin would step down in 1970 during the administration of Richard M. Nixon, the fifth president he served under, after having had the longest term of any Fed chief. The economic expansion that started in 1961 would continue until nearly 1970 the second longest ever, a credit to Martin's stewardship. But many argue that he was too slow to raise the discount rate. In fact, the increase in rates approved in December 1965 did little to control inflation, which would creep higher after the mid 1960s and become a defining issue in the next two decades. A successor, Paul A. Volcker, was forced to push interest rates to nearly 20 percent to bring prices down. In the end, it appears Martin left the punch bowl out too long. Sources: "Chairman of the Fed: William McChesney Martin Jr. and the Creation of the American Financial System," by Robert P. Bremner; and "The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve," by Peter Conti Brown | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
U2 will spend the summer of 2017 reimagining 1987. The storied Irish rock band announced on Monday that it would set out on a 25 date stadium tour to honor the 30th anniversary of its fifth LP, "The Joshua Tree," performing the album in its entirety each night. The shows begin on May 12 in Vancouver, British Columbia, with a stop at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey scheduled for June 28. Along the way, the band will perform in early June at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, which will be its first headlining appearance at an American festival. (The festival lineup will be announced on Wednesday.) A European leg of the Joshua Tree Tour 2017 starts July 8 in London and ends on Aug. 1 in Brussels. Tickets go on sale on Jan. 16 for the European dates and on Jan. 17 for North America. (More information is at livenation.com.) "The Joshua Tree" was released on March 9, 1987, and was, as The New York Times reported, "designed to achieve megastatus for this band at last." It worked. The album became the band's first No. 1 seller in the United States, with hits including "Where the Streets Have No Name" and "With or Without You." It went on to win the Grammy Award for album of the year and has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide. Bono, the group's lead singer, said in a statement that he had recently listened to the full album for the first time in nearly three decades, and called it "quite an opera." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The Volkswagen Golf Sportwagen, yes, it used to be the Jetta Sportwagen, is a practical vehicle. Not too big, not too small it's the right size for conquering concrete canyons and fetching the kids. Normally following directions like this in one... (ON CAMERA) Go through the water, make a hard left at the tree ...is unwise. But this is the new Alltrack version. It has all wheel drive, rides a bit higher, and dresses a little like Ranger Rick. (ON CAMERA) The recipe has been used before with great success. Volvo took the V70 wagon and turned it into the XC70 or Cross Country as it's commonly known. Subaru? Same thing. The Legacy wagon became the Outback, a blockbuster. Inside and out Volkswagen's quietly handsome approach is less Eddie Bauer, more Banana Republic. Cladding is subdued. Its ride height is only raised .6 inches. The 1.8 liter turbo four cylinder makes the same power as standard Sportwagens. (SOUND UP) That would be 170 horsepower and 199 pound feet of torque and no there will not be a diesel. For now, there's a six speed dual clutch automatic, a six speed manual arrives in early 2017. There are different drive modes. FYI, the standard Sportwagen can be had with all wheel drive. Alltrack is quick enough (SOUND UP) I'll estimate 0 60 at just under eight seconds (ON CAMERA) Unlike Subaru's continuously variable transmission that can have an elastic kind of dynamic to it, this dual clutch offers crisp shifts. Snick, snick, snick shifts. Using technical jargon there. Like Golf, Alltrack has a refined upscale driving nature with steering that firms up nicely at speed especially in Sport mode. (ON CAMERA) There's an advantage to not jacking the Alltrack more, it handles much the same as a standard SportWagen. That's a good thing. Most miles are driven on clear dry roads so this setup should work well for many drivers, unless a high seating position is important. My two days with Golf Alltrack happened at VWs press event in Seattle. Shipping auto writers across Puget Sound on a ferry, we are promised some rougher roads on Bainbridge Island after some highway miles, which are quiet and comfortable for this class. (SOUND UP GRAVEL ROAD) The all wheel drive system, which normally cruises about town in front drive mode, seamlessly routes power to the rear when needed. The brakes can pulse independently at each wheel for better stability and control. It's noticeably secure especially on gravel. E.P.A. rated fuel economy is 22 city, 30 highway, which is okay, Honda CR V, Mazda CX 5, and Subaru Forester are slightly more efficient. Remember, Alltrack isn't raised much, giving up a couple inches of ground clearance to Outback. (SOUND UP) (ON CAMERA) There's no question Volkswagen cherry picked this course. Thought it would be more tame though. I'm impressed. Call up off roading information on the screen. Ask yourself, and be truthful would you take your own personal car on terrain this tough? Most likely not. I figured there would be some undercarriage scraping. There was none. A quick check of the interior finds Volkswagen hasn't strayed form it's clean conservative design. Materials look rich. Storage is lined so things don't rattle. Synthetic leather, the good kind, is standard. The user interface is improved with snappy action. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are standard. (ON CAMERA) In back, space is fine for two average sized campers. Foot and knee room is certainly adequate. The center position made a little less usable by the large driveshaft tunnel. The glass roof that is standard on all but the base model is impressive back here. The lack of a power port isn't though. All the expected storage cubbies are here. Cup holders too, if no one's stuck in the middle. (ON CAMERA) Perhaps you haul a lot of sports gear. Maybe you're delivering a season's worth of TP to the campsite. I won't judge. Bring along the electric pump if you're camping with an inflatable mattress. Alltracks cargo bay is nice and square making it easy to shove eight bundles of the two ply in back. Prices begin at 27,770. Top shelf SEL models rise to over 35 grand with major options. Volkswagens SUV line up is becoming long in the tooth, this is the first of three crossovers it's coming to the US in the next year or so. Alltrack isn't a new approach, but Volkswagen is on the right trail. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
The nature of the elusive graffiti artist's public works, which often comment on issues like greed, pollution or immigration, leave them prone to theft and vandalism. According to Le Monde, one of his murals in Paris was cut completely from a wall just days after it appeared on it. And in 2013, a work entitled "Slave Labour" vanished from the wall of a London discount store and wound up on auction in Miami, before it was withdrawn and returned to Britain. His works have also become more lucrative on the auction circuit over the years. In October, a spray painted work on canvas called "Girl With Balloon" was sold for 1.4 million before it self destructed thanks to a secret shredder the artist built into its frame. In the past, Banksy has encouraged buyers to avoid purchasing public works. "For the sake of keeping all street art where it belongs," he wrote in a 2008 statement, "I'd encourage people not to buy anything by anybody unless it was created for sale in the first place." In its post on Saturday, the Bataclan reiterated this idea, writing that the work stolen from its door "only has meaning in this place." "It's the reason that we wish to leave it free, in the street," it added, "accessible to all." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Soft power co opts people rather than coerces them. At the personal level, wise parents know that their power will be greater and will last longer if they exemplify sound ethical values for their children, rather than relying only on spankings, allowances or taking away the car keys. America gains soft power from our values (when we live up to them), and our policies (when they are seen as legitimate because they are framed with some humility and awareness of others' interests). How our government behaves at home (for example, protecting a free press), in international institutions (consulting others and multilateralism) and in foreign policy (promoting development and human rights) affects others by the influence of our example. In all of these areas, Mr. Trump has reversed attractive American policies and made America weaker rather than greater. Defenders of the administration reply that moral issues and soft power do not matter in international relations. Mr. Trump's acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, proclaimed a "hard power budget" as he slashed funds for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development by 30 percent. Fortunately, America is more than its government. Unlike our hard power assets, many soft power resources are generated by our civil society. Skeptics argue that the decline of American soft power does not matter much because countries cooperate out of self interest. But that argument misses a crucial point: Cooperation is a matter of degree, and the degree is affected by attraction or repulsion. The status of our soft power also affects nonstate actors for example, by aiding or impeding recruitment by terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State movement. In an information age, success depends not only on whose army wins, but also on whose story wins. The open values of our democratic society are among the greatest sources of America's soft power. Even when mistaken government policies reduce our attractiveness, the ability of America to criticize itself and correct its mistakes makes us attractive to others at a deeper level. When protesters around the world were marching against our government's policies during the Vietnam War, they often sang "We Shall Overcome," the anthem of our civil rights movement, rather than the Communist "Internationale." That should give us hope for the current moment. Given past experience, there is reason to believe that the United States can still recover its soft power after the Trump presidency. Joseph S. Nye Jr. is a professor at Harvard and the author, most recently, of "Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy From FDR to Trump." 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 |
NASHVILLE Jimmy Capps, a versatile guitarist who played on some of the biggest country hits of the 1970s and '80s and was a member of the Grand Ole Opry's house band for more than five decades, died here on Monday. He was 81. His son Mark confirmed the death but did not specify the cause. Known among his peers as the "master of smoothness" for his seemingly effortless technique, Mr. Capps was a guitarist on signature hits like Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man," George Jones's "He Stopped Loving Her Today" and Barbara Mandrell's "I Was Country When Country Wasn't Cool." He also contributed the filigreed acoustic guitar figure to Kenny Rogers's "The Gambler" and the gutbucket electric guitar riff to the Oak Ridge Boys' "Elvira." All five of those records reached No. 1 on the Billboard country singles chart; "Elvira," "The Gambler" and "Stand By Your Man" were major pop hits as well. According to his website, Mr. Capps played on more than 500 recording sessions a year at the peak of his career, many of them under the supervision of renowned Nashville producers like Billy Sherrill and Owen Bradley. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
From their earliest days, roller coasters have been designed to inspire awe (and an element of fear) among riders. Rob Decker, senior vice president of planning and design at Cedar Fair Entertainment, which operates 14 theme parks in the United States and Canada, tries to make sure that the roller coaster experience continues this tradition, while reinventing how theme parks can continue to attract visitors. "We have a broad group of guests," Mr. Decker said. "We have roller coaster enthusiasts and our family audience, so we try to balance the two and create a great environment for everyone." Following are edited excerpts from a conversation with Mr. Decker. Q. How did you end up working at Cedar Fair? A. I'm an architect and urban designer. I was working with architectural firms and had a good friend who said my kind of background would be good for theme and amusement park design. At the time, I said it doesn't sound like much of a career path. That was 27 years ago. I worked as a consultant for 11 years at Universal, Six Flags and a few other parks. I've been at Cedar Fair now for 16 years. You've set out to maintain Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, as a top destination park, working with the design team to build roller coasters like the GateKeeper, which has the tallest inversion of any coaster in the world. What has the feedback been like? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Before Frieze set up its swinging shop in London's Regent's Park, before Art Basel transposed its staid Swiss self onto Miami Beach, art fairs were small, concentrated events that targeted a narrow class of specialists. None was more connoisseur driven than the European Fine Art Fair, or Tefaf, the granddaddy of old masters events, held every March in the southern tip of the Netherlands. Tefaf recently hosted its 30th edition in Maastricht, and it remains the go to trading post for Flemish still lifes and Sienese altarpieces. But collectors' tastes have changed, and a global network of fairs has forced a rethinking of even the old school events. So Tefaf, like Basel and Frieze before it, has come to the New World and now hosts not one but two American editions in the Park Avenue Armory. The fall edition concentrated more on older art. Tefaf New York Spring, open through Monday, goes harder on art after 1900, though you will also find ancient busts, non Western masks and statuary, furniture both elegant and trashy, and diamonds galore. In other words: This is a very Park Avenue affair, but even those of us not looking to redecorate a megayacht can appreciate the breadth of what's on offer. The Armory looks inviting, decked with white fabric and while most of the dealers are in the building's cavernous drill hall, more than a dozen can be found in the ornate historical anterooms on both the ground and second floors. (As befits a Dutch fair, tulips are in abundance, too.) Here are some of the strongest booths at this first Tefaf for moderns. BERNARD GOLDBERG FINE ARTS, NEW YORK This specialist in prewar American art displays three showstopping mural panels by Thomas Hart Benton, the Missouri born regionalist (and professor to Jackson Pollock) whose muscly, elongated figures can appear as an American translation of Tintoretto and Veronese. Most of the panels from "The American Historical Epic" are at the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Mo., but the three here, from the mid 1920s, suggest the scale of Benton's national imagination. "Clearing the Land" features lumberjacks hacking down trees, but the smoke and stumps express an ecological regret that negates any pride in Manifest Destiny. "Planting," in which a Native American appears in the foreground, continues the theme of Western settlement, while in "The Witch," chilling and surreal, a young woman in white begs forgiveness on her knees as pilgrims prepare her for the scaffold. PETER FREEMAN INC., NEW YORK Sometimes dealers pair older and newer art to sex up the former and goose the latter's prices. But this astute and revealing two hander of the fin de siecle Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso and the contemporary German artist Thomas Schutte goes far beyond the usual exercise by concentrating on both artists' deformed, arresting busts. Rosso, a key figure in the Met Breuer's inaugural show "Unfinished," created discomfiting bronze and wax statues which dissolved the subjects' faces into landscapes of crags and divots. Mr. Schutte (who will have a retrospective at MoMA next year) also drowns individuality into twisted form, whether in glazed ceramic masks or in an astounding bust of green Murano glass, displayed on its side as if bowled over. CAHN, BASEL AND GALERIE CHENEL, PARIS Ancient art is an unexpected highlight of this fair, and a half dozen dealers here have brought antiquities from Egypt, Greece and Rome which are, surprisingly to some, less expensive than much contemporary art. (Numerous stands have opted for Cycladic art from pre Classical Greece, whose simplified forms and lack of facial detail may appeal more to modern tastes.) Chenel has brought a commanding, full height Roman statue from the second century A.D., depicting Hercules wearing the skin of the Nemean lion. The hero killed the beast as the first of his 12 labors; he wears the skin tied jauntily around his neck like a cashmere sweater, and it drapes down Hercules' shoulders to his noteworthy backside. At Cahn, you can become lost amid smaller Greek prizes, like an Attic cup painted with vigorous wrestlers, or a bronze Corinthian helmet covered with verdigris. GALERIE JACQUES GERMAIN, MONTREAL Among several galleries specializing in African and Oceanic art, this booth has one of the rarest pieces: a 14th century ancestor figure from the Dogon people of central Mali, made of patinated wood. With its parted lips and its belly thrust forward, the forefather represented here has an indisputability that makes him nearly a god. Also here is a commanding mask from the Gye people of present day Ivory Coast, from the 19th century, that exhibits the stylized facial features (a strong pyramidal nose, a perfect O of a mouth) that would later prove decisive for the development of modern Western art. DANSK MOBELKUNST, COPENHAGEN Furniture and the decorative arts have their place at Tefaf, too, though the galleries' approaches range from curated single designer displays to cash and carry mini shops. This Danish design gallery has put together one of the more impressive offerings, which intermixes tables, chairs and sofas with textile art, like a tapestry by the Swedish designer Marianne Richter of syncopated oranges and reds. A large copper lamp from 1929 by Poul Henningsen and a rare marble dining room table by Poul Kjaerholm argue for the enduring allure of Scandinavian design this deep into the Ikea Century. DIDIER LTD, LONDON Several jewelry merchants have set up shop at Tefaf, but if your tastes run beyond bling, the most rewarding of them will be this British specialist in wearable works by fine artists among them Braque, Giacometti, Calder and Jacques Lipchitz. The gallery's most covetable works are surely the lightweight pendants and brooches of Louise Nevelson, made from scraps of incised wood that she painted black and slathered unevenly with gold. Modern sculpture since Rodin has gone greater and greater distances from the studio; these artists' baubles are a throwback to personalization and craftsmanship, for which the word "decorative" seems not to suffice. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Follow the live updates on Seattle, Bubba Wallace, statues and the confederate flag. On Twitter and Facebook, hundreds of posts are circulating saying that George Floyd is not actually dead. Conspiracy theorists are baselessly arguing that George Soros, the billionaire investor and Democratic donor, is funding the spreading protests against police brutality. And conservative commentators are asserting with little evidence that antifa, the far left antifascism activist movement, coordinated the riots and looting that sprang from the protests. Untruths, conspiracy theories and other false information are running rampant online as the furor over Mr. Floyd, an African American man who was killed last week in police custody in Minneapolis, has built. The misinformation has surged as the protests have dominated conversation, far outpacing the volume of online posts and media mentions about last year's protests in Hong Kong and Yellow Vest movement in France, according to the media insights company Zignal Labs. At its peak on Friday, Mr. Floyd and the protests around his death were mentioned 8.8 million times, said Zignal Labs, which analyzed global television broadcasts and social media. In contrast, news of the Hong Kong protests reached 1.5 million mentions a day and the Yellow Vest movement 941,000. "The combination of evolving events, sustained attention and, most of all, deep existing divisions make this moment a perfect storm for disinformation," said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab. "All of it is toxic, and make our very real challenges and divisions harder to address." The collision of racial tensions and political polarization during the coronavirus pandemic has supersized the misinformation, researchers said. Much of it is being shared by the conspiracy group QAnon and far right commentators as well as by those on the left, Mr. Brookie said. President Trump himself has stoked the divisive information. Over the past few days, he posted on Twitter that antifa was a "Terrorist Organization" and urged the public to show up for a "MAGA Night" counterprotest at the White House. Along with that, people are experiencing high levels of fear, uncertainty and anger, said Claire Wardle, executive director of First Draft, an organization that fights online disinformation. That creates "the worst possible context for a healthy information environment," she said. Twitter and Facebook did not immediately have a comment. Here are three significant categories of falsehoods that have surfaced on social media platforms about Mr. Floyd's death and the protests. The unfounded rumor that Mr. Floyd is alive is emblematic of the misinformation narrative that a newsworthy event was staged. This has become an increasingly common refrain over the years, with conspiracy theorists saying, among other examples, that the 1969 moon landing and the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School were hoaxes. On Friday, the YouTube conspiracy channel JonXArmy shared a 22 minute video that falsely asserted Mr. Floyd's death had been faked. The video was shared nearly 100 times on Facebook, mostly in groups run by QAnon, reaching 1.3 million people, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook owned tool that analyzes interactions across social media. Jon Miller, who runs the JonXArmy channel, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. YouTube said on its site that it had removed the video, citing its policy on hate speech. On Twitter, posts stating that "George Floyd is not dead" were also tweeted hundreds of times over the past week, with the phrase peaking at 15 mentions in a 10 minute span on Monday morning, according to Dataminr, a social media monitoring service. In thousands of other posts on Facebook and Twitter, people falsely stated that Derek Chauvin, the Minnesota police officer who was charged with third degree murder and second degree manslaughter in Mr. Floyd's death, was an actor and that the entire incident had been faked by the deep state. The false idea that Mr. Soros funded the protests spiked on social media over the past week, showing how new events can resurrect old conspiracy theories. Mr. Soros has for years been cast as an anticonservative villain by a loose network of activists and political figures on the right and has become a convenient boogeyman for all manner of ills. On Twitter, Mr. Soros was mentioned in 34,000 tweets in connection with Mr. Floyd's death over the past week, according to Dataminr. Over 90 videos in five languages mentioning Soros conspiracies were also posted to YouTube over the past seven days, according to an analysis by The New York Times. On Facebook, 72,000 posts mentioned Mr. Soros in the past week, up from 12,600 the week before, according to The Times's analysis. Of the 10 most engaged posts about Mr. Soros on the social network, nine featured false conspiracies linking him to the unrest. They were collectively shared over 110,000 times. Two of the top Facebook posts sharing Soros conspiracies were from Texas' agriculture commissioner, Sid Miller, an outspoken supporter of Mr. Trump. "I have no doubt in my mind that George Soros is funding these so called 'spontaneous' protests," Mr. Miller wrote in one of the posts. "Soros is pure evil and is hell bent on destroying our country!" Mr. Miller did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Farshad Shadloo, a YouTube spokesman, said that the Soros conspiracy videos did not violate the company's guidelines but that the site wasn't recommending them. A spokeswoman for Mr. Soros said, "We deplore the false notion that the people taking to the streets to express their anguish are paid, by George Soros or anyone else." The unsubstantiated theory that antifa activists are responsible for the riots and looting was the biggest piece of protest misinformation tracked by Zignal Labs, which looked at certain categories of falsehoods. Of 873,000 pieces of misinformation linked to the protests, 575,800 were mentions of antifa, Zignal Labs said. The antifa narrative gained traction because "long established networks of hyperpartisan social media influencers now work together like a well oiled machine," said Erin Gallagher, a social media researcher. That began when Mr. Trump tweeted on Sunday that "ANTIFA led anarchists" and "Radical Left Anarchists" were to blame for the unrest, without providing specifics. Then he called antifa "a Terrorist Organization." Dan Bongino, a conservative political commentator who has unsuccessfully run for a House seat several times, then took up the call. On the "Fox and Friends" television show on Monday, Mr. Bongino said antifa activists were responsible for a "sophisticated" attack on the White House and called it an "insurrection." He did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Those assertions soon spread around social media. More than 6,000 Facebook posts linking the antifa movement to the protests appeared in the last seven days, collecting over 1.3 million likes and shares, according to The Times's analysis. And on Twitter, a fake "manual" specifying "riot orders" that was supposedly issued by Democrats directing antifa activists to stir up trouble circulated prominently. But the so called manual was a resurrection of an old hoax linked to the April 2015 riots in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, the fact checking website Snopes reported. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The producer Imanbek near the train station where he used to work in Aksu, Kazakhstan. Imanbek Zeikenov is 19 years old and lives with his parents in the small village of Aksu in Kazakhstan. He studied railway engineering at school, and until last December, held a day job at his local train station. But everything changed in the summer of 2019, when he discovered a song called "Roses" by the Guyanese American rapper and singer Saint Jhn. On the raw, sinewy "Roses," which had already been commercially available for three years, Saint Jhn sings (explicitly) about a night on the prowl. Imanbek, who records under his first name and had a number of amateur remixes under his belt, resolved to iron out some of the track's inefficiencies. His take pitches up Jhn's voice into a manic squeal; he added a thick, rubbery bass line and a snare drum rattling in the distance. Imanbek posted his remix to Russian social media without giving it a second thought. He returned a few months later, surprised to learn he was a pop star. "I made an illegal remix," Imanbek said through a translator over a Zoom call. He was sitting in his newly purchased car and wearing a red and white Kappa top. "I didn't know how to promote it, because I didn't know how to clear it. So I just put it online, and let it go. A few months later, it blew up the whole world." Four years after the initial release of "Roses," Imanbek's remix is an international smash. The song is No. 5 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, and reached No. 1 on the United Kingdom's chart. (Saint Jhn's only other charting single was the 2019 Beyonce collaboration "Brown Skin Girl.") More important, Imanbek is no longer an unsanctioned artist. At the end of last August, he signed with the Russian label Effective Records. The following month, he reached a deal with Saint Jhn to officially release the accidental collaboration as a single. "It was very easy. We said, 'We want to break this record, it's doing well, we want to make it legit,'" Imanbek said, describing the short meeting between Saint Jhn's management and the Effective Records owner Kirill Lupinos that led to the alliance. Imanbek started collecting revenue from "Roses" in late 2019, earning enough to quit his job and proclaim himself a professional musician, though Lupinos said checks from the first half of 2020, when the single exploded, aren't due until later this year. Despite their extremely profitable partnership, Imanbek and Saint Jhn have yet to meet in person. The only way the two have communicated, the producer said, has been over Instagram direct messages. "I'm performing in Russia," Saint Jhn said in an interview with Genius last year, marveling at how audiences reacted to "Roses" despite not speaking English. "Not because I'm trying to perform in Russia, because Russia is requesting me, demanding I come. That's surreal." Like many newer social media hits, "Roses" first caught fire on TikTok, in early 2020, when thousands of teens shimmied to easily replicable choreography. With the power shifting from the hands of industry gatekeepers to the young listeners who can amplify a track's audience almost overnight, pop music success is becoming increasingly difficult to predict. In 2015, a love song called "Cheerleader," written three years previously by the little known Jamaican singer Omi, earned a sprightly remix by the German D.J. Felix Jaehn. It went triple platinum in the United States and had its own TikTok challenge. Looking back now, "'Cheerleader' was always a good song," Omi said in a phone interview, recalling that fans used to sing along to the original version. "I think in 2015 it was an easy transition to open the market up to a different demographic and appeal to a wider audience. It gave it a whole new life." Imanbek's father is a fire marshal, and his mother works for a tourism agency. He said he grew up in a musical family, but added that he doesn't have many western musical influences. Instead, he was inspired by his local scene of D.J.s and producers, and made his own foray into electronic music by watching tutorials on YouTube. Right now, Imanbek is plotting his next move. In May, he put out a chilly house tune called "I'm Just Feelin' (Du Du Du)," a collaboration with the Danish producer Martin Jensen. He doesn't yet know how to D.J., so live dates (even virtual ones, because of the pandemic) are out of the question for now. There is an imitation Imanbek in a Michael Myers like mask and an Effective Records hoodie who streams live sets on YouTube from a wood paneled studio. Once Imanbek learns how to perform, he plans to take his place. For now, he is still making music on his 10 year old laptop using a copy of FL Studio. His sole upgrade has been a new pair of headphones, courtesy of his label. The only recurring reminders of his newfound fame are the emails, WhatsApp messages and Instagram DMs that have flooded his inbox from artists inquiring about potential collaborations. Imanbek screenshots every one of them as a personal memento, before forwarding it along to management. "One of the latest was from Tiesto," he said, referring to the star D.J. "He reached out to me and said he really appreciates what I'm doing, and he wished me good luck." Imanbek knows he's sitting on top of a once in a lifetime opportunity. What's important, he said, is whatever comes next. "I understand where I am now, that my success is truly global," he said. "Now, I need to prove that I'm not a one hit wonder." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Hi, I'm Walt Dohrn. I'm the director of 'Trolls World Tour.' "First things first, these trolls need some serious cheering up, and we're going to have to go top shelf." Now this scene here we find where Poppy, the queen of the Pop Trolls, is trying to connect with the Country Music Trolls by singing the most important songs of all time. So we had a lot of fun coming up with this scene. It started with hours and hours of meetings, making lists of guilty pleasures or songs so bad they're good kind of idea, really recognizable songs. We really wanted to go over the top because from the Country Music Trolls' point of view, these characters don't really understand the cultural sensitivity of this genre just yet. When we presented this notion to Anna Kendrick, who did the voice of Poppy, and Justin Timberlake, who is also our executive music producer, they rolled their eyes a little bit at the concept of this. But by the end of it, like these characters, they were completely into these songs. We had a choreographer who really choreographed this guy. And so the story artist add a lot of jokes, the choreographers add jokes, and then we take it to layout, who add some moments. And then it gets to the animators, who kind of interpret all of that business there. But one of the best jokes, I think, coming up, this kind of final joke. "Tell 'em, Poppy." "Shake that!" WIND WHISTLING "You suck!" This 'you suck' tumbleweed came out of an idea from a story artist, which I thought was really kind of perfectly described how most of the audience was feeling at this point. And this last joke here, Branch kind of has the last word. This was an improv from Justin. I think that's how he really felt. "Well, I knew it. 'Who Let the Dogs Out,' too far." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The handshake came first. Then the high five, fist bump and more recently, the elbow touch. Canadian researchers are now working on a new greeting, the CanShake. It is not a mere salutation. The CanShake which involves people shaking their phones at each other upon meeting to transmit contact information is one of many emerging concepts seeking to use smartphones to do mass contact tracing to track and contain the spread of Covid 19. All involve harnessing common consumer technology to log people's location or movements and match it against the location of people known to be sick. There are dozens of versions, many already in practice around the world, including in South Korea, Singapore, China, Italy and Israel. But in the United States, privacy concerns and absence of national policy have made the approach slower to catch on. Efforts are piecemeal. Google and Apple have a partnership underway to develop software for smartphones that would enable them to continuously log information from other devices. The MIT Media Lab has built contact tracing technology too. Three states Alabama, North Dakota and South Dakota have said they have deployed or are developing apps for tracking the virus. The experimentation is happening as states, counties and cities are working to train people for the traditional, more arduous approach to contact tracing. "There's an army of contact tracers being hired. Technology can make this much more efficient," said Dr. Gunther Eysenbach, editor of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, who is developing the CanShake. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco who is leading training of 10,000 California contact tracers, said digital ideas are bubbling up. "We've gotten several hundred people who want to show us their stuff," he said. But he said, they rely on smartphones, and some lower income people most at risk from Covid 19 don't have them. Whatever the technology, there are trade offs among the major ways that the information can be shared, stored and communicated: geolocation, Bluetooth and QR codes. This software typically runs in the background on phones to help with location services like Google Maps. It can track people to within about 10 meters of their location, and be turned on and off voluntarily. However, in other countries this technology has worked partly because it has been used automatically, with governments taking the data without asking permission. After 3,000 people from the Diamond Princess cruise ship disembarked in Taiwan in late January some of whom were later found to be infected the Taiwanese government tapped into geolocation data of individual cellphone users to look for contacts between its citizens and the passengers. The technology found 627,386 residents of Taiwan who had been in the vicinity of the passengers, whose own location data was also taken using other surveillance methods: the buses they took, the locations where they used credit cards, security camera footage and their phone data. Those residents all received text messages and were offered tests if they exhibited symptoms. Of 67 people tested, none were positive. Dr. Eysenbach, who is an author of a paper on the test, said it was effective but "did not require informed consent" and "would in the Western world be perceived as very privacy invasive." A report called "Apps Gone Rogue," published in April by the MIT Media Lab, found that many international versions of contact tracing technology "expand mass surveillance, limit individual freedoms and expose the most private details about individuals." That said, use of geolocation software doesn't have to invade privacy, partly because it can be turned off by a user who knows he or she might be monitored. It also is possible to build applications that do not allow movement history to be accessed by outside sources, said Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab. Bluetooth, the technology that your phone uses to communicate with other devices, can connect people to within one meter of one another and thus is more precise than geolocation technology. But it potentially creates privacy risk given that very precision. The MIT Media lab has developed a contact tracing concept that could use Bluetooth or geolocation technology in ways its developers say would not compromise individual liberties. Safe Paths runs in the background of a person's phone with his or her permission creating and storing a history of movements. If a person tested positive, that individual's history would be downloaded to a database. After that, other people who used the service could run checks to see if their own movements had intersected with someone who tested positive "completely private," Mr. Raskar said, likening the idea to someone checking for rain without having to reveal his or her location. The project is being developed with input from the Department of Health and Human Services, Harvard University and the Mayo Clinic. Mr. Raskar said several countries and 15 cities and states had expressed interest to MIT in the technology, but declined to identify them. Apple and Google also use Bluetooth to let jurisdictions develop contact tracing apps. The companies' technology offers privacy protections and is "a good faith effort," said Gaurav Laroia, a lawyer for Free Press, a nonprofit that is part of a consortium that includes the American Civil Liberties Union. The larger issue, though, he said, is whether people will choose to download these apps. Bluetooth is also the technology behind the CanShake, an app in early development. When two people were near each other, they would shake their phones at each other to trigger a passing of their contact information through a Bluetooth connection. The data would be logged in each phone. Then, if either person got sick, the information could be downloaded by the authorities, who would with the user's permission warn those in the contact log. "The idea is to replace the handshake with the CanShake. It alludes to the idea that you 'can shake' again not your hands but with your phone," Mr. Eysenbac said. When coronavirus cases surged in South Korea this winter, hospitals there asked people seeking tests or treatment to answer questions on their phones before arriving, including whether they had a fever or cough. After completing the responses, each person was sent a QR code to their phone. When the person arrived at the hospital, a scanner captured the code and the individual's information and the person was directed to get a coronavirus test or not. Initially, this was seen as a way to process people without paperwork, said Dr. Ki Mo ran, a professor at the National Cancer Center Graduate School of Cancer Science and Policy. Now, the country is considering expanding the use of QR codes. In May, Dr. Ki met with Prime Minister Chung Sye kyun to recommend expansive use of the technology for contact tracing. In an interview, Dr. Ki said she described how it would scan visits by people to larger gatherings at restaurants, churches and night clubs, for example. The proposed expansion of this technology was prompted, she said, by an outbreak that began in a nightclub. The government's policy at the time was that visitors to such gatherings were required to sign in and leave their contact information. But she said that 30 percent of the visitors to the nightclub could not be found because there was such a rush of people that not everyone gave information or partial data that could not be traced. Under the new rules, she said, "people would generate a QR code, rather than writing down" their information. That code would be scanned when they entered and the information "would be connected to the government," which, in the event of outbreak, could look for intersections between the sick and those nearby. The government is exploring this idea of a "digital visitors list," for a six month test at nightclubs, restaurants and bars. The government would collect the data but would delete it after four weeks if it was not needed to trace an outbreak. The report from MIT Media Lab noted that one source of abuse from all three technologies was that governments broadcast the location of people who were infected. Singapore published maps designating whereabouts of infected citizens while Korea sent text messages about their locations. It didn't identify people by name, the report said, but it noted that divulging locations was still "making these places, and the businesses occupying them, susceptible to boycott, harassment, and other punitive measures." Dr. Ki acknowledged that privacy was a critical concern, but cautioned that protecting public health may be worth trade offs. "Privacy is a very important issue," she said, "but nowadays even though we try to protect personal privacy, it's very critical to save the community, so we have to find the very appropriate balance." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Instead of having a raven knocking at his chamber door, Joe Biden (as played by Jim Carrey) had a visitor of a different kind on "S.N.L." someone who "was still a little sore." On a Halloween night that fell on a fraught weekend before Election Day, a nation turned its lonely eyes to John Mulaney, the "Saturday Night Live" alum whose return appearances to this sketch show are usually a good omen. With no more presidential debates to lampoon, "S.N.L." opened its latest broadcast with Jim Carrey, in his recurring role as Joe Biden, reading a parody of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," updating the poem for the 2020 presidential race. Noting that it was Halloween ("For some Trump voters, it's the only day they'll wear a mask," Carrey said), he observed that Election Day was approaching and that many Americans were "very, very, very worried about the outcome." Then, after discarding a copy of "Triggered" by Donald Trump Jr. (which he said was "a little too scary"), Carrey began to read from what he said was a volume by Poe: And rifled through his Adderall drawer, When something stopped me with a screech. It was a knock upon my chamber door. It was someone still a little bit sore. Into the room came Kate McKinnon, playing Hillary Clinton. It made me scared of four years more Carrey's Biden said to her: "But this time is different, I can win. The people know I have a plan." McKinnon responded, "But your real advantage is you're not a woman, you're a man." Carrey endured further visits from the polling analyst Nate Silver (Mikey Day), Mitch McConnell (Beck Bennett) and the rappers Ice Cube (Kenan Thompson) and Lil Wayne (Chris Redd), who have offered their support to President Trump. Carrey's last visitor was Maya Rudolph in her recurring role as Kamala Harris. Alternating lines, they delivered a final verse: So whatever happens America, know that we'll be OK. Our nation will endure. We will fight another day. I'm sure it will be peaceful, no matter who has won, Though it's never a good sign when Walmart stops selling guns. Use your voice and use your vote. Democracy will represent. This daylight saving time, let's gain an hour and lose a president. Although he has been heartened to see New Yorkers wearing masks, he said, he was a little sad "because it prevents you from overhearing conversations on the street, and that is one of this city's greatest joys." He told a story of walking downtown in December and hearing another pedestrian say on his cellphone: "No, no, no, I can't meet right now. I'm way uptown." Mulaney added, "And then he looked at me, and he winked and he kept walking." Following the election, Mulaney said: "We might have the same elderly man or we might have a new elderly man. Just rest assured, no matter what happens, nothing much will change in the United States. The rich will continue to prosper while the poor languish. Families will be upended by mental illness and drug addiction. Jane Lynch will continue to book lots of projects, and when she does, she'll deliver. She's so good at being on TV." Mulaney also wondered whether his 94 year old grandmother should be allowed to vote ("You don't get to order for the table when you're about to leave the restaurant"), then chided himself for being ageist. "That would be like calling yourself the Greatest Generation," he said. " 'Oh, we fought the Nazis.' Well, we're trying to fight the new Nazis if you'd get out of the way and stop voting for people you saw in between coin collector commercials." Well, the election, guys, is three days away, and after all this time, Trump, I think, has finally found a winning message. Plays video of Trump saying, "You know our doctors get more money if somebody dies from Covid." That's our president, recently saved by doctors, saying doctors want more Covid for money. Which makes me think Trump only survived Covid so he wouldn't have to pay his doctors. Unfortunately, Trump's gaslighting isn't quite enough to keep you warm, because multiple Trump supporters who were stranded at a freezing cold rally in Nebraska were hospitalized with hypothermia I assume because Trump told them that jackets don't work. He asked viewers not to worry because "the president isn't trying to kill his supporters; he's actually succeeding at killing his supporters." According to a study, he went on: over 30,000 Covid cases and 700 deaths have been tied directly to Trump rallies. That means he's officially killed more people across the Midwest than Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy combined. Which is also kind of what Trump looks like. In the end, I guess that Trump was right, that he is not a typical politician, since politicians don't typically spend the last of the election murdering their own voters. Che picked up on the riff with details about the rapper Lil Wayne's recent meeting with Trump to discuss the president's Platinum Plan, or as Che described it, "Trump's FUBU platinum plan for the Black community." ("I don't know what it's actually called," he added.) Many are surprised by Lil Wayne's endorsement of Trump. But keep in mind, Lil Wayne puts cough syrup in his Sprite, so, grain of salt. It's weird that I have to tell politicians this but rappers are not Black leaders. They're just rappers. Stop negotiating with them. They only do this with Black people. I never saw a candidate talking to Gilbert Gottfried about what to do with Israel. That'd be insulting, right? Plus, rappers are just way too busy to be leaders anyway. I love Ice Cube but you know how many jobs he had on top of negotiating for Black people? You know why Malcolm and Martin were such great leaders? Because they weren't also working on "Barbershop 4." Set to an irresistible R B groove, "Strollin'" is a topical tune featuring Thompson, Redd, Ego Nwodim and Punkie Johnson as four Black voters who seem blissfully calm as they get ready to participate in the election (As Redd sings: "Been hoping for so long, for November 3rd / It's time to march on down, get our voices heard") only to find that every polling station they visit has been shut down. The quartet endures closed roads, muscle cramps and a walk along a busy highway before arriving at a polling station with a three hour long line. Will they successfully cast their votes? The results may or may not surprise you! | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
THE CARTIERS The Untold Story Behind the Jewelry Empire By Francesca Cartier Brickell "Family came first," Francesca Cartier Brickell's grandfather tells her of the family's jewelry empire. Although the Cartier family retained the business for four generations, the author didn't grow up steeped in its history. She wasn't even particularly interested until she came across a trunk of letters in her grandfather's wine cellar. Their ensuing conversations led to what is as much a tribute to a bygone era as a thorough account of modern luxury. While Cartier is now a fixture in every major city, a synonym for international panache, its origins were modest. The author's great great great grandfather, working class Louis Francois Cartier, founded his eponymous company in 1847. Through a combination of industry, shrewdness, and sheer luck, he managed to transform his small shop into a fashionable destination: no small task in an era of civil unrest and regime change. Thriving in the fickle fine jewelry market required finesse, and Brickell highlights the complementary skills different members of the close knit Cartier clan brought to their ever shifting business: innovative design, meticulous craftsmanship, an early appreciation for the power of public relations, and a keen eye for spotting counterfeit stones. Early on, Cartier also, crucially, developed a reputation as an honest and reliable dealer when droves of aristocrats were hocking their jewels following the Franco Prussian War. In the process, the Cartier family improved its own social standing in the merchant class, arranging marriages among other prominent jewelry and fashion houses. (The Faberges, Van Cleefs and Arpels were all family friends.) By its third generation, Cartier had established its three "temples" in Paris, New York and London, and were designated as "King of Jewelers and Jeweler of Kings" by their regular customer Edward VII. Discretion was paramount, as was appropriate for a jeweler to the elite and, later, the stars. Cartier managed the tricky balancing act of maintaining its clientele's privacy while still capitalizing on its influential patronage. They did careful research on their customers (paying close attention to the vicissitudes of society marriages), noting individual tastes and earning trust in return. Brickell's grandfather Jean Jacques Cartier recalls:"Instead of there just being a client card for the man who was buying the jewels, there would be separate cards for the recipients, too. The idea was that the salesman would avoid slip ups that way." Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Maria Callas shared an affinity for Cartier; at the height of its prestige, the jewelry worked with everyone from the Maharaja to Jean Cocteau to the Academie Francaise. The pieces themselves became icons in their own right: the sleek Tank watch became a discreet marker of social status;" the whimsical semiprecious brooches lent visibility by Wallis Simpson; the pink diamonds worn by a young Queen Elizabeth. Cartier began primarily as a supplier to larger jewelers but largely due to the legendary artistic director Jeanne Toussaint its imaginative aesthetic was distinctive by the 20th century. Part of the book's fun is watching the firm adapt to changing tastes for instance, resetting Imperial Russian jewels to suit the Art Deco tastes of the 1920s, or the bandeaux Cartier created to complement newly shingled hair. But this is also a story of the invention of the modern luxury canon. As any reader of Tolstoy or binger of "Succession" can tell you, family business isn't easy. The Cartiers' cohesion had seen the company through two world wars, the Great Depression and a century of changing tastes, but eventually four generations of different personalities and approaches took a toll. The same discretion and personal touch that had helped the company endure what a contemporary newspaper termed "the traditional reserve of a society jeweler" were eclipsed by the midcentury advertising prowess of brands like De Beers and Tiffany. After 115 years, Cartier was sold to a syndicate. The author tells us that her grandfather was initially reluctant to discuss Cartier's early history: He was ashamed that it was his generation that had failed to keep the company in the family. But he gradually embraced the project, and his accounts are the beating heart of "The Cartiers," elevating this from a company story to a human story one even the unadorned will read with pleasure. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Our columnist, Jada Yuan, is visiting each destination on our 52 Places to Go in 2018 list. This dispatch brings her to the west coast of Honshu in Japan (no. 27 on the list); it is the 48th stop on Jada's itinerary. They looked so innocent: planks of wood that attached to my feet with cloth thongs, like flip flops. But their contact surface with the ground was two blocks of wood, neither of which was under the toe. I pitched forward with each step and felt like I might launch face first into the ground. I had spent some 39 years of my life believing I knew how to walk, but click clacking down the streets of Kinosaki, Japan, in geta sandals, I wasn't so sure anymore. Over my clothes, I wore a yukata robe, or lightweight cotton kimono, that had been so complicated to put on, it came with illustrated instructions. A staff member from my traditional Japanese inn, Tsukimotoya Ryokan, tugged and tied it into place. "No, no, no," said the woman, who was half my height, as she put the right side flap over the left. Then she reversed them, nodded, and cinched it all together with an obi sash, "O.K., O.K. O.K." As I ventured outside, I heard loud, assured click clacking behind me two women in the same outfit that I was wearing. They were sisters from Singapore and moved like gazelles in their getas. I wobbled behind them, and then nearly lost my footing as I took in the scene near the lantern lit Otani River winding through the city. It was a veritable thoroughfare of yukatas and getas, in an array of colors, on visitors young and old, shuffling, striding and practically skipping through the night. People come from all over Asia and beyond to soak in Kinosaki's seven onsen, or public hot spring baths, and pretty much everyone does it walking around in a robe all day. The city is one big inn. The ryokan you stay in is your individual room and the streets are like the inn's corridors. It's all very romantic until it hails and rains. I had come to Kinosaki, on the western coast of Honshu, Japan's biggest island, though, not for dressing up, but on a kind of pilgrimage. As a Japanese friend put it to me in an email, "Don't they have that Buddha that's only unveiled to the public every 33 years?" The morning after I'd arrived, I took the Kinosaki Ropeway (a cable car) high up Mount Taishi to the Onsenji temple, home to the 1,300 year old statue of Kannon, the goddess of mercy in the Buddhist tradition. She has 11 faces, 10 in a crown to signify her wisdom, and was carved from the top of a mystical tree that produced three deities, of which she is the only original one left. This April began her unveiling, which will last for three years, until she goes back into hiding for another 30 years. Midway up the ropeway, hail had started coming down, and I rushed inside the temple. There, with the help of a translator, I spoke with Ogawa Yusho, the resident monk, who was born in the temple and is now raising his family there. He'd grown up hearing the legend of Dochi Shonin, a priest who came to this very spot in the eighth century and prayed for 1,000 days for the health of the people here and on the 1,000th day, an onsen sprung from the ground. It is said to be Mandara yu, the oldest of the seven on Kinosaki's onsen circuit. Before modern medicine, ill people would trek to Onsenji temple, pray to the spirit of Dochi Shonin, and then bathe, naked, with a wooden ladle in the hot springs. Once there, the ritual is to strip down, shower while sitting and then soak in those healing waters, surrounded by bodies of all shapes and sizes. (Onsen are divided into all male and all female sides.) I was struck with the ease of nudity, how young girls splashed around with their mothers and big sisters and grandmothers, and what an impact that must make on their self image, to know that bodies are all different and we all have one. The hot spring water warmed away the foul weather. As I left, I put on my yukata, thinking of the words I'd heard in the ryokan: left side over right, "O.K., O.K., O.K.," and stepped out into the thoroughfare that seemed like a reversal of time. The onsen were a little hot for me, but I could walk around in a robe forever. His name was Sushi Tiger. He was 76 and he'd been studying the art of cutting raw fish for 50 years. Why didn't I come in and take a seat? I was the only person in his narrow restaurant, breaking a cardinal travelers' rule to follow crowds to the best food. But I'd already been wandering the streets of Kanazawa, the capital city of the Ishikawa Prefecture, for 20 minutes in search of sushi and a kind young man had brought me here, so who was I to mess with fate? Sushi Tiger, who also goes by Takashi, wrapped a twisted white bandana around his forehead as he prepared my dinner. He spoke little English and I spoke almost no Japanese, so we communicated by writing on napkins, pointing at a sign with pictures of sushi and Google Translate, which is even more hopeless at Japanese than it is at other languages. At one point he brought out a book of cartoons used for teaching English to school children and taught me a few Japanese phrases, while serving me sake. I was glad to be his only customer. I am not an adventurous eater, particularly when it comes to seafood; I was a vegetarian for a long time, in New Mexico, which has no sea. But when I set out on this 52 Places trip, I made a vow to overcome my pickiness, which meant eating a few insects and a small slice of wallaby (I still feel guilty). Japan, I thought, would really test those limits. Under the tutelage of Sushi Tiger and Kawai, another Kanazawa sushi master at Takasakiya Sushi, though, I ate melt in your mouth maguro (tuna) and sucked green eggs from the shell of amaebi (sweet shrimp). I also learned that I do not like eel or squid or anything I have to work hard to chew. In my Kinosaki ryokans, at lavish kaiseki dinners, the learning curve was steeper. I'd sit down to a tray filled with 20 little plates and no one who spoke English to guide me through them. What order was I supposed to eat them in? Did any of them get dipped in soy sauce? So I'd try first and ask questions later. It turns out I am not a fan of preserved fish eggs melded into a rectangular cake, but I'm O.K. with tender fish intestines. The big reason Kinosaki still has such a thriving Asian tourism business in the winter is that snow crab season starts in November, and lasts only a few months. People come for the crab and stay for the onsen. A good crab can sell for up to 300. I was lucky enough to have a snow crab kaiseki dinner served to me in my room at Sinonomesou Ryokan, where I sat at a low table on a bamboo floor mat. I had been relying on guidance from young members of the Kinosaki tourism board and invited them in to eat my crab. Nakada Naoki, who had grown up nearby, showed us how to suck the meat out of the claws. Easier to navigate were sweets and bento boxes. I tried buckwheat battered red bean cakes and soba flavored ice cream in the castle town of Izushi, famed for its soba, and became a huge fan of to go sushi hand rolls at Family Mart convenience stores. What I'll remember this Japan trip for is trying shrimp for the first time in probably 15 years. Our route took us to Shiroyone Senmaida, a set of more than 1,000 terraced rice paddies on the seaside that has been registered as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System; and for a drive along Chirihama Nagisa Driveway, five miles of sea packed sand, one of the few places where ordinary cars and buses can speed right along the shore. But first thing was a visit to the 1,000 year old morning market in the seaside town of Wajima. Locals bought fresh fish, and grilled it over coals in a designated area. I tried yuzu soft serve ice cream and maru yubeshi, a local candy made of orange peel, and mostly wandered around in a mute, dazed state. I followed a crowd to a shop called Tohka doha selling lacquerware chopsticks, a traditional craft, in which the artisan covers a piece of wood with up to 100 layers of lacquer, and then shaves off a portion of the surface to reveal a kaleidoscope of colors. Before long, the 79 year old, English speaking owner, Yatsui Kiyoshi, emerged. When he heard I was on a long trip, he pulled out a weather beaten Rand McNally atlas and told me he had studied nuclear physics at Cornell, and driven across the United States to spend two years in Los Alamos, N.M. He loved the mountains and the tequila but thought it was too hot, and he missed Japan and his family. So he came back to continue a life in nuclear physics and carry out his legacy as a fifth generation lacquerware artisan. His wife took some pictures of us, which he emailed to me with a note about what a small world it is and how wonderful it had been to find someone with connections to New York and New Mexico. Then he reminded me, for about the fifth time, not to put the chopsticks I'd bought in the microwave. Trains Japan's network of trains is famous, and their JR Pass, which offers unlimited rides in cars with unreserved seats, is worth the cost . Purchasing online and having it shipped to you is the cheapest option ( 254 for seven days covering the whole country), but the passes are also available at major stations. If you're only traveling in a single region, you'll save money buying a limited version. (I got a seven day, Kansai Hokuriku JR West pass for 140.) JR Passes don't work in automated entry gates, so you'll need to find a gate agent to waive you in and out of each train. Bullet trains cost extra on limited passes. If you have luggage, board in the rear of the car; there's storage behind the back row of seats. Alternatively, use the coin lockers in the stations, or employ a hands free luggage transportation service that will send your things on to your next destination. A word on exhaustion Multiple transfers over a six hour train trip between Kinosaki and Kanasawa meant no time for naps; I had to set alarms on my phone to make sure I didn't nod off and miss my stop. If you must nap while you travel, consider taking a bus. Also, most hotel checkout times are 10 a.m. Try to stay in one place multiple nights so you can sleep in one morning. Driving Renting a car would have been a great way to see Western Honshu, but you need an International Driving Permit. It's cheap and not hard to get, but easiest if you obtain it before you leave on your trip. Money Matters For a country that seems so futuristic, much of Japan outside Tokyo and major cities seems to be a cash society (even in Kanazawa). I used my credit card twice. Even hotels I'd booked online would ask to be paid in cash or with PayPal. A.T.M.s are plentiful, but you must use the international ones next to post offices if you don't have a Japanese bank. Rubbish Japanese food is beautifully packaged, which creates a ton of waste. I was astounded with how many plastic bags I'd wind up with over the course of a day. To mitigate that, carry reusable bags. There's also a surprising lack of trash cans in public spaces. The local expectation is that you pack your trash, and dispose of it when you get to a place with garbage and recycling bins. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
PARIS France is being roiled by yet another clothing controversy. Almost three years after the burkini scandal, which became the fulcrum of a debate over the right of self expression versus the social contract, comes renewed furor over the hijab, after a French sporting goods retailer, Decathlon, withdrew its plans to sell a runner's head scarf under pressure of a boycott. It's easy for what we wear to become a symbol of what divides us; easy to seize on dress as a point of difference, and to transform it into something ugly. Which is why it can be such a balm when designers choose to make their cause with beauty and dignity instead. Such is the case with Dries Van Noten, the Belgian whose unique study of color, print and line has a poetry of its own. This season his subject was roses specifically the roses in his own garden outside of Antwerp, which he has long tended with love and neuroses. It sounds kind of banal, and he even quoted Gertrude Stein's "A rose is a rose is a rose" in his show notes, but then he subverted expectations by focusing on the flowers' flaws: the moment when they begin to wilt and the decay sets in. Building on a base of dark gray pinstripe tailoring in curvaceous double breasted jackets and the couture drape of a sheath with starburst folds on the side, a quilted scarf over one arm he added a corsage of blooms at the neck of a dove colored shirt, shadows visible beneath the petals. The flowers were sprinkled over lemon yellow silk jackets and lavender skirts, leaves on the verge of browning and falling to the ground were visible beneath a scrim of tulle or organza tossed atop a sheath dress or turtleneck to create the blurriness of double exposure. They crept up from the hem of a green silk bathrobe coat, bloomed on boots and were embedded in clusters of gold sequins. Their imperfections grounded the elegance and made it real. So did the elastic waists. This wasn't fashion as fantasy. It was fashion as an elegy to nature under threat; nature as it may not exist in the future. That should be something we can all get behind. Certainly Natacha Ramsay Levi did at Chloe, in an entirely different way. Her focus was on the untamed and untended moors; the wild expanses. Against a soundtrack of galloping hooves came tweeds and tartans, houndstooth and devore florals. Trousers were long and skinny and unzipped at the ankle to flare over the foot; jackets had big brass buttons; dresses were asymmetrical and puffed at the sleeve; and jumpsuits were patterned in climbing vines of silver, burst into bud. There were horn cuffs and half moon necklaces and branching gold earrings. If a pioneer woman had a night gig as a pagan priestess and wanted something to wear to work that would take her day to evening, this would do the job. Also in the mix: a remixed toile de Jouy sketched with the outline of a couple standing hand in hand, staring out at an endless field of rocks and mountain shrubs, used in a flirty chiffon minidress and reproduced in saturated color on a T shirt, either way meant to signify "engagement and commitment," Ms. Ramsay Levi said backstage before the show. Though it is true that her clothes also require a certain commitment to a look, she was talking rather about relationships. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
"Sleepless: A Musical Romance," which opened on Tuesday at the Troubadour Wembley Park Theater, is more noteworthy for what it represents than for the show itself: London's first fully staged indoor musical since the coronavirus pandemic brought live performances to a halt back in March. Several musical revivals have since been performed in concert at alfresco locations around the city. The rare plays on offer have had either casts of one or, as with the sound installation "Blindness" at the Donmar, no live actors at all. But like it or not and "Sleepless" is fairly anodyne the show on view through Sept. 27 exists on a scale that seemed unimaginable even a month or two ago. And for that at least, three cheers. It helps that the musical has as its source "Sleepless in Seattle," the wildly successful 1993 screen comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan that is unusual for keeping its romantically inclined leads apart until the very end. (This "Sleepless," by the way, is not connected to a separate 2013 stage musical that had its premiere at the Pasadena Playhouse in California.) The result builds into the plot a geographical separation that chimes with our socially distanced age: The show, like the film, spends two hours bringing the widowed Sam (Jay McGuiness) and the excitable Annie (Kimberley Walsh) together atop the Empire State Building on Valentine's Day, at which point they don't do much more than clasp hands as Morgan Large's attractive two tiered turntable set whooshes them from view. Safety precautions are in place. The cast and crew are tested daily for the coronavirus, while audiences are required to wear masks, have their temperatures checked upon arrival and follow a one way system through a building that has hand sanitizer in evidence at every turn. The theater itself, which is toward the outer reaches of northwestern London and well away from the still shuttered West End, is putting less than one third of its 1,300 seats on sale for each performance a revenue limiting measure by producers who clearly decided that some paying public was better than no public at all. The determination of all involved makes it especially disappointing that the director Morgan Young's production isn't more exciting, however likable its leads are. (Young and his two English stars collaborated this time last year on the West End premiere of the 1996 Broadway musical "Big," another screen to stage transfer of a Tom Hanks film.) It's bracing to find a musical showcasing a new British composing team in Robert Scott and Brendan Cull amid a climate still defined this side of the Atlantic by Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose new musical, "Cinderella," is among the many autumn openings that have been postponed. But too much of the score has a samey, easy listening quality, with one song blurring into the next. Annie's numbers exist largely to tell us that she's "out of my mind" or "out of my head," as you might be, too, if you developed a sudden obsession with a man on the other side of the United States based only on a chance hearing one holiday season on the radio. As is true of the film, you feel for the decent if dull Walter (Daniel Casey), Annie's partner, who is blindsided by her gathering infatuation with a voice she needs to see made flesh. The depressive Seattle architect Sam, in turn, is upstaged in this telling by his matchmaking son, Jonah, the 10 year old here played by a young vocal dynamo, Jobe Hart, another alumnus of the musical "Big." (Hart shares the role of Jonah with three other boys, in accordance with union requirements.) Indeed, the closest "Sleepless" comes to a showstopper is a second act duet, "Now or Never," for Hart and the musical theater veteran Cory English as Sam's ebullient friend, Rob. The song comes with its own reprise: "Shall we do it again, just from the key change?" And they do. Michael Burdette's book takes its lead from the Oscar nominated screenplay co written by Nora Ephron, at times running certain references into the ground. It's fine to present Annie, a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, as a film buff with an abiding interest in the Cary Grant Deborah Kerr film "An Affair to Remember," to which the "Sleepless" film owes a debt. But it's unclear why Annie really needs to sing of her love for Grant just as it's hard to believe that so avid a film buff would debate the pronunciation of Kerr's last name. Then again, Annie is the sort who thinks that "even the word exotic sounds exotic," so there's no telling where her conversations may lead. Both known for their work with pop groups, McGuiness and Walsh prove amiable team leaders in a show that can't help but feel like an also ran. You leave "Sleepless" pleased that it happened, and restless for more and better theater to come. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Inspired by the Wynwood Walls of Miami, a street art project that has revitalized a once dreary neighborhood, Susan Bohlken, owner of the beachfront Zamas Hotel in Tulum, Mexico, invited several muralists to the area to literally paint the town last December. The result: 14 new murals on city walls. Since then, artists have been adding to the collection, and more than 30 buildings are decorated in mermaid Madonnas, bejeweled elephants and colorful serpents. Tulum Street Art Tours, run by the resort, introduce travelers to the murals. "People are getting a fresh perspective on Tulum, which is always what I wanted to do at Zamas, connect the local community via my staff to tourists because that makes it a more meaningful vacation," Ms. Bohlken said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Hear the Sounds of Wind on Mars, Recorded by NASA's InSight Lander That's the sound of winds blowing across NASA's InSight lander on Mars, the first sounds recorded from the red planet. It's all the more remarkable because InSight which landed last week does not have a microphone. Rather, an instrument designed for measuring the shaking of marsquakes picked up vibrations in the air sound waves, in other words. Winds blowing between 10 and 15 miles per hour over InSight's solar panels caused the spacecraft to vibrate, and short period seismometers recorded the vibrations. "You can think of it rather in the same way as the human ear, how we in fact listen," said Thomas Pike, a scientist at Imperial College London who is leading research with the instruments. "The solar panels are like the ear drum. The spacecraft structure is like the inner ear." The seismometers act as the cochlea, the parts of your ears that convert the vibrations into nerve signals. They are able to record vibrations up to a frequency of 50 Hertz audible to human ears as a low rumble. NASA also produced a version of the recording that lifted the sounds by two octaves. "To me, the sounds are really unworldly," Bruce Banerdt, the principal investigator of the mission, said during a news conference on Friday. "They do sound like the wind or maybe the ocean kind of roaring in the background. But it also has an unworldly feel to it." Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. A second instrument, an air pressure sensor that is part of InSight's weather station, also picked up sound vibrations, although at a much lower frequency that can be heard perhaps by elephants and whales, but not people. Here is a sound recording of those pressure readings, sped up by a factor of 100, which raises the pitch by more than six octaves. The sounds are so low in part because the instruments are not sensitive to higher frequencies. But the air on Mars is also extremely thin about 1 percent of the density of Earth's and that favors low frequency sounds. The two Viking landers that NASA sent to Mars in 1976 also carried seismometers that captured some wind noise. But Dr. Banerdt said those recordings were at much lower sampling rates and did not pick up anything at audible frequencies. "Even though the Viking seismometer picked up what I would call motions of the spacecraft, I think it would be a stretch to call those sounds," he said. NASA sent microphones to Mars on the Mars Polar Lander spacecraft in 1999, which crashed during its landing attempt, and on the Phoenix Mars lander; that instrument was left turned off, however, because it could have caused problems during landing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Brush away your Shakespeare! Start wrecking him now! The Bolshoi's latest calling card at the David H. Koch Theater this week as part of the Lincoln Center Festival is Jean Christophe Maillot's staging of "The Taming of the Shrew." This is a postmodern mess that begins by untelling the familiar story of Shakespeare's vivid but controversial play. Throughout the first act of Mr. Maillot's two act "Shrew," it's extremely hard to tell (or care) who most of the lead characters are, especially as Mr. Maillot starts the show with a sexy female star who turns out to be a very peripheral housekeeper. Gradually, however, this "Shrew" settles down by turning Shakespeare's story into something much more anodyne. The old Bolshoi style of reckless hugeness is replaced here by slapstick cuteness and marionette type characterizations. All the dances are standard cliche numbers; Mr. Maillot's alternation between cartoonlike acting and gushy lyricism makes the characters look deranged. This is the most timidly inoffensive "Shrew" I've ever seen. At the New York premiere on Wednesday, matters were subverted further when a fire alarm sounded late in Act I. (Most of the audience stayed put, but not all. After the intermission, Nigel Redden, the director of the Lincoln Center Festival, made a good curtain speech, explaining this had been a false alarm and congratulating the Bolshoi for continuing impeccably through it.) Shakespeare's play, also adapted by Cole Porter as "Kiss Me, Kate" and by John Cranko for a hit 1969 ballet, has long been contentious. The hero, Petruchio, boasts that he is taming Katharina, his shrewish wife (he calls her Kate), by starving and bullying and depriving her of sleep. True, Shakespeare creates drama in every play by setting himself a drastic problem the fairy queen enamored of an ass, the Scottish king who must commit crimes to keep his throne but this one and "The Merchant of Venice" (in which Shylock the Jew is punished by being made to become Christian) are the two that have become, understandably, most difficult for modern tastes. Yet Kate and Petruchio are both the play's most robust and unorthodox characters. Many have argued that theirs will be one of the few happy marriages in Shakespeare (who, anyway, tells the whole story as a play within another play). I've seen several productions that have made Shakespeare's original succeed by showing both its psychological subtlety and its central dramatic difficulty. Mr Maillot, however, takes away both. Mr. Maillot sets his ballet to a collage of music by Dmitri Shostakovich (the best part of the show). The dance drama sections come as if by clockwork; the showy display and lyrical outpourings feel like tacked on afterthoughts. At the end, to Shostakovich's famous but still surprising setting of "Tea for Two," the story's four newlywed husbands require their brides to mime polite tea drinking. Only Katharina (Ekaterina Krysanova) obliges. It's unclear why the other three brides won't play the game. Thus Mr. Maillot bypasses Shakespeare's far more objectionable marital task: Katharina is the only bride of three, not four, couples who sets her hand beneath her husband's foot. But here, who cares? It's only tea. In Mr. Maillot's time traveling production, the Housekeeper (Yanina Parienko), chic and sexy, comes onstage in front of the curtain in modern dress before the overture. It's she who brings the curtain up. At first, she's so intrusive that it's hard to tell who's who. Is she Katharina? Or Katharina's pretty and conventional sister, Bianca? The addition of a fourth bride, the Widow, early in Act I confuses matters further. In another cliche, Mr. Maillot also shows how good sex much thrashing around beneath the bridal sheet tames both Katharina and Petruchio (Vladislav Lantratov, an appealingly fresh beanpole) into being good spouses. He also makes Bianca (Olga Smirnova) eventually so outgoing that she, too, upends the story. She and her husband, Lucentio (Semyon Chudin), roll publicly together across the floor during their big, blah marital pas de deux. Mr. Lantratov and Igor Tsvirko (Hortensio) have for some years been among the Bolshoi's boldest actors, but anyone who remembers the high voltage dance panache of Richard Cragun in the Cranko "Shrew" will feel how Mr. Maillot has made these Bolshoi dancers seem pint size by comparison. Though Ms. Smirnova and Mr. Chudin are much friendlier here than in their usual noble stage personas, their lyrical sequences prove tedious. Ms. Krysanova does as well as Katharina as Mr. Maillot will allow, but, since Katharina isn't really much of a shrew here, the role lacks force. She even has a gamine, chic quality. It's easy for us to like a woman with only this degree of edge. Mr. Maillot hasn't the nerve to handle nasty women. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
WASHINGTON Federal Reserve officials expect Donald J. Trump's election to result in somewhat faster economic growth over the next several years, but they see little chance of the boom Mr. Trump has promised, according to an account of the Fed's most recent meeting in mid December. That is in part because the Fed plans to raise interest rates more quickly if growth accelerates. For now, however, Fed officials plan to wait and see what happens next, the account said. "While the Fed signaled that it would likely respond to expansionary fiscal policies with a faster pace of rate hikes, the Fed believes it is too early to embed this into its baseline," Michael Gapen, chief United States economist at Barclays, wrote on Wednesday following the release of the minutes. "Any real shift in the stance of monetary policy will require more clarity on the stance of fiscal policy." At the December meeting, the Fed raised its benchmark rate for just the second time since 2008, citing the continued expansion of the economy and the steady decline of unemployment. The Fed debated and delayed that increase for most of last year, but the account published on Wednesday after a standard three week delay described the final decision as uncontroversial. Officials instead spent the meeting talking about what comes next. Mr. Trump has promised a bevy of major changes in economic policy, including tax cuts and spending increases, reductions in regulation, and restrictions on trade and immigration. As a result, the account said, Fed officials regard both faster growth and slower growth as more likely than before the election, when the economy seemed locked into its longstanding pattern of slow and steady growth. "The job of conducting U.S. monetary policy has not become any easier over recent months," said James Marple, senior economist at TD Bank, referring to the increased uncertainty. The Fed, led by Janet L. Yellen, the chairwoman, predicted in December that it would raise rates three times this year. The account said officials were not yet ready to predict how the pace of rate increases might change as a result of new policies pursued by Mr. Trump and Congress. "Participants emphasized their uncertainty about the timing, size and composition of any future fiscal and other economic policy initiatives as well as about how those policies might affect aggregate demand and supply," the minutes said. The Fed's policy making committee, the Federal Open Market Committee, has 17 members, 10 of whom cast votes on monetary policy. The Fed's caution amounts to a bias in favor of growth. The economy is expanding at roughly the pace Fed officials regard as sustainable. The work force is growing slowly as more baby boomers retire, and productivity is rising slowly. Two percent growth may be about as good as it gets. Ms. Yellen has warned that fiscal stimulus, like a tax cut or a spending increase, could increase economic growth to an unsustainable pace in the near term, resulting in increased inflation. The Fed quite likely would seek to offset such policies by raising interest rates more quickly. 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. Instead of acting pre emptively, the Fed is choosing to wait for more information. But the minutes said officials were concerned about the challenge of communicating their increased uncertainty. They want to be clear that the Fed's prediction about the pace of rate increases depends on its prediction about economic growth. Faster growth will mean faster increases. The account said Fed officials were confident in their ability to raise rates quickly enough to prevent overheating, seeing "only a modest risk" of a "sharp acceleration in prices." By holding rates at low levels, the Fed has sought to increase economic growth by encouraging borrowing and risk taking; higher rates reduce the stimulative effect. The benchmark rate now sits in a range from 0.5 percent to 0.75 percent, still very low by historical standards. "Consumers have no reason to panic about the rate hike last month, or even about additional rate increases in 2017," said Alan MacEachin, chief corporate economist at Navy Federal Credit Union. He noted that the last rate hike would add 1 to the monthly payment on a 5,000 credit card balance. The economic forecast prepared by the Fed's staff for the December meeting anticipated that Mr. Trump's election would result in "slightly higher" growth over the next several years. It said a likely increase in fiscal stimulus would be "substantially counterbalanced" by higher interest rates and a stronger dollar, which would reduce exports of American goods and services. Several Fed officials reported that Mr. Trump's election had increased optimism among business executives in their districts. "Some contacts thought that their businesses could benefit from possible changes in federal spending, tax and regulatory policies," the minutes said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Dr. Huy Nguyen hadn't yet settled his sense of sexual orientation when he and Vincent Quan met in 2013, at the birthday party of a mutual friend in New York. The soiree was at a gay bar, and for Dr. Nguyen, even walking through the door of such a place was a first. He was nervous. "I was not out yet, not even to myself," he said. But when he spotted Mr. Quan, he couldn't stop looking. "I really didn't want to keep looking at him, but my eyes just kept wandering back, and I knew I had to meet him," he said. Mr. Quan said the conversational gambit Dr. Nguyen chose was awkward. "He just came up to the table that I was lingering over, and my distinct memory is that he tried to interject by asking what my thoughts were about Photoshop," Mr. Quan said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The actress and singer Marie Laforet in 1972. She made her first film in 1960 and her last in 2010. Marie Laforet, the French actress and singer known in Europe as "the girl with the golden eyes" ("la fille aux yeux d'or"), died on Saturday in Genolier, Switzerland, a small town in the Nyon district north of Geneva. She was 80. The death was announced by her family. Ms. Laforet appeared in some 35 feature films, as well as numerous television movies and mini series, but her music career was even more successful than her work onscreen. She sold more than 35 million records, counting among her biggest hits "Vendanges l'Amour," "Ivan, Boris et Moi," "Viens, Viens" and "Il A Neige sur Yesterday" ("It Has Snowed on Yesterday"), a 1977 tribute to the Beatles. Her songs were strongly influenced by folk music, and she even recorded versions of American folk songs , including "House of the Rising Sun." Ms. Laforet came from "a bourgeois milieu" and a family that was passionate about music, she said in a 2008 interview with the French newsmagazine VSD (Vendredi Samedi Dimanche ). "The tea was brought on a silver platter at 5 p.m.," she recalled, adding: "My parents used the formal address 'vous.' My mother changed for dinner." At 3, Maitene suddenly stopped speaking . More than three decades later, Ms. Laforet revealed publicly that she had been raped by a neighbor that year, more than once, while her father was in a German prisoner of war camp. She was deeply affected for decades, and it was suggested in various articles that she later turned to acting because it offered catharsis. She agreed. At the end of World War II, Maitene's father returned and the family moved, first to Valenciennes, in the North of France , and then to Paris. She attended Lycee Jean de La Fontaine, in the wealthy 16th arrondissement, where she became interested in drama. For a while, she talked about becoming a nun. But when she entered a radio talent contest in 1959 (filling in for her sister at the last minute), she won and was discovered by the director Louis Malle. Ms. Laforet was signed to appear in Malle's next film, but that project fell through. Instead she made her film debut, at 19, in "Purple Noon" ("Plein Soleil"), a 1960 movie based on a Patricia Highsmith novel about a handsome, homicidal young con man. She starred opposite Alain Delon as an indolent rich girl living in Italy, later played by Gwyneth Paltrow in "The Talented Mr. Ripley," the 1999 American film, starring Matt Damon, based on the same novel . Ms. Laforet's second film, "Saint Tropez Blues" (1961), in which she sang the title song, led to her career as a vocalist . Her third, "The Girl With the Golden Eyes" (1961), gave her a lifelong professional nickname . (Her eyes were actually yellow green .) When that film opened in New York the next year, it led the critic Bosley Crowther of The New York Times to evaluate French cinema's latest direction, the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave. He declared the picture "beautifully photographed" but said that it seemed to hit "the jackpot of intentional obscurity." Happily, he found Ms. Laforet "haunting." Ms. Laforet left France for Switzerland in 1978 and ran an art gallery in Geneva for three years. She remained in her adopted country for the rest of her life, but did return to the entertainment industry. In the 1980s and '90s, she appeared in films, television movies and mini series. In 2005, she gave a sold out concert tour of France. She played Maria Callas onstage in Terrence McNally's "Master Class" twice, in 2000 and 2008 . | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
New York is catching up on Africa's modern art history, though our big museums aren't much in the picture. Two of that continent's leading 20th century painters are having first major solos here, not at the Museum of Modern Art or the Guggenheim, but at small downtown galleries. And a remarkable contemporary artist collective from the Democratic Republic of Congo is making its New York debut at an alternative space in Queens. The Senegalese artist Mor Faye (1947 1984) made a vivid impression two decades ago in a group show at the now defunct Museum for African Art, then in SoHo. His work, all but absent since, is being reintroduced by Skoto Gallery in one of the most stimulating painting shows in Chelsea this season. Born in Dakar, Faye was a prodigy. At 14, he studied with the great modernist Iba N'Diaye, and within a few years was a teacher himself. His career coincided with a high postcolonial moment. Senegal's poet president, Leopold Sedar Senghor, gave art a leading role in shaping a national culture aligned with the literary movement called Negritude. In 1966, Faye was a star of the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar. And he was able, thanks to Senghor's importing of European shows to Africa, to absorb first hand a wide range of Western art history. Throughout everything, he stayed productive. He destroyed a lot of output, but some 800 pieces survive and Skoto's modest survey of 27 works on paper gives an idea of his breadth. An exquisitely brushed acrylic painting from 1969 reads as a pan cultural Romantic nocturne. It carries hints of a dramatic, even apocalyptic narrative, as does a 1970s piece with a Cubist inflected block of color and line that could be a sinking house or a foundering ark. Witty, empathetic images of birds and animals recur. So do nightmarish figures, multi limbed, multi mouthed, multi eyed. Stylistically, the work is kaleidoscopic, the binder being its propulsive energy. This is fabulously inventive picture making. I can easily imagine young painters delighting in it, and learning from it. Whereas Faye spent his life in Africa, Ernest Mancoba (1904 2002), who has a show of 23 drawings and paintings in a second floor space at Aicon Gallery, left early and stayed away. The son of a South African miner, he started making sculpture when he was young and had ambitions for an art career. But he knew that, as a black man, doors were closed. At best, he'd be forced into turning out tribal art for the tourist trade. So in 1938, he made his way, via London, to Paris. There he met with some young Danish artists (their English was good; his French was bad), one of whom, Sonja Ferlov, he would marry. With them, in 1948, he founded a group called Cobra. (The name combines letters from three cities: Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam.) With Karel Appel and Asger Jorn among its members, Cobra was leftist in politics, globalist in thinking, and rejecting of all narrowly defined styles, from naturalism to abstraction. For Mancoba, this freedom also meant release from art that had to look African or Western; he could forge what he saw as a utopian synthesis. Accordingly, the work at Aicon, all from after Cobra dissolved in 1951, thwarts easy cultural readings. In small oil paintings, abstract strokes and daubs of color coalesce into sketchy, featureless figures; in related ink drawings they resemble large headed African sculptures. Other ink drawings are entirely abstract, made up cursive forms that, like characters from an imagery alphabet, spin and tumble across a page. Hoping to escape a sense of isolation in his homeland, Mancoba experienced it in Europe, too. He felt that his Cobra colleagues didn't know what to make of his art, or of him. In a 2002 interview with the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist he said: "The embarrassment that my presence caused, to the point of making me, in their eyes, some sort of 'Invisible Man' or merely the consort of a European woman artist was understandable, as before me there had never been, to my knowledge, any black man taking part in the visual arts 'avant garde' of the Western world." The confusion, and ostracism, continues. Mancoba's name tends to be passed over, or included as a footnote, in many accounts of global modernism, whether written from a European or an African perspective. (He was, however, included in "The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945 1994," which traveled from Europe to MoMA PS1 in 2002.) The problem is perpetuated in a market that requires non Western artists to wear their ethnicity like a brand. Maybe things are changing. Work by Mancoba will be in this year's edition of the venerable European art showcase Documenta. And new artists are breaking, or are at least questioning, old molds. One of the most stimulating shows in New York right now, "Congolese Plantation Workers Art League," at SculptureCenter in Long Island City, features work by a collective of Central African artists who are also field laborers on cacao and palm oil plantations. They transform one of the commodities their harvest produces chocolate into life size sculptures that are part self portraits, part ancestral figures and part cartoons. The enterprise is a complicated one. It was conceived by Europeans and led by the Dutch artist and filmmaker Renzo Martens. The striking sculptures, initially molded from clay, look, at a glance, like exactly the kind of art Mancoba did not want to make. The profits they bring in, largely from a Western market, are permitting members of the collective to reverse, on a local level, the crippling ecological and economic effects of long term colonialism. In short, the project, de exoticizing and re exoticizing, is politically problematic on almost every level, and it's fascinating for that reason. It raises questions about imbalances of power based on race and class that are at the very foundation of modern Western culture, but that our big museums have resolutely refused to address, never mind tried to answer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Corey Nolan arrived in New York four years ago from his hometown, Atlanta, moving in with a friend who owned a large two bedroom in a West Village co op "a dream situation," he said. When his friend sold the place after a year, Mr. Nolan and another friend, newly arrived from Atlanta, decamped to a two bedroom rental in a Chelsea walk up. What with the security deposit, broker fee and first and last month's rent, he had to take out a loan to move. He paid 1,900 a month for his half of the place, and of all the tiny rooms, his was the tiniest. "I had to turn sideways to get into my bed," he said. It made sense to move across the Hudson. Mr. Fare, a school administrator in northern New Jersey, drives to work. What's more, New Jersey has a residency requirement for public employees, who must live in the state unless they are granted an exemption. Mr. Nolan, who works in Midtown West at a technology firm that specializes in social branding, could easily commute by bus or PATH train. The couple, both in their 30s, had brunch in Hoboken one day, loved the village y vibe and took a tour of a new rental high rise, the Park Garden, in uptown Hoboken. Within days, they decided to move there. "It was hard for me to give up my 10011 ZIP code," Mr. Nolan said. But the move meant he could live in "an exponentially better apartment" with a doorman, washer dryer, central air conditioning and outdoor pool, "a lot of luxuries I had given up in Atlanta to move to New York." Their rent was 3,400 a month, which later rose to a little more than 3,500, and the view from the top floor one bedroom included the Lincoln Tunnel helix. "I like not having people above me," Mr. Nolan said. "You don't have any risk of heavy feet. This is coming from years of experience in Atlanta." Their neighbors in Hoboken were mostly former New Yorkers. Over time, the couple dreamed of having more. They craved a second bedroom to use as a home office, and a guest room for friends and relatives visiting from out of town, which is "hard to do in a civilized way when they are sleeping on the couch and all of their bags are on the living room floor," Mr. Nolan said. To get a second bedroom, they were willing to spend around 3,800 a month. If they couldn't find a suitable two bedroom, then they wanted "an upgraded experience the condo grade appliances, fixtures and touches," Mr. Nolan said. In that case, they hoped to pay less, around 3,200. "We were convinced we could find it through our willingness to hunt for it," Mr. Nolan said. "We threw a lot into it." The Ellipse tower in Jersey City was impressive, but the surrounding area was sterile and too "business park like." Robert Wright for The New York Times They had always liked the charm of the Upper West Side, so they began visiting open houses there, although it would have meant obtaining that exemption for Mr. Fare not to mention a tough commute to work, involving a ferry ride and a drive. A return to Manhattan would also mean living in a walk up with small closets, window air conditioners and no washer dryer. "I pictured myself schlepping laundry down the street," Mr. Fare said. "I loved the idea of the Upper West Side, but the reality was not feasible for our situation," Mr. Nolan said. "Scratching that itch allowed us to go back to New Jersey with an open heart and an open mind. The grass isn't always greener." Drawn to new construction, they visited the Ellipse, a rental tower on the Hudson River in Jersey City. Two bedrooms there started in the mid 4,000s, although rental incentives were on offer as the building prepared for occupancy. The men were impressed with the building, which was erected on steel piles extending into the river, and its sweeping views, but they found the planned community of Newport sterile and "business park like," Mr. Nolan said. They decided they were unwilling to leave their neighborhood. A one bedroom in an "intoxicating" condo building on Hudson Street, in Hoboken, was impressively high end, but for the money, they wanted a second bedroom. Robert Wright for The New York Times So it was back to Hoboken, where they checked out a one bedroom for rent at 1400 Hudson Street, a new condominium building. They fell for the kitchen, with its high end appliances, and the bathroom, with its glass shower door. "The building was intoxicating," Mr. Nolan said. But for a rent in the low 3,000s, they had hoped for a second bedroom. They would also have had to relinquish their view and risk upstairs neighbors. And any move still required that daunting upfront outlay, which they estimated at 6,000 to 10,000. For the first time, they were planning to hire real movers instead of recruiting a volunteer crew of friends. "A lot of the furniture is heavy or old, or things I would not feel comfortable moving by giving our friends pizza," Mr. Nolan said. After an extensive search, their apartment at the Park Garden, in Hoboken, looked better than any of the alternatives, particularly given the cost of moving. Robert Wright for The New York Times Ultimately, "what we were getting for the cost of the move didn't make sense." he said. "Real estate was forcing us to have important conversations about the future. We needed to be more strategic. We would rather make smart decisions." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Publishing imprints at comic book companies typically have a unifying trait. Series at DC Comics aimed at mature readers are funneled through its Vertigo and Young Animal lines, while Marvel's Icon presents projects from top tier creators. What links many of the comics published by Boom Box, the imprint from Boom Studios, is that they tell personal stories with a sprinkle of glee. It is touchy feely, but it also seems to be working. The imprint's newest series, "The Backstagers," written by James Tynion IV and drawn by Rian Sygh, begins in August. It focuses on the theater crew at a private school for boys. Like many of the other Boom Box comics, it has a cast that is diverse in race and sexual orientation. For Mr. Tynion, who is best known for his work on Batman and "The Woods," his Boom series about high school students transported to an alien planet, this was a chance to work on something closer to home. "It's very important to me to explore things that are more personal," he said. "I was a stage crew kid growing up myself. It's a very strange place that always held a special part of my heart." The tween to teen male focus of "The Backstagers" makes it almost a mirror image of one of the imprint's biggest successes, "The Lumberjanes," about a diverse group of girls at summer camp, including a transgender character. Last year, "The Lumberjanes" won two Eisner Awards, the industry equivalent of an Oscar, for Best New Series and Best Publication for Teens. The comic has also been optioned for a film by 20th Century Fox. Other series published by Boom Box include "Goldie Vance," which began last month, about a 16 year old black girl who solves mysteries at the Florida resort that her father manages; "Jonesy," about a Latina teenager who can make people fall in love, though her power does not work on her own heart's desire; and "Giant Days," about three female university students navigating adulthood. "Giant Days," which is written by John Allison and is drawn by Lissa Treiman and Max Sarin, was nominated for two Eisners last month: Best Continuing Series and Best Writer. "The main reason Boom Box stands out is because of its target audience," Oliver Sava, a comics writer for the A.V. Club, said in an email. "It's one of the few places to find comics that aren't just appropriate for younger readers, but written with them in mind. There's a generally light tone across all of the Boom Box series, which means every book has a strong sense of humor and a more cartoonish art style." Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. He added, "Women are often at the core of these books, both on and off the page, and it's refreshing to see a publisher provide a platform for worthwhile creators struggling to break in at other publishers." Overseeing the imprint is Shannon Watters, an editor at large at Boom, who is also one of the creators of "The Lumberjanes." She is proud that the comics have received critical acclaim and that readers have embraced them and their noncynical vibe. "They are the kind of comics you want to read over a bowl of cereal on Saturday morning," she said. The sense of joy is presented in the magnification of small moments: earning a badge in "Lumberjanes," waxing poetic about doughnuts in "Jonesy," or the word "tenants" presented in an explosion of stars when the friends in "Giant Days" land their first off campus apartment. The success of "The Lumberjanes" started with grass roots efforts. Ms. Watters and her fellow creators Brooke Allen, Grace Ellis and Noelle Stevenson made copies of the first eight pages, included an order form, and gave them out free. "It was supposed to be eight issues, and then it became something much more, kind of growing ever since beyond our wildest dreams," Ms. Watters said. Not everyone has embraced the message of acceptance extolled by the series. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
There are no surviving images of the 24 Afro Brazilian figures some historical, some legendary who populate the paintings in Dalton Paula's "A Kidnapper of Souls," his North American solo debut. (Mr. Paula, a Brazilian painter and multimedia artist who makes work about the African diaspora, did appear in the 2018 New Museum Triennial.) He modeled them, instead, after residents of a settlement originally founded by escaped slaves in the Brazilian state of Goias. Each figure, sensitively rendered in oil and gold leaf against a green or turquoise background a style inspired by turn of the century portrait photography straddles a subtle lacuna: The 2 foot by 18 inch panels they are painted on are made by screwing two narrow canvases together, and you can just make out the seam. It's an understated gesture that carries a lot of weight, bringing to mind not just the syncretic origins of Afro Brazilian culture, or the continued fusion of those origins with contemporary Brazilian life, but also the enduring marks left by cleaving people away from their homes and families. The conceptual artist Kayode Ojo continues to arrange found objects with a masterly touch in "The Aviator," a sophomore show at Martos named after Martin Scorsese's 2004 biopic of Howard Hughes. A phoropter, the device optometrists use to determine a patient's prescription, hangs at eye level near the gallery entrance, at once a metaphor for art and art itself. (Let the artist shape your vision if you dare!) Or is it a comment about structural biases? Things only get more slippery as Mr. Ojo goes on to arrange prop handcuffs, chrome plated music stands, replica pistols, open Swiss Army knives, and other tools with reflective surfaces in minimal but well ordered piles. Because the placement of all these objects appear to be as significant as the items themselves, they all become terms in a single, all encompassing visual language, supple and thought provoking but endlessly ambiguous. The inaugural group show at this new project space, founded by the artist Onyedika Chuke in his own basement art studio, is a powerful mix of explicit politics and formal verve. Three of Emory Douglas's graphic cover designs for the Black Panther newspaper remain as arresting as they were when he composed them 50 years ago. The Miami based artist Yanira Collado contributes a spare, evocative sculpture reminiscent of a rooftop antenna, and a series of black and white photographs that document performances by Alicia Grullon are surprisingly striking in their own right. Two monumental works on paper one, by William Cordova, a polymath of patterns, features a grayscale check pattern, and the other, by the Houston artist Rick Lowe, has a tidal wave of black marker lines on a golden yellow ground are tacked directly to the walls, adding an extra burst of studio visit excitement to an already energetic roundup. A miniature is a refuge from the trials of real life, an otherworldly little kingdom you can enter with your eyes. But the palm size landscapes in the ceramist Mary Carlson's "Eden," most of them sourced from the peripheries of old master paintings, are different. "Eden Trees (after Bruegel)," a thick brown puddle of desert under a cluster of lumpy trees, is precisely rendered and shiny with glaze; "Eden (after Cranach)" features a trim little cave perfect for some tiny hermit; and in "Reservoir Blue Hills," the only piece from life, the land is even more luscious blue than the water. Weaving around the low white pedestals that these nine little patches of paradise reside on, you may suspect that the Kingdom of Heaven, while surely at hand, is in need of some protection. How would the world look if you could stand outside time? That's the heady question behind "One Second Per Second," a lush but tightly focused suite of paintings by the young Brooklyn artist Dana Lok. In the largest two, "Causal Wedge (Front)" and "Causal Wedge (Back)," a veil of neon mist parts to reveal a single foot trampling through the mud. Simple orange butterflies perhaps a reference to the "butterfly effect" flutter around in the tall grass. Jagged receding borders at the top of this vision suggest that it's not just one instant Ms. Lok has her sights on, but a contiguous train of them. But what makes the concept work is that she doesn't linger over the details. It's just an uncommon way of highlighting what is, after all, the heart of most figurative painting the strange and magical problem of fixing a moment in time. After finishing a body of work about the life and death cycle, the New York painter Megan Marrin, in need of some conceptual recovery, began researching spas and wellness. But she eventually narrowed her focus to a single emblematic object and put together a small but memorable show, "Convalescence," comprising four ominous paintings of the Edwardian sanitarium fixture known as the rib cage shower. Filling their tall and narrow canvases more or less exactly, these devices look like skeletons almost alien but weirdly familiar in cross sections of shadowy flesh. They bring to mind all sorts of disquieting questions about luxury, technology and the sexual undercurrents of the industrial world. Do we shape our environment or does it shape us? Is the desire for comfort a product of the death drive? And just what are we after, anyway, when we design a bathroom? The paintings' bilious colors and sticky looking surfaces only amplify their psychological effect. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Ms. Tantaros joined Fox as a contributor in 2010, and a year later was named co host of "The Five," which aired at 5 p.m. She said in the suit that she was repeatedly told by Fox executives that she could not wear pants on the air because "Roger wants to see your legs." The lawsuit goes on to say that on Aug. 12, 2014, Mr. Ailes called her into his office and asked if she was planning to marry and have children. "Ailes then started complaining about marriage in general, and also made off color jokes about being married," the lawsuit states. It describes Mr. Ailes as speculating on the sexual habits and preferences of 10 Fox News personalities. He asked Ms. Tantaros to turn around "so I can get a good look at you," the lawsuit charges, adding that Ms. Tantaros refused. Soon after, she was moved from "The Five" to a lower rated show, "Outnumbered," that aired at midday. Mr. Ailes called her back for similar sessions in December 2014 and February 2015, the lawsuit charges, and when she continued to rebuff him, she encountered hostility from the Fox News publicity department. In the February meeting, she said, Mr. Ailes talked about how she would look in a bikini, and accused her of ending a long term relationship because she had been merely using the man. The episode brought her to tears, the lawsuit states. She said the sole interview arranged by the publicity department during that period was with a writer for a blog controlled by Fox, who asked about her breasts and if she was difficult to work with. In April 2015, the lawsuit states, Ms. Tantaros met with Bill Shine, then a senior news executive and close aide to Mr. Ailes. She said that she told him about the meetings with Mr. Ailes and asked if he had told the head of publicity for Fox News, Irena Briganti, to go after her. The lawsuit claims that Mr. Shine "told Tantaros that Briganti is like a rabid dog on a chain that we can't control. Sometimes that dog gets off the chain." Then, pointing to a picture of Mr. Ailes on a magazine cover, the lawsuit charges, Mr. Shine told her that "this powerful man has faith in Irena Briganti" and that Ms. Tantaros "needs to let this one go." Mr. Shine, through a spokeswoman, has said that Ms. Tantaros never approached him about Mr. Ailes harassing her. Mr. Shine was named co president of Fox News after Mr. Ailes departed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
As the United Kingdom wrestles over its departure from the European Union and finds diversion in the release of "Downton Abbey," the movie, one thing seems to be sticking around: its decor. Especially, its Victorian decor: the dramatic patterns, ornate millwork and lavish fabrics and trims associated with the reign of Queen Victoria. Spanning much of the 19th century and lingering like a heavy floral perfume into the 20th, the period coincided with the rise of industrial production and the emergence of the middle class, both provoking and reflecting bourgeois taste. Recent furnishings and accessories reveal that Victoriana can be relatable even now. House of Hackney , an English design studio founded in 2011 and now opening a Manhattan branch, channels a Victorian look in its textiles and wall coverings. Frieda Gormley and Javvy M. Royle , House of Hackney's married co founders, seized William Morris as an influence early on in their work. The 19th century British designer and social activist is best known for his contributions to the Arts and Crafts movement, which championed artisan production during the ascendance of industry. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Uber's top executives, including its chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, have been on the road for the last week and a half, pitching institutional investors on the company's stock. In recent days, that roadshow has coincided with turmoil in the stock markets. Over the last three days, the S P 500 index fell partly over investor fears about the state of trade talks between the United States and China. Choppiness in the stock market is among the biggest fears for bankers taking companies public, because that makes it harder to gauge where they should price a client's shares. Even for a company as big as Uber, such volatility could affect its ability to command top dollar. Though Uber had initially planned to go public in the fall of 2019, it sped up its I.P.O. process to avoid the very situation it now finds itself in. At the same time, Uber has had to answer investor questions about Lyft, its main North American rival. Lyft held its I.P.O. in late March, and its shares fell below its offering price on their second day of trading. As of Wednesday, Lyft's stock was more than 26 percent below its 72 a share offering price. Among the concerns that investors have expressed about Lyft and which some share about Uber are the steep losses that plague both companies, with limited visibility into when those losses will tail off, if ever. Ride hailing is expensive, requiring plenty of spending to attract drivers and passengers. On Tuesday, Lyft reported a 1.14 billion loss for the first quarter. Uber has said that it expects to lose money for years, as it tries to dominate in ride hailing while also investing in new offerings like food delivery, electric bikes and scooters, freight and autonomous vehicles. The company recently said in a filing that it lost up to 1.1 billion in the first three months of this year alone. Its public offering would nonetheless be a milestone for a generation of Silicon Valley start ups that rooted their businesses in smartphones and pioneered a model known as the sharing economy, in which companies kept costs low by using freelancers to do the bulk of their work. The companies have said that this model provides workers with flexibility. But the firms have since faced protests and lawsuits over wages and the lack of full time benefits, including a global strike by ride hailing drivers in cities from London to New York to San Francisco on Wednesday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Dolly the Sheep started her life in a test tube in 1996 and died just six years later. When she was only a year old, there was evidence that she might have been physically older. At five, she was diagnosed with osteoarthritis. And at six, a CT scan revealed tumors growing in her lungs, likely the result of an incurable infectious disease. Rather than let Dolly suffer, the vets put her to rest. Poor Dolly never stood a chance. Or did she? Meet Daisy, Diana, Debbie and Denise. "They're old ladies. They're very healthy for their age," said Kevin Sinclair, a developmental biologist who, with his colleagues at the University of Nottingham in Britain, has answered a longstanding question about whether cloned animals like Dolly age prematurely. In a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, the scientists tested these four sheep, created from the same cell line as Dolly, and nine other cloned sheep, finding that, contrary to popular belief, cloned animals appear to age normally. Dolly's birth, 20 years ago this month, blew the world away. Scientists had taken a single adult cell from a sheep's udder, implanted it into an egg cell that had been stripped of its own DNA, and successfully created a living, breathing animal almost genetically identical to its donor. But Dolly's health challenges, along with other cases in which cloned animals developed symptoms of diabetes or obesity, made it harder to grapple with the ethical and safety controversies of the procedure. Not only did many countries, including Canada and Australia, ban reproductive cloning in animals, but the United Nations banned all kinds of cloning in humans in 2005. Last year the European Union made importing food from cloned animals or their offspring illegal. The inefficiencies of cloning have fed into these prohibitions. Few embryos make it to the fetus stage, fewer fetuses develop past the age of one or two, and even fewer become adults. Many blamed cloning when mature animals appeared to show signs of early aging. Now, based on results of this new study, researchers have confirmed what most scientists believed years ago: Cloning does not lead to premature aging. Dr. Sinclair and his colleagues started studying aging in these 13 sheep, which were originally intended for studies on efficiency and artificial reproduction, after Keith Campbell, who was in charge of Dolly's relatives, died in 2012. The cloned sheep were between the ages of 7 and 9, about 60 in human years. To detect subtle signs of aging, the scientists conducted a battery of tests to check for symptoms of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and osteoarthritis. "All we wanted to establish was: Are they normal?" Dr. Sinclair said. For the most part, they were. Glucose tolerance and insulin resistance tests revealed nothing abnormal, and their blood pressure was fine. The sheep were flexible and reactive in musculoskeletal tests, but some did show early signs of osteoarthritis. Debbie's X ray indicated her arthritis was slightly more advanced, but Dr. Sinclair said it was nothing out of the ordinary. Similar evidence disproving premature aging in cloned animals was previously found in mice and cows, said Jose Cibelli, who studies reproductive cloning at Michigan State University. The study of the sheep confirms that once cloned animals survive the first few years of life, they won't die any sooner than other animals. Many scientists hope that changes in perception will lead to advances in reproductive technology that will enable us to provide food for a growing global population, save endangered species and develop advanced therapies. Scientists involved in and separate from the study don't think it will mean we might clone humans anytime soon, nor do they condone it, but they can't say someone won't try. "If they could speak, they would say, 'Yes; it's perfectly safe,'" said Dr. Sinclair. "For them, their whole process worked perfectly. But there are others who struggled to adapt after birth." Cloning won't be truly safe until embryos survive at rates similar to those produced through natural conception or in vitro fertilization. Even then, welfare and ethical concerns will remain. With recent advances, some scientists think safe and efficient cloning procedures will emerge in five to 10 years. "Cloning is entering a new era," said Dr. Loi. Dolly's relatives are expected to live for about another year. Scientists will then search for other abnormalities that may be lurking undetected. Meanwhile, Debbie is taking ibuprofen with her breakfast cereal. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Amanda Moskowitz had no interest in peering into a crystal ball. She was the type who knew where she was going, the girl who took first prize in statewide oratory contests, snagged the lead in school plays, and was admitted to Brown University. Fortunes were to be made, she believed, not told. And yet, Ms. Moskowitz, a native of Gastonia, N.C., remembered listening politely about 10 years ago as a hairstylist and part time psychic predicted that Ms. Moskowitz would meet her special someone through work, at a big event, "where people would be wearing nice clothes." That someone, the psychic said, would be Southern. Ms. Moskowitz forgot about that prophecy until a few months ago, as she prepared for her wedding to Bradford Hargreaves last month. She met Mr. Hargreaves in October 2008 when she, a fledgling entrepreneur, was in Stamford, Conn., pitching potential investors on her business, then a mobile messaging and voice company. She had toted promotional materials from the train station in heavy rain, with a rough wind buffeting her and the big sign she carried. After eight hours of explaining her company to a mostly middle age, married crowd, she was packing her bags when a lanky young man Mr. Hargreaves approached and asked for one last pitch. "I'd seen this incredibly beautiful woman across the room but hadn't found a moment to speak with her," said Mr. Hargreaves, who was also promoting his start up, Go Cross Campus, an online game that attracted 11,000 people, most of them college students. He was 22 and a recent graduate of Yale. "I walked toward her without preparing anything interesting to say, so I asked, 'What does your company do?' " Ms. Moskowitz, her natural vivaciousness waning from a long and fruitless day cultivating investors, inhaled deeply and began a shopworn pitch about her company. But Mr. Hargreaves interrupted. "Are you mad at me?" he asked. "It was so disarming and sincere," Ms. Moskowitz said, "there was nothing I could do but laugh. He wasn't challenging me, he was just asking. I instantly liked him." They shared a seat on a Metro North train back to Manhattan, where they both had apartments. As the psychic hairstylist had envisioned, Mr. Hargreaves was indeed a Southerner. He grew up in Hampton, Ark., a village of about 1,300 people, which has one stoplight and is 30 miles from the nearest grocery store. If his town sounds like something conjured by Frank Capra, then Mr. Hargreaves, with his twinkly enthusiasm and courtly manner, is a throwback to Jimmy Stewart. His father, Chester Hargreaves, is a forester with the Hancock Timber Resources Group, for whom he manages thousands of square miles of loblolly pines in the southern United States. He recalled Brad, as a young boy, walking in the woods with him. "He always knew the way, even when he was this high," Chester Hargreaves said, gesturing about three feet off the ground. "He paid attention to things. If you gave him a toy car, he tried to take it apart and see how it worked." Brad's mother, Patricia, a homemaker, said her son would pore over maps and books. "He was never rambunctious, like other kids," she said. "He was curious about so many things, loved exploring." On the train, Mr. Hargreaves and Ms. Moskowitz discovered that in addition to being Southern, Ivy League graduates living in Manhattan, with budding careers in technology (between the two of them, she estimates they have worked in a dozen other start ups), they both liked to travel, near and far. For their first date, a week after they met, they spent hours walking around Brooklyn Heights and Carroll Gardens, past stately townhouses decorated with pumpkins and on sidewalks plush with colorful leaves. Within a month, they were dating. Their nascent romance coincided with the decline of his company, one that he and his three partners had been unable to make profitable. In May 2009, about six months after he began dating Ms. Moskowitz, he found himself firing staff and shutting it down. "It was the worst experience of my life," he said. "And she stood by me, she was that support structure, that rock." His professional life reignited in 2010, after he and three partners founded General Assembly, a digital trade school that teaches skills like technology, design and entrepreneurship. The company, which officially opened in January 2011, employs 400 people and has 14 campuses worldwide, including in Sydney and Hong Kong. Mr. Hargreaves has been heralded in publications like Vanity Fair and Inc. magazine. Ms. Moskowitz is the founder of Nine Naturals, a line of hair and body products for pregnant women. Their relationship, she said, "kept getting better and better," and she began to realize that she wanted to marry him. "Love is a constant interrogation," she said, citing a line from Milan Kundera's novel "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting." "That resonates with me because with Brad, there's always more to know." Both spoke of the melding of work and home, where business trips become road trips. A conference in Milan led to driving through the French and Italian Alps. Discussions about retailers, how to strategize their respective businesses, operating systems, and "team dynamics" are not left at the office. "Amanda is such a source of stability and calm for him, " said Matthew O. Brimer, a fellow Yale classmate and business partner of Mr. Hargreaves. "The warmth and love she provides allows him to put energy into the unknown." Mr. Hargreaves said: "We're very big on rituals, on things that you do on a regular basis that give structure and credence to life. No matter what happens, you can go back to these. We each have our own business. It's a roller coaster, the ups, the downs." One of these rituals is their "quarterly planning session," when they discuss money, business trips, vacations and social obligations. A Pinterest board they made for their wedding became "an exercise in defining our aesthetic," Mr. Hargreaves said. Many weekend mornings, he makes eggs at their Manhattan apartment and they watch one or two episodes of a TV series. (They have almost completed "The Wire.") Last winter, after dating for five years, he proposed. They were hiking in the hills around Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, N.Y. She said yes, and put on a ring they had designed together. On Dec. 13, they married under a wedding canopy before 152 guests at Studio 450, a party space on West 31st Street between Pennsylvania Station and the High Line, with views of the Hudson River. Through the big casement windows, light flickered from the candles on the sills like the diamonds of the city skyline. Earlier, on the way to the ceremony in paralyzing traffic, many guests abandoned taxis and cars to walk. (Mr. Hargreaves's parents resorted to a pedicab, paying 90 for a six block ride, and that was after protesting the 125 the driver had first demanded.) The wedding party also left their car and walked to the wedding site. Ms. Moskowitz's sister, Abigail Moskowitz, carried, as best she could, the satin train of her sister's wedding dress, as they threaded their way through the neighborhood in biting cold. "Well, we wanted a New York wedding," Ms. Moskowitz said to Mr. Hargreaves, the hem of her dress lightly lined with soot and her black hair and brown eyes shining. As they stood in a fluorescent lit elevator jammed with damp and cold guests headed to the ceremony, he leaned toward her and whispered, "You look beautiful." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
In her work as an estate manager, Kristin Reyes often finds herself fielding client requests for a special kind of child minder. "Callers will say to me, 'Kristin, I need a modern Mary Poppins.' Everyone knows what that means." It refers, Ms. Reyes went on to explain, to that old fashioned paragon of patience, good cheer and decorum otherwise known as a governess. And, yes, she most always a she is back, a plucky hybrid of tutor and life coach in rising demand among affluent families scrambling to educate their offspring in the midst of a pandemic. School shutdowns and social limitations have lent their search a particular urgency. "For the past six or eight weeks we've been slammed with educator and governess requests, from all over the country," said Anita Rogers, the founder and chief executive of British American Household, a domestic staffing agency. Orders began doubling as families girded for a fall semester and the rigors of remote learning, Ms. Rogers said: "During the pandemic, we've done very well." April Berube, the founder and owner of the Wellington Agency, a placement firm in Palm Beach, Fla., has been similarly besieged. "We've had a huge increase in calls for a governess or a nanny with a background in education," Ms. Berube said, the majority young women, generally willing to live in the home for an indefinite period and equipped to instruct their charges in subjects that may vary from math to table manners to a faultless command of Mandarin verbs. The contemporary governess may work in a formal household, staffed with drivers, cooks, housekeepers and the like. But unlike a conventional nanny she is expected to provide a high end version of home schooling. As often as not the job calls for a fancy pedigree that may include an advanced degree from an Ivy institution, a facility with languages, and manners that rival those of a marquise. But the position has been democratized to some degree. "It's no longer exclusive to high net worth families," Ms. Reyes said. During a health crisis that shows no signs of abating, two career families will seek out a governess to function as a proxy parent to their toddlers or teenagers. They may turn to a profusion of domestic staffing agencies springing up from Boston to Bahrain, placement specialists like Quality Nanny in Boulder, Colo.; Elite Nannies in Greenwich, Conn.; or Louer, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, all posting positions that may call for a blue chip education, driver's license, passport and a willingness to relocate. There are families riding out the pandemic in vacation homes in Aspen or Palm Beach, Ms. Berube pointed out, and others that routinely jet to far flung locations overseas. Some clients specify that they are searching for a governess. The title lends an aura of prestige, Ms. Rogers said. Others inquire in a more roundabout way. "Families will copy and paste from something they've seen online," Ms. Berube said. "They will send a textbook description of what a governess is. That means someone well spoken, polished, with as master's degree in education. They may throw in other things like a background in art." Salaries vary, from 80,000 to 150,000 a year. The title itself is quaint, conjuring that tight laced, lavender scented fixture of Victorian era fiction, a Becky Sharp (briefly) or Agnes Grey. It is also loaded, trailing more than a whiff of entitlement. "'Who hires a governess? It's not me,'" Ms. Rogers said, parroting a typical client. "At this level, it is people who want a mentor for their children, like something out of a movie." That is an impression some agencies work to reinforce. A cut glass British accent like Julie Andrews's is an advantage, Duke Duchess, an international placement service, advises in its advertising. "Many international families like their children to learn the Queen's English, free from any accent." Such implicit elitism will inevitably raise eyebrows. "It seems to me to be yet another example of the way society is fragmenting into the very rich and the rest," said Ruth Brandon, a British novelist and journalist, and the author of a 2008 history, "Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres." "Increasingly, the rich are opting out of paying taxes, isolating themselves in their own little walled off bubbles of comfort," Ms. Brandon said, "and so have no personal involvement or investment in public services, including schooling." Historically, the governess herself has not escaped negative scrutiny. True, she has been idealized as a proto feminist heroine, a long suffering Miss Eyre, genteelly impoverished but proud, surviving every crisis, her integrity intact. She has been glamorized as the wickedly seductive protagonist of Regency romances with overripe titles like "In Bed With the Duke" or "The Rules of Surrender." But she has also been demonized, a potentially sinister, and possibly deranged, Miss Jessel in "The Turn of the Screw." Even now, in a presumably more accepting era, her performance raises skepticism. "It combines all the worst aspects of home schooling," Ms. Brandon said. "The child doesn't get to make friends of its own age and doesn't form a life away from home." Tartly, she added, "The range of subjects is necessarily narrow, restricted to what the governess knows." Yet ideally these days, the governess commands respect as a highly accomplished worker in a rigorously demanding job. "She is not just a stand in for a fancy nanny, though nanny duties may be part of the job," said Katherine Patterson, a placement specialist who worked as a governess early in her career. "She is responsible for the child's safety and welfare," Ms. Patterson said. "But the role also dovetails with that of a teacher, an increasingly common scenario as the number of parents home schooling their children continues to rise." Her position is nuanced, extending from a child's education to that child's social and emotional progress. No surprise, then, Ms. Reyes pointed out, that families now are requesting a background in child psychology or child development. In this currently unstable climate, "kids have a lot more to learn about life at a younger age," she said. "A governess can give a 5 year old an outlet to talk about why they can't see their friend or their grandparent. With Covid impacting everything, the governess is a kind of mini therapist." She is no servant, Ms. Alfonso will tell you. But neither is she an equal. Though the work may take place in an intimate setting, it demands a degree of reserve. "I treat the environment like it's my office or a corporation," she said. "I'm not going to sit on the couch or at the kitchen table. My first rule is decorum. This is not my home." Ms. Patterson is as circumspect. "Living in obviously expedites the process of getting to know one another," she said. But the governess is decidedly not a family member. "It's important to not get too comfortable and overstep professional boundaries," she said, "something easily done when everyone's guards are down." Being a governess presupposes a very atypical work environment. "There's a plethora of dos and don'ts that just wouldn't apply to a corporate workplace," Ms. Patterson said. She declined to describe those rules. "That," she said elliptically, "is for another day." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
"Let It Go," the warble heard around the world, wasn't just the signature song from "Frozen." It was an anthem ("Here I stand!") for the mighty, mighty girl power that helped push Disney into industry dominance. The company's supremacy is often pinned on its highest profile franchises: Lucasfilm, Marvel and Pixar, which have historically featured male driven stories. But Disney has also heavily profited from a sparkly pink world of adventure and aspirational uplift for spirited girls and women who "dream big," to borrow a motto from its princess franchise. The sisters from "Frozen," the magical Elsa (the leather lunged Idina Menzel) and the younger, perkily ordinary Anna (Kristen Bell, a honeyed soprano) aren't part of the official princess juggernaut. Maybe that's because Elsa was crowned queen in the first movie, though also because the sisters are big enough to have their very own franchise, having raked in a billion plus worldwide. So, of course they are back for another round of global domination in "Frozen 2," a diverting, prettily animated musical, again written by Jennifer Lee, who directed the movie with Chris Buck. "Frozen" neatly tied things up with Elsa having embraced her magic and wearing the crown, and Anna matched with a nice bland hunk, Kristoff (Jonathan Groff). But there's no such thing as happily ever after in Franchise Land. So, after the reintroductions (hello, Olaf and Sven), Elsa performs a call and response with an ethereally pure voice, a "secret siren" (the Norwegian singer Aurora), in "Into the Unknown." True to her new musical grail, Elsa ventures off into the unknown, followed by Anna, and together they climb the mountain, touch the sky and re enter the circle of life. The ensuing adventure is lively, amusing and predictably predictable with revelations, reconciliations and some nebulous politics for the grown ups. It's never surprising, yet its bursts of pictorial imagination snowflakes that streak like shooting stars keep you engaged, as do Elsa and Anna, who still aren't waiting for life to happen. They're searching, not settled, both active and reactive, which even today makes them female character outliers on the big screen. Even better, this time this journey isn't as tethered to romance. Kristoff yearns to propose to Anna and spends much of the story fumbling to pop the question, a light comic refrain that smartly never overwhelms the story. Instead, the emphasis remains on the sisters. In "Frozen," Anna found true love with Kristoff, but mostly she and Elsa found each other. It was a promising change of genre pace particularly given that Disney has long drawn from classic fairy tales (its first animated feature was "Snow White"), which it has struggled to recalibrate for changing gender norms. With "Frozen" it created grown heroines with different once upon a time stories, one sealed with a man's kiss, the other happily not. It was a modest liberating detournement along the lines of the first "Maleficent," a rethink of Sleeping Beauty in which a kiss from a motherly queen, not a prince, wakes the princess. "Frozen 2" continues in the same nonthreatening, emancipatory vein, jumping to life when Elsa responds to the siren's call. As before, the songs by Kristen Anderson Lopez and Robert Lopez are pleasantly melodious with lyrics that can have the quality of a confession, as if a friend were sharing her inner voice struggles: "I'm afraid of what I'm risking if I follow you." One of the sweetest tunes, "All Is Found," appears in a flashback with Elsa and Anna's mother (Evan Rachel Wood), who introduces an animistic motif ("a river full of memory") while readying her daughters for the future with the Disney Dare: "Can you brave what you most fear?" Well of course they can. As is often true in animation, "Frozen 2" soars highest when it embraces abstraction, as in one number with a pitch black void that entertainingly evokes Jonathan Glazer's "Under the Skin." These moments enrich the storytelling as do Menzel and Bell, who give Elsa and Anna feeling, not simply pluck. This adds dimensions to their sisterly quest, even if the harmonious emotions and good intentions never fully atone for the conventionalism of the blond on blond character design, the tiny waists, pert breasts, jeweled eyes and pale plastic y skin. Hearing women sing of freedom is irresistible, but Disney needs to take its old fashioned ideal of female beauty and just, well, let it go. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
At times, Postrel loses her way and, in turn, us. She explains the mechanics of cloth construction like a scientist, and includes diagrams, in case we don't get it. (I still don't understand how Jacquard's punch cards work, even with the drawings.) She quotes wonky experts or, vaguely, "a historian" on basic information, when she could have told us herself, less dryly. Thankfully, she does drop in witty bits on occasion to unpick the jargon. After one starchy quote from researchers about how the Chinese draw loom surpassed "woodblock printing of the same period," Postrel explains: "If a Lao loom is Ms. Pac Man, a draw loom is Grand Theft Auto." Such asides help lighten seriously unleavened sections of the book. Postrel soars and there are set piece gems, to be sure when she turns away from academia, and employs her well honed reporter's skills. In her chapter on dye, for example, she walks us through the process of brewing natural indigo: "It's got a lot of rotten, some fecal notes, a lot of urine in there," Graham Keegan, a Los Angeles textile designer, tells her, as he sniffs a jar of slurry. "It's got it all." Elsewhere, she recounts the tale of an 18th century French textile designer, Philippe de Lasalle, the so called Raphael of Silk, who signed his glorious "woven portraits" in "Latin capitals like the inscription on an ancient Roman building: 'LASALLE FECIT.'" That detail tells us everything. At the close of her book, Postrel admits to growing up in "a town that styled itself the 'Textile Center of the World.'" I had to Google to identify it as Greenville, S.C., which served as America's textile manufacturing capital until the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the early 1990s drove some of its companies to close, cut jobs or move offshore, gutting the local economy. Today, Greenville is among the many former Carolina mill towns experiencing a resurgence in textile manufacturing, thanks to reshoring. Much of it is driven by Chinese owned companies taking advantage of government financial incentives. Postrel skirts all that. Indeed, she insists that coming of age in a textile town and having a father who early in his career worked in "synthetic fibers" had no bearing on her book. That's a shame. A truly personal take, as Stephen Yafa offered when he delved into the history of his hometown, Lowell, Mass., America's first cotton manufacturing center, for his engaging "Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber" (2005), could pull more readers in and turn "The Fabric of Civilization" from an exercise in imparting information into something more intimate. Postrel talks about how the textile business is forever migrating, but she doesn't look at how such migration, post NAFTA, impacted her hometown or the surrounding region. There are references in the book to the College of Textiles at North Carolina State University, four hours by car northeast of Greenville, which offers extraordinary support for fabric research and innovation. Why isn't there a deep dive into the institution? And who are its scholars who doggedly keep old textile knowledge alive and push new ideas forward? Maybe Postrel's family wasn't in the business of cloth. But she's a Carolinian, who presumably passed by textile factories and went to school with kids whose parents were in the industry. Weaving in some of this history would have made the book warmer, and more engaging. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
In "A Memorial Tablet in Via Mazzini," Geo Josz, the sole survivor of Ferrara's Jewish roundup, unexpectedly returns from Buchenwald. But his fellow citizens (who have seized his family's properties) soon turn upon this Ancient Mariner, who haunts the Caffe della Borsa, importuning the customers with tales of the way each member of his family was exterminated. "How forced and exaggerated, in short, how false, these stories of Geo's were. And then what a bore!" say townspeople, eager to begin the promised "new era" an era, Bassani seems to suggest, that can only be constructed by opportunists with good reason to bury the past. Giorgio Bassani belongs to that extraordinary flowering of Italian Jewish writers, from Natalia Ginzburg to Primo Levi, who came of age under Fascism and thus grew up skeptical, allergic both to absolutism and pious rhetoric. Theirs was a strange twilit generation. Their parents, it might be said, were still riding what Bassani calls "the euphoria of civic equality" following the Unification of Italy, when Jews, recently liberated from the ghettos, threw themselves into public life as statesmen, scientists, scholars, entrepreneurs and, with their country's entry into World War I, as soldiers. These were "modern" Jews, like the father of Bassani's narrator, who belongs to a synagogue much as he belongs to the Merchants' Club and who, "romantic, patriotic, politically naive," joined the Fascist Party on returning from the front in 1919. But Bassani's narrator has grown up in darker days. Still hard wired with bourgeois codes of academic and professional achievement, he nonetheless feels himself "nailed by birth to a destiny of exclusion and resentment," paralyzed by a bitter sense of futility and inertia. While his father, listing the "patriotic merits" of Italian Jewry, assures his family that the proposed racial laws will never pass, the son foresees a "future of persecutions and massacres" for Ferrara's Jews, herded "like so many frightened beasts" back into the ghetto, "from which, when all was reckoned up, we had emerged only some 70 or 80 years ago." It's symptomatic of Bassani's historical pessimism that his two finest novellas end with their respective protagonists' suicide. In "The Gold Rimmed Spectacles," we follow the fortunes of Athos Fadigati, a gentle, kindly doctor whose homosexuality is tolerated until he embarks on a masochistic and highly public love affair with a vicious local youth. As Proust did, Bassani likens homosexuality to Jewishness, and Fadigati's tragic ostracization is played out in parallel with the growing isolation of the narrator's own family, of their expulsion from all the activities and institutions that had formed their daily life. "The Heron," Bassani's masterpiece, takes place on a single Sunday in the late 1940s, when Edgardo Limentani, a Jewish landowner who spent the war in Switzerland, goes shooting for birds in the Po delta. Over the course of the day, Limentani finds himself increasingly alienated from the new Italy he encounters. He is equally repelled by the Communist inspired sharecroppers on his farm, who are demanding a fairer deal, by the former Blackshirt who owns the flourishing hotel restaurant where he stops for lunch and by the restaurant's new clientele, Milanese industrialists out for a day's sport, who seem "a different race, stronger, more full of life, more attractive, more likable!" In a kind of anti epiphany, Limentani realizes that it's money that confers their superhuman air of well being. Compared with this new god of money, all the old allegiances religion, family, land, Fascism, Communism are of little importance. It's a new world in which he can find no refuge. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
WASHINGTON A commercial aircraft carrying 80 tons of gloves, masks, gowns and other medical supplies from Shanghai touched down in New York on Sunday, the first of 22 scheduled flights that White House officials say will funnel much needed goods to the United States by early April as it battles the world's largest coronavirus outbreak. The plane delivered 130,000 N95 masks, 1.8 million face masks and gowns, 10 million gloves and thousands of thermometers for distribution to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, said Lizzie Litzow, a spokeswoman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Ms. Litzow said that flights would be arriving in Chicago on Monday and in Ohio on Tuesday, and that supplies would be sent from there to other states using private sector distribution networks. While the goods that arrived in New York on Sunday will be welcomed by hospitals and health care workers some of whom have resorted to rationing protective gear or using homemade supplies they represent just a tiny portion of what American hospitals need. The Department of Health and Human Services has estimated that the United States will require 3.5 billion masks if the pandemic lasts a year. That overwhelming demand has set off a race among foreign countries, American officials at all levels of government and private individuals to acquire protective gear, ventilators and other much needed goods from China, where newly built factories are churning out supplies even as China's own epidemic wanes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
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 expected to sign a compromise bill to keep the federal government open, and then declare a national emergency to build his border wall, James Corden mused on what would be an unprecedented action in the name of border security. "At this point in Trump's term, what's one more constitutional crisis? Like, we can deal with this." JAMES CORDEN "He's bypassing Congress. Now, I knew that Trump might get a bypass but honestly, I thought it would be from too much KFC." JAMES CORDEN Then Corden looked back to 2014, using one of Trump's old tweets against him. "Going around Congress in this way is a very serious situation, and Trump immediately was blasted on Twitter, with one prominent Washington insider saying that we cannot allow the president to, quote, 'subvert the Constitution of the United States for his own benefit and because he is unable to negotiate with Congress.' Oh no, wait, hang on, sorry that was Trump talking about President Obama in 2014." JAMES CORDEN Trump has been fending off investigations from the new Democratic controlled House. Seth Meyers cited a tweet in which the president argues that the rash of inquiries is preventing him from governing. "'No time left to run the government?' You don't run the government now! You're basically the security guard in every heist movie. 'Murph, wake up!' 'Duhh, I was just resting my eyes!'" SETH MEYERS With Democrats throwing their hats into the ring for president at a rapid clip, Jimmy Kimmel said he was surprised to hear that former Vice President Joe Biden was still weighing whether to run. "Joe Biden is reportedly still, still deciding whether or not to run in 2020. According to The Washington Post, he's been eenie meenie miney moeing for months now. And here's the thing: By 2020, Joe Biden's going to be 78 years old. The only thing he should be deciding is whether or not to stay up watching 'NCIS' at that age. If Biden doesn't run, and this is interesting, they're saying that he and Bernie Sanders, who's also still deliberating, if they do not run, will spend the rest of their lives in a balcony heckling the Muppets." JIMMY KIMMEL "Wow, that's a serious walk back. 'Honey, I know you wanted a diamond engagement ring, but what about this candy necklace that says, 'Hot and horny'? You can eat it!" STEPHEN COLBERT, noting that Congress passed a bill that doesn't include funding for a border wall, despite Trump's insistence on 5.7 billion "Hidden Valley has just released a new version of their famous ranch dressing. They're calling it their Blasted Ranch Dipped Pizza Flavored Ranch. Yeah, you can look for it at your local supermarket in the aisle marked 'She's Never Coming Back, Is She?'" JAMES CORDEN The viral clip of the day was of Kenny G. serenading Kim Kardashian West and Kanye West for Valentine's Day. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Fashion is no longer just waiting for the government to swoop in and save it. Seventeen years ago, in the time after Sept. 11, which brought New York Fashion Week to a terrible halt and cast a long, damaging shadow on many young designer businesses, Vogue and the Council of Fashion Designers of America got together and established the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund: an annual competition for new creative talents involving a monetary prize, networking and mentorship. This week, in the time of the new coronavirus, which has brought life as we know it to a halt, and is already damaging young designer businesses, they are repurposing it. The CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund is dead (at least for a year; it may return in 2021). Long live A Common Thread. A Common Thread is a "fund raising initiative supporting those in the American fashion community who have been impacted by the Covid 19 pandemic," according to a news release from Vogue and the CFDA. Through it, cash strapped designers and manufacturers will be able to apply for funding to help them through the period in which their businesses have been effectively shuttered by government decree. The grant money previously earmarked for the Fashion Fund recipients (approximately 700,000 for the winner and two runners up) will presumably form the base purse, and Vogue and the CFDA will also begin a campaign to further build it out, based around short videos debuting March 25 on the digital platforms of both organizations and featuring fashion folk "whose businesses and livelihoods have been affected by the pandemic and its economic impact." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Robert Scott came from a clan with full buckets on both sides, topped up by marriage in each generation. His great grandfather had been president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. His mother's family seems the more determinative, however, going back to Robert Leaming Montgomery, called the Colonel, a Philadelphia banker who one day at the start of the 20th century fell off his horse in Radnor Township and realized when he got to his feet that the farmland around him was beautiful. So he bought as much of it as he could and then built "a house to match the scale of his ambition." He got immigrant families to work his fields, hired fashionable artists to paint his children and stocked his cellar with Champagne just ahead of Prohibition. He called the place Ardrossan, tied everything up in trust and encouraged his descendants to settle there, rehabbing the estate's scattered colonial buildings. Robert Scott "grew up in his parents' farmhouse on his grandparents' place" and with his life laid out in advance: the same prep school as his father and grandfather, followed by the inevitable Harvard; then a law firm dominated by relatives. And when he married he too moved into a house on Ardrossan first a springhouse and then a larger place with 10 bedrooms where Janny Scott herself lived until she was 14. There are some wonderful characters here, above all the Colonel's daughter, Helen Hope, who showed horses and loved dirty jokes and was said to be the model for the role Katharine Hepburn played in "The Philadelphia Story." Still, to concentrate on such things is to miss the point of this fascinating and judicious book. Scott writes that she "adored" her father but found him at once charming and opaque, unreachable behind a mask of barbed good manners. He kept a pack of beagles and saw marital fidelity as "an option" he chose not to exercise. In middle age, he stopped practicing law and did time as a diplomat before ending his career as president of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He made its endowment boom but he was never not drinking, and his staff soon learned not to give him any work after lunch. Scott ends her opening chapter with a call from a Philadelphia reporter asking about her father's cause of death. Yet she's not ready to say "cirrhosis of the liver," and as she moves through her family's story "The Beneficiary" starts to resemble a quest, a search for something bigger than a factual answer to that reporter's question. Both sides of the family had a history of alcoholism, and even at 11 her father spent afternoons drinking rum with his grandfather. Not that anybody ever spoke about it; nor indeed about a family member's suicide. Then she finds the diaries her father had promised to leave her, volumes hidden in the house he once shared with her mother. She had always believed he didn't recognize his own problem, but really he only denied it to others. That's what the dead man's diaries showed her showed that he had always known himself. He liked booze, and needed it, and was willing to pay the price. He needed it to sustain the compulsive sociability his parents' world demanded, to bear an array of stultifying expectations that he still believed he must meet. At 26, he wrote that "I am married to a charming spoiled wife with whom I have little in common but background. ... We live our background." It didn't get better. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Two of the nation's wealthiest and most powerful football conferences abandoned their plans to play this fall over coronavirus concerns, a move that fractured the season and promised repercussions far beyond the playing field, even as other top leagues were publicly poised to begin games next month. The decisions by the two conferences, the Big Ten and the Pac 12, extended the greatest crisis in the history of college athletics, a multibillion dollar industry that depends heavily on football to underwrite lower profile sports and which provides universities with a national profile they use to recruit students and attract donations. By canceling games this autumn, the two conferences defied calls by some coaches and players and by President Trump to mount a season in the face of the virus's largely unchecked spread. The plans of other leading leagues to start playing by late September could now quickly change. And the Big Ten and Pac 12 may ultimately move their seasons to the spring. "You have to listen to your medical experts," Warren said. "There's a lot of emotion involved with this, but when you look at the health and well being of our student athletes, I feel very confident that we made the right decision." The moves by both leagues came after intense deliberations among university presidents and chancellors, but the decisions were not universally supported by administrators, coaches and players. "This is an incredibly sad day for our student athletes, who have worked so hard and been so vigilant fighting against this pandemic to get this close to their season," said Gene Smith, Ohio State's athletic director. The university had sought a delay to the season's start instead of a sweeping postponement, he said. Universities in the Pac 12 presented a more united front. Ray Anderson, Arizona State's athletic director, said: "Until we have more clarity, we're not going to go forward." College football's decentralized power structure, which allows different approaches by each conference, means that old and new powerhouses like Ohio State and Oregon will not compete this autumn while other leading programs, like Alabama, Clemson and Louisiana State, may still play. The other major conferences the Atlantic Coast, the Big 12 and the Southeastern will face extraordinary pressure in the coming days. College sports administrators are particularly wary of being seen as motivated by money instead of the safety of players, coaches and others, and any effort to press ahead with a season would assuredly provoke new criticism of an industry already under scrutiny by elected officials and the courts. The A.C.C. said Tuesday that it would "continue to make decisions based on medical advice" and that it was "prepared to adjust as medical information and the landscape" evolved. The SEC commissioner, Greg Sankey, said that he was still "comfortable" with his league's approach, but that the conference would "continue to refine our policies and protocols for a safe return to sports." Although the Big Ten and the Pac 12 upended plans for football, their decisions affected all of their fall sports, including cross country, field hockey, soccer and volleyball. The Pac 12 opted for a more far reaching approach, postponing all athletic competitions, including in winter sports like basketball, until at least 2021. Most attention in recent months, though, has been on football, and sports officials from across conferences have engaged in protracted debates over whether it would be feasible to hold a season on time, or at all. The deliberations were frequently hobbled by the sport's governance system. Although the N.C.A.A. has some power over football, it does not have absolute authority, and so decisions about the precise course of a season were left to individual conferences each with its own concerns, including media deals, constituencies and levels of risk tolerance. The Big Ten's internal divisions were on vivid display in the hours after the decision. In a statement, Nebraska officials pronounced themselves "very disappointed" and suggested they might try to find a way for their students to compete this fall. (Some college sports officials scoffed at the prospect, in part because of assorted contracts.) But the Pac 12 said its vote was unanimous. Dr. Doug Aukerman, the senior associate athletic director at Oregon State and the head of the conference's medical advisory board, said his group had two major concerns: that the virus was not under control near the conference's universities, and that there were too many unknowns about health risks related to the virus, including heart damage. With Pac 12 teams scheduled to begin training camp next week, it appeared all but impossible to play safely, officials said. "We're essentially going into a contact season asking them right now to disregard a lot of the guidelines, both federally and locally," Aukerman said. He added: "Playing contact sports, we know there's going to be a higher risk of spread." The Pac 12 had moved its planned kickoff to Sept. 26. But league officials saw no sign that conditions on campuses would improve as students began returning, and Commissioner Larry Scott said the presidents wanted to give athletes certainty, even if it amounted to bad news. Some athletes were not appeased by the decision. The Pac 12 unity group, which for the last two weeks has pressed Scott for greater health protections, among other demands, issued a statement criticizing the conference's "haphazard" response to the virus and what it called a lack of transparency with players. The group called for preserving athletes' eligibility something Scott said the conference would push for from the NCAA as well as access to athletic department resources and uniform safety measures when football returns. The financial consequences of the decisions will be enormous, starving schools of tens of millions of dollars unless the leagues can play in the spring. Even if they do, perhaps arresting a greater economic calamity, the delay of football revenues will cause new pain on campuses and in communities across the country. The two conferences together include 26 universities, including Iowa, Michigan, Stanford and Washington. Wisconsin, for instance, has said it could miss out on up to 100 million without a football season, and top leaders at the university said Tuesday that the decision not to play this fall would hurt "not only our athletic department, but the many businesses and members of our community who rely on Badger events to support their livelihoods." Last year, college football brought in nearly 1.6 billion in advertising, excluding digital platforms, according to the research firm Kantar. Both Fox and ESPN said while reporting their most recent earnings that advertising revenue sunk during the last quarter because of the disappearance of live sports. Until Tuesday, though, programmers and sports officials were hoping that there would be games on fabled fields at places like the Rose Bowl and Penn State's Beaver Stadium (a grand venue that can hold 106,572 people, though one that officials said last week would be closed to spectators if there were a season). In recent weeks, some conferences, like the Ivy League, canceled their seasons without ever publicly pursuing an alternative, like a condensed schedule. The Mid American Conference said it would not play games this fall but would try in the spring. And on Monday, the Mountain West Conference said it had settled on an "indefinite postponement" of all of its fall sports. As the most powerful conferences assessed their seasons, privately, and sometimes publicly, some administrators were skeptical that any of America's top teams would play a single down before the end of 2020. Next spring could also prove a stretch. Although the Big Ten and Pac 12 said they would consider playing football and other postponed fall sports early in 2021, Warren refused to commit to a plan. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Dance relies on technique, but if that's all there is, a performance loses its dimension; its energy fizzles out. There are many points to be made about an excellent show like "And Still You Must Swing," led by Dormeshia, a tap dancer of exceptional elegance, dazzling speed and, yes, an abundance of technique. But above all, at its foundation, there is heart and conviction. And, mission accomplished: It swings. Dormeshia, who no longer uses a last name she's tap dance royalty, she doesn't need one has a delightfully lively projection , yet never more than the moment requires. Her reason to dance extends way beyond footwork. She's nurturing, both to the tap form, whose jazz roots she celebrates here, and to her fellow dancers. In "Swing," she shares the stage with two exceptional tap dancers, Jason Samuels Smith and Derick K. Grant, and another radiant performer, Camille A. Brown. Headliners, all. At the Joyce Theater through Sunday, the program mixes robust unison trios for the tap dancers with nuanced, personal solos titled "Swings." In "Jason Swings," Mr. Smith is a virtuosic wonder , shifting seamlessly from power to quiet sensitivity . His fearless dancing even involved a shoe mishap he slipped out of his heel, but deftly fixed the problem mid step and continued on . And no one dances quite like Mr. Grant, who glides across the stage with a voluptuous, bearlike grace as his feet spark into impossibly intricate rhythms. Dormeshia is simply transfixing. For a dancer so grounded and connected to the floor in ways that you not only see but hear she moves as if buoyed by the air: When she swings, she floats. She has always had a magic quality about her, but with "And Still You Must Swing," which runs a swift 75 minutes and features a jazz quartet performing original music by Allison Miller and Dormeshia, she attains an even greater level of expressiveness. And as the show's leader, it's fitting: This is a celebration of her articulate body and all the information that it contains. It makes sense that the tap dancers perform with Ms. Brown, a contemporary choreographer who explores African American identity in her work; here, she wears sneakers and lights up the stage with her own footwork as always, she's electric and swinging rhythms. She is a container, too, in solos that hint at how tap emerged out of slavery and struggle. But throughout the production, which had its premiere at Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival in 2016, the connective theme comes from the title, which itself comes from a quotation by the tap dancer Jimmy Slyde: "There's balance involved. There's movement involved. And still you must swing." It's an invisible line: Does Dormeshia find the groove or does the groove find her? Her eloquent dancing is utterly natural, full of strength, femininity and a worldly maturity that evokes a bygone glamour as movement melts from her shoulders. Throughout the show, she and the other tap dancers wear gold shoes halfway, she changes flats for heels and her glimmering feet are reflected on the base of two round platforms behind her. It's as if her dancing is giving off actual sparks. There's a swing dance section, too, in which the tap dancers wear sneakers, and Dormeshia shows, yet again, that her understanding of rhythm has a way of enveloping the music like serious play: Just as she makes us pay attention to the moments between the notes, she lets us feel how a step can be as soft as taking a breath. The opening and closing numbers, trios for the tap dancers, end in the same way: Dormeshia high fives each of the guys, who then cross their arms and stand sideways while she, arms out, poses in the center. It's a jaunty hello and goodbye even if it comes too soon. Dormeshia knows what she's doing: She leaves you wanting more of her brand of deeply felt tap, in which dancers good friends alive in the skill of their bodies, let us watch their conversations unfold in real time. Through Sunday at the Joyce Theater, Manhattan; joyce.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
This article is part of a series aimed at helping you navigate life's opportunities and challenges. What else should we write about? Contact us: smarterliving nytimes.com. Maybe it's the lollipops and the stickers, but people tend to love their pediatricians. Nowadays many kids keep seeing their pediatricians right through college and even beyond, as Ross did in a classic scene from "Friends." But once you're in your 20s, it's time to look around for a primary care doctor who knows how to take care of adults. Because most young adults are essentially healthy, they may not feel any sense of urgency, but part of growing up is taking control of your health and your health care. Getting sudden problems like sore throats and sprained ankles seen to in an emergency room or a walk in clinic is convenient, but you should have an ongoing relationship with a health care provider who can think about all the different aspects of your health. You need a medical home, and you want to establish it before you have a major problem. "Easy isn't always the best care," said Dr. Mary R. Ciccarelli, who is trained in both medicine and pediatrics, and is the associate dean for pediatric education at Indiana University School of Medicine; she directs a statewide program called the Center for Youth and Adults With Conditions of Childhood which works to help young people with chronic illnesses navigate this transition. When you get your medical care problem by problem, no one works up the underlying medical issues, and no one looks at the whole picture of your health. "I have to spend time explaining why getting this problem fixed in the E.R. isn't equivalent to having a relationship and working through it in steps." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Several marijuana products have been identified as possible culprits in the mysterious epidemic of serious lung illnesses that has sickened more than 800 people who use vaping devices and e cigarettes to inhale THC or nicotine, or both. Health officials said on Friday that the products include THC filled vaping cartridges labeled "Dank Vapes," as well as some other illicit brands that people bought from friends or family or on the street. But officials said Dank Vapes appeared to be a label that THC sellers can slap on any product and is not a specific formulation or a single product. THC is the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. "Dank Vapes appears to be the most prominent in a class of largely counterfeit brands, with common packaging that is easily available online and that is used by distributors to market THC containing cartridges with no obvious centralized production or distribution," said a report published on Friday by state health officials from Illinois and Wisconsin, and from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is unknown who makes the THC products or where they come from, the researchers said. The new information comes from researchers' interviews with 86 people in Illinois and Wisconsin, from 15 years to 53 years old, who had become ill after vaping. Almost 60 percent had required treatment in intensive care units. About 87 percent of those interviewed had vaped THC from prefilled cartridges purchased from "informal sources" during the three months before they got sick, and 57 had used Dank Vapes. Other THC brands named are Moon Rocks, Off White and TKO. The extensive use of prefilled cartridges suggests they "might play an important role" in the outbreak, the researchers said. Part of the appeal of vaping THC is that it lacks marijuana's telltale odor, enabling users to hide what they are doing. But officials said they did not know if vaping illnesses or deaths in other parts of the country were related to the same THC brands identified in Illinois and Wisconsin. E cigarettes first came on the market in the United States in 2007, ostensibly as a nicotine replacement to help smokers give up cigarettes. But the huge array of fruity and candy like flavors and sleek devices have attracted increasing numbers of teenagers. In Illinois and Wisconsin, among the patients who reported vaping nicotine, Juul was by far the dominant brand. Many who vaped THC also reported vaping nicotine products. The C.D.C. held a briefing on Friday to discuss some of the findings in the health investigations of vaping illnesses that have now been reported in 46 states, involving 805 cases and 13 deaths. Oregon reported a second death on Thursday; state health officials said the person was hospitalized with respiratory symptoms after vaping cannabis products. Dr. Anne Schuchat , principal deputy director of the C.D.C., called the lung illnesses "serious and life threatening." She described the marketplace for vaping products as dynamic, and said that there was a large array of products, ingredients, packaging and supply chains, and that consumers had no way of knowing just what is in the liquids they are vaping. The 86 patients from Illinois and Wisconsin who were interviewed reported using 234 types of e cigarettes or vaping products, labeled with 87 brand names. Of 75 who vaped THC, 49 used it at least once a day, and some more than five times a day. Many of the patients throughout the United States had also reported using THC products, the agency said. Some patients have said they vaped only nicotine, but the Wisconsin researchers found that some patients who made that claim actually had used THC. Both the C.D.C. and the Food and Drug Administration have been investigating the outbreaks of vaping illnesses, in an effort to not only identify the products used but also the substances that were inhaled. The F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Ned Sharpless, told a congressional panel on Wednesday that the agency had been testing vaping liquid provided by people who got sick. "We've received about 300 samples," he said. "We've tested about 150. I would say the answer is about 70 percent are THC products. The rest are nicotine products or something else. A significant fraction of the THC products, like maybe half of them, are contaminated with vitamin E acetate." Vitamin E acetate is a skin oil and has "no business" being in a product that people inhale, Dr. Sharpless said, adding that the product is added to dilute or "cut" THC before it is sold. But other ingredients or contaminants may also be contributing to the illnesses, health experts have said. "We do not know what is making people sick," Dr. Schuchat said on Friday. It is not known whether THC itself is the culprit, or whether solvents, contaminants or the devices themselves are to blame. Patients have become weak, short of breath and sometimes nauseated. Many need supplemental oxygen and treatment in intensive care units. In some patients, the lung damage has been so severe that they have been placed on ventilators. In a few cases, lung function has been so poor that ventilators were not enough, and the patients also had to be connected to machines that pump oxygen directly into the bloodstream. Most of the patients have recovered enough to go home after days or weeks in the hospital, but doctors say it is too soon to tell whether they will suffer permanent lung damage. Given the unanswered questions about the exact cause of the illnesses, many health experts say people simply should not vape. Those who continue to do so should avoid THC and not buy vaping liquids off the street, or add ingredients to commercial products, the C.D.C. said. It emphasized that adults who do not smoke should not start using e cigarettes, and that young people and pregnant women should never use them. The spate of illnesses this summer has led several states and lawmakers to call for more restrictions on e cigarettes and for law enforcement agencies to crack down on illegal vape shops and illicit sales of vaping products. Michigan, Rhode Island and New York have imposed bans on flavored e cigarettes, while Massachusetts has imposed a four month ban on all vaping products. Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington State said on Friday that he would seek a statewide ban on flavored e cigarettes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
A mountain on Mars that is almost as tall as Denali in Alaska appears to be surprisingly light, scientists reported on Thursday. For more than four years, NASA's Curiosity rover has been exploring Mount Sharp, located within an ancient meteor impact crater known as Gale and rising more than three miles high . Now measurements of tiny changes in gravity, recorded by the rover as it climbed in elevation, could help solve the question of how the mountain formed. The official name of the mountain is Aeolis Mons, but mission scientists have nicknamed it after Robert P. Sharp, a Mars expert who died in 2004. It consists of layer upon layer of sedimentary rock, which offer an easy to read history book of Martian geology. That was one of the attractions that led NASA to choose the site for the Curiosity mission, which landed on Mars in 2012. But sedimentary rocks typically form at the bottoms of lakes and oceans, not at the tops of mountains. Some scientists surmised that the 96 mile wide Gale crater was once a lake that slowly filled to the brim with sediment, which was then blown away by winds, leaving Mount Sharp. Others suggested that particles blew in from other parts of the planet and piled up at the center of the crater in the shape of a mountain . Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. In the new research, published on Thursday in the journal Science, the gravity measurements indicated that the rocks beneath Curiosity were not solid but porous, lowering their density. This finding suggested that the crater was never completely filled with sediment, because the porous rocks would not have been strong enough to support all of the weight without being compressed. That conclusion fits in with the notion that both hypotheses of Mount Sharp's formation are true in part, said Ashwin R. Vasavada, the mission's project scientist and an author of the Science paper. Its bottom may consist of carved out lake sediments, while the top part may have built up from windblown particles. "That's an idea that's been gaining strength," Dr. Vasavada said. The brainstorm came from Kevin W. Lewis, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the mission team. He realized that modern devices such as smartphones have chips that measure the forces of acceleration. That's how an iPhone knows to rotate the screen depending on whether you are holding it vertically or horizontally. This kind of sensor, known as an accelerometer, can measure changes in the pull of gravity. On Earth, geologists use variations in gravity to probe for underground features such as earthquake faults and ore deposits. "Wouldn't it be wild if we had something like that on Mars?" said Dr. Lewis, the lead author of the Science paper. Then he realized that there were indeed accelerometers on Mars. The Curiosity rover was using such devices to track the tilt of the vehicle as it moved across the surface. Those measurements provided a record of the force of gravity on Curiosity. "Luckily, the engineers had already been taking a perfect data set, basically since day one," he said. Because the sensors were not meant for Dr. Lewis's purpose, the data were "quite noisy," he said. "The data would jump around pretty severely from day to day." After calibrating the measurements and averaging out the variations, the researchers found that gravity indeed waned slightly as Curiosity climbed about 1,000 feet in elevation. But it was less than what would have been measured if Curiosity had been hoisted 1,000 feet into the air. That is because of the additional gravitational attraction from the mass of the mountain. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The wounds of segregation were still raw in the 1970s. With only rare exceptions, African American children had nowhere near the same educational opportunities as whites. The civil rights movement, school desegregation and the War on Poverty helped bring a measure of equity to the playing field. Today, despite some setbacks along the way, racial disparities in education have narrowed significantly. By 2012, the test score deficit of black 9 , 13 and 17 year olds in reading and math had been reduced as much as 50 percent compared with what it was 30 to 40 years before. Achievements like these breathe hope into our belief in the Land of Opportunity. They build trust in education as a leveling force powering economic mobility. "We do have a track record of reducing these inequalities," said Jane Waldfogel, a professor of social work at Columbia University. But the question remains: Why did we stop there? For all the progress in improving educational outcomes among African American children, the achievement gaps between more affluent and less privileged children is wider than ever, notes Sean Reardon of the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford. Racial disparities are still a stain on American society, but they are no longer the main divider. Today the biggest threat to the American dream is class. Education is today more critical than ever. College has become virtually a precondition for upward mobility. Men with only a high school diploma earn about a fifth less than they did 35 years ago. The gap between the earnings of students with a college degree and those without one is bigger than ever. And yet American higher education is increasingly the preserve of the elite. The sons and daughters of college educated parents are more than twice as likely to go to college as the children of high school graduates and seven times as likely as those of high school dropouts. Only 5 percent of Americans ages 25 to 34 whose parents didn't finish high school have a college degree. By comparison, the average across 20 rich countries in an analysis by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is almost 20 percent. The problem, of course, doesn't start in college. Earlier this week, Professor Waldfogel and colleagues from Australia, Canada and Britain published a new book titled "Too Many Children Left Behind" (Russell Sage). It traces the story of America's educational disparities across the life cycle of its children, from the day they enter kindergarten to eighth grade. Their story goes sour very early, and it gets worse as it goes along. On the day they start kindergarten, children from families of low socioeconomic status are already more than a year behind the children of college graduates in their grasp of both reading and math. And despite the efforts deployed by the American public education system, nine years later the achievement gap, on average, will have widened by somewhere from one half to two thirds. Even the best performers from disadvantaged backgrounds, who enter kindergarten reading as well as the smartest rich kids, fall behind over the course of their schooling. The challenges such children face compared to their more fortunate peers are enormous. Children from low socioeconomic backgrounds are seven times more likely to have been born to a teenage mother. Only half live with both parents, compared with 83 percent of the children of college graduates. The children of less educated parents suffer higher obesity rates, have more social and emotional problems and are more likely to report poor or fair health. And because they are much poorer, they are less likely to afford private preschool or the many enrichment opportunities extra lessons, tutors, music and art, elite sports teams that richer, better educated parents lavish on their children. 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. When they enter the public education system, they are shortchanged again. Eleven year olds from the wrong side of the tracks are about one third more likely to have a novice teacher, according to Professor Waldfogel and her colleagues. They are much more likely to be held back a grade, a surefire way to stunt their development, the researchers say. Financed mainly by real estate taxes that are more plentiful in neighborhoods with expensive homes, public education is becoming increasingly compartmentalized. Well funded schools where the children of the affluent can play and learn with each other are cordoned off from the shabbier schools teaching the poor, who are still disproportionally from black or Hispanic backgrounds. Even efforts to lean against inequality backfire. Research by Rachel Valentino, who received her Ph.D. in education policy at Stanford University this year, found that public prekindergarten programs offered minorities and the poor a lower quality education. Perhaps pre K programs serving poor and minority children have trouble attracting good teachers. Perhaps classrooms with more disadvantaged children are more difficult to manage. Perhaps teachers offer more basic instruction because disadvantaged children need to catch up. In any event, Ms. Valentino told me, "the gaps are huge." This is arguably education's biggest problem. Narrowing proficiency gaps that emerge way before college would probably do more to increase the nation's college graduation rate than offering universal community college, easier terms on student loans or more financial aid. "If we could equalize achievement from age zero to 14," Professor Waldfogel told me, "that would go a long way toward closing the college enrollment and completion gaps." It can be done. Australia, Canada even the historically class ridden Britain show much more equitable outcomes. The policy prescriptions go beyond improving teachers and curriculums, or investing in bringing struggling students up to speed. They include helping parents, too: teaching them best practices in parenting, raising their pay and helping them with the overlapping demands of work and family. And yet the strains from our world of increasing income inequality raise doubts about our ability to narrow the educational divide. Poorer, less educated parents simply can't keep up with the rich, who are spending hand over fist to ensure that their children end at the front of the rat race. Our public school system has proved no match to the forces reproducing inequality across the generations. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
For decades, it's been a retail version of a hard to crack whodunit: What is wrong with West Eighth Street? As Greenwich Village became one of the most desirable addresses for businesses in Manhattan, why did West Eighth Street, especially the block between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas, lag and even deteriorate? For a long time, one storefront after another featured shoes, and the block drew many customers. But more recently, the rows of shoe stores steadily closed their doors, giving the street a rough and tumble look. And despite attempts by local officials to engineer a turnaround, most new businesses that tried to move into the empty storefronts never really got off the ground. Now a spate of recent leases by more than a dozen food related businesses, as well as the opening of a much anticipated boutique hotel, is spurring landlords, restaurateurs and real estate brokers to suggest another Eighth Street revival. "Does it have a real shot this time? It sure does," said Robert Futterman, a retail broker who isn't affiliated with any of the block's stores or buildings. "The street could finally get a hip, cool factor, which would help it." What's fueling the most hope for Mr. Futterman and others is the new hotel, the 107 room Marlton, which opened last month in a cream brick landmark at No. 5. Co owned by Sean MacPherson, whose Bowery hotel is often credited with ushering in the redevelopment of that once seedy street, the Marlton features a lobby lined with rugs and stacked with books, where the public is invited to work on laptops. A restaurant and bar space tentatively called Cafe Marlton is to open this month in the building, which dates to 1900. "I like the idea of creating a neighborhood place in New York where you can hang out without feeling strong armed into spending money," Mr. MacPherson said on a recent tour. A popular crash pad for Beat Generation writers like Jack Kerouac, who according to some historical accounts, wrote part of "Desolation Angels" in a room there, the Marlton in later years served as a dorm for the nearby New School, during which time it grew shabby. After a two year, 15 million gut renovation, the snug rooms feature crown moldings, mahogany closets and wall mounted light fixtures styled like human hands. Prices start at 225 a night at the hotel, which is being leased for at least 50 years by Mr. MacPherson and BD Hotels, his partner, from the Seril family, which owned the Upper West Side's Belnord apartment tower. "You are surrounded by one of the most dynamic neighborhoods around, artistically and culturally, and here you have a street with discount shoe stores," said Richard Born, a BD principal, who graduated from New York University around the corner. In fact, one of those stores, Kinway, was located in a part of the lobby until recently. "I couldn't dream of a better place to put a hotel," he added. When they venture out, guests don't have to walk far for entertainment. In the last two years, at least a dozen restaurants have opened on the block or plan to do so soon, among about 70 storefronts. Offering hamburgers, sushi and even gourmet popcorn, these new businesses join a handful of established wine bars and barbecue joints. They can seem snazzier than many that came before. Another example is Greenwich Project, which sells 45 rib eye steaks in a two level space at No. 47, whose colorful art recalls the comic books once sold on the property. But the vendor really generating buzz is Stumptown Coffee Roasters, which opened at No. 30, in a corner location at Macdougal Street, in May. The Oregon based company has a fervent following, and its customers can choose the gadget with which their coffee is brewed. Stumptown's only other New York outpost is at the Ace Hotel on West 29th Street and Broadway. That Midtown spot, along with the Ace Hotel in which it is located, has helped elevate the stature of its NoMad neighborhood, landlords and brokers say. "Stumptown and the Marlton will be the anchors to solidify the development of the corridor," said William Abramson, the director of sales and leasing for Buchbinder Warren Realty Group, which represents the owners of about a dozen buildings on the block, including Stumptown's. Of the 14 retail berths in those buildings, two are empty, with asking rents steady for now at about 125 a square foot, Mr. Abramson said. That stagnation in prices may work in the block's favor. Storefronts lease at a discount to nearby University Place, where rents average 250 a square foot, and to Broadway near Houston Street, where they average 350, according to Mr. Futterman. Foot traffic on West Eighth, he pointed out, is high because it acts as a link between the East and West Villages. Over all, there continue to be several noticeable gaps on the street, including a string of darkened windows on the southern side. Yet the vacancy rate has dropped significantly in the last couple years, according to the Village Alliance, the local business improvement district. It now hovers at 8 percent, down from a recession high of 12 percent but on a par with the vacancy rate from before the boom years, when sneaker and sandal shops could seem monolithic. Though there may be no single explanation for why the block has struggled relative to its peers, earlier theories were that its sidewalks were too narrow. In the early 2000s, they were widened by a few feet. Others say that the storefronts on the block, which is lined with skinny 19th century row houses and is in a historic district, are too small for modern retail tastes. They typically range from 700 square feet down to just 100 square feet, which is the size of one business that sells the kind of water pipes used for marijuana. Mr. Abramson said he had to cobble together three adjacent storefronts to lure Stumptown, which also entailed canceling the lease of an existing clothing store. He has also vowed not to rent space to tattoo parlors and pipe shops, to ensure a more upscale tone, he said. Other incentives are planned. The Village Alliance is talking with the city's Department of Transportation about possibly putting in the kind of pedestrian plazas found in Times Square and others parts of the city, said William Kelley, the group's executive director. But not everybody is convinced that it is smart to rely solely on restaurants to improve the block. A healthy block needs a variety of retail, Mr. Futterman said, and often, some brand name national firms selling accessories, cosmetics or clothing, like the kind that have colonized sections of nearby Bleecker Street. "Otherwise, it runs the risk of turning into a food court," he said. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the area's attempt at a whole cloth makeover has generated raw feelings among some owners of the surviving shoe stores, like Moshe Mansoor, who owns DaVinci, at No. 37. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Six movies, 12 album collections , two songs and 17 books that will take willing travelers back to August 1969 mud not included. How to Relive Woodstock From the Comfort of Your Couch The epic, Academy Award winning documentary directed by Michael Wadleigh has also served as the festival's foundational text since 1970, when it shocked skeptics to become one of the year's highest grossing films. It has been reissued many times, most recently in 2014 as a Blu ray that includes the 3 hour 44 minute director's cut as well as two more discs of performances and interviews. D.A. Pennebaker's three part documentary mini series (one for each day of the festival) originally intended to commemorate the event's 25th anniversary includes rare performances and interviews with many of the concert's producers, including Joel Rosenman, John Roberts and Michael Lang. The two disc set includes every available bit of footage of Hendrix's hourlong headlining Woodstock performance, uncut and in its original sequence, in two different edits. The release also includes a mini documentary with members of Hendrix's band, and footage of a September 1969 news conference where the rock legend discussed his Woodstock set. Produced by PBS and its "American Experience" series, this new documentary by Barak Goodman draws heavily on the festival's social and political context as well as the promise of "never before seen footage" supplemented by voice over anecdotes from festival attendees. Concert footage takes a back seat to illustrating the scene in the crowd (and around the country). Mick Richards directs another look at how the festival came together, with still more interviews with producers elucidating some of Woodstock's myths and the nitty gritty of just what it took to get so many rock stars in one place (apparently Janis Joplin, for example, required a personal supply of strawberries). Joni Mitchell wrote what would eventually became a hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash Young as well as the British group Matthews Southern Comfort while sitting in a New York City hotel room, watching coverage of the festival on TV. Her manager had told her that appearing on "The Dick Cavett Show" would be a better career move writing an enduring protest anthem, at least, worked in her favor. "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)" (1970) Melanie's Woodstock performance and subsequent ode to the festival helped make her a household name during the early 1970s. "We all had caught the same disease/and we all sang the songs of peace," she sang on the unlikely hit, speaking effectively to the Woodstock fever sweeping the country along with the success of Wadleigh's documentary. The third compilation of music recorded at the festival to be widely released, this time to commemorate Woodstock's 25th anniversary. There's no overlap between the songs on this album and those on the first two Woodstock releases. "Woodstock: Three Days of Peace and Music" (1994) The first of the boxed sets, this one with four discs of performances in chronological order. Hendrix's set alongside his Gypsy Sun and Rainbows band at the 1969 festival was among its most memorable, especially thanks to his sprawling, irreverent rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner." These two albums both capture Hendrix's performance via slightly different edits, the latter being the more complete edition. Joe Cocker and the Grease Band provide one of the better recorded sets from the weekend, spanning 11 songs that include the Bob Dylan cover "Dear Landlord," the Ray Charles hits "Let's Go Get Stoned" and "I Don't Need No Doctor" as well as Cocker's classic version of "With a Little Help From My Friends." This distinctive boxed set, released for the festival's 40th anniversary, combines the complete performances of five Woodstock artists Santana, Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone, Jefferson Airplane and Johnny Winter with studio albums each artist released in 1969. The collection is also available individually by artist. To commemorate the festival's 40th anniversary, Rhino assembled what was billed as the most complete collection to date of festival recordings, spanning 77 songs, six CDs and all but three of Woodstock's artists. The songs are in chronological order, and are supplemented by plenty of interstitial commentary and crowd noise for a more transporting feel. "Woodstock Back to the Garden: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive" (2019) A new boxed set that came out in early August promises an even more immersive Woodstock experience, with 36 hours of music and onstage banter recorded live at the festival (that's 38 CDs). Only 1,969 copies are available; the set also includes a Blu ray copy of the documentary, a commemorative guitar strap, posters and prints and a book by the festival producer Lang. If you want to block out a weekend and truly relive every minute of the festival, this is the set for you. There are also 10 CD and three CD versions. Full versions of Creedence Clearwater Revival's set have circulated among collectors for decades at the time, John Fogerty apparently thought the band's performance wasn't up to snuff. But now the band is finally issuing an official version of all 11 songs from "Born on the Bayou" all the way through "Bad Moon Rising" and "Proud Mary" digitally, on CD and as a double LP. The activist Abbie Hoffman, who gained instant Woodstock infamy by interrupting the Who's set and getting shoved offstage by Pete Townshend, wrote about his experience at the festival and his reflections on youth culture as a whole in this book, as crucial an artifact of the era as the festival itself. "Woodstock: A Special Report by the Editors of Rolling Stone" (1969) It's not strictly a book, and it's fairly hard to find, but for the true Woodstock Nation, what better piece of memorabilia than Greil Marcus's recollections of the festival as they were originally presented, in an insert in Rolling Stone written on deadline? "Young Men With Unlimited Capital: The Inside Story of the Legendary Woodstock Festival Told by the Two People Who Paid for It" (1974) The first, and quite possibly the most clear eyed, of the "this is how it really happened" Woodstock tales this one from the men who funded it, Rosenman and Roberts. The anniversary coverage had already begun 10 years after the festival, with this set of anecdotes from the festival organizer Lang (as told to Jean Young) which are notable both for the comparatively short time between when the festival took place and when they were written down, and the many rich photographs that accompany them. "Knock on Woodstock: The Uproarious, Uncensored Story of the Woodstock Festival, the Gay Man Who Made It Happen, and How He Earned His Ticket to Free" (1994) Tiber's first go at a Woodstock themed memoir, released around the festival's 25th anniversary. The memoir (which would soon become the source for the Ang Lee film of the same name) tells the story of how Tiber unwittingly brought some of his bohemian Greenwich Village lifestyle upstate to his parents' sleepy motel when he volunteered it as a base for Woodstock organizers and ultimately became an intrinsic part of the festival himself. This book, which somehow keeps its completist vision under 400 pages, offers a look backstage at the festival (and in the teeming crowd) as told by the people who were there. The festival has inspired many rapturously retold reminiscences by attendees of all stripes, but few are better equipped for a slightly self indulgent memoir than the Woodstock co creator Artie Kornfeld, who told his side of the story to celebrate the 40th anniversary. "Woodstock Revisited: 50 Far Out, Groovy, Peace Loving, Flashback Inducing Stories From Those Who Were There" (2009) Especially for those who missed the festival (or hadn't yet been born when it happened), this book a collection of stories by Woodstock attendees, not musicians or staff is a unique chance to learn what it might have been like out in the half million strong crowd. Alongside the writer Holly George Warren, the Woodstock co organizer Lang provides one of the most vivid accounts of just how the storied festival happened from as deep inside its machinations as anyone can get. "Woodstock: An Inside Look at the Movie That Shook Up the World and Defined a Generation" (2019) In 1999, Dale Bell, one of the original Woodstock documentary's producers, edited a thorough oral history of his own project, which included interviews with more than 40 crew members and performers, and dug deeply into the technical aspects of piecing together such a huge event. A version of the book with images from the photographer Henry Diltz was published earlier this year. The journalist and publicist Mike Greenblatt (who, yes, attended Woodstock) explores the festival set by set and includes interviews with festival artists like Country Joe McDonald, Richie Havens and Carlos Santana. The photographer Richard F. Bellak's work is showcased in this photo book, written by John Kane. Instead of capturing the musicians, Bellak focused on taking photos of the crowd, resulting in a new perspective on what that storied audience was actually like. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Anyone whose childhood included a move up to a new, better home remembers it as grander than it was. When I was 5, I saw our new home as extending endlessly in every direction. It soared above a vast, churning river on one side and a hectic port on the other. It was exactly the building my kindergarten self would have built, stacking blocks to the verge of collapse. Its pleasures left me breathless the first day I woke up there and most mornings after. In my case, this memory of relocation is not overblown. My parents moved us from Philadelphia to Montreal in 1968, into a housing complex called Habitat, which had been completed the previous summer as the experimental housing pavilion for Expo 67, the Montreal world's fair. Built on a spit of land separating the rapids of the great St. Lawrence River from the working waters of Montreal's port, Habitat's 158 apartments fill 354 cast concrete boxes, piled 11 stories high in a madcap mess of cantilevers and bridges and perilous open spaces like (guess what) a stack of children's blocks. For sheer sensory excitement, Habitat could not and cannot be matched. Every minute in the building felt unlike the next, as space, light, air and sound danced around you. My parents built a jungle gym on one of our terraces, but the building was the best climbing frame of all. Habitat turns 50 this spring, and its excellence is being celebrated well beyond my family. Canada's post office has just announced a Habitat stamp, the first in a series for the nation's 150th birthday. In June a major exhibition on the structure, now declared a historic monument, opens at the Centre de design de l'UQAM in Montreal. The show will include public tours of a Habitat apartment restored to its original space age state, with fiberglass bathrooms cast in one piece and futuristic push button light switches one white dot for "on" and a black one for "off." (By some weird coincidence, the apartment being toured this summer is the same one I grew up in.) Habitat is a prime example of our postwar love of raw concrete architecture. For a little while, from the late 1950s to the early '70s, concrete seemed to be the civic, public alternative to the steel and glass buildings that represented the corporate world, Mad Men slick and meant to sell us on the polished ease of the capitalist way, reflected back and forth across the hall of mirrors of New York's Park Avenue. Poured concrete, in contrast, was honest and audacious in avowing its bulk, primeval and pretense free for an age that still doubted the perfection of the new corporate model and sometimes pushed back against it. It became the preferred material for libraries, universities and courts, in a style that has now come to be known as Brutalism. The Third Church of Christ, Scientist, one of the few notable buildings near the White House, was torn down in 2014, even though it had once been described by the architectural historian Richard Longstreth as "an enduring monument to the human faith in God and the extraordinary power with which that faith can be expressed." But the church's parishioners didn't share his faith in Brutalism and started describing their home as a "bunker" the standard insult that just about every cast concrete building has suffered at one time or another. ("How do you live with all that cement," my schoolmates would ask. "With delight" was the only answer. They understood once they visited.) If only those Brutalist structures could have held on just a bit longer. The style's charms are being rediscovered. If it is true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Habitat's concrete should be blushing. "In the schools, you see that the students are into it again," said Moshe Safdie, Habitat's designer, speaking by phone from his firm's offices near Boston. "Several of my peers are doing buildings influenced by it." Mr. Safdie is now one of the world's leading architects, but he conceived of his Expo project while still a student at McGill University. He was all of 28 when it opened. He said that after a 50 year career spent designing institutions (the Crystal Bridges museum in Arkansas is a recent standout), contracts for housing are pouring in for the first time, "and it's completely linked to people's interest in Habitat." His student project, he said, feels "as though it was built yesterday." Its current imitators seem to agree. A vast new complex planned for downtown Toronto, with a haphazard looking stack of blocky modules, is utterly indebted to the Safdie building. Its cutting edge architect, Bjarke Ingels of Denmark, has referred to it as "Habitat 2.0" and he ended a recent speech with an admission of influence that is rare in his profession: "Canada started something 50 years ago. Now we are picking up where Moshe Safdie left off." In just the last few years, books on vintage poured concrete buildings have started to appear faster than they can be read. Walking tours of Brutalist masterpieces, in cities around the world, are now competing with ones that point out Victorian terra cotta and Art Deco metalwork. Last fall, a British publishing house called Blue Crow Media added a "Brutalist Washington" map to a series that includes maps of Brutalism in London, Paris and Sydney, Australia. The one on Washington, D.C., was the brainchild of a local writer named Deane Madsen, a fan of postwar concrete who was also aware of the abuse it still suffers. "I'd seen so many lists of the least popular and ugliest buildings in D.C., and almost all were Brutalist," said Mr. Madsen in a recent phone call. His map applauds concrete buildings like the cylindrical Hirshhorn Museum, once reviled but now widely admired, and the block spanning F.B.I. headquarters, still so disliked that its demolition seems almost certain. We've lived to regret such destruction before, the standard cautionary tale being New York's Pennsylvania Station. It fell in 1963 when it was seen as an outdated 50 year old. ("Not, architecturally, a monument," was the judgment of the real estate developer Irving M. Felt, whose Madison Square Garden replaced the station. The New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp agreed, writing in 2006 that pulling in there was like "arriving in Philadelphia two hours before you had to.") Penn Station fell at precisely the moment when its out of date architecture was beginning to find some new love it was mourned almost at once just as Brutalist buildings are doing on their 50th birthdays. Mr. Madsen, the Washington writer, has a theory about why vintage concrete is making a comeback at this particular moment: For all the challenges Brutalism can pose to some users, he said, its bold forms and highly textured surfaces make it utterly camera friendly, perfect fare for our Instagram age. What was once a highly theorized Architecture of Truth, with profound social goals and implications, has come to be loved as a pure aesthetic. Passing time has made it trade complexity and depth for a wider surface appeal. That means Brutalism is suffering (or enjoying) the same fate as most modern movements. The Impressionism of Claude Monet, once derided as incomprehensibly ugly and abstruse, now counts as evidently and simply attractive; the Pop Art of Andy Warhol, originally seen as utterly conceptual and counteraesthetic, now decorates strollers. With our new love of cast concrete, it looks as if we've learned to see the beauty in what once counted as bleak. A few weeks ago, the United States Commission of Fine Arts, a body normally busy with our capital's neo Classical style monuments, chastised Washington's transportation authority for painting the concrete in one of its 1970s Metro stations. The commission complained that the paint threatened "the architectural character of this exemplary transit system" (exemplary, it so happens, for its Brutalism). My Hell's Kitchen neighborhood in New York is known for its ornate Victorian tenements, now beloved for the very curlicues that once won them abuse. A new kind of ornament is joining them: On a prime lot at Ninth Avenue and 42nd Street, near Times Square, a generic skyscraper that would once have been faced in cliched glass or metal has instead been surfaced in raw concrete which now, but only now, counts as a suitably decorative finish for a building that will house a trendy Pod hotel. Just up the street on 10th Avenue, ground has been cleared for a condo building that takes its Brutalist roots more to heart. It will be faced in precast concrete panels designed to have some of the same visual texture and complexity as its most photogenic postwar ancestors, including Habitat. That's because the new building's architect, Jonathan J. Marvel, has been a fan of Moshe Safdie's for far longer than most of his peers. In another of this article's peculiar coincidences, Mr. Marvel actually visited Habitat the year it was born, when he was all of 7. (He had been brought to Expo for the debut of a second great building there: the American Pavilion's giant geodesic dome by Buckminster Fuller, Mr. Marvel's great uncle.) "I grew up with cast concrete on my brain," Mr. Marvel said. It was a favorite material of his father's, one of Puerto Rico's leading architects. He also has memories of a hillside in San Juan scattered with unused concrete boxes from a second Habitat that Mr. Safdie never got the chance to complete. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Death comes at you fast. Just three weeks ago the official line at the White House and Fox News was that the coronavirus was no big deal, that claims to the contrary were a politically motivated hoax perpetrated by people out to get Donald Trump. Now we have a full blown health crisis in New York, and all indications are that many other cities will soon find themselves in the same situation. And it will almost certainly get much worse. The United States is on the worst trajectory of any advanced country yes, worse than Italy at the same stage of the pandemic with confirmed cases doubling every three days. I'm not sure that people understand, even now, what that kind of exponential growth implies. But if cases kept growing at their current rate for a month, they would increase by a factor of a thousand, and almost half of Americans would be infected. We hope that won't happen. Many although not all states have gone into lockdown, and both epidemiological models and some early evidence suggest that this will "flatten the curve," that is, substantially slow the virus's spread. But as we wait to see just how bad our national nightmare will get, it's worth stepping back for a few minutes to ask why America has handled this crisis so badly. Incredibly bad leadership at the top is clearly an important factor. Thousands of Americans are dying, and the president is boasting about his TV ratings. But this isn't just about one man. Neither the scientific denial that crippled the initial response to this pandemic, nor the tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths that now seem likely, are unique to Covid 19. Among advanced countries, the United States has long stood out as the land of denial and death. It's just that we're now seeing these national character flaws play out at a vastly accelerated rate. About denial: Epidemiologists trying to get a handle on the coronavirus threat appear to have been caught off guard by the immediate politicization of their work, the claims that they were perpetrating a hoax designed to hurt Trump, or promote socialism, or something. But they should have expected that reaction, since climate scientists have faced the same accusations for years. And while climate change denial is a worldwide phenomenon, its epicenter is clearly here in America: Republicans are the world's only major climate denialist party. Nor is climate science the only thing they reject; not one of the candidates contending for the G.O.P.'s 2016 nomination was willing to endorse the theory of evolution. 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. What lies behind Republican science denial? The answer seems to be a combination of fealty to special interests and fealty to evangelical Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr., who dismissed the coronavirus as a plot against Trump, then reopened his university despite health officials' warnings, and seems to have created his own personal viral hot spot. The point, in any case, is that decades of science denial on multiple fronts set the stage for the virus denial that paralyzed U.S. policy during the crucial early weeks of the current pandemic. About death: I still sometimes encounter people convinced that America has the world's highest life expectancy. After all, aren't we the world's greatest nation? In fact, we have the lowest life expectancy among advanced countries, and the gap has been steadily widening for decades. This widening gap, in turn, surely reflects both America's unique lack of universal health insurance and its equally unique surge in "deaths of despair" deaths from drugs, alcohol and suicide among working class whites who have seen economic opportunities disappear. Is there a link between the hundreds of thousands of excess deaths we suffer every year compared with other rich countries and the tens of thousands of additional excess deaths we're about to suffer from the coronavirus? The answer is surely yes. In particular, when we conduct a post mortem on this pandemic a stock phrase that, in this case, isn't a metaphor we'll probably find that the same hostility to government that routinely undermines efforts to help Americans in need played a crucial role in slowing an effective response to the current crisis. What about the larger picture? Is there a link between the uniquely American prevalence of science denial and America's uniquely high mortality? To be honest, I'm still trying to figure this out. One possible story is that the U.S. political landscape gives special power to the anti science religious right, which has lent its support to anti government politicians. But I'm not sure whether this is the whole story, and the power of people like Falwell is itself a phenomenon that demands explanation. In any case, the point is that while America is a great nation with a glorious history and much to be proud of I consider myself very much a patriot the rise of the hard right has, as I said, also turned it into a land of denial and death. This transformation has been taking place gradually over the past few decades; it's just that now we're watching the consequences on fast forward. 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 |
"I didn't think I'd ever see this car again," said Dick Thompson, the roadracing dentist who in 1960 had co driven the white No. 2 Corvette in the 24 hours of Le Mans with Fred Windridge. With Thompson at the wheel, the 290 horsepower fuel injected car was first off the line when the race started, and it managed a speed of more than 161 m.p.h. on the Mulsanne straight. But Thompson, running among the leaders, spun off the track and into a sand pit. By the time he dug himself out, the leaders were many laps ahead. Thompson's reunion with the No. 2 car took place here at the Laguna Seca track last month, where Chevrolet had gathered veteran Le Mans Corvettes the 1960 racecar; a '67 driven by Dick Guldstrand and Bob Bondurant; and a John Greenwood car that competed in 1973 on the weekend of an American Le Mans Series race. At the 2010 Le Mans race, which takes place next weekend about 130 miles southwest of Paris, Corvettes will again compete. But before the green flag flies, a tribute to tradition: pre race activities on the schedule include a parade of 50 Corvettes on "un tour d'Honneur" around the eight mile circuit, to be led by the No. 3 car of the 1960 Corvette team, which won its class and finished eighth over all. Dick Thompson, a dentist with a track record, reunited with the Corvette he raced in the 24 Hours of Le Mans 50 years ago. At the wheel will be John Fitch, now 92, who co drove it a half century ago with Bob Grossman. Alongside, in the passenger seat, will be the car's present owner, Lance Miller. The Corvettes in this year's 24 hour race, which Chevrolet designates as C6.R models, are survivors of the cost cutting under which General Motors eliminated most of its racing programs during last year's financial crisis. It helped that the rules in the Le Mans GT2 class emphasize production based vehicles like the factory backed Corvettes, which will do battle with entries from BMW, Ferrari, Jaguar, Porsche and other marques. The appearance of Fitch and the 1960 racecar started with Lance Miller's desire to fulfill a last wish of his father, Chip, who organized collector car events. The elder Miller had acquired the car and restored it to its Le Mans trim two years before his death in 2004 at age 61. "My father never had the opportunity to go to Le Mans," Mr. Miller wrote in an e mail message. It was his father's dream, he said, to return the car with Fitch driving to the site of what he called "Corvette's grandest victory." The class win did not come easily to the Fitch Grossman Corvette. It suffered engine overheating in the final hour, but under the Le Mans rules it could not make stops to replenish fluids. The car was able to make it to the end of the race only by packing ice from the team's soft drink coolers into the car's engine compartment during pit stops. The Corvette C6.R in action at Laguna Seca last month, before making the trip to France for the 24 hour race next weekend. Things went worse for the No. 2 car. Thompson remembers it as a death defying experience. "We knew before the race the brakes would fail before halfway, and they did," he said. "I asked Ed Cole, the head of Chevrolet then, why they didn't put disc brakes on such a sporty car. He said, 'No, not on a production car.'" "He also said that he had heard that, in the Northern states, ice was a problem on discs," said Thompson, now 89, relating a myth of the era. "Can you beat that? That Corvette had everything you could want except brakes! The car had great potential. But G.M. didn't want to spend the time and the money on it." In a nod to Thompson and other Corvette racing pioneers, Jan Magnussen, a driver on today's factory C6.R team, wise cracked, "They started the complaining, and things are just about getting fixed now." Mr. Magnussen and five other drivers on the two car Corvette factory team will be campaigning for Le Mans glory in next weekend's race. The C6.R Corvettes are production based but not nearly as stock as those 1960 Corvettes perhaps best remembered as one of the models to star in the "Route 66" television show whose list of modifications included little more than oversize gas tanks with quick fill caps, magnesium wheels, racing seats and heavy duty suspensions. When asked how well prepared the Corvette racecars of '60 were, Thompson replied: "It was strictly a styling exercise. Its roadracing ability was limited. It had a solid rear axle, bias belted tires and drum brakes. They were heavy, but they were fast." VETERAN Dick Guldstrand at the Laguna Seca event with the Corvette he raced at Le Mans. The owner of the 1960 Corvette team, Briggs Cunningham, was a wealthy sportsman who had procured three new Corvettes from dealerships and brought them with him to Le Mans that year. To save on air freight, he booked passage for himself on an ocean liner and had the Corvettes checked as his baggage, Thompson said in an interview. After the race, the cars were shipped back to the United States by the same method. Thompson said he had expected the cars would go into a museum, as Chevrolet officials had told the drivers these were special Corvettes now, and would never be raced again. Instead, Cunningham had the cars returned to a dealership, where all the racing equipment was stripped off. The cars were repainted and sold to the public! ("Low miles, driven only on weekends") The whereabouts of the No. 1 car are unknown. Thompson's No. 2 was found in 1978 in an Irwindale, Calif., junkyard, where a sharp eyed collector bought it for 300. The No. 3 Corvette driven by Fitch changed hands numerous times before the Miller family acquired it in 2000. That any of the cars survive, much less the drivers, is something of a miracle. Fitch, an Indiana native, a World War II fighter pilot and a former prisoner of war, went on to other racing successes during a long career; he eventually became general manager of the Lime Rock Park racetrack in Connecticut. Thompson, a dentist in Washington, decided he could not safely make a decent living behind the wheel. So he quit racing and continued practicing dentistry until retiring at age 75. He now lives in Florida. The No. 2 Corvette now leads a pampered life with Bruce Meyer, a well known West Coast collector. The No. 3 Corvette will be featured at the Corvettes at Carlisle show in Pennsylvania on Aug. 27 29. (Chip Miller was a co founder of Carlisle Events in 1973.) Lance Miller said he still considered No. 3 his father's car. "I have a feeling this will always be dubbed 'Chip's '60 Le Mans racer.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
It's about halfway through Douglas Dunn's "Aidos" that things get weird. This 75 minute work, which had its debut on Wednesday at BAM Fisher, is set to 12 movements from Bach's six suites for unaccompanied cello, played live and out of their original order by Ha Yang Kim. Much of the choreography is politely balletic, its decorum ruffled only momentarily by a rough outburst here, a flash of louche hip motion there. But then, after most of the small cast has sunk into crouches and made a scooting retreat toward the theater's rear wall, Mr. Dunn arrives with two tall women in costumes of bright patchwork. He noodles around. He crawls through the legs of one of the women. The other dancers treat him and the women the way that members of a leper colony might treat rare visitors, climbing on their backs and then shaking in distress as Mr. Dunn and the two women belly crawl away. Later, those women (Jessica Martineau and Jin Ju Song Begin) return, wearing spiky headdresses and diaphanous capes. They sit on thrones that have human shaped backs (costume and set design by Andrew Jordan). Mr. Dunn, who is in his early 70s, passes through their court, gibbering. What is going on here? In Greek mythology, Aidos is the goddess of shame or modesty, the kinds of emotions that are supposed to enforce correct behavior. It seems that Mr. Dunn, whose mind can work in delightfully eccentric ways, is poking under the vestments of propriety. But the points he is making are obscure, and "Aidos" is not quite strange enough for that obscurity to be fully compelling. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
WASHINGTON President Trump has repeatedly blamed the Federal Reserve's interest rate policy for preventing the American economy from reaching the 4 percent growth he had promised. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump renewed that criticism from the sidelines of an elite gathering in Davos, Switzerland. "No. 1, the Fed was not good," Mr. Trump told CNBC when asked why economic growth was closer to 2 percent last year. Data for the full year isn't in yet, but the economy probably expanded at 2.2 percent or 2.3 percent relative to the fourth quarter of 2018, economists estimate. Mr. Trump also pointed to the grounding of Boeing's 737 Max plane and severe storms as factors that held back the economy, but added that "with all of that, had we not done the big raise on interest, I think we would have been close to 4 percent." Economists said that claim was not realistic. The central bank's nine interest rate increases between 2015 and late 2018 three of which it reversed last year probably reined in business investment and the housing market, economists say. But that impact did not shave nearly 2 percentage points from economic growth. It is hard to know how big of a drag it did create, since Mr. Trump's trade war was weighing down business sentiment and investment simultaneously. Here are a few ways to think through how the economy might have shaped up had the Fed acted differently. In the real world, the Fed lifted rates between December 2015 and the end of 2018 in an effort to achieve a soft landing: one in which growth continued at a moderate pace and inflation, which the Fed is supposed to keep under control, settled around its 2 percent target. When growth showed signs of wavering in 2019 and inflation remained soft, Fed officials reversed course, cutting rates three times. In the most extreme counterfactual, one in which the Fed never raised its policy interest rate at all, growth might have been 1 percentage point higher in 2019, said Ernie Tedeschi, policy economist at Evercore ISI. That estimate, which he based on the central bank's main economic model, would have gotten America to around 3.2 percent growth in 2019 but at a hefty cost. "Inflation would've been well above their mandate, 2.5 percent and rising, at this point," Mr. Tedeschi said. Price gains are like an aircraft carrier they're hard to turn around once they get going so that would have necessitated a sharp increase in rates. Such an abrupt change could have plunged the economy into recession. "It would certainly be painful," Mr. Tedeschi said. But even in that version of the world, one in which the Fed was willing to play with fire by leaving its policy totally untouched at near zero for more than a decade, the economy could have achieved that 4 percent growth figure only absent a trade war and even that is a stretch. While it's hard to gauge precisely how much Mr. Trump's tariffs reduced growth, estimates suggest they could have shaved between 0.5 and 1 percentage point away in 2019, Mr. Tedeschi said. All of these projections are highly uncertain it is difficult to know how the world would have shaped up after the fact, and it is impossible to know how policies would have interacted. And even if the basic figures are right, this scenario is unrealistic. Leaving interest rates at rock bottom would have been expected to generate unsustainable economic conditions. That runs contrary to the Fed's very mission, given to it by Congress. In another version of the world, the Fed could have raised interest rates between 2015 and 2018, but then lowered them much more quickly in 2019 as inflation pressures remained muted. Had they dropped the federal funds rate to zero at the very start of the year, Mr. Tedeschi said, it might have added about 0.35 percentage point to growth, getting the economy up to the 2.5 percent range. That is also far fetched the Fed has never slashed rates to zero outside of a recession. Doing so at a time when the economy was growing and Mr. Trump was pushing for a move would have looked overtly political, threatening the central bank's prized independence. It could have raised the risk of higher inflation. And even if conventional models are totally broken and price pressures no longer respond to loose Fed policy, rock bottom rates at the height of an expansion could have helped to fuel financial excesses. So how did the Fed's actual policies affect growth? Relative to the economy's structural growth path the one driven by labor force expansion and productivity the Fed's rate setting may have shaved about 0.1 percentage point from growth in 2019, according to an estimate from Julia Coronado, a founder of MacroPolicy Perspectives. Slower capital expenditures and trade probably shaved another 0.1 percentage point from growth. But those effects were offset by the aftereffect of ramped up government spending and tax cuts, which she estimates probably lifted growth by about 0.4 percentage point. Covid's impact on the supply chain continues. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain and made all kinds of products harder to find. In turn, scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher as inflation remains stubbornly high. Almost anything manufactured is in short supply. That includes everything from toilet paper to new cars. The disruptions go back to the beginning of the pandemic, when factories in Asia and Europe were forced to shut down and shipping companies cut their schedules. First, demand for home goods spiked. Money that Americans once spent on experiences were redirected to things for their homes. The surge clogged the system for transporting goods to the factories that needed them and finished products piled up because of a shortage of shipping containers. Now, ports are struggling to keep up. In North America and Europe, where containers are arriving, the heavy influx of ships is overwhelming ports. With warehouses full, containers are piling up. The chaos in global shipping is likely to persist as a result of the massive traffic jam. No one really knows when the crisis will end. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year's Christmas and holiday shopping season, but what happens after that is unclear. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said he expects supply chain problems to persist "likely well into next year." But even here, there are uncertainties. While it is clear that business investment fell sharply last year and manufacturing sagged, weighing down growth, it is hard to tell how much of that was a lagged response to higher interest rates and how much was a response to the trade war. Anecdotally, businesses primarily blamed slower global growth and uncertainty stemming from the tariffs for that slump. But interest rates probably had at least some economic impact. After the central bank cut them three times between July and December 2019, the wavering housing market perked back up, for instance. "The slowdown in capital expenditures came along when the trade war escalated," Torsten Slok, an economist at Deutsche Bank, said in an interview. "One cautious estimate is that the trade war played a bigger role," he said, but "it's just really difficult to wiggle out which was the cause." The upshot: The Fed matters around the edges, but, in the longer run, it is unlikely that the economy can achieve the 4 percent growth Mr. Trump has promised. Tax cuts and higher government spending have helped to nudge growth temporarily above its potential it came in at 2.8 percent in 2017 and 2.5 percent in 2018, decently above the roughly 2 percent sustainable growth rate. Yet those gains probably will not hold. The working age population is growing more slowly, and productivity, which popped temporarily, has since fallen back to earth. The ingredients for naturally higher economic growth do not exist. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next decade, growth will average 1.9 percent a year, up slightly from the preceding decade but down substantially from the 3 percent and higher growth that prevailed before 2000. "We haven't seen 4 percent growth for many, many years," Mr. Slok said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The empowerment of women was a major theme of Advertising Week, a yearly gathering of roughly 100,000 ad industry people in New York. The female R B group TLC kicked off the program with a concert called "Future Is Female," and there were panel discussions with titles like "Mom Bosses," " RewriteHerStory" and "Time's Up, Pay Up: We Will Not Wait 100 Years." The focus on women at the September conference ignited hope that the industry had learned something from the MeToo movement. Then came closing night, with the rapper Pitbull taking the stage to perform the hit "I Like It." Female dancers in revealing bodysuits surrounded him as he sang, "I ain't playing with you, but I want to play with you." For the ad executive Heather DeLand, the Pitbull show was a sign that the industry had not really changed. "Who thought this would be a good idea?" she later told The New York Times. "Is this a tacky 2019 reboot of 'Mad Men'?" A number of agencies have tried to address the concerns by signing on to diversity initiatives meant to improve gender and racial representation in ad campaigns and in the workplace, but their attempts have clashed with a workplace culture still fueled by testosterone and booze. Creative teams are still led overwhelmingly by men, and women make up a third of chief marketing officers, although women and men join the industry in equal numbers, according to the trade groups She Runs It and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. The gender pay gap in marketing exceeds the average across other industries, according to Glassdoor. The ad agency TracyLocke, which has done work for Pepsi and the rum brand Captain Morgan, signaled that it wanted to set itself apart by promoting "Feminist Fridays" on its social media accounts and hiring female illustrators to create portraits of famous women for a series called "Making Herstory." But according to Karen Dunbar, who spent nearly three years in the Connecticut office as a freelance creative director and copywriter, it remains an uncomfortable place for women. In a discrimination lawsuit filed against TracyLocke in June, Ms. Dunbar claimed that male colleagues referred to her as a "nagging wife," suggested taping her mouth shut, threw papers in her face and rubbed her back in view of colleagues. She also accused Hugh Boyle, the company's chief executive, of encouraging "male managers and subordinates to incorporate" a vulgar term for female genitalia "into their workplace dialogue." (The suit has yet to be resolved.) Teresa Brammer, the agency's chief human resources officer, said that Ms. Dunbar's accusations were found by external investigators to be without merit, adding that "there is no higher priority than creating a safe, fair and equitable workplace for our associates." Women at other agencies, even those that have created high profile campaigns promoting diversity and equal treatment of men and women, said they still experienced the sexist treatment depicted on "Mad Men." They described an industry steeped in "bro culture," saying they are given nicknames like "the face" and "the body" and routinely passed over when it comes time to select who goes to conferences. Like their female predecessors from decades ago, they find themselves stuck on accounts for jewelry and beauty products. Kate Catalinac, a creative director at BBDO, an international agency with headquarters in New York with clients including Alka Seltzer, Ikea and Macy's, said that a man working on the same account at another agency once told her he intended to rape her. She also recalled a client who offered her new luggage in exchange for sex. And she said she was asked "countless times" to arrange for coffee service during casting sessions by people who assumed she was not in a leadership role. "Honestly, I have not seen change," said Ms. Catalinac, who has worked in advertising 14 years. Molly Dunn, a freelance brand strategist, said her 20 year career had been marked by repeated episodes of harassment, discrimination and retaliation. "Part of the problem with advertising is that there's cachet in being like, 'We're all so cool, everyone's O.K. with jokes about ridiculous things,'" she said. "It's a lot of creative people, a lot of big egos, and there's a huge allowance for bad behavior." Ms. Dunn said she was working in New York this year at Anomaly, an agency whose clients have included Coca Cola and Beats by Dre, when she received an emailed invitation to a meeting in a space described as the "Taint Table." "Taint" is slang for the perineum; the space linked two parts of the Anomaly office. Two other women, who described their experience at Anomaly on the condition that their names would not be used out of fear of professional repercussions, confirmed that people in the company used that term for the meeting space. Ms. Dunn said she believed her complaints about her colleagues' use of the term "taint table" led Anomaly to end her contract early. Karina Wilsher, the agency's global chief executive, said in an email that Ms. Dunn's contract "ended amicably, but came down to underperformance." She added, "In the agency world today, there can often be noise and discontentment. Much of it is incredibly well grounded and motivated by a genuine desire to advance the industry. In this case it is not." Ms. Wilsher conceded that the slang term for the meeting area was used by certain employees, but said it was not an official name. In June, Anomaly's executive chairman, Carl Johnson, sent an email to employees telling them to avoid "stupid, offensive slang for meeting areas." In Richmond, Va., the Martin Agency, known for its Geico commercials, tried to reinvent itself after its longtime chief creative officer, Joe Alexander, left in 2017 amid reports of an investigation into multiple accusations of sexual harassment. The agency brought on its first female chief creative officer, Karen Costello, and first female chief executive, Kristen Cavallo, in its 53 year history. "Obviously, there is a need for a new direction," Ms. Cavallo said in a statement at the time. The agency has since said that it closed the wage gap between male and female employees and doubled the number of women on its board. Mr. Alexander, the departed executive, has fought back, filing defamation lawsuits naming, among others, the Martin Agency and Diet Madison Avenue, an Instagram account that posted anonymous reports of sexual misconduct in the industry. As ad agencies try to shed their sexist legacies, they are under pressure from some major clients to have more diversity in their ad campaigns and on their staffs. At the same time, some women have said that routine exposure to sexist workplace behavior caused them to leave the business. Karen Kaplan, the chief executive of Hill Holliday, an agency based in Boston that has worked for clients including Bank of America, said the industry would continue to lose talented women if it did not change. "We lost a lot of talent because of equity issues, and they don't want to deal with that behavior again," Ms. Kaplan said. "If we want to get them back, we are going to have to be very sensitive to what drove them out of the business to begin with." Only seven agencies have passed, according to Kat Gordon, the organization's founder. But one metric has improved in the past decade, she said: The number of women in top executive roles has "seen a dramatic uptick." Deidre Smalls Landau is one of them. In August, she became the chief marketing officer in the United States for the marketing and media agency UM, which has created ads for Hulu and BMW. "I would not say it's been easy I've almost always been the only one," she said of being a black woman in a heavily white and male industry. "And when you're the only one, you develop a very tough skin." Recently, Ms. Smalls Landau said, there has been a "concerted effort" to improve diversity in advertising. UM is now 65 percent female, with more than 40 percent of its senior roles filled by women. "We need to create a culture of belonging, where you don't feel like you're tolerated, but celebrated," she said. Mara Lecocq, who has worked in advertising for 13 years, said she started a database of female advertising workers called Where Are the Boss Ladies after realizing that she had never had a female supervisor. "Agencies are giving us diversity inclusion initiatives," she said, "but in a meeting, men will still talk over you." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
A Five Bedroom Estate on the Coast of Nova Scotia This five bedroom seaside mansion with Atlantic Ocean views is perched on a headland jutting into Mahone Bay in the village of Chester, on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, Canada. Designed by the Toronto based architect James Wright and built in 2000, the 5,850 square foot home blends into a neighborhood of century old Cape Cods with its classic gray siding, white trim, dormers and a cedar shake roof. An octagonal wing with a walkway around it evokes a lighthouse, and the home's round windows accentuate the nautical feel. The property consists of two parcels: a 1.5 acre lot that includes the two story house, and a separate 2,500 square foot lot with 30 feet of shoreline and a 90 foot dock on Mahone Bay. A gravel drive approaches the home's main entrance, which opens to a light filled foyer with a staircase. The foyer leads to a great room flanked by two wood burning fireplaces one of beach stone in the living area, and one with a wood mantel in the dining area. The great room has soaring beamed ceilings, pegged oak floors, paneled walls and built in window seats with views of Mahone Bay. French doors open to a slate veranda. The furniture is not included in the asking price, but is negotiable, Ms. Craig said. From the dining area, two hallways lead to a powder room and the kitchen, which has a vaulted ceiling, large island, glass cooktop, and French doors opening to the stone terrace. There is also a dining area with a large window seat built into a bow window. From the living area in the great room, a slate breezeway leads to a wing with two en suite bedrooms, including the master, which has a dressing room and connects to an octagonal sitting room with a fireplace and French doors to the terrace. The staircase ascends to a second floor landing with access to two en suite bedrooms, each opening to a large balcony overlooking Mahone Bay. The staircase descends to the home's lower level, which has a home theater and recreation room with a fireplace and a bar with a granite top. A hallway leads to a full bathroom and an octagonal bedroom with doors opening to the lawn. The property, which includes a terraced rock garden and is landscaped with rhododendrons, is a 10 minute walk from the heart of Chester, which is about 40 miles west of Nova Scotia's capital, Halifax. Chester, with about 2,350 residents, offers shopping, restaurants, a marina, a theater and an 18 hole golf course, Ms. Craig said. The home is about 50 miles southwest of Halifax International Airport. The South Shore of Nova Scotia, about 150 miles off the east coast of Maine, stretches from south of Halifax down to Shelburne, with white sandy beaches, colorful waterfront villages and picturesque lighthouses. The area has long been popular with foreign home buyers, particularly Americans. However, the coronavirus pandemic, which prompted Canada to close its borders in March to all nonessential travel, has put a damper on that segment of the housing market, said Allan Mosher, a broker with the Lunenburg office of Keller Williams Select Realty. (Nova Scotia province had reported 1,067 confirmed Covid 19 cases and 63 deaths as of July 28, according to the government.) "We don't have our American clients, and that absolutely is affecting our real estate market," Mr. Mosher said. "Not too many people will go online on FaceTime or Zoom or one of those sites and buy an 800,000 property." Other brokers said they are handling more sales of properties virtually, as buyers grow accustomed to digital listing tools. Ms. Craig said she has continued to get inquiries and offers from some Americans who are comfortable buying properties sight unseen. "But it's a big decision, and some buyers are pushing pause on their plans," she said. "Most summers, we would see a number of buyers who are taking advantage of the opportunity to view some properties in person while they're in Nova Scotia on summer vacation. We haven't seen these buyers this summer." The data, however, doesn't reflect the weak sales to Americans and other foreign buyers. Home sales to local buyers in Nova Scotia appear to be filling the void, along with sales to groups such as millennials moving to Halifax, Nova Scotia natives moving home for retirement, and Canadians moving from the west who can telecommute, Ms. Craig said. "During Covid, there was an increase in the number of people searching for homes online, and not surprisingly, there was a trend toward more rural properties as people contemplated an exodus from dense cities," she said. Across Nova Scotia province, home sales in June totaled 1,428 units, an increase of 10.4 percent from June 2019, according to data from the Nova Scotia Association of Realtors. This June, the average price of homes sold was 286,227 Canadian dollars ( 214,000), up 10.1 percent from June 2019. On the South Shore of Nova Scotia, the residential average price in June was 214,121 Canadian dollars ( 160,000), up 9.1 percent from June 2019, according to the Nova Scotia Association of Realtors. Most foreign home buyers seek properties with a waterfront location or a sea view, which can add tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to a property value, Ms. Craig said, adding that the broad spectrum of home prices on the South Shore is one of its attractions. "There is a wide range of waterfront homes available on the South Shore, ranging from 350,000 Canadian dollars ( 260,000) to 3.5 million Canadian dollars ( 2.6 million) plus, depending on the size of the home, location, quality of frontage," Ms. Craig said. Americans have traditionally been the predominant foreign buyers on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, but in recent years a growing number have come from Germany and the United Kingdom, Mr. Mosher said. "We're seeing a lot of people who can work from home move east because of the quality of life and affordable homes," she said. "It will be interesting going forward if we'll see more of this post Covid as work from home becomes an option." There are no restrictions on real estate purchases by foreigners in Nova Scotia. Foreign buyers must hire a local lawyer to handle the transaction, and currently because of the pandemic, document signings can be handled virtually, Ms. Sinha said. Legal fees are usually around 900 Canadian dollars ( 670), she said. Transactions are done in Canadian dollars. The seller usually pays the real estate agent commission, which is typically 4 to 5 percent. Closing costs include a deed transfer tax, which is charged at 1.5 percent of the sale price in most municipalities, plus about 1,600 Canadian dollars ( 1,200) in fees, which include recording fees and title insurance, Ms. Craig said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Ronald Khalis Bell, who with his brother and neighborhood friends formed the jazz funk R B band that became Kool the Gang, and who was the lead writer on its biggest hit, the omnipresent feel good song "Celebration," died on Wednesday at his home in the Virgin Islands. He was 68. His wife, Tia Sinclair Bell, announced his death through a spokeswoman. The cause was not given. Mr. Khalis Bell, who was also a producer and often credited under his Muslim name, Khalis Bayyan, began dabbling in music as a child, mastering saxophone and keyboards and playing with his brother Robert, a bassist who picked up the nickname Kool in elementary school. The Bell household, in Jersey City, N.J., was steeped in jazz; the boys' father, Bobby, was a professional boxer whose friends included Thelonious Monk. Miles Davis sometimes visited. The Bell brothers and friends Spike Mickens, Dennis Thomas, Ricky Westfield, George Brown and Charles Smith began playing together in 1964 and performed under several names, including the Jazziacs, before settling on Kool the Gang in the late 1960s. The band, with its personnel changing over the years but the Bell brothers remaining the core, had success in the 1970s, especially on the R B charts with "Jungle Boogie" (1973). After adding the vocalist J.T. Taylor, it found a new level of fame with songs like "Ladies' Night" (1979) and, especially, "Celebration," which topped both the R B and pop charts in 1980 and became a crowd pleaser at sporting events, fireworks displays and anywhere else where joy and enthusiasm were in order. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
What color was T. Rex? What about triceratops or glyptodon? Until recently, the palette of prehistory was the sole provenance of daydreams, CGI artists or kids with crayons. Advances in imaging technology are bringing us closer to real answers. Over the past decade, we've learned that Sinosauropteryx's tail was striped, and Microraptor's head was blue black and shiny, like a crow's. A paper published Tuesday in Nature Communications adds to the paint box. In it, a team of researchers provide the first conclusive fossil evidence that an ancient creature contained pheomelanin the same pigment that gives a red hue to chicken feathers, tiger fur and your freckles. Their findings, and the method that led to them, will allow researchers to search for more evidence of this coloring across the fossil record. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Even in well preserved fossils, pigments deteriorate quickly. Researchers have a few workarounds to find clues to color. Some look for melanosomes, the organelles in animal cells that make and store pigments. The shape of a melanosome can indicate what type of pigment was once inside, while the organization of melanosomes within a feather can suggest whether a bird (or dinosaur) was dull or iridescent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
There are many instances in medicine when it would be helpful to stop, or greatly slow down, time. Doing so could spare a limb from amputation, prevent paralysis after a stroke or save your life following a heart attack. Across the tree of life, there are many organisms that can essentially cheat time by decelerating their biology. Chief among them is the tardigrade, a creature no bigger than a speck of sand that can survive severe temperatures and pressures, outer space and all sorts of apocalyptic scenarios by entering a dormant state called anhydrobiosis. A team at Harvard Medical School is studying tardigrades in hopes of finding medical treatments that halt tissue damage. In particular, the scientists are drawing inspiration from special proteins suspected to help tardigrades achieve suspended animation. They aim to synthesize a version of these proteins that can enter human cells and pause processes leading to cell death. "When somebody is wounded, there's a window of time they have to get to a medic or a hospital. So our overarching goal is: how do you prolong that time?" said Pamela Silver, a professor of systems biology. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
This, however, is the first time the relationship has extended to the fashion sphere. It's actually a fairly daring move, even for someone who is not running for office or in a position of official authority. After all, Mrs. Clinton knows that her every move in public is being watched and parsed for meaning. And she has a long history with clothing issues, good and bad. Which means that she knows that wearing the shoes is going to be seen as an endorsement, and she is wearing them for a reason. And that is? The reaction tells part of the story. As of Wednesday morning, Ms. Perry's post had more than 309,000 likes, and there were only three pink pairs of The Hillary left in stock on katyperrycollections.com, and five green pairs, which is one way to test the waters of Mrs. Clinton's continued appeal. Breitbart News, however, saw the moment as an expression of weakness, using the headline "Hillary Clinton Reduced to Modeling Shoes for Katy Perry." (Breitbart has recently been going after the fashion world: A recent headline was "NY Fashion Industry Outsources Elite Jobs to H 1B Contract Workers," and an article on Sunday attacked the Council of Fashion Designers of America, Michael Kors and Ralph Lauren for joining forces with the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us to promote changes in immigration policy. Perhaps more pointedly, a woman wrote on Twitter that "6 months ago Hillary Clinton thought she'd be the next President of USA. Now she's advertising Katy Perry's shoeline sale. I CANT BREATHE." Beneath her post, some commenters compared the move to the actions of the current first family, whose members have created controversy because of the entanglements of their personal brands. The comparison isn't really correct. Mrs. Clinton is not benefiting financially from the Katy Perry relationship, though the very public choice of a somewhat wacky shoe is indubitably something of an image changer: a declaration of independence from expectations and tradition, a visual statement that goes with her new haircut. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and the broadcast networks said they would take a prudent approach on election night and they largely kept their word. As the polls closed in key states on Tuesday, TV networks held off on projecting winners throughout much of their election night coverage, promising a prudent, go slow approach to avoid the up is down shocks of 2016. By midnight on the East Coast, anchors were telling viewers that it was now their turn to cool their heels: A clear outcome, they warned, could take days. "If it were a tennis match, each side is holding serve," the Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said. "I think the story of the night has really not been told yet." And on CNN, the map maestro John King likened the pending results in Pennsylvania which was emerging as a tipping point to a ballgame in the "second or third inning at best." With a vote count complicated by the coronavirus pandemic and enormous pressure bearing down on TV executives to dodge an egg on the face moment, the major news networks had promised to be cautious. No major projections in battleground states came during prime time hours. The dam burst shortly after 11 when the Fox News decision desk called Florida, Texas and Ohio for President Trump and in a projection that caught other news outlets off guard Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr. Unlike ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC, which share information on vote counts as members of the National Election Pool, Fox News relies on a proprietary data model that draws from The Associated Press to make its determinations on election nights. (Other networks continued to describe those battleground states as too close to call after the projections by Fox News.) One clear assessment of what was shaping up to be an inconclusive evening came shortly before 11:30, courtesy of ABC's lead anchor, George Stephanopoulos. "It is looking increasingly clear that we are not going to know who the next president of the United States will be tonight," Mr. Stephanopoulos said. "And we are just going to have to be patient as we go through this process in the coming hours, and perhaps in the coming days." 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. Prudence in election coverage is preferable to jumping the gun. Still, as the night wore on, anchors seemed ready for answers. Fox News brought on its politics editor, Chris Stirewalt, several times to explain the reluctance of the network's data team to project battleground winners. It turned into a good natured grilling session. "Our call will hold, we feel very confident," Mr. Stirewalt said after his team's early projection that Mr. Biden would take Virginia. On MSNBC, Steve Kornacki frantically worked his interactive map to work out scenarios that would allow Mr. Biden to win the election without taking Pennsylvania. "That is crazy," said Rachel Maddow, MSNBC's highest rated anchor, as she looked on. "I mean, I have done that math myself, and I know it's true, but I can't believe we're talking about it as one of the things that might actually happen." Before the evening began, major media polls had shown Mr. Biden with a narrow lead in several key states, and some producers had game planned how to handle a situation in which Mr. Trump, down in the count, tried to declare a premature victory. Instead, the early results prompted conversations about why the polls had seemed to miss some of the night's emerging trends. On MSNBC, a destination for ardent critics of the president, the anchor Nicolle Wallace argued that her colleagues' focus on North Carolina was wrong, just as the state appeared to be tilting toward Mr. Trump. "We shouldn't pull our viewers into dramas that aren't necessary," Ms. Wallace said, calling the state a "sideshow." When Mr. Biden fell behind in Florida, Ms. Wallace said: "You can feel the hopes and the dreams of our viewers falling down, and you can hear liquor cabinets opening all across this great land." CNN's coverage was dominated by updates from Mr. King, who zoomed in and out of counties in Florida, Georgia, and Ohio. The conclusions were murky. "Is it significant?" Mr. King asked, peering over results in Pasco County in Florida. "We don't know." Four years on, TV networks still have scars from the 2016 race, when Mr. Trump's victory shocked many journalists. His norm busting presidency and its political fallout became the central focus of cable news, which watched audiences swell. As Wednesday dawned, the future for the networks, and the country, remained hazy. "We are tonight putting together an enormous jigsaw puzzle, but we don't have the box that has the picture on it," the CBS News anchor John Dickerson said. "We're going to be developing that picture as we look at these pieces." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
ATLANTA The New England Patriots' dynasty began exactly 17 years ago Sunday, when the most fruitful partnership in N.F.L. history launched its transformation from plucky upstarts to league overlords. Coach Bill Belichick tamed the explosive Rams, and quarterback Tom Brady commanded an efficient offense. The Patriots commemorated the anniversary by securing another championship against the same franchise, in a similar way, for a title that represents not a bookend so much as an ellipsis. New England's reign is as relentless as a downpour, and without precedent. The Patriots claimed their sixth title in 18 seasons by edging the Los Angeles Rams, 13 3, in a slog of a Super Bowl LIII. How the Patriots stifled the Rams, drive by drive. Like their previous five Super Bowl victories under Belichick and Brady, Sunday's was not decided until late, on Sony Michel's 2 yard touchdown run with seven minutes left. One final stop Stephon Gilmore's interception near the goal line with 4 minutes 17 seconds remaining punctuated a defensive effort that evoked Belichick's first masterpiece against the Rams, when he sapped their potency by erasing the versatile back Marshall Faulk. Against this Rams team, the league's second ranked offense, New England forced punts on nine of 12 possessions and five three and outs. The Patriots' performance will ricochet around their empire as Belichick's magnum opus, but it will be remembered outside New England as a grind, lacking the offensive artistry that defined this record setting season. It was as if after all the marks shattered the most touchdowns scored, the most touchdown passes thrown the ball decided, in the 267th and final game, that it was just too exhausted to breach the end zone anymore. It did so only once. These Rams and Patriots will be forever linked in Super Bowl ignominy: the fewest combined points, the lowest scoring first half in 44 years (3 points), the most time elapsed without a touchdown. That stretch ended at the time when Brady asserts his primacy. All of Brady's other championships have come after the score was tied, or the Patriots were trailing, in the fourth quarter. In those situations, Brady was 45 for 59 with 503 yards and three touchdowns and no interceptions. Taking over at his 31 yard line with 9:49 left, Brady connected on four straight passes for 67 yards, including a 29 yard beauty to Rob Gronkowski down the left side that preceded Michel's touchdown, his sixth of the playoffs. None Week 11 Takeaways: Here is what we learned this week. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Jets Lose Again: Falling to the Miami Dolphins, the Jets' receiver Elijah Moore offered consolation. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. "I'll tell you this," Gronkowski said, "it was the most satisfying year I've ever been a part of. How we came together, the obstacles we had to overcome, the grind from the beginning of training camp to now, it's just surreal." Brady, at age 41, finished 21 of 35 for 262 yards, with more than half of that total 141 going to Julian Edelman. A year after missing the Patriots' Super Bowl loss to Philadelphia with a knee injury and being suspended for the first four games of this season for violating the N.F.L.'s policy on performance enhancing drugs, Edelman was selected as the game's most valuable player. "He just played the best game he has all year," Brady said. In a league designed for parity, Brady and Belichick have destroyed it. Together, they have made nine Super Bowls, including the last three. The Miami Dolphins, from 1972 74, and Buffalo Bills, from 1991 94, accomplished that feat before the Patriots, but neither had New England's staying power. Only one other franchise has won six Super Bowls, and it took the Pittsburgh Steelers 34 years to collect their Lombardi Trophies. The Patriots needed half as long. The Patriots' infrastructure owned, coached and quarterbacked by the same men during this run and ruthless roster manipulation gives them a chance every season to extend the dynasty. Rarely, though, is that pathway linear. Belichick's charge this season, as always, was to discern the identity of this team instead of recreating that of another one. The Patriots' quest for self discovery meandered through a pair of two game losing streaks, three double digit defeats and five road setbacks until, in late December, after falling at Pittsburgh, they found equilibrium. Complementing quick passing with power running, New England averaged 177.8 on the ground across its last five games. That approach powered the Patriots past two A.F.C. West behemoths, the Chargers and the Chiefs, and on Sunday it helped them gash the Rams for 154 yards, 94 from Michel. The lesson, as ever: The Patriots are not vulnerable so much as they are procrastinators, evolving before they can pounce. Back when Brady won his first Super Bowl, Sean McVay was a 16 year old sophomore at the Marist School, 15 miles to the north of Mercedes Benz Stadium. He is now, at 33, the youngest coach in the N.F.L., hired by the Rams two years ago, after they finished their first season back in Los Angeles as a bumbling mess, and tasked with shaping a winning team and energizing a fan base. One of McVay's many aphorisms Sean isms, as they're called is "the standard is the standard." The Rams won consecutive division titles, but as they gazed across the field Sunday they saw the personification of that standard, a team whose sustained success they hoped to emulate. Rams quarterback Jared Goff grew up watching Brady, like him a son of Northern California, while McVay exchanges text messages with Belichick. The mastermind outwitted the prodigy, and McVay knew it, blaming his play calling and an absent feel for the game's flow. "You can't fool the great quarterbacks, anyway," he said. "You have to outplay them." In the A.F.C. championship game three years ago, when Phillips led the Broncos' defense, Denver's pass rush pummeled Brady all game. Brady's protection in the playoffs had been so good entering the Super Bowl 90 dropbacks, no sacks, according to Pro Football Focus that he posted to his Instagram story a photo of his jersey, white and pristine, and tagged his offensive linemen. Early on, the Rams' coverage and pressure discombobulated New England. On his first pass, Brady's wobbly throw was deflected, and then intercepted by Cory Littleton. On the Patriots' next drive, they called two timeouts before Stephen Gostkowski hooked a 46 yard field goal, missing a kick in the Super Bowl for the third consecutive year. On the series after that, John Franklin Myers strip sacked Brady, but New England recovered the fumble. In a matchup of two of the N.F.L.'s four highest scoring teams, nearly 20 minutes elapsed before Gostkowski scored the game's first points, on a 42 yarder with 10:29 left before halftime. The Patriots' 3 0 lead which signified the fewest first half points scored in a Super Bowl since Pittsburgh led Minnesota, 2 0, in 1975 did not seem insurmountable. But it did increase the likelihood that Belichick, aided by the defensive play caller Brian Flores, again had concocted a strategy to foil a prolific offense in the Super Bowl. (Flores, 37, is expected to become the coach of the Miami Dolphins this week.) As Belichick did against the 1990 Bills, when he worked for the Giants, and the 2016 Falcons, who did not score for the final 25 minutes of regulation and overtime, he silenced the Rams like no other team since McVay took over. Patriots linebacker Kyle Van Noy said the defense was focused on taking Goff, just 24, out of the game. "I think we felt if we stopped the run and put it into his hands, it played in our advantage," Van Noy said. Gostkowski extended the margin of victory with a 41 yarder with 1:12 left, and after Zuerlein missed a 48 yarder, a final act of desperation, the Patriots swarmed the field, the scene familiar and new all at once. They have assembled this unyielding dynasty behind Gronkowski and Edelman, Devin McCourty and Dont'a Hightower, and hundreds of others. But only two men have witnessed it all from the start. Neither Brady nor Belichick has indicated he intends to retire, and why would they? The everlasting champions, for the sixth time in 18 seasons, have a title to defend. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Turn off your sound machine. Throw away that blankie. Meryl Streep has bedtime covered tonight. Yes, Hollywood's perennial gold statue holder is reading "Charlotte's Web," the perennial blue ribbon winner at the state fair of children's literature. And, no surprise, this new audiobook is a keeper. Some children's books are disheartening to revisit as an adult; the author's prejudices suddenly glaring, the prose surprisingly flat. Not so with E. B. White's 1952 story about a brave little pig and the clever spider who saves him. If "Charlotte's Web" is disheartening, it is only because the book is so perfect. After reading it, you can't help feeling that it is pointless to continue in your chosen career assuming, like me, you happen to be a children's book author. What makes this "radiant" but "humble" story (to borrow Charlotte's words for Wilbur) so very, very wonderful? Maybe it has something to do with all those big themes, like, oh, the passage of time and the inexorability of death, wrapped up in small packages. Or maybe it's the way the animals seem so deeply human and yet so true to their species at the same time. Like many city kids, I got my first exposure to farm living through "Charlotte's Web" to slops and manure piles and barn swings. It taught me what happens to an unhatched egg, and about the types of thread that shoot from a spider's abdomen. It also taught me about writing. 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. Among other things, the book is a sly tribute to the writer's craft. Wilbur may be the beloved runt piglet the human girl Fern rescues from her farmer father's ax, but it is Charlotte, the spider spinning the story's words, who is its real star. Imagine, writing so powerful it saves a life! As Mrs. Zuckerman says to her husband, who is now besotted with their pet pig: "It seems to me you're a little off. It seems to me we have no ordinary spider." Needless to say, "Charlotte's Web" makes a great read aloud. For some audiobook aficionados, nothing could beat White's own 1970 recording, with his gruff New England accent and pointed lack of drama. Does it make the new Streep version more momentous that it's a full cast recording with drama to spare, or less so? For kids, or at least for the one kid I quizzed on the matter, a full cast recording is by definition preferable. To my older ears, a large cast can be distracting I imagine all the actors fighting over a mic, clamoring for my attention but the clamor effect certainly suits Charlotte's barnyard setting. And, fear not, we still get plenty of Streep. Her narration is sometimes warm and cozy, like a grandmother reading us to sleep, and other times as dry and witty as was the author himself. It's not easy to evaluate an audiobook performance, but I tried my best to mark moments in which she brought something extra to the text. For instance, when the school bus honks for Fern, Streep pauses just long enough for us to hear the honking in the word "honks" itself. Am I reading or listening too much into this? Probably. The other performers are terrific, too. One standout: Robin Miles reads the part of the cranky Old Sheep, leavening the character's dark vision of the pig's fate with a generous pinch of mordant humor. Also, Tavia Gilbert, as the Goose, has to repeat every word she utters, over and over, at an impossibly rapid clip. January LaVoy as Charlotte is charming, but it took me a minute to get used to her girlish voice in that maternal role. (Then again, White does describe the spider's voice as "thin.") Alas, not all classics remain as uncontroversially popular as "Charlotte's Web." I am too old and set in my Gen X ways to vote for canceling Dr. Seuss. His books were the first I read to myself and the first I read to my kids. (I know I'm not the only father of twins to refer to his children as Thing One and Thing Two.) And I would like to believe that "The Sneetches" remains the fun fable about the pitfalls of prejudice that I remember. Nonetheless, his racist cartoons, having surfaced in the news in the years since his death, are thoroughly disgusting. And I cannot deny that even some of his most beloved picture books bear traces of harmful racial stereotypes. What to do? Random House, at any rate, has decided to forge ahead with a new Seuss. "Dr. Seuss's Horse Museum" is based on a partial manuscript discovered two decades after his death, and presumably written in the mid 1950s, prior to the publication of "The Cat in the Hat." This short nonfiction book is a primer on art appreciation for kids. Narrated by a horse, it examines art history through the lens of horse paintings. "Art is when an artist looks at something ... like a horse, for instance," the horse says near the beginning, "and they see something in that horse that excites them ... so they do something about it." Not a bad definition, I suppose, especially the notion that artists don't just see, they do. The horse goes on to introduce us to a world of paintings, from Lascaux's prehistoric cave images to Jackson Pollock and beyond. (Did you know that one of Pollock's "drip paintings" included a hobbyhorse head glued to the canvas? I didn't.) Though unrhymed, the simple, conversational sentences have a certain off kilter humor that we might call pre Seussian even when introducing Baroque artists: "A Spaniard named Velazquez painted horses by the dozens. He saw them as something for kings and princes to sit on while he painted them. (Velazquez worked for the kings and princes. He never got any money from the horses.)" Not surprisingly, the art in the book is mainly (though not exclusively) Western. The print edition, illustrated by Andrew Joyner, adds a multicultural cast of kids to the mix, as museum visitors. Not a full answer to concerns about Seuss' racism, but it's a welcome first step. The audiobook, obviously, has no such illustrations, nor does it have photos of the paintings mentioned. The job of filling out the text goes to Samira Wiley, a star of "Orange Is the New Black," who reads the part of the horse. She has a lovely voice that practically screams, or rather, that perfectly projects, Juilliard trained actor, as indeed she is, and I would enjoy listening to her read almost any book. Here she has a steep hill to climb, however. She is given next to nothing to work with, character wise. (The first time I listened I didn't even realize she was supposed to be a horse.) Worse, she is narrating a book about visual art that offers little in the way of visual description. The audiobook would work well as a companion to a slide show or video whether online or in a classroom. As a stand alone, it is too insubstantial to make an impact. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
When Bill Walczak called Meg Campbell to ask her for a date in 2016, he hung up happy. The yes he had received wasn't particularly enthusiastic, but her hesitant acceptance gave him a lift anyway. Spending time with Ms. Campbell, he knew, would be good for him. His wife had told him so. Mr. Walczak, 65, and Ms. Campbell, 67, are social activists in Boston. Since 2000, they have worked to steer Codman Academy, which they founded with a third partner, Dr. George Brackett. The charter school serves children from kindergarten through Grade 12 in the Codman Square section of Boston, a neighborhood that saw racial unrest and economic disintegration in the 1970s. Until Mr. Walczak's July 2016 phone call inviting Ms. Campbell to a movie, theirs was a purely collegial relationship. "We occasionally would have lunch or something together," Mr. Walczak said. "But that was pretty much the limit." Neither, in all those years, had time for much beyond a quick bite. Since both found their way decades ago with their spouses to Dorchester, the diverse part of Boston where they still live half a mile from each other, they have been consumed with improving quality of life there. Ms. Campbell, who said she is known for having a "bazillion ideas," is similarly motivated. Before Codman Academy, she was the founding executive director of EL Education, a national network of schools inspired by Outward Bound. In 1989, seven years after she moved to Dorchester, she founded the Boston Women's Heritage Trail, the first walking trail honoring women in the country. In 2011, she helped found the Margarita Muniz Academy, a dual language Boston public high school. In between, she published two books of poetry, "Solo Crossing" and "More Love." Though Ms. Campbell and Mr. Walczak didn't start working in the same building until 2000, each remembers becoming aware of the other in the mid 1980s. "I had done a lot of organizing around health care issues," she said. Mr. Walczak's name came up frequently. They also bumped into each other around the neighborhood. In 1984, when her older daughter, Moriah Musto, was 6 and her younger daughter, Adrienne Campbell Holt, was 4, she called him for advice on the safest place to have their ears pierced. Ms. Campbell grew up in San Diego with her father, Dr. Charles Campbell, a radiologist and oncologist, and her mother, Ruth Mary Campbell, a travel agent. Her purposeful life was made fuller by her husband and daughters. A rupture came in 1995 when she and her husband divorced. Instead of searching for a new love interest, or even committing to finding someone to occasionally date, she threw herself into her work. "I tried having relationships for a while, but then I felt I didn't really have the time and that I was done with men," she said. "And I was O.K. with that." By the time she approached Mr. Walczak in 2000 with her proposal to open Codman Academy in Codman Square Health Center, where it is still located, she was deep in the grooves of her single life. In addition to her daughters, she spent time with a cadre of local nieces and nephews and their children. Between work and a growing family as grandchildren came, "it felt like a very rich life," she said. Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. In 2014, Linda Walczak was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. "She lasted a little over a year," he said. Throughout that year, Ms. Campbell showed her support by sending flowers or making soup and leaving it on the Walczaks' back porch. In response, "Linda would always write me these beautiful handwritten notes," Ms. Campbell said. At work, "Bill was in denial. I remember him saying, 'What happens if she doesn't get well?' And when I said, 'You're going to make it,' he was like, 'I can't even think that thought.'" "I was pretty distraught," Mr. Walczak said. "It's the most horrible thing that's ever happened to me." Before Ms. Walczak died at 61, on Dec. 27, 2015, she sat her husband down for what he remembers as instructions. "We had this conversation about what she wanted our kids to do and what she thought I should do," he said. "She actually said she thought I should look at Meg as a potential future love interest." He didn't want to hear it. "I was so hoping she would survive." Six months into widowhood, though, loneliness crept in. Ms. Campbell was not the only candidate he had in mind for a first date to the local cinema. In fact, he put together a list of five women, all divorced or widowed, whom he said had been nice to him since Ms. Walczak's passing. "I ranked them, too," he added. Looks or sex appeal were not the criteria by which he was judging. Suitability was. "I wanted someone who shared my belief in social justice, and someone who would not only be a romantic partner but understood they would be a parent and a grandparent figure." Ms. Campbell, better than the others, fit the bill. Plus, "Meg was the only one Linda had mentioned," Mr. Walczak said. It wasn't just because she had been thoughtful enough to send flowers and make soup. "One interesting thing is that, when I was in the process of moving from the upstairs to the downstairs in my house, I found a pad of paper with some stuff my wife had written. One was 'Meg and Bill.' Then she drew a line and wrote, 'Good person, Catholic, history.'" Both Mr. Walczak and Ms. Campbell both are parishioners at St. Cecilia Parish in Boston. When he called to ask her to the movies in 2016, Ms. Campbell heard alarm bells. "I said, 'Why would you want to ruin a perfectly good friendship?'," she said. "But I also thought, if he took up with some 30 year old, I was going to kill him." By the time they went to see the documentary "Weiner," deciding they would call the outing a "friend date," each of their children had been consulted on how they would feel about their parents dating. "My daughter Adrienne said, 'It's a miracle, Mom,'" Ms. Campbell said. "Bill is something out of another time and another place. They don't make men like that anymore." Still, the Campbell and Walczak children advised against rushing into a relationship. "All four of them independently said, take this slow," Ms. Campbell said. "But we were like, 'We're in our 60s, how slow can we take it?' It was a real role reversal." After a handful of movie outings and walks around the city, Ms. Campbell's reluctance about dating Mr. Walczak fizzled. She remembered some words of advice from a therapist she had seen years ago. "She told me, Meg, if happiness knocks on the door, don't be afraid to answer it," she said. Mr. Walczak's steady, not overly insistent knocking had won her over. Though both are still active at Codman Academy, Mr. Walczak as board chair and Ms. Campbell as chief of innovation and strategy, each is retired. Ms. Campbell left in 2016, Mr. Walczak in 2019. By then, they had traveled as a couple to Peru and learned to cook together ("Neither one of us is a cook, and I wasn't going to cook all the meals," Ms. Campbell said). In September, they took a trip to Baja California for a friend's wedding. There, "we did a lot of walking on the beach and talking," Ms. Campbell said. "There was no hard proposal, but it was more like emergent situation. We said, 'Are we proposing to each other?'" Matching Reds Ms. Campbell wore a black taffeta knee length dress, designed by Sara Campbell, under an ivory cardigan trimmed with fur and a red cloche hat, which lent a Diane Keaton resemblance. Her granddaughters, and his granddaughters, all wore red cloches and cardigans to match the bride. Mr. Walczak's red bow tie complemented his black suit as well as a parade of hats: All six grandchildren accompanied the couple down the aisle wearing matching red hats. Historic Honeymoon The bride and groom planned a "civil rights honeymoon" in Charleston, S.C., to dovetail with their Martin Luther King Day ceremony. "There's an amazing history of resistance we wanted to see," Ms. Campbell said. Cookies for a Cause A post wedding lunch on the church's lower level included marinated chicken breast with potatoes; cookies were from Haley House, a bakery, cafe and meal center supporting the community. Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Through nerve, cunning, a skillet filled with boiling oil and the gruesome misuse of an underling deployed as a bullet proof vest Lalo survived an armed home invasion against very steep odds. He was outnumbered, surprised, and his assailants had an insider who let them into Sr. Salamanca's fortresslike home and told them where to find the target. And Lalo didn't merely live. He staged an instant counterattack. After leaving his compound through an underground tunnel, he baited the assassins into searching for him along his escape route, unaware that he had doubled back and had begun hunting them. Let's leave aside how unlikely this near death experience seems. (C'mon. Gus called these guys the best in the business and they can't pull off an ambush under what could only be described as best case scenario conditions.) The good news is that Lalo will be around for Season 6. And boy will he be angry. In the closing shot, he's seen limping away from his murdered cook, the only person in the world he seems to care about. (I assume this death is the "Something Unforgivable" of the episode's title.) He knows Fring is behind this entire calamity, and he'll want revenge. What about Nacho? While Lalo finishes off the last assassin, he looks over to the bottle (of tequila, one assumes) that he'd been sharing with his second in command just minutes earlier. You can see him registering the Nacho lessness of the tableaux. Which means that the guy has some explaining to do. My guess is that he wins Lalo's trust again. Why? Mostly because his conversation, earlier in the episode, with Don Eladio (Steven Bauer) went on for so long. That talk established that Nacho is, in fact, considered the cartel's new man in Albuquerque. A man with ambitions, a detailed expansion plan and preferences when it comes to how to be treated by upper management. (The fewer questions the better, he boldly tells the Don.) That's a lot of exposition for a guy who isn't going to live another week. I was hoping that visiting Lalo's casa would shed a lot more light on the background of this apparently rootless rogue. It didn't. We now know that he has a big house, a handy tunnel, a chef he adores and a handful of guards. We learn he's a bit of an insomniac. But we discover little about his personal life. We're talking about a man in his mid 40s. No sign of a wife. No kids. No partner. Not even a pet. He's a curious confection, this villain. On the one hand, he has little by way of loving connections, and the writers clearly intend to keep his biography a source of speculation. Some strands of his DNA seem lifted from Anton Chigurh, the hit man of "No Country for Old Men," a malignant cipher. At the same time, Lalo seems pleased to have company at 3 a.m. He's the chummiest sociopath you'll ever meet. He's also a showboat. In the unofficial contest titled "Who can hand over more tribute to Don Eladio," Lalo easily bests Juan Bolsa. As minions and women in bikinis party by the swimming pool Eladio's eventual grave, as "Breaking Bad" fans know Lalo wins the day by handing over the keys to a Ferrari, which also has a box of cash in the trunk. We don't get a great look at the loot, but eyeballing the haul, I'd guess that Bolsa brought in a lot more. He just didn't put it in a flashy, pricey car. Lalo knows how to play Eladio. Which means he is far better at sucking up than he is at the sort of mano a mano contest that he has fought with Gus Fring throughout this season. Lalo scored a few victories in this battle. Fring has been forced to burn down one of his own restaurants, construction on his superlab has been paused, and his drug smuggling operation has been interrupted. But that's about all that can be scribbled in Lalo's win column. On to the drug free part of our story. Jimmy and Kim are so rattled by the visit from Lalo that they check into a swish hotel, a move that Walter and Skyler White will reproduce in Season 5 of "Breaking Bad." The two spend most of the episode in that hotel room, with the exception of the hours that Kim spends at court. There, she asks for as many felonies and time intensive cases as comedian Roy Wood Jr. can give her. (OK, it's a guy from the public defender's office played by Wood, an inspired piece of casting.) And in a private, impromptu meeting, she learns from Howard that Jimmy has bowling balled his Jaguar and embarrassed him with hookers. As I've said before, this subplot is the oddest, least compelling part of the show, and it appears as though the writers are doubling down on it. After learning about Jimmy's sophomoric attacks on Howard, Kim suggests new and even more juvenile pranks to Jimmy. Like shaving Howard's head. Initially, I though Kim was being ironic. Nope. She's all in, and she actually has an end game in mind. She wants to bait or trick Howard into a misstep public enough and embarrassing enough to force the settlement of the long running Sandpiper lawsuit. This will yield a cool 2 million for Jimmy and Kim, which Kim plans to plow into a pro bono clinic, staffed with whiz kids lured from the city's white shoe firms. In short, Kim argues that the working life of one preening jerk ought to be sacrificed for the larger good that could be done with the money generated by his downfall. What's set up here is a classic "Better Call Saul"/"Breaking Bad" moral conundrum, in which a character justifies an indefensible act by highlighting its upsides. But this conundrum feels different. In part, that's because Howard has done nothing to earn the enmity of either Jimmy or Kim. In fact, he's been pretty generous to both of them. More important, Kim has made a pivot to the dark side that feels wildly improbable. Yes, she has helped with Jimmy's cons before, and yes, she found them a sexual turn on. But the difference between her previous bad acts and the one she's urging here seems vast. As a dastardly schemer, she ends this season a step ahead of Jimmy. None A question: Has any actress in the history of television spent more on screen time brushing her teeth and flossing than Rhea Seehorn? Seriously. What's going on, "Better Call Saul" writers? At this point, it's kind of fetishistic. We get it. The woman has terrific dental hygiene. Do you think Seehorn gets these scripts and says, "Again with the brushing?" None Another question: Where did Lalo get the money for the Ferrari and the box of cash? Bolsa says his bricks came from his work with Gus Fring, so we're left to presume that Lalo's comes from a different source. Yes, the cash counting room operated by the cartel has a lot of bills on hand. Did he just grab a box from there? None The cavils above notwithstanding, this was easily the best season of the show. There were many indelible moments including the opening of Episode 3, which depicts ants swarming a scoop of ice cream dropped on the sidewalk. Next to that, I'd put the explosion of a Los Pollos Hermanos. At times, this show achieves a level of intelligence and polish rarely found beyond cinema at its finest. At long last, Saul turned up, as did Hank and Gomez. The machinations between Gus and Lalo seemed a bit lopsided, but they are both great characters played by supremely gifted actors. None No curtain call would be complete without a salute to Michael Mando. He plays Nacho, a man who lives an excruciatingly hemmed in life, with impeccable restraint. His torment is all cinched down, everything roiling behind his eyes. He manages to convey Nacho's heartbreaking predicament without raising his voice, or asking for pity. If he lives, give that guy a show. But for now, comment on this one. I'll see you next time. Until then, I need you to leave. I have family coming over. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Tower after tower has shot up along the radically revamped waterfront in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, over the past decade, and the latest one to rise, called 1N4th, will be far from the last. The 2005 rezoning of almost 200 blocks of Williamsburg, and parts of neighboring Greenpoint to the north, catalyzed the transformation of the waterfront area, a once bleak industrial zone lined with trash transfer stations and contaminated sites. The controversial rezoning made way for thousands of new apartments in towers, some more than 40 stories, but it also was designed to spur creation of affordable housing, along with a public esplanade and a 28 acre city park. A 41 story building with 510 rental apartments at 1 North Fourth Street, 1N4th is now topped out and started leasing this month, but has received little media attention since construction began, perhaps because it blends in with Williamsburg's growing collection of littoral towers. When pioneer towers like Schaefer Landing, completed in 2003, the Northside Piers development (2007) and the Edge (2008) went up, they drew many more stares. About 10 waterfront high rises may eventually join 1N4th, including three towers at the Domino Sugar site and several more on sites south of the Williamsburg Bridge. These could add as many as 4,300 apartments. But the developers of 1N4th say it is not just another brick in the wall of waterfront development. Designed by FXFowle Architects, 1N4th is a glassy high rise that is attempting to push the envelope on high end finishes and amenities for luxury rental towers, said Jeffrey E. Levine, the chairman of Douglaston Development, which is building the tower. "This is a rental project with condo level amenities," he said. And Mr. Levine touted not just the building's Manhattan views after all, Williamsburg's existing luxury waterfront towers have those but also its "360 degree views." "We're like a ship, not a building," Mr. Levine said. "The site is almost a peninsula jutting out into the East River, and we literally have views from our homes that are 360 degrees." The land was originally to be the site of a third condominium tower in the Northside Piers development, a venture of Toll Brothers, RD Management and L M Development Partners. However, by 2010, more than 1,000 condo units had been developed along the Williamsburg waterfront, and at the Northside Piers towers, sales were sluggish. Douglaston, which took over the property in 2011, decided to instead tap into Williamsburg's booming rental market and build 1N4th. Since that time, the condo market citywide has recovered. Listings in Williamsburg's waterfront buildings are hovering around 1,450 a square foot, which is comparable to prices for new development in some Manhattan neighborhoods. Still, like Douglaston, some developers have set their immediate sights on rental apartments. If everything currently planned along the Williamsburg waterfront is developed, towers could eventually stretch from about North Seventh Street down to Division Avenue and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, with a few gaps for a New York Power Authority station, a restaurant and a government building. Still to be determined is the future of land owned by Con Edison, just north of the power station. Zoned for manufacturing, it will be put on the market as early as next year, said Sidney Alvarez, a Con Edison spokesman. The rental market along the Williamsburg waterfront is thriving. Rents there have increased, especially for larger apartments, as much as 25 percent since 2010, trumping parts of Manhattan. Rents range from 2,200 to 3,250 a month for studios, 2,800 to 3,700 for one bedrooms, and 4,200 to 5,800 for two bedrooms, she said. Three bedroom apartments start in the high 5,000s a month and go up to 8,500 a month. Finishes in the apartments include gray oak flooring, solar shades, Caesarstone countertops in kitchens and Pietre d'Italia porcelain tile in bathrooms. Each apartment has a washer and dryer by Bosch; other appliances are by Whirlpool. Besides a 24 hour concierge, 1N4th has more than 20,000 square feet of interior and exterior amenities, including an 8,500 square foot sun deck on the third floor with a swimming pool, a movie screen and a barbecue area. Inside the tower are a 3,000 square foot fitness center, a media lounge with billiards, a party room with a kitchen and a children's playroom. Developers have not yet decided if they will charge a fee for the use of amenities, but if they do, it will be only 25 or 50 a month, said Steven Charno, the president of Douglaston Development. The spacious lobby has double height wood paneled ceilings and mailboxes integrated into various pieces of furniture, as well as a kitchenette, a library and a nearby business center, said Highlyann Krasnow, a broker at MNS. The building will have racks for hundreds of bicycles as well as ample storage, she said. Most of the renters, who will begin moving in next month, will likely be in their 20s and early 30s, Mr. Levine said. He anticipates that the building will be fully leased by the first quarter of 2016. Meanwhile, Douglaston Development has also broken ground on the final phase of its Edge development, a high rise with 550 market rate rental apartments to the north of 1N4th. South of 1N4th, but north of the Williamsburg Bridge, is the 11 acre site of an old Domino Sugar factory, where three waterfront towers, one of them 55 stories, will eventually flank the waterside refinery building, a designated landmark that will be converted to office space. Originally proposed almost a decade ago by different developers, the Domino redevelopment project has come to symbolize the rebirth of Williamsburg's waterfront. But it was fought by many residents and community groups for years. However, neighborhood opposition waned in the face of a radical redesign by a new developer. Last spring, Two Trees Management received city approval for the project, to include a ziggurat shape 16 story building set back a block from the water that is to break ground in January. The building will have about 500 units, more than 100 of them affordable. In an attempt to break up the march of glassy towers through coastal Williamsburg, SHoP Architects, which designed two buildings, created slender, porous structures with less glass and more metal that are varied in height "to bring light and air into the neighborhood," said Vishaan Chakrabarti, a principal of SHoP. Towers may eventually continue south of the Williamsburg Bridge, where there are now only a couple of residential high rises. Developers continue to covet the land now occupied by the restaurant and catering hall Giando on the Water. At the same time, two other chunks of land already have approved development plans, although neither is the scene of construction activity at the moment. One, a site at 420 430 Kent Avenue, is the former home of Kedem Winery. The new owner, Spitzer Enterprises, is still in the design process, but the zoning allows for more than 800 rental apartments with 20 percent of them affordable, said David J. Maundrell III, the president of aptsandlofts.com, a real estate company involved in the project. He would not say how many towers are planned. While residential development along the waterfront is sprouting, one area that is quiet is a 28 acre waterfront space called Bushwick Inlet Park, just north of the new waterfront development and adjacent to the seven acre East River State Park. Bushwick Inlet Park was promised to the community by the city to compensate for the massive 2005 rezoning of Williamsburg, which promised to bring tens of thousands of new residents to an area already short on parks and green spaces. However, only about nine acres of actual parkland exist today, said Laura Treciokas, a founding member of the Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park, a group working to get the park completed. The city needs six parcels to finish the park, and it has two: one with a newly built soccer field, park building and playground; the other a contaminated concrete lot, she said. Four more parcels are needed, two of which the Parks Department hopes to have acquired by June, one for 68.5 million, said Maeri Ferguson, a parks spokeswoman. "We are moving forward to procure a consultant to develop a demolition plan," she said, "which will help to determine the cost of environmental testing, design and park development." Acquisition of a parcel that is home to the Greenpoint Monitor Museum remains unscheduled and unfunded, as does the purchase of an 11 acre property that is now CitiStorage. Residents are particularly worried about the 11 acre parcel. The fear is that it might be sold to a developer who could work out a deal to provide affordable housing in exchange for permission to build yet another tower, Ms. Treciokas said. "There's some irony to all of this," she said, "because we're supposed to be this waterfront community, and that's supposed to be the selling point, and yet there's not a whole lot of open space on the waterfront for all these new residents." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
LYON, France Three dances. Three major choreographers. Three renditions of Beethoven's "Grosse Fuge." That's the simple yet audacious idea behind the Lyon Opera Ballet's "Trois Grandes Fugues," which offers two pieces, by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Maguy Marin, already in its repertory, and a new work by the American choreographer Lucinda Childs. That the choreographers are all women is a fact you might not even remark on if it weren't for the recent rumblings about the lack of female choreographers in the ballet world. It makes sense that these choreographers come from the contemporary dance field, a contrasting stronghold for female dance makers. (Interestingly, Twyla Tharp, too, recently choreographed a work using this music.) The 35 member Lyon company, directed by Yorgos Loukos since 1988, has long had an exceptionally ambitious and diverse repertory, avoiding the big classical ballets (which can be done better by larger companies) to showcase an amazingly broad variety of choreographers, from Merce Cunningham to Rachid Ouramdane. It's hard to imagine where else you could see this program. Many directors might have feared boring audiences by playing the same score three times. Instead, the experience is riveting, opening up and deepening Beethoven's complex, impassioned score that was originally composed as the finale of his Op. 130 String Quartet. After the negative reception at its premiere in 1826 (one reviewer described the music as "incomprehensible, like Chinese"), Beethoven composed a new ending and published the "Grosse Fuge" separately. The piece is monumental, stark and uncompromising, foregrounding the tension created by fugal structure, in which musical themes are alternately presented by different instruments, while the others play contrapuntal harmonies and rhythms. It's fascinating to see the enormous differences in the choreographic and kinetic responses to this music. Each dance could serve as a stylistic manifesto for the choreographer, and each received its full due from the remarkable ensemble of dancers. Ms. Childs's "Grande Fugue" is cool, spare, spatially complex; Ms. De Keersmaeker's "Die Grosse Fuge" (1992) is abstract yet theatrical; Ms. Marin's "Grosse Fugue" (2001) is intensely, uninhibitedly emotional. Each choreographer has used a different account of the score. (Mr. Loukos said that he would have liked the music played live, but that it proved too expensive.) Ms. Childs chose an orchestrated version, recorded by the Lyon Opera ensemble, and the effect is smoother and less turbulent than the string quartet recordings by the Quatuor Debussy used by Ms. De Keersmaeker, or the Quartetto Italiano used by Ms. Marin. That relative smoothness suits Ms. Childs's meticulous, austere style and movement vocabulary. Although she emerged from the radical group of artists at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village in the 1960s, she is the most balletic of these choreographers, deploying simple academic steps to create layered, thrilling patterns in counterpointed timings. (Ms. Childs will have a two week season at the Joyce Theater in New York, starting on Nov. 29.) Her piece begins in silence and dim light, with two dancers standing in an ornately patterned silver cage at the back of the stage, which will later throw a lacy shadow upon the stage. (The lovely design, light and costumes are by Dominique Drillot.) More dancers, in simple gray bodytights, walk on, and the two emerge to join them. Standing in male female pairs, they face upstage, and as the music starts, the men swing into arabesque facing the audience. Quick shifts of direction and geometric patterning dominate this first section; Ms. Childs's characteristic use of stillness and rapid movement for alternating groups keeps the visual field utterly clear and spatially surprising. In the slower, more lyrical second section of the music, two couples do a beautiful double pas de deux imbued with swirling lifts and skaterlike glides unusual for Ms. Childs, who rarely choreographs partnered work. As the music mounts in tension, the ensemble returns to repeat the opening patterns, finishing abruptly together on the final notes. In silence, two dancers return to their silvery cage. Ms. De Keersmaeker's version is characterized by the falling and rebounding vocabulary that marked her work during the 1990s, when she was (among other things) exploring gender identity in dance. She has used varying numbers of men and women in versions of her "Grosse Fuge": In the cast I saw on Friday, two women and six men, all wearing black suits and white shirts, performed with exhilarating energy through the running, jumping, falling sequences that Ms. De Keersmaeker sets with dizzying shifts of counterpoint and canon. As the dance progresses, the performers begin to shed their jackets and loosen their shirts. A slow, dreamlike sequence sees them rolling across the floor, rising onto an elbow, then sinking again, as if falling into the melancholy melody. Despite the neutrality of the dancers' demeanor, the piece feels highly theatrical and charged, testament to the sheer physical excitement Ms. De Keersmaeker generates. Last on the program, but perhaps most intense, came Ms. Marin's quartet for four women, all dressed in shades of red. The movement is rough, often pedestrian, with outflung limbs, hunched bodies, rolling heads and jerky, twitching impulses. The women seem possessed, filled with a fierce, desperate energy that occasionally calms into what might be either despair or acceptance. More than the other two versions, Ms. Marin captures the score's roiling emotional turmoil. This doesn't make it better; it's simply one more response an intensely honest one to a great work of art. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
For the 2016 Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles, 19, a life of frequent travel is an inevitable part of her newfound fame. A record holder in the United States for having the most gold medals in women's gymnastics at a single Olympics, Ms. Biles recently embarked on the Kellogg's Tour of Gymnastics Champions, a show touring 36 cities around the United States, which features performances by members of the 2012 and 2016 United States Olympic gymnastics teams. The world may beckon, but the athlete said that her favorite destination would always be Belize, a Central American nation, where she holds dual citizenship through her mother, Nellie Cayetano Biles. The younger Ms. Biles spoke about her love for Belize while she was on her way to the airport in Los Angeles (she was in town to film the season premiere of "Ellen") to head home to Houston for a few days before beginning her tour. (The interview took place before Ms. Biles said that she had ADHD after the hacking of an antidoping agency revealed she and other athletes had been granted exemptions to take banned substances.) Below are edited excerpts from a conversation with Ms. Biles. Q. You have referred to Belize as your second home. How often do you get to visit? A. I go at least once a year with my family, mostly in the summer. We spend five days, sometimes a week. Where do you stay when you go? My mom has a house on the mainland, but we like going to the islands so we always stay at a resort. Usually, we go to San Pedro a town on the island of Ambergris Caye and stay either at Victoria House or Ramon's. The hotels are near each other, and the staff is super nice at both. What do you like to do when you're there? Belize, for me, is all about the beach. My family and I spend most of our days hanging out by the water, but I don't like to lie out and relax. I go swimming, which I love because the water is so beautiful and so clear that you can see all the fish underneath. Also, we are big on fishing trips and make sure to take at least one whenever we're in Belize. My mom, two older brothers, my younger sister and I head out by 7 in the morning on a boat with a local fisherman, who takes us to the best fishing spots. It's so much fun because we make teams and compete to see who can catch the biggest fish or the most fish. Usually, we catch snappers and groupers, and occasionally, we'll get a barracuda. Besides a lot of seafood, what's the food in Belize like? We eat a ton of rice and beans and also stewed chicken. For breakfast, we have fry jacks, which are fried pieces of dough that are so good. I put jam on top of mine. Belize has become a popular travel destination in the last few years. What do you think the appeal is? It's a destination that has something for everyone of all ages. The beach is a big attraction, and the scuba diving is fantastic. The Blue Hole is a famous scuba diving spot there. The country also has Mayan ruins if you like history, and the people there are very welcoming and want you to have a good time. Given your love for the beach, did you have any time to hit the beaches in Rio de Janeiro when you were there for the Olympics? Yes. Out of the three weeks I spent there in Rio, I had two free days and spent them hanging out on Copacabana Beach. The water was clear like it is in Belize but a lot colder! You've been traveling much more frequently for your work in the last few months. What do you like and dislike most about being on the road? I'm lucky in that I can sleep anywhere and at any time, but I don't like living out of a suitcase. On the other hand, I do love seeing new places and meeting new people. What are your travel essentials? I need a blanket or jacket to stay warm, and headphones are a must so that I can listen to music, watch TV and movies, and block out sound. Right now, I'm into the shows "Modern Family" and "One Tree Hill." And the last movie I saw when I was flying was "Zootopia," which I really liked. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
It has been many years since lofts in SoHo were the province of musicians, dancers and artists. There are holdouts, though, and on Friday one of them invited the public in. Passing the high end stores on Prince Street, audience members climbed a rickety staircase to sit on folding chairs in Peggy Spina's loft. Ushers took care to keep slush wet shoes off the wooden floor. That was reserved for footwear with metal on the soles. Ms. Spina is a tap dancer. She founded the Peggy Spina Tap Company in 1981. Six years later, she started giving performances in the loft where she has lived since the 1970s. The music is always by the versatile jazz pianist Joel Forrester, joined by two or three other adept musicians, playing mostly his compositions. Ms. Spina's dancers are all women and loyal. Of the six who performed on Friday, four have been with her for 10 years or more. Ms. Spina's dances, full of nice ideas nicely shaped, have a warm glow and an affable wit. The pithy tap phrases and agreeable stage patterns, closely coupled with the live music, make for a rare and intimate pleasure. Friday's 90 minute concert featured 11 short numbers, mostly recent and including a premiere, "Pulse." In profusion, they added up to an impression of sameness, despite changes in the not too flattering costumes and the stylistic variety of Mr. Forrester's songs (which all tend to sound familiar). The counterpoint and high speed unison of some numbers called for a bit more precision than the dancers could muster, and when incorporating vocabulary from ballet or modern dance, they looked more amateurish than they sounded. But the glaring problem is one of affect, the bright smiles they continually flash at one another and the audience. Too strong for such close range, their manner lacks the cool that this kind of jazz tap seems to demand. The absence can be felt most uncomfortably in slow blues, though Alison Manning compensates with a forceful attack. Her taps thump, snap and pop. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Looks from the Krammer Stoudt fall 2018 collection. The models are Madison Paige, Arta Gjonbalaj and Terra Juano, who is known as TJ. Is the future of men's wear nonbinary people? It is if the designers behind the indie label Krammer Stoudt are to be believed. In just five seasons, Mike Rubin and Courtenay Nearburg, who are married, have proved themselves a pair worth watching. (Last month Mr. Rubin, 59, was awarded the Fashion Group International's Rising Star award.) The couple's shrewdly assembled collections have played on influences that ranged unfettered from the German Neo Expressionist dandy Markus Lupertz to the Orange County surf culture memorialized in the novels of Kem Nunn (sometimes referred to as surf fiction's dark lord) to the live rough transients known as gutter punks. This season, Krammer Stoudt summoned shades of the playwright Sam Shepard to create a collection ostensibly influenced by Mr. Shepard's seldom performed "Cowboy Mouth" (written with Patti Smith), and yet more notably inspired by the thrill Ms. Nearburg felt when she stumbled last year upon Terra Juano, a model known on Instagram ( Renegades ) as TJ, or Skinnybonejones. Dressed for the Krammer Stoudt show in a rejiggered hooded Army M65 fishtail parka, its body elongated and its sleeves shortened; a patch pocket wool shirt that looked like a supersize version of a standard issue Pendleton; a pair of drawstring wool trousers Mr. Rubin based on a favorite pair of vintage Capri pants; and a high crowned Esenshel rabbit velour hat with a brim the size of a cartwheel, TJ looked like an incredibly cool butch girl or a very pretty femme boy or both at once or something altogether in between. Like many of the models cast for the show among them Madison Paige ( madspaige), Arta Gjonbalaj ( artagee), Rain Dove ( raindovemodel) and Merika Palmiste ( merikatheone) TJ identifies as nonbinary. And the lineup may reflect a reality the fashion world has been struggling to accommodate mashed up men's and women's shows is one example for some time. "There is this evolution happening as opposed to a revolution of people recognizing themselves outside of gender specificity," Ms. Nearburg wrote in an email before what would be the first men's wear show in this observer's memory in which not a single model was male. "Krammer Stoudt has a loyal following among nonbinary people, L.G.B.T.Q. women and straight women," she wrote. "Often we are asked if it's 'okay' for these people to buy our clothes. Of course it's okay." What is more, Ms. Nearburg said on Monday, recognizing an inevitable tropism away from traditionally defined gender identities opens up not only potential new markets, but also many design possibilities. "The practical reason for doing this is that people like TJ and Mads and those in their generation or younger are not comfortable confining themselves to a gender definition any more," Ms. Nearburg said. Yet, as she learned during her years in the 1990s punk scene in Austin, Tex., gender play as a way of subverting societal norms is one of fashion's time honored tools. Back when her club uniform was a sleeveless man's T shirt, a leather biker jacket and trousers, Ms. Nearburg found that her apparent androgyny made her attractive across the spectrum of gender identities. "I was hit on by straight men, gay men, gay women, straight women," she said. "That was part of my inspiration for doing the casting this way," she said. "We're deliberately not casting feminine presenting men because we're doing a masculine show. It's still men's wear we're dealing with here. We wanted masculine presenting women, androgynous women, gay women who consider themselves female, nonbinary women, because we wanted to demonstrate how that space is opening up at a culturally regressive time." There was something else. "You look at people like TJ and Madison and they are just so badass and cool," Ms. Nearburg said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Under pressure from federal regulators and legislators, General Motors this year has been reviewing past safety problems. That has resulted in 54 recalls affecting about 25.7 million vehicles in the United States. But there may be limits to how far the automaker is willing to go in its safety push: G.M. has resisted recalling almost 1.8 million full size pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles from the 1999 to 2003 model years for corrosion related brake failures, saying the issue is one of maintenance. The resistance has come even though the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been investigating the issue since 2010, and the agency has now received about 1,000 complaints from owners, some of whom report narrowly avoiding crashes. "Hit brakes and a line blew. Almost hit car in front of me," the owner of a 2003 Chevrolet Silverado wrote in a complaint filed in June. "Like all G.M. trucks in snow country my brake lines rusted through along with my rear backing plates. I don't know how many people have to be killed from blown brake lines for them to do anything. I guess a lot since they held off 10 years on their current problem." G.M. has resisted recalling the pickups and sport utility vehicles, telling regulators that rusted brake lines are a routine maintenance issue. In addition, the automaker says, the vehicles have dual brake lines, so "the affected vehicle would be capable of stopping." In a statement this year about the issue, the company said that rusted brake lines were an industrywide problem. "Brake line wear on vehicles is a maintenance issue that affects the auto industry, not just General Motors," the company said. "The trucks in question are long out of factory warranty, and owners' manuals urge customers to have their brake lines inspected the same way brake pads need replacement for wear." In contrast to G.M., Subaru last week said it was recalling about 660,000 vehicles in the United States, telling investigators it was worried that the brake lines "could perforate after exposure to seven or more winter seasons." The Japanese automaker took action without an investigation by federal regulators. G.M. does not comment on other automakers' recalls, Alan Adler, a spokesman for G.M., wrote in an email. He added that General Motors had developed a parts kit last year for the brake lines. "These are available through dealers and the aftermarket," he said. "Based on time studies, the repair including labor should cost about 500. We can only suggest how much labor time the repair should take." The highway safety agency's investigation into G.M. vehicles was prompted by a formal complaint by an owner, called a defect petition, filed in 2010 by an Ohio man after the brakes on his 2003 Chevrolet Silverado 2500 heavy duty pickup failed because of corroded brake lines. In January 2011, the agency intensified its investigation to a more serious engineering analysis, saying there were 761 complaints from owners, most of whom were in states that used a lot of road salt during the winter. That included reports of 26 crashes and three injuries, the seriousness of which were not detailed. There were no reports of deaths. There has been no update of those numbers in the investigation file. The agency's engineering analysis investigation has taken far longer than its self imposed goal of 12 months. The agency has previously been criticized by the inspector general of the Transportation Department for taking too long to conclude such investigations. The agency had no immediate comment. Last week, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, and Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote to N.H.T.S.A., saying they wanted information about the way the agency handles investigations, including defect petitions of the type filed in the G.M. brake case. The senators said they wanted to make sure such investigations "are responded to in a timely and complete manner." The models originally under investigation include the 2002 3 Cadillac Escalade, the 1999 2003 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups, the 1999 2003 Chevrolet Suburban, the 2000 3 Chevrolet Tahoe and GMC Yukon, the 2000 GMC Yukon XL and the 2002 3 Chevrolet Avalanche 1500 and 2500. However, in a 2012 letter to G.M., a federal regulator asked for additional information covering the 2004 6 model years. Some owners of much newer G.M. models have also filed complaints, although in far smaller numbers, including one owner of a 2012 GMC Sierra. "At 81,000 miles the rear steel brake line from the frame to the rear end rusted out and burst," the owner complained to regulators early in 2012. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.