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TAMPA, Fla. Near the end of his batting practice on Thursday afternoon, Gary Sanchez sent a home run off the left field scoreboard at George M. Steinbrenner Field. The sparse crowd watching from the stands applauded. Some cheered his name. Few Yankees players are entering spring training as much an enigma as Sanchez. Will he be the All Star power hitting catcher whose offense outweighed his defensive lapses, as he was in 2017? Or will he repeat 2018, the worst all around campaign of his young career? Or will it be something in between? For one, the Yankees said Sanchez, 26, was in better physical condition than he was last year. He had surgery on his nonthrowing shoulder in November to remove tissue that was causing discomfort. "I feel normal," Sanchez said in Spanish on Thursday. "Almost back to 100 percent." Still, to be cautious, the Yankees will hold Sanchez out of spring training games until around March 1. Sanchez refused to attribute his poor 2018 season at the plate to his shoulder, but the results were clear: After hitting .278 with 33 home runs in 2017, he mustered only a .186 average with 18 homers last season. He also missed 57 games with two occurrences of a groin injury.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
It is a lesson that Hollywood has learned time and time again, from Steve McQueen's movies to the "Fast and the Furious" franchise: Quick cars and charismatic celebrities sell tickets. That combination worked once more this weekend for 20th Century Fox's racing drama "Ford v Ferrari," starring Matt Damon and Christian Bale. It opened to an estimated 31 million in domestic ticket sales Friday through Sunday, outpacing expectations. The studio had projected an opening weekend of just below 20 million. Directed by James Mangold, the movie revisits the golden age of auto racing: Damon and Bale play the car designer Carroll Shelby and the driver Ken Miles working for Ford in the lead up to a historic 1966 race. The cast also includes Tracy Letts as Henry Ford II and Jon Bernthal as Lee Iacocca. The movie got a boost from critics going into the weekend it currently holds a 92 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In his review for The New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote that "'Ford v Ferrari' is no masterpiece, but it is to invoke a currently simmering debate real cinema, the kind of solid, satisfying, nonpandering movie that can seem endangered nowadays."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Credit...Andrew Mangum for The New York Times Where Companies Welcome Refugees, the More, the Better SILVER SPRING, Md. With forecasters expecting the unemployment rate to sink further this week, the chorus of complaints about worker shortages from custodians to computer prodigies has swelled. Yet companies that turn to labor recruiters like Ray Wiley tend to have an especially tough time: The jobs they offer are in out of way places; the work is low paid and disagreeable; and native born Americans, particularly white men, are generally not interested. "We have employers call us all the time," said Mr. Wiley, who primarily works with meat processing plants and lumber mills that have trouble retaining workers even when the jobless rate is well above its historically low level of 4.1 percent. The economy is on solid footing in the ninth year of the recovery, and even entry level workers have more options. So in Atlanta, San Diego and other cities, Mr. Wiley's company, East Coast Labor Solutions, finds workers, primarily refugees from war ravaged countries who don't speak English. Other candidates include Puerto Ricans discouraged by the island's lack of jobs, as well as immigrants here legally, he emphasizes who have no problem passing a drug test. "If you told me there's 1,000 refugees who need work and want work, I could find them work this month," said Mr. Wiley, whose distinctive drawl pays tribute to his Georgia roots. Employers like refugees, he said. There is no question about their legal status, he noted, and they are generally more motivated and work harder, if only because their situation is more dire. "I'm ready to go right now," said Ronald Johnson, 37, who showed up one afternoon with two friends at Labor Solutions' bare, second floor office in Silver Spring, Md. He had heard from others in his community of Sierra Leone refugees that this agency could immediately place anyone willing to move to a nearby state. "I want to go where they pay the most money and charge the least for rent." Within an hour, all three men agreed to move to a rural town they had never heard of, to take a job they had never done before. Of course they might, if the pay were good enough. When meatpackers were unionized and located in cities like Chicago, hourly wages averaged 20 an hour in today's dollars, plus generous benefits. In the 1960s, though, packers began moving to rural areas, bringing workers to where the animals lived instead of the other way around. The shift enabled companies to cut wages drastically, escape the pressures of collective bargaining and speed output. The move from high wage locations to low wage ones has become commonplace as the economy globalized, upending stable middle class communities. In the international arena, companies like Carrier and Rexnord recently closed factories in the United States and moved operations to places like China, Vietnam and Mexico where labor could be found at cut rate prices. But long before complaints about the North American Free Trade Agreement or steel imports from China commanded headlines, a domestic version of this pattern was already playing out in some industries. And as the pay changed, so did the face of the work force, once dominated by white males. Women, immigrants and people of color now hang chickens on hooks or hack them into parts on an assembly line. They are paid about half of what their counterparts earned four decades ago (after taking inflation into account), and have fewer benefits and protections. Such conditions don't foster long term stability. In some plants, employers have to replace up to 70 percent of their staffs every year. "I'll take any job," said Suleiman Kabba, 42, who came to the Labor Solutions office in Silver Spring, a Washington suburb, with Mr. Johnson. He had recently moved to Maryland and was down to his last few dollars. He needed to save up to replace stolen identity documents and buy airline tickets to bring over his two children, still in Sierra Leone. He removed a pair of tinted glasses and pulled at the collar of his U.S.A. T shirt to show the scars from a bullet that had traveled through his eye and out the left side of his neck when his family was attacked during the civil war there. Haimonet Demcasso, the recruiter, explained, in two languages, the broad outlines of the jobs. The poultry plant work pays roughly 11 to 13 an hour in small towns in Virginia and West Virginia. Labor Solutions would transport the recruits, find apartments for them to share, help fill out paperwork, and advance them the money to cover their travel, the first month's rent, the security deposit, heavy work boots and home essentials. They could pay it back out of their paychecks with no interest at a rate of 60 a week. 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. They are paid the same as other plant workers, but they are employees of Labor Solutions for up to a year, until they've repaid their loans. More details about the job itself would come once they went through orientation at the plant, Ms. Demcasso said. His wife, Elizabeth, was more skeptical when she heard about the deal. An apartment and two jobs just waiting for them? Money up front? There were plenty of unscrupulous recruiters who made all kinds of promises and deceived trusting job seekers a cruel and sordid side of the industry that Mr. Wiley acknowledged is all too common. "I was dragging my feet," Ms. Johnson said. But after coming up for a day to check the area and the classrooms her two children would attend in Woodstock, Va., she was convinced. "I loved the school just by looking at it," she said. Most important, she saw no signs of the drugs, violence and bullying that plagued the White Oak neighborhood of Silver Spring, where they were temporarily doubled up with family. "And there's no roaches and mice or rats." Mr. Wiley said that when he started working with refugees, mostly Burmese, in 2008, he didn't offer money and support, but he soon realized that the job placements wouldn't last without it. Resettlement agency assistance was temporary and many job seekers didn't speak English. So he hired case managers to translate, help with school enrollment, drive recruits to the supermarket, find English classes and more. Berhane Teklay, who once hung live chickens upside down in a plant, handles the 30 or so workers Mr. Wiley has placed in Woodstock. "You need somebody to help you get into the system," Mr. Teklay said, and that's what Labor Solutions does. For refugees who can't speak English well or drive a car, he said, a job in a meat processing plant is about the best they can do. Fluent in Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya and English, Mr. Teklay acts as interpreter, administrator, real estate agent, loan office, complaint bureau and overall fixer. For a year, he helped Waleed Kanuo, Elfadil Daoud and Ali Hamid, refugees from Sudan, settle into an apartment in Woodstock and navigate the system, until they transferred to working directly for the poultry plant operator. Gathered in the living room of the sparsely furnished apartment they share, all three said they were saving money and grateful to Labor Solutions for finding them a job. For others, the experience is more mixed. Mr. Kabba, for instance, said he had not known that he would have to pay an additional 25 every week for the daily mile ride from a co worker to and from the plant. Nor did he understand that he would be working for Labor Solutions and not the processing plant directly, which he said makes it more difficult to switch departments, and means he is not yet eligible for the health benefits or 401(k) plan. At the same time, plant conditions are regimented and unforgiving, with 30 minutes for lunch and two 10 minute bathroom breaks that workers said don't include time to change out and into cumbersome protective garb. And small infractions can lead to firing.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
In an era of information saturation, when cable news seems ubiquitous and Twitter posts stream forth uninterrupted, local television still holds a powerful grip on the American consciousness. And the Sinclair Broadcast Group just tightened its grasp. Already the largest owner of local television stations in the United States, Sinclair said Monday that it had agreed to buy Tribune Media for 3.9 billion, beating out other suitors including Nexstar and 21st Century Fox. With the deal, Sinclair would reach more than 70 percent of American households, with stations in many major markets, including Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, giving it significant heft at a time of increasing consolidation in the industry. The acquisition would also provide Sinclair with a far reaching platform for its news programming. A Pew Research study last year showed that almost 60 percent of adults get their news from television, and of those, almost 50 percent rely on local stations. That has stoked concern about the pitfalls of consolidation, with some pointing out that Sinclair has shown a willingness to use its 173 stations to advance a conservative leaning agenda. Opponents of the deal have cited examples like Sinclair's hiring of Boris Epshteyn, a former spokesman for President Trump, as its chief political analyst and the on air commentary of Mark Hyman, a former Sinclair executive who provides reliably conservative arguments on dozens of Sinclair stations. "It's an incredible amount of power in one company's hands," said Craig Aaron, president of Free Press, a consumer advocacy group that has opposed the deal. He added that Sinclair, based in the Baltimore area, had a tendency to "centralize things as much as they can," saying it produced stories from its headquarters with a clear conservative slant. Michael J. Copps, a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission from 2001 to 2011 who is now a special adviser to the nonpartisan consumer group Common Cause, called the planned merger "another blow to the diversity of journalism that we should have." "It's symptomatic of what is happening in this market," he said, "which is fewer and fewer organizations controlling more and more of the information on which our democracy rests." People with knowledge of the bidding said Sinclair had not expressed any plans to compete directly with Fox. Some analysts and media specialists discounted the idea that political ideology shaped Sinclair's approach, saying the expansion was more likely motivated by business considerations. "This is about a play to get bigger because the world requires scale," said Michael Nathanson, a media analyst with MoffettNathanson. In the last several years, cable and telecommunications companies have consolidated, and analysts predict that the deal could set off another wave of combinations, with jostling by groups like Nexstar, Tegna (which was formed when Gannett split into a newspaper division and a television company), Cox, Hearst and Meredith Corporation. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. "This combination creates the largest TV broadcast company in the country," said Christopher S. Ripley, the chief executive of Sinclair. "And as you all know, scale matters in this industry and the media in general." Tribune would be the latest acquisition for Sinclair, which has often turned to mergers to build its empire. The company has spent more than 7 billion on takeovers since 1996, excluding the Tribune deal, according to data from Standard Poor's Global Market Intelligence. As part of the deal, Sinclair would also acquire Tribune's minority stake in the Food Network. Under the agreement, Sinclair will pay 35 a share in cash and 0.23 of one of its class A shares. The final bid was valued at about 43.50 a share, up about 26 percent over Tribune's stock price before reports of merger talks. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year, pending approval by Tribune shareholders, the Federal Communications Commission and antitrust regulators at the Justice Department. For Tribune Media, a deal with Sinclair could be the coda for a company that was the television arm of the Tribune behemoth that published newspapers including The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune. "I think it's probably the first of a variety of combinations that will take place in local broadcasting that will better allow local broadcasters to compete," Peter M. Kern, Tribune's chief executive, said in an interview. The company began to explore selling itself last year, recognizing that it could become an attractive target if consolidation increased, two people with knowledge of the process said. The presidential election and the expectation that a Republican led F.C.C. would loosen regulations increased the possibility of a deal frenzy. Several weeks ago, Tribune formally put itself up for sale, drawing interest primarily from Sinclair and Nexstar. But late in the process, 21st Century Fox, in partnership with the Blackstone Group, a private equity firm, jolted the proceedings by joining the talks. Interest in Tribune was heightened late last month when the F.C.C. eased rules on how many stations an owner may have. But Fox and Blackstone, whose potential bid involved a complicated joint venture, could not work out a suitable financial arrangement and did not make a bid, the people with knowledge of the process said. They insisted on anonymity to discuss private talks. One of the people said that the competition was always between Sinclair and Nexstar and that Fox's late entry did not ultimately drive up the price. Nexstar appeared to have the upper hand, the person said, until Sinclair proposed 43.50 a share on Saturday, sealing the deal. Whether Sinclair uses its expanded reach to push its conservative leaning views remains to be seen. Any ambitions to do so would face significant hurdles. For one, television, where ratings beget advertising revenue, is not a forgiving medium for dissatisfaction, several media analysts and specialists said. Because overnight ratings are readily available, Sinclair will know almost instantaneously if its programming is attractive to viewers or driving them and advertising dollars away. "If you are not serving the community's needs, you will know it, and you will know it fast," said Al Tompkins, a senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute. "In television, if you fail to serve, you will pay the price." There is also the question of how much Sinclair can shape local programming. It would seem unwise, for instance, for Sinclair to replace scheduled shows on network affiliates with partisan content. Sinclair, however, could tilt the coverage at local stations, as some say it did at WJLA, an ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C., that it bought as part of a 2014 deal with Allbritton Communications. Still, the onus is now on Sinclair to show that it is committed to serving the myriad local communities whose homes it has entered. "They're moving into the big leagues," Mr. Tompkins said. "And that will bring substantially more scrutiny into what they do and how they do it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
If Shakespeare's Romeo had lived into adulthood and kept his rebellious streak, he might have been something like Ferdinand Von Walter, the suitor in Friedrich Schiller's "Love and Intrigue." Let's hope he'd have turned out better, though. Ferdinand, a young major besotted with a musician's daughter but promised to an aristocrat, has steeped long enough in the cruelty of his father the country's grasping president, and the first councilor to its ruling duke that he's picked up a trick or two. This ruthless, morally unhinged inheritance is at the core of the Russian director Lev Dodin's spare and subdued adaptation of "Love and Intrigue" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater. The tragedy Schiller wrote, in five outraged and overstuffed acts, was a "Romeo and Juliet" for the Age of Enlightenment, with loads of politics and a romantic rival mixed in. His story of dreamy lovers split apart by scheming courtiers is also a protest against rulers, like the unseen duke, whose riches are wrung from the blood of their people. Mr. Dodin's pared down version performed by the St. Petersburg based Maly Drama Theater, a company last seen at the Harvey with Mr. Dodin's adaptation of "The Cherry Orchard," in 2016 is much less overtly political than Schiller's, and as interesting for what it doesn't say as for what it does. The intermissionless production takes its time, building to a chilling climax over 135 sometimes soporific minutes. Yet all along, Mr. Dodin is laying the table for a banquet worthy of Tantalus, the king in Greek mythology who killed his son and served him to the gods.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
THE POLAR EXPRESS (2004) 5 p.m. on AMC. Tom Hanks lends his likeness to five different characters in this animated holiday movie directed by Robert Zemeckis, which was pioneering at the time for relying entirely on motion capture technology. Based on the children's book by Chris Van Allsburg, the film follows a young Santa skeptic who boards the titular train bound for the North Pole one Christmas Eve. But the trip isn't without its hazards. "In this wonderland, danger lurks around every bend," Manohla Dargis wrote in her New York Times review. "Kids nearly fly off the train, which in turn slides across ice and hurtles down inclines." It's a rocky ride that tests the protagonist's faith and ultimately leaves the audience with a cozy holiday lesson. A CHRISTMAS WINTER SONG 8 p.m. on Lifetime. The R B artist Ashanti brings her singing and acting chops to Lifetime's slate of holiday programming. In this film, she stars as Clio, a young woman mourning the death of her father, who befriends a homeless former jazz singer and convinces him to perform for the customers at her store. Together, they bond over music and Clio encourages him to reconnect with his estranged daughter as the Christmas holiday approaches.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Diana Damrau, in bed, and Juan Diego Florez, right, star in the Metropolitan Opera's new production of "La Traviata," directed by Michael Mayer and conducted by Yannick Nezet Seguin. It's almost a month before New Year's Eve, but as audience members left the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday evening, they received free little bottles of sparkling wine. Confetti was blasted at the curtain calls. What was the momentous event? Nothing less than the start of a new period in the Met's history: the Yannick Nezet Seguin era. Read about Yannick Nezet Seguin's bold plans for the Met. To begin his tenure as the company's music director, Mr. Nezet Seguin led an uncommonly fine rendition of Verdi's "La Traviata," in a new staging by Michael Mayer that stars the soprano Diana Damrau and the tenor Juan Diego Florez. And in a rare gesture of respect and good will, the Met's musicians joined Mr. Nezet Seguin on stage for a bow after the show. After the company's traumatic break earlier this year with its former music director, James Levine, over allegations of sexual misconduct which Mr. Levine denies it's no surprise the Met would want to turn the page and break out the bubbly. And on Tuesday it was well deserved. Since making his Met debut in 2009, Mr. Nezet Seguin has proved his excellence in nearly 70 performances. I expected his "Traviata" to be good, but not this good. Our critics choose the best classical music of 2018 During the poignant music that opens the prelude to Act I, Mr. Nezet Seguin drew radiant yet delicate playing from the strings. Then he shaped the melody that unfolds in sighing, descending phrases with elegance and refinement. A little later, during the duet when the passionate young Alfredo expresses his long brewing love to the courtesan Violetta, Mr. Nezet Seguin excelled at the most essential requirement for a Verdi conductor: the ability to keep a simple oom pah pah accompaniment in the orchestra steady and undulant, while giving the singers just enough leeway to expressively bend vocal lines. Then, in moments of intensity, he drew vehemence without a trace of melodramatic excess. Mr. Mayer who made his Met debut in 2013 with a "Rigoletto" updated to 1960s Las Vegas and recently staged Nico Muhly's "Marnie" has said he wanted to capture the mix of romantic and decadent elements of "Traviata." He presents the opera, as other directors have, as the memories of Violetta, who is seen dying in bed during the prelude. The action take place in a semicircular room with an opening at the top, designed by Christine Jones. The turquoise walls are covered with leafy gold filigree that sometimes seems to separate from the walls and close in on Violetta, emphasizing the social pressures on her and her status as a kept woman. In every scene Violetta's Paris home, her escape in the country, her friend Flora's place we see Violetta's bed in the middle, her piano and dressing table at the rear. The production suggests that all the action has merged in her recollection as, dying, she flashes back to the events of her life. For all its decadent touches slightly garish, Day Glo costumes in the party scenes (designed by Susan Hilferty); steamy ballet dancers who perform for the guests at Flora's party Mr. Mayer's production is essentially a traditional staging set in the mid 19th century. But the imagery is not that involving, especially in comparison with the boldly surreal, excitingly provocative Willy Decker staging it's replacing. If a production is going to rely on what's in effect a unit set, it would be better for that set to be more visually interesting. The singing, though, was wonderful. In a recent interview, Mr. Nezet Seguin said that he had encouraged Mr. Florez, as Alfredo, to sing the well known toast "Libiamo" with lyrical grace and hint of shyness. Those qualities came through in Mr. Florez's lovely performance. He has slowly been moving out of his comfort zone in the florid bel canto repertory, toward roles that require more weight and carrying power. His voice was a little light in comparison with some classic Alfredos. Still, I loved the lyrical nuances he brought out in the music, the clarity of his execution, and the honesty of his singing. He sounded fresh and rich, and he looked adorably youthful; in moments of jealous passion, he was a convincing hothead.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
"Katie, I am noting your split step isn't happening." Those words set into motion the best tennis lesson I've ever received. It was from Venus Williams. I had traveled from New York to West Palm Beach, Fla., to spend an afternoon with Ms. Williams, to report on her off court endeavors. (She is studying for a master's degree in interior architecture and is the founder of two businesses: a fitness wear and athleisure company called EleVen by Venus Williams and V Starr Interiors, a design firm.) But first, we were meeting at the courts where she and her sister Serena Williams practice, at the BallenIsles Country Club in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. I knew from my back and forth with the EleVen publicist that I, a moderately fit, rather uncoordinated 44 year old mother of two, might be called upon to hit a few balls with Ms. Williams, the 6 foot 1 five time Wimbledon singles champion. But I had not anticipated sprinting up and down the court and running in circles around cans of tennis balls at the behest of one of the greatest players in history. It was the most fun I've had at work all summer. Before we get to the split step, let me tell you what it's like to be on the receiving end of a ball that Ms. Williams has hit to you about as softly as she likely is able: It's terrifying. My strategy was to try to have my racket make contact with the ball. When I succeeded, I squeezed the grip as much as I could to prevent the racket from flying out of my grasp. It was after this point that Ms. Williams called out my footwork. She demonstrated the importance of hopping into a wide legged ready position after hitting each ground stroke from the baseline. "You win with your feet," she said. "It looks easy and it's not." Next we worked on our (our!) sidestepping, going from the forehand side of the court to the backhand side of the court (and back again) while facing the net. I watched her sashay from side to side and then took my turn. "You are so unbelievably graceful," I said to her, as I panted. She shrugged her shoulders and replied, "Win pretty, win ugly, just win." Then she had me run sprints. Then she had me go the length of the court by leaping on one foot, holding the landing and then leaping on the next. Then there were the high jumps. Then I was drenched. Ms. Williams was ready to return to preparing for the United States Open. She and Mr. Jenkins set up a cardio intensive cross court drill. She asked her assistant, Zebe Haupt, to hit with me on the adjacent court: "Serena's court" as she referred to it. Cocky from my triumph of not breaking a leg or having a heart attack, I called out, "I'll play the role of Serena." Venus answered, "If you want to be Serena, you better be prepared to serve at 120 miles an hour and win over 22 majors. That's pressure even for me." I guess Venus Williams and I have at least one thing in common.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
It's easy to forget that Geneva, a city that's practically synonymous with international diplomacy, has an identity quite apart from its status as a global hub. But Geneva's historic heart was already a couple of thousand years old when the United Nations came to town, and the city's residents newcomers and natives alike still fiercely embrace traditions that have been celebrated here for centuries. Paris or Rome it isn't, but then Geneva isn't vying to be one of the megastars of Europe. At once deeply Swiss and intrinsically international, the city has carved out its own place in the world, which it occupies with pride. Start your visit with a tour of the Maison Tavel, a small museum in Geneva's Old Town that tells the story of the city through the centuries (free entry). Two highlights: the absorbing audiovisual display on the ground level; and, on the top floor, an architect's replica of the city center, which occupies an entire room. A recurring theme here is the Duke of Savoy's surprise attack on the city during a December night in 1602. The Genevois pushed back the invading army, thanks in part or so legend has it to a local woman who poured a caldron of hot soup on the Duke of Savoy's soldiers as they tried to scale the city's walls. Locals still celebrate this victory every year on a weekend in December, when Old Town's cobblestone streets reverberate with cannon booms and fill with people parading around in 17th century dress. This year's celebrations will take place from Dec. 6 to 8; details Wander downhill from Old Town to Geneva's first botanic garden, the leafy Parc des Bastions. Near the entrance to the park, and just next to a cluster of giant, outdoor chess boards, you'll find your destination for dinner: Le Cafe Restaurant du Parc des Bastions. The restaurant's greenhouse like building hosted concerts in the 19th century, and was later transformed into a cinema. Today, it's a romantic spot for a meal, with an elegant atmosphere and a sophisticated menu that includes beef tartare, housemade foie gras, and perch from Lake Geneva. Dinner for two, from 100 Swiss francs, about 102. Walk out through the park's main entrance and catch the tram to Carouge, a stylish neighborhood that was built as a separate city complete with neo Classical architecture and a well planned grid of streets by the King of Sardinia in the 18th century. Sample the natural wines at Vert Bouteille (from 7 francs per glass), then go next door to catch some live music anything from jazz to indie to electro pop at Le Chat Noir (entry price varies; cocktails from 15 francs). If you get hungry, cross the street for tapas (from 7 francs) with the local crowd at La Plage, or walk a few blocks to Cafe Equinoxe for a late night dessert (12 francs). Geneva's large Portuguese community has made its mark on the local food scene. Get a taste at L'Epi Dore, a busy, Portuguese owned cafe that serves homemade pastries to a devoted clientele. Order a cafe renverse (the Genevois term for a coffee with milk, 3.90 francs) to go with your pastel de nata (2.50 francs), the classic Portuguese custard tart, served here alongside a shaker of cinnamon sugar. Geneva has a well deserved reputation for being expensive, but don't let that scare you off. The Plainpalais neighborhood a diverse district not far from Old Town is a good place to look for deals, or at least reasonable prices. On Saturdays, Plainpalais's locally famous flea market overflows with antiques, clothes, jewelry, and bric a brac, with plenty of treasures to be hunted. A few blocks away, you can browse high end kitchenware and other home goods at Grain de Sel; find a chic baby gift at Poisson Rouge; and shop for classy women's wear at Pourquoi Pas. Restaurants in Geneva tend to be either starchy, white tablecloth dining rooms or kebab shops. Chez ma Cousine, which has four locations in the city, is a glorious exception. Here, the atmosphere is warm, the food hearty, and the prices reasonable, at least for Switzerland. Order the restaurant's signature dish: half a roast chicken, served alongside a pile of chunky, well seasoned roasted potatoes and a heap of perfectly dressed salad greens (15.90 francs). It's best to book ahead for Saturday lunch, although the smallest location, in Old Town, doesn't take reservations. You could argue that Geneva arrived on the global stage in 1863, when the Genevois Henry Dunant and four other Swiss men set up what we know today as the Red Cross, an organization whose emblem the inverse of the Swiss flag has become a universal symbol for medical aid. Explore this history, and the Red Cross's role in assisting soldiers, prisoners, and endangered people around the world, in the small but engrossing International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum (entry, 15 francs). The museum's immersive exhibitions explore three pressing humanitarian challenges: defending human dignity, restoring family links and reducing natural risks. Look out for the moving video testimony of a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay. Set off downhill from the museum and walk around the corner to the Broken Chair sculpture, which sits at one end of a long row of flags leading to the Palais des Nations, the European headquarters of the United Nations. Carry on down the slope to the enchanting and often overlooked Botanical Garden, where dahlias, asters and autumn daffodils come into bloom as summer draws to a close. At the bottom of the garden, look for the small underground walkway that takes you below the traffic on Rue de Lausanne and straight to the edge of Lake Geneva (or Lac Leman, as it's called in French). Keeping the lake on your left, walk past the lawn of the World Trade Organization, continue through the landscaped Parc Mon Repos, and finally stroll along the Quai Wilson, where you can take in a view of Geneva's 460 foot tall fountain, the Jet d'Eau, across the lake. Let's hope the walk has warmed you up, because it's time to disrobe: You've arrived at the Bains des Paquis, a jetty sitting atop Lake Geneva that hosts a popular sauna and bathhouse from mid September to the end of May. You can wear your bathing suit if you're squeamish, but you'll be in the minority, as most Genevois especially the men enjoy their bain completely in the nude. Start off in the steam bath (hammam), then roast in the sauna before taking a jump in the lake, which on a typical day in mid September hovers around 68 degrees Fahrenheit (entry, 20 francs, plus 5 francs to rent a towel). Yes, it's true: The Swiss enjoy a good fondue. And you can too, at the casual, semi outdoor restaurant, La Buvette des Bains, that's a few steps from the sauna. Just make sure you follow the rules: never have a fondue if the weather's warm, unless you want to immediately identify yourself as a tourist; drink only white wine or herbal tea as you eat, never beer or water (the Swiss swear this will help you avoid a post fondue stomachache); and finally, at the end of the meal, be sure to scrape off and savor what the Genevois call la religieuse, the golden, crunchy crust on the bottom of the pot. Stagger out of the restaurant, then do your best to make it to bed before the cheese coma hits (fondue, 25 francs; call ahead to reserve). 11) 10 a.m. Get out of town Most places in Geneva are closed on Sundays, so follow the locals and head for the hills. Your destination this morning is Mont Saleve, the small (by Alpine standards), but statuesque, mountain that serves as the backdrop to most photos of the city's skyline. To get to the base, either drive or catch the Number 8 bus to Veyrier, then walk across the border to France (that's right, Saleve is not actually in Switzerland). Buy a ticket for the cable car, the Telepherique du Saleve (return trip 11.90 euros, or about 13), which will whisk you up to 3,600 feet. Enjoy the expansive views of the city, its lake and the Jura mountains in the distance, then set off on the two hour "balcony" hike, a gentle walk through forest and farmland that will reward you with views of Mont Blanc, if the weather's good. (Ask for a hiking guide when you buy your cable car ticket.) Wrap up your wanderings at L'Observatoire, a cozy restaurant that's about a 25 minute walk from the top of the cable car. Dive into a generous burger and fries as you rest your legs and take in the views. It's a popular spot on the weekend, so be sure to call ahead; ask for a table by the window. Lunch, about 20 to 25 euros. If you'd like to brush shoulders with some international pooh bahs, then book a room at the InterContinental, Geneva's go to spot for high level peace talks and news conferences. Double rooms without breakfast start from 367 francs. For a homier stay, consider the Hotel Auberge Communale in Carouge, which offers double rooms for 180 francs, breakfast included. Or to feel like a local, rent an apartment in either Plainpalais or Carouge, both lively and walkable neighborhoods with good transit links. Prices on Airbnb in those areas start from around 100 francs per night.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
What to Tell the Children About Their Inheritance and When JESSIE SPECTOR was determined to give away her inheritance as soon as she received it. She said her parents intervened and advised that, at 23, she should take time to think about it. What if she wanted to buy a house one day? When Naomi Sobel learned at 20 that she would receive a large inheritance, she said she knew it was a lot of money, and for her, too, it raised questions about a house: would it be enough to buy one? She laughs at this today, since it would have paid for many, many homes. "I have enough money that I don't ever have to work," said Ms. Sobel, now 28. Inheriting money would seem like one of life's unabashed blessings: someone gives you a lump sum just for being you. For the rest of us, inheritors seem like a democracy's version of royalty: born into a world of privilege we would love to know. Yet the inheritors I spoke to said they were ill equipped to handle the windfall and found that it quickly made them feel separate from their peers. I have written recently about very wealthy people taking advantage of the 5.12 million gift tax exemption to give their heirs money now and save on estate taxes later. But what makes the issue of inheritance broader is the amount of money that is expected to change hands at different levels of wealth. Accenture reported in June that baby boomers will leave 30 trillion to their children in the next 30 to 40 years. (This is on top of the nearly 12 trillion that MetLife predicted in 2010 that boomers would receive from their parents.) Regardless of the amount, the decisions surrounding bequests are routinely made to maximize tax benefits but often without any input from the people who will inherit the money. "I ask any dad, 'Do the kids know how much money you have?' " said Roy Williams, president of the Williams Group, which consults with families on transferring wealth. "Dad turns white and says, 'Are you kidding?' " Mr. Williams has outlined a plan to transfer wealth in the book he wrote with Vic Preisser, "Preparing Heirs: Five Steps to a Successful Transition of Family Wealth and Values" (Robert Reed Publishers, 2003). But he said it boiled down to parents' talking openly about the money. "When you're looking at it from a broader, more holistic perspective, you can say what are we trying to accomplish," he said. "If you don't define it as money and things but as our values, that's a huge, huge opportunity." Ms. Sobel, who works for the nonprofit Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, said she wished she had had a better sense of the size of her wealth earlier in her life. She found out all at once when her grandfather died and her mother was put in charge of the family affairs. She was a junior in college, and her mother flew out from New York to discuss the inheritance. "She took me to meet with the trustee of my trust," Ms. Sobel said. "He handed me a totally incomprehensible stack of documents, which I never referred to. A couple of months later we hired a financial adviser." At least her mother talked to her in person. Jason Franklin, now 32, said he received a call from his grandfather's secretary asking if he wanted to serve on the board of the family foundation. He was 21 at the time, and up until that point, he said he thought his parents were just affluent professionals like his friends' parents. The invitation prompted questions. "If your family has enough money to create a family foundation, that means you have to ask about issues of wealth," said Mr. Franklin, who works for a philanthropic consultancy. "It caused me to really pause. The reaction I was getting from my friends it was isolating and confusing." This reaction is pretty common. Coventry Edwards Pitt, chief wealth advisory officer at Ballentine Partners, said many of her clients did not talk about money with their children for fear that it would rob them of motivation, but silence about something so obvious leaves them trying to figure it out on their own. She said parents did not necessarily need to talk about numbers but should ask their children for their thoughts about the family's money. "Parents often think, oh, we're going to be embarking on this sophisticated wealth transfer strategy so maybe we should talk to them about investments and assets," she said. "When you ask the kids what they want to talk about, they say, 'Does this affect me now, or is this money I'm going to inherit when I'm 50?' " This was similar to how Ms. Sobel felt. "I didn't want to meet with people who were talking about investments," she said. "I was a gender studies major. I had a new girlfriend. I was doing activist work. This was something that had never been in my day to day, and I wanted to know why I had to prioritize it." What she wished was that her parents had talked to her more openly about how different their life was from everyone else's something that became apparent when she left Manhattan and landed at the University of Chicago. "My mom didn't feel comfortable talking about money," she said. That fell to her father, who was a public school teacher. "He tried to teach me how to fit into the world." What heirs should know and when is the question every parent wants answered, Mr. Williams said. "The biblical story about the prodigal son was really about a son who wasn't prepared," he said. "It's the same problem today." The better question parents should ask themselves, he said, is what they want to accomplish with the money. Waiting may result in a higher tax bill but could avoid generations of family discord. Jeff Ladouceur, director of solution development at SEI Private Wealth, said he sometimes suggested that parents give their children a small amount of money at an early age and see what happens. Beyond that, though, his best advice is to take their time. "People often talk about the values around money, that they want their kids to think about other people and they want them to be entrepreneurial," Mr. Ladouceur said. "That's a lot of talk. The more I talk, the more my kids zone me out. But if I exemplify the action, they seem to get it quicker." Ms. Spector, who is now 25 and works as the program director at Resource Generation, a group of socially minded young inheritors, said her parents had always been generous in helping out friends in need and being involved in their community. But her family had never talked about how much money was in the trust funds she and her cousins would receive. "For lots of us, we've not been given the tools to talk about money because it's not polite," she said. Yet she had the advantage of coming from a family that had been wealthy for generations and was able to advise her. This is where taking time to figure things out matters. Doug Ideker, 58, has spent the last nine years, since he sold his building supply company, Gypsum Products, working with his wife, Terrie, and their two sons to make sure their money is put to good use. "I felt a greater responsibility to make sure my kids knew what the expectations were and to make those expectations realistic," he said. Mr. Ideker said he was fortunate that his sons, 29 and 33, had seen him go to work every day and knew the sacrifices he had made in building his business. "But all of a sudden that stopped and there was this pool of money sitting there and they saw me throttle back," he said. "It would have been easy for them to think, 'Hey, this is pretty good.' To their credit, I don't think they ever thought that way." He added, "Terrie and I were very open and honest with them: they needed to be responsible citizens, they needed to create jobs, and they also knew that we had expectations that they would give back." That's a lesson that anyone can apply.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Italy has officially slipped into recession, and Europe as a whole is essentially at an economic standstill, raising anxieties that the world is on the verge of a significant slowdown. The timing could not be worse. The lousy performance of the Italian economy, reported on Thursday, is likely to aggravate relations between the European Commission and Italy's populist government, which has pursued spending policies widely regarded as irresponsible. Leaders on the Continent are already dealing with Britain's messy exit from the European Union. At the same time, China's economy is slowing, in part because of President Trump's trade war. The data published Thursday by official statistics agencies provided a glimpse of just how intertwined China and Europe have become, and how vulnerable that leaves the eurozone. This weakness, in turn, adds to risks facing the United States, which is Europe's top trading partner. In Italy, the government's debt load is one of the highest in the world. A prolonged economic slump would significantly add to the risk of default, with global repercussions. The European Central Bank has in the past come to the rescue of Europe, and Italy in particular, but it has less scope to do so now. The bank is scaling back its purchases of government bonds, a stimulus measure that helped ensure there were buyers for Italian government debt. "We have weaker economic momentum and at the same time the E.C.B. is getting out of the market," said Katharina Utermohl, an economist at German insurer Allianz. "That means there is less room for policy mistakes." Giuseppe Conte, the Italian prime minister, hardly reassured his European partners when he said Thursday that the economic setback had nothing to do with his government. The Italian economy shrank 0.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2018 compared with the third quarter, Istat, the Italian statistics agency, said. It was the second quarter in a row of declining output and that, by one common definition, means a recession. It is Italy's third since 2008. Growth in the eurozone itself was just 0.2 percent in the fourth quarter compared with the third quarter, the European Union statistics agency said. That rate matched the previous quarter's, and anemic as it is, it might have been worse but for Spain and France. Spain's economy grew at an unexpectedly strong clip, rising 0.7 percent in the fourth quarter compared with the third. And in France, where the government has been struggling with mass public protests over economic duress, growth hit 0.3 percent. 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. Economists agree with Mr. Conte on one point that China's woes are weighing on Europe. During the last decade, Europe profited from China's push to modernize its infrastructure. China equals the United States as a customer for heavy duty German machinery, like cranes, textile machines or equipment for steel mills, and companies like Volkswagen have made the country a priority. "It's our biggest market," said Ralph Wiechers, chief economist at the Mechanical Engineering Industry Association, which represents German machine manufacturers. "We still have growth, but we are noticing a lack of momentum." Critics of the Italian government blame its economic policies at home for its performance. Economists say the populist alliance has sowed uncertainty, prompting many Italians to spend less. A decline in consumer spending was a major culprit in the economy's setback. Carlo Cottarelli, a former director of the International Monetary Fund who led a spending review of the previous Italian government, reviewed the statistics on Thursday and said the alliance, in power since June, was responsible for Italy's slide. "This recession here, it can't be the fault of the previous government," he told a radio station in Padua. Italian business leaders have become bolder in their criticism, as seen Wednesday when Mr. Conte hinted to a powerful business association in the northern Lombardy region that the new economic figures might disappoint. Carlo Bonomi, the group's president, implored the prime minister to stop governing from the "easy street" of electoral politics, and to introduce responsible economic policies. "Stop this drift towards violence and hate, also rhetorical, that is starting to rend the fabric of Italian society," Mr. Bonomi said, in remarks broadcast on television news and in press reports. After the statistics of a new recession became official, the criticism spread. "We need to immediately open the construction sites," Vincenzo Boccia, president of the Confindustria business association, told reporters on Thursday. He added: "We need to react as soon as possible, so that we can compensate the external effect from the global economy." Some analysts said that economic pain could be the only way to break the spell cast by Italian populists. But others warned that a struggling economy helped set the conditions that fueled the extreme parties' rise. On Thursday, the Italian government wasted no time in blaming someone else, in this case, its predecessors. "Today's data from Istat show a fundamental thing, that those who were in government before us lied to us," said Luigi Di Maio, the political leader of the Five Star Movement and Italy's economic development minister, speaking at a party event. "They never got us out of the crisis."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
I thought about this one recent afternoon while I sat waiting for my turn to get my hair blown out in a crowded uptown salon. I thought of the 1939 film "The Women," with its famous scene in a beauty salon that serves as a hub of gossip and self care. I was living the modern version of that but couldn't wait to get out. For about 25 more I could have used Glamsquad or another app to summon someone to my apartment to style my hair while I listened to podcasts or pretended to work. I was ready to consider whether I could wean myself off salons entirely, if I could pull off trimming and coloring my own hair, when I heard about a new one that intrigued me. It's called Starring by Ted Gibson, and it's in Los Angeles (home, I recalled, to "Shampoo," one of the other great salon movies). In late 2016, the stylist Ted Gibson and his husband and business partner, the colorist Jason Backe, closed their 13 year old salon in the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan. A few months later, they left New York to try out life on the West Coast. Los Angeles life suited them, and they had no shortage of famous clients Angelina Jolie, Rachel Brosnahan, Priyanka Chopra, Anne Hathaway, Lupita Nyong'o, Jessica Chastain but they found themselves wanting to run a salon again. In February, the two opened Starring by Ted Gibson on South La Brea Avenue . They call it a smart salon. The space doesn't have normal chair and mirror stations but rather something they are calling "salon clouds," softly rounded room dividers designed by Francisco Gonzalez Pulido that are strangely suggestive of a vaginal canal. The lighting inside the clouds, powered by Amazon's Alexa, can be changed among soft light that resembles "sunrise," "daylight," "sunset," "twilight" and "moonlight" to see your hair in different settings. Or, you can have it violet or orange or any color of the rainbow. I asked Alexa to cycle through all the settings. My favorite was the green light, which indicated that it represented strength. The whole thing is made for selfies, which are encouraged. Written on the mirror in lipstick was starringhair, the desired hashtag. On a sign next to the mirror, you are reminded that you can also play Jeopardy or Would You Rather via Alexa. Even the window displays and espresso machine are shoppable via SmileCodes, on the Amazon app. A salon news release called it "Barneys meets 'Black Mirror.'" If this all sounds gimmicky, it is. Still, it's a novel way to experience a salon. I don't know if clouds and lights and the ability to scan products is the future, but what made the salon memorable was its timeless personal touch. There is no waiting area, for example. The salon is one open space with a sofa in front. I sat down with Mr. Gibson and Mr. Backe, and we talked about life in Los Angeles versus New York, weather and clothes, as if we were friends hanging out. There was no hurry to begin discussing my hair, no pressure to get down to business. We all got iced coffees at the cafe next door. It felt individual and civilized and a little bit old fashioned. This very pleasant experience comes with an eye popping price. Mr. Gibson charges 2,000 for a haircut; color with Mr. Backe will cost 450. But you don't have to be rich to set foot inside the salon. I was happy to learn that blowouts start at 50 with Michael Janda and Eric Leonardos, the two other stylists working in the salon, each with plenty of experience behind them. That price is competitive with the chains and within my budget. The question of my hair felt almost like an afterthought. I was on my way to a meeting and wasn't looking for any kind of big change, just a blow dry. I wanted my blond hair to look a little more clean, a little less frizzy and a little more polished than when I walked in. I had booked a blowout, and Mr. Gibson himself ended up doing it. He shampooed and conditioned my hair, then applied a generous amount of his Shooting Star Texture Meringue to it while still damp. "Feel it," he said, squirting a bit of the stuff in my hand. It had the texture of beaten egg whites but smelled like figs. He dried my layered curly hair with a diffuser. Mr. Gibson frequently works with Sandra Oh, whose curls I like to think are somewhat similar in texture to mine. What he had in mind for me was a style with more height than I am accustomed to. "Your hair looks Bette Midler in the '80s ," a stylist told me as I left. I thought my big hair was reminiscent of the 1980s doing the 18th century, like the movie "Amadeus." Was that the look I was going for? Maybe not, but the whole experience was so comfortable that I hardly cared. We Tried It Vibe Tech y and luxurious. Instead of a mere chair and mirror, you get your hair done in a "salon cloud" with lighting that can be changed at your whim by voice control. The salon's news release called it Barneys meets "Black Mirror." If you need inspiration, there are photos of celebrities and other beautiful people all over the place.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The global economy is showing signs of collapse, yet Apple said that its sales continued to rise and that it was buying back another 50 billion in stock. The tech giant has long been a bellwether for global industry, and investors will now hope that is still the case. Apple said on Thursday that its revenue rose nearly 1 percent to 58.3 billion in the first three months of the year, despite coronavirus lockdowns in China, where Apple assembles nearly all of its products and sells nearly a fifth of them. Apple said it more than compensated for a 7.5 percent decline in revenue in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong with surging sales of its internet services, like iPhone apps and Apple Music, as well as the Apple Watch and AirPods. Yet there are signs of a rougher path ahead. Analysts expect the current quarter to be much uglier because of the shutdowns across much of the world to combat the spread of the virus. "The supply chain is largely back up and running, but now the question is what kind of demand is there going to be for their products," said Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst with Bernstein Research who tracks Apple.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
I wanted to climb right through the screen into a seat a few rows from the stage. It was a visceral impulse, not a rational one. It paid no heed to impossibility, or even recent memory the feeling of unease that nagged in the last days before the theaters shut down, when from avidity and habit we kept packing the houses, breathing communal air. That was a scant two weeks ago, but it feels eons longer since we've learned to keep a cautious social distance. For now we seek our drama fixes online, trying to fill the empty space left by the temporary absence of the empty spaces. So a couple of recent evenings lately have found me peering into my laptop, watching plays that were digitally immortalized before the coronavirus thwarted their respective opening nights, and the runs that would have followed. Both Ren Dara Santiago's "The Siblings Play," a world premiere at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in New York, and Mike Lew's "Teenage Dick," a Chicago premiere at Theater Wit, are available for ticketed streaming a scrappily defiant, even noble insistence on the part of producers that the artists' work on their small stages not simply disappear. It is heartening that these recordings are there, and that the companies can earn some box office from them. But if you watch, you may arrive as I did at the conviction that you have not truly seen the plays. That's not the fault of the shows; it's a function of experiencing them through the filter of a medium they weren't constructed for. Glowing at me through my screen, they felt flattened and far away and, oh, how they made me wish I were in the room to sense all of their dimensions. Recordings of stage productions are frustrating by nature, pale relics of theater rather than theater itself. I hesitate to say that, because it is a brutal truth, and don't we all have enough of those in this strange pandemic time? The upside is the forceful argument these videos inadvertently make for the live experience for the undiminished necessity of coming together in person to see a story unfold. All the cliches about actors and audience as a single organism, about each performance being different from the one the night before: You feel in your bones the truth of them, watching a show that asks nothing of you because it has already taken place. Directed by Jenna Worsham for Rattlestick and Piece by Piece Productions, "The Siblings Play" comes off the better of the two partly because it is staged proscenium style, while Brian Balcom's alley style configuration for "Teenage Dick" put the live audience on either side, making it trickier to film. Set in Harlem, "The Siblings Play" is a drama about a family whose gritty dysfunction and just scraping by existence place them solidly in the tradition of Lucy Thurber, whose Hill Town Plays cycle was seen in part at Rattlestick, and who mentored Santiago during the development of "Siblings" in the Cherry Lane Theater's Mentor Project three years ago. The 17 year old Marie (Cindy De La Cruz); her big brother Leon (Ed Ventura); and their baby brother, 13 year old Marian (Mateo Ferro), are a tight group with a squabbling affection for one another. It's an alliance forged by the undependability of their parents, Lenora (Dalia Davi) and Logan (Andy Lucien), whose fractious chaos leaves the teenagers to fend for themselves. This is a play shaped by trauma, but on video its shifts into nightmares and flashbacks don't read properly, so the emotional tenor of the piece is off. Some of the trouble is simply the way that stage lighting can come across on video, stark or cheap or washed out even if it's impeccably done. In those moments, it feels like watching a translation in the wrong language. The magnetic Ferro, who is 18, is the main reason to see the recording nonetheless. In his hands, the science minded, tennis playing Marian is the linchpin of the family swaggeringly irreverent, endearingly funny, but vulnerable, too, in the way that kids can be when they're just starting to shed the chrysalis of childhood. Angelica Borrero's apartment set is also excellent; bonus points for the clever way she incorporates Rattlestick's upstage proscenium into the structure of the family's home. If "Teenage Dick" fares less well, it's not for lack of spirit. Where Rattlestick offers an unadorned online experience, Theater Wit bookends its screenings with a warm preshow tour of the building (oh, look, we're told: There's the lobby bar, which would be open if not for the pandemic) and a pitch for donations over a farewell drink with the cast. All of that is recorded. Then, if you like, you can join a live post show videoconference chat. The idea propelling all this is connection, yet the performance itself feels awfully remote. That's not, however, the fault of the actors in Lew's riff on "Richard III," whose Richard Gloucester (MacGregor Arney) isn't Shakespeare's ruthless duke, but rather a high school junior with cerebral palsy and a similar aptitude for scheming. In the room, surely, the experience was different. The spectators there could see, for example, the side wall where, I'm almost certain, quite a few tweets were projected. And when Richard danced with the graceful Anne Margaret (Courtney Rikki Green), that audience had a view of the actors' full bodies, which the camera repeatedly cuts off. That matters in a play that is so much about the way Richard is perceived for his physicality, and how it makes him perceive himself. Such framing is a shortcoming built into even the best of videotaped theater the high polish offerings of National Theater Live, the considerable catalog of the Wooster Group, the invaluable trove that is the New York Public Library's Theater on Film and Tape Archive. When theater is put on camera, the camera's eye controls our gaze. As the 24 Hour Plays' "Viral Monologues" have proved, that can work splendidly when the theater is made with the camera in mind. But videotaped shows created for the stage are artifacts, really, and as such maybe more valuable to history than to the present. When all this is past, these fresh additions will remain as evidence reminders of what the theater went through, and what we yearned for from a distance when we weren't allowed to gather.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
With the number of coronavirus cases down sharply in New York, the city began a gradual reopening this week. But in yet another sign that the full resumption of cultural life is still far off, the New York Philharmonic announced on Wednesday that it was canceling its fall season. "We're in a marathon," Deborah Borda, the orchestra's chief executive, said in an interview, adding: "It is possible we could lose this entire upcoming season. But we will do our best to find some way of doing some kind of performances. There must be live music for people." The decision not to resume performances before Jan. 6, 2021, at the earliest came the week after the Metropolitan Opera said it would not reopen before the end of December. Like the Philharmonic, the Met has been closed since March, and has furloughed its orchestra, chorus and stagehands and some administrative staff, while continuing to provide them with health benefits. But symphonies are smaller operations than grand opera companies, and the Philharmonic has been able to continue to pay its musicians. As they have since May, they will earn about 2,200 per week 75 percent of the orchestra's base pay through Sept. 21, when their current contract expires. The musicians and management plan to meet through the summer to negotiate a new contract.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
In the 2013 Modern Love essay "Rallying to Keep the Game Alive," Ann Leary's marriage to her husband, the actor Denis Leary, was on the rocks. They felt like competitors instead of partners, and couples counseling didn't seem to be helping. Headed for divorce, they suddenly found a path forward together, and Ms. Leary learned two lessons in love along the way. 1) Deciding to get divorced can be the key to staying married. 2) How you play tennis with each other matters. A lot. I recently caught up with four writers whose essays inspired episodes in the new "Modern Love" television series on Amazon Prime Video. (You can watch a clip below, and stream the full episode here.) You can also read my interviews with the writers Terri Cheney ("Take Me As I Am, Whoever I Am"), Deborah Copaken ("When Cupid Is a Prying Journalist") and Julie Margaret Hogben ("When the Doorman Is Your Main Man"). Daniel Jones: Your essay was about a rough patch in your marriage. Why did you decide to write about that? Ann Leary: People don't often write about marriages that almost don't work out. And in our case, no one, not even our kids, knew what was going on with us. We'd covered it up so well that our kids were astonished to hear that we ever had a hard part in our marriage. They were like, "Wait, what?" They had no idea. They were in middle school, high school, absorbed in their own thing. And we weren't screaming and hurting each other it was more like a cold war. But I was very aware it was a crisis. We walked out of this therapist's office declaring our marriage over, and everything felt very slowed down, but at the same time kind of crystallized in a way that makes you remember specific details, like the boots I was wearing and how hard it was to walk. How I needed to hold on to Denis after we left. Saying the marriage was over felt so dangerous and scary to us. It was something we'd been thinking about for so long, but once we said it, the whole world didn't vaporize or blow up. Sign up for Love Letter, our weekly email. And catch up on all things Modern Love. Right. You just went to get food. We were like, "Oh, now I'm hungry, let's go get something to eat." And the intensity of it just kind of went away. I even tried to keep it going by telling Denis it was all his fault, but he'd surrendered. He was like, "Sorry." And he meant it. He said, "I am sorry, but I can't do anything about that now." And I said, "Oh my God, I am too. You're right." And we ended up going to a movie. At the movies we often end up kind of entwined because Denis has really long legs, and we did that night. It was, but we loved it so much. Denis has helped me appreciate camera work in movies, which wasn't something I was normally aware of I'm more into story. So as we were watching, I was appreciating that aspect of it, as I knew he was, and suddenly I thought, "Who else would I want to watch this movie with?" I felt this other thing of value that I hadn't felt for a while. We both felt it. You bring up "The March of the Penguins" in your essay, which turns into a brilliant little scene in the TV episode. Where did that come from? That's another thing Denis and I had in common, that was our favorite movie. We love nature movies, and we cried and cried when we saw that. The episode's writer and director Sharon Horgan turns it into such a marvelous scene. When the essay was published I got a lot of emails. I had a website so strangers could email me. And so many people wrote, "I think I'm in a penguin marriage." Really? It became a thing? Yeah. They really related to it. So many people wrote to say, "We're trying to hold it together for the kids." Do you and Denis still play tennis together? Does he still play "Denis Tennis"? We still play. I started playing in a league, a women's doubles league. Denis plays more with a pro and likes to get more of a workout, but he's still really resistant to the rules. My kids will crack up, especially our son, Jack, who plays tennis really well, much better than us. But it's always been a joke like that Denis will still change the rules in the middle of the game. Even when he's playing a traditional game of tennis? Well, like he says it's not fair because he's not very good at serving. But him not being good at serving doesn't mean it's not fair. If you're bad at serving, you have to become better at serving! But no, we play but not as doubles partners. I think that's common with couples. Because if I'm partnered with my brother in law and he makes a mistake, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, don't worry." But if I'm with Denis and he misses a shot, I'm like, "What the hell?" We did reach a point where we started playing a lot of tennis one on one, and our marriage was improving, and I was aware of how much we were really pleased when the other did well. Right you were playing to extend the game, to keep playing. And there was something about therapy that wasn't in the column but should have been, which was that we kept thinking it was obvious what a disaster our marriage was, and our marriage counselor didn't think so. He thought we actually had an O.K. marriage. He pointed out that we would say things negative about each other, but if he said anything even slightly negative about either of us, we would jump to the other's defense. Yeah, for example, I'd say something and the shrink would say, "So you have an inclination to be a little negative." And Denis would jump in and say, "Negative? No she's not. I would never describe her as negative." And the same thing happened with me when the shrink was talking about him.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Allergic reactions reported in two health workers who received a dose of Pfizer's vaccine in Alaska this week have reignited concerns that people with a history of extreme immune flare ups might not be good candidates for the newly cleared shots. The two incidents follow another pair of cases in Britain. Three of the four were severe enough to qualify as anaphylaxis, a severe and potentially life threatening reaction. But all four people appear to have recovered. Health officials on both sides of the pond are vigilantly monitoring vaccinated people to see if more cases emerge. Last week, British drug regulators recommended against the use of Pfizer's vaccine in people who have previously had anaphylactic reactions to food, medicines or vaccines. And on Thursday, Dr. Doran Fink, deputy director of the Food and Drug Administration's clinical division of vaccines and related products applications, addressed the issue during a meeting about the vaccine made by Moderna that contains similar ingredients and is expected to soon receive emergency use authorization, or E.U.A., from the agency. "We anticipate that there may be additional reports, which we will rapidly investigate," Dr. Fink said, adding that robust surveillance systems were in place to detect these rare events. Still, Dr. Fink said that "the totality of data at this time continue to support vaccinations under the Pfizer E.U.A., without new restrictions." The F.D.A., he added, would work with Pfizer to revise fact sheets and prescribing information for the vaccine so that the public would understand the risk of allergic reactions and know how to report them. What do we know about the people who had bad reactions? The first two confirmed cases of allergic reactions came from two health care workers in Britain. Both had a medical history of serious allergic reactions, but had not previously been known to have trouble with any of the vaccine's ingredients. After an injection of epinephrine the typical treatment for anaphylaxis both recovered. On Wednesday, two health workers in Alaska experienced reactions as well. One was too mild to be deemed anaphylaxis. But the other, which occurred in a middle aged woman with no history of allergies, was serious enough to warrant hospitalization, even after she got a shot of epinephrine. "What is happening does seem really unusual to me," said Dr. Kimberly Blumenthal, an allergist, immunologist and drug allergy researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital. Vaccine related allergic reactions are typically rare, occurring at a rate of about one in a million. Dr. Blumenthal also pointed out that it was a bit bizarre to see allergic reactions clustering in just two locations: Britain and Alaska. Zeroing in on the commonalities between the two hot spots, she said, might help researchers puzzle out the source of the problem. Do we know for sure that their reactions were caused by the vaccine? British and U.S. agencies are investigating the causes, but no official has declared a direct link. But Dr. Blumenthal suspects they were connected to the shots, because the reactions were immediate, occurring within minutes of injection. "We have to think it was related because of the timing," she said. Nor is it known if a particular ingredient might have been the cause. Pfizer's vaccine contains just 10 ingredients. The most important is a molecule called messenger RNA, or mRNA genetic material that can instruct human cells to make a coronavirus protein called spike. Once manufactured, spike teaches the immune system to recognize the coronavirus so it can be fought off in the future. Messenger RNA, which is naturally found in human cells, is unlikely to pose a threat, and degrades within about a day of being injected. The other nine ingredients are a mix of salts, fatty substances and sugars that stabilize the vaccine. None are common allergens. The only chemical with a history of causing allergic reactions is polyethylene glycol, or PEG, which helps package the mRNA into an oily sheath, protecting it as it goes into human cells. But PEG is, generally speaking, inert and widespread. It's found in ultrasound gel, laxatives like Miralax and injectable steroids, among other drugs and products, Dr. Blumenthal said. Despite the chemical's ubiquity, she said, "I've only seen one case of a PEG allergy it's really, really uncommon." It's still possible that something else could be causing the reactions perhaps a factor related to how the vaccines are transported, thawed or administered, Dr. Blumenthal said. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. In an email, Steven Danehy, a spokesperson for Pfizer, said the company was working with health authorities to assess the situation in Alaska, and would keep close tabs on any subsequent reactions. "Reports of adverse events outside of clinical studies are a very important component to our pharmacovigilance activities and we will review all available information on this case and all reports of adverse events following vaccination," Mr. Danehy said. Did the volunteers in Pfizer's clinical trials have any bad reactions? A small number of volunteers in Pfizer's clinical trials experienced allergic reactions. Just one of the 18,801 participants who received the vaccine in a late stage trial had anaphylaxis, and the incident was deemed unrelated to the vaccine, said Steven Danehy, a spokesman for Pfizer. No severe reactions were found in people who got a placebo shot. Pfizer excluded people with a history of anaphylaxis to vaccines from its clinical trials. What does the F.D.A. say about these reactions? Several experts raised concerns about the allergic reactions in meetings convened to discuss both Pfizer's and Moderna's vaccines. The agency has advised caution, noting that health care providers should not administer the vaccine to anyone with a "known history of a severe allergic reaction" to any component of the vaccine a standard warning for vaccines. Should people with mild allergies wait to get vaccinated? There's no evidence that people with mild allergies, which are quite common, need to avoid the vaccine. Allergies are, simply put, the product of an inappropriate immune response against something harmless pollen, peanuts, cat dander and the like. In many cases, the results of this overreaction are mild symptoms such as a runny nose, coughing or sneezing. But allergies are specific: A reaction to one substance does not guarantee a reaction to another. On Monday, the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology released guidance stating that people with common allergies "are no more likely than the general public to have an allergic reaction to the Pfizer BioNTech Covid 19 vaccine." William Amarquaye, a clinical pharmacist at Brandon Regional Hospital, said he wouldn't let his asthma or allergies stop him from taking the vaccine when it is offered to him in the next few weeks. He's also never had trouble with other vaccines he has taken in the past. "It should still be OK to take the vaccine," Dr. Amarquaye said. "I'm actually excited about it." What about people with a history of severe allergies? Most people in this category should be good to go, too, said Dr. Eun Hyung Lee, an expert in allergy and immunology at Emory University. Guidelines released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identify only one group of people who might not want to get Pfizer's vaccine: those with a known history of severe allergic reactions to an ingredient in the injection. People with a history of anaphylaxis to any other substance, including other vaccines or injectable drugs, can still get the vaccine, but should consult their health care providers and be monitored for 30 minutes after getting their shots. Everyone else, like people with mild or no allergies, need to wait only 15 minutes before leaving the vaccination site. "In general, the immediate reactions that require epinephrine are those that happen within the first 30 minutes," said Dr. Merin Kuruvilla, an allergist and immunologist at Emory University. Some people will understandably be concerned. Dr. Taison Bell, a critical care physician at UVA Health in Charlottesville, Va., said he worried about his 7 year old son, Alain, who is severely allergic to several foods, including wheat, peanuts and cow's milk. Alain has about two bouts of anaphylaxis each year. It's a bit of a relief that Alain is "later in the prioritization schema," Dr. Bell said. By the time a vaccine is ready for him, he said, "we'll get a better sense for how serious this is." The family plans to discuss their situation with Alain's doctor.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Cities around the world are commemorating the anniversary of Leonardo's death, on May 2, 1519, with exhibitions, conferences and other events, including a private auction this fall of the first vintage made from a Milanese vineyard that once belonged to da Vinci. Prolific as da Vinci was in his writings, fewer than 30 paintings have been attached to his name, and about half of those have not been universally accepted as his autograph, raising the cachet of exhibiting an authentic masterpiece this year. Museums that own da Vincis have been ardently wooed to temporarily part with their masterpieces, with varying results. The Vatican Museums, for example, will lend "St. Jerome Praying in the Wilderness," to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an exhibition opening July 15, but the Uffizi Gallery of Florence has denied requests for its three da Vincis because they are too fragile to travel. Lara Anniboletti, a spokeswoman for the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, said the museum wanted to "offer its own contribution" to the da Vinci commemorations. "It made sense to ask the Hermitage for a work that would relate to this important event," she said. For the Poldi Pezzoli in Milan, the loan of the Litta Madonna is a bit of a homecoming: The Hermitage bought the painting in 1865, from the collection of Count Antonio Litta. Attribution of the work to da Vinci has not been unanimous, and at the Poldi Pezzoli, it will be shown alongside another work from the Litta collection, a "Virgin and Child" by Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, an artist who worked in da Vinci's Milanese studio and who has been identified by some experts as the Litta Madonna's possible author. Da Vinci spent his final years in France, which is why many of his paintings ended up in the Louvre. But he worked in Milan for 20 years when he painted the Litta Madonna and left a profound mark on the city. The Poldi Pezzoli exhibition will also include paintings and drawings by the artists in his circle.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
The PGA Tour returned from a three month layoff due to the coronavirus pandemic on Thursday. But to golf fans worldwide, the true measure, and appeal, of a tour event is a taut, nerve racking final round. If the scheduled 18 holes end in a tie at the top of the leaderboard that leads to a tenser, more jittery playoff, then all the better. On that count, professional golf got its wish on Sunday with a star studded leaderboard that included the game's top players, who alternately soared and stumbled in what was an entertaining close to an eventful week for the sport. The Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth began with the 148 players in the field successfully passing tests for the coronavirus. Then, near the beginning of each of the four rounds, players, caddies and officials at the golf course paused for a moment of silence in honor of George Floyd, whose death in Minneapolis police custody has sparked protests worldwide. Next, the golfers adapted to a new condition of tournament play: competition without fans. In the end, a one hole playoff on Colonial's 17th hole ended with a rising star on the tour, Collin Morikawa, 23, missing a short par putt that handed the championship to Daniel Berger, another surging young player who has had to overcome serious, career threatening injury. Berger clinched his berth in the playoff with a twisting birdie putt on the 72nd hole of the event. Morikawa could have clinched victory on the same 18th green, but missed a 3 foot putt. Berger, 27, whose playoff record before Sunday was 0 2, commiserated with Morikawa. "Obviously, I didn't want to win it like that, but sometimes that's just the way golf goes," said Berger, who now has three tour victories in his career and four top 10 finishes in 2020. "To be able to come out here and beat so many of the best players in the world you look at the field that was out here this week and I don't have a stellar playoff record so to show up here this way, I'm very proud of myself." Morikawa explained afterward that he struck the putt on the 18th hole as he intended, but had misread the break of the green. Of his missed playoff putt, he simply said, "Just not a good putt." The world's top ranked player, Rory McIlroy, began the day with a chance to catch the leaders, but bogeyed the first hole, the course's easiest. Things went downhill from there. Playing at Colonial for the first time, he bogeyed the fourth, fifth and ninth holes and double bogeyed the seventh, taking himself out of contention early. He finished with a four over par 74. Playing with McIlroy was DeChambeau, who was as buoyant as his partner was dispirited. DeChambeau had played the event four times and made the cut only once. He teed off Sunday three strokes behind Schauffele, the third round leader, but with five birdies in a nine hole stretch near the middle of his round, he charged into a tie for the lead. DeChambeau's 145 yard approach shot to the 17th green flew long and into a difficult spot to chip from behind the hole. He did not recover well from that predicament, and the ensuing bogey dampened his momentum. Still, he had a chance to get into the playoff with a birdie attempt on 18 that he nearly holed. DeChambeau, whose newly enhanced, musclebound upper body allowed him to smash towering drives that overpowered the venerable Colonial layout, was not cowed by his final hole failings. "If I had putted well," he said afterward, "I would have won by a lot this week. I'm very encouraged." Berger's comeback comes after a confusing, debilitating injury sustained in 2018. After tying for a sixth place finish at the 2018 United States Open, he felt pain in his right index finger after hitting a shot at the tour's next event, the Travelers Championship. Berger tried playing through the pain for months, but the discomfort not only got worse, it led to an inflammation of his right wrist. An extended rest was the medically recommended course of action. While Berger made strides in 2019, it wasn't until this spring that he seemed to regain his old form, with a tie for ninth, a tie for fifth and a tie for fourth in three successive tour events. Berger said the health setbacks to his career helped motivate him. "There was so many times today where I could have given it up or let the pressure get to me," he said. "But I hung in there and I played practically some of the best golf I've played during the last six years in the last five holes today." Harold Varner III an early tournament leader who is one of the few black golfers on the elite professional tours and who was vocal last week in the discussion in golf about racial injustice began the day in contention but had some costly missteps in the middle of his round on Sunday. He shot 72 and finished tied for 19th. Jordan Spieth, the three time major champion whose game before the shutdown had been wildly inconsistent for several months, concluded what was an uplifting tournament for him with an uneven 71 that included four birdies and five bogeys. He finished tied for 10th. Spieth was nonetheless feeling refreshed, and not just because he was back playing competitive golf again. "I definitely see progress," Spieth said. "I knew coming in that I didn't have all the tools. Didn't have all my weapons yet. But I certainly gained more this week, gained a lot of confidence."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
I was on my fourth J. Crew when I noticed it, the small signage that explained the large problem that is bedeviling this company, and many like it. It was on a table of men's pants on the second floor of the Rockefeller Center store. The pants, khaki chinos ( 68), were fine a little stiff, maybe, but not irredeemable. The sign next to them, though, offered a different value proposition. This is, at best, patronizing, a way of communicating to your customers that you know better than they do. Grab a pair or two of these pants, and maybe a couple of these shirts (another sign was on that table) and never again devote a moment of critical thought to your wardrobe acquisition! Do you see the problem here? I may be at the extreme end of the yes brainer approach to shopping, but consumers are better informed and more curious than ever, and taking a stand, even a casual one, against that movement indicates a kind of frailty of imagination. It also suggests a lack of confidence in the idea that people, given a range of options and a functioning occipital lobe, would choose your products. It is the language of discount retailers, a category that J. Crew, for the last decade or so, has tried aggressively to distance itself from. It has done so with help from thoughtful architects of creative vision Jenna Lyons on the women's side, Frank Muytjens on men's wear and some savvy marketing. For a time in the early 2010s, as the men's wear boom was beginning and Michelle Obama was visibly supporting the brand, J. Crew thrived by delivering an accessible version of high fashion. The company is now in upheaval. Both Ms. Lyons and Mr. Muytjens have left (been pushed out?) in recent months, as the company slumps financially. What of the clothes, though? I visited five J. Crew stores to try to understand, at ground level, what was causing the company's woes, or better, how those woes were expressed in the clothes. At the Columbus Circle women's store, I spied one garment that appeared to encapsulate it all: an off the shoulder blue and white pinstripe shirt cloth top, tied at the waist, and with emerald color beads embellishing the front of the top in small, splattered patterns ( 118, with a satchel of extra beads, though you could hardly do more damage to the top). This was neither luxe nor cheap. It existed in a hinterland of chintz and misguided aspiration. Much of this season's women's clothing fell in that screaming loud and saying little category, with a few exceptions: a pair of multicolored raffia slides ( 88) that was fit for Tulum, Mexico, and a voluminous summer dress, made with Thomas Mason shirting, that looked like the outfit for an "Amelie" reboot in Savannah, Ga. ( 298). But in the main, and in spite of the searingly bright colors on display, the women's half of J. Crew felt curiously blank and directionless, neither sophisticated nor appealingly accessible. Striking that balance had been Ms. Lyons's skill, but that skill is both more widespread and also less essential now. What we want from fashion is more varied than it was a decade ago. This iteration of J. Crew was perfect for the first wave of internet driven fashion interest, when being slightly smarter and more modern than the other centrist brands was enough. But it is no longer sufficient. Once the internet made it easier to see more, to learn more, and to buy more widely, J. Crew began to feel fusty. It was too slow moving for those who were paying close attention, and a little too rich for those who do indeed look for no brainers. Which brings me back to the piles. At Rockefeller Center and Columbus Circle, there were pants and shirts piled inches high, the retail equivalent of a shrug. Piles, especially ones where several different colors or patterns are mixed together, communicate indifference, and also the low value of any one individual item. If it can be hidden in a pile, it most likely has little to offer. One of J. Crew's solutions to that problem, at least with men's clothing, has been to create stand alone locations that give the clothes a little more space to breathe. Two are in TriBeCa: the Ludlow Shop, which focuses on suiting, and the Liquor Store, which when it opened in 2008 felt radical for its reconstruction of the men's shopping space into something more folksy yet still nouveau riche. These stores maintain some of the imagination that propelled J. Crew out of the middlebrow into the upper middlebrow, though they have their own limitations. When the Liquor Store first opened, it had a glint of attitude to it, though that has been largely washed away. Instead, this is a narrow outlet for basics, both by J. Crew and other brands Izod, Norse Projects, Vans and more that aim for painless outfitting. The lighting is low, the space cramped. Once there was a sense you might find a gem hiding here, but now it just feels cluttered though I did find one gem: a sturdy, military esque navy overcoat by FDMTL ( 483) that was, quite literally, shoved behind some patchwork shirts on a hook by the front door.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
PARIS European factories ramped up their output of consumer durable goods in June, official data showed Tuesday, and economists said the news signaled an end to the recession that has made the Continent the laggard of the world economy. Industrial production in the 17 nation currency zone rose 0.7 percent in June from May, Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Union, reported from Luxembourg. The agency also revised down the size of the decline in May to 0.2 percent, from 0.3 percent. On Wednesday, Eurostat is scheduled to release its first estimate of second quarter gross domestic product, and expectations for good news were supported by the results of a survey that showed growing confidence in Germany. The ZEW institute, an economic research organization based in Mannheim, said its economic sentiment indicator had risen to 42.0 points, up by 5.7 points from July, and well above its historical average of 23.7.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Dec. 7 12. Details and times are subject to change. THE CALL OF THE WILD (2020) 7 p.m. on HBO Family. This latest adaptation of Jack London's 1903 novel, about a dog getting de domesticated in the Yukon, has a pair of very expensive stars. One is Harrison Ford. The other is Buck, a cutting edge computer generated canine. "Pondering this interspecies communion between a craggy star and a digital dog (based on a man playing a dog) may prompt howls into an existential void," Ben Kenigsberg wrote in his review for The Times. "But as the basis for a family crowd pleaser, the pairing is often irresistible." INDEPENDENT LENS: CHARM CITY (2018) 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The documentarian Marilyn Ness looks at violent crime in Baltimore and some of the people working to fight it in this affecting documentary. Picking up a few months after the death of Freddie Gray in 2015, Ness follows subjects on multiple sides of the issue, including community organizers, a cop and a councilman. The resulting film "captures up close the way violence transforms neighborhoods and families with an immediacy that transcends headlines or sensationalism," Ben Kenigsberg wrote in his review for The Times. ZZ TOP: THAT LITTLE OL' BAND FROM TEXAS (2019) 8 p.m. on Reelz. If you were directing a documentary about the rock band ZZ Top, where would you start it? With a childhood image of the band's founding lead guitar player, Billy Gibbons, pre beard? With contemporary footage of the group, now eligible for senior discounts, tearing through "Sharp Dressed Man"? Sam Dunn, the director of this recent documentary about the band, doesn't do either: He shows footage of Texas landscapes, with a recording of the early 20th century Texas blues singer Henry Thomas playing over it in a nod to the way both Texas and early blues shaped ZZ Top's sound. The movie covers the band's decades long career, from before the release of their first album in 1971 (aptly titled "ZZ Top's First Album") to the present day. That's a lot of ground to cover. As Gibbons told The Times in 2005: "We've been in this band longer than school, longer than marriage, longer than anything else we've ever done." DR. SEUSS' THE GRINCH MUSICAL 8 p.m. on NBC. Families looking for a contemporary take on Dr. Seuss's lean, mean, green Christmas gift stealing machine have several options to choose from, including movie versions with Benedict Cumberbatch and Jim Carrey. They'll get a fresh one this year in the form of this televised production of the Grinch musical, with the Broadway star Matthew Morrison. KISMET (1955) 6 p.m. on TCM. For a musical with vintage CinemaScope flair, consider this film version of the 1953 Broadway musical comedy "Kismet." This version of the story, about a poet (Howard Keel) scouring Baghdad looking for a rich suitor for his daughter (Ann Blyth), was brought to the screen by Vincente Minnelli, just a few years after Minnelli directed "An American in Paris." Bosley Crowther, in his 1955 review for The Times, was underwhelmed. Minnelli, he wrote, directs the script "as though it were the marching orders for the Macy parade." He added that the film "moves at a ponderous tempo, as though it is meant to give all the spectators a chance to see it fully as it goes by." ONE NIGHT ONLY: THE BEST OF BROADWAY 8 p.m. on NBC. Tina Fey will host this two hour special, a benefit show for the nonprofit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. The broadcast is slated to include outdoor performances by the cast members from several Broadway musicals, including "Ain't Too Proud," "Chicago" and "Jagged Little Pill." Kelly Clarkson, Brett Eldredge and Patti LaBelle will also perform, alongside appearances by a roster of other celebrity guests. MICHAEL KOSTA: DETROIT. NY. LA 11 p.m. on Comedy Central. As a correspondent on "The Daily Show," the comic Michael Kosta has found creative ways to make humor in quarantine this year, including hosting a "travel show" from his apartment. This stand up special, filmed before the pandemic, finds Kosta making city specific jokes on more traditional stages in Los Angeles, Detroit and Manhattan, where he offers his interpretation of New York's fabled unsleeping energy: "It's not energy, you idiots, it's panic." THE BEE GEES: HOW CAN YOU MEND A BROKEN HEART (2020) 8 p.m. on HBO. When the Bee Gees had their first hit song, "Spicks and Specks," in the 1960s, the band's three sibling members Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb were all under 21. "We were still kids, and we were still very naive," Barry Gibb said in a recent interview with The Times. "I don't think the naivete went away for a long time." The peaks and valleys of the career that followed which included an effective breakup, then a dive into disco are the subject of this new documentary, directed by Frank Marshall. COUPLES THERAPY: THE COVID SPECIAL 8 p.m. on Showtime. The coronavirus pandemic's effects on romantic relationships sometimes working as a catalyst, sometimes as an extinguisher has been discussed and written about at length. But this special should offer some particularly palpable case studies. The first season of "Couples Therapy," a Showtime docuseries, followed Dr. Orna Guralnik, a therapist, as she ran in person sessions with various couples. Dr. Guralnik moves to video chat for this new entry, offering a look at both the pressures of pandemic romance and the ups and downs of remote therapy. "Scripted shows have of course given us plenty of insightful, probing therapists and complex, resistant to change patients," Margaret Lyons wrote in The Times when the show debuted last year. "The power here is the reality of it all, the rawness and ridiculousness of the human condition."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
WASHINGTON In November 2016, Dipayan Ghosh was still reeling from Hillary Clinton's defeat as he left what was supposed to be a celebration party at the Javits Convention Center in New York to attend morning meetings for his job at the Washington offices of Facebook. As Mr. Ghosh, a former White House technology adviser to President Barack Obama, made the four hour drive, troubling questions started nagging him. What if fake news on Facebook and other sites had an impact on voters? How did the campaigns and any outsiders use ads on the site to influence the election? A few months later, Mr. Ghosh quit his job at Facebook, where he worked on privacy and public policy issues. On Tuesday, a Washington think tank, New America, and Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy published a report he co wrote, asserting that technology behind digital advertising the financial lifeblood of Facebook, Google and Twitter has made disinformation campaigns more effective. "The problems were much broader than we imagined, and it was not just about one tool or platform," said Mr. Ghosh, who with his co author, Ben Scott, worked on devising Mrs. Clinton's tech policy platform. "It's the profit model underlying the whole digital advertising system." Mr. Ghosh and Mr. Scott are the latest members of the political party that more eagerly embraced Silicon Valley to sharply criticize the tech industry. Tech policy officials from the Obama administration and from Mrs. Clinton's campaign, as well as prominent Democrats in Congress, are demanding changes from companies they had long viewed as too important and nimble for regulations. Senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota are demanding greater disclosures from companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter for political advertising on their sites. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who has big political backers from Silicon Valley, fears the biggest companies have edged out competition. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut has called for the Federal Trade Commission to restart an antitrust investigation into Google. And Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota has introduced a bill that would update antitrust policies to take more direct aim at the tech sector. "Democrats and progressives still strongly feel that there are shared values with Silicon Valley, but there is also a real concern over the industry's increasingly concentrated wealth and power," said Daniel Sepulveda, an ambassador and deputy assistant secretary at the State Department for the Obama administration. Karen Kornbluh, who served as Mr. Obama's ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said that before the election, there was a view of "internet utopianism" in government. Officials looked to the internet to solve problems in education, income inequality and global democracy. They called on tech executives to help with those initiatives and hired from Google and other tech outfits to bring their expertise into the White House. "So if you were championing the best things about the internet, it was easy to be disappointed that it was hijacked to subvert the very things it could foster," Ms. Kornbluh said. But she said few people in government were looking with a full view of how social media and other internet services posed national security, economic and other risks. Mr. Ghosh and Mr. Scott played a leading role in helping to create the tech friendly policies that helped companies like Facebook and Google flourish during the Obama administration. But as more information trickled out about the role played by technology firms in Russia's attempts to influence the presidential election, they, like many Democrats, became disillusioned. "We were always careful to condition our optimism and our advocacy that this technology was potentially a double edged sword," said Mr. Scott, who is a senior adviser to the Open Technology Institute at New America. "But I guess we didn't expect them to hit home quite as hard as it did." Titled " DigitalDeceit: Exposing the Internet Technologies of Precision Propaganda," their report argues that the interests of internet giants in helping advertisers run persuasive campaigns are aligned with those of someone looking to spread misinformation. The authors suggest a few ways to regulate the advertising technology industry, including requiring more transparency for political advertising, restricting data collection or ad targeting on political issues, and strengthening consumer protection and competition policies. Republicans have also expressed concerns about internet giants. Many on President Trump's campaign suspected that Google rigged search results in favor of Mrs. Clinton, questioning the influence of high profile supporters of hers like Eric Schmidt, who is the former executive chairman of Google's parent company, Alphabet. They were outraged by claims that Facebook manipulated its trending topics feature to push down results related to Republicans. But increasingly, the most vocal criticism is coming from Democrats. Tom Wheeler, Mr. Obama's head of the Federal Communications Commission, recently called for social media firms to make it easier to figure out how certain information goes viral, who is sending those posts and what impact that activity may have. "The internet was once heralded as the great democratizing tool," Mr. Wheeler said. "That vision was smashed by the algorithms of the social media platforms." Last year, Google, Facebook and Twitter admitted that groups with ties to the Kremlin had used their online services to push false news stories or controversial headlines on divisive topics. In some cases, those groups amplified their reach by buying ads. On Friday, Twitter said it had found more than 50,000 Russian linked accounts tweeting election related content in the 10 weeks preceding the vote. Twitter said it would email notifications to 677,775 people in the United States who followed, retweeted or liked tweets from accounts linked to propaganda efforts by the Internet Research Agency, a shadowy Russian company linked to the Kremlin. But Mr. Ghosh and Mr. Scott said it would be a mistake to focus solely on the Russians. They argued that the tools used by the Russians could easily be applied to other misinformation campaigns. In the same way digital advertising campaigns spend relatively small sums of money to reach millions of people, any party with an interest in swaying sentiment can gain access to reams of behavioral data on the internet to target specific audiences. Improvements in artificial intelligence for digital advertising could allow for more precise audience targeting and make the problem even worse, they said. Fundamentally, the problem is that "disinformation campaigns and legitimate advertising campaigns are effectively indistinguishable on leading internet platforms, " Mr. Ghosh and Mr. Scott wrote. This month, Mr. Ghosh's former employer, Facebook, announced changes to what its more than two billion members would see most often. The company said it would give what users' friends and family shared priority over content from publishers and brands, with the goal of delivering a more positive experience on Facebook.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
THE DEATH OF POLITICS How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump By The presidency of Donald Trump offends on many levels, but most of all as someone who takes ideas and words seriously. A former speechwriter for George W. Bush who also served in the administrations of Bush's father and Ronald Reagan, Wehner is horrified at the way the president uses words "to murder the very idea of truth." Trump, Wehner writes in "The Death of Politics," his lament for the state of our civic discourse, "embodies a Nietzschean morality rather than a Christian one." Up until the point he feigned religiosity to secure the votes of evangelical Christians, Trump would likely have agreed with this brutal character assessment. Which brings us to the other plane on which the current presidency represents an affront to Wehner: traditional morality. One of evangelical Christianity's most thoughtful political communicators, Wehner is appalled at the way in which his coreligionists have so enthusiastically backed Trump, voting for a thrice married, loutish beauty pageant producer in higher numbers than they did for Bush, a born again Christian "who spoke easily and openly about his relationship with Christ." The rise of Trump, and the slavish devotion he inspires among leading evangelicals, has forced Wehner to consider seriously something he had always deemed a secular slander: that "both politics and the Christian witness are now made worse by people of faith actively involving themselves in politics." Wehner attributes this degeneration to the adoption of an all or nothing mentality by his fellow evangelicals, for whom eight years of Barack Obama were apparently so catastrophic that a figure like Trump could emerge as the country's improbable savior. Wehner excoriates this apocalyptic rationalization, naming and shaming a slew of evangelical personalities who have issued "defenses of Trump that range from rhapsodic to ridiculous." He singles out the former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, who privately joked about murdering Pat Buchanan during the latter's insurgent 1996 Republican presidential primary campaign against Bob Dole, and yet is today an important ally of a president who essentially ran on Buchanan's platform of nativism, protectionism and racial resentment. Noticeably absent from his critique is former Education Secretary William Bennett, who launched Wehner's career when he invited him to join the Reagan administration. The author of, among other pious tomes, "The Book of Virtues," "The Book of Virtues for Young People," "The Children's Treasury of Virtues" and "The Moral Compass," Bennett ranks as a particularly shameless pro Trump pundit.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
MANCHESTER, England The play's not quite the thing at this year's Manchester International Festival. A showcase for homegrown and international art in this former industrial capital, it is unique in Britain for its interdisciplinary reach. Alongside the profusion of performance and visual arts, however, theater remains the festival's main focus, and its opening weekend highlighted two ambitious yet flawed world premiere productions. Idris Elba and Kwame Kwei Armah's "Tree" arrived at the festival under a cloud of controversy, after two writers claimed that their work on the play hadn't been properly acknowledged or compensated. Both of the show's creators deny the accusations. Mr. Kwei Armah is the artistic director of the Young Vic theater in London, where the show will transfer later this month. He has collaborated with Mr. Elba, best known as an actor, on this semi autobiographical tale about a young mixed race man in London who sets off for South Africa to uncover the truth about his family. All of this is far more engaging than the play itself, whose ideas are thinly dramatized and whose characters are barely developed. It is a visually and musically bold evening, but the script takes a back seat to the production's immersive ambitions. In place of development and dramatic tension, the play offers wooden dialogue that even the most seasoned members of the cast can't transcend. But Lucy Briggs Owen comes closest as the protagonist's white mother, who is glimpsed in the play's numerous (and awkwardly inserted) flashbacks and dream sequences . Whether by accident or design, "Alphabus," a spoken word and dance piece by Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray, felt like a miniature version of "Tree." Across the street at the Great Northern Warehouse, the audience was once again arrayed around a raised platform to watch this brisk hourlong production, which combined poetry, flexing a virtuosic street dance style and beats to weave a modern fable about the origin of language. The dialogue was frequently lofty, but it felt less out of place than the grand pronouncements in "Tree," a show that made a greater claim to realism. Drama, dance and music were whipped together in an even more crazy quilt way in "Invisible Cities," a colossal production inspired by Italo Calvino's classic novel of the same name. It was directed by Leo Warner, who seems to have been given an unlimited budget for this cosmic romp of sensory overload. Imposingly staged inside Mayfield, a former railway station, the elaborate production felt as exhausting as a two hour Disneyland ride. And with its CGI projections and adventure film soundtrack, it better captured the spirit of a video game than the poetic wit of the innovative Italian fabulist. Calvino's slim novel is a travelogue through 55 imaginary cities conjured up by Marco Polo, presented in a dialogue between the Venetian explorer and the emperor Kublai Khan. At Mayfield, the audience watches their exchange from stadium bleachers on four sides of a massive set. Dizzying projections continually light it up to depict both Khan's palace and the chimerical metropolises conjured by the explorer. An endless assortment of computer animated landscapes caverns, deserts, tropical forests and so on are projected onto curtains that ring the entire set during scene changes. When the second act curtain rises on an actual waterway built through the stage to depict a Venetian canal , the effect is momentarily staggering until the real water begins to move and overflow by means of digital trickery. Why does an onstage pool need to be digitally enhanced? The production's bulwark against this CGI frenzy is Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, a prolific Flemish Moroccan choreographer, who here directs the London based modern dance company Rambert. Flamboyant, sweaty, virtuosic and precise, the evocative choreography provides the lion's share of the evening's artistic excellence. With dazzling inventiveness, the 22 dancers assemble themselves as ferocious beasts, tangle themselves up in elastic bands in an elaborate game of cat's cradle and walk nimbly on stilts. They evoke the invisible cities far more effectively than any amount of expensive technology. But the choreographic inventiveness tumbles forth at a frantic clip. As with everything in "Invisible Cities," less would have been more. Everything, including the epic music and the thick sound design, ensures that there is never any space for quiet contemplation. The production seems beset by panic at the thought of the audience being less than wowed at all times. There was more room for reflection in "Atmospheric Memory," an immersive multimedia installation by the Mexican Canadian artist Rafael Lozano Hemmer that is the most ambitious art project at this year's festival. Housed in a huge chamber assembled from shipping containers on the grounds of the Science and Industry Museum, the labyrinthine exhibit is itself a kind of "invisible city." Cascading overhead lights usher the visitor down a hallway thick with 3,000 audio channels of natural and industrial sounds that leads to a temple like exhibition space, where works inspired by Charles Babbage, the 19th century English polymath sometimes considered the "father of the computer," are on show . Babbage theorized the atmosphere around us as a vast library containing every utterance ever breathed, and he dreamed of a device that would enable us to decode those voices hidden in the ether. In the most visually arresting (and coolest) section of "Atmospheric Memory," visitors speak into a microphone the names of things that they would like to see disappear. Those words and phrases then appear written in water vapor on a wall length display, where they hover for several seconds before evaporating. While I stood looking at the display, a visitor bent over to whisper his wishes. Seconds later, "Hunger" and "Donald Trump" materialized and vanished into thin air. The festival's attempt to connect with contemporary issues also included Sunday's daylong program to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre, a watershed moment in British democracy, in which a cavalry charged into peaceful protesters demanding parliamentary representation in St. Peter's Square in central Manchester. Fifteen people were killed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
After weeks of reporting, a journalist breaks a story. Moments after it goes online, another media organization posts an imitative article recycling the scoop that often grabs as much web traffic as the original. Publishers have complained about this dynamic for years, ever since the explosion in digital news obliterated the daylong exclusive enjoyed in the print era. On Thursday, Google said that it had made changes to its search algorithm to give an advantage to "original reporting" that would be reinforced by changes in other guidelines. In a blog post, Richard Gingras, Google's vice president of news, said the changes to the company's search guidelines would help it to "better recognize original reporting" and make it more visible on the internet. "This means readers interested in the latest news can find the story that started it all," Mr. Gingras wrote, "and publishers can benefit from having their original reporting more widely seen." In a phone interview on Thursday, Mr. Gingras acknowledged that the shift was in Google's own interest. "We do everything here with Google Search and Google News to continue to earn and retain the trust of our users," he said. Google and other major tech platforms have lately come under scrutiny and federal antitrust investigations in part because of their influence over the digital news industry. Google, Facebook and Amazon reap most of the available online advertising revenue. The News Media Alliance, a trade group, has been sharply critical of the tech companies and has lobbied lawmakers for a limited antitrust exemption that would enable outlets to bargain collectively with the platforms. In turn, several platforms have signaled a willingness to work with publishers. Facebook has pitched an initiative to license articles from major publishers and display them in a "News" tab. The Apple News app has made deals with some media companies, including Conde Nast, to highlight their articles and split revenue. David Chavern, the News Media Alliance chief executive, welcomed Google's announcement but cautioned that he had to wait to see how the changes were carried out. "Google search results have not rewarded investments in journalism," Mr. Chavern said in a phone interview Thursday. "If we can get to a place where they do better, that's good." 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. Google seemed to acknowledge with Thursday's changes that publications that dig up new information could use some help from the platforms. "Some stories can also be both critically important in the impact they can have on our world and difficult to put together, requiring reporters to engage in deep investigative efforts to dig up facts and sources," Mr. Gingras said in the post. "These are among the reasons why we aim to support these industry efforts." The guidelines from Google would also elevate outlets known for a history of accurate reporting, considering metrics like how many journalism awards a publication has won. Several tech platforms, including the Google owned YouTube, have been criticized for seeming to promote sensational content with no basis in fact. Soon after the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., for instance, the No. 1 trending video on YouTube tapped into false theories that the survivors of the shooting were "crisis actors." That kind of inflammatory content may attract views in the short run while damaging the reputation of any company that makes it widely available. The three examples of hard news articles Mr. Gingras noted in his post were published by large outlets: the Suddeutsche Zeitung in Munich, The Washington Post and The New York Times. It was unclear what the algorithm change would mean for publications in small and midsize cities that have struggled in recent years while trying to transition from print to digital. Google, Mr. Gingras said, is putting "increased effort into, How do we do right by local outlets?" He cited reporting on natural disasters as the type of local coverage that could benefit from the changes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
THE ONES WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America By Charlotte Alter The first wave of millennials tech savvy and type A, thanks to hovering boomer parents is on the cusp of holding real political power. The number elected to Congress jumped from 6 to 26 in 2018, and mayoral offices and city councils are suddenly filled with them. More than one is running for president. How this generation will wield power to change America when it fully acquires that power is the question Charlotte Alter, a national correspondent for Time, sets out to answer in "The Ones We've Been Waiting For." To examine the issue, Alter retraces the careers of 10 elected millennials, weaving their voices together to describe the defining moments that unite this generation, from Sept. 11 to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. We see the progressive icon and Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and her family deal with the aftermath of the 2008 crash; the presidential candidate and former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg pondering "generational purpose" while staring at a cloudless sky as a Harvard undergraduate on Sept. 11; and the Republican representative Dan Crenshaw losing his eye in Afghanistan. We also meet some less well known, up and coming leaders, like Svante Myrick, who at the age of 24 became the youngest and first person of color to be elected mayor of Ithaca, N.Y., and Braxton Winston, a 30 something Charlotte, N.C., City Council member who ran for office after protesting police shootings of black people. Saddled with student debt, freaked out by climate change and school shootings, and driven by a sense that their parents aren't going to fix any of these problems, millennials, Alter suggests, are ready to harness their political potential. She does an excellent job detailing with persuasive data what has shaped and motivated this young generation so far. The recession is "an invisible postscript" that explains how millennials have been economically disadvantaged. The low salaries and scarcity of jobs that confronted many of us upon graduating from college meant it took us much longer than previous generations to find our way in the world, to say nothing of repaying loans we took out for our very expensive degrees. By the time jobs began to come back, in 2012, Alter writes, employers were looking for younger, cheaper graduates, leaving some of us stuck in underemployment. The "forever war" has inextricably colored how we view American foreign policy: Millennials are far less likely than boomers to think the United States should get involved in the affairs of other countries. And how we use technology has transformed the way we organize politically. As Alter points out, movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter began on the internet. (We also learn that Buttigieg's early internet use in college consisted mostly of "just logging on to WNDU.com to look at a grainy picture of South Bend," a detail that will stay with me for a long time.) Alter is upfront about the fact that we don't yet know what a millennial political revolution might look like, writing that "by learning where they've been, we can get a sense of where we're going." The great millennial takeover is very much a work in progress; the average age of our congressional leaders still hovers in the 70s, and Senator Bernie Sanders (age 78) continues to poll highly among young voters in the Democratic primary far higher than Buttigieg, who remains unpopular with voters under 35. Alter's story is moving faster than she can write it. She depicts the young Republican representative Elise Stefanik, of New York, for instance, as trying to keep Trump at a safe distance but not be out of step with her party. However, with Trump's impeachment, Stefanik has transformed into one of Trump's biggest defenders and has raised considerable money for her re election campaign because of it. "The Ones We've Been Waiting For" takes its name from a speech by Barack Obama during his 2008, millennial galvanizing campaign, and it's apt; it took us a little while to realize that boomers were not going to save the world and that any significant change would be up to us. Already, members of Generation Z, some of whom may be voting in their first presidential election this fall, have figured out how to engage in political activism at a much younger age than we did think March for Our Lives or Greta Thunberg but thanks to Alter's timely book we can have a better understanding of why an entire generation was set back and what's driving it now.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Marvin Nicholson asked his golfing buddy to be a groomsman in his wedding. That normally would not be a big deal, or even out of the ordinary. But Mr. Nicholson has spent the last eight years as the White House trip director and a personal aide to the president, who happens to be his golfing buddy. Shortly after President Obama's star studded farewell party on Jan. 6 at the White House, he boarded Air Force One with a soon to be wedding officiant, Secretary of State John Kerry. They arrived early that morning in Jacksonville, Fla., to take part in the evening wedding of Mr. Nicholson and Helen Pajcic.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
With its promise of gentle movement and relaxation, a well designed rocking chair can be a source of comfort in trying times. "Rocking chairs have always offered a way to be soothed," said Susan Ferrier, an interior designer based in Atlanta. "They function almost as stress relief." Because of their laid back appeal, rocking chairs usually work best in casual spaces rather than formal ones. "We usually have them in family rooms, dens, lounges," Ms. Ferrier said. "Anyplace where you're watching television or reading." (Or in nurseries, of course.) And as most rocking chairs are fairly light both visually and physically they are also very versatile.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. For the past several days in the N.B.A. bubble, Luka Doncic and Kristaps Porzingis have been asked various forms of the same question, occasionally with the tone of a lecture. Don't you know the playoffs are different? As they prepared to make their N.B.A. playoff debuts together Monday, when Doncic and Porzingis will lead the seventh seeded Dallas Mavericks against the second seeded Los Angeles Clippers in the evening's marquee game, they seemed to realize there was nothing they could say to make the question go away. Only convincing, forceful play could do that. Doncic averaged 28.8 points, 9.4 rebounds and 8.8 assists a game in 61 games in his second N.B.A. season thrusting himself into the Most Valuable Player Award conversation by hitting benchmarks only Oscar Robertson and Russell Westbrook have matched over a full season. Porzingis has left the Knicks (and many Knicks fans) with a sense of seller's remorse after he capped his first full season with Dallas by joining Doncic as one of only six players to average more than 30 points a game since the season resumed July 30 in Florida. (Porzingis has a bruised left heel, the Mavericks announced Sunday, but he is listed as probable for Monday's game.) Yet it is often this way for even the N.B.A.'s top imports. Whatever they might have done in playoff conditions abroad is dismissed until replicated in the N.B.A. "I don't think they're that different, but I'll tell you after we finish the playoffs if it's different or not," Doncic said on Friday in an interview. How the European duo fares on the N.B.A. postseason stage looms as one of the foremost curiosities as the league shifts from two disorienting weeks of teams adapting to games without fans or travel to four rounds of best of seven series to crown a champion. But Doncic and Porzingis do have the backing of at least one notable observer with some pertinent experience. Dirk Nowitzki, in his first year of retirement after 21 seasons and one championship with the Mavericks, interrupted a family vacation on Sunday to proclaim that Doncic and Porzingis were "both ready for it." "I got to play with Luka for a year, and I've always said that from the first practice, which was more like a scrimmage, that this kid is built different," Nowitzki said in a telephone interview. "The passes and the way he read the game already, I was super, super impressed. "I thought he would have a little more trouble adjusting to the size and the speed of the N.B.A. game, but he's had zero problems," Nowitzki continued. "And K.P., playing at the five now, that's a tough, tough matchup for any team because they have to try to step out and guard him. The way this game is going, it's so wide open on both ends. There's shooters everywhere. There's always lanes to drive. Obviously the game will slow down a little bit in the playoffs, but I don't think it's anything those two can't handle." The matchup with the Clippers, which are teeming with quality perimeter defenders to hound Doncic, will be the Mavericks' first playoff series without Nowitzki since 1990. As Dallas has quickly learned since swinging a draft day deal with Atlanta to acquire the Slovene star's rights in June 2018, Doncic has a penchant for speeding up timetables. Even with the future two time M.V.P. Steve Nash at his side, Nowitzki did not reach the playoffs until his third N.B.A. season. The same held true for LeBron James and Kevin Durant. But Doncic got there in his second year, and in his first season alongside Porzingis, whom Dallas acquired in a trade with the Knicks on Jan. 31, 2019, that continues to generate passionate debate. Doncic confirming his franchise player status after only a few months is what persuaded the Mavericks to pursue Porzingis so hard before the 2019 trading deadline. Porzingis wound up delaying his Mavericks debut until this season, extending his rehabilitation from a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee in February 2018 to 20 months, but he has returned to an All Star level in 2020 after an uneven start. In 21 games since Jan. 31, buoyed by a move to center after Dwight Powell's season ending Achilles' injury, Porzingis is averaging 26.7 points, 10.5 rebounds and 2.1 blocks. In six of those games, he amassed at least 30 points and 10 rebounds, after he did so only three times in his first 222 N.B.A. games. Cue the regret at Madison Square Garden, where the Knicks have overhauled their front office in recent months. Steve Mills, the former team president, was reassigned and replaced by the player agent Leon Rose, at least partly because it became obvious the Mills led front office did not get nearly enough for Porzingis. The inconsistent Dennis Smith Jr., and two future first round picks represent the Knicks' primary return from the deal. "They're a two star team now," Clippers Coach Doc Rivers said of the Mavericks. Porzingis, a 7 foot 3 Latvian, celebrated his 25th birthday in the bubble on Aug. 2, but knows, for all the praise he has been receiving from Rivers and others, that he is about to face a higher level of scrutiny under the playoff microscope. "Stats and all that are great, but when people look back, they want to see who was a winner, who won it all and who achieved great things as a team," Porzingis said. "The main goal has to be team success." Beyond the defenders the Clippers can send at Doncic, including Kawhi Leonard, Paul George and Patrick Beverley, Dallas has to be worried most about its recent defensive decline. Dallas ranked 21st out of the 22 teams in Florida in defensive efficiency through the seeding games, allowing a whopping 120.6 points per 100 possessions. Yet it's clear that in whatever order Mavericks Coach Rick Carlisle ranks the potential dangers of a matchup with the Clippers, fretting about how Doncic copes hasn't cracked his list. "He's wired for big moments," Carlisle said. "He'll be fine." Doncic proved that as an 18 year old at the EuroBasket tournament in 2017, when he teamed with the Miami Heat's Goran Dragic to lead tiny Slovenia to a championship no one expected. At the end of the ensuing season, one month before he was drafted, Doncic was named M.V.P. of the EuroLeague after leading Real Madrid to the most prestigious club title outside the N.B.A. "He likes the big stage," said Igor Kokoskov, the former Phoenix Suns coach who coached Slovenia to its EuroBasket glory in 2017. "Even at a young age, I never felt that he is afraid of the moment. I think he will play even better in the playoffs. "One thing about Luka: If you put him in any kind of basketball drill, he will be OK, but if you put him in any kind of real competition, he completely changes and turns himself into a warrior." Remembering the hostile crowds that greeted him in Utah in his 2001 playoff debut, Nowitzki added: "I was a little overwhelmed by the atmosphere that place gets as loud as any place in the league. That first game was definitely jittery, but that's maybe where the bubble can help. They already know the surroundings and there are no fans."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Alexei Ratmansky's latest ballet, "Serenade After Plato's Symposium," is the most authoritatively original creation this bewilderingly versatile choreographer has given us. Since 2009, Mr. Ratmansky has been artist in residence with American Ballet Theater, which, after this premiere at Monday's gala at the Metropolitan Opera House, emphasized its affiliation to his work by closing with the first performance of his "Firebird" since its premiere season in 2012, with Misty Copeland in the title role. Ms. Copeland and others rose to the occasion. The "Firebird" now enthrallingly suspenseful storytelling looked far better than when new. (Natalia Osipova danced the premiere.) For these and other reasons, this was Ballet Theater's most valuable gala in many, many years. Mr. Ratmansky, long a very fine choreographer, now begins to seem a great one. "Serenade After Plato's Symposium," made to Leonard Bernstein's exceptional 1954 violin concerto of that name, is intriguingly multilayered. With seven male dancers, it reveals the intense individuality of each one, with beautifully subtle classicism. (Marcelo Gomes, Herman Cornejo, Calvin Royal III, James Whiteside, Daniil Simkin, Blaine Hoven and Gabe Stone Shayer danced it on Monday; different casts follow this week.) It's a marvel of musicality; you hear this American concerto (Benjamin Bowman played the solo violin with beautifully singing eloquence) far better for watching the dance. And yet Mr. Ratmansky's "Symposium" also evokes conversation, debate, camaraderie, an Athenian evening of philosophical talk in the days of Socrates when men did the talking and the voting. In Plato's "Symposium," seven noted Athenians discuss the nature of love ("eros"). Mr. Ratmansky's ballet affectingly honors philosophical debate itself, showing us the supremely civilized kind of evening in which seven vividly different characters propose different ways of being, different forms of human energy. They coexist and support one another in intricate ways. The word "symposium" is written in Greek on a canvas hanging above the stage, but one section could be subtitled "agon," in the sense of "disputation"; you can see the start of a quarrel, the rising of temper. In one poignant and amorously heroic interlude, a woman (Devon Teuscher) appears; the others leave her alone with Mr. Gomes. She appears again at the end of the work, when all the men gesture toward her in the ballet's closing image. She may well represent love; her duet with Mr. Gomes has both a grandeur and an intimacy that set it apart from the rest of this ballet. And yet this work's true heart lies in the colloquy among those seven men. Not since Merce Cunningham's "Nearly Ninety" (2009) has a choreographer so showcased human variety in solos as Mr. Ratmansky does in this work. His same sex partnering here is not erotically charged; yet affection and mutual supportiveness are wonderfully apparent. As a dance evocation of the philosophical discourse of Socrates how amazing to encounter any dance in this terrain! "Serenade After Plato's Symposium" may at once be ranked alongside Cunningham's "Septet" (whose subject, he wrote, was "Eros") and "Second Hand" (which was, John Cage once revealed, about the death of Socrates); and Mark Morris's "Socrates." Mr. Ratmansky's premiere richly extends the nature of dance theater though it would look 10 times better if the lighting (by Brad Fields) did not direct white light into the eyes of the audience. And, though I love the differentiated elegance of Jerome Kaplan's costumes, one of them (for Mr. Royal) slightly interferes with dance movement. Even the best known of these eight dancers Mr. Gomes and Mr. Cornejo show dimensions we've never seen before. Mr. Royal, Mr. Simkin, Mr. Whiteside and Mr. Hoven have never been better. And Ms. Teuscher (noble) and Mr. Shayer (merry) help to make this a celebration of human diversity. Everything previously excellent about "Firebird" looks even better now; Simon Pastukh's changing decor is theatricality itself. What felt like problems are no longer serious though I still wish the maidens were not transformed into uniformly blond Aryan types. The long pas de quatre for Firebird (Ms. Copeland), Ivan (Mr. Gomes), the Maiden (Stella Abrera) and Koschei (Cory Stearns) has gained more suspense. Mr. Ratmansky departs, at times radically, from the story intended by Igor Stravinsky in his 1910 score; while he misses a few of its opportunities (a magical chord late in the Firebird Ivan duet passes unnoticed), his tale now proves spellbinding. The gala also presented dances from Frederick Ashton's "Sylvia" (which the company danced last week) and "La Fille Mal Gardee" (which rejoins repertory next week); and from Mr. Ratmansky's 2015 production of Marius Petipa's "The Sleeping Beauty" (which will end the company's eight week season) and Kenneth MacMillan's "Requiem." This "Requiem" (1976) happens to be the Faure one; we saw the "Pie Jesu" solo, an unfortunate study in maudlin coyness (MacMillan based its choreography on photographs of his little daughter, Charlotte) danced by Alessandra Ferri, who was returning to the Met stage nine years after her farewell to American Ballet Theater there. The touchingly youthful simplicity of her style is unchanged; the gorgeous arches of her tapering feet seem more remarkable than ever. Though "Sylvia," "Sleeping Beauty" and "La Fille Mal Gardee" excerpts were vehicles for the lead dancers Maria Kochetkova, Hee Seo, Veronika Part, Mr. Stearns, Isabella Boylston and Jeffrey Cirio, these dances all demonstrate that in 2016 Ballet Theater is presenting itself as a true company. The eight attendant huntresses in "Sylvia" have wonderful steps, geometries, phrases; they looked jubilant, their high energy setting the gala off to a pulse raising start. All three Ballet Theater conductors David Lamarche, Charles Barker and Ormsby Wilkins were at their finest throughout the evening. I know of no ballet conductor anywhere today who has such revelatory affinity with the music of one composer as Mr. Lamarche does with Delibes, as the "Sylvia" dance showed. You could close your eyes and listen with joy; but Ashton's choreography helped you hear the music even better.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
In Debussy's "La Mer," you can almost hear the heaving sea speckled with dawn sunlight, the dancing waves, the gusty winds. That's certainly the painterly, descriptive way audiences are often encouraged to think of this repertory staple. But on Thursday at David Geffen Hall, the Finnish conductor Susanna Malkki led the New York Philharmonic in a performance of the work that was so urgent, detailed and exciting that I forgot all about cresting sea and splashing waves. I was, instead, engrossed by the way Ms. Malkki brought out the colors, intricacies and radicalism of "La Mer" (1905), which came across as Debussy's idea for an alternative kind of 20th century symphony. Ms. Malkki, making her return to the Philharmonic after a belated debut in 2015, certainly drew out the atmospheric sonorities in the subdued music the opens the piece, with the softly rumbling timpani, flecks of harp, heaving low strings and woodwind lines that seem to peek through the mist. But I was more struck by the unusual clarity of the textures, the careful voicing of chords to highlight pungent harmonies. In the final movement, Ms. Malkki deftly balanced the music's tumultuous frenzy with symphonic majesty, driving headlong to the brassy climax without a trace of cinematic excess. She preceded "La Mer" with the New York concert premiere of Esa Pekka Salonen's "Helix," from 2005, which the composer has described as a nine minute accelerando. The music starts tentatively, with halting chords, eerie blips and a strange, tolling bass riff. Moment by moment, this dark music gains intensity and volume, as jerky rhythms break out and fragments try to coalesce into phrases. It hurtles to a dizzying, blazing final stretch, played to the hilt here.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Alessandra Ferri and Herman Cornejo (Wednesday through March 6) After a brief retirement, the Italian prima ballerina Alessandra Ferri has been in top form, dancing in contemporary work. She partners often with Herman Cornejo, a current principal dancer with American Ballet Theater, where Ms. Ferri danced for more than 20 years. In "Trio ConcertDance," the pair is joined by the concert pianist Bruce Levingston in a program of duets featuring choreographic contributions by Angelin Preljocaj, Russell Maliphant, Stanton Welch, Fang Yi Sheu and Demis Volpi. Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 242 0800, joyce.org. (Brian Schaefer) 'Angel Reapers' (through March 13) Though there are only a few living Shakers left in America, the group's ideas and aesthetics have been hugely influential, particularly among artists. "Angel Reapers," the choreographer Martha Clarke and the playwright Alfred Uhry's exploration of lust and desire within the Shaker community, returns to New York after a 2011 run. Performed against a sparse set reflecting the Shaker ethos of cleanliness and simplicity, Ms. Clarke's stomping, slashing movement hints at turbulence within. Tuesdays through Sundays at various times, Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 West 42nd Street, Clinton, 212 244 7529, signaturetheatre.org. (Schaefer) BalletBoyz (Friday through Sunday) This troupe from London, founded by Michael Nunn and Billy Trevitt of the Royal Ballet, wraps up its United States tour at the Joyce Theater. Two ensemble works "Mesmerics," by Christopher Wheeldon, and Alexander Whitley's "The Murmuring" showcase the athletic prowess of the company's 10 male dancers. Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 242 0800, joyce.org. (Siobhan Burke) Company XIV (through March 12) Fresh off its titillating take on "The Nutcracker," Austin McCormick's company applies its sensual burlesque meets ballet meets circus formula to another popular fairy tale, "Snow White." Of course, this sumptuous production is no Disney remake: Mr. McCormick takes his inspiration from the haunting Brothers Grimm version, and the abundant partial nudity makes it an adults only evening. That poisonous apple might as well be Eve's its magic spell is the release of inhibitions. Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 5 p.m., Minetta Lane Theater, 18 Minetta Lane, at Avenue of the Americas, Greenwich Village, 800 745 3000, companyxiv.com. (Schaefer) Elisa Monte Dance (Wednesday through March 5) To celebrate her company's 35th anniversary, Elisa Monte hosts a gala on Wednesday night with excerpts from her diverse repertory. On March 4, she premieres "Pangaea," a new work four years in the making, and on March 5, she hands over the artistic reins to Tiffany Rea Fisher, a longtime dancer with the company, who presents two works of her own, dances in a solo and joins company alumni in "Shattered," a speedy and intricate work from 2000. Wednesday at 7 p.m., March 4 at 7:30 p.m., March 5 at 7:30 p.m., Aaron Davis Hall, City College, West 135th Street and Convent Avenue, Hamilton Heights, 212 281 9240, harlemstage.org. (Schaefer) FJK Dance (Friday) The Iraqi born Fadi J. Khoury started his dance company in 2014 to combine his love of ballet, ballroom and Middle Eastern dance. In "A Fusion of Culture and Dance," Mr. Khoury presents a collection of his fluid, sensuous work. The evening is also presented by the Consulate of Lebanon and the Arabic studies department at Hunter College and is meant, according to Mr. Khoury, as an antidote to the turmoil that often defines the region. At 7:30 pm., Kaye Playhouse, Hunter College, 68th Street between Lexington and Park Avenues, 212 772 4448, hunter.cuny.edu/kayeplayhouse. (Schaefer) Maria Hassabi (through March 20) In recent works like "Premiere" and "Show," Ms. Hassabi has offered rigorous explorations of slowness and stillness, drawing attention to incremental shifts of weight in the body. "Plastic," a moving installation for the Museum of Modern Art in particular, its stairwells and floors extends those meditations across larger expanses of space and time, lasting all day every day (during museum hours) for a month. 212 708 9400, moma.org. (Burke) Juliana May In her work "Adult Documentary," Ms. May solicits real and fictional biographies from her five dancers: Lindsay Clark, Talya Epstein, Rennie McDougall, Kayvon Pourazar and Connor Voss. Then she scrambles them, as she does with their movements, using distortions in the dance's form to get at a broad idea of trauma or the disruption of the expected. Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Chocolate Factory, 5 49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, 718 482 7069, chocolatefactorytheater.org. (Schaefer) Keely Garfield (Friday through Sunday) Last year in an early iteration of "Pow," Keely Garfield cut and reconfigured past work to create a new quilt of experiences that are alternately fun and free spirited as well as contemplative and focused. Now fully grown, "Pow" has its premiere at the 92Y Harkness Dance Festival, with a score that zooms from cinematic waves to reggae grooves, reflecting Ms. Garfield's thematic breadth and expansive interests. At 8 p.m., 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, 212 415 5500, 92y.org. (Schaefer) Malcolm Low/Formal Structure (Friday and Saturday) The title of Mr. Low's new multimedia work, "Speakeasy," suggests both hushed, secretive spaces and free, unfettered communication. Reflecting on growing up gay in a religious family, Mr. Low envisions an alternate history in which openness and honesty displace shame and fear. At 8 p.m., Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, 280 Broadway, near Chambers Street, Lower Manhattan, 646 837 6809, gibneydance.org. (Burke) Mariinsky Ballet (Friday through Sunday) This storied St. Petersburg company deploys a handful of dancers at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to honor the great Russian ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, who died in May. Chief among them are the principal dancers Uliana Lopatkina and Diana Vishneva, who will star in many of the ballets (and excerpts from ballets) assembled on four separate programs. The tribute continues on Friday with nods to Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky, including "Le Spectre de la Rose," Saturday brings an encore of Alberto Alonso's "Carmen Suite," and Sunday concludes with a slew of pas de deux, plus Michel Fokine's "The Dying Swan." Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m., Sunday at 7 p.m., Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene, 718 636 4100, bam.org. (Burke and Schaefer) Miro Magloire, New Chamber Ballet (Friday and Saturday) In February, the Austrian composer Friedrich Cerha turned 90. As a birthday gift of sorts, Miro Magloire's small, dedicated troupe presents "Gravity," set to Mr. Cerha's music. Mr. Magloire also presents a new work he created to a Ravel sonata, joined by works set to Debussy and Schoenberg. Music is Mr. Magloire's muse; it's always played live and is a vivid presence alongside the talented New Chamber Ballet dancers. At 8 p.m., New York City Center Studio 5, 130 West 56th Street, 212 581 1212, nycitycenter.org. (Schaefer) New York City Ballet City Ballet's winter season concludes with three evening performances of the "Balanchine Black White" program, featuring "Episodes," "Agon" and "The Four Temperaments," all examples of Balanchine's famous mix of the sharp and the sensual, paired with a stark, stripped down aesthetic. Saturday's matinee performance offers a quartet of his more lush and romantic works: "Walpurgisnacht Ballet," "Sonatine," "Mozartina" and "Symphony in C." Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 3 p.m., David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, 212 496 0600, nycballet.com. (Schaefer) New York Theater Ballet (Friday and Saturday) The dancer Steven Melendez has long been a standout member of this small and adept company. For the next edition of the group's "Legends and Visionaries" series, he steps into the role of choreographer, teaming with the American Ballet Theater corps member Zhong Jing Fang. Their "Song Before Spring," accompanied by the New York University Steel Drum Ensemble, shares a program with Jerome Robbins's "Antique Epigraphs," Richard Alston's "Such Longing" and the premiere of "Chemical Bond" by the San Francisco choreographer Milissa Payne Bradley. Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., New York Live Arts, 219 West 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 924 0077, newyorklivearts.org. (Burke) Pacific Northwest Ballet (Friday and Saturday) Directed by the former New York City Ballet principal Peter Boal, this company swoops in from Seattle with two programs. This weekend brings the second, a contemporary trifecta of David Dawson's "A Million Kisses to My Skin," William Forsythe's "The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude" and Crystal Pite's "Emergence." The program features live music by the company's orchestra. At 8 p.m., City Center, 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan, 212 581 1212, nycitycenter.org. (Burke) Works Process, Shen Wei Dance Arts (Sunday and Monday) Fifteen years ago, Shen Wei burst onto the dance scene with a mesmerizing blend of starkly beautiful visual art and propulsive yet meditative movement. His company visits the Guggenheim's behind the curtain series to show excerpts from his repertory as well as a new commission from the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Mr. Shen will also discuss his creative process with the Guggenheim curator Alexandra Munroe. At 7:30 p.m., Peter B. Lewis Theater, Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, 212 423 3500, guggenheim.org. (Schaefer) Flamenco Festival New York 2016 (Wednesday through March 19) The 13th iteration of this festival celebrating all things flamenco brings a bright lineup of music and dance to locations throughout the city. Venerable troupes like Ballet Flamenco de Andalucia make an appearance, as do dynamic stars like Farruquito. Under the banner "Beyond Flamenco" are artists who have roots in flamenco or take inspiration from it but mix in other styles like Nino de los Reyes, who stirs in jazz and modern dance. At various times and places, flamencofestival.org/eng/. (Schaefer) World Music Institute's Festival Ay! Mas Flamenco (Thursday through March 6) This flamenco dance series features four programs that span the spectrum from traditional to contemporary takes on this dramatic Spanish dance. The program features La Otra Orilla, from Montreal (Thursday), Joaquin Grilo (next Friday) and La Lupi (March 5), all performing at Symphony Space. On March 6, the dynamic married team of Sonia Olla and Ismael Fernandez perform at La Nacional Spanish Benevolent Society. Information is at worldmusicinstitute.org. (Schaefer)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Although much of the country has barely noticed, avian influenza a version of the virus that generated "Killer Bird Flu!" headlines a decade ago is now sweeping the Midwest. More than 20 million turkeys and chickens have died or been culled; Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin have declared states of emergency; and teams of experts are trying to figure out how the new virus is spreading. No humans have caught this flu, but health officials fear they might. They are requiring that cullers and barn cleaners wear the kind of protective gear that Ebola workers do. Officials have also advised that everyone who was recently in contact with affected poultry operations workers, truckers, veterinarians and so on take Tamiflu, a flu preventive. No one knows how lethal any of the new viruses might be to humans. But because the virus spreading in the Midwest can wipe out most of a flock in two days, all are assumed to be dangerous. The authorities are preparing for the panic that may ensue if someone catches one of these viruses and dies. Still, officials, say, most Americans are in little danger. The overall risks pale compared with those posed by well known mortal threats that elicit no panic: car crashes, bee stings, bathroom falls and so on. "We deem this a low human health risk low, but not zero," said Dr. Anne Schuchat, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "So far, we don't have worrisome signs. But we don't want to be overly reassuring, because with influenza, we always take events quite seriously." The three flu viruses found recently in American birds are an H5N8, an H5N2 and a new H5N1. The new H5N1 virus has been found only in three wild birds in Washington State. The H5N8 virus, moving south from Canada in December, infected a few poultry farms in California and Idaho but has not been reported recently. The H5N2 virus, however, is spreading rapidly in Midwest poultry operations and is the largest such outbreak in North American history. The lethal ancestor of all three viruses, the Asian H5N1, was first identified in 1997 when it killed six people in Hong Kong. To stop it, every chicken in the territory was slaughtered, and poultry imports from China were banned. The virus disappeared, although experts assume it circulated in China without being reported. It re emerged in Hong Kong in 2003 and has spread to Asia, Europe and Africa. It has killed people in Indonesia, Egypt, Vietnam, Cambodia, China and elsewhere most of whom had contact with live poultry, often in backyard flocks. A few infections appear to have been transmitted within families after one member nursed another. That Asian virus has never been found in the Western Hemisphere. But the flu viruses spreading here now contain some of its genes, including those for the H for hemagglutinin "spike" it uses to attach to cells. The H5N8 virus is thought to have emerged before 2014, when Asian H5N1 mixed with a milder duck flu in China with a different "N" gene. ("N" stands for neuraminidase, the protein "helicopter blade" that chops away receptors on a cell's surface so virus particles can escape. There are 18 H shapes and 11 N shapes, and each virus has six other genes that also determine its lethality.) That H5N8 spread to Japan, Russia and Europe before turning up in Canada. The H5N2 and the new H5N1 have some North American genes and so clearly emerged on this continent more recently presumably when the H5N8 virus finally arrived and crossed with North American strains. That may have happened last summer. Migratory ducks, geese and swans from around the world share ponds in the Arctic in summer. New flu gene mixes emerge and move south along the various migratory paths taken by the birds. Whatever the mix of genes, dose size is also important in determining spread of the virus, said Dr. Peter Palese, a flu expert at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Human flus can infect people who inhale only one to 10 virus particles, he said, but it takes 100,000 to 1 million particles of an H5 bird flu to infect a human. "That's why people who sleep under their chickens in markets in Asia get it, and we don't get it on Fifth Avenue," Dr. Palese said. In birds, flu is primarily an intestinal disease rather than a respiratory one, so cullers and cleaners are told to wear coveralls, face masks and goggles to prevent any barn dust much of which is powdered feces from entering their noses, mouths or eyes. Dr. Palese says he believes they should wear the full hoods with battery powered air filters used in biosafety Level 3 laboratories. Officials, he said, should also consider giving them the vaccines developed years ago against H5N1. Although it would not be a perfect match, it might provide some protection. Several million doses of an experimental vaccine are in the National Strategic Stockpile, said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The agency has also begun work on a vaccine against the new H5N8 virus, Dr. Schuchat said, and can make one against H5N2 virus, as well. But producing it in large quantities can take months or even a year. To cull birds, farm operators normally cover them with a suffocating carbon dioxide foam. As they decompose, said Henry L. Niman, a biochemist in Pittsburgh who tracks genetic changes in flus, the heat generated kills the virus and the carcasses can be used as compost. But that stops poultry production in the barn for weeks. Other methods include incineration in portable kilns, and burial, though each have drawbacks. With burial, rotting birds could end up in the water table; with incineration, infectious feathers or other particles could blow up the stack and into the wind.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Ms. Canedy is a former New York Times journalist and the author of "A Journal for Jordan." I struggled for the words to comfort Jordan, my 14 year old son. He had come into my room and heard a snippet of a news report that President Trump had called fallen soldiers "suckers" and "losers" soldiers like Jordan's father and my fiance, First Sgt. Charles Monroe King. He was killed in Iraq in October 2006, when Jordan was 6 months old. "Mom, is he talking about my dad?" Jordan asked, his eyes searching and his forehead furrowed in confusion. My son reads me well, and so it took every ounce of my strength not to physically react. "What do we care what anyone thinks," I said and made a swatting gesture. "We know the truth about your dad's heroism." I have spent Jordan's childhood filling in the blanks, making sure that he knew his father, as a soldier and as a man. But I had never expected that I would need to remind my son of his dad's honor and sacrifice. I had tried to shield Jordan from this news, which broke in The Atlantic on Thursday, while working through my own anger and pain sensations so palpable that I became nauseated and short of breath. I thought, too, about all the other Gold Star families who must be confused and hurt by even the possibility that the president had made those insulting and incendiary remarks. Still, I tried hard to ignore the emotions stirring so viscerally within me, telling myself that President Trump knew nothing of my brave, sweet, humble soldier. "Don't lean in to this latest loop on the Trump roller coaster," I told myself. "It never stops." But then my son had popped into my room before I could grab the remote control and turn off the television. By the next morning, when Jordan brought up Trump again, it became clear how distressed he was. "He shouldn't say that," Jordan said. "My dad was a hero." Jordan never knew his dad, but in many ways, he knows his father better than many children whose dads are living. That is because Charles took a journal with him to Iraq and wrote to our son, even before he was born. He filled that journal with 200 pages of wisdom and expressions of love for us. He wrote that he hoped to make us proud with his service to our country. On the last page, he told Jordan that he had written all he could think of favorite Bible verses, how to choose a wife, lessons in how to be a man in case he did not make it home. He had one month left on his tour of duty when he was killed by a roadside bomb. I collapsed onto the hardwood floor when I received the news. Since then, I have worked hard to create a happy, full life for Jordan and me, and fill in any holes that the journal left. Over the years, when Jordan needed to hear his father's voice, we pulled out the journal and read from it together. I told him stories about the honor, dignity and leadership of his highly decorated dad's 19 year career of military service. I showed him pictures of his dad wearing a chest full of medals, including a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. Even as I have tried to make Charles a real presence, Jordan has had to reprocess our loss every time he hits a major developmental milestone. Because we have pictures of the two of them together from the only time they met when Charles finally took a two week leave to meet his son Jordan had always insisted that he had memories of his dad. Then one day about a year ago, he stopped at our front door as he was heading to school when he froze and suddenly started sobbing. I knew that day was coming. He stayed home from school, and I took the day off from work. Jordan snuggled in bed wearing his father's dog tags, while I made homemade soup. We talked about his dad. It is hard enough for Gold Star children to heal from the wound of losing a parent. Never should they have to endure the pain of anyone picking at the scar that eventually forms over it. I can only speak for my boy and myself, and certainly not for other military families, but here is what I would advise President Trump: Go on television immediately, from the Oval Office, and speak directly to these Gold Star children. If you want, deny that you said those awful things. But tell them you are sorry anyway. Say that no child should ever think that the commander in chief would utter such hurtful lies. Tell them that their mom or dad or anyone who has made the ultimate sacrifice is more of a hero than you will ever be. Humble yourself. If Mr. Trump had it in his heart to extend his empathy to all the Gold Star adults who are suffering as well, that would be great. But he must speak to our children. As for Jordan, I have used this moment to repeat some of his favorite stories about his dad. He knows that his father broke his big toe in combat during the first gulf war and that, despite the pain, he shoved his foot back in his boot and kept marching. Jordan knows that when I asked his father about what his duties were in Iraq, he responded, "Everything from making sure my soldiers get their mail to recovering their bodies." It did not matter whether they were from a blue or a red state. Jordan knows that his dad missed his birth, because Charles wouldn't leave Iraq until every soldier he led into combat could come home first. Jordan also knows that this determination ignited one of the biggest fights I ever had with his father, but that now, so many years later, I am proud of him for it and for our shared sacrifice on behalf of our country. After I reminded Jordan of all of this, I asked him who he thought had shown more patriotism for the country we love his father or the man who may well consider him a loser. "My dad," he said, and proudly smiled. Dana Canedy is a former New York Times journalist and the author of "A Journal for Jordan." 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.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
TASKMASTER 9 p.m. on the CW. This widely entertaining series assigns a group of comedians with a number of creatively vague tasks such as "make the most exotic sandwich" or "fill an egg cup with tears" leaving the host, Greg Davies, and the task devisor, Alex Horne, to choose a winner. It's a clever take on the classic British panel show format that doubles as a devious way to torture its celebrity guests with hilarious, and occasionally genius, results. I'LL BE GONE IN THE DARK 10 p.m. on HBO. In April 2018, the decades long search for the sexual predator known as the Golden State Killer, concluded in the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo. But the true crime writer Michelle McNamara, who spent years investigating the case, died before she could see the man who terrorized California in the 1970s and '80s brought to justice. This six part series traces the evolution of the case, as well as McNamara's remarkable life and work, as an adaptation of her book, which was published posthumously. In the finale, McNamara's husband, the comedian Patton Oswalt, connects with survivors of DeAngelo's crimes and reflects on McNamara's absence.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The crowd that assembles at the Vivienne Westwood show during Paris Fashion Week is typically an eclectic bunch. So it was something of a surprise on Saturday afternoon to see Lewis Hamilton, the clean cut reigning Formula One world champion, speeding through the drag queens, goth rockers and the more avant garde of the fashion elite on his way to his spot on the front row. But Mr. Hamilton, who became an official ambassador for British men's fashion in June, is becoming a seasoned circuit fixture. In Paris for the weekend before the 2016 championship season kicksoff in Melbourne, Australia on March 20, he took five minutes to talkto Styles after the show was over. How are preparations for the upcoming year going? I've just come from Barcelona where I've been doing lap after lap after lap, then training in the gym morning, noon andnight. I have to lose seven pounds before the start of the season because the car is a little heavier it's been great to come to Paris for the weekend and get a little change of scene. And what did you make of the show? It was fantastic. I'm glad I got a chance to see it. Vivienne has been such an important figure on the British fashion scene and continues tobe incredibly influential. Both she and her label continue to be proud of standing out from the crowd and from making a statement. I think that's something to be admired. There was a lot of cross dressing in the collection. Would you wear a skirt? Er. Well. I suppose if Vivienne asked me personally I would consider it. But it's not something I get asked very often! That's not to say I think other men shouldn't wear skirts, it's just really not my kind of style.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn are the authors of "Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope," from which this essay is adapted. Dee Knapp visiting the grave site of four of her five children, near her home in Oklahoma. The family previously lived in the same rural Oregon town as Nicholas Kristof.Credit...Lynsey Addario/Getty Images Across America, working class people including many of our friends are dying of despair. And we're still blaming the wrong people. Dee Knapp visiting the grave site of four of her five children, near her home in Oklahoma. The family previously lived in the same rural Oregon town as Nicholas Kristof. YAMHILL, Ore. Chaos reigned daily on the No. 6 school bus, with working class boys and girls flirting and gossiping and dreaming, brimming with mischief, bravado and optimism. Nick rode it every day in the 1970s with neighbors here in rural Oregon, neighbors like Farlan, Zealan, Rogena, Nathan and Keylan Knapp. They were bright, rambunctious, upwardly mobile youngsters whose father had a good job installing pipes. The Knapps were thrilled to have just bought their own home, and everyone oohed and aahed when Farlan received a Ford Mustang for his 16th birthday. Yet today about one quarter of the children on that No. 6 bus are dead, mostly from drugs, suicide, alcohol or reckless accidents. Of the five Knapp kids who had once been so cheery, Farlan died of liver failure from drink and drugs, Zealan burned to death in a house fire while passed out drunk, Rogena died from hepatitis linked to drug use and Nathan blew himself up cooking meth. Keylan survived partly because he spent 13 years in a state penitentiary. We Americans are locked in political combat and focused on President Trump, but there is a cancer gnawing at the nation that predates Trump and is larger than him. Suicides are at their highest rate since World War II; one child in seven is living with a parent suffering from substance abuse; a baby is born every 15 minutes after prenatal exposure to opioids; America is slipping as a great power. We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation. Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of "deaths of despair." "The meaningfulness of the working class life seems to have evaporated," Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize winning economist, told us. "The economy just seems to have stopped delivering for these people." Deaton and the economist Anne Case, who is also his wife, coined the term "deaths of despair" to describe the surge of mortality from alcohol, drugs and suicide. The kids on the No. 6 bus rode into a cataclysm as working class communities disintegrated across America because of lost jobs, broken families, gloom and failed policies. The suffering was invisible to affluent Americans, but the consequences are now evident to all: The survivors mostly voted for Trump, some in hopes that he would rescue them, but under him the number of children without health insurance has risen by more than 400,000. "I'm a capitalist, and even I think capitalism is broken," says Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, the world's largest hedge fund. Even in this presidential campaign, the unraveling of working class communities receives little attention. There is talk about the middle class, but very little about the working class; we discuss college access but not the one in seven children who don't graduate from high school. America is like a boat that is half capsized, but those partying above water seem oblivious. "We have to stop being obsessed over impeachment and start actually digging in and solving the problems that got Donald Trump elected in the first place," Andrew Yang argued in the last Democratic presidential debate. Whatever you think of Yang as a candidate, on this he is dead right: We have to treat America's cancer. In some ways, the situation is worsening, because families have imploded under the pressure of drug and alcohol abuse, and children are growing up in desperate circumstances. One of our dearest friends in Yamhill, Clayton Green, a brilliant mechanic who was three years behind Nick in school, died last January, leaving five grandchildren and all have been removed from their parents by the state for their protection. A local school official sighs that some children are "feral." Farlan, the oldest of the Knapp children, was in Nick's grade. A talented woodworker, he dreamed of opening a business called "Farlan's Far Out Fantastic Freaky Furniture." But Farlan ended up dropping out of school after the ninth grade. Although he never took high school chemistry, Farlan became a first rate chemist: He was one of the first people in the Yamhill area to cook meth. For a time he was a successful entrepreneur known for his high quality merchandise. "This is what I was made for," he once announced with quiet pride. But he abused his own drugs and by his 40s was gaunt and frail. In some ways, he was a great dad, for he loved his two daughters, Amber and Andrea, and they idolized him. But theirs was not an optimal upbringing: In one of Amber's baby pictures, there's a plate of cocaine in the background. Farlan died of liver failure in 2009, just after his 51st birthday, and his death devastated both daughters. Andrea, who was smart, talented, gorgeous and entrepreneurial, ran her own real estate business but accelerated her drinking after her dad died. "She drank herself to death," her uncle Keylan told us. She was buried in 2013 at the age of 29. In the 1970s and '80s it was common to hear derogatory suggestions that the forces ripping apart African American communities were rooted in "black culture." The idea was that "deadbeat dads," self destructive drug abuse and family breakdown were the fundamental causes, and that all people needed to do was show "personal responsibility." A Harvard sociologist, William Julius Wilson, countered that the true underlying problem was lost jobs, and he turned out to be right. When good jobs left white towns like Yamhill a couple of decades later because of globalization and automation, the same pathologies unfolded there. Men in particular felt the loss not only of income but also of dignity that accompanied a good job. Lonely and troubled, they self medicated with alcohol or drugs, and they accumulated criminal records that left them less employable and less marriageable. Family structure collapsed. It would be easy but too simplistic to blame just automation and lost jobs: The problems are also rooted in disastrous policy choices over 50 years. The United States wrested power from labor and gave it to business, and it suppressed wages and cut taxes rather than invest in human capital, as our peer countries did. As other countries embraced universal health care, we did not; several counties in the United States have life expectancies shorter than those in Cambodia or Bangladesh. One consequence is that the bottom end of America's labor force is not very productive, in ways that reduce our country's competitiveness. A low end worker may not have a high school diploma and is often barely literate or numerate while also struggling with a dependency; more than seven million Americans also have suspended driver's licenses for failing to pay child support or court related debt, meaning that they may not reliably show up at work. Americans also bought into a misconceived "personal responsibility" narrative that blamed people for being poor. It's true, of course, that personal responsibility matters: People we spoke to often acknowledged engaging in self destructive behaviors. But when you can predict wretched outcomes based on the ZIP code where a child is born, the problem is not bad choices the infant is making. If we're going to obsess about personal responsibility, let's also have a conversation about social responsibility. Why did deaths of despair claim Farlan, Zealan, Nathan, Rogena and so many others? We see three important factors. Second, there was an explosion of drugs oxycodone, meth, heroin, crack cocaine and fentanyl aggravated by the reckless marketing of prescription painkillers by pharmaceutical companies. Third, the war on drugs sent fathers and mothers to jail, shattering families. There's plenty of blame to go around. Both political parties embraced mass incarceration and the war on drugs, which was particularly devastating for black Americans, and ignored an education system that often consigned the poor especially children of color to failing schools. Since 1988, American schools have become increasingly segregated by race, and kids in poor districts perform on average four grade levels behind those in rich districts. Farlan's daughter Amber seemed to be the member of the Knapp family most poised for success. She was the first Knapp ever to graduate from high school, and then she took a job at a telecommunications company, managing databases and training staff members to use computer systems. We were struck by her intellect and interpersonal skills; it was easy to imagine her as a lawyer or a business executive. "PowerPoint presentations and Excel and pivot charts and matrix analytics, that's what I like to do," she told us. She married and had three children, and for a time was thriving. Then in grief after her father and sister died, she imploded. A doctor had prescribed medications like Xanax, and she became dependent on them. After running out of them, she began smoking meth for the first time when she was 32. "I was dead set against it my whole life," she remembered. "I hated it. I'd seen what it did to everybody. My dad was a junkie who cooked meth and lost everything. You would think that was enough." It wasn't. She bounced in and out of jail and lost her kids. Another successful strategy is investing not just in prisons but also in human capital to keep people out of prisons. The highest return investments available in America may be in early education for disadvantaged children, but there are also valuable interventions available for adolescents and adults. We attended a thrilling graduation in Tulsa, Okla., for 17 women completing an impressive local drug treatment program called Women in Recovery. The graduates had an average of 15 years of addiction each, and all were on probation after committing crimes. Yet they had quit drugs and started jobs, and 300 people in the audience including police officers who had arrested them and judges who had sentenced them gave the women a standing ovation. The state attorney general served as the commencement speaker and called them "heroes," drawing tearful smiles from women more accustomed to being called "junkies" or "whores." "I thought we'd be planning a funeral instead," said one audience member whose younger sister had started using meth at age 12 and was now graduating at 35. Women in Recovery has a recidivism rate after three years of only 4 percent, and consequently has saved Oklahoma 70 million in prison spending, according to the George Kaiser Family Foundation. Bravo for philanthropy, but the United States would never build interstate highways through volunteers and donations, and we can't build a national preschool program or a national drug recovery program with private money. We need the government to step up and jump start nationwide programs in early childhood education, job retraining, drug treatment and more.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Just a year ago, the New York Philharmonic seemed to be floundering. Deficits stretched back more than a decade, administrators were leaving in an exodus, and the orchestra faced the prospect of a costly, disruptive plan to renovate its Lincoln Center home. Then the orchestra hired Deborah Borda, who ran it in the 1990s and went on to make the Los Angeles Philharmonic a wonder of the music world, to be its next leader. In recent months she has swiftly raised 50 million and successfully pushed to scrap the planned gut renovation of David Geffen Hall in favor of more modest changes. Now, as a stabilizing Philharmonic prepares to welcome the Dutch maestro Jaap van Zweden as its 26th music director, the orchestra is focusing on its hometown. Announcing its 2018 19 season on Tuesday, the Philharmonic said that it had canceled a planned domestic tour to devote itself to strengthening its ties to New York. "I feel like we are touring in our own city," Mr. van Zweden said in a recent interview with editors and reporters of The New York Times. "This is not just for certain people. This is for all of us, everybody." Ms. Borda said that forging connections would be an important part of her tenure. "I hope that people will start to perceive us as more outward facing than frankly, I think, we have been in the past," she said in the Times interview, sitting next to Mr. van Zweden. When Mr. van Zweden was appointed, some critics worried that, since his reputation was based largely on performances of the standard repertory, he would give new music short shrift. His first season is carefully calibrated to suggest it should not have to be an either/or proposition. Mr. van Zweden will conduct plenty of old favorites, including Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony, Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, and works by Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler and Shostakovich. But he will also lead five world premieres: Louis Andriessen's "Agamemnon," part of a focus on that Dutch composer; Julia Wolfe's "Fire in My Mouth," a multimedia choral work about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire; David Lang's opera "prisoner of the state," a take on Beethoven's "Fidelio" and the centerpiece of a season ending festival of "music of conscience"; and pieces by Ashley Fure, who will write a new work for opening night on Sept. 20, and Conrad Tao. "A lot of people thought I was the guy who likes Bruckner, Brahms, Beethoven and that's absolutely true," Mr. van Zweden said. But he emphasized that he had been an advocate for new music as chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra from 2005 to 2013. "It's fine if people did not recognize that," he added. "But I'm very happy that I can bring some new works to the New York Philharmonic and to its audiences." The Philharmonic still faces challenges. Its musicians' contract expired in September, and negotiations for a new agreement are underway. The question of just what to do about its widely unloved hall remains unresolved. Ms. Borda wants renovations that can be achieved in phases, so the orchestra is not left homeless for long stretches while it battles an industrywide decline in subscriptions. The baritone Matthias Goerne, a frequent collaborator with Mr. van Zweden, will be the Philharmonic's artist in residence next season, and several conductors will make their subscription debuts, including two women. Mirga Grazinyte Tyla, who recently became the music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in England, will conduct Sibelius, Ravel and Dvorak. Emmanuelle Haim, an early music specialist, will lead the orchestra in Handel and Rameau, and Matthias Pintscher will conduct the New York premiere of his "mar'eh." Returning conductors include Ivan Fischer, Manfred Honeck, Semyon Bychkov, Herbert Blomstedt, Jakub Hrusa and Zubin Mehta, the Philharmonic's music director from 1978 to 1991. The orchestra is ending several new music initiatives started by Mr. van Zweden's predecessor, Alan Gilbert: Contact!, the contemporary chamber music series that took players to smaller spaces downtown and in Brooklyn; the NY Phil Biennial, modeled on art world examples like the Venice Biennale; and, at least for the time being, the composer in residence position. The idea, Ms. Borda said, is to integrate new music offerings more completely into the main season and reflect larger programming themes. To host its two new contemporary series, the Philharmonic has tapped Nadia Sirota, a violist and the host of the "Meet the Composer" podcast. One series, Nightcap, will feature 10:30 p.m. cabaret style concerts by guest musicians and ensembles at the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse at Lincoln Center programmed by contemporary composers, including Mr. Tao, Mr. Andriessen, Gabriel Kahane and John Adams. The other, Sound On, includes three afternoon concerts at the Appel Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center. "Any discussion of serious music, of serious art, has really slipped to the side of social discourse," Ms. Borda said. "How do we start to bring it back to the center?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Stacy Keach at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, where he is starring in "Pamplona," a play that had an abortive run in 2017. CHICAGO Jim McGrath and I first met during the filming of the second Mike Hammer series in the 1990s in California. Jim has always been a wonderful writer, and we discussed the possibility of doing a one man Hemingway show together. Ever since playing Papa in a mini series in the late '80s, I found myself reading his short stories for audiobooks, and I wanted to continue to explore his unique persona. We decided to set the play in a boat, with a sort of "gangplank" leading to the stage and various scenes from his life depicted in an open space. Malgosia, my sweet wife, read the draft, didn't like the setup, but pointed to the particular sequence where the running of the bulls was depicted. She suggested that we begin the play there, scrap the whole idea of the boat, and call it "Pamplona." I was initially resistant, as I knew it would require a complete rewrite, but nevertheless, I pitched the idea to Jim McGrath and, to my surprise, he loved it! Jim began to craft the story of Hemingway, having just won the Nobel Prize and experiencing writer's block while on assignment for Life magazine in Spain to pen an article covering the mano a mano between two great matadors, Antonio Ordonez and Luis Miguel Dominguin. I've often been asked what it's like to play Hemingway at 77, having played him on television some 30 years earlier. As a younger man, I was not fully able to grasp the intricacies, the complications and contradictions, surrounding his suicide. For me, it is, and has been, an ongoing source of curiosity. What I have managed to learn, over time, is just how much I don't know about the circumstances that led to his decision. What I do know is that he was depressed and in pain, unable to write, and unwilling to withstand the inevitable downhill physical spiral before him. That other members of his family took their own lives, a fact pointing to a possible genetic influence, illuminates the mystery of such an act. How are we ever to know what strand of DNA causes one to pull the trigger? I feel that I have also matured in my evaluation of his personality overall, particularly in terms of his relationships with women, with his father and especially with his mother. When I played him in the late '80s, I was completely oblivious to the emotional pain he experienced with his mother, who had hoped for a girl when he was born. "Pamplona" explores those relationships and reveals Hemingway's deep seated fixations with his mother; with J. Edgar Hoover; and with the whole notion of what it means to flourish, and to fail. I have always felt that Chicago was the perfect place to premiere the play, as Hemingway grew up in Oak Park. Also: I love working with the director Robert Falls! We began our relationship when he directed Arthur Miller's "Finishing the Picture" in 2004 at the Goodman Theater, and two years later collaborated on "King Lear." The painful irony of the situation pitted Hemingway (in the play) trying to find the words to express the article he was assigned to write, against me, the actor, trying to remember his lines. As a result, there was a five minute period where I'm sure the audience couldn't detect anything amiss. However, as time went on, it became painfully apparent, after I repeated the same line a half dozen times, that something was terribly wrong. Bob saved me by coming onstage, hurrying me into the wings, giving me a hug, and informing the audience that the play was over. Naturally, I was devastated. My wife rushed backstage in tears, accompanied by my daughter, Karolina, who was also in a state of shock. I wanted to go back and resume the play, but that was out of the question. The audience had left the theater, and there was a consensus that I should get to an emergency room. I didn't feel it was necessary. I was now cogent, in no pain whatsoever, so it was decided that I would see a doctor first thing in the morning, which I did. My brother, James, had some contacts at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, and thanks to him I was admitted. After a battery of tests, it was revealed that I had had a mild heart attack, but also that I had some seriously clogged arteries, and unless I underwent immediate bypass surgery, there was a good chance that I wouldn't survive any future episode(s). So I elected to undergo the surgery. Happily, the six hour triple bypass operation was successful. Everyone was greatly relieved, including me, but my main concern, the main thing on my mind, was when I might be able to resume performing Hemingway. I felt terrible that I hadn't opened the play, especially given the fact that our preview period had felt so successful. Since that time, I am happy to report that my health has never been better, my recovery aided by diet and exercise. I am deeply grateful for the love and support of my family and friends.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Lynne Calloway had been taking a newly refilled arthritis prescription for a few days when she mentioned she wasn't feeling well. So her husband, Joseph Calloway, did some investigating. When he looked up her medication in a book detailing prescription drugs, he said, he discovered that she had been given the wrong one. A CVS in New Jersey had mistakenly dispensed a chemotherapy drug, he said, that could be used to treat arthritis, but only when taken at limited frequencies commonly a single dose a week. Mrs. Calloway had been taking her medication twice a day. Pharmacy errors come in various forms, and many pharmacists at retail chains across the country are increasingly worried about making mistakes, an investigation by The New York Times found. They say they are juggling too many tasks without enough help. One pharmacist acknowledged making 10 to 12 errors a year "that are caught" in an anonymous letter to the South Carolina Board of Pharmacy. While patients cannot control what happens behind the pharmacy counter, they can be on the lookout for errors. These simple steps can help. Yes, they may look busy, and probably are, but pharmacists are the best source of information about the drugs they dispense. Ask to speak with a pharmacist, especially when the prescription involves a medication that is new to you. Inquire about side effects and whether the new drug is safe in combination with any others you are already taking. Pharmacists are supposed to check for drug interactions when dispensing prescriptions, and have computerized alerts to help, but they can get distracted. Just by asking questions, a patient increases the odds that the pharmacist will take a second look at the prescription and catch any errors. The Institute for Safe Medication Practices suggests asking the pharmacist at least one question, such as, "Is there anything special I should know about taking this medicine?" One of the most common mistakes made in pharmacies is dispensing a prescription to the wrong patient, according to the institute, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing medication errors. The correct name of the patient should be on the bag (usually on a printout stapled to the outside) as well as on the box or bottle inside it that contains the medication. It is important to check both; sometimes the bag is right, but the medication is not. Also check the address and birth date, in case someone with a similar name had a prescription waiting as well. Look at the pills Patients who get refills of the same medications month after month are more likely to recognize a pill that looks different, yet they might assume that the pharmacy has switched to a different generic or a new supplier. Make no such assumption. Start by reading the bottle. Many include a description of the pills. If the bottle says "round yellow pills" and it is filled with oval blue ones, something is amiss. But sometimes the differences are subtler. Fortunately, the internet is filled with websites that can help. WebMD has a search engine to help identify pills, as do AARP, Medscape, Drugs.com and the National Library of Medicine. Most drugs come with an informational leaflet. Take a look to make sure the medication matches the ailment being treated. Alert the pharmacy as soon as possible when there is a mistake. Not only should the wrong medication be exchanged for the correct one, but another patient might be at risk if prescriptions were accidentally mixed up. The prescribing doctor should also be alerted, according to Allison Hanson, a pharmacist at the Institute for Safe Medication Practices. A mistake could have started with the doctor, so he or she should be informed, and ingesting the wrong drug may require medical attention. Letting pharmacies know about errors can help them prevent others in the future. All the major pharmacy chains told The Times that patient safety was their top concern. The National Association of Chain Drug Stores, a trade group, said that "pharmacies consider even one prescription error to be one too many" and "seek continuous improvement." Errors can also be reported to state pharmacy boards. In addition, the safe medication group collects reports of medication errors and analyzes them for trends. It shares the information with the Food and Drug Administration, which can investigate further or pursue regulatory action.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
BUDAPEST The grand, gilded Hungarian State Opera House here is where Brahms once heard Mahler conduct Mozart. It's where Bartok's still shocking "Bluebeard's Castle" had its premiere a century ago. It's where the artist Matthew Barney shot part of his "Cremaster" cycle, and Jennifer Lawrence filmed scenes for her violent thriller "Red Sparrow," in which she played a ballerina turned spy. These days, the house is also emerging as a flash point in Hungary's culture wars. The opera company is in the midst of one of its biggest expansions ever, thanks to the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars by the increasingly autocratic right wing government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is building what he calls an "illiberal democracy" and has described Hungary's theaters, opera houses and concert halls as "temples of national culture." The money is paying for the first major overhaul of the State Opera since the Cold War, as well as a construction spree that will leave it with three theaters when work is completed next year. But in the midst of its country's rightward turn, the company has recently attracted controversy. It canceled some performances of the musical "Billy Elliot" after a conservative newspaper denounced the work as "gay propaganda" and staged "Porgy and Bess" with white singers, against the wishes of its creators' estates. This month, the State Opera and the Hungarian National Ballet are bringing 350 singers, dancers and musicians to New York to perform nearly two weeks of fully staged operas and ballets. The lineup includes "Bluebeard's Castle," Karl Goldmark's rarely staged "The Queen of Sheba" and "Bank Ban," an 1861 Ferenc Erkel work considered the national opera of Hungary, as well as ballets including "Swan Lake" and "Don Quixote." The tour will run from Oct. 30 through Nov. 11 at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. "Our musical heritage has always been very strong, and we have to convey it," Szilveszter Okovacs, the general director of the opera, said in an interview here last spring, explaining that it made sense to tour while the main opera house was closed for renovations. The ambitious and expensive tour comes at a moment when many of Hungary's leading classical musicians, especially those with international careers, have criticized the Orban government. The eminent pianist Andras Schiff no longer performs in Hungary, where he was born. ("I'm a great opponent of the political situation there now," he told the BBC in 2013.) Adam Fischer, a sought after conductor, stepped down as music director of the State Opera in 2010 in part to protest the Orban government's policies. His brother Ivan, the music director of the acclaimed Budapest Festival Orchestra, is an outspoken supporter of human rights at home and abroad. But both Fischers, who are among Hungary's most revered artists, still perform there: Adam leads a Wagner festival that draws audiences from around the world to Budapest, and the Budapest Festival Orchestra continues to receive some government support. One area where they diverge, though, is the arts. Mr. Trump tried, but failed, to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has had an uneasy relationship with artists, many of whom have been publicly critical of his policies. Mr. Orban, on the other hand, has made big investments in culture, seeing it as an important component of national identity. After his re election in April, the government's website reported that the opera star Placido Domingo had congratulated Mr. Orban in a letter, praising him as "a great supporter of the arts and culture." Classical music and dance are among the most international art forms and have played a big role in cultural diplomacy over the years. But they can stir tensions as well. During several recent visits to the United States, the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev has attracted protests by advocates for gay rights and Ukrainian autonomy; last spring, the Philadelphia Orchestra drew pro Palestinian demonstrators who were opposed to its tour of Israel. Michael M. Kaiser, who used to bring visiting international companies to the Kennedy Center regularly when he led it, said that the politics involved in the Hungarian tour could lead to tensions. "I think there are certainly elements of discomfort," said Mr. Kaiser, the chairman of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland. "We in the arts always want to believe that we are showing off the very best of humankind." In Hungary, Mr. Orban's Fidesz party has moved to exert more control over cultural appointments in recent years, naming scores of theater directors across the country. Mr. Okovacs, a trained singer with a deep knowledge of opera and a showman's knack for audience development initiatives, worked as a television executive before he became general director of the State Opera in 2011. But, he added: "It's not a bad thing. At the opera, it has been so for 135 years. It has always been a State Opera. And that's where it stops: They have never exercised any pressure." And at a time when other major cities, including New York and London, have found it difficult to support two opera houses, Hungary has reopened a second, the Erkel Theater, run by the State Opera as a lower priced alternative. Mr. Okovacs noted that it was the Orban government that brought back the Erkel in 2013, after it had been closed for several years. Now the company is in a fever of construction. It hopes to complete the renovation of its main house by September. A few miles away, construction crews are building a third theater for chamber size works in a cavernous 19th century railway maintenance shop. The opera house is turning the facility into a sprawling, 237,000 square foot complex of workshops, rehearsal studios and storage space called the Eiffel Art Studios. It will include a restaurant in a vintage rail car. And the ballet has been transformed in recent years. The idea for the New York tour began with Tamas Solymosi, the director of the ballet, who has hired a large number of new artists decreasing the average age of the dancers by nearly a decade, he said, to 25 or 26 brought different repertoire, and established a new school, the Hungarian National Ballet Institute. Now, he said, the company was ready for the world stage. Unlike the State Opera, which is bringing Hungarian works on tour, the ballet is making a point of focusing primarily on well known classics. Mr. Solymosi, who had an international career as a dancer, said he wanted the New York audience to have a reference point. "How can they can really judge the company if I bring something they've never seen?" he said. The State Opera's programming is extensive it has held more performances than any major opera company in recent years, by some counts and inventive. A Puccini festival this season features hits (both a traditional "La Boheme" staging for purists and a modern take, "La Boheme 2.0") as well as rarities, including "Edgar." The company is performing dozens of different titles, including Meyerbeer's "Les Huguenots"; a staging of two unfinished Mozart operas, "L'Oca del Cairo, ossia lo Sposo Deluso"; and plenty of war horses. In May it celebrated the centennial of "Bluebeard's Castle" with a striking new production conducted by the celebrated Hungarian composer Peter Eotvos and directed by Kasper Holten, the former director of opera at the Royal Opera in London. The performance was praised by the critic John Allison in Opera magazine, who noted that "no orchestra has lived with this music more." (The company will bring a different "Bluebeard" production to New York, but the same strong cast: Andras Palerdi as Bluebeard and Ildiko Komlosi as his bride, Judit.) But the State Opera has also courted controversy. In January, it staged "Porgy and Bess" with white singers over the objections of the Gershwin brothers' estates, which ask that the work be performed with black casts. The staging drew criticism abroad, but also praise within Hungary from some who saw it as striking a blow against political correctness. The production, mounted during Mr. Orban's re election campaign, relocated the action to a hangar like space full of homeless people searching for a promised land reminding some of the refugee crisis that overwhelmed the Budapest train station in 2015, and of Mr. Orban's strong anti immigration stance. "There was really silly fake news about our 'Porgy' production," Mr. Okovacs said in the interview, switching briefly from Hungarian to English to employ a favorite phrase of Mr. Trump's.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The incoming Trump administration appears determined to reverse much of what President Obama has tried to achieve on climate and environment policy. In position papers, agency questionnaires and the resumes of incoming senior officials, the direction is clear an about face from eight years of policies designed to reduce climate altering emissions and address the effects of a warming planet. The Republican led Congress appears to welcome many of these changes. But mayors and governors many of them in states that supported President elect Donald J. Trump say they are equally determined to continue the policies and plans they have already adopted to address climate change and related environmental damage, regardless of what they see from Washington. "With a federal government that's hostile to climate action, more and faster climate action work from cities, states and businesses will be required to stay anywhere near on track with our carbon pollution goals," said Sam Adams, the former mayor of Portland, Ore., and current director of the World Resources Institute United States. "In many cases, the solutions that help address climate change are what you have to do anyway in a city transit options so the city doesn't get gridlocked, which reduces greenhouse gas emissions and unlocks a tremendous amount of economic competitiveness because you don't have thousands of people stalled in traffic," Mr. Adams added. In last month's election, Seattle, Los Angeles and Columbus, Ohio, voted to expand mass transit. Portland, Ore., which many say is the most environmentally minded city in the country, began a new municipal waste program a few years ago, resulting in higher recycling and composting rates, and smaller amounts of trash headed to landfills. Miami Beach is raising roadbeds and building flood walls to hold back the rising seas. California, led by the Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, has adopted a cap and trade program, which limits carbon dioxide emissions and sets up a market for companies to buy and sell carbon allowances, so companies can meet or come under that carbon dioxide limit. The state has set one of the nation's most ambitious climate targets to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. Hawaii is planning to use 100 percent renewable energy by 2045. Governor Brown delivered a fiery defense of his state's environmental policies at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco last week. He scoffed at reports that some Trump transition officials wanted to eliminate the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's system of earth observing satellites. "If Trump turns off the satellites," he said, "California will launch its own damn satellite." Though stymied by alternating bouts of congressional gridlock or fossil fuel friendly presidential administrations over the last two decades, cities and states have been able to take substantive action. They have fortified themselves against rising seas, switched to renewable sources of energy, expanded mass transit and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Whatever happens or does not happen in Washington, officials say, these projects will continue. Leaders in some cities feel that without presidential leadership it will be hard to achieve the swift transition that dealing with climate change requires. Many fear that they will not get federal funds or national policies needed to make it happen. Still, many mayors and state officials are optimistic about their plans already in motion and those that are scheduled over the next few years. "We feel really good, and we don't see this election slowing us down," said Eric Garcetti, mayor of Los Angeles. "We're not going to wait for action from the federal government. We're taking action now and securing our values." While experts caution that there are areas where federal regulations can determine what states and local governments are able to accomplish, they maintain that a climate skeptical administration could not halt all the momentum generated locally over the last two decades. "Cities are where climate change problems originate, and therefore that's where the solutions are," said Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City who is co chairman of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy and the United Nations' Secretary General's special envoy for cities and climate change. A number of cities have made substantial progress. In Miami Beach, where 400 million has been invested to deal with flooding, roads have been elevated and sea walls have been constructed. Susanne M. Torriente, the city's chief resiliency officer, said the city had also recently completed its greenhouse gas inventory and now would aim to reduce its emissions, regardless of federal policy. Whatever policies the Trump administration adopts, she said, "won't really be a big change for us." Republican mayors also govern some cities that are especially vulnerable to climate change. James C. Cason, the mayor of Coral Gables, Fla., is working to protect the city from some of the flooding it is already experiencing and to prepare it for more flooding that will most likely accompany rising sea levels. Florida has a Republican governor, Rick Scott, who has questioned the cause and extent of climate change, but that has not stopped Mr. Cason and other Republican mayors in South Florida from making pragmatic decisions on the issue. Cities have also seen lots of benefits from networks the Compact of Mayors, which has been signed by more than 120 American cities, C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, Climate Mayors and others most notably, information sharing and solutions, and reaffirming commitments to each other and to their citizens, as many mayors did in a recent letter to the president elect. Depending on their state, however, cities are somewhat limited in what they can do from a legislative or regulatory standpoint. Some policy experts and state officials maintain that state governments, if they are willing to act on climate or energy policy, are where the measurable progress is made. In most states, governors and legislatures have the authority to regulate the two biggest sources of emissions: power plants and transportation. States can set automotive fuel efficiency standards, and in the case of California, effectively set them for the whole country, experts said. Twenty nine states require that a certain percentage of their electricity comes from renewable sources, known as a portfolio standard, and another eight have voluntary portfolio standards or targets. In addition to California, nine other states, grouped in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, known as R.G.G.I., and 17 governors, mostly from that group of 29, have also signed the Governors' Accord for a New Energy Future, which commits their states to certain sustainability goals. New York has also enacted progressive climate policies, rivaling California, largely by engaging market solutions, in particular attempting to reform the state's utility system. Republican led states, which may not be favorable to climate policy, have still achieved meaningful progress, especially when it comes to renewable energy, because of the economics of the wind and solar industries. Texas, for instance, has more wind power than any other state, largely a product of deregulating the utility market, but also of subsidies from the federal government and tax credits. Robert Perciasepe, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, said that there were areas where national policies could hamstring state efforts. The federal government, he said, can be helpful in getting states to work together, though it is not essential to those efforts, as demonstrated by R.G.G.I. or the Governors' Accord. And while achieving meaningful reductions may not be without difficulty, Mr. Perciasepe said, "I'm comforted that we have so much momentum, though we still need to be going faster, and the fact that we need to continue to accelerate may be lost."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
LIVERPOOL, England Mohamed Salah has been here before. The edge of the opposition box, down Liverpool's right hand side, a defender snapping at his heels. A little burst of speed creates a touch, a glimmer of space. The ball is at his left foot. He touches it just a few inches in front of him. Mohamed Salah has scored this goal before. He seemed to score this goal almost continually last season: opening his body out, wrapping his foot round the ball, generating enough whip to carry it high, across the goalkeeper, arcing into the far corner. It is the goal that won him last year's Puskas Award. It is the goal that at one point seemed to become his signature. The mechanics of it are still there. Now, he sets the ball just the same as he used to. He shapes his body just the same as he used to. He is, it is safe to assume, aiming for the same corner as he used to. This time, though, it is not quite enough. The ball curls, but it fades too soon. It picks up height, but too little. Jordan Pickford, Everton's goalkeeper, barely moves. The ball drifts, welcome, into his arms. Salah missed more glaring opportunities than that as Liverpool, just as it had last week, visited a team desperate to see it fail and left with a goalless draw. The cost was a little higher this time around: A single point against Manchester United last week took Liverpool to the top of the Premier League table. The same result against Everton on a rain specked Sunday left it a point behind Manchester City. Salah was not the only player who might have diverted the course of the game Joel Matip and Fabinho, in particular, spurned their chances to become folk heroes but he did it most often. Twice, once in each half, he raced clear, his feet a blur as he bore down on goal. Twice, his touch was heavy. Twice, his timing was awry. Pickford saved one; the defender Michael Keane stopped the other. But though they were his best chances, it was the first of them, the one that curled straight into Pickford's hands, that was most symbolic of Salah's campaign so far. Everything is almost exactly the same as it used to be, as it was in his unstoppable season last year, only it isn't, not quite. It was, of course, unavoidable that Salah would be accused of suffering from what is popularly known as second season syndrome. That is the unfortunate thing about setting quite so high a bar last season: even the slightest drop off, or even the slightest perception of a drop off, can be interpreted as an anticlimax. So it has proved. Salah has scored 17 goals in the Premier League in his 28 games this season. Good, of course; respectable, obviously, more than a goal in every two games; still a smart inclusion in the fantasy team, clearly. Is it a total bettered only by Sergio Aguero, putting Salah ahead of Harry Kane and Pierre Emerick Aubameyang and the rest of the billions of dollars of strikers in the Premier League? O.K. But still, not quite the same. Not really. Salah, indeed, is a strange kind of busted flush. He was, according to his manager, Jurgen Klopp, "unplayable" as recently as four days ago, when he twisted and curdled the blood of Adam Masina, Watford's left back, during a 5 0 win at Anfield. He has been criticized for disappearing in high pressure games not always wrongly but in the one truly do or die game of Liverpool's season so far, in the Champions League against Napoli, Salah scored the only goal. He is still his club's leading scorer. Even at Goodison Park, even in the stalemate, it was abundantly clear that he was Liverpool's greatest threat. That is not to say, though, that the criticism is entirely misplaced. Just as Salah is not a write off because he has not managed to maintain his furious goal scoring rate, it is hard to deny that he is not quite the force of nature he was for much of last year. And perhaps, even as the injury has healed, its effects are still felt. Klopp dismisses any notions that Salah has lost confidence, but the heavy touches when he was once so deft, the slight stumbles when he was once so sure: they are the surefire signs. Salah's newfound profile means he has to deal with the closer attentions of opposing defenders. He has had to do so, at times, in the absence of much creative assistance from Liverpool's midfield, and for much of the year in a new position, too. He has not been able to pick up the burden when he is not quite as fluid, not quite as free as he used to be. There is no shame in that, of course. The number of goals he has scored despite all of that warrants respect, rather than scorn. The worry from Klopp's perspective, and from Liverpool's is that, in a title race that will probably be decided by the very finest of margins, what they need more than ever is the Salah of last year, the one who scored that same goal again and again, the one whose every touch seemed to be golden. If Liverpool is to overhaul Manchester City, if it is to end its 29 year wait for an English championship, it needs the player it had last season, rather than the one who is almost the same, but somehow, infinitesimally, not quite.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
There may yet be hope for the Tasmanian devil. The marsupial carnivores have been struck with a lethal and contagious cancer that has reduced their population by 80 percent. But now scientists believe that the animals have found a way to fight back: a genetic variation in some individuals that may make them resistant. In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers examined the genomes of three isolated populations of devils living in different parts of Tasmania. In each population, the scientists found two regions of the genome that were rapidly changing; both contain genes related to immune function or cancer risk. This genetic variation may be the key to avoiding extinction. "The populations are evolving independently, but changes across all three are consistent," said the senior author of the paper, Andrew Storfer, a professor of biology at Washington State University. "This makes what we found more compelling."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Heading south on Route 34 toward Jersey Shore beaches on a summer weekend, drivers confront a daunting array of highway quirks, not limited to jughandle intersections and baffling exit signs. The simple act of turning left on Allaire Road in Wall Township, for example, is confounded by a traffic circle, where an attempt to head east casts the driver into a ballet of choosing the proper lane, looking for the exit and maintaining a high alert in the crush of beach seeking vehicles. Now imagine that during this encounter a low tire warning flashes on the dashboard. Next, a chime alerts the driver that a text message maybe important has landed. Then the cellphone rings. The overload of inputs, perhaps amplified by foul weather or a demanding toddler, presents a real challenge to the driver and a danger to all road users. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that distraction and inattention contribute to 20 to 30 percent of reported crashes. Much as regulators and automakers have rushed to deal with the flood of distractions that invade the automobile GPS displays, Internet radio, e mail and even Facebook apps there is a growing effort by engineers to build cars that gauge the difficulty of situations and recognize a driver in distress. Then the car would react, delaying all but the most urgent alerts, sending phone calls to voicemail and freeing the driver to focus on the task. The study of driver workload management some would point to the irony in this reaction to a situation partly created by automakers themselves is progressing alongside the efforts of the planners who dream up new generations of infotainment features. A foundation of workload study is the Yerkes Dodson Law, a theory developed in the early 20th century that plots workload and performance on a bell curve. There can be trouble at either end an inattentive, underworked driver may be as much a risk as an overworked driver who cannot handle the combined sensory inputs and driving chores. In the middle is the ideal, a driver functioning at optimum level. Systems that detect driver drowsiness, like the Mercedes Benz Attention Assist feature, can prompt a driver to be more alert, but driver overload is harder to manage. N.H.T.S.A. has issued voluntary accessory design guidelines in an effort to reduce distraction, but given consumers' hunger for gadgets, managing those distractions to reduce workload may prove a better solution. As safety groups press for restrictions on phone conversations and messaging in the car, the urgency to find a solution will only increase, experts say. Studies of driver workload have a long history, but a milestone came in 2003 when the John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, a unit of the Transportation Department in conjunction with Delphi, the giant parts supplier, Ford Motor and several universities began a research project to quantify distractions and driving situations as a way to generate workload estimates. Paul A. Green, a University of Michigan research professor, said in a telephone interview that the Volpe study stimulated research. Today, automakers and universities are developing technologies that will let them measure the level of driver stress and the response to the pressure. That data could be used by a management system that would delay calls, alerts, text messages and warning lights at the times when the driver's workload was peaking and the stress level was high. Because many cars are equipped with advanced electronics radar, sensors and cameras developed to enable features like smart cruise control and lane departure warning some of the equipment needed to gauge workload is already in vehicles. Sensors that determine speed, throttle position, steering wheel angle and transmission gear selection, and even weather conditions, can be adapted to see traffic on the road and monitor driving situations. Jeff Greenberg, a Ford senior technical leader, said in an interview that his research team had built models that predicted workload based on information from data points relative to time. The model takes into account that when steering and throttle position are constant for an extended time and outside sensors show moderate traffic, workload will be minimal. But if over just a few seconds the accelerator is pressed, traffic becomes heavy and the wheel is turned, the system determines that the driver has encountered a changing situation and workload is increasing. Those elements describe the driving situation. But what about the driver? That is where biometrics devices that measure how well the driver is managing workload come into play. A simulator built by Ford to demonstrate biometric tools uses sensors in the steering wheel, like those on exercise machines, to monitor heart rate. Sweaty palms are detected by gauging skin conductivity. Probes aimed at the driver's face measure skin temperature, and a sensor in the seat belt can tell when the driver is breathing hard. Mr. Greenberg said that by combining biometric data with an analysis of the driving situation, workload could be very accurately gauged and distractions could be delayed until things were on an even keel. Some automakers have not embraced biometrics as a practical way of measuring driver stress. Jim Foley, senior principal engineer at Toyota's research center in Ann Arbor, Mich., said in a phone interview that although work on biometrics started in the 1970s and continued, there were problems in applying the technology to production vehicles. He added that measuring anything through the steering wheel did not work if the driver was wearing gloves and that getting a reliable signal for all drivers was challenging. Bryan Reimer, a scientist engaged in driver workload studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, disagreed. "Some researchers believe biometrics work in the laboratory only," he said in a phone interview. "Others, including myself, believe firmly they can be used in the car." He added that heart rate could be measured through the seat as well as through the steering wheel. "We are doing a considerable amount of work using biometrics in conjunction with other visual information, such as eye tracking and vehicle telemetry, to provide a holistic view of the demands the driver is under," he said. Honda and Ohio State University are collaborating on a driver workload study. They have built a simulator on a platform that mimics vehicle motion while driving scenarios are projected on a wraparound screen and driver performance is charted. Biometric sensors measure blood pressure, heart rate, eye movement, respiration, blink rates, skin conductivity and, by means of functional near infrared technology, brain activity. "We're trying to get a better understanding of how the driver thinks about the system while driving the vehicle," said Steven Feit, Honda's chief engineer for infotainment research. "We don't want to just lock out features, but we want to make them available at the right time. We're trying to do a balanced approach between controlling the environment and optimizing the operation of infotainment features." Janet Weisenberger, director of the Ohio State University simulation laboratory, said that this research could be applicable to the development of semiautonomous vehicles. "In the long term, you want to know things about the driver so systems could be best matched to a driver's capabilities." The semiautonomous car that can assist the driver in difficult situations is an obvious next step beyond using workload detection to manage distraction. If the automobile can gauge workload, it can lend a hand when necessary. Most luxury cars are available with collision avoidance systems and intelligent cruise control, and, as workload measurement technology is refined, other aids will become possible. For example, if sensors see that snow is obscuring the road and biometrics indicate driver stress, the vehicle could project lane lines on the windshield. But there might be limits to how much control automakers would want to wrest from the driver: leaving the driver with little to do could be problematic.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
The new BMW 428i coupe is one better than the 3 Series sedan. Thank a sleek design and a lower center of gravity. If two heads are better than one, and four of a kind beats three, BMW's naming strategy makes perfect sense. Busily filling gaps in its something for everyone lineup, BMW has conjured up a 4 Series coupe and convertible for 2014. Since the mid 1970s, these two door cars have been among the models collectively known as the 3 Series. That's a champion's name, invoked around the world like Muhammad Ali's: the 3 Series has been at the core of BMW's self professed claim to make the Ultimate Driving Machine. But from now on, the 3 Series label will apply only to the sedan, the wagon and a new hunchbacked hatchback, the 3 Series GT. You have to wonder why anyone would walk away from a name like that. It's a bit like Porsche rebadging its classic sports car the 311. Yet putting two and two together, BMW figures that the 4 Series merits a higher number. Audi has gone this route, with fluid A5 and S5 coupes that are essentially designer upgrades of its A4 and S4 sedans. And BMW's 6 Series coupes and convertibles have long played the same elevated role versus the 5 Series sedans and wagons. Naturally, BMW's policy, as immutable as gravity, decrees that 4 costs more than 3. The 428i coupe starts at 41,425, an 1,800 jump over last year's 328i coupe and a steeper 3,200 beyond the current 328i sedan. The more powerful 435i coupe is 46,925. Hardtop convertible versions blow the 50 grand barrier to smithereens, reaching heights once reserved for BMW's track ready M3 models: 49,675 for the 428i convertible, 55,825 for the 435i. For all models, xDrive all wheel drive adds 2,000 more. For M fans waiting for a superhero, the 425 horsepower 2015 M4 Coupe which trades the outgoing 414 horse V8 for a brutally powerful but much more fuel efficient twin turbo in line 6 goes on sale in June at 65,125. BMW seems aware that in order to justify the higher prices, the 4 Series needs to tempt buyers like the 65 dessert menu at Per Se. This, it mostly manages. And by current luxury standards, the 4 feels honest and satisfying, not overstuffed with gadgets that are as superfluous as an after dinner mint. Coupes invariably sell fewer copies than their sedan counterparts. But I suspect that the 4 Series, buoyed by BMW's shrewdly cultivated customer base, will soon reflect satisfied faces wherever creative, fashionable folks meet for potent cocktails and subtle one upmanship. None of this would work if the 4 Series wasn't pretty. But even BMW's most petulant critics may have to admit that this is a fine looking car, with taut, glowing skin over a great bone structure. So called "air breathers" are the auto equivalent of adhesive nasal strips: these body vents behind the front wheels let air exit quickly, BMW says, reducing drag. The 4 Series continues the inexorable upsizing of BMW's once compact cars. The expansion puts the 4 Series into the territory of midsize coupes. The overall length, 182.7 inches, is barely two inches shorter than a Mercedes E Class coupe. Compared with the retiring 3 Series coupe, the 4 gets a nearly 2 inch increase in both width and wheelbase, and its roof drops by roughly half an inch. The spread between the rear wheels, especially 3 inches wider than before allows the hips to flare wider, giving the 4 a stable stance and a curb presence that seems packed for action. Compared with the 3 coupe, there's a welcome increase in rear legroom, just enough to quell complaints from adult passengers. I tested a pair of coupes, a 428i with the 240 horsepower 2 liter TwinPower turbo 4, and the 435i with the 300 horse 3 liter in line turbo 6. Fans of manual or automatic transmissions are equally well served. A 6 speed manual maxed out the entertainment value of the 435i; yet BMW's optional 8 speed paddle shifted automatic made the most of the 428i's lesser power. With those engines and transmissions forming the guts of so many BMW models, the 4 Series performed in familiar, professional fashion: a "3 plus one," in BMW's marketing parlance, though my Olympic scorecard would give it a solid 3.5. BMW claims that the car's center of gravity, less than 20 inches off the pavement, is the lowest in its lineup, even below that of the Z4 sports car. I pointed the 428i from Brooklyn to Boston and back, smitten again by the way this 4 cylinder engine blazes from city to city, yet rarely bothers with fuel stops. The E.P.A. rates the 428i with the automatic gearbox at 23 miles per gallon in town and 35 on the highway a notable step up from the 435i's rating of 20/30 and no other nonhybrid luxury coupe comes close. Importantly, that 35 m.p.g. figure is achievable in the real world: just keep the car around 65 m.p.h. The TwinPower 4 will never sound as inspired as BMW's in line 6s, especially at its clattering idle speed. But for many buyers, the 5,500 price savings and higher mileage make up for aural deficiencies. For either model, a console switch toggles through Eco Pro, Comfort, Sport and Sport Plus settings. Eco Pro tames the throttle and engine management, and even the climate control, for maximum mileage. Eco Pro also displays fairly patronizing driving tips in the interest of efficiency: "Accelerate modestly" is the sort of advice you'd expect from a parent in the back seat. Traditionalists who choose the manual get a more intimate bond between car and driver, even if the automatic is quicker. With the automatic, the 435i rides sonorous waves of power to reach 60 m.p.h. in 5 seconds, beating a self shifting driver by about 0.3 second, by BMW's estimate. Select Sport Plus, and the BMW eases back the stability control, amps up the throttle and transmission, lowers the shift points and disables the traction control freeing the electronic limited slip differential to deliver maximum power to the rear wheels, especially when skittering out of corners. Whereas a more delicate steering and chassis sensibility has crept into the 3 Series, the 4 felt more athletic and connected. It helped that both models I tested had the optional M Sport package (a respective 3,100 and 3,500 in the 435i and 428i), whose features included larger alloy wheels, an adaptive M suspension, sport seats, an M steering wheel and some aerodynamic and trim extras.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Not many warehouses come with design accolades, but one of the few remaining relics of the old Brooklyn waterfront has not one, but two distinguished architects to add some prestige. The building that takes up the block of Kent Avenue between North Third and North Fourth Streets in Williamsburg opened as a warehouse in 1915 and was designed by Cass Gilbert, who also designed the Alexander Hamilton United States Custom House and the Woolworth Building. Now, a century later, Morris Adjmi, an architect praised for adding a modern touch to historic structures, has designed plans to convert the building to condominiums. Opened originally as the Austin, Nichols and Company warehouse, the building became the epicenter of the largest grocery business in the world, according to Nina Nazionale, director of library operations at the New York Historical Society. The warehouse was converted to rental apartments in 2010. It will be rechristened as the Austin Nichols House, with studios to three bedroom condos priced from about 535,000 to 3 million. Sales start in about three weeks. Mr. Gilbert designed the warehouse in Egyptian Revival style, with clean, bold lines emphasized by the enormous scale and proportion of the building. The warehouse was a highly efficient packaging and distribution center of various foods, spices, coffee and eventually liquor, incorporating piers and railway tracks, according to a 2005 report by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Although the building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it is not a city landmark; the City Council reversed its designation by the preservation commission.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
At some point this off season, Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman will meet with Hal Steinbrenner, the team's managing general partner, for their usual dissection of the season. The team's professional scouts will huddle to do much of the same: examine the roster and discuss ways to avoid repeating the outcome of the 2020 season. Despite being a preseason title favorite and possessing one of the most talented rosters in Major League Baseball, the Yankees again failed to reach the World Series, extending a drought that dates to their 2009 title. This time, they were toppled in a best of five American League division series by the Tampa Bay Rays, who sit one win from reaching the final round despite having a payroll about a third of the Yankees'. In the Bronx, though, the path forward this off season is perhaps hazier than any other in Yankees history. Will Gleyber Torres, who was tied for the A.L. lead in fielding errors among shortstops, stay at that position next season? Will Gary Sanchez, who was one of the worst hitters in baseball and was benched during the playoffs, be the team's primary catcher or with the team at all? Will Luis Severino, who may not return until next summer from Tommy John surgery, and Domingo German, who was suspended for the entire 2020 season for violating M.L.B.'s domestic abuse policy, be enough to upgrade a starting rotation that Cashman called "at risk" in the playoffs and in definite need of improvement? Beyond that sampling of questions, one issue perhaps supersedes all: How much money will M.L.B. teams, the Yankees included, be willing to spend after a year in which they said they suffered billions in losses because of a pandemic shortened season without fans in the stands until late in the postseason? None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. "We'll see," Steinbrenner, the Yankees' managing general partner, said on Tuesday on the radio show hosted by Yankees television broadcaster Michael Kay. "It depends what kind of money is going to be required to be spent, based on what we look at and decide needs change. But look: There's no doubt we sustained significant losses this year, more so than any other team in baseball. It's just been a crazy year." While teams have not opened their books, M.L.B. Commissioner Rob Manfred has said about 40 percent of revenue comes from tickets, concessions and other gate related income. The Yankees, who generally rank near the top of the league in attendance, have said that share might be higher for them. And just before the pandemic, they committed a record 324 million to ace Gerrit Cole and pushed past several luxury tax thresholds with the largest opening day payroll in the majors, at 265 million, according to Cot's Baseball Contracts. About 65 million in 2020 salaries are set to come off the books as star infielder D.J. LeMahieu, and pitchers J.A. Happ, Masahiro Tanaka and James Paxton are eligible for free agency. That doesn't include Zack Britton, a key reliever, and outfielder Brett Gardner, the longest tenured Yankee, who have team options or clauses in their contracts that will need to be sorted out soon. Exactly how much wiggle room the Yankees have to upgrade their roster, specifically on the mound, is unclear at best. One area the Yankees could improve is adding more left handed batters to a lineup that was heavily right handed, which the versatile Rays exploited in the playoffs. But that is not a simple exercise. "Of course you'd like to have the balance, if you can, but then when you're faced with a decision of: Do I not try to re sign D.J. LeMahieu because he's right handed, so I can get a left handed bat in there?" Cashman said. During his and Manager Aaron Boone's annual season ending news conference with reporters on Wednesday, Cashman said he had yet to have the "heavy lifting" conversations about the future payroll with Steinbrenner. But he said he was looking forward to pairing existing talent on the team (including the young starters Deivi Garcia and Clarke Schmidt) with players who weren't available in 2020 (like German and Severino). He said the front office would consider free agent and trade options at a later date. "This global pandemic has affected everybody in a horrific way in a business setting," Cashman said, adding later, "These are real constraints that exist throughout all industries and in households alone, and so it'll be something that will clearly factor into how we approach the future." Over two days, Steinbrenner, Boone and Cashman spent a lot of time explaining the shortcomings of the year (like the regular season inconsistencies that led to a fifth seed in this year's expanded playoffs, Sanchez's disappointing performance and the team's over all defensive troubles, including Torres's); the disappointment of once again not winning a title ("At this point in time, all I can do is apologize to our fans," Steinbrenner said); and the organization's decision making in Game 2 of the A.L.D.S. In that contest, the Yankees started Garcia for only one inning before handing the ball to Happ, who wasn't pleased with the decision and struggled. "If I can get better players, a deeper roster which is on me I think we have a chance to have maybe a better outcome in some of these matchups," Cashman said. He said that he was sorry that he put Boone whom Steinbrenner said would return as manager in 2021 in a position where he had to use a less traditional pitching plan that backfired. "Because of the roster, the way it was configured which is my responsibility, not his he was forced to try to come up with different game plans and be open minded to how to best navigate it," Cashman said of Boone. "And it didn't work out. But hopefully in the future, we'll be in a better position than we are right now."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Marc Kirschner, the co founder of Marquee TV, an arts oriented streaming service that launched in February, gets the question all the time: "People have been asking us when we were going to have 'Hamilton.'" His answer: "Well, if we had 'Hamilton,' we would change our name to The Streaming Platform That Has 'Hamilton.'" The platform that does have Lin Manuel Miranda's blockbuster is Disney , which paid about 75 million for the live capture that premieres on July 3. (In what surely must be a coincidence, Disney has dropped its free trial period.) While watching theater on a screen now feels a bit weird, live telecasts were common in the 1950s and early 1960s, when programs like Playhouse 90, Studio One and The U. S. Steel Hour displayed the work of the finest playwrights, directors and actors. Some of them are even streamable. Amazon Prime, for example, offers a 1957 telecast of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, once Broadway's royal couple, starring in "The Great Sebastians." What about other options? While the state of theater streaming is in perpetual flux, here are answers to the most common questions. Be warned, however, that "Hamilton" is an outlier among Broadway hits. I love musicals. Where do I find them online? Here's one genre where there is actually a lot out there. The websites Filmed on Stage and Thespie can help point you to many of them, such as the West End production of "Gypsy," starring Imelda Staunton and available to buy or rent on Amazon, iTunes and YouTube. Musicals are a portion of the long running PBS Great Performances series, while Netflix lists popular properties as different as "Shrek the Musical" and "Springsteen on Broadway." HBO will present the Spike Lee capture of "David Byrne's American Utopia" later this year. I don't want to spend time hunting for those shows, though. Aren't there one stop shops? Yes, and to nobody's surprise the popularity of subscription based platforms has increased in recent months. The closest thing to a Netflix for theater is BroadwayHD, which has about 300 titles in its catalog, from hits like "Kinky Boots" to vintage nuggets, including Lee J. Cobb reprising his Willy Loman in a 1966 CBS telecast of "Death of a Salesman." The British American Marquee TV is another service that offers all you can watch for a weekly, monthly or annual fee. (Broadway On Demand is a newcomer in this market, and while its original interview programming seems promising, its high profile stage offerings are underwhelming so far.) Why aren't all the big Broadway shows available for streaming? Video recording a show is up to individual producers. And they have tended to pass on the opportunity for two main reasons: cost, and the fear that streaming will cannibalize ticket sales. "To do what 'Hamilton' did would require a real outlay of cash from the producers," said Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League. That show's three lead producers, who have made fortunes from it, financed the filming themselves; for others, a multicamera investment can be prohibitive. And then there is the paperwork. "We secure all the permissions from the creative teams, the producers, the theater companies, all of the casts," said Patrick Hoffman, director of the Theater on Film and Tape Archive at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. "Everyone has to sign an agreement authorizing us to come and video record a production in its entirety." And, of course, there must be an agreement with the unions, which Hoffman handles via the Coalition of Broadway Unions and Guilds. That public library archive must be a treasure trove. How do I watch? It is indeed a bounty: 5,000 live theater performances covering the last 50 years. But they are only viewable in person, with a New York City library card, which limits access considerably. A new agreement will let a librarian screen tapes in local schools and colleges. For now, obviously, both the performing arts library and schools remain closed. What about those National Theater and Royal Shakespeare Company captures? There are so many, and with big stars, too. Britain and many other European countries got a head start because digital initiatives were made a condition for state funding, to help achieve accessibility, equity and sustainability. "Most countries started with that top down view of digital, whereas in the United States it's an upside down approach, which is one reason everything has lagged behind so much here," said Marquee TV's Kirschner. He also points out that video recording is prohibitively more expensive in America. "To capture a Broadway production costs 5 to 10 times what it would overseas," he said, which helps to explain the impressive film catalogs of Britain's National Theater and France's Comedie Francaise, not to mention Canada's Stratford Festival. Will my school have to deal with streaming rights if we want to do our show on Zoom? Licensing companies have rushed to create package deals that include streaming for their properties, instead of just the rights for a live performance onstage (known as the grand rights). "We are clearing the rights on a title by title basis and adding new ones every day," said John Prignano, chief operating officer and director of education and development for Music Theatre International, which holds the rights to hundreds of shows. MTI has also partnered with the ticketing company ShowTix4U and Broadway Media Distribution to bundle licensing, ticketing, streaming and collecting royalties making the process easier for schools, for example. Why can I watch some streams whenever I want but for others I have to log in at a specific time? There are three basic types of streaming. Livestreaming is the closest you get to an appointment theatrical experience: you watch a show as it unfolds live, usually by purchasing a ticket or making a donation ahead of time. With scheduled streaming, audience members watch a recording of a show at a specific time. Finally there is streaming on demand, which is either a subscription model a la Netflix or timed access where customers buy a ticket and have, say, 48 hours to watch the show. "Each show we license might have different options," Prignano said. "Some only offer livestreaming, others only offer live and scheduled streaming, etc. If a show has a movie deal or an impending movie deal, it's more difficult to get streaming rights, and it'll be really difficult to get on demand." With no Broadway until January 3, at least, will we run out of new material to stream? "We have enough in the pipeline to take us well into next year, when we can start shooting again," said Bonnie Comley, the co founder and co CEO Broadway HD which adds about four titles (older and newer, with a heavy preponderance of British productions) to its roster per month. Producers are also looking at ways to capture shows performed in front of empty or socially distanced houses. Actors' Equity Association is in the process of reviewing pandemic prompted agreements, including for Zoom shows, that were released in March. "One was to allow theaters to exhibit online archives of their productions, another to allow producers to do remote work," said Lawrence Lorczak, a senior business representative for the union. "We're in the middle of reviewing the terms for those two to make them more accessible for the producers and theaters."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Ray Mantle, driving, with his golfing partner, Bob Gaca, at the Queen's Harbour Yacht Country Club in Jacksonville, Fla. Mr. Mantle is fighting the club's liability waiver for golf cart use. Who's at Fault? Read the Fine Print to Make Sure You're Not at Risk If the old printer at his golf club had not been replaced, Ray Mantle probably would not have realized that he and his friends had been signing a liability waiver that could expose them to expensive litigation and damages. Mr. Mantle, a retired New York lawyer whose specialty was intellectual property, said he had noticed something on the back of the receipt for a golf cart rental at his club, Queen's Harbour Yacht and Country Club in Jacksonville, Fla., that alarmed him. Appearing clearly in black ink on white paper, thanks to the new printer, was an agreement that exempted ClubCorp, which owns the club, from any liability incurred while any person the renter, a family member or even a third party was using the cart. These types of waivers, often written in small print with legal verbiage, have become a part of modern life. They typically exempt a business or a person from blame or liability should something go wrong; instead, the onus is on the person who signs the waiver. But Mr. Mantle thought this one went too far, because it tried to absolve the club's owner from basic responsibility. So he complained to the manager, only to find out that he had overlooked the agreement for years, when it was printed in gray ink on yellow paper. Mr. Mantle, 81, began a campaign against the waiver, enlisting fellow members to challenge its use with Queen's Harbour and ClubCorp. His effort goes beyond one gated golf community in North Florida. It raises issues for anyone who has taken a child to a trampoline park, driven around a go kart track or rented sporting equipment: How enforceable are these ubiquitous waivers, what rights does a signer give up, and are individuals unwittingly taking on risk that a business should assume? States have a lot of say over waivers of liability. Lee Wickert, a lawyer in the Austin, Tex., office of Matthiesen, Wickert Lehrer, compiled a list of how each state interprets them. He found that only Louisiana, Montana and Virginia ban them. California interprets them strictly, while in Alabama, pretty much anything goes. Florida, he said, often sides with the business over the individual; in Wisconsin, it's the opposite. At the heart of any of these waivers are two points: whether the language is clear and what bargaining powers the person being asked to sign the waiver has. "A lot of times, people aren't even aware of the language," Mr. Wickert said. "Oftentimes, it's a hindsight question: The court says, 'If he did read it, would he have understood it?'" In Florida, the state looks at whether the service or area covered by the waiver is essential to the public, like a park. If it is, the waiver is not valid. A golf course does not fall under the public service designation. But how the ClubCorp waiver would be enforced is not clear. Mr. Mantle said he and his fellow members were concerned that if an accident occurred on the golf course, they could be sued while the waiver's legality was debated in court. "It's likely unenforceable, but before it got to that point, the person would be sued and have to hire a lawyer," he said. "And there's always some uncertainty about whether you'd win." The costs to someone who had signed that waiver could be staggering, depleting savings and other assets like a house. "The issue isn't any golfer being responsible for his own negligence," Mr. Catalli said. "The issue is ClubCorp saying we need to be responsible for their negligence." Neither Kimberly King, senior associate counsel at ClubCorp, nor the company's spokeswoman, Patty Jerde, would discuss the matter by phone. In an email, Ms. Jerde defended the policy, equating the risk that golfers take to those assumed by a skier. "Similar to other hosts of recreational sites (e.g., ski resorts), we use an assumption of risk policy so that our members and guests can understand their own personal responsibility," she wrote. "We believe we've struck a fair balance between offering a great recreational experience and the associated risks assumed with the enjoyment of our facilities." In an email to Mr. Catalli, Ms. King said the company would not change its language and compared its waiver to ones she had signed for bike rides, summer camp for her children and bounce houses. But when using entertainment equipment, like a trampoline or a bounce house, parents and children are required to acknowledge lengthy agreements before being allowed to participate. It's clear that dozens of children bouncing on a trampoline carries risk of injury. But even those agreements do not always hold up in instances of negligence by the company, lawyers said. Or consider an ice skating rink, where a waiver would be required. If a skater gets hurt, the skater has waived liability against the owner of the rink. If a skater hurts someone else, the skater is still liable. "If you injure someone else, that liability is now part of your personal liability coverage," said Scott Teller, executive vice president at Chubb, the insurance company, adding that a lawsuit could be financially devastating. "It only takes one single liability event like that to impact your financial well being." Lawyers questioned whether putting a waiver of liability on the back of a golf cart slip was even valid, let alone aboveboard. The waivers that hold up best in court are written with bold type highlighting the risks to a person, who then has to agree to them by signing, Mr. Wickert said. "Warnings on the back of tickets aren't so strong," he said. But this can be a hazy area, because Queen's Harbour is also open to the public. At a private club, such exculpatory language does not exist and most likely would not be tolerated by members, said Tom Walker, vice president at RPS Bollinger Sports Leisure Insurance. "If you're a member, you don't have anything contractually that you'd sign off on," he said. "Nor would your guests be involved with that." A private club might try to mitigate risk with private contractors who work there, however. Yet there are instances when being on a private course is not protection from liability. To protect yourself, insurers stress the need for excess liability coverage, also known as umbrella policies. Traditionally, these policies pick up coverage where automobile or homeowner policies leave off. Ross Buchmueller, president and chief executive of Pure Insurance, said his company had settled a claim a few years ago after a client's golf club slipped from his hands during a swing on a course in Miami and struck a cyclist on an abutting bike route. The cyclist, of course, was not required to sign a waiver for a bike ride, Mr. Buchmueller said. "He went on a path open to the public maybe it had signs warning about golfers but either way, the person got hurt," he said. His company paid a claim in excess of 100,000 because the golfer had an umbrella policy. Mr. Mantle said ClubCorp's waiver had not deterred him from golfing. But he and his golfing buddies make sure to cross it out and write that they do not accept it. "So far, the people manning the cash registers let me do it," he said. "My own preference is to take out those terms that release me from liability and indemnifies the club from liability. But as a lawyer, I've modified the terms, and they've accepted it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Less than an hour after President Trump named John R. Bolton as his new national security adviser on Thursday, Mr. Bolton made an appearance in the venue where many Americans, including Mr. Trump, have come to know him over the past decade: Fox News. "I think I still am a Fox News contributor," Mr. Bolton, laughing, told the host Martha MacCallum at the start of a previously scheduled interview. You can't blame him for being a bit confused. Mr. Bolton a featured commentator on Fox News since 2007, after his term as ambassador to the United Nations is the third TV personality in the past eight days to join Mr. Trump's it came from the small screen White House team. The president last week tapped Larry Kudlow, the CNBC commentator, to be his chief economic adviser. On Monday, he hired Joseph E. diGenova, a Washington lawyer who drew Mr. Trump's attention on Fox News, where he described without evidence "a brazen plot" by F.B.I. agents to frame the president for a crime.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
"Beautiful," the Tony and Grammy Award winning jukebox musical about the life and songs of Carole King, will close on Oct. 27, 2019, producers announced on Wednesday , after nearly six years on Broadway. The production, which opened in January 2014 and features a collection of beloved songs written by Ms. King, her ex husband Gerry Goffin and the writing partners Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, will have played 2,418 regular performances and 60 previews at the Stephen Sondheim Theater. It will close as the longest running and highest grossing show in that theater's history: Since its opening, "Beautiful" has grossed nearly 250 million. With a book by Douglas McGrath, "Beautiful" portrays Ms. King's origins as a young songwriter in New York, her rocky marriage to her writing partner, Mr. Goffin, and the parade of hits she wrote for the Drifters ("Some Kind of Wonderful"), the Shirelles ( "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" ), Aretha Franklin ("Natural Woman") and later for her own chart topping album "Tapestry." Over the years, the role of Carole King has been played by multiple performers. ("Beautiful" also featured Carole King herself, who surprised audiences in January when she sang the final song onstage to celebrate the show's fifth anniversary.) Jessie Mueller, who opened the show in the role, won a Tony Award for best actress in a musical in 2014. After Ms. Mueller left in 2015 to star in "Waitress," Chilina Kennedy took over and played Ms. King in more than 1,000 performances. Ms. Mueller's sister, Abby, and the actress Melissa Benoist have also played the lead.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
DAYTON, Tenn. William Jennings Bryan earned a permanent place in American history nearly nine decades ago in the Scopes trial, when he stood in a courtroom here and successfully prosecuted a teacher who broke the law by teaching evolution in a public school. While not quite "the fantastic cross between a circus and a holy war," as Time magazine put it, that captivated the nation in 1925, a similar debate is again playing out in Dayton, this time at an evangelical Christian college named for Bryan, which is being sued as part of a controversy over its own stance on the origin of humans. The continuing debate at Bryan College and beyond is a reminder of how divisive the issues of the Scopes trial still are, even splitting an institution whose motto is "Christ Above All." Playing out at a time when the teaching of evolution remains a cultural hot spot to a degree that might have stunned its proponents in Bryan's era, the debate also reflects the problems many Christian colleges face as they try to balance religious beliefs with secular education. Since Bryan College's founding in 1930, its statement of belief, which professors have to sign as part of their employment contracts, included a 41 word section summing up the institution's conservative views on creation and evolution, including the statement: "The origin of man was by fiat of God." But in February, college officials decided that professors had to agree to an additional clarification declaring that Adam and Eve "are historical persons created by God in a special formative act, and not from previously existing life forms." "It makes Bryan a different place," said Allison Baker, who graduated this month and was the vice president of the student government, which raised questions about the clarification's swift enactment. "I would argue it makes it a more narrow place." The consequences so far have been stark at a college where about one quarter of incoming students were home schooled and whose alumni routinely earn spots in graduate programs at secular institutions. Two longtime faculty members this month sued the college, arguing that the Board of Trustees was powerless under the college's charter to change the statement of belief. Brian Eisenback, a biology professor and a Bryan graduate whose parents met on campus, decided to move to another Christian college. Faculty members, spurred in part by the clarification, said they had no confidence in Bryan's president, Stephen D. Livesay. And before the academic year ended this month, hundreds of students, on a campus with an enrollment of more than 700, petitioned trustees in opposition to the plan. Dr. Livesay said the clarification, which will not change the curriculum in any way, was intended to reaffirm, not alter, the institution's traditional position. He said concerns had been building for years that some employees had perhaps moved "away from the historical and current position of the college." "We want to remain faithful to the historical charter of the school and what we have always practiced through the years," Dr. Livesay said. "There has never been a need, up until today, to truly clarify and make explicit what has been part of the school for 84 years." He added, "We want to make certain that we view culture through the eyes of faith, that we don't view our faith through the eyes of culture." Many Christian institutions of higher education require employees to sign doctrinal statements as administrators seek to blend religious traditions with academic standards. "The struggle for Christian colleges is to try to define how a Christian college is different from a Christian church," said William C. Ringenberg, the author of a book on the history of Protestant colleges in the United States. "Is one different from the other?" For Dr. Eisenback, who is writing a book with support from an organization that has called the college's clarified stance "scientifically untenable," teaching an array of perspectives was an act of faith in itself. "Because of the culture war that is raging with Scripture and age of the Earth and so on, I think it's important for me to teach my students the same material they would hear at any state university," said Dr. Eisenback, who accepted a job at Milligan College, also in Tennessee, amid the discord here. "But then also, as a Christian who is teaching at a Christian liberal arts college, I think it's important that they be educated on the different ways that people read relevant Scripture passages." Others at Bryan insist that the college's doctrinal stances should take precedence. "Academic freedom is not sacrosanct," Kevin L. Clauson, a professor of politics and justice, wrote in a letter to the editor of The Bryan Triangle, a campus publication. "It too must submit to God in a Christian college." Some question whether the new statement is consistent with school policies outlined in a 2010 internal document for board members, which said that because Bryan is a college, not a church, it does not set itself up as a judge on ecclesiastical matters and does not attempt to prescribe what other Christians do. "The trustees do not legislate 'stands' for faculty or students," said the document, which was included in a court filing. Bryan is not the first Christian college in recent years to deal with internal strife. Shorter University, a Southern Baptist institution in Georgia, was criticized in 2011 after it said employees would have to "reject as acceptable all sexual activity not in agreement with the Bible," including premarital sex and homosexuality. And Cedarville University in Ohio, whose administration was censured in 2009 by the American Association of University Professors, has endured years of debate and litigation about academic freedom and doctrinal standards. Such debates often take place, Dr. Ringenberg said, as the colleges try to fine tune the balance of faith and education. "Soon enough, the two of them will clash if you're serious about academics and serious about having a biblical view of Christianity," he said. Dr. Livesay said that Bryan's leaders were determined to proceed with the clarification. "I don't think you have to believe the Bryan way in order to be a strong evangelical," he said. "But this is Bryan College, and this is something that's important to us. It's in our DNA. It's who we are."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
And, as Washington is perceived to have slipped into gridlock, the states have increasingly become the front line for several political and cultural battles, including those over immigration and same sex marriage. Last month, for example, the national focus turned to Indiana, when state legislators enacted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which some suggested permitted discrimination against gays and lesbians. At the same time, the presence of journalists in statehouses has plummeted. Since 2003, the number of newspaper statehouse reporters has fallen about 35 percent, according to figures from the Pew Research Center. About 15 percent of those who remain are students. "If you go into some states there is almost nothing, almost nobody paying attention," Mr. VandeHei said in an interview. Though robust coverage of states is crucial at any time, he said, noting that many have vast economies, it is particularly important "when you fall into these periods where there is a lot of Washington inaction." The states are now incubators for policies, on topics like energy and transportation, which eventually are folded into national solutions, he said. The Politico model is to get half of the necessary revenue to sustain small newsrooms from higher priced subscriptions aimed at a smaller group of insiders obsessed with politics and policy, and the other half from advertising and events, Mr. VandeHei said. "No matter where we go, if you're working in government, you need the same kinds of information," he said. And there is little competition, he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
SAN FRANCISCO Uber set two dubious quarterly records on Thursday as it reported its results: its largest ever loss, exceeding 5 billion, and its slowest ever revenue growth. The double whammy immediately renewed questions about the prospects for the company, the world's biggest ride hailing business. Uber has been dogged by concerns about sluggish sales and whether it can make money, worries that were compounded by a disappointing initial public offering in May. For the second quarter, Uber said it lost 5.2 billion, the largest loss since it began disclosing limited financial data in 2017. A majority of that about 3.9 billion was caused by stock based compensation that Uber paid its employees after its I.P.O. Excluding that one time expense, Uber lost 1.3 billion, or nearly twice the 878 million that it lost a year earlier. On that same basis and excluding other costs, the company said it expected to lose 3 billion to 3.2 billion this year. Revenue grew to 3.1 billion, up 14 percent from a year ago, the slowest quarterly growth rate Uber has ever disclosed. "We think that 2019 will be our peak investment year," Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's chief executive, said in an interview, noting that he anticipated losses would decline over the next two years. "We want to make sure that the kind of growth we have is healthy growth." He said there were positives. Uber's bookings the money it gets from rides and deliveries before paying commissions to drivers rose 31 percent from a year ago. The company also added customers, totaling more than 100 million monthly active riders for the first time. The results continued to cast a shadow over Uber, sending its stock falling in after hours trading. The company, whose growth once rose like a rocket ship as it upended traditional transportation and barreled into markets around the world, was expected to be valued at about 120 billion at its I.P.O. this year. But Uber dropped below its 45 offering price on its first day of trading and has only briefly risen above that share price since. Mr. Khosrowshahi has been criticized for the way Uber went public and has faced questions about how he intends to revive growth. "What we're looking for is evidence that the company can reaccelerate revenue growth after the last few quarters," said Tom White, a senior vice president at the financial firm D.A. Davidson. The ride hailing industry has faced scrutiny in recent months for the way its businesses burn money with no imminent likelihood of profits. Companies must constantly spend freely for incentives to attract passengers and drivers and to fend off competition. Both Uber and its rival Lyft were questioned by investors this year about their business models as they prepared to list on the stock market. Lyft has also reported a series of deep losses. This week, it said it lost 644.2 million in the second quarter, though it added that it expected that amount to abate. Several months earlier, Lyft had also posted a particularly steep loss related to stock based compensation payouts to its employees. Like many technology start ups, Uber and Lyft recruited employees with stock options that they said could make the workers wealthy when the companies went public. The costs of that practice have now materialized. Uber said it projected spending 450 million to 500 million on stock based compensation in the third quarter. Mr. Khosrowshahi has been working to cut costs and shift management. In June, he ousted two top executives: the chief operating officer and the chief marketing officer. Last month, he laid off a third of the marketing staff, or about 400 people, which he said during an earnings call was necessary to speed up the team's decision making. Three board members have also stepped down since Uber's I.P.O. The board changes have been led by the company's chairman, Ron Sugar, Mr. Khosrowshahi said on Thursday. He added that they were part of a natural shift after a public offering. "This is a different Uber," he said in the interview. Since the I.P.O., "I get to spend more time internally with our employees. What I'm insisting on is excellent execution." Mr. Khosrowshahi said Uber, which had been competing with Lyft by offering heavily discounted rides to lure riders, has seen that price war subside. "The competitive environment, which got worse in the second half of last year, is progressively improving now," he said. Although Uber has relaxed its discounts for rides, the food delivery business is still highly competitive and the company plans to invest more aggressively in that area, he said. Uber's food delivery business, Uber Eats, more than doubled its number of monthly customers in the quarter. Uber, which aspires to become an Amazon like store for all forms of transportation, is also investing in the development of autonomous cars, public transit deals, the expansion of its bicycle and scooter business, and in its freight delivery platform. The company plans to roll out more options for shared rides, such as its car pooling and public transit features. The employment status of ride hailing drivers remains an issue for Uber, which classifies them as independent contractors, saying the work is flexible. The categorization also means that Uber does not need to provide drivers with full time benefits. Yet regulators in New York have set a minimum wage for ride hailing drivers and California legislators are considering a bill that could reclassify drivers as employees. Mr. Khosrowshahi characterized the changes in New York as "malarkey" and said that increased driver wages were passed on to riders, which makes the service unaffordable for lower income passengers. In California, Uber is negotiating with lawmakers over the proposed legislation, he said. "We do believe there can be a win win scenario here," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Last week, two Black former N.F.L. players raised questions about potential racial bias in how their applications for dementia claims in the concussion settlement were evaluated. Now Congress is looking into the matter. On Wednesday, four Democratic members of Congress sent the N.F.L. a list of questions about the race based benchmarks being used in the landmark concussion settlement to determine whether retired players who filed claims for dementia were eligible for monetary awards. The lawmakers' questions stem from two legal actions filed last week in federal court by two former N.F.L. players who said they had their claims denied because the benchmarks "explicitly and deliberately" discriminate against hundreds, if not thousands, of Black players who apply for payouts worth as much as 3 million. The players want the judge overseeing the settlement to stop doctors from using the race based benchmarks and rely on age, education levels and other metrics that would create a more precise point of comparison for the players. They also want Black players to be able to have the results of their neurocognitive exams recalculated using "race neutral" scales to put them on an even footing with white players. In their letter to N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, Representative Yvette Clarke of New York and Representative Maxine Waters of California asked the N.F.L. to describe how these benchmarks were developed, what efforts were being used to reduce any "embedded biases in the data" and whether the measures were peer reviewed or examined by independent experts. The lawmakers also asked the league to provide documentation with its responses, as well as statistics on the race of applicants for dementia claims, including what percentage of Black applicants had their dementia claims denied compared with white players. Those figures are not publicly released by the administrator of the settlement. About two thirds of the roughly 3,000 claims submitted by all former players have been for dementia, and about three quarters of those claims have been denied. The specifics of how the separate scales for Black players and white players are applied are in the confidential manual given to league approved doctors who examine players to determine whether they are eligible for payouts for neurological and cognitive conditions including dementia. The N.F.L. was urged "to immediately halt the use of any racially based algorithms in the cognitive impairment evaluation until it can be determined, through a full independent review, that they do not have the effect of depriving Black players compensation they are owed," the lawmakers wrote in their letter. The members of Congress asked for answers to their questions no later than Oct. 2. Last week, the N.F.L. said in a statement that the lawsuit was "entirely misguided" and that the settlement "always contemplated the use of recognized statistical techniques to account for demographic differences such as age, education and race." None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. "The point of such adjustments in contrast to the complaint's claims is to seek to ensure that individuals are treated fairly and compared against comparable groups." Doctors, the league said, are not required to use any particular adjustments. Still, the N.F.L. has appealed approved claims, arguing that doctors should have considered a player's race when deciding whether he was eligible for a payout. For instance, the league challenged a payout to Najeh Davenport, a former running back, one of the two players who took legal action against the league last week. But the settlement case's special master, who rules on appeals, wrote in response to the N.F.L.'s appeal that "it is inappropriate to deny a claim solely because the clinician chose" not to use a player's race when interpreting his test scores. The special master also cited medical experts who questioned the merits and fairness of using race when interpreting test scores. "As using African American specific norms increases the rate of false negatives, there is a risk that some may be denied access to necessary benefits or compensation solely on the basis of race," the special master wrote. Davenport, who was joined in the lawsuit by Kevin Henry, who played eight years with the Pittsburgh Steelers, compared the use of race based benchmarks to redlining, or the practice of denying applications of Black people seeking home loans or insurance. The senators, Wyden and Booker, are also questioning whether the racial benchmarks in the concussion settlement are consistent with other economic practices in which race is used against people of color. The two senators and Clarke last year introduced the Algorithmic Accountability Act, which "requires companies to study and fix flawed computer algorithms that result in inaccurate, unfair, biased or discriminatory decisions impacting Americans." Algorithms, they wrote, help decide which job candidates will be interviewed, who will be targeted for or excluded from advertisements and the prices consumers pay for goods and shopping online. The bill was referred to the Senate Commerce Committee, where no votes have been taken. There were 30 co sponsors of the bill in the House of Representatives, where it was referred to the Energy and Commerce Committee. The members of Congress noted that if the accusations of racial bias were true, they "would raise serious questions about the N.F.L.'s commitment to racial justice and compliance with the Federal law that mandates equal protection." They continued: "As the N.F.L., and this country, attempts to take steps to address racial injustice, the N.F.L. must make a concerted effort to evaluate the degree to which racial bias impacts these compensation determinations and move promptly to rectify it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
BERKELEY, Calif. One by one, celebrities came forward this week to say they were sick of the misinformation and hate speech on Instagram and Facebook, its parent company. Many of them Kim Kardashian West, Katy Perry, Leonardo DiCaprio have tens of millions of followers on social media. Then the stars went further. They were not just speaking up to protest Facebook, they said, but would take action, too. On Wednesday, they said, they would freeze their Instagram accounts for 24 hours and not post anything on the photo sharing site as a kind of moratorium against Facebook. But the move, which the celebrities made in concert with the Stop Hate for Profit Campaign, a coalition of civil rights organizations that had organized an ad boycott of Facebook in July, quickly became fodder for online criticism. On Twitter, people called the celebrity Instagram freeze a stunt. "Oh god what a sacrifice" to stop posting for a day, one user wrote. Another posted an eyeroll like emoji and said, "Way to take a risk people." "These stunts are worthless if temporary and short lived (which they always are)," tweeted Jenna Golden, the head of a consulting firm in Washington, mirroring a common sentiment shared across Twitter. "If anything, they shine a light on the fact that we cannot live without these platforms since everyone always comes back (brands included.)" It was a far cry from what the organizers of the Instagram freeze had hoped to achieve. The Stop Hate for Profit Campaign which is made up of civil rights organizations including the Anti Defamation League and the N.A.A.C.P. has had success over the past few months in getting others to take action against Facebook for its distribution of toxic content. In July, the campaign persuaded more than 1,000 of Facebook's advertisers, including Ben Jerry's and Puma, to pause their spending on ads on the platform. In an interview on Tuesday, Jim Steyer, the chief executive of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group that is part of the campaign, said the Instagram freeze was just the first step in a new round of messaging. After the 24 hours of the freeze was over, he said, celebrities such as Sacha Baron Cohen and Demi Lovato would begin posting educational messages aimed at young people. The messages would promote democracy and explain how social media companies spread disinformation, broadcast hate speech and allow far right groups to form online. The freeze "is designed to keep up the pressure," Mr. Steyer said. Of Facebook and Instagram, he added, "they are by far the worst platforms in terms of amplifying hate speech, amplifying racist messages and undermining democracy." Mr. Steyer said he expected more celebrities, as well as groups and individuals, to hop on board the Instagram freeze as the campaign spreads. The freeze effort began on Monday, when celebrities including Mr. Baron Cohen and Mark Ruffalo posted that they were part of the campaign. "I can't sit by and stay silent while these platforms continue to allow the spreading of hate, propaganda and misinformation created by groups to sow division and split America apart only to take steps after people are killed," she tweeted to her 66.7 million followers, urging them to also freeze their Instagram and Facebook accounts. In total, the campaign said at least 14 celebrities were taking part in the social media effort, including Jennifer Lawrence, Mr. Ruffalo and Kerry Washington. Despite the backlash, some people were emboldened by the stars' announcements. "I'm in!!" one user tweeted in response to Mr. Baron Cohen. "Facebook is destroying minds, friendships, families, businesses. The false information that is being believed by previously rational people is destructive beyond belief. It has to stop."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Recently I wrote about a math equation that had managed to stir up a debate online. The equation was this one: The issue was that it generated two different answers, 16 or 1, depending on the order in which the mathematical operations were carried out. As youngsters, math students are drilled in a particular convention for the "order of operations," which dictates the order thus: parentheses, exponents, multiplication and division (to be treated on equal footing, with ties broken by working from left to right), and addition and subtraction (likewise of equal priority, with ties similarly broken). Strict adherence to this elementary PEMDAS convention, I argued, leads to only one answer: 16. Nonetheless, many readers (including my editor), equally adherent to what they regarded as the standard order of operations, strenuously insisted the right answer was 1. What was going on? After reading through the many comments on the article, I realized most of these respondents were using a different (and more sophisticated) convention than the elementary PEMDAS convention I had described in the article. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. In this more sophisticated convention, which is often used in algebra, implicit multiplication is given higher priority than explicit multiplication or explicit division, in which those operations are written explicitly with symbols like x / or /. Under this more sophisticated convention, the implicit multiplication in 2(2 2) is given higher priority than the explicit division in 8/2(2 2). In other words, 2(2 2) should be evaluated first. Doing so yields 8/2(2 2) 8/8 1. By the same rule, many commenters argued that the expression 8/2(4) was not synonymous with 8/2x4, because the parentheses demanded immediate resolution, thus giving 8/8 1 again. This convention is very reasonable, and I agree that the answer is 1 if we adhere to it. But it is not universally adopted. The calculators built into Google and WolframAlpha use the more elementary convention; they make no distinction between implicit and explicit multiplication when instructed to evaluate simple arithmetic expressions.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
"Music to Be Murdered By," the latest album by the 47 year old rapper Eminem, topped the Billboard chart this week after a surprise release, becoming his 10th straight album to debut at No. 1, the most of all time and one better than Kanye West, who has an active streak of nine. The Eminem album, which dropped without warning on Jan. 17, earned the equivalent of 279,000 units, according to Nielsen Music, including 117,000 in album sales and 218 million streams. That was a drop from the rapper's 2018 album, "Kamikaze," which debuted with a total of 434,000 units, including 252,000 in sales and 226 million streams. In typical Eminem fashion, "Music to Be Murdered By" raised eyebrows for some of its lyrical choices, including references to the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas and the Manchester, England, bombing at an Ariana Grande concert. After some backlash, the rapper released a statement explaining that "murder has become so commonplace that we are a society obsessed and fascinated by it. I thought why not make a sport of it, and murder over beats?" He added: "This album was not made for the squeamish. If you are easily offended or unnerved at the screams of bloody murder, this may not be the collection for you."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Bull elephants in Addo Elephant Park in South Africa. They belong to a diverse group called afrotherians mammals that live in or originated in Africa that include manatees and rodent like insect eaters whose testicular descent was lost over time. Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times Reader, here's an incomplete list of things you shouldn't try with elephants: a memory contest, jump rope and castration. See, in addition to having uncanny recall and a firm relationship with gravity, elephants have their testicles nestled deep within their bodies, all the way up near their kidneys. That's unusual: In most other mammals, testicles form during embryonic development near the kidneys and then descend, either to the lower abdomen or an external scrotum, by the time of a male's birth. Biologists have wondered about this discrepancy for decades. Did the earliest mammals retain their testicles, like elephants, or did they let their family jewels drop? A new study, published Thursday in PLOS Biology, says it was the latter. Studying the DNA of 71 mammals, a German team concluded that testicular descent is an ancestral trait that was later lost in so called afrotherians, a ragtag group that includes elephants, manatees and several insect eaters that live in or originated from Africa. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. In four afrotherian subgroups manatees and dugongs, elephant shrews, golden moles and tenrecs (small insectivores that resemble hedgehogs) the authors found nonfunctional remnants of two genes specifically involved in testicular descent. Scientists often rely on geologic fossils to piece together evolutionary history, but this study shows that there is also a "fossil record in the genome," said Mark Springer, a biology professor at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the research. These "molecular fossils" abound across the tree of life. "For pretty much any species, you'll typically find on the order of a hundred or more broken genes that existed back in time and were lost," said Michael Hiller, a senior research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, and senior author of the new paper. He and the study's lead author, Virag Sharma, did not start out targeting testicles. Over years, their group had developed a computational method to screen different genomes for broken genes with high precision. They observed vestiges of genes that were rendered useless by evolution: enamel making genes in toothless whales, fat digestion genes in sugar dependent fruit bats and DNA repair genes in armadillos with armor that protects them from harmful UV radiation. Additionally, they noticed that two genes called RXFP2 and INSL3 were inactive in several afrotherian species. From a literature search the researchers learned that if you knock these genes out in male mice, the rodents' testicles won't descend. They also learned that evolutionary biologists have long debated whether this absence of testicular descent called testicondy is a primitive trait, or one that afrotherians uniquely evolved. "It became clear that we'd be able to help resolve that debate," Dr. Hiller said. Based on the fact that genes start to rack up mutations once they lose their function, the researchers worked backward and estimated that testicondy independently arose at least four times, ranging from about 25 million years ago in cape golden moles to about 80 million years ago in cape elephant shrews. This also meant that testicondy evolved after afrotherians split from other placental mammals, about 100 million years ago, which suggests the common ancestor of all mammals did indeed lower their testes, Dr. Hiller said. But mysteries still remain. Not all afrotherians exhibit testicondy aardvarks, for instance, have descending testicles. And although elephants and rock hyraxes (which resemble guinea pigs) do not have descending testicles, RXFP2 and INSL3 are still intact in both. It may be that researchers are only "looking at part of the picture," and that other genes and processes involved have not yet been identified, said Ross MacPhee, a mammalogy curator at the American Museum of Natural History who did not participate in the new study.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
William E. Macaulay, a billionaire energy investor whose record 30 million gift to the City University of New York has given thousands of select students the same opportunity he was accorded a half century ago as a middle class teenager from the Bronx to graduate tuition free from an elite college died on Nov. 26 at a hospital in Cleveland. He was 74. The cause was a heart attack, his daughter Elizabeth Macaulay Lewis said. Mr. Macaulay made his fortune in energy company buyouts, overseeing the transformation of the First Reserve Corporation, which he acquired in 1983, into one of the field's largest private equity firms. He was chief executive until 2015, shared the title until 2017, and had been executive chairman since then. He and his wife, Linda, also contributed to the American Museum of Natural History (she was a co chairwoman of the board); the Rogosin Institute, a kidney treatment and research center, at NewYork Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medical College; and the Macaulay Library at the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology. (The couple were avid bird watchers, logging 6,625 species in 147 countries.) Mr. Macaulay especially prided himself on what may be his most enduring legacy: the highly selective college, founded in 1999, at which the most promising students from eight of the City University's senior campuses receive additional academic mentoring and financial support.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Headed east for the long weekend? You can shop for provisions at Goop Mrkt, a reimagined general store opening on Thursday and filled with essentials for Goopies like a Kisuii ruffle trim romper ( 350), a rose quartz jade egg ( 55) and health loaf bread gluten free, obviously from Eli Zabar ( 16). At 145 Main Street, Floor 1, Amagansett, N.Y. On Saturday, the activewear purveyor Bandier will open a Bandier by the Beach pop up at the Aussie cafe Bluestone Lane. Grab a cute Heroine Sport color block bra ( 85) and leggings ( 155) for a free Nike Run Club workout at 10 a.m., with breakfast to follow. At 786 Montauk Highway, Montauk, N.Y. Sign up at bandier.com/studio b. That same day, Elizabeth and James will open a pop up at the jewelry store Love Adorned with summer ready accessories like oversize sunglasses ( 185), alongside a hand selected range of vintage embroidered jackets ( 395) and floral kimonos ( 495). At 156 Main Street, Amagansett, N.Y. Also on Saturday, the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund Alliance Super Saturday annual charity shopping event promises deeply discounted designer items from more than 125 brands, including Vilebrequin and Bonpoint. At Nova's Ark Project, 30 Millstone Road, Water Mill, N.Y.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
I'm horribly cheap, but Spotify is one of the few apps I pay for. Since I'm paying, my expectations are sky high, and yet the app is buggy and slow, and it crashes regularly. I expect it to read my mind and know exactly what I want to hear at all times, but it doesn't, so I'm disappointed. I also love that more and more messaging apps are adding options for ephemeral conversation. I'm increasingly convinced that the default of digitally hoarding all conversations forever was a terrible idea, and I like that I can get my conversations to disappear from most of the chat apps I use now. You've written a lot about security. How do you keep your own tech setup secure? I got interested in security out of necessity. When I was a kid using social media for the first time, I was also in the process of extricating myself from an abuser. I had to figure out how to use things like Myspace it felt very important at the time to have a vibrant Myspace life! in ways that would protect my anonymity, my location data and other sensitive information. I'd constantly be messaging my friends, asking them to take down certain pictures or posts that could help my abuser find me. This isn't a concern for me anymore, but the situation forced me to think about what kinds of personal data I was sharing online from the moment I started doing it, and I'm grateful for that. A lot of people don't think about their online privacy until they're dealing with a compromising situation in which their data is already out there. Unfortunately, I think experiences like mine are quite common. Lots of people learn about the risks to their online security only when they're affected by a widespread breach like Equifax, or another security threat. After college, I started learning more about cryptography and going to crypto parties, which helped me realize security could be something fun instead of something scary. Encryption is seen as this nerdy, niche subject, but I think there's something almost romantic about putting in the time and effort to keep a conversation private and safe it shows you care. What about protecting conversations with sources? I approach security as a journalist in much the same way that I've approached security as a person. The first thing I think about is limiting my exposure what kind of data are my source and I generating? How do I minimize that footprint, or at least minimize how long my devices retain it? The second step is securing the data we do end up generating, which often means encrypting it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
SAN FRANCISCO The Defense Department said on Thursday that it would re evaluate the awarding of a 10 billion cloud computing contract to Microsoft after sustained protest from Amazon, which had contended that it lost the deal because of potential interference from President Trump. In a legal brief filed to the Court of Federal Claims, the Justice Department requested the reconsideration after Amazon argued in federal court that its offerings and pricing had been incorrectly assessed by the Pentagon. The Defense Department requested 120 days to reassess the award. The judge in the case, Patricia E. Campbell Smith, is expected to allow the re evaluation to go forward, though she has not yet made an official ruling. The reconsideration is the latest twist in the enormous contract, known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, which was considered to be a prize for technology companies. Amazon, a cloud computing giant, had widely been considered the front runner to win the contract before it was awarded to Microsoft in October. Amazon then pushed to overturn the decision, arguing that President Trump interfered because of his dispute with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the owner of The Washington Post. The Washington Post has aggressively covered the Trump administration.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
From 2015: A century after Albert Einstein proposed that gravity could bend light, astronomers now rely on galaxies or even clusters of galaxies to magnify distant stars. In the 1993 Bill Murray movie, a weatherman finds himself reliving the same day over and over again. Now astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope say they have been watching the same star blow itself to smithereens in a supernova explosion over and over again, thanks to a trick of Einsteinian optics. The star exploded more than nine billion years ago on the other side of the universe, too far for even the Hubble to see without special help from the cosmos. In this case, however, light rays from the star have been bent and magnified by the gravity of an intervening cluster of galaxies so that multiple images of it appear. Four of them are arranged in a tight formation known as an Einstein Cross surrounding one of the galaxies in the cluster. Since each light ray follows a different path from the star to here, each image in the cross represents a slightly different moment in the supernova explosion. This is the first time astronomers have been able to see the same explosion over and over again, and its unique properties may help them better understand not only the nature of these spectacular phenomena but also cosmological mysteries like dark matter and how fast the universe is expanding. "I was sort of astounded," said Patrick Kelly of the University of California, Berkeley, who discovered the supernova images in data recorded by the space telescope in November. "I was not expecting anything like that at all." Dr. Kelly is lead author of a report describing the supernova published on Thursday in the journal Science. Robert Kirshner, a supernova expert at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who was not involved in the work, said: "We've seen gravitational lenses before, and we've seen supernovae before. We've even seen lensed supernovae before. But this multiple image is what we have all been hoping to see." Supernovas are among the most violent and rare events in the universe, occurring perhaps once per century in a typical galaxy. They outshine entire galaxies, spewing elemental particles like oxygen and gold out into space to form the foundations of new worlds, and leaving behind crushed remnants called neutron stars or black holes. Because of the galaxy cluster standing between this star and the Hubble, "basically, we got to see the supernova four times," Dr. Kelly said. And the explosion is expected to appear again in another part of the sky in the next 10 years. Timing the delays between its appearances, he explained, will allow astronomers to refine measurements of how fast the universe is expanding and to map the mysterious dark matter that supplies the bulk of the mass and gravitational oomph of the universe. Einstein proposed that matter and energy warp the geometry of space the way a heavy body sags a mattress, producing the effect we call gravity. One consequence of this was that even light rays would be bent by gravity and follow a curved path around massive objects like the sun, as dramatically confirmed during a solar eclipse in 1919. In effect, space itself could become a telescope. How this cosmic telescope works depends on how the stars are aligned. If a star and its intervening lens are slightly out of line, the distant light can appear as arcs. If they are exactly lined up, the more distant star can appear as a halo known as an Einstein ring, or as evenly separated images the Einstein Cross. Astronomers have learned how to use entire galaxies and galaxy clusters as telescopes to see fainter objects beyond them that would otherwise be lost in the fog of time. Hubble scientists have recently been using this trick in a program known as Glass, or Grism Lens Amplified Survey from Space, to explore around clusters of galaxies, the most massive and thus most powerful gravitational lenses in the universe. This has enabled them to extend Hubble's already powerful vision deeper into the past, in one case to a galaxy that existed when the universe was only half a billion years old. Dr. Kelly's job was to inspect the images for distant supernovas. He was not expecting to see four versions of the same explosion at once. They appeared in images recorded in November of a spiral galaxy roughly nine billion light years from here. The light from this spiral has been bent and magnified both by the gravity of the intervening cluster, which is five billion light years distant, and by one very massive galaxy in the cluster. As a result, ghost images of the spiral appear throughout the cluster and in particular in an Einstein Cross around that one galaxy. Because the lensing effect gathers light that would not otherwise be sent to our eyes or a telescope, the image of the host galaxy is not split so much as multiplied, explained Adi Zitrin, a team member from the California Institute of Technology. "We simply see more appearances than we would if the lens were not present," he said. So far the supernova, named after a Norwegian astrophysicist, Sjur Refsdal, has been detected in only the four images in the Einstein cross. Based on computer modeling of the cluster, Dr. Kelly and his colleagues suspect that Supernova Refsdal has appeared before, around 1964 and 1995, in other lensed images of the spiral galaxy. It should appear again elsewhere in the same cluster within the next few years, Dr. Kelly's team predicts. The exact timing of Supernova Refsdal's reappearance depends on how the dark matter in the galaxy cluster is distributed, which will tell astronomers much about a part of the universe they cannot see any other way. The longer the path length or the stronger the gravitational field the light ray goes through, the longer the delay. Because of the expansion of the universe, the star and its galaxy are receding from us so fast that, according to relativity, clocks there appear to run markedly more slowly than clocks here. As a result, two months from the point of view of the supernova corresponds to nearly six months on Earth. From our point of view, Dr. Kelly said, "it's going on in slow motion." A star might die only once, but with Einstein's telescope, if you know where to look, you can watch it scream forever.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
To celebrate the centennial of the choreographer Merce Cunningham, the Baryshnikov Arts Center will support five artists this year rather than one as Cage Cunningham fellows. The organization announced Thursday that Charles Atlas, Tei Blow, Phyllis Chen, Liz Gerring and Silas Riener are to be awarded fellowships. "On this special occasion in 2019 we honor the collaborative spirit that Merce Cunningham epitomized by giving fellowships to five artists," Mikhail Baryshnikov, the Baryshnikov Arts Center's founder and artistic director, said in a statement. "It's our way of celebrating Merce's 100th birthday: with a diverse group of innovative artists and their collaborators in the studio experimenting, creating and sharing art." Baryshnikov Arts Center received several designated gifts to make a financial increase possible; this year it has 100,000 to award, up from 50,000. Mr. Atlas, a filmmaker; Mr. Blow, a multimedia artist; Ms. Chen, a composer and musician; and Ms. Gerring, a dancer and choreographer, will also receive 40 studio hours spread throughout the fellowship period and an additional residency week. At the end of their weeks, each will present a studio show open to the public.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
For more than 50 years, some spark of divine fire has kept touching the dancer choreographer Steve Paxton. In the 1960s, he performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and Judson Dance Theater. He created roles in epoch making dances in both; his collaborations with the artist Robert Rauschenberg were among the bold experiments of the decade. In the 1970s, when Mr. Paxton was a founder of the improvisational group Grand Union, he developed contact improvisation, which became an international genre. Mr. Paxton's contact improv showed the drama that could emerge from the ways one person's weight could be taken by others in continually changing negotiations. In the 1980s, he began solo improvisations to Glenn Gould's recording of Bach's "Goldberg" Variations, moving to classical music in often unorthodox ways, and with disarming freshness. Read our critics on the best dance moments of 2018. In 2010, he danced the world premiere of his solo "The Beast" in a program shared with the still phenomenal Mikhail Baryshnikov. Mr. Paxton's uncompromising and unpretty toughness, his stark objectivity about showing basic qualities and facts of movement in new lights, were fully as momentous as and more haunting than anything Mr. Baryshnikov showed that evening. Yet Mr. Paxton has spent much of his career far from the madding crowd; a great many dancegoers have never seen his work. We're fortunate that the choreographer Stephen Petronio, who was his student in the early 1980s, has, with several first rate dancers, reconstructed a 45 minute program of Paxton choreography from the years 1964 92 for the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition "Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done." Mr. Paxton is one of his field's great originals; Mr. Petronio and his dancers do him honor in this program. These dances evolve like studies in suspense. Non sequiturs and unforeseen twists abound. They cleanse the palate, inventively taking us into the detail both of basic movement and of aspects of non virtuoso dance technique. In view of Mr. Paxton's reputation for intensity and seriousness, it's surprising to find how often they're playful and witty. On Sunday, I was struck by a single gamboling jump taken by Ernesto Breton, throwing one forearm in the air, then the other, while skipping from foot to foot. And by the way two men in a duet propped each other up while both leaning off balance in straight lines like the mainstays of a steep roof then, while keeping this position, started to turn and turn. And by how Bria Bacon, lying on her back, sternly propelled herself along the floor by using her heels as hooks that pulled the rest of her body toward them. These images come from "Jag Vill Garna Telefonera (I Would Like to Make a Telephone Call)," a 1964 dance that Mr. Paxton originally performed with Rauschenberg and which Mr. Paxton taught to Mr. Petronio, who has made this new arrangement of it. I love its spirit as much as its facts; and the objective clarity with which these dancers perform it is exciting. Just as riveting are the two suites of dances from the Paxton "Goldberg Variations." Variations 16 24 are performed by Megan Wright and by Nicholas Sciscione. The effects made by these two dancers are interestingly unalike. They both begin by walking around the space to music, while rubbing white make up, like a mask, onto their faces: a perfect touch of theatrical alienation. Mr. Sciscione, shirtless, makes a knockout impression in the solo in which he seems to be dancing almost entirely with the muscles in his back. This is actually a full bodied dance involving head, legs and arms, but what's startling is how much detail Mr. Sciscione (who danced this work in a 2017 program at the Joyce Theater) brings into play between shoulders and hips, all metrically responding to the keyboard. Ms. Wright, wearing a white undershirt, can't show us the same interplay of musculature, yet we're soon aware how much texture her torso is bringing to this number, how juicily it ripples and tilts. Other variations here are danced with higher energy: Bach's music is answered by jumps, gestures, turns and other motion. The style is informal and sometimes fascinatingly awkward, as if a musical impulse in one part of the body directed other parts of the body to move helplessly. The head often has a life of its own, bending up and down and side to side in circles. These movements come in long rhythmic skeins that meet Bach's music with strangely satisfying phraseology.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
With the 2013 racing season at its midpoint, more or less, two of the biggest series are finding that it's anything but business as usual. Each of those series, the Formula One world drivers championship and the Nascar Sprint Cup, have shown cracks in their armor in recent months. Taking one at a time, Formula One is tripping over its own regulations, its teams are running out of money, and the fields are not full. Add to that the indictment of Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One Management chief, for bribery. The charges, by a German court, involve an episode from seven years ago and that has been common knowledge for some time. Whether the Ecclestone case goes to trial has yet to be decided, but the other half of the 44 million transaction, a German banker, has admitted guilt. On matters more directly concerned with racing, most of the first 10 events of the year (there are 19 counting for the title) found teams preoccupied by complicated new tire change regulations, which reduced many races to guessing games. Those who guessed right were the winners. And the image of Pirelli, the series' tire supplier, suffered mightily.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
SOME NOVELS are dense as lead, their every line, character and event heavy with import. Others belie their weighty payloads with a veil like fluttering, shunning complex characters and precise details in favor of less fixable quantities like mood, movement and texture. The Danish author 's debut in English translation, "The Endless Summer," is very much in the latter category, telling the story of a family that indulges in life's lightness, ultimately paying the price for ignoring the weight of being. Nielsen is many things a musician, actor, playwright and performance artist who has journeyed to Iran and who walked with refugees all the way from the Balkans to Denmark. But she is probably best known for declaring her birth identity, Claus Beck Nielsen, dead in 2001 and producing work under a series of names that culminated in "" in 2014. This change involved a switch from male to female dress and gender pronouns, although readers coming to "The Endless Summer" expecting a dissection of transgender themes will be disappointed. This is not a criticism of the novel clearly Nielsen has no intention of foregrounding gender in this particular work. It's a reminder that in an era profuse with identity politics, authors like Nielsen will remain interested in many different things. If gender is mainly absent from "The Endless Summer," the questions that do occupy it include vagabondage, romanticism, sexuality, art and what the author calls "life's unfurling as destiny and tale." The book begins with a Danish patriarch who comes into a large inheritance and moves his wife, stepdaughter and four sons into an enormous estate. He unfortunately then falls into a depression when he is overcome by both his wife's infidelity and the upkeep on the new property (which is far beyond his capacities or income). So he disappears into the night.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
In June 2019, Iran had shot down an unmanned American drone, and Bolton, who has always championed what he proudly calls "disproportionate response," pushed Trump to approve a series of military strikes in retaliation. You can sense Bolton's excitement when he describes going home "at about 5:30" for a change of clothes because he expected to be at the White House "all night." It's therefore an awful shock when Trump decided to call off the strikes at the very last minute, after learning they would kill as many as 150 people. "Too many body bags," Trump told him. "Not proportionate." Bolton still seems incensed at this unexpected display of caution and humanity on the part of Trump, deeming it "the most irrational thing I ever witnessed any President do." In the book, Bolton is vague about the targets themselves, though it was later reported that he wanted one of them to be the Iranian commander Qassim Suleimani, killed on Jan. 3 by American airstrikes, four months after Bolton left the administration. On Jan. 6, Bolton finally agreed to testify at the impeachment trial if the Republican controlled Senate subpoenaed him which, as predicted, it never did. As for what Bolton might have said at the trial, his chapter on Ukraine is weird, circuitous and generally confounding. It's full of his usual small bore detail, but on the bigger, more pointed questions, the sentences get windy and conspicuously opaque. He confirms what Fiona Hill, a White House aide, recalled him saying to her when she testified at the House impeachment hearings (including his memorable comparison of Rudolph Giuliani, Trump's personal lawyer, to a "hand grenade"). But Bolton declines to offer anything comparatively vivid in his own book, taking cover in what he depicts as his own bewilderment. He recalls a meeting in the Oval Office during which Trump said he wanted Giuliani to meet with Ukraine's then President elect Volodymyr Zelensky "to discuss his country's investigation of either Hillary Clinton's efforts to influence the 2016 campaign or something having to do with Hunter Biden and the 2020 election, or maybe both." Yet Bolton known for what a 2019 profile in The New Yorker called his "tremendous powers of recall" said it was too much for him to fully understand. "In the various commentaries I heard on these subjects, they always seemed intermingled and confused, one reason I did not pay them much heed." He resorts to making noises of concern about what he refers to as "the Giuliani theories." In an epilogue, Bolton tries to have it multiple ways, saying that while he may have found Trump's conduct "deeply disturbing," it was the Democratic controlled House that was guilty of "impeachment malpractice." Instead of a "comprehensive investigation," he sniffs, "they seemed governed more by their own political imperatives to move swiftly to vote on articles of impeachment." He says they should have broadened their inquiry to include Halkbank and ZTE, but then neglects to mention that nothing was stopping him from saying as much, or from testifying if he was so terribly concerned. "Had I testified," Bolton intones, "I am convinced, given the environment then existing because of the House's impeachment malpractice, that it would have made no significant difference in the Senate outcome." It's a self righteous and self serving sort of fatalism that sounds remarkably similar to the explanation he gave years ago for preemptively signing up for the National Guard in 1970 and thereby avoiding service in Vietnam. "Dying for your country was one thing," he wrote in his 2007 book "Surrender Is Not an Option, "but dying to gain territory that antiwar forces in Congress would simply return to the enemy seemed ludicrous to me." When it comes to Bolton's comments on impeachment, the clotted prose, the garbled argument and the sanctimonious defensiveness would seem to indicate some sort of ambivalence on his part a feeling that he doesn't seem to have very often. Or maybe it merely reflects an uncomfortable realization that he's stuck between two incompatible impulses: the desire to appear as courageous as those civil servants who bravely risked their careers to testify before the House; and the desire to appease his fellow Republicans, on whom his own fastidiously managed career most certainly depends. It's a strange experience reading a book that begins with repeated salvos about "the intellectually lazy" by an author who refuses to think through anything very hard himself.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Pink packs a punch. The once playful tint of fragile ballerinas, Bubble Yum and Malibu Barbie has flexed some muscle of late, taking on overtones of sociopolitical protest, transgression and unalloyed eroticism. That message emerges with unexpected force at the Fashion Institute of Technology in a museum exhibition that explores variations of a color that has ping ponged across the centuries, varying in tone from demure to baldly subversive, from classy to trashy and back. Pink is a color in transition pretty, and pretty unsettling in a show that opens Sept. 7 . Its lingering kitsch factor has clouded its impact for sure. "That's one reason people think it's not serious," said Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at F.I.T. Ms. Steele, on the other hand, would emphatically urge you to rethink pink. "Really, it's society that makes color, that decides what colors are going to mean," she said, a point reinforced throughout the exhibition and in Ms. Steele's accompanying book, "Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color." A multidimensional hue with widely varying connotations, it is no longer, Ms. Steele insisted, "just girlie dumb pink but androgynous, cool hip protesting pink, an expression of all kinds of more complicated ideas." The show makes her point, pink shedding its chaste, frothy associations in stealthy stage s in favor of a more defiantly confrontational and sometimes downright kinky mood. Janelle Monae mined that mood to the hilt with a copy of the ripely suggestive costume she wore in her recent video "Pynk." That eye searing look by Duran Lantink, a Dutch designer, is on view, its petal like trousers opening to reveal a rosy hued vagina. Pink's transgressive impact, though, has been long in the making. In Western culture the color, in near magenta and faint, powdery variations, was embraced by the nobility, its popularity enhanced in the late 14th century when new dyes sourced from India and Sumatra made for richer pinks. In the mid 1700s, Madame de Pompadour rendered a more confectionary pink the height of fashion: In the portraits of Francois Boucher, she models a succession of sassily beribboned shell pink gowns and negligees. Pink during that period was intended for both sexes, a point underscored in the exhibition by a mannequin showily attired a coat and breeches, its pale salmon silk damask contrasting smartly with a creamy embroidered waistcoat. But by the mid 19th century, men had largely ceded pink to their sisters and wives, any of whom might have worn the coy mid 1800s dress showcased at F.I.T., a pink silk taffeta gown, its multiple tiers bordered in an effusion of ruffles. Pink, as Ms. Steele writes, was perceived in those days as a pretty color expressive of delicacy and playful high spirits. But pink also suggested a second skin. A lingerie tint with louche undertones, it was celebrated by Theophile Gautier in his 1850 poem "To a Pink Dress," the poet rhapsodizing, "How I love you in that dress that undresses you so well." Times change and with them, pink's profile. By the late 19th century, pink was as common as ragweed. The introduction of aniline dyes that produced ultrabright, occasionally garish variations diminished the color's prestige and rendered it vulgar, a tint flaunted in the novels of Emile Zola by shop girls and prostitutes. Not for another half century would pink be restored to a semblance of its former self, a hue both fancy and frivolous enough to be whipped into a ball gown by the couturier Charles James. Propped high on a pedestal at the exhibition, James's 1955 evening dress is a showstopper, a stole of black velvet opening like a flower to show off its faintly naughty rosy lining. By the 1960s, pink had taken on a dual personality. It was sophisticated enough for Jackie Kennedy, who received the French minister Andre Malraux at the White House wearing a bonbon pink evening dress. And it was sexy enough for Marilyn Monroe, who gave pink a racy spin encased in a closefitting diamond studded pink evening dress in the 1953 film "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." Pink went punk in the 1980s, a particularly garish shade known as Ultrapink enlivening the album covers of the Ramones, the Sex Pistols and X Ray Spex. A decade later, the color asserted itself on a global scale as the fashion insignia of self proclaimed outliers: Madonna embraced pink's bordello associations, performing in 1990 in a soft pink cone cupped bustier by Jean Paul Gaultier. Pink became ubiquitous in Japanese girl culture, the blushing hue of mini gangs of Lolitas roaming the Harajuku district in Tokyo. Around that time, pink took on a more knowing shading, as marketers and scores of young consumers made a run on the beiged, grayed and dusty variations known in aggregate as millennial pink, a color that spruced up a range of goods, including Scandinavian furniture and the Fenty label. Fenty's creator, Rihanna, improbably melded a boudoir mood with the aggressiveness of the playing field in a spring 2017 collection. "I figured pink would be over by the time this show was up," Ms. Steele said. But there are indications Tom Ford's pointy pink glitter shoes and the feathery pink ball gown Lady Gaga wore to the premiere of "A Star Is Born," among them that pink has yet to run its course. "In terms of its meaning new things, pink has acquired the charisma and complexity of black," Ms. Steele said. "Once it's been interpreted as an androgynous and political color that speaks to young men and women of all races, there is no going back."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Joe Biden tells us he is intent on winning in November "for the workers who keep this country going, not just the privileged few at the top." The election is a referendum not only on the moral failings of President Trump, Democrats argue, but on the economic fissures of the new economy. It is a fight, Mr. Biden says, on behalf of "the young people who have known only an America of rising inequity and shrinking opportunity." Why on earth, then, are Democrats fighting and fighting hard for a 137 billion tax cut for the richest Americans? Mr. Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer don't agree on everything, but on this specific issue they speak with one voice: the 10,000 cap on deductions for state and local tax (better known as the SALT deduction) must go. The House of Representatives has already passed legislation removing the cap, allowing the amount of the deduction to rise. If the Senate turns blue in November, Democrats have promised to return to the issue. "I want to tell you this," Senator Schumer said in July, "If I become majority leader, one of the first things I will do is we will eliminate" the SALT cap "forever." It "will be dead, gone and buried." The cap was introduced as part of the 2017 Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Overall, the package was hugely skewed in favor of the rich: 20 percent of the value of the tax cuts went to households whose income was in the top 1 percent. Democrats lined up to decry the changes as a giveaway to the wealthy. And so it was, in the main. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." But there was one seriously progressive element, a single diamond in a lot of rough: the introduction of the SALT cap. Lifting it would therefore reverse one of the few good things about the 2017 bill. Almost 60 percent of the benefit of removal would go to the top 1 percent of households (of which 90 percent are white). For the superrich, the top 0.1 percent, repeal would make for an average tax cut of around 145,000 a year. In isolation, this change would be more skewed to the rich than the Republican tax bill as a whole. What's going on here? Senator Schumer and others are dressing up the cut in anti Covid clothes, suggesting that it would help people in decimated cities like New York. This is specious. It is true that potential beneficiaries mostly live in higher tax cities and states, but it is the richest residents who would reap most of the rewards. This is not a tax cut for those hit hardest by the virus. Families in the middle 60 percent of the income distribution nationally would see, on average, a minuscule reduction in their tax bill, around 25. To be fair, leading Democrats combine their calls for a removal of the SALT cap with other offsetting tax changes, like lifting the top rate of income tax, giving the rich money with one hand and then taking it back with another. But really, this is no way to do tax policy. Rather than repealing the cap, the deduction should be removed altogether. Even with the cap in place, it is still highly regressive, with 75 percent of the economic benefits going to families in the top fifth of the income distribution. Previous Democratic arguments for a generous SALT deduction have included the idea that it encourages states to spend more by making it easier for them to tax more. State coffers are certainly squeezed in 2020, as they will be in 2021. But if the goal is for the federal government to provide additional support to state and local governments, far better to do so directly, rather than by the roundabout route of offering a tax break to the rich. The real motives here are surely political; for many Democrats in 2020, electoral calculations are more important than distributional ones. Unsurprisingly, repealing the SALT deduction appears to be popular among richer voters in blue cities and states. In the 2018 midterms, Democrats did particularly well in affluent suburbs where many households claim the SALT deduction. One race seen as instructive on this front was Jennifer Wexton's thumping 12 point defeat of the incumbent Republican Barbara Comstock in Virginia's 10th Congressional District, where more than half of taxpayers claimed the deduction before the 2017 tax bill. By pushing for repeal of the cap, Democrats are leaving themselves wide open to criticisms of hypocrisy and opportunism. As Senator Michael Bennet, one of the few Democrats opposed to removing the SALT cap, pointed out to his Senate colleagues in October 2019: "We can say we are for a progressive tax code and for fighting inequality, or we can support the SALT deduction. But it is really hard to do both." Alexandria Ocasio Cortez also voted against repeal. Mr. Bennet and Ms. Ocasio Cortez are right. Whatever its short run political attractions, the Democrats' pursuit of such a deeply regressive tax cut casts serious doubt on their egalitarian claims. It is a shame to see Democrats urging a big tax break for the richest, whitest families, which is arguably the very last thing the country needs right now.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
How to Argue Fairly and Without Rancor (Hello, Thanksgiving!) This story was published in November 2016 and updated in November 2017. If the current state of politics has shown us anything, it's that it sometimes seems as if opposing views can never be reconciled. And with American Thanksgiving upon us as far flung family members from all walks of life gather for a meal the political and personal disagreements that crop up are as traditional as the turkey and cranberry sauce. So this may be a good time to explore what psychologists and philosophers say are the most effective ways to argue. And by "argue" they do not mean "quarrel," but communicate without rancor or faulty reasoning with someone who has an opposing viewpoint, with the hope of broadening one's understanding of people and ideas. Here are a few suggestions: The aim of an argument should not be proving who is right, but conveying that you care about the issues, said Amy J. C. Cuddy, a social psychologist and associate professor at Harvard University. Show the person with whom you are speaking that you care about what he or she says. The goal should be to state your views and to hear theirs. It should not be: "I am not leaving until you admit that you are wrong, or here is what I believe, and I am not budging from this," said Dr. Cuddy, who has explored the question in Business Insider columns. And when you listen, go all in. "Don't half listen while figuring out what you're going to say next," said Gary Gutting, a philosopher at Notre Dame. Some people start an argument by staking their position and refusing to budge, an impulse that Dr. Cuddy called "dropping the anchor." Instead, try to understand the other person's point of view; it does not mean you have to agree with him or her, or that you are abandoning deeply felt objections to, for example, racism or sexism, she said. "Think of it from a courage perspective: I can go in and I am going to ask questions that are truly, honestly aimed at increasing my understanding of where he or she is coming from," Dr. Cuddy said. "How did they get there, and what is leading to that?" Your body language can send messages that are more compelling than the words coming out of your mouth. Try to avoid gestures that are patronizing or defensive, like crossing your arms or clenching your jaw. Maintain eye contact in a way that is not a stare down. Lean forward slightly to show you are interested. And no eye rolling, Dr. Gutting said. Dr. Gutting says it helps to use neutral or charitable language when acknowledging opposing viewpoints, especially during arguments over politics. It lays the groundwork for a more effective argument on points of genuine weakness. Don't think of an argument as an opportunity to convince the other person of your view; think of it as a way to test and improve your opinions, and to gain a better understanding of the other side. It is rarely productive to nitpick errors in your interlocutor's remarks or to argue just to "win." "People do give up views because of rational arguments against them," Dr. Gutting said in the interview. "But this is almost always a long process, not the outcome of a single decisive encounter." In "How to Argue About Politics," a chapter from his book "What Philosophy Can Do," Dr. Gutting writes that, in many political arguments, the people we think we "convince" almost always already agree with us. A good argument is supported by evidence, but that is just a starting point. Sometimes, especially with political back and forths, one side will look only at evidence supporting its own position, conveniently leaving out the full picture, Dr. Gutting noted. "An effective argument would have to take account of all the relevant evidence," he said. George Yancy, a philosophy professor at Emory University who has written extensively about race, was asked by a student this year why he even bothered to discuss race with white supremacists. Dr. Yancy said he told his student there was a need to inform white people about how African Americans think about race. "This is a moment when we are not just talking past each other, but against each other," Dr. Yancy said in a telephone interview, speaking about the current national climate. "So for me, the condition for a conversation has to be that you are unafraid to speak courageously, and you are unafraid to tell your partner exactly what it is that you think about the world." But a two way argument also requires fearless listening, "even if it is me talking to a white supremacist who is trying to tell me that I am inferior," he added. "One of the conditions for the possibility of a fruitful argument is to allow for some kind of opening up in myself to hear." Sometimes it takes a painful step to find common ground, Dr. Yancy said. "What you need to be able to do is to speak the same language," he said. "They believe in God, and you would say: 'You and I believe the same thing. How is it that this God who loves you can't possibly love me?' Is it possible that we can agree to disagree on some issues?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Paul Badura Skoda, an Austrian pianist who was known for insightful interpretations of classical era repertory and who had one of largest discographies of any major pianist, more than 200 recordings, died on Sept. 25 in Vienna. He was 91 . His death was confirmed by his partner, Elisabeth Vilatte. Though not a formidable technician, Mr. Badura Skoda was admired for refined and elegant performances, especially of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. He was praised for the singing tone he drew from the piano, a quality he attributed to the influence of Edwin Fischer, the great Swiss pianist. In a 1978 interview with The New York Times, he described Fischer as the "shining example" of a great pianist who could produce "the most gorgeous, powerful sounds" and yet who taught his students that "the piano sound deteriorates when you go above a certain dynamic level." Though associated with the classical period masters, Mr. Badura Skoda actually had an extensive repertory, including works by Chopin, Scriabin, Rimsky Korsakov, Hindemith and the Swiss composer Frank Martin. Martin wrote his Second Piano Concerto, completed in 1969, for Mr. Badura Skoda, who took the work on tour. He grew up believing in the superiority of the modern piano over period instruments promoted by exponents of the authentic performance movement. He maintained a "prejudice," as he said in a 2017 interview with the critic Laurence Vittes in Early Music America, that "old instruments were good for museums or worse: to be used as heating material for your room in winter." That prejudice was shattered when, in his early 20s, he heard the Austrian harpsichordist and fortepianist Isolde Ahlgrimm perform, including in intimate concerts at her home. Her playing revealed to him, he said, the "beauty and originality" of these instruments. He began buying fortepianos and early 19th century pianos, his collection growing so large that he had to acquire a house next to his in Vienna to maintain them. He is thought to be the only pianist to have recorded complete surveys of the Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert piano sonatas on both period and modern pianos. His refined approach to playing allowed him to adjust to the lighter keyboard action and gentler yet pinging sound of fortepianos. He began piano lessons at 6 and developed a lively curiosity about all kinds of music. He played his own transcriptions of Rossini overtures on the accordion, his stepfather's passion. He went to concerts as often as possible. He would sneak into the standing room section of the Vienna State Opera through an obscure entry he discovered. Though drawn to mathematics and physics, he decided on a career in music around the age of 14, when he heard Fischer perform. He wanted to enter Vienna's academy of music, he recalled, but by then, with World War II underway, the occupying Nazi government took steps to draft him into a labor corps. His stepfather intervened, however, falsely telling the head of the academy that a letter of recommendation from Hermann Goring was coming any day. In any case, Paul ended up on far less onerous duty with a farmworker corps near Vienna, where he was able to study musical scores. From 1945 to 1949 he studied at the Vienna Conservatory, graduating with distinction in both piano and conducting. Afterward he took master classes with Fischer in Lucerne, Switzerland, and continued to work with him for a decade. Mr. Badura Skoda's international career was set in motion in 1949, when, at 22, he was chosen by the eminent conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler to perform Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 22 with the Vienna Philharmonic. That engagement was followed by another invitation to perform with the orchestra, this time with Herbert von Karajan conducting. In 1951 he recorded Bach's six partitas in two sessions, one before marrying Eva Halfar, a German musicologist, and the other afterward. "So we had no honeymoon," he said in 2017. "Our honeymoon was Bach." Mr. Badura Skoda and his wife had four children, one of whom, Michael Badura Skoda, a pianist, died in 2001. There was no information available on his survivors. Mr. Badura Skoda also did scholarly work with his wife, Eva Badura Skoda, including jointly writing a well received book, "Interpreting Mozart at the Keyboard," and editing Mozart concertos. They both taught in the late 1960s and 1970s at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He had a lifelong musical partnership with the Austrian pianist Jorg Demus, who died in May at 90, with whom he played and recorded four hand and duo piano repertory. Together they wrote the book "The Piano Sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven." While Mr. Badura Skoda's playing was generally respected for its integrity and taste, some critics found it lacking in sparkle and clarity, especially during his later years. To acknowledge his 90th birthday, Deutsche Grammophon in 2017 released a 20 CD box set, "The Paul Badura Skoda Edition," which includes many of his early Westminster recordings, among them Beethoven's five piano concertos conducted by Hermann Scherchen. That year he also gave a Beethoven recital at the Musikverein concert hall in Vienna, a program including the last three sonatas. When asked by Mr. Vittes , the critic, if he was ready for such a demanding program, Mr. Badura Skoda replied: "Ninety is quite a good age. I'm very well prepared."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Credit...Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times Night after night, actors dot the farmland behind a local theater here, using every arrow in their quiver of stage tricks to maintain a safe distance from patrons who walk from scene to scene. Double Edge Theater, an adventurous troupe based in Massachusetts's rural hilltowns, was on tour in Albuquerque when the coronavirus pandemic erupted. The tour with stops planned in California, Michigan, Norway and England was canceled, and the company headed home to quarantine its members and renegotiate its mortgages. And then they started to dream. The result: "6 Feet Apart, All Together," a new version of the theater's annual summer spectacle: performed entirely outdoors for masked audience members who move through the show in small groups and are asked to stay apart from one another. All 22 performances sold out. As the theater world tries to weather a pandemic that has shuttered stages from coast to coast, many companies have pivoted to streaming, and there are a variety of other endeavors, almost all involving nonunion actors, ranging from dinner theater to drive in shows. Now several companies are attempting variations on what is sometimes called promenade theater outdoor productions in which audiences move as they follow the action. The form a cousin to street theater has a long tradition, particularly in Europe, but has new appeal in the United States this summer because of the relative ease of keeping patrons apart outdoors. In Missouri, the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, which canceled its annual Shakespeare in the Park productions, is instead offering "A Late Summer Night's Stroll," loosely based on "A Midsummer Night's Dream," with 15 scenes at different sites in Forest Park. The free production, which runs through Sept. 6, has proved so popular that all 23 nights were booked before the first performance. "It would be easy to shut the doors and hunker down until there's a vaccine, " said Josh Short, the Wilbury artistic director, "but times like this is when theater and storytelling is so important." There are many variations on the theme. In New York City, where any kind of in person production is likely to attract a crowd, Here Arts Center is offering a downloadable soundwalk, "Cairns," by the performer Gelsey Bell ("Natasha, Pierre the Great Comet of 1812"); participants can listen on their own as they wander through Brooklyn's Green Wood Cemetery. And in western New York, Artpark, which ordinarily presents rock concerts at venues including a 10,000 seat outdoor amphitheater, is instead offering "The Art of Walking," a site specific, interactive event for no more than 25 people who, wearing sanitized headphones, are guided by two actors on an hourlong walk through a portion of the vast park on the Niagara Gorge. A stage manager follows in a cart with a soundboard, mixing audio. Clark said she has long been interested in European street theater, but that the art form is difficult to finance in the United States. She encountered the work of the Spanish artists Itsaso Iribarren and German de la Riva at a street theater festival in Spain; last fall she matched them with a New York based writer and director, Carin Jean White, and invited the three to create a work for the 150 acre state park where her nonprofit operates. When the pandemic made in person collaboration impossible, she wondered if it would be possible to continue, but the team forged a relationship online and created a script that combines poetry, music and physical theater. This show, like most of these ventures, loses money tickets are 15 and Clark, whose organization ordinarily has a 5.5 million annual budget, said "we still have our challenges it's going to be rough." But, she said, "responding to what is happening to us today, in this place, in this community, is the main point of what this is about." The Providence and St. Louis events each involve multiple artists from those cities different troupes on different stages and both are attempting to respond not only to the pandemic but to the racial justice issues that have consumed America this summer. "We started looking at Covid 19, but as the Black Lives Matter movement took center stage and social justice issues rose to forefront, it seemed like there was a lot more our artists would need to talk about," Short said of the Providence project, which costs 10 to attend. "We asked each artist to build stories around idealized visions of the future." "The actors are a wayfinder through the night, and through the complexities of what we need to do to keep the community safe," said Barnaby Evans, who created WaterFire, an arts organization best known for a popular bonfire themed sculpture event held, in normal years, on three downtown rivers. In St. Louis, audience members (one household at a time; 16 households per night) will walk about a mile and a quarter through scenes inspired by Shakespeare's play: a dance company enacting a scene between Oberon and Titania; two violinists playing Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" from a bridge; even a burlesque artist who performs with a Great Dane dressed up as a donkey, according to Tom Ridgely, the Shakespeare Festival's producing artistic director. The first and final stops will be drawn directly from Shakespeare. Those who can't get tickets can still sample the project: A new group called PaintedBlack STL has enlisted 14 Black artists to create arches along the show's pathway, and each one has a QR code that can be scanned to hear some lines from "Midsummer," and some music. In Ashfield, where the run ended on Sunday, Double Edge presented eight scenes from a variety of myth inspired works it had been performing over the years, including some still in development, all linked, Klein said, by the themes of "flight, loss and possibility." Tickets were 42 for adults; at first, only 36 people were allowed per performance, moving through the scenes in three groups of 13; when it became clear that demand was high and safety was possible, that capacity was increased to 45. Klein said the feedback has been intense. "It's just such an important moment for people to have something live," she said. "We really appreciated being able to break down the barriers of the mask and the distance to have people feel that they were together with us."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
This week on the Billboard chart, 6ix9ine, the Brooklyn rapper currently jailed on federal gang charges, narrowly missed landing a No. 1 album from prison, despite only three days of chart eligibility. Instead, in a shrewd business move, the rapper Travis Scott used T shirts, key chains and beach towels each of which happened to come with a copy of his album to return to the top, while simultaneously earning a No. 1 Billboard single. Scott's album "Astroworld" (Cactus Jack/Epic), which was released in August, jumps back to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 thanks to a so called merchandise bundle, a chart trick in which an album is packaged with other goods and counts as a sale if the buyer redeems the music. The rapper used the e commerce holiday known as Cyber Monday to release a new round of products to his loyal, fashion loving fans, helping to carry him to a total of 31,000 albums sold, according to Nielsen Music. When added to the album's 52 million streams and 27,000 song downloads for the week, "Astroworld" had more than enough activity 71,000 album equivalent units, by the industry's math to spend its third overall week at No. 1. (Scott used similar merchandise bundles around the album's debut, much to the consternation of Nicki Minaj, who settled for No. 2 over the summer.) At the same time, Scott's single "Sicko Mode," which features the chart hero Drake in an uncredited appearance, ascends to No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart, the Hot 100, aided by a new remix by Skrillex. (For Billboard, plays of the remix count toward the original's total numbers.) The song dethrones Ariana Grande's "Thank U, Next," which may very well return to the top next week after the blockbuster release of its teen movie music video, which broke the 24 hour YouTube record for views.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Streaming hits dominate the top of the Billboard chart this week, with the North Carolina rapper DaBaby taking No. 1. But the biggest winner may be the Beatles. "Kirk," DaBaby's second LP, with guest spots by Migos, Chance the Rapper and Gucci Mane, opened with the equivalent of 145,000 sales in the United States, according to Nielsen. Of that total, just 8,000 copies were sold as a full album the 182 million streams of songs from "Kirk" represented the vast majority of the album's consumption. Post Malone's "Hollywood's Bleeding," another big streaming hit, fell to No. 2 after three weeks at the top. Yet with each click of a streaming track worth just a fraction of a penny, the real money is in old fashioned album sales. And there the Beatles have an advantage. A 50th anniversary reissue of the band's "Abbey Road" landed at No. 3 the album's first time in the Top 10 since 1970 with the equivalent of 81,000 sales, 70,000 of which were for copies of the full album. DaBaby, Post Malone and the Beatles' albums were all released by divisions of the Universal Music Group. But thanks to the Beatles' success in selling premium priced physical albums the four CD "Super Deluxe Edition" of "Abbey Road" went for 110 and the band's undying fame around the world, "Abbey Road" may well end up the most lucrative for Universal.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
In a second season episode of "Happy Endings," the much loved but little watched comedy that ran on ABC from 2011 to 2013, the show acknowledged a comparison that had been dogging it since its premiere. Brad (Damon Wayans Jr.), loopy and slurring from a megadose of laughing gas at a dentist's appointment, perks up when he sees his friends but he calls them by the names of another set of friends. Pointing in turn to Dave (Zachary Knighton), Alex (Elisha Cuthbert), Penny (Casey Wilson) and Max (Adam Pally), Brad exclaims: "Hey, Ross! Rachel! Phoebe! Fat Joey!" A few beats later, he turns to his wife, Jane (Eliza Coupe), and pouts, "Don't patronize me, Monica." Yes, "Happy Endings" had superficial similarities to "Friends," the '90s Must See TV juggernaut: It centered on six BFFs, played by a cast with blazing chemistry and crack timing, entering their 30s and razzing one another through the ups and downs of dating and careers in the big city. An on again, off again romantic relationship within the gang was an ongoing plot driver. And, true, the pilot episode involved a runaway bride. (The creator David Caspe has claimed to have forgotten that Rachel Green entered our lives in a wedding dress.) So it was probably inevitable that some critics initially dismissed "Happy Endings" as a "Friends" knockoff, lumping it in with a wave of now forgotten ensemble sitcoms that the networks rolled out around the same time. (Remember "Perfect Couples"? "Mad Love"? "Traffic Light"? You have no reason to.) Yet granting that "Happy Endings" bears a resemblance to "Friends," it also has the markings of a post "30 Rock" world. Caspe and company apply elements of that workplace sitcom to their hangout comedy format single camera filming, a relentless jokes per minute rate, absurdist cutaway gags and a cast of lovable characters who are terrible people. This is a heightened reality, closer in sensibility to later shows like "Broad City" than to strait laced studio audience comedies. Not every network sitcom would make a running joke of Alex's adoption of a racist parrot, or have Max and Penny get hooked on a black market cough syrup called NocheTussin as a way to keep from texting their boyfriends too much. (Unlike "Friends," "Happy Endings" actually has gay main characters, not just gay jokes.) The show opens as the flighty Alex runs out on her wedding to the blando Dave, leaving the rest of the wedding party to fear that the whole gang will have to break up. It takes about half of the show's 13 episode first season (it premiered as a midseason replacement) for the writers to get themselves out of that pilot episode trap, though ABC made it feel longer by airing the season out of its intended order. One's ability to watch them in the correct sequence today there are many guides online is just one reason "Happy Endings" feels so right in the streaming era. (All three seasons are on Hulu.) I watched and liked the show when it aired, at least partly because it's set in my own city of Chicago, but I've probably seen the whole series at least five times and some favorite episodes in the double digits, finding new bits to admire on every rewatch. I'll tell myself I'm putting it on as a background show, but before 22 minutes are up, it has my full attention. Here are three reasons I can't quit "Happy Endings." The characters weren't fully formed at the starting line; it took a chunk of the first season before traits like Jane's maniacal Type A competitiveness or Penny's desperate optimism came into focus. But the writers deftly employed smash cut flashbacks to fill in the gang's back stories, like when Penny dated a closeted Max in college. The "Remember that time?" setups also echo the real way anecdotes get repeated forever among longtime friend groups. Sometimes whole episodes are devoted to revealing the gang's origin stories. In the third season's Thanksgiving episode, we finally see the first time the group met: when Brad and Max were housemates on an un aired season of MTV's "The Real World." The flashbacks offer a sharp parody of that reality show's aesthetic and of early aughts fashion. Some episodes of "Happy Endings" lay out complex, Rube Goldberg style plots that pull the whole cast toward a grand climax. Others offer simpler, sillier character showcases. Either way, the bits are dense. The writers layer jokes on jokes on jokes, many of which coil in on themselves to hit three or four consecutive punch lines, pop culture references, or clever bits of wordplay. The cast delivers it all in a crisp, rat a tat style, and the editing is so tight that reaction shots manage to serve as overlapping mini jokes. (Coupe and Wilson are the queens of this.) The pace rewards rewatching, as there's always likely to be something a fleeting one liner, a visual gag you didn't fully appreciate the last time through. Everyone's in on the joke My partner loves to point out that nothing delights me more than a little light fourth wall breaking, and "Happy Endings" loves a subtle demonstration of self awareness. The "Friends" reference isn't the only time the show has acknowledged its critics. In that same episode, Penny relates a complaint from a recent ex about a personalized pronunciation she leaned on in early episodes: "And he said he hates when I say ah mah zing, but I've barely said that at all this season!"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The fly agaric is the quintessential mushroom of fairy tales. Its big, bright fruiting bodies scatter in great numbers across mossy forests of North America and Europe. They emerge from the soil first like white eggs, abandoned by some mysterious creature of the woods. They can grow up to a foot tall, as warts appear on the cap. The mushroom often blushes red in the process. Finally, they crack open and flatten into a polka dot disc that would make a gnome's perfect dinner plate. Recently mushroom hunters and nature lovers have been sharing photos of their fly agaric finds on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Perhaps the most striking images came from Hungary, in a Facebook post, which included a video and a photo of a mushroom as big as a child. For many Eastern Europeans, mushroom hunting is a tradition. For some, it's also a way to earn extra cash. For Csaba Reisz, a fertilizer salesman and soil nutrition consultant in southern Hungary, it's escape from work stress. "I make everything right with a little mushroom hunting and photo shooting," he wrote in an email.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
What Should I Do With My Dead Dog? Alexandra Manno was 16 when her boyfriend at the time gave her a surprise gift: a dog, which she named Calle. A pit bull mix that appeared to have some Australian cattle dog in her bloodline, Calle slept with Ms. Manno every night, moving with her from North Carolina to the Seattle area, where she now works as a public defender. "She's been with me through college, law school, all my boyfriends," said Ms. Manno, now 31. In short, nobody in Ms. Manno's life bore such intimate witness to her path to adulthood and self sufficiency. So last year, when it became apparent that Calle was sick and needed to be put down, a tearful adieu at the veterinarian's office wouldn't quite cut it. A friend of Ms. Manno's told her about a pet funeral home in West Seattle called Resting Waters, opened in December 2016 in a low slung brown building across from a popular deli by Joslin Roth, 39, and Darci Bernard, 34, who are sisters. Its name succinctly describes the process, known as alkaline hydrolysis (or aquamation), by which it puts pets to rest. Aquamation is a water based alternative to flame based cremation. An animal's corpse is placed in a nylon bag, followed by a multi partition metal contraption ("like Tetris," Ms. Bernard said) and then a tank filled with heated water, potassium hydroxide and occasionally sodium, which breaks down tissue while preserving bones, microchips and the like. The process, which sounds and smells like a large capacity dishwasher cycle, typically takes about 19 hours and usually involves the submersion of several pets at once. Resting Waters' aquamation machine can hold up to 400 pounds, while larger machines can accommodate 2,000 pound animals, including livestock. The bones are then dried in a closet with a dehumidifier, and delivered to pet owners in urns or whatever method they specify. The interior of Resting Waters is cleanly appointed, with paintings of animals gracing the walls. There are cozy pet beds arranged beneath a desk, and the music is meditative and relaxing. For a pet, it's like "you're going to your last spa day," said Rhonda Krider, 44, who had her dog, Hunter, laid to rest there. Like its counterparts on the human side of the death care industry, Resting Waters offers a range of after life services, some of which it contracts out to third parties. If you want a locket of your pet's hair shorn and preserved, Resting Waters can handle that for you. If you want your pet groomed for a viewing or ceremony before it is placed in the tank, that can be arranged as well. Ms. Manno, who said, "I was just obsessed with my dog, I'd had her forever," made a slide show featuring portraits of Calle and eulogized her dog before several guests, who were treated to snacks and wine. "After that, I taxidermed the paws," she said. And then there are the truly special requests. "We had a woman come in and make us drink shots with her," said Ms. Roth, who, like her sister, eschews the Brylcreem and suits of traditional funeral directors for nose piercings and tattoos. Ms. Roth started Resting Waters after she came to the realization that, in Seattle, "you could do stand up paddleboard yoga with your dog but couldn't visit a death care provider. With pet death care, you'd leave your pet at the vet and they'd literally dispose of them in garbage bags. It was like, 'Whoa, this was a need.'" After several decades as a television executive, Jerry Shevick came to a similar conclusion before opening Peaceful Pets Aquamation in Newbury Park, Calif., in 2013. "We have six dogs and I did a pet show on TV once, so I knew from a population standpoint that this is an industry the total pet space that grows 3 to 4 percent every year, even through the last recession," said Mr. Shevick, 59. "A lot of the spending increases are about people wanting better and more services and options." Mr. Shevick also extolled the virtues of aquamation as an environmentally friendly alternative to flame based cremation. "People don't think about cremation like they do all the big carbon producers, but in actuality, it has a pretty significant footprint," he said. Conversely, he said that aquamation "really uses the same components that natural decomposition uses. With people paying attention to climate change, it's becoming more interesting to people as well." Indeed, California and Washington are among the nearly 20 states that have recently legalized aquamation as a means of dealing with human corpses. But unlike the heavily regulated human death care industry, the pet one "is the Wild West," said Ms. Roth, and thus far more lightly regulated . Occasionally, though, someone seeking to open an aquamation facility will have difficulty convincing wastewater treatment officials that the process is sufficiently pure. Still, it's a lot easier to open an aquamation facility these days than a flame based crematory. If you buy an aquamation machine in the United States, it will likely have been manufactured by Bio Response Solutions, a small, family owned company in Indiana. Samantha Sieber, 36, a founder and the vice president of research who also handles regulatory and legislative issues, estimates that the company has sold some 150 pet aquamation machines throughout the United States. (Bio Response Solutions also has several clients in Europe, where alkaline hydrolysis has been around a lot longer.) "A lot of my customers got turned down to put a crematorium in," Ms. Sieber said. "If they're in residential or downtown areas, they would never allow the emissions. The public perception of a smokestack and fire risk, they're not going to let that happen. You don't have any of that with alkaline hydrolysis." Why is it that the death of a pet often elicits a far more emotional response in a human than the death of a blood relative? "Relationships with pets are way less complicated," Ms. Bernard said. "Pets never really wrong you, and sleep at your feet every night." "If you're a single person, if you open your door, they're there," said Diane Dyer, who has conducted memorial celebrations at Resting Waters. A self described tomboy who excelled at sports growing up in the Bay Area, Ms. Krider and her dog, Hunter, relocated to the Pacific Northwest when her marriage ended. She now works for Trupanion, a company providing insurance for dogs and cats, and moonlights as a high school football referee.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
BARBATE, SPAIN In the police station of Barbate, a port town in the southern region of Andalusia, officers have pinned a poster to the wall that reads "they owe us April," referring to the late payment of their salaries. At the same time, they are having to combat a pickup in illegal drugs trafficking another consequence, some say, of the tough economic times. "It's a disastrous and chaotic situation here," said Rafael Romero, one of the officers. "We need more boats, vehicles and everything, but there's not even money to repair two broken surveillance cameras." Barbate, in fact, has found itself caught in a perfect storm: a fiscal crisis that has sunk public finances, a dwindling fishing industry that has exacerbated one of Spain's worst unemployment situations, and a revival of the drug smuggling that has long plagued this area because of its proximity to North Africa. Powerful rubber boats need only about 40 minutes to cross over, loaded mainly with hashish from Morocco. The mayor of Barbate, Rafael Quiros, garnered national attention during his recent re election campaign by suggesting that a young person who could not find a job and turned to drug dealing should not automatically be called a delinquent. "A youngster has absolutely zero chance right now of finding a fixed job here," he said during an interview in the Town Hall. "The politicians in Madrid who consider my views on youngsters occasionally dealing drugs to be those of a caveman either don't understand or don't care about how much people are struggling here." Responding by e mail to questions about the mayor's views, the Spanish Labor Ministry said it was deeply concerned about the level of youth unemployment, but that "we cannot start to give value to individual opinions that do not add anything constructive." Mr. Quiros said that the drug activity had revived in the area since the start of the crisis, although it remained below what it was a decade ago. Then, "there was just complete impunity here," he said. "You can nowadays get sentenced to five years in jail, so it does make some people think twice, however desperate their economic situation." Still, around 300 of Barbate's 22,000 inhabitants are now sitting in jail because of drug trafficking, according to Mr. Quiros. Five years ago, before the onset of the financial crisis, there were about 160 in jail on drug cases. Barbate itself ranked as the town with the second highest joblessness in mainland Spain at the end of 2010, behind Ubrique, which is also in the Andalusian province of Cadiz, according to a separate study published this month by the savings bank Caja Espana Caja Duero. To help create jobs, Mr. Quiros is trying to develop alternatives to fishing, an ancestral occupation that has fallen about 80 percent over the past 20 years amid stricter quotas, intense competition from foreign boats and a recent decline in domestic fish consumption. A light bulb factory is due to open later this year, employing about 200 people, as well as a fish farm with a work force of 270. A few hotel projects are also earmarked, but "this isn't exactly the easiest time to find investors," the mayor said. Fishing still represents about 60 percent of the local economy. Despite the national criticism over his remarks, Mr. Quiros's seems to have struck a chord with voters. On May 22, he was one of the few Socialist mayors of Andalusia to win re election, in what proved to be an unprecedented debacle for his party in regional and municipal elections across Spain. Not everyone in Barbate believes there is a drug problem. Miguel Molina, the 39 year old local leader of the center left Andalusian Party, said that "some people seem determined to give Barbate a bad reputation, but in all my life here I have never once been offered drugs." Five minutes from Mr. Molina's party headquarters, however, in a neighborhood that the police described as a hub for drug dealing, two youngsters parked their black BMW along Vejer Street. Asked about his fancy car, the driver sniggered and said that it was bought "by selling drugs, of course." Nearby, a dozen youngsters were milling around, some of them openly admitting to drug dealing and one even offering a sample of hashish. Among them was Paco, a 30 year old with a frog tattooed on his neck who would only give his first name. In early 2006, along with 10 other men, Paco said that he was arrested trying to smuggle into Barbate a boatload of 600 kilograms, or 1,320 pounds, of hashish. He was sentenced to three years and nine months in jail. Since his release, he had not found a job and instead relied on "all sorts of things" to keep going, as well as to help support two young daughters. Prison time had not convinced him to abandon the drug trade, he said, but "to handle it better." The retail price of hashish, he added, was now about EUR2,000, or 2,855, a kilo, up from EUR800 when he entered jail in 2006. The Guardia Civil, Spain's military police, would not comment or provide statistics on Barbate's drugs trade. Still, last December, five people were arrested in Barbate as part of a nationwide investigation into a cocaine and heroin network, coordinated out of Madrid but using Barbate as its regional hub. Barbate used to also be a major landing point for illegal African immigrants. But as a result of an upgraded system of infrared camera surveillance to monitor boats, the port has not witnessed any such arrivals in over a year. "Why so much chocolate is still getting through is something that I just can't understand," said Jose Manuel Jimenez, a 14 year police veteran, using a slang term for hashish. "There must be stronger interests behind the drugs trafficking and more money to be made from that than from people." In nearby Conil, at an enclosure operated by the Guardia Civil for seized vehicles, rubber boats with large outboard motors could be seen stacked four high. One local officer, who would not give his name, said the main change was that "those who control the drugs used to have other legal businesses, but the crisis has wiped out those businesses, so they're back focusing on the drugs." What counts as a legal business is another matter. Last January, Valeriano Gomez, Spain's labor and immigration minister, estimated that Spain's underground economy was equivalent to about 20 percent of its gross domestic product. In Barbate, the size of the underground economy is about 40 percent of the local G.D.P., Mr. Quiros, the mayor, estimated. Most of that has nothing to do with drugs, he added. Some local residents, Mr. Quiros said, had become "professionals at living off social security" and other benefits, even if holding a temporary job on the side. Others, however, cannot claim benefits because they never held an official job in the first place. "The problem of Barbate is that there are plenty of guys like me who have a lot of work experience, but none of which ever came with a proper work contract," said Joaquin Gil Narvaez, who has been jobless for two years and is living at his mother's home. Still, he recently enrolled in a course to get a boat captain's license. "There's no future in fishing around here, but the course is free and it's at least something to keep myself busy," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
The Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games, from Aug. 5 to 21, are the first to be held in South America, and they come with some baggage. Brazil's chaotic and ever changing political situation, concerns about the Zika virus, security issues: All of these are contributing to trepidation from North Americans, who are reconsidering whether to venture south for the Games. A recent survey of travel agents by the travel technology company Trisept Solutions showed that 63 percent had seen less interest in these Olympics than in previous destinations like London and Beijing, with 88 percent stating that they had not seen an increase in interest in traveling to Rio for the Games. Numbers may be down, but this means that those who do decide to go can find many ways to save money, even with less than two months left. "For Americans, the strong dollar should be a major factor for them to book their trip to Brazil now," said Joao Rodrigues, an executive at FSB, which handles North American public relations for the Brazilian Tourism Board. The strength of the dollar (now worth about 3.4 Brazilian reals, compared to 2.26 two years ago at the time of the Brazil World Cup), coupled with Brazil's economic recession, means that prices have dropped significantly for visiting Americans. "Airfare has consistently been much less expensive than for the World Cup, and even less expensive than New Year in Rio," said Julia Carter, the director of sales at Brazil Nuts, a United States based tour operator specializing in South America. Her agency is offering air and hotel packages of 2,599 a person for five nights in an Ipanema hotel, with nonstop flights from Miami to Rio. No event tickets or extra luxuries are included, but this is enough to get most visitors started. Saving more on airfare might mean missing the beginning of the Games, but it could still be worth it. Aislyn Greene, the South America editor at Afar magazine, said that deals kick in if you're willing to arrive after the opening ceremony. "What we discovered is that prices dropped after Aug. 7 by about 300, so that's one way to get a good deal: Go early or late. Another option, if you really do want to go to the opening ceremony, is to fly into an alternate airport like Sao Paulo. Flights there cost up to 50 percent less than what you'd pay to Rio, and from there it's an easy one hour 100 flight. And Sao Paolo's a cool city on its own; it's worth spending some time there. Plus, if you want to go to the Paralympics, those flights are quite a bit less." When it comes to finding a hotel, it's mid range or below at this point, with the five star properties fully booked. But Ms. Carter said that prices for three star hotels are dropping. "Back in 2014 and the beginning of 2015, a lot of the hotels were bought out by operators paying in dollars and at much higher prices for the rooms because the real was much stronger then. People who had invested in purchasing these blocks a year or two ago now want to drop the prices, because they're afraid they're going to get stuck with unsold inventory, so prices have come down 15 to 20 percent for some of the lower end properties." To save even more, look to AirBnB, which is an official sponsor of the Games and which announced that it would have 25,000 accommodation options available. "While apartments are averaging around 300 a night, if you want, say, a single room in Copacabana, you can find one for 31," Ms. Greene said. "There are plenty of options in neighborhoods near the stadiums." She also recommends AlltheRooms.com, which aggregates information from several home sharing sites like VRBO, HomeAway and Flipkey. So, you can get to the Games and you've found a place to stay, but what about the events themselves? A handful are sold out, but there are still tickets available for most, even golf, which is making its Olympics debut this year. Just 67 percent of tickets had been sold as of May 20, many fewer than at this point before the 2012 London Games. This is a result of at least in part slow domestic sales, according to Donovan Ferreti, ticketing director, who predicts that this will improve. "It's part of Brazilian culture to buy tickets closer to the date. With the World Cup, we saw a spike in sales closer to the event." There are other factors to consider, too. Brazil has waived its usual visa requirements for travel between June 1 and Sept. 18 for citizens of the United States, Canada, Japan and Australia (Americans normally pay 160 for a visa). Visitors can pick up a Rio Cultural Passport for 15 reals, which gives free or discounted access to more than 700 cultural attractions and events, as well as discounted weekend metro fares during the Games. For those who would rather avoid the subway, Bike Rio has bicycle rental stations in the neighborhoods where the majority of Olympic events are taking place: Copacabana, Barra, Deodoro and Maracana. These cost 5 reals for an hour (a single ticket on the subway is 4.10 reals), and they are an easy way to get around if you're staying in those areas. Then there's the time difference: While attendees flying from the East Coast to London and Beijing had to contend with time differences of five and 12 hours, respectively, there's just a one hour difference between New York and Rio de Janeiro, which means that there's no losing a day to the fog of jet lag. And while travelers should exercise caution when it comes to Zika, August is winter in Brazil, the period in which transmission of mosquito borne diseases is lowest. "Probably the biggest value advantage consumers will find is the last minute thing they're going to get a better deal now than they would have for Beijing or London," Ms. Carter said. "If you've been thinking about going, the price in most cases should be lower than it was a year ago," she added, although she cautioned that it might not be quite as much of a bargain as consumers are anticipating. "Most people don't have an understanding that Brazil is a relatively expensive destination, with or without the Olympics," she said. "They think it must be like Mexico. But there are certainly more deals than there were six months ago." It's the rare case of procrastinators reaping significant (financial) rewards. "With these last minute deals, it's going to be great; the city's going to be spectacular, and it's really a fantastic event," Ms. Carter said. "It's such an outdoor, athletic city with so much sports enthusiasm. You just have to get there."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
It's not unusual to view local art, consume regional foods or meet area trendsetters in boutique and luxury hotels. Now to the great welcome of penny pinching travelers the trend in lodging to embody the location has trickled down to budget hotels and even brands generally regarded as cookie cutter. Graduate Hotels, recently opened in five college towns across the country and with another five opening in 2016 (rooms average 120 a night), tries to tell the story of its locations through design. Among them are the Graduate Madison in Madison, Wis., where the chandeliers are made from canoes and oars, and the Graduate Athens in Georgia, which hosts a music club that pays homage to the local music scene (groups including R.E.M. and Widespread Panic hail from Athens). Opened in December outside Aspen, Colo., the new Element Basalt Aspen (rooms from 169), part of Starwood Hotels Resorts' extended stay Element brand, serves locally roasted Bonfire Coffee, pours local beer and booze at its daily complimentary happy hour and hosts a branch of Basalt Bike Ski for rentals or tuneups. Many large hotel companies are adding affordable, locally skewed brands to their portfolios, including AccorHotels, which acquired a 35 percent stake in the French boutique chain Mama Shelter and plans to open 20 new locations in the next five years, including London and New York. Mama Shelter Los Angeles (from 169) features Los Angeles based film scripts in the rooms and a restaurant with a ceiling displaying chalk drawings by local artists.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Cardiologists recently hailed early results of a study suggesting that many lives might be saved if people with high blood pressure got it down far below levels now recommended. They predicted swift changes in treatment practices. But the intense interest in this big, rigorous clinical trial masked a startling truth about heart research: Many studies are never published, their findings consigned to oblivion. It is an issue that is arising in other parts of medicine as well, but heart disease is one area where it has been especially well documented. Hundreds of millions of dollars has been going to heart studies that are too small and narrow to yield results meaningful enough to get into a journal. In an era of ever tightening budgets, federal health officials acknowledge that money has been squandered on work that makes no difference to patients or even to research scientists. Now, a few years after coming to that jolting realization, the influential federal agency that funds much of the nation's heart research is overhauling its practice, a change with far reaching implications for the way medical research is funded in this country. The result will be the financing of fewer, but deeper, studies, to focus resources on efforts with real world impact and life or death implications. "We are much more willing to turn down proposed trials," said Dr. Michael Lauer, who is the newly appointed deputy director for extramural research of that agency, the National Institutes of Health. In fact, he added, "we are turning them down." The pronounced shift is shaking up a field where change is usually measured in tiny increments. Some question this new direction. "If you want to do things that are truly innovative and cutting edge, you sometimes have to do things that are high risk high gain," said Dr. Steven A. Webber, a pediatric cardiologist at Vanderbilt, arguing for the need to continue funding small exploratory studies like one he conducted, which he could not complete because of unexpected technical issues. "If a research project is never published it is as if it never happened," Dr. Lauer said. So starting next year, the heart institute will require that all research results be reported in a federal database even if no journal will publish them. In addition to turning down smaller studies, it is insisting that the costs of large studies go way down even if that means sacrificing data by, for example, not gathering lab results on peripheral questions researchers think are interesting. Though some researchers are unsettled by the new practices, many agree that money was often wasted under the old system. Five small studies cost less than one large one, so the temptation, federal officials acknowledge, has been to stuff the clinical trials portfolio with small studies, especially given the reality of the federal budget. Funds for the National Institutes of Health have fallen by 20 percent in inflation adjusted dollars since 2006. "It's worth understanding how perverse and that's the right word the environment has been for clinical trials," said Dr. Salim Yusuf, a cardiologist at McMaster University in Ontario. Dr. Lauer never expected to uncover such a troubled system when he asked for data on the publication or nonpublication of heart institute studies. The results shocked him and his colleagues, and after some soul searching they reported their findings in The New England Journal of Medicine. They realized they were airing what some said was the institute's dirty laundry in a journal that is all but required reading for medical researchers. "We did it anyway," Dr. Lauer said, explaining that he could hardly criticize others for not publishing and then fail to publish his own results. Others have also unearthed stunning rates of nonpublication. A Yale study found more than half of studies funded by the National Institutes of Health were not published in the 30 months after they were completed. A group at Duke examining more than 13,000 clinical trials of drugs found most had not reported results by five years after completion, even though the Food and Drug Administration requires reporting by one year after a study's end. Federally funded studies were less likely to report results than those funded by drug companies. A new Yale study under review at a medical journal found that a failure to publish afflicts researchers equally in prestigious medical centers and ones that are less well known. "If people really knew what was happening they would be outraged," said Dr. Nihar Desai, a Yale scientist who has been investigating nonpublication. But trials with so called surrogate endpoints Did cholesterol levels rise or fall? Did people walk more each day? tended to languish. Many small studies focused on understanding biochemical pathways that lead to disease. For example, researchers would conduct what they call feeding trials: participants come to a lab to be fed different diets, with the food prepared in special research kitchens. Investigators then drew the subjects' blood to see how their blood sugar or cholesterol levels were affected by what they ate. "A feeding trial definitely has value and provides insights," Dr. Lauer said. "But it has absolutely nothing to do with what happens in the real world." Another change will come with the design of large trials. The new emphasis will be on so called pragmatic trials that look for outcomes that matter, like reductions in heart attacks or deaths. Participants in such trials are ordinary people of the sort doctors see every day. They are randomly assigned to one group or another to take a drug meant to prevent heart disease or to take a placebo, for example. To cut costs, the institute will require researchers to make use of data that are already being collected during routine care, like information on episodes of chest pain or heart attacks. Donald Berry, a statistician at MD Anderson Cancer Center, says there are drawbacks to doing large studies that use clinical data from electronic health records, for example, to cut costs. The result, he said, can be the mingling of clinical trials and clinical practice, which have long been kept separate for ethical reasons. In a clinical trial, the goal is to get data that will help all patients, whereas in clinical practice, the goal is to help each individual patient. Researchers had to do all the lab tests on the participants and gather their own data on patients' clinical histories. These steps added greatly to the cost of trials, which often reached more than 50 million or even run into hundreds of millions. The new plan is to fund studies for no more than 1.5 million per year, which means a total cost well under 10 million for a typical trial. As for those studies that languish unpublished, researchers will be required to post results on clinicaltrials.gov whether or not they publish a paper. If the government is going to pay for these studies, said Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, the public should be able to see the data. And that includes data on all clinical trials, not just ones on heart disease, he added. Those whose studies are not published often say it is not their fault. Rhonda Cooper DeHoff, for example, an assistant professor of pharmacotherapy and translational research at the University of Florida, tried to publish the results of her study, which she completed in 2009. She wrote a paper and sent it to three journals, all of which summarily rejected it, she said. The study, involving just two dozen people, asked if various high blood pressure drugs worsened sugar metabolism in people at high risk of diabetes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
I am surprised by the distorted images that show up in panoramas, like the ones above, as a result of my moving the camera, moving myself, and moving the subject. Residue of movement, time and space are left behind as the camera travels constantly forward with the action. By late morning, all the dancers have settled into the studio. Class is over, air conditioning is off. No matter how hot, sweat is better for the muscles than frigid air blowing against moisture. Cellphones are tucked far away, disruptive to the working process and its sense of community. A tight ensemble requires time to develop. I have been working with many of these dancers more than a decade, a couple more than two. Today's rehearsal begins with the end of "Preludes and Fugues." Not always, but for a certain kind of dance, it is best to know the ending first. This last section is a repeat of the ballet's opening, also set to the Prelude in C major, shown in the ballet first as a duet but now orchestrated for all six couples. Its form is a circle. This is one of the most ancient configurations in dance and so common as to be on the cusp of cliche. I think of African pots, Matisse, children at play. But for me there is no other choice to end this dance. Some back story: In 2001, my company had been the last to perform at the World Trade Center's outdoor plaza. We danced on Saturday night, Sunday was dark and Monday night's show was rained out. The attack was Tuesday morning. At the time we were rehearsing "Movin' Out," a Broadway show with a score to songs by Billy Joel, in Midtown. Tuesday I called all the dancers, telling them we would work again on Wednesday. That day, too, I was in the studio early. Sirens in the city would be wailing wall to wall for days and nights. How, I asked myself, was I to justify working on a Broadway show when all around there was only evidence of human destruction? How to justify dancing? Huge headlines were everywhere: WTC I/II down. Suddenly I flashed on another WTC I/II. "The Well Tempered Clavier Volumes I/II" is the title of Bach's two volume set of 48 paired preludes and fugues. I had Prelude in C major of Volume 1 on my laptop and I began to dance. The word I use for Bach is ecumenical. "The Well Tempered Clavier" is encyclopedic, it has so many different possibilities of color and form and emotion, a compendium of keys and rhythm, improvisation and intense structural complexity, the simplest of beautiful tunes; all live so happily with one another in Bach's twice covered circle of fifths. His music is a huge umbrella, large enough to accommodate all movement styles and intentions and it was this possibility of inclusion and tolerance that allowed me to dance again.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The exquisitely renovated and inventively painted Federal style town house at 104 Willow Street in Brooklyn Heights began its tenure in 1826 as a custom built farmhouse with trees as its nearest neighbors. Back then, Brooklyn was a bucolic burg reachable by boat from Manhattan for a cost of around 12 cents, or 5 cents by rowboat, and the farmhouse had an outhouse and stables. Today the house has five full bathrooms, three of which qualify as spa style, and a chic black marble powder room. Upstairs in the family room, the 21st century flat screen television is mounted on a nearly 200 year old brick wall; the base of the balustrade of the curving staircase is a fish carved from mahogany, and the fan shaped leaded glass transom above the front door is original, too. The exterior is a refreshing Landmarks Preservation Commission acceptable shade of Benjamin Moore blue, Nantucket Fog; the interiors are bathed in colors reminiscent of tropical fruits. It is poised to re enter the marketplace for 12 million, which, if met, would set a new town house record for the borough. After a restoration that involved a new roof, shingles and wiring, as well as updated plumbing, a four zone HVAC unit and a Bose sound system, the case could be made that a farmhouse built for the long haul is approaching ageless elegance. "Our idea was to take a period home and, while respecting the integrity of the original details, change the interior aesthetic and bring it up to a level of comfort and beauty and convenience where it met the needs of a contemporary lifestyle," said Roberta Fisher, who is selling the home with her husband, David Chirls, after having lived there since 2007. The couple she is retired from a career in investment banking, and he from finance and marketing plan to downsize to a new town house in Dumbo. Leaving Brooklyn, where Mr. Chirls has lived for 28 years and raised three children, was not an option. Ms. Fisher jettisoned her Manhattan loft to join him in the Heights in 2006: after an exhaustive search, they found the house on Willow Street the only one that felt instantly right to them and commenced an 18 month renovation. "With two of the kids grown up and out," she said, "we don't need such a big house anymore." They fell in love with 104 Willow for its light, its historical detail, and the fact that, unlike most brownstones, it has the kitchen now clad in birds eye maple on the parlor floor. But their next home will be in "white box form." "This has been a labor of love," she said, "and a joy to live in. Our friends with brownstones all have closet envy." The beams in the vaulted ceiling of the top floor master suite are original, as are the seven working fireplaces of imported Belgian marble and the white oak herringbone floors with mahogany marquetry trim. Yet the home has been reimagined as a luxury family retreat. The shady west facing backyard is fenced in cedar and granted privacy and perma green vistas by a bamboo variant that does not shed its leaves in winter. The trees and plantings are illuminated at night and nurtured by an automatic irrigation system, as is the ipe wood sun deck on the top floor, ablaze with flowering species and a tropical vibe that is a nod to Ms. Fisher's extensive banking stints in South America. The town house in its original incarnation was built by Robert Speir, a slightly homesick immigrant from Glasgow, who found Manhattan too urban for his taste and moved his family to Brooklyn in 1820. Six years later he had completed his dream house, and his business of importing Merino sheep (they and their bovine brethren grazed in the backyard, which sloped downhill toward the river) was going gangbusters. Mr. Speir, who died in 1856, built residences at 102 and 106 Willow Street to accommodate his children and grandchildren. The town house has a two bedroom one bath legal accessory apartment on the basement level, with two working fireplaces, that had been used as an in law apartment before Ms. Fisher and Mr. Chirls arrived. There is a tenant through May 2014; a buyer can continue that arrangement or remove the soundproofing at the top of the basement stairway and reconnect the apartment to the house. The listing broker is Rhea Cohen of Brown Harris Stevens. Both she and Ms. Fisher said the uniqueness of the property, with building dimensions of 25.5 by 66 feet deep on a 25.6 by 100 foot lot, coupled with the quality of the restoration, had been major factors in determining the 12 million asking price. The present sales record of 11 million was set in Gravesend in 2003 and tied last year by 212 Columbia Heights. The annual real estate taxes are 20,878.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
What I'll miss during the Museum of Modern Art's four month public shutdown is something I've already been missing for five years and will probably continue to miss when the expanded museum reopens in October. I'm talking about the presence on West 53rd Street of the American Folk Art Museum, which was physically demolished in 2014, and whose site the expanded MoMA absorbs, but whose spirit lives on as a restless ghost in the corporate machine that MoMA is. You'll remember the story of the rise and fall of the Folk Art Museum building. The museum itself initially opened on 53rd Street in 1961, and bought property there, but moved to quarters in the Lincoln Center area before deciding to build a permanent home at its founding location. In the late 1990s, working with a 32 million loan, it commissioned a new building from Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, which opened in 2001 . The first reviews of the building, a few paces west of MoMA, were welcoming. But in 2009, disaster struck. Hit by a serious revenue shortfall, the institution defaulted on its loan. Its only option was to sell the building, then barely a decade old. MoMA snapped it up, and after giving some thought to incorporating the structure into its expansion plans, pulled it down and built on the site it had occupied. Architectural historians argued against destruction, but protest was not universal. The Williams Tsien building had problems. Conceived on the scale of a compact townhouse, it was only 40 feet wide. Its narrowness created a cramped interior, with corridor like galleries inhospitable to art viewing. In addition, some people found its facade composed of more than 60 plates of a copper bronze alloy textured to look handworked uninviting, even forbidding. It was hard to tell at a glance what was housed behind them, what the building was about. At the same time, nobody denied that the design was distinctive, an interruption in a sea of midtown blandness to which MoMA's facade contributes. Indeed, the Folk Art Museum looked about as un MoMA as could be imagined: a small, dark, recessive sculpture set against the mega museum's stretch of glass and steel. Anyway, it went. A shame. If a work of architecture, loved or hated, has the weight and personality of an aesthetic object, which the Williams Tsien building did, it should be considered "museum worthy" and preserved. There was another factor that made its loss regrettable. The work it housed by folk artists, self taught artists, and so called outsider artists was not only deeply charismatic, but filled out the story of Modernism in a way that MoMA itself, in recent years, has largely neglected to do. This wasn't always true at MoMA, whose early leaders regarded folk or self taught artists as foundational figures in Modern art. In 1938, when the museum was operating out of temporary quarters on West 49th Street, it organized a large exhibition called "Masters of Popular Painting," described as a survey of "Modern Primitives of Europe and America." Among its 22 artists were Henri Rousseau and Seraphine Louis, known simply as Seraphine, from France, and the Americans John Kane and Horace Pippin. Pictures by all four soon entered the permanent collection, as would work by the Pennsylvania landscapist Joseph Pickett and the Polish born New Yorker Morris Hirshfield. The presence of the Folk Art Museum on 53rd Street picked up the slack. I even tended to think of the smaller museum as a kind of antechamber to the larger one an entry point, the place you go to first for historical grounding. The museum still offers this, in its 2 Lincoln Square location on the Upper West Side and its "Self Taught Genius Gallery" in Long Island City, Queens. But in midtown, MoMA is now again on its own with the tradition of self taught art. And what, if anything, will it do with it? The full answer remains, of course, to be seen in October and beyond. All we can do at this point is hope for the best, and give some advice. When, in 2014, the fate of the 53rd Street building was announced, MoMA's director, Glenn D. Lowry, framed the decision in terms of the larger museum's need for more space, which, he said, would permit the presentation of "transformative" acquisitions "by such artists as Marcel Broodthaers, Lygia Clark, Steve McQueen, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Mira Schendel, Richard Serra, Sophie Taeuber Arp and Cy Twombly , among many others." I would suggest that we, and MoMA, don't need any more Rauschenbergs, or Richters, or Serras, or Twomblys. What we do need is "many others." And some of those Others were, for 13 years, to be found in the Folk Art Museum next door. Maybe MoMA can now be persuaded to acknowledge its spirit, and their genius, in its expanded home.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
'BE MORE CHILL' at the Lyceum Theater (closes on Aug. 11). The shutdown sequence has started for Joe Iconis and Joe Tracz's show about a nerd who swallows a supercomputer with an operating code that aims for world domination. In his review, Ben Brantley questioned the musical's craftsmanship, though he noted that unlike other Broadway productions about teenagers, this one "feels as if it could have been created by the teenagers it portrays, or perhaps by even younger people imagining what high school will be like." 212 239 6200, bemorechillmusical.com 'FAIRVIEW' at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center (closes on Aug. 11). Jackie Sibblies Drury's shape shifting, frame breaking, soul shaking play, directed by Sarah Benson, ends its encore run. When this drama, which won the Pulitzer Prize, opened last year, Ben Brantley called it "dazzling and ruthless," and added, "If you see it and you must you will not be comfortable." 866 811 4111, tfana.org 'THE PROM' at the Longacre Theater (closes on Aug. 11). This winning musical comedy, by Bob Martin, Chad Beguelin and Matthew Sklar, has its last dance. According to Jesse Green, this "joyful hoot" about a quartet of Broadway vets who descend on the heartland to help a teenage lesbian "makes you believe in musical comedy again." 212 239 6200, theprommusical.com 'TONI STONE' at the Laura Pels Theater at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater (closes on Aug. 11). Lydia R. Diamond's play, about the first female professional baseball player, prepares for its last at bat. Reviewing Pam MacKinnon's production, Jesse Green praised April Matthis's home run performance and Diamond's script. The play, he wrote, is "at its considerable best whenever, like its main character, it's at its most unconventional." 212 719 1300, roundabouttheatre.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
MONTICELLO, N.Y. For the Chevrolet Camaro, burning rubber in a straight line has rarely been a problem. Turning and stopping? Not always a top priority. But the 2015 Camaro Z/28 that I'm romping around Monticello Motor Club's road course is cranking off laps that would surely beat any number of full bore sports cars, including the Porsche 911 S and the Corvette Stingray. Forget the mullet jokes: This Camaro is a legitimate track star, albeit at a starry eyed price of 75,000. It's a long way from 1967, when Chevrolet charged 358 for a Special Performance Package, option code Z28, on its Camaro pony car. Only 602 were made that first year, with Chevy playing down the 302 cubic inch V8 and chassis package to avoid scrutiny from a racing shy corporate bureaucracy. But the Z/28 soon became a dream car for homegrown hot rodders. Through the bloodlines of the original Z/28, this new Camaro also traces a direct link to the romantic era of Trans Am racing in the late '60s and early '70s. That series sprang to life as a battleground for popular American V8 pony cars Camaros, Mustangs, Challengers and others contested by hero drivers like Mark Donohue, Parnelli Jones and Dan Gurney. Discontinued after 1974, the Z/28 was revived in the late '70s, the '80s and the '90s, before the entire Camaro line dried up in 2002. But successive Z/28s (mostly with badges that read Z28) never approached the charisma and appeal of the early models. That all changes with the 2015 version, the first Z since Camaro's return for 2010. Today's retro tinged Camaro consistently outsells the Mustang, in part because Chevy continues to keep the car fresh with special high performance versions like the ZL1, a supercharged, 580 horsepower beast that is the fastest Camaro in a straight line The Z/28 isn't about stoplight high jinks. Instead, this is a sharply focused, special purpose tool. Spending the money for one if you don't have access to a racetrack, even for a few days a year, is a bit like buying an 8,000 carbon fiber road bicycle for evening spins to the Dairy Queen. The 2015 Z/28 is all beefcake, and it's powered by one of my favorite motors: the 505 horsepower 7 liter V8 last seen in the Corvette Z06, hand assembled with a dry sump oiling system and titanium valves and connecting rods. A 6 speed manual is the only transmission available. Chevy points out that the Z/28 is 300 pounds lighter than the ZL1. There's no air conditioning, the battery is smaller, and there's only a single speaker that regulators required to sound the seatbelt chime. (That air conditioning and an audio system with five more speakers is an option.) But it's still beefy at 3,820 pounds just 88 fewer than a Camaro SS with a manual transmission. Even the bow tie trademark proved too dressy for this occasion. Cutting out the grille logo's solid center creates what Chevy calls the Flowtie, which passes enough extra air to reduce oil and coolant temperatures by two degrees on the track, the company says. The Z/28 will let barroom debate societies use "Camaro" and "Aston Martin" in the same sentence: The monotube shock absorbers feature spool valve technology, familiar from Formula One racing, but never used on a production model unless you count the 1.8 million Aston Martin One 77 supercar. These precisely machined valves give chassis engineers a wider tuning range to tailor the suspension responses without sacrificing ride quality. A Torsen limited slip differential helps maximize traction under power. So called square tires all four are the same size, rather than using wider rubber in back are ultrasticky 19 inch Pirelli P Zero Trofeos in the generous 305/30 size. Apparently, the lavish performance investment left only small change for the interior: It is a mineshaft of coal black plastic, mildly enlivened from basic Camaros with the addition of Recaro seats, special gauges and some Alcantara bits. But interior styling was the last thing on my mind when I exited the pits and, on cold tires, promptly spun the Camaro on a tricky, descending left hander. Lesson No. 1: When the Z/28 does finally break loose, it does so with little warning. All warmed up, the Camaro and its driver proceeded to have a ball. The Z/28's carbon ceramic brakes are as impressive as the engine and suspension, so strong and impervious to fade that I could wait until the last possible moment to squash the pedal, saving time in every corner. The only real shortfall is a lack of steering feedback: The Camaro isn't as nimble or connected as its Corvette cousin or other pure sports cars. This is going to sound like a left handed compliment, but it's actually applause: It's hard to believe this is a Camaro. In terms of improbability, it's like seeing the Deathmobile from "Animal House" pirouette around a track. Speaking of realism, Chevrolet is probably wise to limit Z/28 production to 3,000 over two years. The list of Camaro fanatics may be long, but the list of fanatics willing and able to spend 75,000 is infinitely shorter. (The price won't go much higher, as the option list is very short.) The question is thrown into relief by the 65,000 Corvette Stingray convertible I happen to be driving this day. It's a Corvette, for gosh sakes, a dream car that's roughly as fast as the Camaro on the street, but also prettier, more deluxe, accommodating and prestigious. And it still costs 10,000 less. There's been some overheated talk that people will buy the Z/28 for its potential value as a collector's item. But few people buy a new car with the hope of payoff decades away. Savvy Camaro loyalists might do better pursuing a vintage Z/28 instead. Still, give General Motors credit. This Camaro is hardly a moneymaking enterprise, yet the company has developed a car that vividly evokes the spirit of the original. Whoever ends up with this Z/28 is sure to be grease stained: it's a car for serious car people with a chip on their shoulder. Now they'll have a Camaro to match.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Governments from more than 190 countries on Thursday adopted a measure that for the first time will reduce the climate impact of international jet travel. The accord adds an exclamation point to a week in which enough countries signed onto the broader Paris climate deal to ensure that it will enter into force later this year. The aviation plan, the product of years of negotiations, was approved by acclamation at a meeting of the International Civil Aviation Organization, or I.C.A.O., in Montreal. The measure could force air carriers to take major steps to improve fuel economy in their routes and fleets, very likely accelerating the purchase of newer, more efficient planes. Carriers may pass the cost of the program on to consumers in higher airfares, though most experts think any increases would be relatively small. Leaders hailed the accord, which will take effect in 2021, as a major step in reducing the environmental impact of international aviation, which is currently responsible for about 2 percent of worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases. Secretary of State John Kerry called the measure "unprecedented" and said it built on the Paris agreement and other international efforts to reduce emissions. "This measure addresses a growing source of global emissions, demonstrates the international community's strong and growing support for climate action in all areas and helps avoid a patchwork of potentially costly and overlapping regional and national measures," Mr. Kerry said in a statement. Along with international shipping, international aviation was not covered by the Paris accord reached in December. On Tuesday, with the ratification of that pact by the European Union, it reached a threshold acceptance by countries responsible for more than 55 percent of the world's emissions that causes it to go into effect. It is expected to enter into force before the next large United Nations climate meeting, in Morocco early next month. Under the program, airlines will buy credits to offset emissions from individual flights. The credits will come from alternative energy installations, forest conservation programs and other projects that prevent some amount of greenhouse gas emissions. But critics point to several possible problems. Some environmental groups said the plan did not go far enough, forecasting that it would fall short of the goal originally set by the aviation organization to offset all of the growth in emissions from air travel after 2020. At least 65 nations, including the United States, China and the European Union countries, have signaled that they will participate during the voluntary phase of the measure. The measure exempts many smaller countries that do not have large international air carriers, and because of rules on competition, that could mean that some popular routes from participating countries could be exempt as well. Several countries that are significant sources of international air travel, including Russia and India, on Thursday expressed formal reservations about the agreement, indicating they would not participate, at least for now. Critics and supporters of the measure alike noted that much work remains to be done before the agreement is put into effect. Mechanisms must be developed to monitor and report current emissions, and criteria established to select conservation programs and other projects that will count toward offset credits. The aviation industry has supported the idea of mitigating the climate impact of its jet engines. Manufacturers have taken steps to improve the efficiency of current engines, and some carriers have begun replacing some of their conventional jet fuel with cleaner burning biofuels. Some airlines have also encouraged environmentally conscious passengers to buy offsets voluntarily for their flights. Under the new measure, the airlines would buy the offsets, and they could pass the cost on to all passengers. But one estimate by the aviation organization forecasts that by 2025 the annual cost to airlines would be less than 1 percent of revenue. On Thursday, industry representatives welcomed adoption of the measure. Michael Gill, executive director of the Air Transport Action Group, a coalition of manufacturers, carriers and other companies, said he was heartened by how many countries, including small developing countries with a lot at stake as climate change takes hold, had agreed to participate voluntarily. "Despite some reservations over the scheme being voluntary in its initial years, the support of all these states large, small, developed and developing shows the commitment of the international community, working through I.C.A.O., to deliver a robust measure," Mr. Gill said in a statement. But an analysis by the International Council on Clean Transportation, a research group, shows that the agreement as approved will offset only about three quarters of the growth in emissions from international aviation above 2020 levels. That means the proposal falls short of the goal originally set by the International Civil Aviation Organization of "carbon neutral" growth after 2020.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Major League Baseball suspended the Houston Astros hitting coach Alex Cintron for a third of the season on Tuesday for his role in a benches clearing altercation with the Oakland Athletics. Cintron was suspended for 20 games for inciting and escalating the incident on Sunday in Oakland. A's outfielder Ramon Laureano, who had exchanged words with Cintron and then charged the dugout after Cintron moved toward him, was given a six game ban. Cintron and Laureano also were fined. Cintron's suspension is one of the longest ever imposed on a coach by Major League Baseball for an on field incident. When M.L.B. established its health and safety protocols to help limit the spread of the coronavirus for the 2020 season, it indicated that fighting would not be tolerated because of the increased chance of transmitting the virus during an altercation. The operations manual issued before the season prohibited fighting and instigating fights, and said M.L.B. had the authority to impose "severe discipline consistent with past precedent." The ruling on the Astros A's incident, which was made by Chris Young, the former pitcher who now serves as M.L.B.'s senior vice president for operations, came two weeks after Dodgers pitcher Joe Kelly was suspended for throwing at several Astros batters and sparking another benches clearing incident. Kelly was banned for eight games. Cintron's suspension set a new bar for penalties for violations of the league's safety protocols. His punishment was more severe in part because he instigated the fight, but also because of his position of responsibility as a coach. "I just thought they threw the book at us big time," Astros Manager Dusty Baker said in a video call with reporters. "What can you do? The rule is the rule." A 20 game suspension would be severe in any season, but the impact of the punishment is far greater in a pandemic shortened season of only 60 games. Laureano, who was drafted by the Astros in 2014 and spent time in their minor league system before being traded to Oakland in 2017, has appealed his suspension and is allowed to continue playing until M.L.B. makes a ruling. Coaches do not have the option to appeal. The altercation began after Laureano was hit for a second time in Sunday's game. After walking to first base, Laureano and Cintron began shouting at one another. Cintron stepped out of the dugout, yelling at Laureano and gesturing for him to come and fight. Laureano charged the dugout but was tackled by Houston catcher Dustin Garneau before he could get to Cintron, who stood behind other Astros while players poured out of both dugouts and began shoving and grabbing one another. Laureano told ESPN that Cintron had yelled a derogatory comment about Laureano's mother, which Cintron denied. "I accept M.L.B.'s suspension and will learn from this," Cintron said in a statement released by the Astros. "Although I never referenced Ramon's mother, my actions were inappropriate. I apologize for my part in Sunday's unfortunate incident. As coaches, we are held to a higher standard and should be an example to the players. Hopefully, other coaches will learn from my mistake so that this never happens again in the future."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Paul Wilson, the shoemaker at the John Lobb store on Madison Avenue, helps men order bespoke shoes and boots, made from leather and exotic skins like lizard and crocodile. Wearing a leather apron to protect himself from a possible knife slip during the monthslong process, Mr. Wilson tends to a customer's every desire be it the requested leather or the thickness of sole and heel height. The finished product of his service starts at 8,000 and can climb to over 25,000. Mr. Wilson's painstaking attention to detail reflects a growing demand among male customers for luxury shoes, with new and well known retailers at the top end of exquisitely designed footwear lining up in a corridor along Manhattan's Madison Avenue, the mecca for so many high end stores. A few other luxury brands, like Louis Leeman and Santoni, plan to offer custom shoemaking services that cater to individual needs in their Madison Avenue stores, which are either under construction or about to open. Following retailers like Tom Ford, Hermes and Lanvin, all with luxury men's wear boutiques on Madison Avenue, Louis Leeman, a two year old brand based in Florence, plans to open its first store in December at 793 Madison Avenue, on the northeast corner of 67th Street. Designed by David Collins Studio, which has also worked with Alexander McQueen and Jimmy Choo, the Leeman store will resemble a Parisian apartment, with a fireplace, and a cobbler will take orders. Tina Fineberg for The New York Times Erica Pelosini, who founded Louis Leeman with her husband, said the brand was opening its first store in New York because "it's such an international city, open to new talent. Paris is more niche." Madison Avenue, she added, "is so compact. There's a certain prestige for brands to be there." At the end of this month, customers can look forward to the reappearance of a Santoni store on the avenue. For 13 years until 2010, Santoni was between 70th and 71st Streets. It will now open a shop at 762 Madison, between 65th and 66th Streets. The shoe retailers' expansion plans are no doubt a result, in part, of growing demand for men's shoes in the United States: In a report issued last month, NPD Group, a market research company, said dollar sales of men's footwear in the United States grew 8 percent in the last two years, twice the growth rate of dollar sales of women's footwear in the same period. Robert Burke, a fashion consultant in New York, said men were shedding the practice of casual Fridays. "There's a pattern with men: They want to enjoy luxury watches, Scotch, good shoes and tailored clothing," Mr. Burke said. "They're not price resistant. It's very much a status symbol. And it's not just for baby boomers any longer it's for aspirational 20 and 30 year olds as well." And upscale retailers recognize the value of clustering near the new luxury high rises on West 57th Street (nicknamed Billionaires' Row) and Park Avenue. The latest store openings come after the expansion in January by Berluti, part of the LVMH empire. The luxury company quintupled its presence on the avenue, opening a two level, 3,000 square foot store at 677 Madison, between 61st and 62nd Streets. Berluti gives clients the option of adding customized tattoos, like a butterfly, to its shoes. Tina Fineberg for The New York Times Overseen by Antoine Arnault, son of Bernard Arnault, the chairman and chief executive of LVMH, Berluti also opened an 800 square foot boutique on the second floor of Bergdorf Goodman's men's store on Fifth Avenue last December, and began selling its shoes in the store's first floor shoe department. Other upscale men's shoe retailers on Madison Avenue include J. M. Weston, at 600 Madison, between 57th and 58th Streets; Church's, which is owned by Prada and is at 689 Madison, at the southeast corner of 62nd Street; John Lobb, owned by Hermes, at 800 Madison between 67th and 68th Streets; and Silvano Lattanzi, at 905 Madison, between 72nd and 73rd Streets. Virginia Pittarelli, principal of Crown Retail Services, estimated these retailers were spending slightly over 1,000 to almost 1,850 per square foot for rent, with the low range north of 72nd Street and the highest rents charged between 57th and 63rd Streets. Mimi Fukuyoshi, vice president and divisional merchandise manager for men's sportswear and shoes for Bergdorf Goodman, said the men's store which currently carries the Louis Leeman, Lobb and Church's brands as well as Berluti consolidated two shoe departments into one on the ground floor two years ago. "A lot of people in the market say men are shopping for shoes more like women, who want a lot of variety in their shoe wardrobe," Ms. Fukuyoshi said. "Men in the past only invested in shoes to wear to work every day. On the weekend they would wear dirty sneakers or some sort of boring loafer. Now men are much more willing to invest in casual footwear." Tom Ott, senior vice president and general merchandise manager for men's apparel and accessories for Saks Fifth Avenue, which carries Louis Leeman and Santoni shoes, said sales of men's shoes at his store "have gained momentum in the last three years." William Friedland, a principal in Friedland Properties, a developer that was Berluti's previous landlord on Madison Avenue at 76th Street, said men's retailers had begun shifting from locations near shoppers' Midtown offices to Madison Avenue. On the avenue, he said, shoppers can find a different experience that is "more customer focused, more of a boutique feel, more one on one interacting." And Laura Pomerantz, a real estate broker in New York, suggested growth of men's luxury shoe retailers on Madison Avenue reflected a cycle in which "brands look for where their competitors are doing well. They want to locate near that and have a position of co tenancy from which to grow their base." Giuseppe Santoni, chief executive of Santoni, said the retailer's expansion on Madison Avenue was part of a global repositioning of its brand, which also includes a redesign of its top boutiques worldwide by Patricia Urquiola. The new Madison Avenue boutique will carry a larger selection of women's shoes than its predecessor and a new line of accessories for men and women. Patrick Ottomani, director for the United States for Bertuli, said the brand's new store on Madison Avenue, which sells men's clothing as well as shoes and accessories, was "doing extremely well. We can show all categories of products, ready to wear and custom shoes, clothing, leather accessories." He said he was not concerned that Berluti's presence in Bergdorf Goodman would dampen sales of its Madison Avenue boutique, but that rather, it would create synergy. Echoing her competitors, Kelli Duggan, manager of the John Lobb store on Madison Avenue whose shoes are also sold at Bergdorf Goodman, Barney's and Leffot said there was a "place for all" the men's luxury shoe brands on Madison Avenue, since each had a "unique aesthetic." She predicted some brands' expansion plans would benefit all businesses, since men's shoe buying will become "a little more centralized. If you can't find what you need in one store, then you can go a few blocks up or down and find exactly what you're looking for. It creates a kind of centralized luxury men's shopping experience."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Remember when federal regulators made rules that seemed tailored to benefit the technology industry? Not anymore. On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to take votes on two measures that would continue efforts to unwind rules created during the Obama administration. The first would make it easier for broadband providers to increase charges on other companies that connect to their networks. The second would ease the limit on how many stations a broadcast television company can own.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
A few weeks ago, I recommended Instagram feeds of artists mostly based in New York City. We were just getting accustomed to the new state of affairs, and it felt invigorating, in the suddenly compacted experience of lockdown, to take in multiple perspectives on local reality. Maybe it's the weather, maybe it's news of baby step "reopenings" in various countries I gasped with envy on seeing colleagues post pictures of their socially distanced gallery visits in Paris or Dubai but I'm starting to envision travel again. Call it optimism, or wanderlust. Yet I sense, in my Instagram scrolling, an ethos re emerging everywhere: Things have changed; we're adapting; and artists will always find their way to the front when it comes to imagining how to live in community. Here are five of my favorite accounts; New York Times critics will be posting their own favorites every week. Rahima Gambo wakes up and walks, gathering things: branches, objects in the street, conversations, impressions. Then she takes these materials and makes something, with the intangible inputs coming through in the way she sets up an installation or draws on the wall in line forms that feel runic, improvised yet ancient. Ms. Gambo soured on photojournalism after one too many assignments depicting trauma in northeast Nigeria her home region, where the Boko Haram conflict has gone on for a decade. Her walk practice is an antidote; a different documenting, grounded and attuned. In Abuja, Nigeria's capital, where she lives and has opened a space for artists, she shares it, inviting people to walk with her. It's a way of belonging together, and on Instagram she offers outtakes from both the walking and the art it generates. Yassine Alaoui Ismaili, whose also uses the name Yoriyas with his work, is a child of Casablanca; his street photography, colorful and conversational, exudes a native son's love for the Moroccan metropolis, as well as an instinct for movement that reflects his background in hip hop and break dancing. But Yoriyas is also a builder of the bubbling Moroccan photo scene. Recently he curated the inaugural exhibition of the national photography museum, in a restored fort in Rabat an excellent, adventurous showcase of 15 emerging artists, some of whom he discovered through social media. And since the lockdown, he's helped run a weekly photography competition open to amateurs and professionals alike; you'll find the winning entries and artists, along with his own work, on his Instagram feed. I met Amos Kennedy long ago in tiny Burkville, Ala., where he was selling 10 prints at the local Okra Festival. Later I realized how the self described "humble Negro printer," who quit middle class office life at 40, is a legend in the letterpress world. Mr. Kennedy has a big following in American book arts and folkways. His prints have voice: political, history minded, playful and despite their earthy feel, cosmopolitan, for instance referring to social movements in other countries. Now based in Detroit, where he works on antediluvian machinery he has restored, Mr. Kennedy has bought an old garage the Pile of Bricks, he calls it to spread out, welcome visitors, and teach. On Instagram he documents that project's progress, and shares welcome whimsy from a practice devoted to social justice and craft. The members of the collective Slavs and Tatars keep their number and identities concealed; they are described as living and working "in Eurasia," and devote their exhibitions and projects, including books and zines, to the area "east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China." The results can be eccentric in last year's Venice Biennale, they offered a pickle juice bar where you could refresh yourself, if that's the right word, with weird fermented beverages as you emerged from the visit but at its core this is archive work, mining history, foregrounding local thought, sparking collisions. If you're theory minded, you can appreciate how it challenges imperial or Orientalist frames of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Or simply dig the stimulating stream of ideas, sources and images they share on their feed. I've never been to Buenos Aires. But since coming across Vanessa Bell's Instagram feed a couple of years ago, a journey to Argentina's capital has felt imperative. Ms. Bell is half British, half Argentine, an inside outsider position that she puts to good use as an intellectually curious ambassador for Buenos Aires and its design culture and history. On Instagram, that means buildings, especially the Modernist, Brutalist and Postmodern gems with which the city is replete, and many unclassifiable oddities. Ms. Bell's obsessions with high design 1970s building intercoms, for example are contagious, and her captions are generous with context and architectural history. In normal times, she consults and gives tours; in lockdown, she's been sharing her photos and archival ones, from what is clearly a gigantic collection.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
In September, the model and actress Emily Ratajkowski published an essay describing, among other injurious experiences, being sexually assaulted by a photographer named Jonathan Leder when she was 20. For years afterward, Ms. Ratajkowski wrote on The Cut, nude and seminude Polaroids from that shoot have been shown in galleries and republished without her permission. In response, Mr. Leder called Ms. Ratajkowski's accusations "false and salacious," and her essay "tawdry and baseless." Years ago, when Ms. Ratajkowski first began publicly denouncing Mr. Leder for publishing books of her nude shots, the photographer provided The New York Times with a copy of her model release a contract specifying or limiting the use of one's image signed by Ms. Ratajkowski's agent. The agreement allowed the photos to be used in "a future book of Polaroids." But according to Ms. Ratajkowski, her agent denied signing anything; Ms. Ratajkowski also said her lawyer suggested the signature was forged. Since the publication of Ms. Ratajkowski's essay in which she described Mr. Leder penetrating her with his fingers after the photo shoot, while she was drunk on wine he'd provided more women have emerged with stories about Mr. Leder, ranging from discomfort with his continued use of certain images to allegations of abuse. The Times tried to contact Mr. Leder, 47, for comment for this article, through phone calls, emails and text. He did not respond. He is not the first photographer accused of exploiting young bodies while gatekeepers shrugged or turned the other way; Terry Richardson, Bruce Weber, Mario Testino and Patrick Demarchelier have also been accused of misconduct. (None of these men have been charged with a crime, and all have issued denials. Only one Mr. Weber faces lawsuits.) "These are the kinds of stories that we hear every day," said Sara Ziff, founder of Model Alliance, a labor rights nonprofit that runs a support line and workshops. Their magazine, inspired by vintage issues of Playboy and featuring what Mr. Leder once described as "wholesome" nudity, was well received. He was soon asked to shoot videos for brands like Adidas and Louis Vuitton. In October of 2011, after two years of marriage and two children together, Ms. Hettara said she confronted her husband about his involvement with Nola Palmer, the lead actress of a feature film he was directing. During that argument, according to a police report Ms. Hettara filed in Woodstock, N.Y., Mr. Leder choked her while she held their infant daughter. At that moment, she said in an interview, "I was so shaken up that I couldn't remember the number to call 911." She went to the police five days later, after speaking to friends and family and intermittently trying to reconcile with Mr. Leder. She was granted an order of protection. Mr. Leder was arrested and charged in January 2012 with criminal obstruction of breathing or blood circulation and endangering the welfare of a child, but acquitted at trial. (The case record is sealed, but Mr. Leder's acquittal was discussed in a divorce related hearing in September 2017; at this hearing, Mr. Leder denied the incident and denied ever being violent with any woman, according to the court transcript.) Over the years Ms. Hettara told her story to business associates, she said, hoping they might stop working with him. "A lot of people didn't care, because as you can see, the modeling agencies just sent him models," she said."I immediately got painted as this jealous housewife." In a 2014 issue of Jacques themed around betrayal, with Mr. Leder off the masthead Ms. Hettara identified herself as "a domestic abuse survivor" who "had a nervous breakdown because of it." She and Ms. Palmer, who had broken from Mr. Leder, did a photo shoot together and exchanged emotional public letters. "For a year I felt crazy," Ms. Hettara wrote in her letter. "It's part of his abuse he makes you feel and look crazy." The week after Ms. Ratajkowski's essay was published, Ms. Palmer, 29, wrote on Instagram that Mr. Leder was "my abuser," too. He would, she said, monitor her weight and control her hairstyle and clothing. He would tell her not to work with anyone else. He taught her that "my body can only be respected or appreciated if it's naked," she said. She has since changed her name, she said, to make a break with the person that he controlled. While shooting Mr. Leder's film in Florida where she also temporarily lived with him, Ms. Hettara and their two children she called her parents and agent to tell them she was scared and wanted to go home, she said. Ms. Palmer's agent emailed Mr. Leder in May 2011. In the note, reviewed by The Times, the agent told Mr. Leder that she'd spoken to Ms. Palmer and was concerned. She asked him to call Ms. Palmer's father, as well as make other living arrangements for her: "While you feel sometimes like a big brother, also big brothers can be a pain to deal with and little sisters as well," she wrote. She told Mr. Leder once the film got rolling, the footage of Ms. Palmer, then 19, "will be AMAZING." The movie, in which Ms. Palmer played a stripper, was not finished. Because of the unreleased footage in Mr. Leder's possession, she said, she has worried about speaking out against him. She also drank while filming with him. Shortly after Ms. Hettara and Mr. Leder separated, Ms. Hettara said she discovered in a storage locker several contact sheets from a magazine shoot he was hired to do in 2011. The subject was a 15 year old girl, who, in some images, has her top unbuttoned to reveal a sheer bra; in another she was posed kneeling, with her legs slightly spread, on a mattress. Models younger than 15 have long been used in fashion photography, but the photos Ms. Hettara found went further than her and Mr. Leder's typical work with minors, she said, and she found them deeply troubling, as she has described in court documents. Young girls still routinely find themselves asked to undress during shoots, and do not always feel empowered to say no, Ms. Ziff said Often, models don't feel comfortable complaining to their agent, she said, because "they don't want to seem difficult to work with and jeopardize future bookings." Ms. Sorbara said she didn't feel uncomfortable until the second shoot. When she arrived, she said, she was surprised by the concept: "1950s 1960s lesbian porn pinup." At one point Mr. Leder asked her to kiss another model, who was then his girlfriend, and she said no. After seeing the photos, Ms. Sorbara asked, through her agent, that her name be removed from the project. Mr. Leder agreed according to emails provided to The Times. Not only did "Vol. 1" include her name and, on the cover, her photo but over the next two years, she saw images from that shoot in a Los Angeles gallery show and in another art publication. "These were photos that were used for different projects that I had never given him permission to use," Ms. Sorbara said. She wanted her agency, Wilhelmina Models, to take legal action. "I trusted this photographer with these photos because the agency set me up with him," she wrote in an email to the agency. "But now these photos are being reproduced and sold over and over again." An agent told her in 2015 he would look into it. But he added that he didn't like her tone; he had been "against you shooting in that manor sic for a while," he wrote, and this "should be a learning experience in your career to make sure not to put yourself in uncomfortable types of shoots." In a statement, Wilhelmina said that in Ms. Sorbara's case, a lawyer advised the agency that "it was not likely that there had been a breach of contract that would enable Ms. Sorbara, or Wilhelmina, to pursue a claim." The following year, in 2016, she arrived at a casting call to discover the job was another shoot with Mr. Leder in Woodstock. He wasn't at the casting, but she was distraught that her agency had put her in the position to potentially encounter him again. She received an apology and was promised the agency had recorded that "you or no other girl should shoot with this photographer." But Ms. Sorbara said she believes "young women continue to get thrown into the fire pit" until "agencies take a stand," or until there's more industry oversight of photographers. Ms. Sorbara also believes there are ethical ways to stage and share artistic nudes; the problem is not the content. One photographer, Stacey Mark, said recently that before selling a print of a topless model to an interested buyer, she called the model to make sure it was OK. "She was like: I've never been asked that before,'" Ms. Mark said. Ms. Mark shot for Jacques magazine, as well as more mainstream magazines. She has photographed both Ms. Sorbara and Ms. Palmer, who've both confided in her their experiences with Mr. Leder. She also dated Mr. Leder in the late '90s and early 2000s. It was an unhealthy relationship, she said, describing him as manipulative and mean. On Instagram, after Ms. Ratajkowski's essay was published, she called him "an abusive monster." She wanted to walk down a street in Williamsburg without seeing a topless photo of herself on a passer by's T shirt (sold by ASOS in 2013). In 2014, she sent a cease and desist letter to Mr. Leder after discovering he had included intimate footage of her in a video promoting a zine in which she did not appear. Some of her battles have been unsuccessful. Jacques folded after its ninth edition in 2015.Mr. Leder has sole legal custody of their two children, although she sees them on alternate weekends and holidays (with extra weekends in certain months and a full month in the summer). In court documents, Ms. Hettara and Mr. Leder have accused each other of abandonment and neglect. He has called her "bizarre" and reported her to the Woodstock police for threatening his life (she has not been charged). Recently, representing herself pro se, Ms. Hettara tried to use Ms. Ratajkowski's allegations to have her custody restored. Ms. Ratajkowski's essay mentions the children multiple times, including when Ms. Ratajkowski wonders, post assault, if she's sleeping in his daughter's bed. The order was denied. Ms. Hettara, now 34, has never met or spoken to Ms. Ratajkowski, 29. But Ms. Palmer and Ms. Ratajkowski used to be friends, although they hadn't shared their stories about Mr. Leder with each other until recently. "The silver lining is that we finally get to find healing through it," Ms. Palmer said. Ms. Ratajkowski declined to be interviewed for this article but provided a statement through her publicist: "Writing 'Buying Myself Back' wasn't easy to do and publishing it was even scarier. But hearing from other women (inside the industry and out) about how much it resonated with them and spoke to their own experiences made me feel hopeful and simply less alone a feeling that shouldn't be underestimated. "It's devastating to realize how many young women have been taken advantage of and felt powerless to do anything about it," the statement said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. Real estate out here is too expensive for a working person, so the East Hampton Golf Club usually provides shared houses for its caddies. But Covid 19 means no boardinghouses, and no boarding means no caddies, and no caddies means that the media moguls who pay more than 400,000 to join (putting it in the middle range for initiation fees in the Hamptons) now must pull their own clubs around, which they've been telling one another reminds them of their youth, and which is just the kind of sacrifice that the coronavirus has brought to East Hampton. That's not all. The parties and attendant deals are off, and executives face a summer without tiki torch lit pathways leading to raw bar spreads on the beach, catered for tens of thousands of dollars for a few dozen friends. Parents are growing desperate: "With no camps being open, they're looking for things to do," said Boomer Jousma, a yacht broker, who has met that need by selling twice as many yachts as usual, including four of the 1 million plus Vanquish brand in the last two weeks. There's also not so much Instagram. Everyone saw what happened when their neighbor, David Geffen, who paid 70 million for his spread on Lily Pond Lane in 2016, posted a picture of a sunset over his 590 million superyacht in late March and shared that he was "isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus," provoking a wave of public shaming. Out here, they're being careful to avoid both the disease and the anger seething out of New York City, where much of the working media is both exhausted from covering the story of their lives and in open revolt. "People's antennae are up higher than they have been before to what they say, and how it can be interpreted, and recognizing the unintended consequences of our actions," said the Discovery executive Henry Schleiff, a mainstay in the mansion dotted hamlet of Water Mill, who said he thought the shift toward less conspicuous consumption was for the better. "Not only are our actions and our words being filtered, but we're listening more." New York's media business appears to be in endless decline, but it is still one of America's most visible stages for cultural conflict, drama and change. Top figures at Bon Appetit, Refinery 29, Variety, ABC News and The New York Times have been forced to resign or take leave this month, as were lower profile executives, like the editor of Indy Week in North Carolina. The ousters were driven, in many cases, by employees who believe the companies' internal cultures don't mirror the progressive and anti racist values they sell. And while the immediate spur is the wave of protests against anti black racism and police violence set off by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the New York based media had already been activated by something else: The clarity with which the onset of Covid 19 revealed who could afford to get out of town, who might be OK if they lost their job, who had money or family to fall back on. The backgrounds of Zoom calls, your colleagues' Instagrams and casual Slack references revealed who was trying to get the air conditioner in their Crown Heights studio working, and who was opening up the pool. "People are scared and they're seeing other people's safety nets at a time when everything is uncertainty and they don't have one, and everybody else's safety nets are in their faces," said Ashley Ford, 33 and living in Flatbush, who has written for outlets including Refinery29 and Marie Claire, and has a memoir due out next spring. "Not only are people mad, but they have time to talk about it." The CNN president, Jeff Zucker, who is also the chairman of WarnerMedia News and Sports, is in East Hampton, where he is among the caddy less golfers, as is the Discovery C.E.O. David Zaslav. The president of MSNBC, Phil Griffin, is in Hampton Bays. (Fox News's chief executive, Suzanne Scott, is still going into the Sixth Avenue office.) At the embattled magazine company Conde Nast, Roger Lynch, the chief executive, has been in mountainous Lake Arrowhead, outside Los Angeles; the artistic director Anna Wintour is weathering the crisis in Mastic, just west of the Hamptons. Troy Young, the president of Hearst Magazines, is on Shelter Island. A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, is in the Hudson Valley; the executive editor, Dean Baquet, has remained in his Greenwich Village apartment. Their employees have made an art of deducing their surroundings from details of Zoom backdrops. One new media executive told me he issued specific instruction to his executives to be careful about what gets into the Zoom frame: no pool, no ocean, no nanny. At a recent WarnerMedia town hall, employees listening to an executive speak about his experience with police also took note of the hot tub over his shoulder. Many of the most passionate hours of cable news are also produced from out of town, though the miracles of green screen backgrounds conceal a host's whereabouts. Sean Hannity has been working from the North Shore of Long Island since before the crisis, and Tucker Carlson's show is produced near his homes in Florida and Maine. Chris Cuomo made his Hamptons basement famous. (Don Lemon, who has been living in Sag Harbor, is commuting most nights to CNN's studio in Hudson Yards.) MSNBC's progressive hosts went north: Chris Hayes to the Hudson Valley, Rachel Maddow to Western Massachusetts. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. It's reasonable to wonder whether this has affected the tone of coverage of the crises in New York. Were media leaders in the right place to cover the horror of the early days of the outbreak, when they weren't being kept awake by sirens? And did they overplay the violent fringes of protests, when they've been overwhelmingly peaceful and the city's broader mood has been a kind of revolutionary good cheer? Walking with a television executive past boutiques on Newtown Lane in East Hampton last week, I tried to convince him that his teenage children would be fine walking around their native Upper East Side unaccompanied. During the protests, the city could look terrifying on television, and reporters on the scene faced violence, mostly from police; but the mood away from the police billy clubs was not exactly the Reign of Terror. (Though stay tuned: When The New York Times forced out the opinion editor James Bennet over a controversial column a week ago, two employees reacted in Slack with a slackmoji of the word "guillotine," prompting internal complaints, a Times reporter said. "We encourage constructive, honest dialogue among our colleagues but there are lines that can be crossed, and this was one of them," Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said in response.) At The Times, some of that debate is playing out among employees. Some people active with the company's union, the NewsGuild, compiled a Google document of articles they found objectionable to present to editors, two Times employees told me but after an internal debate, they abandoned the project. On Saturday, The Washington Post's union sent management 11 proposals, signed by 454 employees, to address discrimination and inequality in retention and promotion, require bias training, and update the stylebook on questions of race, gender and other aspects of identity. At The Intercept, founded in 2014 by radical believers in free expression, the union's diversity subcommittee challenged that central priority in an email to management: "Free speech is an important principle at The Intercept, but unit members are concerned that this commitment to free speech has detracted from a commitment to anti racism in our coverage and in our workplace," they wrote. The editor in chief, Betsy Reed, questioned that suggestion, and wrote in response that "we should also consider the question of whether, in the name of anti racism, there has been pressure to suppress non racist ideas that do not align with the dominant view of how the movement should seek to achieve its aims or what those aims should be." At Bloomberg, which is wedded to a culture of absolute neutrality, frustrated employees asked if they couldn't, at least, tweet Bloomberg editorials supporting protesters. On a video call with reporters in Europe and Asia, the chief content officer for the regions, Heather Harris, replied that she would "be careful about only tweeting that and perhaps not tweeting something else from the other side." (Ms. Harris said, through a spokeswoman, that she was "referring to political viewpoints in the interest of maintaining objectivity.") Underlying much of this tension is a sense in media as in the rest of American society of just how deep the gaps can be. I felt that sting last week when I saw a tweet from Amber Jamieson raging about rich New Yorkers who fled the coronavirus, leaving behind spacious houses and apartments that would have made for a relatively easy quarantine. "Genuinely hope they feel deep shame their whole lives," she wrote. "I feel bad that I feel like everybody should feel absolutely self loathing and shame," she said. I asked Ms. Jamieson if what she was feeling was rooted in a desire for justice, or for better journalism, or just free floating, Australian inflected rage. "All of those things," she said. Nothing personal, of course. Ms. Jamieson has reporter friends who left a small apartment for a place in Aspen; she understands that people have children, parents, health conditions. "They wanted more space for their kids, or to care for an elderly relative, OK, everyone has a reason," she said. But she thinks that the bosses, and journalists, have a special obligation to stay: "Being a leader means staying with your people and seeing what they see." But Ms. Jamieson said it had been an eye opening experience. "It revealed the money in journalism who has cash and who doesn't and how much this industry is from people with trust funds or well connected parents and they could stay in the Hamptons or the Catskills," she said. (On that note, I should disclose again that I don't extensively cover BuzzFeed, which I left in February, in this column because I have yet to divest my stock options in the company, as required by The Times.) Those of us who have left the city, or (as in my case) have the luxury of coming back and forth, with a detour on assignment to Montauk, can take the heat. Here in the Hamptons, caddies aside, it's really not so bad. Those who don't have space to house a chef are relying on deliveries from the gourmet wholesaler Baldor, whose familiar white and black logo trucks are circulating the island. The private school Avenues is opening a Hamptons branch for those parents who do not wish to return to the city in the fall. Some executives are beginning to commute again, so the helicopter company Blade has started its seven day service earlier than usual. Without day trippers or middle class vacationers and their crowded sublets, it has been, for the lucky few, "the summer we had long wanted, busy, but not too much so, and quiet enough to hear the birdsong," according to The East Hampton Star. The golfers will be OK too. The East Hampton Golf Club, a member told me, has changed its rules to permit autonomous robot caddies, which follow you silently through the greens.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Pregnant women infected with the coronavirus are more likely to be hospitalized, admitted to an intensive care unit and put on a ventilator than are infected women who are not pregnant, according to a new government analysis. Pregnant women are known to be particularly susceptible to other respiratory infections, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has maintained from the start of the pandemic that the virus does not seem to "affect pregnant people differently than others." The increased risk for intensive care and mechanical ventilation worried experts. But the new study did not include one pivotal detail: whether pregnant women were hospitalized because of labor and delivery. That may have significantly inflated the numbers, so it is unclear whether the analysis reflects a true increase in risk of hospitalization. Admissions for childbirth represent 25 percent of all hospitalizations in the United States, counting mother and baby, said Dr. Neel Shah, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Harvard University. Even at earlier stages of pregnancy, doctors err on the side of being overly cautious when treating pregnant women whether they have the coronavirus or not. "There's quite clearly a different threshold for hospitalizing pregnant people and nonpregnant people," he said. "The question is whether it also reflects something about their illness, and that's something we don't really know." The results are to be published on Thursday by the C.D.C.; government researchers presented the data to a federal immunization committee on Wednesday. (The slides were posted online on Wednesday afternoon but taken down later in the day.) The analysis, the largest of its type so far, is based on data from women with confirmed infections of the coronavirus as reported to the C.D.C. by 50 states and Washington, from Jan. 22 to June 7. The report includes information on 8,207 pregnant women between ages 15 to 44, who were compared to 83,205 women in the same age bracket who were not pregnant. More than 31 percent of the pregnant women were hospitalized, compared with about 6 percent of women who were not pregnant. Pregnant women were more likely to be admitted to the I.C.U. (1.5 percent versus 0.9 percent) and to require mechanical ventilation (0.5 percent versus 0.3 percent). These proportions are small, Dr. Shah noted, and the 10 fold difference in the number of pregnant and nonpregnant women in the analysis makes it difficult to compare their risks. In a separate analysis by Covid Net of women hospitalized with the coronavirus, C.D.C. researchers noted that "the risk of I.C.U. and mechanical ventilation was lower among pregnant compared to nonpregnant women." Covid Net analyzes data from hospitalizations in the network's surveillance area in 14 states. Despite the ambiguities, some experts said the new data suggests at the very least that pregnant women with the coronavirus should be carefully monitored. If many of the pregnant women were hospitalized for labor and delivery, the proportion of women who were hospitalized for only coronavirus infection and became severely ill those advancing to the I.C.U. or ventilation would be even higher, said Dr. Denise Jamieson, a member of the Covid 19 task force at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. "I think the bottom line is this: These findings suggest that compared to nonpregnant women, pregnant women are more likely to have severe Covid," she said. Pregnancy transforms the body's biology, ramping up metabolism, blood flow, lung capacity and heart rate. It also suppresses a woman's immune system to accommodate the fetus a circumstance that can increase her susceptibility to respiratory illnesses like influenza. Because of this heightened risk, scientists have been closely monitoring pregnancy outcomes in various coronavirus studies. So far, few studies have indicated a significant risk for pregnant women or for their children. Infections in newborns have been exceedingly rare.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
When to watch: Now, on Hulu or free on the Starz website and app. This 10 part documentary aired on Starz in 2018 and was one of my favorite shows that year. I've thought of it often since, and I've recommended it to friends with a level of insistence that surpasses politeness. The show follows a handful of students and teachers through an academic year at Oak Park and River Forest High School in suburban Chicago. It's a large, diverse and well resourced school that struggles to address and sometimes even to acknowledge systemic racism.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
"Sweat," Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer Prize winning and Tony Award nominated play about the woes of the American working class, will close on Broadway later this month the latest victim of a crowded season in which many plays have struggled at the box office. Ms. Nottage's play, her debut on Broadway, is scheduled to close June 25, after 24 previews and 105 regular performances. It transferred to Studio 54 this spring after a critically lauded run Off Broadway at the Public Theater. With no celebrity cast members, "Sweat" largely depended on its prestige Ms. Nottage had previously won a Pulitzer for "Ruined," and the play had enjoyed early critical success at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. for commercial viability on Broadway.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater

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