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The Obama administration is pushing hard this week to keep the spotlight on its efforts to make college more affordable. On Tuesday, administration officials met with 10 college presidents who have agreed to include a consumer friendly "shopping sheet" in the financial aid packages they send to incoming students. Although the Education Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed such a form in January, only Congress could make it mandatory. But at a round table Tuesday led by Vice President Joseph R. Biden, the presidents of some of the nation's largest institutions, representing 1.4 million students among them, Arizona State University, Miami Dade College, and the state university systems of New York, Massachusetts, Maryland and Texas volunteered to provide the information, starting with the 2013 14 school year. The sheet would simplify the current process of comparing colleges. It would clearly state the cost of a year of classes, the student's net cost after grants and scholarships, financial aid options to pay that cost and estimated monthly payments for federal loans. It would also provide information about the colleges' retention and graduation rates and the share of graduates who default on their student loans. "These aren't standards," said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at a briefing on Tuesday afternoon after the college presidents' meeting. About two thirds of bachelor's degree recipients borrow to attend college, but many colleges send out confusing financial aid offers, sometimes blurring the lines between grants and scholarships, which do not have to be repaid, and loans, which do. Without uniform information, students and their parents often find it difficult to compare offers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Islands play a crucial role in sustaining marine ecosystems in the Pacific Ocean, according to a new study. The waters surrounding islands are rich in phytoplankton, microscopic organisms that inhabit the upper layers of the oceans and serve as an important food source for larger animals. After studying 35 coral reef islands using satellite imagery and ship based surveys, researchers concluded that the biomass of phytoplankton around islands was up to 86 percent greater than what is found in other parts of the ocean. The findings appear in the journal Nature Communications. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Photographs by Vincent Tullo for The New York Times Photographs by Vincent Tullo for The New York Times Credit... Photographs by Vincent Tullo for The New York Times The single word, all caps title "CHIHULY" of a new show at the New York Botanical Garden conveys immediately exactly what visitors will be getting: vibrant glass sculptures in a familiar style, one that often recalls nature, and sometimes competes with it. For the exhibition, which runs through Oct. 29, the Seattle glassmaker Dale Chihuly and his team have spread 20 different installations throughout the garden's 250 acres. Visitors who head to the Bronx will find a 30 foot tall "Scarlet and Yellow Icicle Tower" and the spiky blue supernova "Sapphire Star." When it opened last weekend, however, many viewers said they came to the garden specifically to see the Chihuly works. "We have gardens in Indianapolis, too," said Sarah Wasson, who was visiting New York. "But the way he juxtaposes glass, which is hard, with plants that are soft that's what I like." Others felt the glass pieces were superfluous, "like seeing remnants of a nice meal on a table," said Altan Kolsal, a city planner who lives in Manhattan. "I'm looking past them. I'm glad they're there. But I'm here for my nature walk." The mild mannered and curly haired Mr. Chihuly, 75, certainly doesn't seem like a lightning rod. He came to town for the opening of the show with his wife of 25 years, Leslie Jackson Chihuly, who's the president and chief executive of Chihuly Studios. Sometimes adjusting his eye patch his left eye was blinded in a 1976 car crash the artist noted that he had never taken to actual gardening himself. Rather, his work on the "Garden Series" was influenced by his mother's green thumb. "She loved that garden, and she was out there every day," he said, recalling her azaleas and rhododendrons in Tacoma, Wash., where he grew up. Mr. Chihuly was jet lagged from a trip to Venice, where, as a young man, he once studied glassmaking for eight months. He said his love of his signature material remained undimmed from his student days. He started by weaving glass into tapestries but, eventually, the weaving part, once his primary technique, fell away. "There is something about glass, one of the few materials that light goes through," Mr. Chihuly said. "You're looking at light itself." The shapes that Mr. Chihuly has spread to institutions worldwide remind many people of organic forms. But he has always maintained that copying nature has never been his goal. "I'm not conscious of mimicking," he said. "I don't study plant books. Glass wants to make forms like that, if you let it." Edward Cooke, a professor of American decorative arts at Yale, compared him to another prolific glassmaker who found a way to master both the high culture of museums as well as the popular market. "You could say he's the contemporary version of Louis Comfort Tiffany," said Mr. Cooke, who is very familiar with the work of both artists. Like many people in the art world, Mr. Cooke, though, is of two minds about Mr. Chihuly. He admires some work, but noted, "There's a crassness to it at times," which he attributed to "color, sensory overload, scale and ubiquity." However he derives his forms, "having artwork in the landscape changed how people view the plants, and the entire garden," said Karen Daubmann, associate vice president for exhibitions and public engagement at the New York Botanical Garden, referring to the 2006 show. "People thought of us as an exhibition venue from that point on." (The Botanical Garden had 525,000 visitors to "Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life," in 2015.) And Ms. Daubmann had a ready response for any purists who think that Mr. Chihuly is merely gilding lilies. "There are people who are not fans, but our answer to that is that this is a temporary display," she said. "We say, 'Come check it out,' but it will be gone by November, and it's back to your favorite flowers and shrubs." Mr. Chihuly, who has three studios and a staff of 80, long ago gave up blowing glass himself. His current role, he said, was simple: "I tell the team what I want to have made, and I select from there what I want to use." The colored panes of polycarbonate that form the "Koda" works in the current show lean up against one another in a pool of water and, in another installation, hang together in a large grid over a pond. Glenn Adamson, a former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan, said he recognized Mr. Chihuly as a leader of the glass movement and, recently, as someone who has a real genius "as an inventor of forms." He added that, to his mind, a garden was better than a museum as a setting for Mr. Chihuly's pieces: "I would say his work is at its best in a natural environment. It competes very well with plants." Over lunch Mr. Chihuly ordered a bunless hamburger and ate half of it his wife said that he had a naturally positive attitude. "Dale gets up every morning and goes to the studio to make work," Ms. Chihuly said. "He's not going to fold up like an old lawn chair just because someone didn't like his work." She added perhaps slyly, given his success "He's been getting just enough encouragement to keep him going." Of some criticism, Mr. Chihuly said, "It bothers you for a while, and then you forget about it." But his one blue eye did twinkle a bit when he made a comparison to another era when many makers competed for favor in a crowded landscape of potential patrons. "I wonder how that worked in the Renaissance," Mr. Chihuly said, musing on what the ambitious denizens of the 15th century art world said about one another. He paused. "I wonder if they were as critical as the ones now?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Athleisure, the high performance sportswear originally designed for workouts but now worn everywhere, represents a populist, street up phenomenon that got its start like this: Women loved wearing comfortable and sleek leggings to the gym. Sweat eliminating wicking fabrics allowed them to add layers before heading to brunch. And sometimes, they didn't even work out at all. The athleisure spectrum now runs from workout clothes to off duty weekend uniforms to "elevated" high fashion clothes think Rihanna's Fenty x Puma collection, characterized as Marie Antoinette inspired streetwear that is perfect for after dark. In a roundup of the recent Paris shows, Vogue.com decreed that the trend is now influencing all levels of fashion: "The athleisure effect can't be denied." The mecca for athleisure is on lower Fifth Avenue from 17th Street to 23rd Street, in the Flatiron neighborhood. Stores there stock everything from basic black leggings to this season's oversize bomber jackets. Bonus: Some of the stores have studios, a few offering free classes, and salespeople who are plugged in to the latest neighborhood fitness craze. It's like finding out where the best powder is on the mountain from the cool ski locals while they are setting your bindings. The Lululemon salespeople are like legging sommeliers, patiently explaining the various fabric types, and suggesting associated activities for each wicking materials for hot yoga, for example, or compression fabric for cycling, and lattice sides for barre class. Be warned that Lululemon sizes are not ego boosting: If you are usually a size 6, you may need an 8. Still, the salespeople will work with you until they can honestly say that yes, it looks good. And although it may sound like a "Saturday Night Live" parody, the store has a concierge who will point customers to nearby workout options, like Swerve, the hot new team inspired cycling studio, or the latest array of workouts at Flex Studios (Pilates, barre and TRX), and then help book the classes. Downstairs, there is a studio called Hub Seventeen, which has classes, some free and some that cost 10 to 20, art shows and film screenings that can be booked online. Gap owned Athleta, at 126 Fifth Avenue at 18th Street, does not push the envelope, and that can be a good thing. Mannequins are dressed in laid back and doable options, such as leggings ( 65 to 98) layered with a chunky long sweater and topped with down vests. A rotating roster of A list teachers like Dana Trixie Flynn from Laughing Lotus yoga teaches classes in the beautiful studio downstairs. Classes are free. It is best to book online in advance because they fill up. To flesh out the basic look, cross the street for hoodies, graphic tees and sunglasses at Zara, 101 Fifth Avenue at 17th Street, or H M, 111 Fifth Avenue at 18th Street. Tory Sport, 129 Fifth Avenue at 20th Street, is the athleisure line started by the designer Tory Burch in 2015. The '70s infused style is right in the modern groove: color blocked, chevron patterned and with track stripes in cutting edge, sports friendly fabrics. Framed vintage Sports Illustrated covers of greats like John McEnroe and Martina Navratilova set the vibe for the collection and the store, which has the feel of a sleek, retro Scandinavian ski chalet. On a recent visit, a Tory Sport saleswoman inquired, "What sport are you into?" before pointing to the separate golf, tennis, running and studio lines. Her own current favorite, she said, was the killer workouts at Tone House in the neighboring Murray Hill area: "The hardest workout I've ever had." However, sport distinctions quickly seem irrelevant, as even a dedicated yogi on her way to check out the seamless leggings will stop short at the golf clothes, like the cunning short sleeve crew neck sweater ( 225) that has a contrasting ring collar and is made of "performance cashmere." That's right: cashmere that wicks. The "Coming and Going" category is a catchall for wardrobe staples officially intended for going to and from the studio. But these pieces, made from performance fabrics, are appropriate for work or for social gatherings. A convertible blazer with zip in nylon dickey and hoodie is a nice twist on a classic ( 365). Bandier, a few blocks north at 164 Fifth Avenue at 22nd Street, is a multibrand shop, the place to check out this season's mesh or perforated fabrics, graphic leggings, camouflage motorcycle (camo moto) jackets, cropped tops and oversize bomber jackets. These are club worthy, the elevated end of the spectrum. The store is the real deal, so worth braving the brisk (or overwhelmed?) salespeople, including one who handed a customer a size small bomber jacket to try on, while waving off the idea of taking a medium for comparison purposes, with a definitive, "It's supposed to be fitted." Bandier has attitude. Painted on the wall in a cheeky script is the message: "Take Care of Your Girls." Upstairs at Studio B "Where Fashion Fitness and Music Go to Play" you can take classes like Stoked Shred, ModelFIT sculpt and Yoga for Bad People. Sign up online; prices range from 15 to 35. The new Bandier collaboration with Prabal Gurung Sport is cool and yet very wearable for civilians who aren't models (kaleidoscope print short sleeve tee, 98; color block neoprene bomber jacket, 298). The Cushnie et Ochs leggings can inch up to 215; the Alo leggings, a fashionista favorite, start at about 70. The sneaker statement is key. The shoe section in the front ranges from the clean minimal lines of the classic white Superga ( 65) to the performance ready APL TechLoom Phantom sneaker ( 165). One shopper picked up a colorful version of an APL sneaker, informing her friend in a stage whisper, "This is what the Karadashians wear to work out." The British retailer Sweaty Betty, at 168 Fifth Avenue at 21st Street, is into sport specific leggings, all manner of ingenious outwear (a parka with a zip in gilet, i.e. sleeveless vest) and fun on trend items (cashmere harem like pants, banded at the ankle). The saleswoman, a SoulCycle devotee, morphed into a personal stylist, cautioning against a chunky shoe with the ribbed cuff cashmere pants, and mentioning a metallic bomber jacket that would be in stock soon. It is worth the cardio schlep up four flights of stairs at 25 West 23rd Street, just around the corner toward Sixth Avenue, to Y7 Studio, the self proclaimed home of "Original Hip Hop Yoga," to check out the small retail space. Score a black graphic crop top or muscle shirt ("I'm Like / Hey / What's Up / Let's Flow," or "Namastizzle," 50) and a New York Yogis snapback hat ( 40) for instant street cred. One caveat: Not everyone is enamored of the athleisure look, and even for its adherents, it pays to remember not to go too basic. As the fashion arbiter Tim Gunn told Bloomberg.com of the very idea of wearing leggings and athletic clothes in public: "It's vulgar. Unless you are Robin Hood." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The author of a New York Times editorial will have to testify under oath in a defamation lawsuit filed by the former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, a federal judge ruled on Thursday. The Times filed a motion last month seeking to dismiss the case, and the judge, Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, said the testimony was necessary to help him determine whether to grant that motion. Judge Rakoff set the hearing for Aug. 16. Judge Rakoff said last month that he would rule by the end of this month on the motion to dismiss the case. A spokeswoman for The Times said in a statement that the news organization would provide the testimony the judge had ordered. David McCraw, deputy general counsel for The Times, said the witness would be James Bennet, The Times's editorial page editor. In the lawsuit, which was filed in June, Ms. Palin contends that The Times "violated the law and its own policies" when it linked her in an editorial to a mass shooting in January 2011. The editorial was published online on June 14, the same day that a gunman opened fire at a baseball field where Republican congressmen were practicing, injuring several people including Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
DOHA, Qatar Victoria Beckham came from London. Diane von Furstenberg and Alexander Wang from New York. Pierpaolo Piccioli of Valentino flew in from Rome, while Olivier Rousteing of Balmain and Giambattista Valli came from Paris. So did Carla Bruni, with her husband, former President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, firmly in tow. They were part of a pantheon of the biggest names in fashion that descended upon Doha last week, to mix with Qatari dignitaries and socialites and act as judges for the inaugural Fashion Trust Arabia prize. Twenty four hours earlier, the same group alongside the artist Jeff Koons and the soccer manager Jose Mourinho, as well as celebrities including Johnny Depp and Sonam Kapoor had attended a star spangled opening event for the new National Museum of Qatar, featuring Bedouin dancers, musicians, singers and flag wielding horseback riders. Few, if any, of the boldface names at these gatherings had ever been to Doha before . Their en masse arrival, however, on the invitation of the ruling Al Thani family, was an unmistakable demonstration of the unlikely influence of Qatar, a tiny Gulf state where vast natural gas resources were discovered almost 60 years ago, helping to make it the most wealthy country per capita in the world. It was also the latest move in a cultural and architectural arms race raging in the Gulf. Rival nations that stem from the same Bedouin roots, share the same religion and eat the same food compete to establish distinctive national identities and status amid political volatility, colliding cultures and intense economic upheaval. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi accused Qatar of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, alongside other allegations, like assisting some popular Islamist movements that rose with the Arab Spring. So far, however, their demands from noninterference in neighboring states to closing the al Jazeera media network have fallen upon deaf ears. Instead, Qatar has painted the dispute as a drive by bullying neighbors to crush its maverick, open door foreign policy. "Isolation has, it seems, acted as a catalyst to Qatar's long term vision for itself," said Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute at Rice University. Rather than being called to heel, the state scrambled to adapt to its new status quo. It has invested in its military, strengthened its alliance with Washington, shifted imports and shipping routes through countries like Turkey and Iran, and doubled down on its economic ties to global powers. Few expect the blockade to end any time soon, and so diplomatic tensions remain uncomfortably high. Consequently, as Qatar prepares to host the FIFA World Cup in 2022, it has furthered efforts to bolster its standing overseas, the better to guarantee its long term survival. It has made major donations to universities, including Georgetown and Carnegie Mellon, building sister campuses across Doha, and developed a London property portfolio larger than that of Queen Elizabeth II of Britain , according to a report in The Telegraph. The jewel in that portfolio is the Shard, the tallest building in western Europe. And that is just the beginning. In the art world, the buying power of the Qataris has until recently been essentially unmatched. It has been led by Sheikha Al Mayassa Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the chair of Qatar Museums and sister of the emir, who holds an annual acquisitions budget estimated at 1 billion per year for blue chip works. In fashion, Mayhoola for Investments (its name means "unknown" in Arabic), a secretive state backed conglomerate linked to Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, a global style icon and mother of the emir, owns several luxury brands, including Valentino and Balmain. Unsurprisingly, both brands emerged as major sponsors of the F.T.A. prize, which was founded by Sheikha Mozah; its co chairs are Sheikha Al Mayassa and Tania Fares, a Lebanese philanthropist and British Vogue contributing editor who founded the Fashion Trust in Britain. Elsewhere, a string of sizable luxury investments has also been built up by the Qatar Investment Authority, the country's sovereign wealth fund, from holdings in groups like LVMH to ownership of the upmarket British department store Harrods and luxury hotels like Claridge's in London. Such Qatari owned trophy assets have been hard hit by the ripple effect of the blockade, however, with wealthy Saudi and Emirati patrons opting to shop or stay elsewhere. Social media users in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates possibly orchestrated by their governments frequently encourage others to boycott companies with links to Qatar. An unofficial blacklist of places in London, where many Middle Eastern visitors spend the summer months to escape the heat back home, was widely circulated online last year. It has not escaped the luxury industry that it may be a pawn in a geopolitical battle. "The severing of ties between Qatar and its neighbors is something many in the luxury industry have been paying close attention to," said Alexander Bolen, the chief executive of the American fashion house Oscar de la Renta, which has a concession in Harrods and is sizing up expanding its retail footprint in the Gulf. "The Middle East is home to a significant proportion of extremely valuable clients, who spend at home but also extensively abroad," Mr. Bolen said. "It is not in our interests to alienate anyone." Many countries would have buckled under the type of restrictions imposed on Qatar by its larger and more powerful neighbors, but Qatar has refused to capitulate, albeit by spending heavily and dipping deeply into its 340 billion reserve funds to establish new trading partners, build up domestic industries and, in some cases, create new ones. Nevertheless, the kingdom's fledgling tourism industry has taken a hit, leaving hotel rooms empty and a glut of retail space in malls. At the same time, consumer prices have gone up, cutting into the budgets of the foreign workers who make up 88 percent of the country's population of 2.4 million people. Not that this has stopped Western brands from opening stores in Doha. Earlier this year, for example, Ralph Russo, a couture house based in London, opened its biggest boutique in the world at the Lagoona Mall in Doha. Measuring more than 3,000 square feet, it is decorated in silver, alabaster, light beige and rose gold with a colossal mirrored Murano glass chandelier as a centerpiece. "Sheikha Mozah discovered us, was hugely supportive of the business, and since then our relationship with our Qatari clientele has just been phenomenal," said Michael Russo, the chief executive of Ralph Russo. "They are a small but extremely valuable customer base for us, so it made total sense to ensure that we could offer them collections on their home turf." Mario Ortelli, a managing partner of the luxury consultancy Ortelli Co., said that Qatar remained a niche but important market for luxury companies, with residents who have significant disposable income and a preference for European brands. "The biggest impact of the embargo has been that rather than spending abroad, more and more of those Qataris are opting to spend at home, partly for reasons of practicality and partly through patriotism," he said. "Even if things stay slower in the short term, the expectation is that things will definitely pick up significantly ahead of major high profile events such as the World Cup." Observers such as Mr. Cafiero of Gulf State Analytics and Dr. Coates Ulrichsen of the Baker Institute say it is the blockading countries, rather than Qatar, that have found themselves on the back foot in recent months. While Qatar is hardly immune to international criticism, which has largely focused on evidence of exploitation of its migrant workers and government support for the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia was publicly condemned across the West after the killing last fall of the dissident Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist who was ambushed and dismembered by Saudi agents in Istanbul. The murder has tarnished Saudi Arabia's reputation in Washington, and in much of the Western world, with a dark shadow cast over previously heralded plans for economic and social reform in the country, championed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom's de facto ruler. At the same time, Dubai's economy is teetering on the brink of another downturn thanks to a shaky real estate market, its reputation as a sun and shopping haven dampened by sluggish travel demand in the region. The disappearance of Qatari wallets hasn't helped. "The biggest loser from the blockade is not Qatar, it is Dubai, where Qataris both spent a lot of money recreationally and used the city as a logistics hub. Now all that money is gone," Mr. Cafiero said. "While the blockade initially hit the Qatari economy hard and officials had to spend billions of dollars restructuring trade routes, they appear to have done so in a relatively short period of time. It may have a very small population, but Qatar continues to hold very big ambitions." Two Lebanese women's wear designers, Salim Azzam and Roni Helou, were jointly awarded the inaugural ready to wear prize; Krikor Jabotian, also from Lebanon, scooped up the evening wear accolade. Other awards went to the Egyptian bag brand Sabry Marouf, the Moroccan footwear label Zyne and the Lebanese jewelry brand Mukhi Sisters. Hints that the game of influence transcended fashion and good intentions to verge on political calculation kept coming through. Of the 25 finalists whittled down from an initial 250 applicants, none came from Saudi Arabia, which hosted its inaugural fashion week in Riyadh last year. A handful, however, came from Dubai and Egypt, with their participation warmly welcomed by Sheikha Al Mayassa during an interview in her office at the National Museum ahead of the event. Later, from a lectern on the stage, she reiterated her hopes for the start of an emerging fashion industry in the Middle East that could transcend regional borders but be rooted in Qatar. "Like other branches of the arts, fashion enables us to dream and express ourselves," she said. "This prize will now anchor fashion as a major creative field in Qatar and across the Arab world." She acknowledged, as well, the complicated situation that was the backdrop for the festivities. "At the time this prize was conceived, political realities were different than they are today," she said. "As a nation, we have remained open to applications from all countries. It is unfortunate that in this day and age, some individuals can hinder the course of progress and prosperity for millions of people without being held accountable for their whimsical and detrimental actions. We, on the other hand, have chosen not to follow suit." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The new teaser trailer for the next installment, for which Abrams returned to the helm, begins with a tantalizing glimpse of Rey, alone on a desert planet and wielding her light saber as a mysterious starcraft charges at her. (Can we presume it is piloted by Kylo Ren, her sometime ally and more frequent foe?) The voice of Luke Skywalker is heard to say: "We've passed on all we know. A thousand generations live in you now. But this is your fight." There are all too brief looks at characters new and old, including Billy Dee Williams as the interstellar cad Lando Calrissian and Carrie Fisher, who died in 2016, as Leia, using footage shot for "The Force Awakens." A piece of onscreen text vows: "The saga comes to an end." And then there is a mysterious, villainous laugh, coming from an unseen figure. (Disney confirmed on Friday that this was indeed the cackle of the actor Ian McDiarmid, who will reprise his "Star Wars" role as the nefarious Palpatine in this new movie.) The new film is scheduled for release on Dec. 20. This is at least the third time fans have been promised closure to the long running narrative of the Skywalker clan: Everything looked well and fine at the end of George Lucas's "Return of the Jedi" in 1983, which wrapped up the classic original "Star Wars" trilogy. Then Lucas had to go and make a second trilogy of not especially beloved prequel films, telling the story of Anakin Skywalker's metamorphosis into the sinister Darth Vader, which concluded in 2005 with "Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith." But that bargain was altered after Disney acquired Lucasfilm and its "Star Wars" franchise in 2012, leading to the new trilogy and stand alone movies like "Rogue One" and "Solo." At present, people like Johnson, as well as David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (the showrunners of "Game of Thrones"), are developing their own "Star Wars" movies that will chronicle new characters and plot lines. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. Two dozen Republicans stormed a House Intelligence Committee meeting on Wednesday, staging a protest in an attempt to halt the impeachment inquiry proceedings. "For five hours today, Republicans blocked someone from saying damaging things about President Trump. Yeah. Yeah, they left after they realized they could be there the rest of their lives." CONAN O'BRIEN "It's like when you're on the debate team and the other side is really strong in the cross examination, so for your counterpoint, you set fire to their coach." STEPHEN COLBERT "Yeah, Republicans stormed a closed door meeting to protest the impeachment inquiry. Even crazier, they used Mike Pence as a battering ram." JIMMY FALLON "Because nothing says 'completely innocent' like storming the room of someone about to testify." JIMMY FALLON "The Democrats did everything they could to get them out of the room. But here's the thing they were trying to get them out of the room, they didn't know what to do. If they wanted the Republicans to leave so badly, they should have just held a gay wedding in there. They would have been out of there in a shot." JAMES CORDEN "I haven't seen a group of white guys that angry since they found out their Don Henley tickets were 'obstructed view.'" SETH MEYERS "That's either a bunch of Republican lawmakers or a Black Friday sale on pleated khakis." STEPHEN COLBERT "It really turned into an ugly scene among Republicans. I haven't seen that many angry white guys since NBC canceled 'Frasier.'" JIMMY FALLON "I haven't seen that many old white guys storm a room since Applebee's offered half off the surf and turf combo." JAMES CORDEN "Looks like a protest outside a pharmacy that ran out of Viagra." SETH MEYERS "They shouldn't be at the Capitol they should be standing at the counter at a McDonald's demanding to see a manager." SETH MEYERS | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
If you thought those drones buzzing around on the beach were annoying, just wait and see what happens when they become cheaper than iPhones. Whether you like it or not, drones miniature remotely controlled aircraft may be on the cusp of going mainstream as they plummet in price. DJI, the world's largest consumer drone maker, which is based in Shenzhen, China, will soon release Spark, its first 499 drone. That's roughly half the price of the most popular drones on the market, or three quarters the cost of an iPhone, which starts at about 650. I tested Spark over several days this week and found it surprisingly capable for a low cost drone. Unlike most expensive drones, which operate with a physical remote control, this machine was designed to work primarily with a smartphone app; you can also make hand gestures to move Spark or make it take your selfie. It shoots superb high definition video, weighs about a quarter of a pound and is so compact you could stuff it in a tote bag. I was able to confidently fly Spark, the first drone I have ever used, after several sessions, a testament to its overall ease of use. Unsurprisingly, Spark isn't perfect. Its app can be tough to grasp without reading an instruction manual. The battery lasts only about 15 minutes, and there are some bugs in the software that could send your drone flying off erratically. Yet I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Spark for people who are curious about trying drones for taking aerial photography or for experiencing the sheer joy of flying an object. Considering how small and lightweight this drone is, Spark will also make a great stocking stuffer this holiday season. Here's what you need to know about what you're getting from a budget drone. There are a few basic components to Spark: propellers, motors, a camera and a battery. To set up the drone, slide the battery into the bottom of the device. Then install the smartphone app, scan a bar code on the carrying case to register the drone, turn on the gadget and connect to it via Wi Fi. From there, you use the app to change settings on the drone and make it take off. Inside DJI's app for controlling Spark, there are virtual joysticks for making the drone rotate or move up, down, forward or backward. Initially, the app will be confusing to use. It took me three sessions, or 90 minutes of flight time using two batteries, to get the hang of it. The app buttons do not intuitively state what they do or how to use them. In the end, I had to flip through a 50 page instruction manual to learn how to better operate Spark. There is an option to skip using the app altogether by enabling PalmControl, a mode that lets the drone respond to your hand gestures. To enable this, hold your palm flat toward the camera, and the drone will lock in on your hand and follow it around as you move. You can hold out your thumbs and index fingers to form a frame around yourself to make the drone automatically take a selfie of you. Wave your hand at the drone and it will ascend and fly backward. Spark was ultimately inconsistent with reacting to hand gestures. Sometimes it responded quickly, but often the drone failed to recognize the gestures and continued to hover. The Spark has several features that make it well suited for those who are new to drones. The killer feature is a menu of shortcuts called QuickShot: These are automated motion sequences for shooting some neat drone videos. You select a subject (like a human or a dog) to record, choose a QuickShot mode and tap a button to commence the sequence. One QuickShot mode called Circle makes the drone automatically circle a subject while recording video of it. My favorite QuickShot mode was Rocket, which caused the drone to lift dozens of meters into the air while continuing to shoot video of me and a friend from overhead. The recording was a delight to watch and share on Instagram. But in three different test locations, activating Helix caused the drone to fly upward and so far away that it lost its Wi Fi connection with the smartphone. (This may have been related to interference caused by nearby Wi Fi routers.) The drone is programmed to return home, or land where it took off, whenever it loses connection with a smartphone but nobody would blame you if you chased after it out of anxiety. By far Spark's most annoying feature is its carrying case. The case snugly fits the drone, two batteries and some extra propeller blades, but it lacks room for the propeller guards, which are essentially bumpers that help prevent the spinning propellers from cutting people or objects. DJI said that because the propeller guards are optional accessories that are sold separately, the compact case has no room for them. But to me, this was an oversight: Any beginner should equip the propeller guards, and they should be part of the overall package and fit inside the case. That brings up another issue with Spark: The 499 price tag is misleading when you add the extra accessories you are likely to need. After buying the propeller guards ( 19), you probably also need at least one extra battery ( 49) and the battery charging station ( 69). In the end, you'll probably spend roughly 640 just to make flight sessions last half an hour, given the device's 15 minute battery life. Even so, 640 is still cheaper than an iPhone or a high end Android device like the Google Pixel (also priced at about 650), which makes it a compelling potential gift for tech and photography enthusiasts. Spark is a solid product for a relatively low cost, and it seems inevitable that drones will become more commonplace at parks, beaches and tourist attractions. Perhaps the most intriguing question is whether new etiquettes will form around these flying cameras, which may be noisy and intrusive of people's privacy. There was one thing I learned the hard way: Don't fly a drone at a dog park. While some dogs enjoyed chasing Spark, the drone frightened two pups so much that they darted into the street. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The big economic bounce that some experts have confidently predicted for later in the year may turn out to be only a small bump. It is not that the economy is weakening, or that a recession is in the offing. Rather it appears as if the pace of growth in 2017 will not be much faster than it was last year, or the year before that. So even as the Commerce Department on Friday offered an upward revision of the first quarter growth rate to 1.2 percent from the 0.7 percent cited last month other forecasters were lowering their sights for the current quarter. The expectations have dipped amid fears of lackluster consumer spending and orders for durable goods, and new data on Thursday that showed a larger than anticipated trade deficit in April. Instead of 4.1 percent growth in the second quarter, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's widely followed GDPNow model now calls for a 3.7 percent rate. And the New York Fed reduced its rival Nowcasting estimate slightly to 2.1 percent. In March, that forecast stood at 3 percent. Despite the slight erosion in expectations recently, the job market has remained strong, pushing the unemployment rate down to 4.4 percent last month. As a result, the Federal Reserve Board is expected to raise interest rates twice more this year, with traders betting that the next increase will come in June. In other words, the so called new normal steady but not spectacular growth that never reaches escape velocity is beginning to resemble the old normal. "We're still on track for a 2 percent growth economy, give or take a little, but not a 3 percent economy," said Diane Swonk, a veteran independent economist in Chicago. "It may not sound like much, but the difference is important." The budget proposal released this week by the Trump administration assumes growth of about 3 percent annually, and President Trump has talked about annual growth of 4 percent or even more. Neither figure is realistic, given the country's aging population, and low growth in productivity, Ms. Swonk said. "Those two factors make for headwinds that are hard to overcome," she said. Although the kind of annual gains that Mr. Trump has targeted were achieved in the mid 2000s and the late 1990s, the economy's underlying potential is not as strong now than it was then. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. "It's like trying to use old road maps in a GPS world," Ms. Swonk said. "We need to acknowledge that." Scott Anderson, chief economist at Bank of the West in San Francisco, has not had to lower his expectations for the current quarter. That is because he has been considerably less optimistic than many of his peers, with a forecast of roughly 3 percent. "I've been below consensus for a while," Mr. Anderson said, citing the likelihood of weaker spending by businesses. "There's not a lot of visible growth drivers outside of consumer spending and rebuilding inventories." "Everyone is hanging their hat on stronger consumer spending, but there's a lot of uncertainty there," he added, noting that data expected next week on personal income and spending would be an important indicator of how consumption is shaping up. Besides tempering expectations for the broader economy, traders appear to be discounting the likelihood of major tax cuts or a burst of infrastructure spending this year, judging by a recent drop in bond yields. Yields on the benchmark 10 year Treasury bond, which move inversely to price, were 2.25 percent on Friday, down from 2.6 percent in March. Investors tend to buy bonds when economic activity and the risk of inflation ease, and pare back as growth quickens. The inquiries into possible dealings with the Russian government by associates of Mr. Trump, and conflicts among Republicans in Congress, may further stymie any big stimulus from Washington. "We haven't built any stimulus into our projections for 2017, and the way I'm seeing things, possibly not in 2018 either," said Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist for Northern Trust in Chicago. "The dissonance in the Republican caucus is such that it will be hard for them to reach consensus." Given at least a modest uptick this quarter after the year's weak start, Mr. Tannenbaum is looking for growth in the first half of 2017 to average about 2 percent. While lower than many experts and consumers would like, that is still slightly higher than the growth rate in Germany, the largest economy in the eurozone. Growth of around 2 percent is also what economists like Mike Gapen at Barclays expect for all of this year and next. Typically, quarterly data is volatile, but in recent years, first quarter growth estimates have been especially unpredictable. This year, as was true in 2014 and 2011, growth appears to have been very weak in the first quarter. Experts expect a rebound in subsequent quarters in 2017, as happened in those previous years. Early this year, output was also reduced slightly by warm temperatures in many parts of the United States, slowing demand for energy from utilities. One key indicator for the current quarter will come on Thursday, when the latest monthly data for auto sales is released. Slightly lower car sales reduced growth by about 0.4 percentage points in the first quarter, Mr. Gapen said. On an annual basis, demand for cars has been running just over 17 million. If the number sinks below that threshold, expectations may have to be adjusted downward again for the second quarter, which ends on June 30. On the other hand, Mr. Gapen noted that Asia, Europe and other markets are finally growing in sync with the United States, rather than there being rotating global weak spots. "We don't have a problem child," he said. "In previous years, it was the fiscal cliff in the U.S., or debt fears in Europe or a hard landing in China. Global growth is more synchronized, without any individual pillars showing weakness." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The epigraph etched in Latin on the ancient stone tablet was short and tender : "Claudia Aster, prisoner from Jerusalem." Brought to Rome in chains after the quelling of the revolt in Jerusalem in 70 A.D., she was apparently the concubine of a Roman notable who wanted to give her a dignified burial and added an unusual element to the funerary stone. "I pray," it said, "take care and follow the law that no one should remove the inscription." That tribute is one of many revelations at the new Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah in Ferrara, and is at the heart of the museum's first major exhibition, "Jews, an Italian Story . The First Thousand Years," which examines the long and complex relationship between Rome and Jerusalem, Christianity and Judaism. Jews have lived on the Italian peninsula for more than 2,000 years, one of the oldest communities in the Western Diaspora. Even before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, then the centerpiece of Judaism, and the ensuing transport and enslavement of Jewish prisoners to Rome, there had been Jews living in the city and southern provinces, where they had arrived as traders and refugees. However, there is another part to the Italian Jewish story, one of acceptance, integration and even appreciation throughout the long arc of civilization on the peninsula. "The historic dialogue with the culture of Italy has enriched Italian Judaism and has also brought to the Italian culture much of Jewish values and contribution," said Simonetta Della Seta, who was appointed the museum's director in 2016. As the museum moves chronologically through the eras of Italian history, additions are being made to the permanent exhibit. The second major exhibit opened in April, on Jews and the Renaissance. The Holocaust will be addressed by the museum with a permanent exhibition that will open in September. So why choose a former prison to house the new museum? "The challenge is to take a place where people were closed in, where it was dark; transform it into an open space, open to ideas, open to culture, open to dialogue, and this is our mission," Ms. Della Seta said. The museum's collection of more than 200 artifacts and multimedia installations supports that alternative narrative, of coexistence and contribution. A fifth century mosaic of two matronae, one with the Old Testament, the second with the New, shows a single community of faith, a chapter in an otherwise fraught relationship with Christianity. There are precious documents and instruments depicting Jewish contributions to medicine, science and astronomy. Also on display are fragments of ancient manuscripts and texts, highlighting the importance of literacy in Italian Jewish history. "Jews for centuries were the writers, the scribes. Then they became the printers of the Italians," Ms. Della Seta said. She noted that among the first publishers in Italy during the medieval era were the Jewish printing houses in Venice and Soncino. Ferrara represents what was, for a time, a golden era of Italian Jewry. It was the policy of the Duke of Este in the 16th century to welcome Sephardic exiles from Spain and other Jews to the city, a period when the Church was ascendant and Jews were being confined to ghettos in Rome and Venice. "Jews have been living in Ferrara for over 1,000 years," Mr. Pesaro said as we stood in front of the synagogue building on Via Mazzini, 95, on its original site since 1603 and renovated many times since then. It is now being repaired after sustaining serious damage from the earthquake of 2012. The building is simple, red bricked and almost undistinguishable from others on the street except for the two plaques next to the arched entrance, commemorating the victims of the Holocaust from Ferrara. There are two synagogues inside. The larger, the Ashkenazi synagogue, with its barrel vaulted ceiling, multiple chandeliers and bright Jewish drawings on the walls, contrasts with the simple dark wooden pews and Torah ark. A walk through the former ghetto with Mr. Pesaro provides a moving glimpse into a distant time. Via Mazzini, once the main ghetto street, is now dotted with cafes and shops. It bustles with bicyclists riding to the nearby main square of the historic district, dominated by the cathedral and moat ringed castle. Jewish life is invisible to all but the most discerning pedestrians. Two narrow cobblestone streets, adjacent to Via Mazzini, form the more recognizable heart of the ghetto. We walked on one, Via Vignatagliata, as Mr. Pesaro pointed out buildings that once housed the matzo bakery (No. 49) and the Jewish school (No. 79), whose numbers swelled after Jews were barred from attending public schools by the racial laws of 1938. On the left is a small square, Piazzetta Isacco Lampronti, named after a renowned rabbi, scholar and physician of the 18th century. At night, however, when the winding, narrow streets seem so melancholy under dim lights, it is easy to imagine that dark time for Ferrara's Jews. The Jewish cemetery, outside the ghetto, is startling, if only for its sprawl and large grassy areas, free of headstones. When I asked Mr. Pesaro where all the gravestones had gone, he explained that the marble and stone were taken during the Inquisition in the 18th century, when some were used to build the two pillars framing the municipal hall across from the cathedral. The cemetery draws many visitors, Italian and foreign, mainly to pay tribute to Giorgio Bassani, the distinguished Jewish writer from Ferrara, best known for his novel, "The Garden of the Finzi Continis." A tilting bronze headstone, with a jagged facade that pierces through a stone base, marks his grave, isolated in the cemetery. The book, later made into a movie by the same name, is about a wealthy Jewish family contending with the racial laws of 1938 and about to be engulfed by the Holocaust. It is a source of contention for Mr. Pesaro and others in the community, who feel Bassani offended his family, on whom the book seems to be based, by depicting them and the Jews of Ferrara as out of touch with fascism and their impending doom. The museum is a public, state funded institution, proclaimed by the Parliament of Italy in 2003. Originally conceived as a museum of the Holocaust, its mission was changed later to encompass the history and heritage of Italian Jewry. It was inaugurated on Dec. 13, 2017, in two of the former prison buildings that were renovated and designed by an international team based in Milan. Four new buildings, designed to look like five, inspired by the books of the Torah, are to be added so that by its completion in 2021, the museum will contain nearly 100,000 square feet of space, at an estimated cost of 50 million. At the entrance, visitors are encouraged to watch a 24 minute video (in English and Italian) that conveys the sweep of Italian Jewish history through individual stories a Jewish slave, deported from Jerusalem to Rome in the first century, a scholar from the Middle Ages who enjoys a privileged status, and a young girl in 1938, forced to leave school as a result of the racial laws. Following that compressed virtual history, a short walk leads to the second building, crossing an educational garden where visitors can learn about Jewish dietary laws. The "First Thousand Years" exhibition is largely focused on Rome and the southern regions Sicily, Puglia, Campania, Calabria as that is where Jews mainly settled during the first millennium. After passing a replica of the Arch of Titus, commemorating Rome's victory over Jerusalem, and depicting soldiers carrying the seven branched menorah, visitors are offered a well lit and spacious display of original and replicated artifacts: ancient engravings, amulets, rings, seals and oil lamps with Jewish symbols, medieval manuscripts, some now on permanent loan from other national Italian museums. There are complete chambers, simulating the Jewish catacombs in Rome, their walls adorned with frescoes of menorahs, other religious symbols and Hebrew lettering. "The Jewish catacombs in Rome were a treasure trove for our knowledge of Jews in the Imperial Age, about 40,000 people," said Ms. Della Seta. The display is thematic as well as chronological. The dispersal of Jews throughout the Italian peninsula, the relationship between Jews and Christians, the contribution of Jewish scholarship and science to the broader civilization. Video monitors are strategically placed featuring experts historians, archaeologists and rabbis explaining their choice of artifacts or historical events. What comes across throughout the two floor exhibition is the breadth and tenacity of Jewish life over the millenniums. The Italian peninsula witnessed serial conquerors Romans, Goths, Byzantines Longobards and Muslims who are all gone. Yet the one continuous presence has been the Jews, clinging to their identity and civilization in the face of severe challenges to their survival. There are about 30,000 Jews living in Italy today, the majority in Rome and Milan, according to the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, an umbrella organization. The mission of the museum, said Dario Disegni, chairman of MEIS, is to foster dialogue, understanding and coexistence. "The MEIS tells the story of a minority, which was integrated in the Italian society and, at the same time, was able to maintain its identity, both cultural and religious, without being assimilated. It is really a model, a point of reference for the Italian and, more generally, Western societies of today." It is a message, at a time when Italy and other European countries are being tested by a new wave of immigration and rising intolerance, that might give MEIS a broader resonance and purpose than that usually associated with a history museum. Harry D. Wall writes frequently, and produces films, about Jewish culture and heritage around the world. Follow NY Times Travel on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Get weekly updates from our Travel Dispatch newsletter, with tips on traveling smarter, destination coverage and photos from all over the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
At least twice as many new condominium units are scheduled to hit the Manhattan market this year as in 2014, the most since 2007. That means more choice for buyers and some welcome competition among developers. The influx comes after a five year shortage, when new condo buildings practically had the market to themselves, allowing developers to push prices ever higher. The oncoming wave of new development in 2015, some real estate watchers predict, will temper that price growth and slow the pace of sales, providing some relief to Manhattan buyers. "Whenever you have a strong market in a competitive environment, the ultimate winner is the consumer," said Shaun Osher, the chief executive of the brokerage firm CORE in Manhattan, which is working on nine new projects for 2015, a total of 608 units. "I think the buyer will be the beneficiary from a robust development market. To compete, people will have to build better product." "From one of a kind boutique buildings to soaring luxury towers, an incredible variety of new development will enter the marketplace," said Kelly Kennedy Mack, the president of Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group. All across the city, she said, "we are seeing more new residences than we have in years." A roster of highly anticipated towers in and around the West 57th Street corridor, known as Billionaire's Row, are in the beginning stages of construction, with plans to open sales in the coming year. "All eyes are going to be on this prime Midtown market," Ms. Kennedy Mack said. Among them is 111 West 57th Street, at approximately 1,400 feet tall, a condo tower and conversion of the landmark Steinway building by JDS Development Group and Property Markets Group, the same team that developed Walker Tower, which broke a downtown record last year with the sale of a 50.9 million penthouse. Also commanding attention: the Jean Nouvel designed 53W53, a tower near the Museum of Modern Art measuring roughly 1,050 feet tall, undertaken by Hines, Goldman Sachs and the Pontiac Land Group of Singapore; and Vornado Realty Trust's 950 foot building at 220 Central Park South, designed by Robert A. M. Stern Architects with interiors by the Office of Thierry W. Despont. On the Upper East Side, 520 Park Avenue, a 54 story limestone clad condominium, developed by Zeckendorf Development with Park Sixty and Global Holdings, has already grabbed headlines for its 31 residences, ranging in price from 16.2 million for the least expensive full floor apartment to 130 million for the triplex penthouse. "At what point does the market start to say, 'that's enough,' " said Stuart Siegel, president of Engel Volkers NYC. "I think we need to be asking that question." Still, most brokers and new development marketers say demand for trophy apartments isn't waning. "We are of the mind set that the market will continue to be very strong and deep for these high end properties, as it is being fueled not just by domestic but by an international market as well," said Susan M. de Franca, the president of Douglas Elliman Development Marketing. "New York City is still rivaling London as the top city" in which high net worth individuals are seeking to invest their capital. What's happening, they say, is that some high end clients are holding off on buying in anticipation of the oncoming spate of opulent pads. "Most projects are taking a bit longer to sign on the dotted line," said Steven Rutter, the director of Stribling Marketing, which is handling at least 14 new developments with plans to open sales in 2015. "Buyers don't feel the same sense of urgency. They want to see what else is out there. They want to make sure they've done their homework." In 2015, he added, "things are going to sell, they will just take longer." Ms. Kennedy Mack of Corcoran Sunshine says that apartments at the very top make up less than 10 percent of new development in 2015, with about 500 "ultraluxury" units priced at 5,000 a square foot or more expected to come to market. "There is a misperception that the market is swinging drastically toward the high end," she said. "We're seeing a relatively steady pricing mix from year to year, which is really supported by robust buyer demand at all levels." Half of the new units will be in the so called middle luxury segment, with prices between 1,700 and 2,300 a square foot. Two bedrooms in that price range were selling for about 2.5 million in the third quarter of 2014, based on contracts signed. Half of new condos, or about 3,300 units, will be priced between 1,700 and 2,300 a square foot, up from 1,100 last year, according to Corcoran Sunshine, as developers home in on a sweet spot in the market that had been underserved. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. The number of units coming to market at the so called "entry level," defined by prices at less than 1,700 a square foot, is also expected to rise. More than 800 units in this category are expected to enter the market in 2015, up from 306 in 2014. One bedrooms in this segment were selling for an average of 1.19 million in the third quarter of 2014, based on contracts signed. The overall market share in this category is forecast to remain steady, with entry level units making up just 13 percent of the new development pie. Soaring land costs have made it difficult for developers to turn a profit at these prices, said Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel. So, unless they are working from a lower cost basis to begin with, as might be the case with land purchased several years ago, most developers are not building for the entry level buyer. As a result, Mr. Miller said, "we are continuing to build a lot of product that is higher than what is desperately needed, because the math doesn't work out otherwise." Ground up construction will continue to dominate the landscape in 2015, making up 59 percent of new development. But conversions could produce some interesting reinventions. The original home of the New York Life Insurance Company, a full block Renaissance style 1899 building designed by McKim, Mead White, is to be turned into 140 high end apartments called 108 Leonard Street. Sales are planned to begin late this year. The 31 story Verizon building at 140 West Street, across from One World Trade Center, is getting a residential overhaul by Magnum Real Estate Group and the CIM Group, with condos scheduled to enter the market in the first quarter of this year. Prices will range from 1.4 million for one bedrooms to 15 million for five bedrooms. The 1927 building will use the address 100 Barclay Street and maintain its lavish exterior, decorated with carvings of vines, flowers and birds, as well as receive a reimagined lobby by the interior designer Alexandra Champalimaud. To stand out, developers are focusing on architecture, interior design and craftsmanship. "Everybody is designing to a very high level," said Stephen G. Kliegerman, the president of Terra Development Marketing, "which I think is much different than what we saw pre 2008, where developers were kind of building to what they believed their marketplace was, instead of building to attract new buyers to their marketplace." Terra Development Marketing advises Halstead Property and Brown Harris Stevens. Architects making a New York debut this year include Tadao Ando, the Pritzker Prize winning architect behind 152 Elizabeth Street, a boutique condominium developed by the New York firm Sumaida and Khurana. The building will incorporate Mr. Ando's signature poured concrete, galvanized steel and voluminous glass, and house just seven two to five bedroom apartments with half floor residences starting at 5.9 million and full floor apartments beginning at 15 million. Along the High Line in West Chelsea, Zaha Hadid has drawn attention for her sinuous 37 unit condominium at 520 West 28th Street. The developer is the Related Companies. The first New York building by the Brazilian architect Isay Weinfeld is going up at 527 West 27th. The block through development by Centaur Properties and Greyscale Development Group will be made up of two buildings with 36 one to four bedroom apartments. And 515 Highline, a 12 unit condo with a wavy facade facing the park at 515 West 29th Street, is the second project in New York by Soo K. Chan, an architect and developer from Singapore. The condo, developed by the Bauhouse Group, will open sales this month with prices from 5 million to 25 million. The project comes on the heels of Mr. Chan's other New York project, Soori High Line, a 31 unit condo with more than a dozen private pools, across the street at 522 West 29th. The developer was Siras Oriel Development. "There will definitely be an increased level of construction quality," said Roy Kim, who heads new development at Urban Compass. Buyers, he said, will not just have more choices, "but really well designed quality projects to choose from. The ante has been upped." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
THE chief executive who oversees one of the world's most highly sought Tuscan wines was in New York this month, trying to persuade people to buy one of his less expensive brands, something that would seem counter to his interests. Giovanni Geddes da Filicaja, of the Marchesi de' Frescobaldi Group, was drawing attention to Le Serre Nuove, which is known as a second growth or second label wine. The first growth, in this case, is Ornellaia, which is considered among the best Italian wines and costs three times as much. "We don't want to call it the second growth anymore," he said. "It's not what's left over. It's a great wine in its own category." Tasting Ornellaia and Le Serre Nuove is a little like driving an Audi and a Volkswagen. Both are owned by the same company and stand for a certain quality for the price. The Audi is the nicer car, but if you can't afford it, you would probably be happy and safe in a Volkswagen. But unlike cars, which may have separate dealerships, Mr. Geddes da Filicaja and his fellow producers rely on the same people to sell their wines, regardless of the price or quality. Chief among them is the sommelier a well trained wine steward at a high class restaurant who probably doesn't know you and has only a few minutes to sell you some wine. How does a good sommelier find the right wine out of hundreds or thousands of bottles? What should you tell him so you get what you want and not just the same wine you drink at home (albeit at the higher restaurant price)? Should you trust his opinion? Is he on the make to sell you something the restaurant needs to offload, like a purple Audi A8, or is a producer giving him some kind of financial incentive to sell as many equivalents of Volkswagen Passats as he can that month? I put these questions to some sommeliers at New York City restaurants known for their wine. It all starts with the wine list, of course, but in many fine dining restaurants the list is an absurdly long tome for a decision that needs to be made in a few minutes. At the Regency Bar Grill, the list has 650 choices. That is heavy reading before dinner, but nothing compared with Per Se's 2,300 bottles. "I used to work in a restaurant called Cru where we had 4,500 selections," said Michel Couvreux, the head sommelier at Per Se. "This is just half of it." In one concession to time, Mr. Couvreux said Per Se's wine list was on an iPad so he can select a list of just a few bottles to avoid overwhelming a guest. But a dinner out is supposed to be fun, not a tortured trip through global vineyards. So the person selling the wine had best be sharp especially if the person ordering it isn't. "Maybe at most you have five minutes with the guest, if you're not busy," said Jeff Porter, director of beverage operations at the Batali Bastianich Hospitality Group, which owns Del Posto, Babbo, Esca and Lupa in New York. "I teach my sommeliers that you have 90 seconds to get as much information from the guest and decipher it in your brain and come out with a minimum of three suggestions." If, for example, the guest likes a type of wine, say an Italian Brunello, Mr. Porter said, the sommelier could offer three Brunellos at three prices or three styles. But even that approach can be nerve racking for some people who are about to spend several hundred dollars on a wine. "When a guest is sitting down, for the most part you're presenting wine to a stranger," said Andre Compeyre, wine and beverage director of the Regency Bar Grill, who spent a decade working alongside the great French chef Alain Ducasse. "You don't know their budget, their taste, if this is a first date or a business meeting. What I'll try to do is find some key words." With its selection of 2,300 bottles of wine, Per Se uses an iPad to help guests make a selection. Sam Hodgson for The New York Times Here are several questions sommeliers will most likely ask to get those words and give themselves an idea of what you might want. Price should be among the first. "You don't need to be shy about that," said Olivier Flosse, wine director at A Voce. "That's nothing negative. You don't want to impose something or have a misunderstanding." He said a great compliment to him was when guests say they had a great meal, a great bottle of wine from a region they had not tried before and did not feel as if they had spent a fortune. Even Per Se, a four star restaurant where the prix fixe menu costs 295 a person, Mr. Couvreux said, features bottles of wine as inexpensive as 60. That option is for people who have saved up for a meal there and also for people who would not appreciate the difference between a 100 bottle of wine and a 400 bottle. Then there are the questions a sommelier will ask to see if the guests like certain grapes or regions. Do they like cabernet sauvignon, pinot noir or syrah? Do they like a particular style, like oaky chardonnay? Or the most basic: sparkling, white or red? This approach can sometimes backfire when people think they know more than they do. "The worst situation is when people confuse dry and sweet," Mr. Flosse said. "It happens quite often. They say, 'I'd like to have a sweet wine.' They don't mean a dessert wine. So you have to describe exactly what you think they're thinking, then you bring a wine, and they say, 'I don't like that.' " His solution is to bring a sauvignon blanc, a chardonnay and a viognier and let them try. Their choice? "It's almost always the chardonnay," he said. "It's not sweet. It's a dry grape." But the sommelier is still a salesman. Can he be trusted? Mr. Porter said all of his sommeliers were paid an hourly wage and a portion of the tips. "They're incentivized to make the guest happy," he said. "Once you're incentivized by brand, people will push that brand and you'll see it all over the room, and that is not what people want." But someone like Mr. Geddes da Filicaja has a leg up. He may not like having Le Serre Nuove known as a second label, but sommeliers said that connection had worked to the advantage of the many great and expensive wines that had less expensive second labels. Mr. Porter said that at Del Posto, the least expensive Ornellaia is a 2006 that costs 600; the oldest is a 1986 for 1,225. A 2012 Le Serre Nuove costs 185. "We show guests that and explain to them the difference younger vines, different blend, and it's a wine that is more approachable now," he said. Selecting a wine is not unlike cooking a steak: They don't all turn out perfectly. And any good sommelier should let you try as many wines by the glass as you would like or take back a bottle not to your liking. "If they say, 'I'm so sorry. I thought I'd enjoy the wine, but it's not what I was looking for,' we'll definitely change the wines," said Mr. Couvreux. "If you've been rude and you're being a nasty person, which we don't have a lot, I'm going to be offended." At the end of a dinner, a good sommelier might just save you from yourself. Mr. Flosse recalled the man who came in around the holidays with eight people, bragging about his great wine cellar. "He said, 'Can I have a Riesling from Burgundy?' and I said, 'Sir, I'll do my best,' " Mr. Flosse said, without telling him there was no such thing. "At the end of the night, he told me, 'I want to thank you for two things you were under budget, and I don't know anything about wine, and I don't have a wine cellar.' " But the guest was happy, and that was what mattered. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
WHAT IS IT? A heavy duty work truck that can run on compressed natural gas or gasoline. HOW MUCH? As tested, 58,385. Base truck is 47,435; natural gas conversion is an additional 10,950. WHAT WILL IT CARRY? On either fuel, towing capacity is 12,000 pounds and the maximum payload is 3,290 pounds. HOW THIRSTY? As a heavy duty vehicle with a fully loaded weight of more than 8,500 pounds, the F 250's mileage is not estimated by the E.P.A. Expect 12 to 15 m.p.g. either on gasoline or the gallon equivalent of natural gas. ALTERNATIVES Ram 2500 SLT 4x4 C.N.G. Heavy Duty pickup, 47,870. Available late this year will be Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra extended cab C.N.G. pickups, starting at 43,325. I WAS expecting a truck, not a monster truck. The bi fuel Ford F 250 Super Duty, capable of running on either gasoline or compressed natural gas, known as C.N.G., took up more than one side of my two car driveway, dwarfing and menacing the compact car on the other side. In doing so, it eloquently addressed one of the prime advantages of natural gas over electricity as a way to move vehicles forward: it is scalable and can be practically adapted to 18 wheelers and commuter cars. Drivers accustomed to these big load haulers won't notice much of a performance difference when running on natural gas. It takes some experience to learn how to back the vehicle up or maneuver in tight parking lots, but I could relax once the behemoth was pointed straight ahead. Around town and on the highway, the F 250 had plenty of pulling power on natural gas. That's not surprising, considering the high torque rating of the 6.2 liter V 8. Natural gas is the default setting for this truck. There's no toggle to switch over to gasoline, or back, so I wasn't able to contrast the performance on the two fuels. The transition to gasoline, which occurs only when the C.N.G. supply is depleted, is said to be seamless, but I couldn't prove it because I didn't run out of natural gas. Having driven a variety of big V 8 pickups, I found the SuperDuty had plenty of muscle running on C.N.G. In Connecticut, on a long run down the Merritt Parkway, I stayed in the fast lane and gunned the truck around slower traffic. At 65 m.p.h., it was still responding well to the accelerator. Perhaps because I've driven a lot of electric cars lately, I kept an anxious eye on the C.N.G. gauge which measures pounds per square inch of pressure in the tank but it didn't move much. Although flex fuel cars and trucks able to burn E85 ethanol are relatively common, a broad shift to vehicles powered by natural gas, the cleanest of fossil fuels, has been limited by a shortage of publicly available filling stations. (There are about 500 in the United States, the American Gas Association says.) But exceptionally low natural gas prices, partly a result of the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing, is changing the equation and forcing fleet buyers, in particular, to pay attention. "There's definitely major interest in C.N.G. from fleet buyers," said Mike Levine, a spokesman for Ford. "It's the cheapest fuel out there." Another advantage is reduced emissions. The gas association asserts that a natural gas vehicle reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent, compared with an equivalent gasoline model, and that emissions of carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides are also reduced. The trade off is an increase in methane emissions. The only available C.N.G. car available in the United States from a major manufacturer is the Honda Civic Natural Gas. But a number of manufacturers, including General Motors, Chrysler and Ford, make natural gas trucks available through dealerships for fleet customers. The Ford Super Duty in my driveway received hardened valves and seats, a bi fuel manifold and expanded engine calibration from the factory. The truck was sent to Westport LD, one of six companies licensed to do conversions for Ford, for installation of C.N.G. ready fuel injectors, pressure regulator, fuel and coolant lines and other parts. That added 9,750 to the purchase price. Another 1,200 went into a 24.5 gallon equivalent C.N.G. tank (an 18.4 gallon tank is included). The larger tank intrudes 24 inches into the bed. So equipped, the F 250 can go about 650 miles before refueling impressive for such a big, thirsty vehicle. C.N.G. has much lower energy density than gasoline, but the calculations to determine a gallon equivalent take that into account. Still, a pickup like the F 250 (or F 350; a package is available for that even bigger gun) would have range challenges on just that fuel. A gallon equivalent of C.N.G., pressurized to 3,600 pounds per square inch, takes up 0.51 cubic foot of volume, enough space for 3.82 gallons of gasoline. According to AltFuelPrices.com, a gallon equivalent of natural gas costs about 2.60 at stations in the New York City area. In a calculation by Dr. Kathryn Clay, executive director of the Drive Natural Gas Initiative, the payback time for my truck's natural gas package would be from 1.8 years (at 8 m.p.g.) to 4.9 years (at 22 m.p.g.) . That analysis assumes the truck is driven 28,000 miles annually, that gasoline costs 3.60 a gallon and that natural gas is 2 for the equivalent of a gallon of gas. (In April, an Energy Department report found the national average was 2.08.) C.N.G. has some dissenters. In an opinion piece on a company Web site, ExxonMobil cited the reduced cargo space of C.N.G. vehicles and the need for more frequent, longer fill ups. "A government push to subsidize or mandate the expanded use of natural gas in the transportation sector is a wrong turn," ExxonMobil said. Dr. Clay said chemical companies that rely on natural gas as a raw material fear higher prices if C.N.G. is used widely in vehicles. Their opposition is one factor in the stalled effort to pass the Natural Gas Act, supported by the financier T. Boone Pickens, which (in differing House and Senate versions) would provide a five year jump start for natural gas vehicles and filling stations through various tax credits. But even without tax incentives, the fuel's low cost provides an impetus to convert fleets to natural gas. Getting consumers into C.N.G. cars will be tougher: there are few home refueling units. The sole available model, the Phill from BRC FuelMaker, costs 4,500. But General Electric announced this month that it was working to develop a more affordable natural gas filler. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
It is one of the first tasks a journalist learns on the job, a routine aspect of reporting: asking for comment from the people or organizations that are mentioned prominently in an article, especially those cast in a harsh light. For student journalists at Harvard, that practice has been met with a backlash. The Harvard Crimson, a 146 year old daily student newspaper at the Ivy League university, published an article on Sept. 13 detailing a campus rally protesting United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency that has stepped up deportation raids under the Trump administration. With the headline "Harvard Affiliates Rally for Abolish ICE Movement," the article drew the ire of campus activists because of a sentence stating that the reporters had contacted the agency for comment: "ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday night." Act on a Dream, the campus group that had organized the rally covered in the article, started an online petition demanding that The Crimson vow to never contact ICE again and to apologize for the "harm it has inflicted." "We are extremely disappointed in the cultural insensitivity displayed by The Crimson's policy to reach out to ICE, a government agency with a long history of surveilling and retaliating against those who speak out against them," the petition read. It continued: "In this political climate, a request for comment is virtually the same as tipping them off, regardless of how they are contacted." More than 650 people have signed the petition. It has the backing of several campus organizations that represent Latin American students, as well as the Harvard College Democrats. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The Crimson's critics said the newspaper had compromised the safety of undocumented immigrants on the Harvard campus, including students. In August, a Palestinian Harvard student traveling from Lebanon was denied entry to the United States by an immigration official. After an outcry, the student was allowed to enter the country. As a student publication, The Crimson had a unique standard to uphold, said an Act on a Dream co director, Emily Romero. "These are our peers calling ICE," she said. The Crimson has stood by its reporting. In a note to readers on Monday, the paper's president, Kristine E. Guillaume, and its managing editor, Angela N. Fu, wrote that "every party named in a story has a right to comment or contest criticism leveled against them." The letter went on to cite the Student Press Law Center and the Society of Professional Journalists, both of which approve of the practice. It also noted that The Crimson did not contact the agency until the rally had concluded. "A world where news outlets categorically refuse to contact certain kinds of sources a world where news outlets let third party groups dictate the terms of their coverage is a less informed, less accurate and ultimately less democratic world," the note said. Ms. Guillaume declined to comment further when contacted for this article. A leader of the Harvard College Democrats said the group disagreed with The Crimson's stance and sided with Act on a Dream. "It's very much in line with our values," Isabel Giovannetti, the Harvard College Democrats vice president, said of the anti ICE activists' point of view. "It lines up with our commitment to protecting these movements, making sure people's voices can be heard, that intimidation from ICE doesn't prevent these students from exercising their right to mobilize and organize." Margo Schlanger, a law professor at the University of Michigan who specializes in civil rights and prison reform, said that while she understood the protesters' concerns, the paper had not done anything unethical. "They're trying to make ICE a pariah agency," she said of the Harvard activists. Ms. Schlanger added that it was "not responsible journalism not to call the agency to ask them to respond to things." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Yet another reason to stop smoking: It may reduce your risk for dementia. Korean researchers studied 46,140 men, 60 and older, following them for an average of eight years with periodic health examinations. Over the course of the study, 1,644 people were given a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease or another form of dementia. After controlling for age, body mass index, blood pressure, physical activity and other health and behavioral characteristics, they found that the less time men smoked, the less likely they were to have dementia. Compared with continual smokers, men who had quit for up to four years had a 13 percent lower risk, those who had quit for four years or more a 14 percent lower risk, and never smokers a 19 percent lower risk. The study is in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology. The authors acknowledge that they had no data on education level, which is a risk factor for dementia, and that the eight year follow up may not have been long enough to pick up all cases of dementia, a disease that develops slowly. "Smoking has not been well known as a risk factor for dementia," said the lead author, Dr. Daein Choi, a researcher at the Seoul University College of Medicine. "Our findings suggest that smoking cessation, or reduced smoking, might be helpful in reducing the risk." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Maybe the studios just needed a dragon this whole time. After several lackluster weeks at the box office, many have wondered when things would pick up this year. A step in the right direction came this weekend: Audiences turned "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World" into a bona fide hit. The third installation of Universal's animated dragon series sold 55.5 million in tickets, exceeding most analysts' expectations and giving the franchise the best opening weekend of any of its three movies. That figure is especially impressive given that the latest (and supposedly final) "Dragon" installment had a slightly lower budget than either of the previous movies about 129 million, against 165 million for the original (2010) and 145 for the second (2014), according to Box Office Mojo. Also notable: The two best opening weekends this year have both been for the final installments of trilogies. Until this weekend, M. Night Shyamalan's "Glass" held the top spot. That superhero thriller opened last month to about 41 million in its first weekend. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
WASHINGTON Federal Reserve officials will gather in Washington on Tuesday and Wednesday to debate whether a bumpy start to the year is now in the rearview mirror, clearing the way for higher interest rates. The Fed is not likely to raise rates this week, but the steady growth of the domestic economy despite the wobbles of financial markets and the weakness of other developed nations is strengthening the hand of officials who say that higher rates are necessary to maintain control of price inflation. It seems increasingly clear that the Fed's plans to spend 2016 gradually raising its benchmark interest rate have been delayed, not derailed. The challenge now confronting Janet L. Yellen, the Fed's chairwoman, is forging a consensus among Fed officials about how soon to resume the march begun in December, when the Fed raised rates, by 0.25 percent, for the first time since the financial crisis. Some Fed officials still emphasize caution, arguing there is little risk in moving slowly. Lael Brainard, a Fed governor, has been particularly vocal in warning that the weakness of the global economy could weigh on domestic growth. "We should not take the strength in the U.S. labor market and consumption for granted," Ms. Brainard said in a speech last week. "Given weak and decelerating foreign demand, it is critical to carefully protect and preserve the progress we have made here at home through prudent adjustments to the policy path." But other officials are antsy about inflation. Prices rose 1.7 percent in the 12 months through the end of January, according to the latest reading from the Fed's preferred gauge. The modest uptick brings the Fed closer to its goal of 2 percent annual inflation for the first time in years. "We may well at present be seeing the first stirrings of an increase in the inflation rate," Stanley Fischer, the Fed's vice chairman, said in a speech last week. Fed officials predicted in December that they would raise the benchmark rate by about one percentage point over the course of 2016, most likely in four quarter point increments. The Fed was widely expected to make the first of those increases this week. But when markets started gyrating, Fed officials hit the brakes, offering reassurances that they would not make any big decisions until things calmed down. Financial conditions tightened early in the year as investors pulled back from riskier loans and demanded higher interest rates. The effect by the end of January was the equivalent of the Fed raising rates by one percentage point, according to economists at Goldman Sachs. But the tightening has almost completely reversed. The Dow Jones industrial average, which lost 10 percent of its value during the first six weeks of the year, has rebounded and is now down just 1 percent this year. Indeed, some analysts say the Fed overreacted and should have preserved the option of a rate increase in March. "We get that when it comes to monetary policy, concerns about market stability and global headwinds have trumped the resilience in the U.S. economy," said Tom Porcelli, chief United States economist at RBC Capital Markets. "But even here, there has been considerable improvement." But analysts do not expect the Fed to surprise investors, who have written off the chances of a policy change this week. Instead, most are looking for the Fed to signal that rate increases will resume in the coming months. The Fed's next scheduled meetings are in April and June. Wage growth remains slow, which some Fed officials see as evidence that employers are still finding an abundance of candidates for available jobs. Such slack in the labor market might suggest the Fed should persist in its stimulus campaign. In a recent analysis, however, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco argued that the weakness of wage growth reflected a shift in the composition of the work force as relatively high paid baby boomers retire and companies hire younger, cheaper workers. "Sluggish wage growth may be a poor indicator of labor market slack," the analysis concluded. "In fact, correcting for worker composition changes, wages are consistent with a strong labor market that is drawing low wage workers into full time employment." Job growth has outpaced economic growth, which remains relatively weak. But that, too, has waned in the minds of Fed officials as a reason to extend the central bank's stimulus campaign. There is a growing consensus that job growth is relatively fast because productivity growth is relatively slow. The output of each worker, in other words, is rising more slowly, so employers need more workers at any given level of economic growth. Ms. Brainard suggested last month that the Fed might be limited in its ability to raise rates at a time when other major central banks are pressing ahead with stimulus campaigns. The divergence tends to amplify the impact of rate increases, for example by increasing the value of the dollar and restraining exports. "Predictions that U.S. monetary policy would chart a notably divergent path have been tempered by powerful crosscurrents from abroad," Ms. Brainard said at a conference in New York. The European Central Bank cut its benchmark interest rate last week to zero from 0.05 percent, a largely symbolic move, and announced that it would increase its purchases of government bonds and begin to buy corporate bonds. It also announced a pair of measures to encourage bank lending: increasing the penalties on money that banks keep on deposit with the E.C.B. and, for the first time, paying banks what amounts to a small fee to make loans. The central banks of Japan and China are also continuing to pump money. Economists at Goldman Sachs, however, concluded in a recent analysis that the current differences among the major central banks were not "unusual or implausible" by the standards of recent decades. If the economic fortunes of the United States continue to diverge from those of other developed nations, it is likely that the Fed's path will diverge, too. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
ANTONIO RAMOS AND THE GANGBANGERS at Dixon Place (Sept. 15 16, 22 23, 29 30 at 7:30 p.m.). The films of Pedro Almodovar swerve among camp, melodrama, psychosexual thrillers and jet black comedies, a combo that inspires the Puerto Rican born choreographer Antonio Ramos. In his new work, "Almodovar Dystopia," Mr. Ramos channels the Spanish filmmaker's droll extravagance into an uninhibited escapade for six naked performers. This is more than just a romp, though: Mr. Ramos uses skin and sensuality (as well as video, spoken word and cooking) to dig into questions of gender and the politics of the body. 212 219 0736, dixonplace.org AUNTS at N.Y.U. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts (Sept. 15, 7:30 p.m.). There's dance that happens onstage, between the curtains and then everything else. The everything else is the realm of AUNTs, an unconventional dance platform that since 2005 has been scrambling our assumptions about how to see and experience the art form, turning performances into immersive parties. The latest "choose your own adventure" offering comes to the Skirball Center at New York University, where every nook and cranny of the theater is fair game except the stage. (This free show is completely booked, but there will be a standby line for unclaimed tickets.) 212 998 4941, nyuskirball.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
India enjoyed annual growth of 8 to 9 percent in the years leading up to the global financial crisis but has struggled to reach 6 percent since then, despite heavy government spending and large fiscal and trade deficits. From corner stores to corporate boardrooms, the consensus in Mumbai these days is that stagnation may continue over the next few months, although almost no one expects a steep downturn. Sitting in his office on Friday morning in front of an abstract Indian painting in blues and yellows, Mr. Singh voiced concern about a 7.2 percent drop in nationwide diesel consumption during the first three weeks of August from a year ago. Nationwide diesel consumption was also down 5.9 percent in July from a year ago. But heavy monsoon rains have limited the need for diesel in irrigation pumps, making the comparison less clear, Mr. Singh cautioned. Rohit Dawar, the top diesel demand expert at the Petroleum Ministry in New Delhi, said in a telephone interview that diesel consumption had been artificially inflated in July and August last year by a peculiarity in government fuel subsidies, since removed, that temporarily made it cheaper to burn diesel instead of other fuels in industrial boilers. Even allowing for all of these factors, however, "there is a slight slowdown" in diesel demand recently, Mr. Dawar said. Plentiful monsoon rains, a key indicator for the Indian economy for thousands of years, have produced lush fields that could yet help stabilize broader measures of the economy in the coming months and forestall a steeper slowdown. While World Bank data show that value added in agriculture is only one sixth of the economy these days, a good harvest could still play an outsize role in limiting recent increases in food prices. Inflation will probably remain a problem, however, given that India relies almost entirely on imported oil, which becomes more expensive with each drop of the rupee. So important is oil to India's trade deficit that desperate bidding for scarce dollars by Indian refiners helped drive the rupee briefly to a record low on Wednesday, before the Reserve Bank of India stopped the rout that evening by arranging to transfer dollars from its reserves to oil importers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
And Idris Elba's directorial debut hits Amazon. HOME VIDEOS Stream on HBO platforms. A quiet, cinema verite documentary shot with a solitary film camera isn't the kind of project one would expect from a stand up comic like Jerrod Carmichael. With "Home Videos," Carmichael presents 30 minutes of candid conversations between himself and some of the women in his life in his hometown, Winston Salem, N.C. They touch on topics like blackness, feminism and relationships. The goal, Carmichael recently told The New York Times, was to have honest conversations. "No performance for the camera," he said. "Me and you, we're here. Let's see what happens." WEED THE PEOPLE (2018) Stream on Netflix; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. In the 2008 documentary "The Business of Being Born," the filmmaker Abby Epstein dived into American motherhood and home childbirth. Her latest documentary, "Weed the People," also involves the very young; it tells of instances in which medical marijuana was used to fight pediatric cancer, making a case for further research and arguing that legal red tape is preventing potential medical breakthroughs. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Times At the New York Academy of Art, facial reconstruction fusing art and science may help identify the missing, including migrants. The final moments of life for the eight border crossers whose remains were found in the Arizona desert over the last two summers will always be a mystery. What is clear is the cause of death for them, as for many migrants, recorded by the Pima County medical examiner's office: "Heat stroke, exposure to hot environment." "Hyperthermia due to exposure to the elements." "Dehydration, hypotension and hyperthermia due to environmental exposure to heat in desert." The list goes on. The desolation of their deaths in this perilous corridor along the border is compounded by another indignity: The identities of these eight men remained unknown. The traditional tools used by medical examiners to identify human remains, including DNA and dental comparisons, had yet to yield any clues. Now, a last ditch effort to identify the dead and help bring closure to their families, has moved from the medical examiner's office in Tucson to a more rarefied setting: a workshop in facial reconstruction at the New York Academy of Art. Young graduate students, whose rigorous classical training includes anatomy, are working with 3 D printed replicas of the men's skulls based on CT scans of the originals, which are considered forensic evidence. Painstakingly rendered in clay applied onto the copied skulls, with marbles for eyes and a black Sharpie dot marking the pupils, the students' reconstructions are being exhibited in the academy windows through March 29. "We're visual creatures," said Bruce Anderson, a forensic anthropologist with the Pima County medical examiner's office. "When we don't have a viewable face," because of decomposition, Dr. Anderson said, "we ask artists to give us the impression of what the person looked like in order to draw attention to a particular case." The academy reconstructions have been posted on NamUs, the National Institute of Justice's National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. The class comes at a sobering juncture. Migrant deaths along the United States border with Mexico rose last year despite a steep decrease in attempted crossings, according to the United Nations Migration Agency. Since 2001, the remains of roughly 2,800 migrants have been found in Pima County alone, represented by a grim sea of red circles on "death maps" produced by the Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased Migrants. "Anyone who spends regular time in this landscape does so with the knowledge of the scale of death and dying," said Robin Reineke, the co founder and executive director of the Colibri Center for Human Rights in Tucson, an advocacy organization that reports on missing migrants and conducts DNA searches. "It's shocking given the silence our country maintains on this issue." Remains are often scattered by vultures and other scavengers, which can pick a body clean in a matter of days. "If there is one thing more dangerous than crossing the Sonoran Desert with a smuggler, it's crossing by yourself," Dr. Anderson said. To a trained eye, the complex structure of the human skull offers a blueprint to the facial features of the deceased. "A skull is the foundation an individual's face is built on," said Mr. Mullins, 47. "It's like a house for your face." The class began by analyzing clues: The thickness of the lips, the shape and placement of the eyes, nose and chin, the earlobes, even the curve of the eyebrows are all revealed in the skull. He cautions students to leave artistic license at the door. "You have to have that artistic mojo flowing through your veins," he tells them. "But if you put the wrong face on, that person is going to stay lost." Reconstructing a face with scientific accuracy involves rebuilding the muscles and soft tissue layer by layer, using strips of clay. Then the students use cut plastic straws placed on the clay to mark tissue depths, which are based on researchers' averages for ages, genders and cultural backgrounds. Antonia Barolini, a 23 year old painting specialist, said she chose the academy because of Mr. Mullins's class, having dreamed about being an F.B.I. agent. The skull she was working on had pronounced cheekbones, an uneven jawline and a distinct overbite. The man was 18 to 22 years old when he died, according to the Pima County medical examiner. "He was younger than me," Ms. Barolini observed. "That part was real hard." The class, in its fourth year, grew out of a working relationship between Mr. Mullins and Bradley J. Adams, director of forensic anthropology for the chief medical examiner's office in New York City, which received a grant from the National Institute of Justice to purchase a 3 D printer. "Facial reconstructions are intended to provide an investigatory lead in cases that have gone cold," Dr. Adams said. "The hope is that someone who knew the person will see the reconstruction, recognize some similarities and notify the authorities of a potential match." Not every skull can be traced to the desert, but many have chilling stories behind them. Madison Haws, 25, an academy painting student, was given an unidentified skull from New York that was recovered in a basement crawl space at a nursing home in Queens, since closed. The woman had lost her teeth, giving her a sunken appearance captured in Ms. Haws's reconstruction. "Part of me is afraid she was abandoned," Ms. Haws said. "I hope someone's looking for her so that her bones will rest in peace." She and her colleagues join a line of artists using facial reconstruction, from the ancient Egyptian funerary or death masks used to cover the faces of mummies to anatomists like Gaetano Giulio Zumbo (1656 1701), who recreated facial muscles in wax over real skulls. The academy's curriculum includes the art of ecorche, making "flayed" or "skinned" sculpted figures with exposed muscles (the clay figures are somewhat gruesomely scattered about the students' paint splattered studios). Karen T. Taylor, considered a dean of the profession and a consultant for the television show "CSI," said the complexity of her rather esoteric occupation is often underestimated, with police personnel sometimes taking on the reconstruction instead of trained artists who work in tandem with anthropologists and odontologists. Among professionals, the balance between artistic skill and scientific standards continues to be debated. "Practitioners without artistic skills produce less believable and realistic faces, and practitioners without scientific rigor produce faces that are inaccurate and unreliable," Caroline Wilkinson, director of the School of Art Design at Liverpool John Moores University in England, said by email. She leads a research based "Face Lab" whose celebrity depictions have included Richard III, J.S. Bach, Ramesses II and Mary, Queen of Scots. At the academy, as the faces created by students took shape, the room began to take on the feeling of a hallowed space. "It's kind of eerie," said Michael Fusco, 30, a student whose specialty is painting. "They become people." Two of the eight migrants wound up being identified independently of the class. But the desert still contains untold numbers of the missing. For Mr. Mullins, the class represents a potential to bring closure to loved ones of those who perished, perhaps while seeking a better life. "It was a gamble that cost them their lives," Mr. Mullins said. "But it shouldn't have to cost them their identity." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The Senate voted 72 to 18 to confirm Dr. Stephen Hahn as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, as the agency faces pressure to reduce teenage vaping and weighs competing interests on a long delayed proposal to ban flavored e cigarettes. Dr. Hahn, chief medical executive at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, was nominated by President Trump to replace Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who left the post in the spring. Since then, the F.D.A. has been run by two acting commissioners. In two recent appearances before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Dr. Hahn, 59, sidestepped questions on whether he supports the F.D.A.'s proposal to ban most flavored e cigarettes. Although President Trump promised to do so in September, he has since backed away from that plan, flummoxing public health lobbyists and industry executives alike. Under tough questioning by Democrats, Dr. Hahn said repeatedly that he would use the best science to make regulatory decisions. But he stopped short of saying whether he supported the agency's original proposal. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The debate over how, when and why the Canary Islands were first populated arose in part from records made by Europeans in the 1400s, which claimed the native Canarians had no navigational skills. The texts have led scholars to wonder how the indigenous people, who consist of several different tribes such as the Guanches and Bimbapes, reached the islands. Were they brought by Romans or Carthaginians, or did they have the means and ability to sail there themselves? "The case of the Canary Islands is of particular interest because the indigenous culture and language was lost after the European colonization, complicating our ability to know more about the past," said Laura Botigue, an expert in North African genetics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who was not involved in the study. To investigate the early peopling of the Canary Islands before Europeans arrived and introduced the slave trade, Dr. Fregel and her colleagues collected nearly 50 mitochondrial genomes from remains at 25 sites. Mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from one's mother who inherited it from their mother and so on, offer population geneticists clues to help decipher ancient human migrations . Most of the sites were radiocarbon dated between approximately 150 and 1400 C.E., although a couple of them came after post conquest periods. "In the Canary Islands indigenous people, we find typical North African lineages, but also some other lineages with a Mediterranean distribution, and also some lineages that are of sub Saharan African origin," Dr. Fregel said. That fits with the archaeological and genetic history of North Africa, she said: Previous studies have shown that by the time the Canary Islands were inhabited, Berbers from North Africa had already mixed with Mediterranean and sub Saharan African groups. In their analysis, the team found that some of the islands did not have much genetic diversity, whereas others had a great deal, indicating that these ancient populations may have been large. The researchers found lineages that were known only from the central part of North Africa, as well as more common lineages from other parts of North Africa, Europe and the Near East. The team also found four new lineages exclusive to Gran Canaria and two eastern islands. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Frustratingly fuzzy and intermittently provocative, "XY Chelsea" profiles Chelsea Manning, the U.S. Army analyst who leaked cascades of classified documents to WikiLeaks in 2010. Picking up as Manning's 35 year prison sentence is commuted by President Obama in 2017, Tim Travers Hawkins's good looking documentary features more glamour shots than psychological insights. Manning's turbulent, remarkable story including a troubled Oklahoma childhood with heavy drinking parents, two suicide attempts and seven years in an all male prison while transitioning to a woman is a nonfiction filmmaker's dream. Hawkins, however, seems content to hover on its surface, a decision that, depending on your viewpoint, feels either cowardly or humane. Certainly, when The New Yorker's Larissa MacFarquhar interviews Manning (who's currently back in jail for refusing to testify in the WikiLeaks inquiry) and tries to delve deeper, her subject appears visibly rattled. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
WASHINGTON Emily Strzelecki, a first year science teacher here, was about as eager for a classroom visit by one of the city's roving teacher evaluators as she would be to get a tooth drilled. "It really stressed me out because, oh my gosh, I could lose my job," Ms. Strzelecki said. Her fears were not unfounded: 165 Washington teachers were fired last year based on a pioneering evaluation system that places significant emphasis on classroom observations; next month, 200 to 600 of the city's 4,200 educators are expected to get similar bad news, in the nation's highest rate of dismissal for poor performance. The evaluation system, known as Impact, is disliked by many unionized teachers but has become a model for many educators. Spurred by President Obama and his 5 billion Race to the Top grant competition, some 20 states, including New York, and thousands of school districts are overhauling the way they grade teachers, and many have sent people to study Impact. Its admirers say the system, a centerpiece of the tempestuous three year tenure of Washington's former schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, has brought clear teaching standards to a district that lacked them and is setting a new standard by establishing dismissal as a consequence of ineffective teaching. But some educators say it is better at sorting and firing teachers than at helping struggling ones; they note that the system does not consider socioeconomic factors in most cases and that last year 35 percent of the teachers in the city's wealthiest area, Ward 3, were rated highly effective, compared with 5 percent in Ward 8, the poorest. "Teachers have to be parents, priests, lawyers, clothes washers, babysitters and a bunch of other things" if they work with low income children, said Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers Union. "Impact takes none of those roles into account, so it can penalize you just for teaching in a high needs school." Jason Kamras, the architect of the system, said "it's too early to answer" whether Impact makes it easier for teachers in well off neighborhoods to do well, but pointed out that Washington's compensation system offers bigger bonuses ( 25,000 versus 12,500) and salary enhancements in high poverty schools. "We take very seriously the distribution of high quality teachers across the system," he said. The evaluation system leans heavily on student test scores to judge about 500 math and reading teachers in grades four to eight. Ratings for the rest of the city's 3,600 teachers are determined mostly by five classroom observations annually, three by their principal and two by so called master educators, most recruited from outside Washington. For classroom observations, nine criteria "explain content clearly," "maximize instructional time" and "check for student understanding," for example are used to rate the lesson as highly effective, effective, minimally effective or ineffective. These five observations combine to form 75 percent of these teachers' overall ratings; the rest is based on achievement data and the teachers' commitment to their school communities. Ineffective teachers face dismissal. Minimally effective ones get a year to improve. Impact costs the city 7 million a year, including pay for 41 master educators, who earn about 90,000 a year and conduct about 170 observations each. The program also asks more of principals. Carolyne Albert Garvey, the principal of Maury Elementary School on Capitol Hill, has 22 teachers she must conduct 66 observations, about one every three school days. "I've really gotten to know my staff, and I'm giving teachers more specific feedback," Ms. Albert Garvey said. "It's empowered me to have the difficult conversations, and that gives everyone the opportunity to improve." Several teachers, however, said they considered their ratings unfair. A veteran teacher who said he did not want to criticize the school system openly, said that a month after he inherited a chaotic world history class from a long term substitute, the visiting evaluator cut him no slack for taking on the assignment and penalized him because a student was texting during the lesson. Another teacher who expects to lose her job next month because of low ratings said at a public hearing that evaluators picked apart her seventh grade geography lessons, making criticisms she considered trivial. During the most recent observation, her evaluator subtracted points because she had failed to notice a girl eating during class, the teacher said. "I'm 25 years in the system, and before, I always got outstanding ratings," she said. "How can you go overnight from outstanding to minimally effective?" A report issued by the Aspen Institute in March said one of Impact's accomplishments was to align teacher performance with student performance, noting that previously 95 percent of Washington's teachers were highly rated but fewer than half of its students were demonstrating proficiency on tests. Still, the report quoted teachers who complained of cold eyed evaluators more interested in identifying losers than in developing winners. "After my first conversation with my master educator, I felt it was going to be worthwhile she offered me some good resources," the report quoted one teacher. "My second master educator was kind of a robot, not generous in offering assistance, a much tougher grader." This month, Mary Gloster, who taught science in three states before she was recruited to Impact in 2009, was at Ballou High, one of the city's lowest performing schools, to share the results of some classroom visits. She met with Mahmood Dorosti, a physics teacher who won a 5,000 award this spring. "Don't even think about it you're highly effective," she told him. Next was Ms. Strzelecki, 23, who came to Ballou through Teach for America. The two sat at adjoining desks, with Ms. Strzelecki looking a bit like a doe in the headlights. But Ms. Gloster, who had watched her teach a ninth grade biology lesson the week before, offered compliments, along with suggestions about how Ms. Strzelecki might provide differentiated teaching for advanced and struggling students. "You did a really good job, kiddo," the evaluator ruled, grading her as effective, the equivalent of a B (the same rating she got on previous observations). "What I liked about Mary was that I felt she was on my side," Ms. Strzelecki said later. "Some teachers feel the master educators are out to get them." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
PLAYING safe with your investments doesn't pay these days. United States Treasury bonds and other high grade bonds used to be the safe way for older investors to generate income in their portfolios. But yields on these bonds are now so low, they are not generating much income. The Federal Reserve's announcement on Wednesday that short term interest rates would remain close to zero through 2014 confirmed that there was little hope in the near term for much change in bond income. But it is not easy to find something to replace that income. Other options are not nearly as safe. The wild gyrations in the stock market at the end of last year further unsettled investors who did not need much to remind them of their losses from 2008. "We think the search for yield will continue for a few structural reasons," Barbara M. Reinhard, chief investment strategist at Credit Suisse's private bank, said. The first, she said, is low interest rates. But the second reason is what keeps many retirees awake at night. "You have this aging population in the U.S. saying: 'I need to supplement my retirement through income generation. My life expectancy is long. I retired at 65, but I could live another 18, 20 years,' " Ms. Reinhard said. So what can investors, particularly those nearing or in retirement, do to guarantee a big enough and regular stream of income? Here is a look at three variations. LESS RISK It may seem obvious, but low risk means lower return. Tom McNulty in Scottsdale, Ariz., who worked in the automobile and mortgage businesses before retiring six years ago, found an adviser who practiced a variation on this theme. Mr. McNulty said he depended on income from his portfolio for about 70 percent of the living expenses for him and his wife, Peggy. His adviser keeps four years of expenses in safe but low yielding bonds, leaving the rest of the portfolio to grow. "It wasn't just providing us the income but protecting the asset base we did have," Mr. McNulty said. "We hope to live another 20 or 30 years. We learned that 70 30 in stocks and bonds in the accumulation phase and reversing it in the distribution phase is just not going to work." Jeremy A. Kisner, president of Sure Vest Capital Management, which works with Mr. McNulty, said his firm wanted clients to feel as if they had a pension even if they did not. "What we've found is that retirees who have a pension sleep really well at night and they're happy," he said. "The clients who don't have that worry about running out of money, no matter how much money they have. We try to create a pension for them." Mr. Kisner said his firm settled on putting aside four years of income for two reasons: If the growth part of the portfolio has a down year, money will not have to be moved into the safe assets, and the firm found that five years of safe money was too much, given the need to increase the rest of the portfolio through retirement. "The strategy of 'I'm just going to live off this interest' was never the right strategy," Mr. Kisner said. "This low interest environment has laid that bare." MORE INCOME Henry Fleischer, a retired engineer who lives outside Detroit, has opted for a strategy that will provide more income now, require him to dip less into the principal of his retirement account and still have little exposure to equities. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' His sizable nest egg is divided among investments in three income producing assets: real estate investment trusts, master limited partnerships most commonly companies involved in the transportation of natural resources and annuities. "We don't need to be superaggressive," said David B. White, his adviser, who runs David B. White Financial. "We don't want the volatility of the stock market." Last year, REITs had yields of 4.5 percent, according to the FTSE Nareit index, and master limited partnerships had 5.6 percent yields, according to the Alerian MLP index. But neither is risk free. Another downturn and collapse in the rental market could hurt REITs, and master limited partnerships can be volatile; they fell as much as the equity markets in 2008. What is telling about these nervous times is that Mr. Fleischer should not have to worry. He is 89, and while he wants to make sure his wife has enough money if he dies first, he is less concerned about his two sons, who are successful and self sufficient. Still, his portfolio lets him sleep well. "When times are good, I kind of feel badly about it," because he feels he isn't participating in the rising market, Mr. Fleischer said. "When there are downturns, I'm very pleased. I make sure that greed doesn't overtake me." A BALANCE Simon R. C. Wadsworth, 64, made his money in the real estate business. He retired in 2009 as the chief financial officer of MAA, a REIT focused on apartments. While Mr. Wadsworth, who lives in Memphis, has much of his wealth still tied up in real estate, he says he thinks preferred REIT stocks, a niche among REITs, are a good source of income in retirement. On average, the preferred stocks yield about 7 percent, against 3 percent for regular REIT stocks. But dividends are fixed for preferred REIT shares. So if inflation goes up, the payment stays the same. And REITs can buy back the preferred shares after five years, usually because they can sell new ones with lower yields. Yet Mr. Wadsworth said preferred shares account for only about 7 percent of his income generating portfolio. That is not because of the risks associated with them. Rather, he said, "you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket." His view could become the prevailing one in an era without pensions and guarantees of income. Just as assets need to be allocated when people are looking to accumulate wealth, they need to be spread out as people spend the money they made in their working lives. Karen H. Wimbish, director of the retail retirement group at Wells Fargo Advisors, said people nearing or in retirement should think of their money as coming from three distinct sources: guaranteed income, stable income and what can be left to grow over time. Right now, all three sources might understandably leave people feeling unsettled. She said there were fewer sources of guaranteed income pensions, Social Security and annuities are three and anything with stable income, like bonds, has low returns. Still, she noted, interest rates cannot stay this low forever, so it will be important for retirees to be more flexible in the future. When the economy picks up, they will have to rethink how their retirement assets are allocated. Keeping people patient until then could be tough, though. Joel Isaacson, founder of an investment firm of the same name, said investors too often look to buy something just because it has a high yield, without understanding the risks. "One of the things in this type of market is, people get desperate," said Mr. Isaacson, whose firm handles 4 billion in investments. "This is where you see a lot of elder fraud, where people look for 'too good to be true.' " He said there was no silver bullet to replace the high yielding bonds of the past, unless you count Apple stock. "If you look at the news today, the only thing you should really do is buy Apple stock," Mr. Isaacson said after the company reported record quarterly earnings this week. Alas, Apple doesn't pay a dividend. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
It Could Be the Age of the Chicken, Geologically None A poultry farm in South Africa. There are at least 10 times more chickens on Earth than any other bird. It's one thing to eat chicken every day. It's something else to have that on your permanent record, as in the geological record, the remnants of our time that archaeologists or aliens of the future will sift through to determine who we were and how we shaped our world. But a group of scientists argue in a new essay published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science that this is exactly how our time on Earth will be marked, by leftover chicken bones. We live in the Age of the Chicken. There are about 23 billion chickens on Earth at any given time, at least ten times more than any other bird, forty times the number of sparrows. The second most numerous bird on the planet, at an estimated population of 1.5 billion, is a small creature called the red billed quelea, sometimes known in its home of sub Saharan Africa as a feathered locust. The combined mass of those 23 billion chickens is greater than that of all the other birds on Earth. But, said Carys Bennett, an honorary fellow at the University of Leicester and one of the authors of the essay, it's not only the mind boggling numbers of chickens that will tell a tale of our times, but their shape, genes and chemistry. "We have changed the actual biology of the chicken," she said. Chickens seem to have been domesticated about 8,000 years ago, and gradually bred to be larger and meatier than their jungle fowl ancestors. But it wasn't until production of broilers ramped up in the 1950s and farming practices changed that the bird was transformed. The modern broiler chicken, with an average life until slaughter of a scant five to nine weeks, by various estimates, has five times the mass of its ancestor. It has a genetic mutation that makes it eat insatiably so that it gains weight rapidly. It is subject to numerous bone ailments because it has been bred to grow so quickly. And because of its diet heavy on grains and low on back yard seeds and bugs its bones have a distinct chemical signature. Chicks recently separated from the eggs they hatched from at a Perdue chicken farm in Candor, N.C. Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times The broiler is also completely dependent on and designed for an industrial system of meat production. It can only live supported by human technology. Eggs are artificially incubated and chicks grow in climate controlled sheds of up to 50,000 chickens, the scientists write. The chickens are transported to slaughterhouses at no older than nine weeks (broilers at some farm animal sanctuaries live four years or more) "where most waste products (feathers, manure, blood etc.) are recycled via anaerobic digestion, incineration and rendering into edible byproducts, all technology dependent." Chicken potpie anyone? There is, of course a question about how well all the leftover chicken bones, from the 65 billion or so chickens consumed each year, will be preserved in the fossil record. Bird bones don't fossilize well. But many chicken bones go to landfills, where they become mummified as much as fossilized. And there are so, so, so many bones. The big issue, of course, is what all these chicken bones say about us. The essay did not take a position on this question, leaving it up to the reader. "Some people would say this is an amazing technological innovation," Dr. Bennett said. Indeed, Tom Super, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council, an industry group, said that the production of chickens, in the U.S. at least, is a great success "in terms of efficiency, the welfare of the birds and responsibly producing more meat with fewer resources." On the other side, Lori Gruen, a philosophy professor at Wesleyan University and advocate for animal welfare, said that it was "hard to see this human caused transmogrification that purposely disables these birds from birth as something to be proud of." Of course, archaeologists of the future won't just find chicken bones. There will be plastics, and concrete and other so called technofossils. There will be radiation signatures in the rocks from nuclear tests. All of these will be markers of what some scientists call the Anthropocene epoch, the Age of Humans. But the single most identifiable and significant biological remnant, these scientists argue, the lasting sign of how we changed the living world, will be the broiler chicken, in its numbers and strangeness. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Symbols their meaning, history and power to hurt have been a volatile topic across the country this summer, and college campuses have not escaped the storm. The Confederate flag became a target of outrage after the massacre of nine African Americans at a historic church in Charleston, S.C., and the emergence of photos of the accused gunman waving the flag. Amid calls to remove the symbol from the South Carolina Statehouse grounds, statues of Civil War figures at campuses in Chapel Hill, N.C., and Austin, Tex., were spray painted with the message "Black Lives Matter." Symbols associated with bias and oppression have, in fact, been a flash point on campuses for years. Months before the killings, the student government of the University of Texas had passed a resolution demanding that the statue of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, be removed from the Main Mall. The statue was one of three vandalized in June, leading the university to form a task force to evaluate its statuary. Several recent examples illustrate the conundrum universities face. Last semester, a Jewish student at the George Washington University placed a small bronze swastika on the bulletin board at his historically Jewish fraternity. He was suspended and the case referred to the police as a possible hate crime. While there have been numerous instances of swastikas drawn as anti Semitic intimidation, in this case the object was not the Nazi emblem but a variant, a Hindu and Buddhist sign of auspiciousness. In May, the student was allowed to return to school but on disciplinary probation. Another image of racism a noose hanging from a branch, on the Duke campus led to an outcry in April when the university accepted the apology from the student who put it up. The student said he had been creating a visual pun on "hanging out" with friends and was ignorant of its association with lynching. The questions are complicated: What should students be exposed to? Does context matter in displaying that which offends? How should universities respond and, particularly in the South, what to do about symbols that are intertwined with a campus's history and identity? Colleges must acknowledge that memorials to slavery advocates "might be hurtful to their students and should take proactive measures to remove them or address these sentiments," says Mitchell J. Chang, a professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose research focuses on campus diversity programs. "For African American students, these are reminders that they are second class citizens, that there's a certain racial order in the country's history and that it's still playing out on campus." Students who display imagery that offends, he says, would benefit from the "teachable moments" that can ensue if they are challenged, he says. Last fall, two women at Bryn Mawr mounted a Confederate flag in their dormitory as an expression of Southern pride and declined to take it down until angry demonstrations erupted. "Students are often naive about what that flag means to other people, that others may view it as very aggressive behavior," Dr. Chang says. "This is why students come to college, to learn that their interpretation of a symbol may not be universally shared by everyone. By the time they leave college, they should understand what the repercussions may be." Echoing that view, Benjamin D. Reese Jr., a vice president and chief diversity officer at Duke, emphasizes that in a multicultural world, students need to understand the nuanced "difference between intention and impact." A Hindu sign of auspiciousness, left, and the Nazi swastika, symbols that caused confusion at George Washington University. The student at the George Washington University who put up the swastika had told friends that after a trip to India he was intrigued that a beneficent symbol could be transformed into one of bigotry and wanted to hash it out with fellow students. But critics suggested that a swastika unexplained has the power to instill fear and intimidate students who are a minority on their campuses and far from the cushioning of home. Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, says objectionable symbols can be part of a university's two missions: instruction illustrating, say, lessons about the Second World War or Civil War and research. "Otherwise," he says, "the university should have a fair amount of discretion in regulating the use of symbols" and "is fully justified in imposing rules that respect the sensitivity of students." "Most students," he says, "are away from home for the first time and not used to living on their own." Young students need to be prepared for real world hostilities "in a gradual way." If these had been graduate students, he believes, "there's a stronger argument for letting anything go." Those who take a more expansive view of free speech insist that officials often overreact in their eagerness not to offend. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education was quick to remind the George Washington University that even Nazi style swastikas are protected by the First Amendment. State schools cannot ban them under constitutional free speech protections unless displayed in the course of an illegality, like vandalism or "a threat of imminent violence," says John F. Banzhaf III, a professor of law at G.W. While the courts have given private organizations more leeway, he says, as a practical matter private colleges would also be subject to the constitutional law because their handbooks boast of respecting free speech. And no crime had been committed by the G.W. student to justify the president's call for a hate crime investigation, Mr. Banzhaf says, acknowledging that the president, Stephen Knapp, might have acted reflexively after being criticized just a few weeks earlier for not responding forcefully to swastika vandalism. What would one do, he wonders, if a Hindu student displayed a swastika as a spiritual statement of hopefulness? Free speech advocates worry that such excessive caution regarding uncomfortable iconography will dovetail with the contemporary trend of alerting students to potentially disturbing material so called trigger warnings. "We're in a period of hysteria about words and symbols and an inability to understand the context in which words and symbols are used," says Wendy Kaminer, a lawyer and free speech advocate. Referring to the student's desire to stimulate discussion by displaying a swastika, educators note that this is precisely the kind of thorny exercise universities must foster. For a time, at least, the University of Texas's Confederate statuary is inspiring just such a debate. Two campuswide forums have been held on moving Jefferson Davis's likeness, and its task force is commissioned "to analyze the artistic, social and political intent of the statuary," as well as the "university's role as an educational and research institution." Update: In mid August, the university decided to move the Davis statue from the mall to its American history museum; other statues of Confederate leaders were to remain. Mark Auslander, professor of anthropology at Central Washington University and author of "The Accidental Slave owner," sees the iconography as a springboard for "critically examining history." Virtually every venerable university has links to the slave trade, he says, so "there's no way you can purify that history and deny it." Besides, he says, universities exist to forge "enlightened citizens and moral leaders who have the capacity to listen to each other and arrive at reasoned judgments, and to understand the relationship between hate speech and free speech." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
On a scrap of paper in the archive is written I have forgotten my umbrella. Turns out in a pandemic everyone, not just the philosopher, is without. We scramble in the drought of information held back by inside traders. Drop by drop. Face covering? No, yes. Social distancing? Six feet under for underlying conditions. Black. Just us and the blues kneeling on a neck with the full weight of a man in blue. Eight minutes and forty six seconds. In extremis, I can't breathe gives way to asphyxiation, to giving up this world, and then mama, called to, a call to protest, fire, glass, say their names, say their names, white silence equals violence, the violence of again, a militarized police force teargassing, bullets ricochet, and civil unrest taking it, burning it down. Whatever contracts keep us social compel us now to disorder the disorder. Peace. We're out to repair the future. There's an umbrella by the door, not for yesterday but for the weather that's here. I say weather but I mean a form of governing that deals out death and names it living. I say weather but I mean a November that won't be held off. This time nothing, no one forgotten. We are here for the storm that's storming because what's taken matters. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
In several ways, Pam Tanowitz's "Broken Story (wherein there is no ecstasy)" is accurately titled. The parenthetical phrase might mislead, though. The work, which had its premiere at the Guggenheim Museum on Sunday as part of the Works Process series, does have droll fun tweaking dance traditions of romantic fulfillment. But Ms. Tanowitz and her collaborators maintain such a high level of imagination that what is fragmented by design can be experienced as a satisfying, organic whole. Ecstatic is a good word for how it made me feel. "Broken Story" was broken in conception. The composer David Lang, rather than contributing a full length score, wrote a short piece and invited three of his former students (Hannah Lash, Caroline Shaw and Ted Hearne) to supply short pieces of their own. The resulting works, all for string quartet, are inventive, bristling with the sounds of bows bounced and strings twanged and rubbed. Vividly rendered by the unflappable Flux Quartet, the individual scores share a skeptical attitude, melting down romantic themes, but they are separate, and it takes Ms. Tanowitz to thread them together with the variegated dynamics of her unpredictable steps. She has help in resourceful lighting design by Davison Scandrett and costumes by Reid Bartelme that combine flat Color Field shapes with translucent shimmer. Her dancers (Lindsey Jones, Maggie Cloud, Dylan Crossman, Stuart Singer and Melissa Toogood) could hardly be better. But most significant is the extra preparation time that the Guggenheim allowed her in its small and idiosyncratic theater. She makes the best use of it that I have ever seen. Indicative of her wit is how a safety railing can function as a barre or a dancer can check his balance with the underside of a low overhanging balcony. Entrances and exits, as from an odd, high set door, are both comically and dramatically surprising. The dancers venture out on a semicircular path that arcs from the stage through the audience area and back. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Crime fiction has long been fascinated by the fuzzy line between crooked cops and the criminals they are meant to chase. The new French film "Rogue City" tramples it, positing that corruption is pervasive and we live in a hopeless, brutal world from which there is no escape. It's a bleak vision that makes Olivier Marchal's movie radical in its nihilism. Unfortunately, "Rogue City," which is streaming on Netflix, is also an ineffectual muddle. This is somewhat surprising coming from Marchal, a former police officer turned writer director who displayed storytelling chops while exploring murky moral quandaries in both features like "36th Precinct" and entertainingly gonzo series like "Braquo." Here it's hard to tell what's going on and, by extension, care in a war between rival police factions and rival gangs duking it out in Marseille. (The original title is "Bronx," the borough name having become French slang for a messy situation.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
It takes some gumption for a designer to announce, just days before the opening of the Metropolitan Museum's costume extravaganza celebrating the ubiquity of "camp," that "reality is what interested her. Because everything now is too much: too complicated, too sophisticated." Too angry, Miuccia Prada could have added. Too gilded. Too full of distortion. "Simplicity is a kind of protest," she said. But then, Ms. Prada has never been afraid of a little dissonance, aesthetic or conceptual. Bringing her resort collection to New York for the second year in a row, she proved it. Prada is one of the few brands that has not joined the current trend toward renouncing exotic skins and fancy pelts, though it looked as if there was only a single sheepskin coat on the runway. And none of the guests, who included Naomi Watts, Lee Daniels, Uma Thurman and a bunch of the "Stranger Things" kids, were wearing fur. So guests could be forgiven for wondering what, exactly, the picketers were protesting: a general sense of wrongdoing, perhaps. The inchoate yelling did kind of underscore Mrs. Prada's point. "In moments of difficulty," she said after the show, "the only way to survive is being yourself." So that's why she held the collection in her "home," with its views over the Hudson River, and that's what she expressed in her clothes. Going back to the awkward elegance that originally defined her approach to dress, she layered neatly tailored double breasted coats and long blazers over high necked cotton tunics, often sprinkled with naive pastel flowers, and themselves worn long and loose atop A line pleated skirts. Everything was paired with thick ribbed socks scrunched at the ankle and high top Prada sneakers or wedges. Often, there was a skinny ribbed scarf covered in paillettes tossed around the neck. The air was youthful, without insisting on being young. It didn't try too hard. "Meh," said this show and these clothes. There is enough to think about in the world at the moment without freaking out over what you wear. Who needs slogans, when you have dad closet shirting? "Intellectually, I am very worried," Ms. Prada said as her celebrity invitees came over to pay their respects. ("Who is that one?" she asked after one newly minted star had been presented; everyone around her shrugged.) "Sometimes, as a designer, you feel you always have to impress and to please. But I think you need to do what is right for the moment." This the offhand provocation of dowdiness, the refusal to perform for the eye of the beholder was her gauntlet, and she threw it down with aplomb. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
NEW DELHI Nandan Nilekani, a co founder of one of India's biggest information technology services companies, is an older billionaire but a young investor. In his nearly 30 years of starting and then building up Infosys, he did not have the time to focus on investing anywhere else, he said. Not to mention that most of his wealth was tied up in the company. His next step was public service, as he set up India's unique identification system, where, once again, he did not have the luxury to think about personal investments. Now that he is finally a free man at the age of 61, he is more focused on what to do with his money. Mr. Nilekani says he is concerned about the bad debt piling up on the balance sheets of banks in India, but he worries more about an increase in anti globalization sentiment. "Between 'Brexit' and Trump, are we entering a world that's less enchanted with globalization?" he asked. His concern is because of his continuing investment in Infosys, which has a strong global exposure with nearly 90 percent of its revenue coming from the United States and Europe. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
THE GEOGRAPHY OF RISK Epic Storms, Rising Seas, and the Cost of America's Coasts By Gilbert M. Gaul Hurricanes and other coastal storms create more costly damage than do earthquakes, tornadoes and wildfires combined, and 17 of the 20 most destructive hurricanes in history have occurred since 2000. At the moment of this writing, Hurricane Dorian, a Category 5 storm at its strongest, has pummeled the Bahamas and is heading toward the Southeast of the United States. Past storms have pitched houses into forests half a mile away or submerged them beneath the sea. Doors and windows jut from the sand "like weathered dinosaur bones," we're told by the two time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Gilbert M. Gaul in this carefully researched and eye opening book. But astonishingly, between 1970 and 2010, in coastal floodplains that are among "the most ecologically fragile and dangerous places on earth," real estate values have risen and the population expanded. How could this be? Through a strange, post disaster land rush, Gaul explains, speculators and repeat developers busily rebuild "the riskiest and costliest houses" as part of what he calls "disaster capitalism." "It is growing like crazy, especially after Sandy," one mayor tells him. Encouraging such capitalists, Gaul argues, is the federal government, which has removed personal risk from that which is risky. In 1950, it paid 5 percent of post hurricane rebuilding costs, he notes, but now pays 70 percent and in some cases 100 percent. And one out of every three federally insured properties is a beach house, an investment property or second home. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Ford announced Wednesday that it had developed its largest air bag for the 15 passenger Transit van. At nearly 15 feet long and 3 feet tall, the air bag relies upon two inflaters to fill its 11 gallon volume in a fraction of a second, staying inflated for several seconds, the automaker said. A series of sensors activates the inflaters during a crash. The giant air bag, which is made from a coated, polyester cloth, is supported by the vehicle's B, C and D pillars. Edward Saenz, a spokesman for Ford, said that TRW Automotive builds and supplies the inflaters for the air bag and said that TRW was not involved with the recent industrywide air bag recalls. As automotive safety features become more capable of protecting vehicle occupants, side curtain air bags, which are designed to provide head and neck protection in rollover and side impact collisions, have become popular. Many automakers offer them as a standard safety feature, even on their entry level models. Ford offers side impact air bags as standard features on some of its most popular models, including the Fusion sedan, Fiesta compact and Super Duty trucks. The Transit vans also come standard with front seat side air bags and a stability control system to help prevent rollovers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Duncan Campbell made his fortune with a timber investment fund he started in 1981 and sold eight years later. But he never forgot his difficult childhood in Portland, Ore., with alcoholic parents and a father who was in and out of prison twice. So when he had the time and wherewithal to devote to philanthropy in 1993, he said, he chose to tackle a problem he knew about: improving the lives of children at greatest risk not the top students at underperforming schools, but the struggling ones who faced multiple impediments to success. That is the story behind Friends of the Children, which began in Portland and is now in 15 cities with plans to be in 10 more by 2025. "Our core model is to take the most at risk or most vulnerable child," Mr. Campbell said. "If there are 100 kindergarten kids, we ask for the eight most troubled, most challenging ones." The organization has won plaudits from groups like the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a philanthropy for poor children, and researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington. The organization has managed to address three persistent challenges that philanthropists at all levels face. How can private money meaningfully influence a societal problem? How can successes be replicated? And how do you get other philanthropists to support what was essentially your idea? Mr. Campbell said he wanted to give a sense of stability to children who may not have it at home. His organization hires a mentor, or friend, to work with just eight children, who are selected in kindergarten and are expected to remain with the program until they finish high school. The cost per child each year works out to about 10,000. The friends are paid a wage equivalent to or slightly higher than teachers' salaries in the first years of their careers. And they spend four hours every week with each of their eight students two hours in the classroom and two helping them in a variety of activities, such as doing homework and going to museums and sporting events they couldn't afford. From the start, Friends of Children logged data for all of these activities to get a sense of what was working and what wasn't. It found that the intensive interaction helped build trust, increased the children's positive social behavior and was more likely to keep the children out of trouble. In many cases, the children's relationship with their parent or caregiver improved. A recent study by researchers at the University of Washington and Washington State University found that the paid mentor approach provided children and their caregivers with a "consistency and continuity" that was critical to the program's success. But the data wasn't always positive. The selection of who got to be mentors made a difference. They had to value education. They also had to be empathetic. One person "did a great interview, but after first six or nine months he wasn't connecting with the children," Mr. Campbell said. "He eventually became a parole officer." After the program had success in Portland, it began to expand to other cities with a ready made offering. "When we go to new cities, as long as they keep the core, we're willing to let them experiment with it," Mr. Campbell said. "It's fidelity to the model versus learning and adapting over the past 25 years." The Los Angeles chapter, for example, is focused on at risk children of people who grew up in the foster care system. The chapter in Austin, Tex., was the first to translate all the materials into Spanish and hired native Spanish speakers as mentors. The one in Chicago focused on the problem of gang violence. "We've had different community solutions within the same program," said Terri Sorensen, chief executive of Friends of the Children. "Focus is so important," she said. "Nonprofits stretch themselves too thin." At the same time, Ms. Jonker said, the national organization knew what it could do well for all the chapters centralized data collection, marketing, accounting and other back office work and allowed chapters to adapt to their communities. "Frequently, tensions tear apart nonprofits," she said. The national organization reached out to professionals who were already established in the cities where there was interest in starting a chapter. The executive director of the Los Angeles chapter, Thomas Lee, had 20 years of experience in child welfare there before joining Friends last year. Mr. Lee was skeptical of the program at first, he said, but was won over by the small mentor to child ratio, the competitive pay that would attract qualified candidates and the organization's ability to retain mentors for seven years, on average. "It's better not to have a mentor than to have one for a short time," he said. "It's common for some kids to bounce around foster home to foster home six, eight, 15 times. That doesn't help create the strategies for long term success that we'd want." James Tyrrell, 29, went through the Friends program in Portland and had the same mentor, John Foster, the entire time. He credits it with helping him deal with the murder of his father when he was 2, his mother's leaving him with her parents and addiction problems in his family. "It was consistency with that one positive adult in my life," said Mr. Tyrrell, a court clerk south of Portland. "If I didn't have him, I don't know where I'd be." He added that his mentor had told him, "You know where this path leads, and you can go for it, but why not try this one over here?" That's what he did, said Mr. Tyrrell, who graduated from college, moved away from his family and now has a wife and two children. David Shapiro, chief executive of Mentor: The National Mentoring Partnership and a board member of Friends, said that Friends chose its mentors well but that mass producing those bonds was difficult. "It's much easier at a McDonald's to say, 'Wear the uniform, and cook the fries at 112 degrees,'" Mr. Shapiro said. "With humans, it's a lot more difficult to standardize things, and every human service agency is trying to figure that out now." One of the criticisms of Friends is how expensive it is to reach one child in a given year, let alone over 12 1/2 years. And getting other donors to give money to someone else's idea is also difficult. Friends has succeeded with donors who are driven by data and measurable results. It may also help that the charity focuses its marketing material on what it has achieved and aims to do, not on Mr. Campbell's largess. The organization also requires every chapter to raise three years of operating expenses about 1.5 million before it can start work. No more than 40 percent of that money can come from one person, to ensure that the program has broad support. Most recently, Friends received a multimillion dollar grant over several years from the basketball great Michael Jordan that will go toward chapters in Chicago and Charlotte, N.C. It has received funding in Seattle and Los Angeles from the former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer and his wife, Connie. Rachel Arnold, a partner at the private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, helped start a chapter in Austin, Tex., with her friend Nancy Pollard by raising 1.8 million from 50 families. "Most of the donors hadn't given to a program like this before," Ms. Arnold said. "We got donors on both sides of the political spectrum. It had that broad appeal and data behind it." Since 2017, when the chapter started, Ms. Arnold's group has raised 4 million. "If I'm going to invest my time and money into a program, I want to see that impact," she said. "It also really resonated," she added, because "I know it to be true that it only takes one person to change a child's life." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
How Weird Were the Tony Nods? Well, How Weird Was the Season? None Daniel J. Watts and Adrienne Warren were both singled out for their roles in "Tina The Tina Turner Musical," but nominators missed a chance to consider Watts as a lead actor for playing Ike Turner. Follow live updates from the 74th Tony Awards and the 2021 winners list. How does it feel to be an asterisk? That was going to be the question particularly for musicals however the Tony Award nominations turned out. In a Broadway season cut short by a pandemic, with only 18 of perhaps 36 planned shows eligible, and not likely the best of them, the people and works honored in this morning's announcement were bound to be met with a "yes, but" shrug. Even the worthiest of them, and some were fully worthy, will go into the record books with unfortunate footnotes. It may not look that way at first from the numbers. In an ordinary season it would be exciting news that three new musicals swept up a whopping 41 nominations among them: 15 for "Jagged Little Pill," 14 for "Moulin Rouge! The Musical" and 12 for "Tina The Tina Turner Musical." But in a season with only four musicals to begin with, and one of them "The Lightning Thief" a dud, it's merely math. "The Lightning Thief," rightly shut out, left the other three shows to be nominated (sometimes more than once) in every category for which they were eligible. At least all three are reasonable contenders for best musical. But the nominators, facing an impossible situation, made choices in some of the other musical categories that can only be seen as desperate. It was not of course their fault that the award for best musical revival had to be eliminated; no musical revivals had opened as of the Feb. 19 cutoff. (Not coincidentally, the revival of "West Side Story" opened on Feb. 20.) But why not do the same for best actor in a leading role, a category that had only two possible nominees: Aaron Tveit in "Moulin Rouge" and Chris McCarrell in "The Lightning Thief"? An obscure rule, now forever to be known as the Tveit Exception, all but handed him the award without the pretense of a competition. To be fair, even if the season weren't interrupted, that category did not seem likely to cough up additional viable male candidates. For years, the musical leading man has been an endangered species, in part because the stars of musicals are now most often women. The most exciting competition this year is among the leading musical actresses: Karen Olivo, Elizabeth Stanley and Adrienne Warren. Next season's Tonys or rather those for 2021 22, since there surely won't be any for 2020 21 will at least have Hugh Jackman in "The Music Man" to tentpole the category, but he is the exception that proves the rule. What could the nominators have done? As long as the Tonys were rejiggering some rules to acknowledge the way Covid 19 had affected the season, why not rejigger others? Why not move the terrific Daniel J. Watts, who played Ike Turner in "Tina," from supporting actor to leading? That would have made at least as much sense as what happened in the best score category. Because three of the four new musicals were ineligible jukebox shows, and the fourth was, once again, "The Lightning Thief," the nominators chose to acknowledge music written for plays, including "Slave Play," "The Inheritance" and "The Sound Inside." Though all very effective, their elevation into the echelon of "Carousel" and "Hamilton," even if not unprecedented, comes off as a feeble gerrymander. The category should have been eliminated. From left, Zawe Ashton, Charlie Cox and Tom Hiddleston in the revival of Harold Pinter's "Betrayal." Both the production and Hiddleston were nominated for Tonys. Among plays, the nominations made a lot more sense, though of the four revivals, of which three were nominated, only one "Betrayal" was excellent. The 10 eligible new plays made a stronger bunch and a healthier contest. By "healthier" I mean they allowed for a slate of nominations more like that in an ordinary year, with lots to gossip about and parse. Why no Eileen Atkins in "The Height of the Storm" or Zawe Ashton in "Betrayal"? Celebrity nominations for Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge (in "Sea Wall/A Life") but not for Michael Shannon in "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune"? And how could Paul Alexander Nolan, so excruciatingly good in "Slave Play," fail to be noticed when five of his seven castmates were? Where's the ensemble award when you need it? These are the kinds of arguments we're supposed to have when the nominations are announced. But don't think the problem is just the pandemic. In ordinary seasons it's hard enough to fill these categories if exceptional excellence is the criterion; in this season it was often impossible. The nominators did their best, but all they could ultimately demonstrate, besides indomitability, is a problem Broadway faces pandemic or no: With rare, thrilling exceptions, it's not good enough. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
"The Play That Goes Wrong," a British farce about an inept theater troupe's ill fated effort to stage a murder mystery, will close on Broadway this summer. The play, which began performances early last year, will play its final performance at the Lyceum Theater on Aug. 26, after 27 previews and 585 regular performances. The show won one Tony Award last year, for best scenic design of a play. The play's producers, led by Kevin McCollum and the filmmaker J.J. Abrams, said the comedy would begin a tour after the Broadway closing, starting in Pittsburgh in September. "The Play That Goes Wrong" was written by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields of the British company Mischief Theater, and directed by Mark Bell. It has been running in London for four years, and is also on tour in Britain. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Credit...Bon Duke for The New York Times Nothing is more of a buzz wrecker when you're talking about cool than talking about cool. It is not, after all, a quality one can anatomize or acquire. People possess it inherently or not at all, and those who have it are typically too smart to claim it. Those who lack it are well advised to find other virtues to cultivate. That Dao Yi Chow, 42, and Maxwell Osborne, 34, the designers who made their names with the streetwise label Public School, are cool has never been called into question. It is almost as much of a calling card as their skills at design. They grew up in New York Jackson Heights, Queens, for Mr. Chow; Kensington, Brooklyn, for Mr. Osborne and met in the early aughts at Sean Combs's streetwear label Sean John, where Mr. Chow was a senior executive and the younger Mr. Osborne an intern with no background or particular interest in design. The two hit it off, though, and when in 2005 Mr. Chow opened a fashion boutique in Miami called Arrive, he brought in his former colleague to help him start a private label for the store. They formed the label in 2008, calling it Public School in a nod to their city kid backgrounds. Almost from the first they found a ready reception not just from mainstream editors but also from the style bloggers and influencers who, even then, were making an impact on the industry. And while it took the pair a while to find their aesthetic footing, eventually they arrived at a signature style of layered, monochrome men's wear, clothes that added tailoring to familiar slouchy elements of athletic and urban wear, rejiggering them as a new kind of masculine uniform. The positive early critical reaction was matched by commercial success, and the two men neither of whom has formal design training were inducted into the inaugural group of the Council of Fashion Designers of America's incubator program in 2010. Then, in one of the abrupt changes of fortune so common in a fickle business, Public School was dropped by Barneys New York, which had accounted for more than half their orders, and Mr. Chow and Mr. Osborne shut the label down. They went on to score the 2014 CFDA Menswear Designer of the Year Award and the 2014/2015 International Woolmark Prize, simultaneously quadrupling the number of stores that carried the brand. Then, last year, Mr. Chow and Mr. Osborne became fashion's version of an indie band signed to a major label when they were tapped to be creative directors of DKNY, the accessible sibling line of Donna Karan International. At the time of their hiring, the French luxury conglomerate LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton owned the brand. But over the summer, LVMH agreed to sell Donna Karan to G III Apparel Group, a manufacturer based in New York's garment district that holds licensing agreements with Calvin Klein, Ivanka Trump, Levi's, Tommy Hilfiger and the National Football League. While LVMH and G III are completing the deal, Mr. Chow and Mr. Osborne will present their third DKNY collection at New York Fashion Week before a tough crowd. G III executives will be watching. So will the industry supporters who, while they are rooting for this duo, are aware that critics questioned whether this mainstream brand and designers known for their downtown cool are a natural match. Go hunting for the source of the cool that Mr. Osborne and Mr. Chow so effortlessly project, and before long you may find yourself at a 12 story former Con Edison substation on West 26th Street. There, in 1990, a small group of New Yorkers got together to create a club they named Building, which became a necessary outpost of New York night life. Though Mr. Osborne is too young to have made the scene at Building, Mr. Chow was a regular at the Thursday Night Train parties and Friday Powerhouse events where a dream roster (KRS One, Run DMC, De La Soul, Black Sheep, the Beastie Boys, Shabba Ranks, among many others) performed for a crowd that itself seems almost like an imaginary cross section of New Yorkers artists, photographers, designers, models, B boys, downtown girls and celebrities like Russell Simmons, Sofia Coppola, Madonna, Bjork and Pedro Almodovar. They were people famous for the old fashioned reason: They had actual accomplishments. "There was this sense of individuality then," Mr. Chow said on a recent rainy summer day. "Everyone was figuring out night life, figuring out the bits and pieces that defined who they were." Nursing an ear infection, Mr. Osborne propped his head on his hand. The angular and athletic Mr. Chow leaned forward on his elbows, looking half ready to pounce or to bolt. If the two felt the pressures of rejuvenating the fortunes of a label that is, for the moment, effectively between owners, while also sustaining the identity of their own brand, it didn't show. It probably helped that critics heaped praise on the most recent Public School collections. Their latest women's wear show, held in a blue chip art gallery that once housed the Roxy nightclub, "conjured New York City in its wild, pre gentrified days," Maya Singer wrote in Vogue. The Public School men's wear show that followed it extended and amplified that impression, riffing on references to '90s club wear: boiler suits and quilted parkas, leather Perfectos with floppy lapels, tunic type shirts with clear origins in oversize throwback jerseys, flat brimmed gunslinger hats. After some wobbly seasons during which it seemed as if the demands of nascent fashion stardom had separated the designers from their creative wellspring ("We kind of lost ourselves," Mr. Chow said), Public School appeared to find strength in a return to its aesthetic roots. "Part of myself had been running from who we were," Mr. Osborne said. "That was the first collection where we referenced something really personal, where we felt we could call friends from high school and say, 'This is a collection you should really see.'" The packaging and retailing of that attitude is as good a reason as any why the pair was handed the reins at DKNY, a label that, as the designers said when they were hired, "evokes everything our city was always about: energy, disruption, new thinking and transcending all boundaries." DKNY had not signified any such thing for a long time, a fact of which the brand's owners, were not unmindful. And so it made perfect sense for a label that had begun to look as if it were designed by committee in Topeka, Kan. despite the NY in its name to try to revitalize itself by enlisting a pair of award winning designers in possession of street cred and the ability to mix it up beyond the confines of the runway and showroom. "Fashion exists in a world of make believe," Mr. Osborne wrote in July, in an essay for W titled "Why I Stand With Black Lives Matter," which chastened the industry for a lamentable lack of diversity. "As a black man in an overwhelmingly white industry, race is never far from my mind." Whether at Public School or DKNY, Mr. Osborne and Mr. Chow are less symbols or ambassadors of inclusion than a link to a less fragmented city and a time, one not all that long ago, when chromatic dispersion and diversity were civic givens, when the disparate tribes of New York came together to make music and art and fashion. "I miss the old New York," Mr. Osborne said. "No, you don't," Mr. Chow said. "You miss the old you." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The men's show season winds down with Thom Browne, deconstructed; Dior Men on a moving walkway; and Comme des Garcons finding beauty in the dark. PARIS When, at 12, Grayson Perry began covertly dressing in women's clothes, he assumed in his innocence that the impulse must have something to do with wanting to be a member of the opposite sex. For decades he pursued his cross dressing adventures, first in private and then very publicly as a Turner Prize winning artist whose performances increasingly incorporated his feminine alter ego, Claire. It wasn't until 2000, the year he turned 40, that Mr. Perry experienced an epiphany about his cross dressing. It was, as it turned out, really "about me putting on the clothes that gave me the feelings that I wanted," he has been quoted as saying. The most joltingly direct and concentrated emotional hit, he found, came from wearing frilly, flouncy, beribboned frocks, the kind of confectionary stuff you picture when you think of Little Bo Peep. Classic preadolescent dresses, in Mr. Perry's mind and also in his polemics, came to symbolize the antithesis of the macho. And it was Mr. Perry as Claire that came to mind often during the week of men's wear shows that ended in Paris on Sunday, and not only because Mr. Perry is the subject of an excellent exhibition at the Monnaie de Paris, or Paris Mint ("Grayson Perry: Vanity, Identity, Sexuality," through Feb. 3). Thom Browne who staged one of his typically stylized and glacially paced shows ("Sponsored by FedEx," one front row wag quipped upon encountering a bubble wrap set) is a designer whose inner erotic life, like Mr. Perry's, appears to have been arrested around puberty. It is not just the short pants. It is not only that Mr. Browne's constricted tailoring telegraphs a struggle to manage unruly sexuality. It is that there is always something interior and fetishistic, something intimate and slightly creepy, about the way Mr. Browne approaches the human body and conscripts you as an accomplice to his point of view. For an audience that included Ermenegildo Zegna, the Italian fashion industrialist whose family label last year acquired an 85 percent stake in Mr. Browne's company for an estimated 500 million, he sent out 12 groups that each had three looks. Most of them were deconstructed and then Frankenstein stitched together again from familiar men's wear elements, though this time as dresses. "I love the idea of a guy wearing dresses," Mr. Browne said after the show, a notion that seems less transgressive when you consider that you cannot swing a cat in the Lakers locker room these days without hitting some fashion forward ballplayer in a Fear of God tunic or a Gucci kilt. Yet the show was ornery and impassioned. It played to Mr. Browne's kinky emphasis on erotic suppression. Gazing at the male identified models creeping around in Mary Jane brogues and corseting garments that left plenty of doubt as to erogenous zones, you were inevitably reminded of the old theoretical saw about gender not being a matter of what's in between your legs but what's in your head. And the show had the effect of separating Mr. Browne from the rest of the pack here in Paris and from the designers at houses like Berluti or Jil Sander or Valentino or Loewe or Hermes. Each put in efforts that, while impeccably (if predictably) skilled and on message; while communicating brand image and direction; while maintaining what people persist in calling the "DNA" of their labels (as if late stage capitalism were genetically determined), mostly left this observer feeling numb. Knowing that the Yellow Vest protesters, those persistent critics of what they describe as France's inequitable economy, were mobilizing to come out in force on Saturday had something to do with the bristling impatience induced by a show like the one staged on Friday by the designer Kim Jones for Dior Men. There was some fizzy excitement beforehand as fans rushed the rope line, chasing celebrities along a gantlet leading from their chauffeured cars to an immense gray box set up on the grounds of the Ecole Militaire, a vast military training complex not far from the Eiffel Tower. The hubbub continued inside the black painted show space as paparazzi mobbed Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, lest the world run out of images of two of the most photographed women of all time. Then the lights went down and there began a show in which the models did not walk or strut and stomp, but rather stood stationary as they were conveyed on a moving sidewalk through the entire length of the space. "The idea was they became like statues," Mr. Jones told Vogue beforehand. Yet what the models brought to mind as they moved past slowly in their gray suits, their scarf sash jackets, their armoring vest jackets or sweaters with a motif of a woman's face drawn by the artist Raymond Pettibon was the unwitting human fodder riding conveyor belts to meet their fate as processed food in the 1973 dystopian cult classic "Soylent Green." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Westport, Conn. On a recent Sunday afternoon here, anyone visiting open houses might have thought the recession never happened. At one new multimillion dollar colonial after another, real estate agents were eagerly waiting to show visitors high ceilinged kitchens anchored by immense white marble islands; fireplaces hefty enough to offset mega size flat screen TVs; exercise rooms with saunas and steam showers; and marble bathrooms with freestanding tubs and heated floors. En suite bathrooms for every bedroom are "really big right now," said Lisa Watkins, an agent with William Raveis, who was showing a 2.699 million house on the outskirts of the sought after Compo Beach area. So are "fabulous outdoor spaces," said Todd Gibbons, an agent with William Pitt Sotheby's International Realty, who was holding an open house at a 4.35 million home (since reduced to 4.199 million) with multiple stone terraces that incorporated a pool, a spa and a fire pit. Builders' expectations for the spring market here are clearly high. After a recession induced lull, new construction catering to wealthy buyers is back in a big way in Westport and a few other select areas of Fairfield County, particularly New Canaan and the neighborhoods around the beach. And the voracious demand for teardown properties where that new construction can be built is raising the already high bar for first time buyers, pitting them against builders looking for older homes on decent size lots. As Doug Bross, an agent with the Riverside Realty Group, in Westport, said recently: "I've gotten three calls in the last 24 hours from different builders looking for land. There are a lot of new players in town." That creates a problem for buyers who want older homes, and usually put contingencies on purchase offers that allow them to back out if problems turn up during a home inspection. Offers like that can easily be trumped by bids from builders who require no such contingencies, and may be able to pay cash, Mr. Bross said. And while builders will usually stay away from properties of less than a quarter of an acre or those with wetlands, he added, competition is fierce for better lots. It's not uncommon for builders in Westport to pay upward of 1 million for a teardown, and 2 million or more near the water. Westport has long been known as a hub of teardown activity. Construction dropped off by nearly 60 percent during the recession, but it never completely stopped, said Joe Feinleib, a principal at the Coastal Construction Group, in Westport. And since 2012 it has picked up in earnest, driven by the demand for new homes for well to do buyers many of them from the city, agents say who want the latest in design and technology, and aren't willing to renovate existing homes. Demolition permits issued during the fiscal year ending in June 2014 totaled 103, compared with 88 the previous year, said Patricia Washburn, the town building department clerk. This year, the number has dipped slightly, thanks to the construction slowdown during the harsh winter as of March 31, the total was 86 but it is expected to rise considerably before the fiscal year ends on June 30. "I hope we have the buyers," Ms. Klaff said. "But there's a lot of competition there's a lot for people to look at." IN NEW CANAAN, the number of demolition permits set a record last year, at 72, said Brian Platz, the town's chief building official. (In 2013, there were just 51.) But unlike in Westport, where much of the new construction is being done on spec, in New Canaan at least 80 percent of the new homes are being custom built for clients, Mr. Platz said, so the multiple listing service doesn't fully reflect the level of building activity. Here, buyers tend to want more land and input into shaping their houses, said Nicole Steel, an agent with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices New England Properties. "When you get into the 3 and 4 million price points, people feel they should get what they want," she said. "They don't want to have to change what's there." What do they want? Kitchens, family rooms and master suites that are "substantial," she said. And well designed mudrooms: "It's become one of the most important rooms in the house," Ms. Steel said. "A lot of these buyers are very Type A, and every child has to have their cubby." Other demands are more extravagant, which isn't surprising in a town often ranked as one of the country's wealthiest. One New Canaan property owner who has filed plans to build a home and guesthouse on seven acres has also applied for permission from the planning and zoning commission to cut down more than 400 trees to make room for a 15,000 square foot artificial pond. The construction is "definitely a notch up," said Mr. Feinleib, whose company is building that house, along with a number of other custom homes in New Canaan. "It's more of an estate kind of feeling. There are more two acre lots, whereas Westport is more beachy." THE BEACH is a big selling point in the town of Fairfield. Since Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, builders have been buying up lots near the adjoining Jennings and Penfield public beaches from homeowners unwilling or unable to make the necessary repairs. New custom and speculative homes Nantucket style and more modern are now rising rapidly, some of them very large. However, as Thomas Conley, the town's chief building official, noted, while there are some "monsters," many of the houses look bigger than they are because they have to be elevated to meet flood zone regulations. So far this year, at least six of these new homes have sold, at prices ranging from 1.325 million to 2.275 million, said Denise Walsh, the principal at Denise Walsh and Partners, which is part of William Raveis Real Estate in Fairfield. And demand for property near the beach is pushing construction beyond the blocks closest to the water into "fringe areas," she said, remaking those streets with new houses priced over 1 million. "I work with five builders, and every single one of them is looking for properties at the beach or close to town," Ms. Walsh said. "Everybody's cold calling and knocking on doors." Some beach area homeowners, she added, are taking advantage of this heightened interest by approaching builders before they list their homes for sale. With so much construction going on, Ms. Walsh said, "all anyone thinking of selling has to do is walk across the street and tap the builder on the shoulder." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Terry Goodkind, the author of the best selling epic fantasy series "The Sword of Truth," died on Sept. 17 at his home in Boulder City, Nev. He was 72. His wife, Jeri Goodkind, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. Mr. Goodkind was a latecomer to writing: He spent years as a woodworker and wildlife artist before publishing his first novel, "Wizard's First Rule," when he was 45. But that book the story of a heroic forest guide, Richard, who teams with a beautiful woman, Kahlan, to defeat an evil wizard, Darken Rahl won legions of fans and earned positive reviews when it was published by Tor Books in 1994. Kirkus Reviews called the novel, which became the first book in the "Sword of Truth" series, "a wonderfully creative, seamless and stirring epic fantasy debut." Over the next 24 years, Mr. Goodkind's series grew to include 17 books, several of them best sellers. Together, the "Sword of Truth" books have sold more than 25 million copies worldwide. In 2008, the books were adapted by the director and producer Sam Raimi into a television series, "Legend of the Seeker," that aired for two seasons on ABC. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
When Ishmael finds himself compelled to share a blanket at the sold out Spouter Inn, he declares, "No man prefers to sleep two in a bed." But he settles in, waiting for his mysterious South Seas roommate who, he's informed, is peddling a shrunken head on the streets of New Bedford. Queequeg's appearance terrifies Ishmael mute. But after things equilibrate, Ishmael reconsiders: "For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal ... a human being just as I am. ... Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian." In the morning Ishmael wakes to find Queequeg's arm "thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife." Now there's no panic. Eventually Queequeg rouses and, by signs and sounds, makes Ishmael understand that he'll dress and leave. "The truth is, these savages have an innate sense of delicacy," Ishmael editorializes. "It is marvelous how essentially polite they are. ... So much civility and consideration, while I was guilty of great rudeness." Reflecting on Queequeg's tatted visage, he concludes: "Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face at least to my taste his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. ... Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed." Mates now for life, they find a ship, but Queequeg is barred; he's not Christian. Ishmael fast talks: Queequeg, like "all of us, and every mother's son and soul of us," belongs to "the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshiping world. ... In that we all join hands." Impressed by Ishmael's impromptu sermon, the recruiter allows their marks; they'll board the Pequod, a ship Melville has named, he reminds us, for a famed tribe of Massachusetts natives, already extinct. Nearly two centuries ago, Melville showed us how easy it is to welcome as our own the touches of others, their equivalent colors, customs and beliefs; their journeys, their transitions. And to remember those who, unwelcomed, suffered. How much could have been avoided, and embraced, had we heeded. Melville feverishly scribbled a diagnosis, prognosis and prescription for the human condition. We are all Ishmael the ingenue and Starbuck the pragmatist and Ahab the maniac, stuck on a ship driven by winds we cannot predict, helmed by a mind not fully comprehensible, whose compulsions we don't control. The world is an elusive whale; we might choose coexistence or destruction. And though we do not decide the outcome, the hands on those oars are ours; each stroke invites consequences. And lest we overlook the obvious: The men went equipped to do harm in their quest for oil. If we are all Ishmael and Starbuck and Ahab, caught in our collective addiction, the whales exemplify a counterculture, a way of living weightlessly, of not draining the world that floats them. It's no coincidence that Leviathan, the sperm whale, is Melville's chosen vehicle. No other candidate qualifies. Ahab could have chased a fire breathing dragon. But to face real quotidian madness we must have at stake real blood and real will on both sides. Only this creature the largest with teeth on the planet comes to us as quickened flesh and immortal metaphor, tangling us with our own pursuits, profane, bleeding, sacred, free. Only Leviathan could do it. Could win. So one wonders about those who've turned the book aside as, in college, I did. How does one fare, having failed to be forewarned about our inner Ahabs or the risks of being led into complicity with madness, uncounseled on the wisdom of rejecting the obsessive quests that the world's pulpits condone and its ports reward. "Moby Dick" is only partly about madness; it's equally about banality. Herman Melville's haunting inquiry "whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc" returns to me again while every whale in every ocean returns to share our air in seas we're warming and thickening with plastic. "If ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats," Melville mused, "then the eternal whale will still survive, and ... spout his frothed defiance to the skies." But the warming that will erode the contours of Florida and New York, Houston, Hong Kong and Bangladesh will make life difficult for whales, too. They, and all beings, as the naturalist Henry Beston wrote, are "caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth." Mesh by knotted mesh, it's a net we have woven, perversely, by unweaving the web of life. Melville tried to warn us. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
LOS ANGELES A reporter, a photographer and a TV star walked into Max Karaoke Studio on Sawtelle Boulevard. The place didn't serve alcohol, and so the reporter, who had booked a private room for the evening, had a pint bottle of whiskey concealed in a jacket pocket. "I've been here before," said Will Forte, 45, the star and co creator of "The Last Man on Earth," a postapocalyptic half hour comedy on Fox. "My karaoke partner is always Jason Sudeikis, and we come here, to this very room. I can still smell him." The two friends, former "Saturday Night Live" cast members, play brothers on Mr. Forte's show, which is now in its second season and returns Sunday, after a 12 week break. "Basically, the last year of my life has been waking up, going straight into work and then going home to bed," Mr. Forte said. Also present was David Noel, a writer on "The Last Man on Earth." Mr. Noel's fiancee, the model, actress and singer Alanna Vicente, stopped by with 10 cold cans of Asahi beer. After getting settled, Mr. Forte dimmed the lights and made his first selection: the Merle Haggard song "Mama Tried." He took a sip of whiskey and sang it with a slight Oklahoma twang. Next, he gave his all to Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues." "It's going to seem like I'm a huge country guy," he said. "Black Sabbath will be next." During the eight years he spent as a performer and writer on "Saturday Night Live," Mr. Forte did a lot of karaoke with his cast mates. "It's really less about the quality of your singing and more about your passion," he said. He punched in the numbers for Black Sabbath's "Fairies Wear Boots." After the lengthy guitar intro, he started howling. "It's so therapeutic to do this," he said. "Black Sabbath is wonderful." When he sang "Strange Days," by the Doors, his voice was a deep drone. During the final verse, Mr. Forte seemed to inhabit Jim Morrison, and the mood turned eerie. The reporter asked him if he felt 45. "Mentally, I don't," Mr. Forte said. "Physically, I definitely feel more aches and pains than I used to. My bedroom is on the second story of the house, and it's harder and harder to walk down those stairs. A lot of times I'll walk down backward." Mr. Forte has spoken publicly of his obsessive compulsive like tendencies. "It depends on how tired I am," he said. "I still check the showers and stuff like that. For me, it used to be mainly about checking the sinks, in weird patterns, and the stove. I've gotten better about that." Ms. Vicente said she has known Mr. Forte for eight years. She described him as a sweetheart, but complicated. "I'm this weird mixture of confident and superfragile," Mr. Forte said. Orville Willis Forte IV (his full name) said he had a happy upbringing in the Northern California towns of Moraga and Lafayette. He got along with his parents. His mother was a teacher and artist, his father a financial broker who became a ski bum. During Mr. Forte's freshman year of high school, he was class president. In senior year, his class voted him Best Personality. The only time he got in any real trouble came when he served as the unwitting getaway driver for friends of friends who had squirted ketchup all over a Jack in the Box. "I am not into that," he said. "I'm like, 'Somebody's going to have to clean this up.' It bummed me out." Someone noted his license plate number as he drove off. When he got home, the police were waiting. They took him to the station for questioning. "I said I didn't know who was in my car," Mr. Forte said. "And it was kind of the truth. I didn't know those people's names, so it was very easy to say, 'I don't know them.' And he's like, 'They were in the back of your car!' They spent all night trying. My mom was there, saying, 'Just tell them the names of these people.' And I never said anything." At the University of California, Los Angeles, Mr. Forte joined a fraternity and majored in history. After graduation, he went to work in finance, but it wasn't a fit. In 1995, he wrote a humor book, "101 Things to Definitely Not Do if You Want to Get a Chick," which led to a job at the "Late Show With David Letterman." During his first week, staff members were asked to list their stupid talents. Mr. Forte's was cutting his own hair, and he showed off his talent in an on air segment that ended with him pretending to stab Mr. Letterman's hand with the scissors. "It was the scariest thing," he said. "I was terrified that I was going to go too far and stab him." Mr. Forte left the show after nine months and ended up writing for "3rd Rock From the Sun" and "That '70s Show." He took classes with the Los Angeles sketch troupe the Groundlings before joining it in 2000. Lorne Michaels was in the audience on a night when Mr. Forte slayed. For his "Saturday Night Live" audition, Mr. Forte did impressions of Martin Sheen and Joni Mitchell. He also portrayed a gold painted human statue who sings an X rated song detailing how he paid for body paint. He got the job, only to turn it down. A fear of failure went into the decision, Mr. Forte said, and he had regrets about it. When Will Ferrell departed from "Saturday Night Live" in 2002, Mr. Forte left his writing job in Los Angeles and accepted a second offer to join the show. Many of his oddball sketches aired at 12:50 a.m., and he said he didn't feel confident until his seventh season. He was into pranks during his time at the show's studio in Rockefeller Center. Every workday for a full season, for instance, he blasted the bombastic Emerson, Lake and Powell song "Touch and Go" from his office. Colleagues begged him to stop, to no avail. "I think I drove myself crazy a little bit," Mr. Forte said. "But it's a great song. It was kind of a fun backdrop to writing. I don't know, I can eat the same meal every day for months. I have no problem with repetition." One sketch that took off was "MacGruber," a moronic on purpose parody of the action series "MacGyver." Originally pitched by the writer Jorma Taccone, it became a "Saturday Night Live" staple, and Mr. Michaels co produced a 2010 movie version, written by Mr. Taccone, John Solomon and Mr. Forte. His mother, who had a bit part, was on the set on the day he filmed a scene wearing nothing but a celery stalk. The movie tanked. But when Mr. Forte was a guest on "Late Show With David Letterman" to promote the film, he was heartened to find that his old boss seemed to approve. "That was one of the most exciting things," he said. "Dave loved 'MacGruber.'" Now that it has something of a cult following, Mr. Forte said he is trying to put together a sequel. Mr. Forte left "Saturday Night Live" in 2010. "I was proud of the stuff I did there, but there was no reason for me to think that I would ever have a major acting career," he said. "I left thinking, 'If nothing happens, I'll just go back to writing.'" His agents persuaded him to send an audition tape to the director Alexander Payne, who asked to see him in person and gave him a prime role in "Nebraska." Critics noticed he was more than a clown. "I got very lucky," Mr. Forte said. Around that time, the actor Val Kilmer, who played the villain in "MacGruber," asked Mr. Forte if he could stay at his house while he looked for a new place. Soon, his assistant showed up, carrying two large duffel bags filled with books. Mr. Forte and Mr. Kilmer ended up being roommates for two months. "I can't say enough good things about Val," Mr. Forte said. "He is a delight. I'd come home and think nobody was home, because it was completely dark. Then I would see a little light coming out of his bedroom, and he'd be reading with a little miner's lamp on his head." In 2013, Mr. Forte and the writing duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who made "The Lego Movie," got serious about "The Last Man on Earth." The premise was not the usual sitcom fare: In the first episode, the protagonist seems to be the lone survivor of a pandemic. He goes feral. He uses a swimming pool as a toilet and bathes in tequila. When he finally meets up with other survivors, he has trouble reconciling himself to civilized life. Mr. Forte resisted the suggestion that "The Last Man on Earth" suits the current sociopolitical climate, which seems to have doomsday in the air. "We're just making a comedy show," he said. As if to avoid additional questions on the show's themes, he grabbed the microphone and started singing "Help Me" by Joni Mitchell. It lay beyond his vocal range, but he fought gamely to the end. Looking for a final number, he decided on "Superstar," a song made famous by the Carpenters, which chronicles a groupie's unrequited love for a rock star. Don't you remember you told me you loved me, baby? You said you'd be coming back this way again, baby. Mr. Forte sang the song tenderly, when he wasn't screaming. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
SAN FRANCISCO The e scooter boom began in Santa Monica, Calif., about 16 months ago. Electric scooters, owned by start ups looking to mimic the success of ride hailing companies like Uber, appeared around town. The idea was simple: Use a smartphone app to rent a scooter and then leave it at the end of the ride for the next person. Soon, people in cities from San Francisco to Paris were complaining that the scooters were all over sidewalks usually without the approval of local officials. In Portland, Ore., city officials worried that they would soon get their own flock of uninvited scooters. So they established a four month pilot program in July with a limit on scooters and a requirement that companies share detailed data about trips and injuries with city officials. That data, released Tuesday by the city's Bureau of Transportation, offers the most detailed analysis of the impact of e scooters on a city. Scooters often replaced short car trips in Portland, offering some support for one of the biggest selling points the companies have made to communities: They can help reduce congestion and pollution. And the scooters did not lead to as many injuries as some had feared. But it is not yet clear if scooter companies can comply with different cities' tight and varying limits and still run profitable local operations. The programs often cap the number of scooters and dictate which neighborhoods they ought to be in. "That is not letting the market determine how many scooters should be anywhere," said Gabriel Scheer, Lime's director of strategic development. "How do you unfetter us in a way that allows us to meet demand?" Still, Portland officials are using the pilot program to make a big point with start ups: It is better to ask permission and work with local regulators than risk being run out of a community. That has not always been the case among start ups trying to get a piece of the so called sharing economy. Ride hailing companies like Uber and Lyft and the short term rental company Airbnb have usually jumped into new markets before local regulators have had time to understand their businesses. For the scooter start ups, not asking for permission has had consequences. After Lime and Bird began to operate without permission in San Francisco, the city instituted a permit system but issued permits to only Skip and another smaller competitor, Scoot, effectively locking Lime and Bird out of the city. Some cities have simply impounded the scooters. "A lot of these companies roll into town, flout local regulations, see what they can get away with and how far they can push cities to accommodate them," said Chloe Eudaly, a Portland city commissioner. "I feel like there is somewhat of a reversal of that trend among these companies and they are learning that's not necessarily the best way to do business." Other cities are establishing permit programs to limit the impact of unexpected scooter invasions. Washington, for example, said in November that companies could deploy no more than 600 scooters each, which Bird argued would make it "impossible" to provide full service. Bird, Lime and Skip received permits to operate in Portland. They handed over a wealth of data about scooter rides, giving city regulators access to information about where each trip started, the route it followed, where it ended and what time of day it occurred. Personal information on riders, such as payment data, was not shared. Portland capped the number of scooters at about 2,000, roughly divided among the three companies. Mr. Scheer, from Lime, said the cap system made it difficult to determine how many scooters a city actually needed. But he added that the limits forced scooter companies to hone their operations, offer scooters with smoother rides and ensure they were deployed in neighborhoods where they could draw the most riders. And the caps forced the start ups to compete on how well they could comply with the city's mandates rather than playing a numbers game. "We don't think this is a land grab type of business. This is one where you have to solve problems in a sustainable way," said Sanjay Dastoor, the chief executive of Skip. "Having more vehicles on the road isn't going to help if there aren't places where people can ride them and feel safe." The data that Portland collected allowed the city to assess whether e scooters live up to their promises of reducing pollution and congestion. According to a citywide survey, 34 percent of residents who used the scooters and took a survey said they had used e scooters to replace driving their own car or taking an Uber. City officials also had concerns about accessibility and safety, but saw low rates of injury and will continue to study those issues during a second test run. Some rules were meant to get the scooters into neighborhoods that could be underserved. One hundred scooters from each company had to be positioned in East Portland, a lower income neighborhood with poor access to Portland's public transit system. About 6 percent of the city's rides originated in that neighborhood. Scooter start ups didn't always comply with restrictions, according to the report. The scooters often exceeded the speed limit of 15 miles an hour that the city had imposed, and none of the start ups completely fulfilled their obligations to deploy scooters in East Portland. Over the four month program, Portlanders took 700,369 scooter rides. Nineteen percent of those rides occurred between 3 and 6 p.m. on weekdays. But it was a small sample size compared with other cities. In Paris, which has no scooter cap, Lime alone provided more than a million rides over four months. When the Portland pilot effort ended in November, all of the e scooters were cleared off the streets. The city is planning a second, yearlong pilot program in the spring but has not decided how many scooters it will allow, a spokesman said. "It seemed like a little bit of carnival on our streets for a while, but I think they definitely have potential to make our city easier to navigate for a lot of different people in different ways," Ms. Eudaly said. She even took a ride on an e scooter. "It was fun. It was easy," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Is the Coronavirus an Epidemic or a Pandemic? It Depends on Who's Talking None Update: On March 11, the W.H.O. declared the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic. All eyes have been on the coronavirus since it crept up in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. Since then, the virus has sickened tens of thousands of people in more than three dozen countries, and its quick advance across Asia, the Middle East and Europe has raised fears that a pandemic could be on the horizon. The World Health Organization has referred to the outbreak as an "epidemic" as opposed to a "pandemic." But late last month, it increased its assessment of the global risk of spread and the risk of impact of the coronavirus outbreak from "high" to "very high." What's the difference between an epidemic and a pandemic? According to the W.H.O., an epidemic is explained as a regional outbreak of an illness that spreads unexpectedly. The C.D.C. calls it "an increase, often sudden, in the number of cases of a disease above what is normally expected" in that area. In 2010, the W.H.O. defined a pandemic as "the worldwide spread of a new disease" that affects large numbers of people. The C.D.C. says it is "an epidemic that has spread over several countries or continents, usually affecting a large number of people." "Typically, an outbreak becomes an epidemic when it becomes quite widespread in a particular country, sometimes in a particular region, like Zika," said Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, said. "Whereas a pandemic is thought to be a wide geographic spread of a disease on many parts of the world, many continents." Both terms are often used in reference to the coronavirus outbreak, but how they are used is subjective, and there are no hard and fast rules on when to use them, Mr. Gostin said. Last month, the W.H.O. declared the outbreak a global health emergency. Last week, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the W.H.O., said the decision whether to use the word "pandemic" was based on "an ongoing assessment" of the geographical spread of the virus, the severity of its effects and its impact on society. What's stopping the W.H.O. from using 'pandemic'? According to Mr. Gostin, there are two reasons Dr. Tedros stopped short of calling the outbreak a pandemic: Because the outbreak can still be contained, and to try to avoid unnecessary panic. "He wanted to create a seriousness, a purpose, but not an overreaction," Mr. Gostin said. "Not more travel bans. Not more closures of cities. Not more drain on human rights and economic activity." Mr. Gostin said the outbreak was still containable, though other experts have disputed that assertion. But if the outbreak reaches a level where it could no longer be controlled, it would move into a pandemic phase. The W.H.O. no longer uses a system of six phases, which ranged from Phase 1 no reports of animal influenza causing human infections to Phase 6, a pandemic, according to Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesman for the W.H.O. Does it matter what we call it? The terms epidemic and pandemic imply different approaches to a health crisis, said Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. An epidemic suggests that the virus may be geographically limited, and that intervention by health agencies could help stop the spread. For a pandemic, where many places could be affected, there may be consequences for how many people or how much money or supplies are available, she said. When an outbreak covers the globe, international groups like the W.H.O. and the United Nations have to divide their resources across greater territory than during a regional epidemic, she said. That would make a pandemic far more difficult to manage. The approach to dealing with the pathogen could also be different, Dr. Nuzzo said. If cases are everywhere, the authorities might stop trying to prevent it from entering a country and focus instead on trying to treat illness, slow the pathogen's spread and protect vulnerable people. Where has the coronavirus spread? There have been more than 80,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus around the world, according to a Feb. 25 report from the W.H.O. The majority of those cases have been reported in China, where more than 2,700 people have died. Beyond China's borders, the virus has spread to 46 countries across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas, killing at least 57 people. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
BILL TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (1989) 9 p.m. on Viceland. Way before he was Neo, John Wick or even Hamlet, Keanu Reeves was Ted, an affable high school slacker with a best friend named Bill (Alex Winter). In danger of flunking out of history class, they stumble on a time machine that lets them carouse with Napoleon, Joan of Arc and more; George Carlin plays their time travel guide. The movie was brutally panned in The New York Times upon release but has since become a cult classic and even received a shout out in "Ready Player One." Rolling Stone named it the "eighth best stoner movie of all time," but if you're looking for a different strain of comedy there are plenty of options: CHEECH CHONG'S NICE DREAMS runs at 9:35 on FLIX; Comedy Central shows HAROLD KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE at 10; and IFC has PINEAPPLE EXPRESS at 8. JANE THE VIRGIN 9 p.m. on the CW. Season 4 wraps up on Friday. Jane believes she and Rafael are in a good place until she realizes he is keeping a secret from her. Petra and JR make a decision about their future that neither of them saw coming. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
KLEPPER 10:30 p.m. on Comedy Central. Jordan Klepper has spent his career as a "Daily Show" correspondent with Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah, and as the host of his own Comedy Central talk show, "The Opposition With Jordan Klepper," which was canceled last June. Now, this comedian is getting out from behind a desk to embed with people across America who are fighting for change, from veterans' care to inequality in the marijuana industry. In the first episode, Klepper jumps into the ring with a group of military veterans who use wrestling to cope with PTSD. PARADISE HOTEL 8 p.m. on Fox. This new reality TV show, hosted by the "Laguna Beach" star Kristin Cavallari, seems to follow a similar format as the British phenomenon "Love Island." Eleven competitors enter a tropical resort, where they will pair up to go on dates and compete in challenges for the chance to win 250,000. Each week, one person must leave the hotel to make room for a new guest, and fans are encouraged to follow along at home, using social media to help decide who stays and who leaves. The series's executive producer is SallyAnn Salsano, who created "Jersey Shore." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
A supernatural thriller from John Krasinski, a bawdy sex prevention comedy, a new TV project from Jordan Peele and odd Bill Murray stories are all part of the South by Southwest film festival lineup, organizers announced Wednesday. Though movie distribution models are continuing to shift, the festival's producer, Janet Pierson, said SXSW's role was unchanged. "Our job is to connect talent with audience," she said by phone from Austin, Tex., the festival's home. "As the different means of delivery and formats change, we're just looking for people who make compelling work." SXSW has long showcased new television series, and this year it will also screen independent TV pilots. But the movies are still the biggest thing. This year's festival will run March 9 17. Here are five selections from the lineup that are likely to generate chatter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
With a white facade that billows outward like a crinkled origami cloud, the new addition to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) lends a touch of unearthly beauty to the vibrant South of Market neighborhood. But for the crowds who have been drawn to the greatly expanded museum since it reopened May 14 after a three year, 305 million makeover, beauty is proving far deeper than a fiberglass reinforced polymer skin. Inside the museum, the more than 5,000 visitors who snapped up all opening day tickets in advance, and the tens of thousands who followed in the ensuing days, encountered entire constellations of a single artist's work, installed throughout seven floors of open yet intimate feeling galleries. There were rooms of Warhols, including his early silver toned portraits, and of Chuck Close's pixelated renderings of friends and family in media ranging from oil paint to paper pulp. Two dozen photographs by Diane Arbus had a room of their own, while an octagonal gallery was devoted solely to seven of Agnes Martin's serene abstract paintings. The mobiles in an Alexander Calder gallery gently moved when doors were opened to the adjacent sculpture terrace (one of six at the museum), where more Calders were backed by a lush, living wall of 19,000 plants. Founded in 1935, SFMoMA was the first West Coast museum devoted to modern and contemporary art. In 1995, after decades of sharing a building with other civic and cultural institutions, it moved to a new home, a five story postmodern composition in brick by the Swiss architect Mario Botta. "We soon became a victim of our own success there in terms of attracting visitors and gifts," said Neal Benezra, museum director. "By 2006, it was clear we needed more gallery space." The museum turned to the Snohetta architecture firm, whose notable public projects include the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet in Oslo and the entryway pavilion of the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York. For SFMoMA, the firm designed a 10 story annex whose airy, free flowing interior meshes with the reconfigured spaces of the adjacent Mario Botta building, the exterior of which was left untouched. "We saw it as a very strong building," said Craig Dykers, a founder of Snohetta. "It was nice to have a good dancing partner." With 170,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor galleries nearly three times more than before the museum now ranks among the largest modern art museums in the country. All the extra space finally allows it to showcase the exceptional depth of its own 33,000 plus holdings in art and design, not to mention those of the private Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, whose 1,100 works by top postwar and contemporary artists like Gerhard Richter, Barbara Hepworth, Roy Lichtenstein and Ellsworth Kelly will stay at the museum for at least 100 years. The new Pritzker Center for Photography, the largest space devoted to photography in any American art museum, increases SFMoMA's longstanding strength in that medium. Museum officials predict that first year attendance will exceed one million, up from an annual figure of 650,000 before the expansion. The museum is also expected to further enhance the arts centric profile of its neighborhood, which already is home to galleries, performance venues, movie theaters and several other museums. For visitors needing a break, a fifth floor cafe with seating on the sculpture garden offers pastries and boxed lunches like lemon thyme grilled chicken. On the third floor, the local small batch roaster Sightglass Coffee serves espresso drinks and individual pour overs. In Situ, a full service restaurant, is to open next month for lunch and dinner. A project of Corey Lee, who earned three Michelin stars cooking at Benu in San Francisco, In Situ will feature a changing menu of dishes from recipes contributed by Rene Redzepi, Alice Waters, Andoni Luis Aduriz and other famous chefs. In an attempt to draw a diverse audience, an endowment ensures free admission in perpetuity for visitors 18 and under. A free app for iOS devices uses indoor positioning technology to deliver a variety of themed audio tours ranging in tone from philosophical to irreverent, including a "This Is Not an Artwork Tour," in which comedians from the TV show "Silicon Valley" debate the artistic merit of works like Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" urinal. Additionally, 43,000 square feet of temporary exhibition space on the ground floor is open free to the public. In one of those galleries, a monumental Richard Serra walk through sculpture of slope walled, interlocking steel ellipses (on view for the next few years) can be seen through sidewalk level windows near the new Howard Street entrance. Not surprisingly, the sculpture is attracting throngs of passers by, who detour into the museum, slowly walk the sculpture's strangely disorienting path, and then briskly continue on their way. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
This week, cardiologists learned that a new online calculator meant to help them determine a patient's suitability for cholesterol treatment was flawed, doubling the estimated risk of heart attack or stroke for the average patient. But fixing it would not be easy, because it is based on older data, and heart attack and stroke rates today are much lower than in decades past, meaning that people are at less risk than might be expected from historical extrapolations. Yet the outdated risk figures are the only ones available for researchers to use as assessment tools, cardiologists say, and that raises real problems for the new risk calculator, which the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology posted online last week as part of a radical new set of guidelines for treating high cholesterol. The guidelines, which are supposed to shape the way doctors prescribe cholesterol lowering statins, recommend looking beyond a patient's cholesterol readings. "The disease of atherosclerosis is changing before our eyes," said Dr. Peter Libby, the chief of cardiovascular medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. The reasons for the changes, he said, are only partly understood. The problem of using longitudinal health studies from previous decades to assess health risks today arose unexpectedly last weekend at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association. Two Harvard researchers, Dr. Paul M. Ridker and Dr. Nancy Cook, revealed that the new calculator released with fanfare last week exaggerated the true risk of a heart attack or stroke by an average of 100 percent. Moreover, they said, the committee that developed the calculator knew that the online tool was inaccurate yet told doctors to use it in deciding whom to treat. The data that was used to build the calculator was 20 years old, the researchers said, and a lot has happened since then. Many fewer people have heart attacks and strokes. Those who have them do so at older ages. Women are now nearly as susceptible as men. But there also is another issue, said Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, a medical professor at Dartmouth. The calculator, like many others used in medicine, is based on a mathematical model that assumes that risk rises in a straight line. As levels of blood pressure rise, for example, the chances of a heart attack or stroke rise in concert, the calculator assumes. In reality, Dr. Welch said, that line is far from straight. "The model suggests that lowering systolic blood pressure from 130 to 100 is nearly as important as from 180 to 150," he said. "I doubt there is a cardiologist in the country that believes that." When the guidelines were being developed, several outside reviewers, including the two Harvard researchers and Dr. Roger Blumenthal from Johns Hopkins University, pointed out that the tool seemed to exaggerate risk. The calculator, Dr. Blumenthal said, "was clearly not satisfactory." In response, he said, the guidelines committee added a tiebreaker for doctors to use with patients whose risk score was equivocal. Those patients could have other tests, such as a heart scan for coronary calcium, which can determine if they have plaque in their arteries, and a blood test for a protein, C.R.P., that is associated with increased risk. But the heart groups do not plan to change or eliminate the calculator, in part because there is no good alternative. Prescribing statins is often a judgment call, doctors say, except for patients whose chance of a heart attack or stroke is extremely high, like those who have already had a heart attack or who have diabetes. Previous treatment guidelines, which were released in 2004, also included a risk calculator, but researchers recently discovered that it, too, overestimates risk. In fact, said Dr. Michael Blaha of Johns Hopkins, the old calculator overestimated risk much greater than the new one, mainly because it was based on data from the 1980s and from the largely white male population of Framingham, Mass. "The new risk calculator is actually better," Dr. Blaha said. "People did not appreciate the problems with the Framingham calculator." Dr. Blaha and his colleagues discovered the flaws of the calculator based on the Framingham Heart Study a couple of years ago but did not publish their results because they were waiting for the new calculator to appear. They thought any issues with the old calculator would soon be moot. "It's a touchy subject," Dr. Blaha said of the old calculator's problems. Many doctors never used the Framingham calculator anyway, said Dr. Benjamin Ansell of the University of California, Los Angeles. Instead, they mostly offered statins to people with very high cholesterol levels, ignoring the fact that those who have lower cholesterol levels but other risk factors, like smoking or high blood pressure, often benefited. But others used the Framingham calculator to help patients make informed decisions. Dr. Lisa Schwartz and Dr. Steven Woloshin at Dartmouth, for example, said they would show patients their risk percentage and then recalculate what it would be if they were under treatment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
As soon as Pamela Capalad moved to New York, her mother urged her to buy a house rather than pay rent. That was five years ago. But Ms. Capalad, now 27, wasn't ready; not quite. "I'm like, I can't even navigate the subway system yet!" she recalled. She shared a rented apartment in a two family row house in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She lucked out: her share, with two roommates, was an impossibly cheap 400 a month. She knew she would be able to save for a down payment. Two years ago Ms. Capalad, who works as a financial planner and is also an author of a financial literacy curriculum for middle school, decided she was ready to start house hunting. She wanted a two or three family so she could rent out the other units. "I am a big believer in practicing what I preach," she said. "One way to gain passive income is to collect rent." Her budget, which would include her mother's help with the down payment, topped out at about 425,000. She was finicky about location her home had to be within a few blocks of one of five specific M train stations in Bushwick or nearby Bedford Stuyvesant. In fall 2010 she found it: a two family house for 450,000 on Pulaski Street on the edge of Bedford Stuyvesant. Ms. Capalad intended to allow the top floor tenant, an elderly woman, to remain. Later, a boarded up three family house on Grove Street in Bushwick caught her eye, but she was too late. It sold to someone else for 222,000. "I pined away for this for months, because I can see it from my train stop," Ms. Capalad said. Three families were selling especially quickly, said John Chetram of Charles Rutenberg Realty, her agent. "Everyone jumps on them because they can get more rental income to offset their bottom line." What's more, "Pam was being outpriced and outbid," he said, with other buyers offering all cash. She was outbid on a well maintained two family owned by a retired couple on Willoughby Avenue in Bedford Stuyvesant. It sold for 450,000. "That one was so tragic," Ms. Capalad said, "because that house was beautiful and in such a great location and the couple was so nice." Then, the plan changed. She and Mr. Kushner decided to buy a place together. They let her mother off the hook, but without her help, their budget fell to the low 300,000s. They focused on foreclosures and short sales, most of which were in terrible condition. They were approved for the Federal Housing Administration's 203(k) loan program, which is designed to finance both purchase and renovation. Agents rarely got back to them. They heard things like " 'It's not showing, we are taking only all cash offers and we meant to take it off the market,' " Ms. Capalad said. In some cases, houses came with "tenant kicking out issues," which both found unsavory, Mr. Kushner said. "Every time I walked into a house with that kind of vibe, I bristled," Ms. Capalad said. Sometimes, "I walked into the kids' room and they were staring me down and I was, like, 'I have to go, I can't do this.' " Last spring, fearing they would never find the right house, they checked out apartments. They saw a one bedroom that would do, in an eight unit condominium on Flushing Avenue in Bushwick. The price was around 300,000. "We panicked," Mr. Kushner said. "We were like five years too late to get something affordable for nonrich folks. The condo was affordable and not terrible." Meanwhile, Ms. Capalad was e mailing the agent representing a two family place, bank owned, on Hart Street in Bushwick. The listing price was 280,000. The agent invariably replied that it wasn't ready to be seen but Ms. Capalad was heartened to receive any response at all. She made a final attempt to schedule a viewing, saying they were on the verge of committing to another property. They got in. "The house was trashed from top to bottom," she said. "I fell in love with it." There was space for a music studio for Mr. Kushner, a musician known as Dyalekt, and a backyard for his dog, Vinyl. "It had that love at first sight spark," Mr. Kushner said. "I could see us raising our kids in the house." The purchase price was 190,000, with another 145,000 available for renovations. People joked that "short sales are anything but short," Ms. Capalad said. "They weren't kidding. We ran into a new, seemingly made up rule every day." The couple closed on the deal last summer. During renovations, which are ongoing, they faced delay after delay. "There were so many you can't make this up moments," said Ms. Capalad, who blogs about her house adventures at sowerebuyingahouse.wordpress.com. They don't expect to move in until summer. They were excited about doing over the place to suit themselves, Mr. Kushner said, "but we also went in blind and really didn't know what was going on. We had researched a lot and spoken to a number of people. It's not like we were wholly unprepared, but somehow we were still wholly unprepared." After the recent snow, they had a sidewalk to clear for the first time. All four stores they tried were sold out of shovels. A neighbor lent them his. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
More than 100 million children could be at risk for measles because countries around the world are suspending national immunization programs in order to reduce the risk of coronavirus infection, international public health leaders warned on Monday. So far, 24 low and middle income countries, including Mexico, Nigeria and Cambodia, have paused or postponed such programs, according to the Measles and Rubella Initiative, a consortium whose members include UNICEF, the American Red Cross, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Unlike wealthier countries, where parents typically make appointments to follow a routine vaccine schedule at clinics or private pediatric offices, these countries inoculate large numbers of infants and children in communal settings, like marketplaces, schools, churches and mosques. Dr. Robin Nandy, the chief of immunization for UNICEF, acknowledged that finding the balance between guarding against the spread of Covid 19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, and preventable diseases like measles was delicate and difficult. "In our quest to vaccinate kids, we shouldn't contribute to the spread of Covid 19," he said. "But we don't want a country that is recovering from an outbreak of it to then be dealing with a measles or diphtheria outbreak." Dr. Nandy said that public health organizations had endorsed new immunization guidelines from the W.H.O., which recognize that while campaigns advocating mass inoculations should be sustained as long as safely possible, temporary suspensions might occur because of reasonable concerns about transmission of Covid 19 to patients and health care workers. "We have to acknowledge the disruption, whether we like it or not," Dr. Nandy said. But he urged countries to plan for shipments of vaccines and syringes to be available as soon as an easing of Covid 19 restrictions permitted and, given the limited number of international flights, even to be prepared to charter planes. Countries should be compiling immunization registries, tracking earlier campaigns and doing risk assessments, to prioritize regions where outbreaks would be most likely and children most vulnerable, he added. But Dr. Beate Kampmann, director of the Vaccine Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said many countries that already have weak and fragmented health care systems would not be able to collect reliable immunization data. "There are virtually no registers for vaccinations in West Africa other than parent held records," she said, adding that an entire "birth cohort of infants could miss out on vaccinations altogether with serious consequences." Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. Before the coronavirus pandemic, measles was already making a resurgence in some places. In 2017, there were 7,585,900 estimated measles cases and 124,000 estimated deaths, according to the World Health Organization. By 2018, the last year for which international figures have been compiled, there were 9,769,400 estimated measles cases and 142,300 related deaths. In 2019, the United States reported 1,282 measles cases, its highest in more than 25 years. The measles vaccine has been available for more than 50 years. Countries including Brazil, Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Nigeria, Ukraine and Kazakhstan are currently fighting outbreaks of measles. Among the countries that have postponed their vaccination programs are Bolivia, Chad, Chile, Colombia, Djibouti, the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Honduras, Lebanon, Nepal, Paraguay, Somalia, South Sudan and Uzbekistan. Dr. Kampmann was also concerned about potential outbreaks in wealthier countries in North America and Europe, which do not have national inoculation programs. Because of Covid 19 fears, American pediatric practices are beginning to report significant drops in well child visits, including those for routine vaccines. "Even in resource rich settings there is a danger of measles raising its ugly head in the not too distant future," Dr. Kampmann added, "hence it is even more important to sustain routine immunizations." Dr. Melinda Wharton, director of the C.D.C.'s Immunization Services division, said that one upside of current social distancing measures was that if outbreaks of measles occur, transmission might be limited. She said that in recent years, many cases entered the United States from common travel destinations and that the sharp decreases in air travel because of the pandemic might also keep a lid on measles cases. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
WESTCOTT, England When Taylor Wimpey, one of the largest residential construction companies in Britain, proposed building 34 homes in an empty field in Westcott, 30 miles southwest of London, it was doing just what Britain's leaders were calling for: attempting to alleviate a severe housing shortage, which politicians consider a key factor in the country's soaring real estate costs. But nearly five years after Taylor Wimpey sought permission, there are still no houses in the Westcott field. The local planning authority refused the initial 34 house proposal, raising a welter of concerns including calls for the installation of sensitive external lighting so as to not disturb the nocturnal activities of bats. There was also a requirement for an exploratory dig to ensure that a ditch was not, as some believed it might be, a repository for medieval treasures. And in the years since Taylor Wimpey first unrolled its blueprints, Britain's housing crisis has grown worse. George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, recently said that the shortage was pushing home prices higher up more than 25 percent in the past year in London and 12 percent in Britain overall, data show. That, he said, was causing too many people to take on too much debt and posing perhaps the greatest threat to the country's strong economic recovery. But the local government in Westcott, like many around England, sees its own set of threats. These include concerns about increased traffic, among the primary reasons for the refusal. The narrow country lane leading to the Taylor Wimpey site bypasses a 16th century home that has Grade II status, meaning it is considered to be of historic importance. Because the house has no foundations, there was fear it could be damaged by construction trucks rumbling past. Local residents and other concerned parties also expressed worries documented in 187 letters about potential flooding, as well as the aesthetic impact of the development. Natural England, a government advisory group, has named the locale an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, worthy of preservation. Others voiced concern about the safety of badgers, reptiles and other wildlife, and even the potential loss of a venerable chicken coop. The impulse to resist development is by no means unique to the English countryside, of course. But national politicians, construction industry executives and people searching for homes to buy say local concerns and traditions play outsize roles in Britain's dearth of new and affordable dwellings. "This is a tiny country with an ever growing population, and if you are going to accommodate that population in the most desirable areas, you have to be honest and say that it is the end of England's green and pleasant land," he said, sitting in his manicured garden up the road from the proposed development site. To finance the action group's campaign, it raised PS75,000, or 129,000, through village fairs and garden tea parties. For an event last New Year's Eve, they hired an Elvis impersonator. Activists and homeowners say they fear that the development push by the government of Prime Minister David Cameron will contribute to the destruction of so called greenbelts vast and verdant swaths around cities and in the countryside that together encompass 13 percent of England's land, according to the Campaign to Protect Rural England, an advocacy group. About 113,000 new homes were built in England last year, only about half or even less than the number that housing experts say is needed. Before the onset of the financial crisis in 2008, the annual peak was around 170,000 new homes. The credit crunch played a role in slowing development, though the national government has tried to resolve that with incentive programs for banks to step up their lending to middle income home buyers. The government also has issued reams of policies intended to streamline planning. But local councils are naturally inclined to protect cherished green spaces and maintain the centuries old flavor of thousands of distinct villages. So while the central government chides the councils as being out of touch Mr. Cameron has referred to planning officials as the "enemies of enterprise" the councils counter that to decimate those protections would threaten the lush lands they consider one of England's greatest assets. "I am hissingly angry that the government has an idea that the planning system is the problem," said Valerie Paynter, founder of Save Hove, a group that campaigns for affordable housing in the coastal cities of Brighton and Hove. Sensible planning, Ms. Paynter said, is what "is keeping this densely populated country sane." The stratospheric rise in London home prices has prompted politicians including Mr. Osborne and Mr. Cameron, as well as Mark J. Carney, the central bank governor, to wonder if there might be a housing bubble in the making and if so, what should be done about it. Hoping to deflate a potential housing bubble, the Bank of England recently put a cap on lenders, saying that no more than 15 percent of their loan portfolios can consist of mortgages in which borrowers are lent amounts that exceed 4.5 times their income. Mr. Osborne also said he would free up brownfield sites old industrial and commercial properties for development. Despite those policy pronouncements, the obstacles to building new homes remain significant, according to architects, home builders and developers in communities close to London. In many spots, including the high demand areas of southeastern England, there are a large number of rules and regulations, including the Code for Sustainable Homes, issued by the central government and adopted by certain local councils for environmentally sustainable homes. This includes measures to increase energy efficiency and to limit water usage. Paul Jordan, a managing director at Crowzon Builders in Surrey, southwest of London, cited other novel requirements in the code, including building habitat boxes for bugs, bats and birds. "It seems to be applying a sledgehammer to crack a small nut," Mr. Jordan said, noting that the same requirements are applied for either a single home or a large development. Chris Townsend, leader of the Mole Valley District Council, which oversees the Westcott area, said the council was "committed to improving the quality of the built environment while preserving the character and integrity of our towns and villages and protecting the rural landscape." In 2012, Mr. Cameron's coalition government issued the National Planning Policy Framework to try simplifying the labyrinthine planning process. Local councils are under increased pressure to identify how much housing their communities will need over a five year period, and how that demand will be met. Where there is a deficit, appeal decisions are increasingly handed down in favor of development, says Paul Burgess, director of Lewis Co Planning. Some critics say the political imperative to develop houses to fuel economic growth will render the planning process moot. "That is a great concern to anyone trying to protect the greenbelt or the countryside," said Kristina Kenworthy, director of the Cherkley Campaign, a group that has fought a plan to turn Cherkley Court, a home in Surrey formerly owned by the press baron Lord Beaverbrook, into a luxury complex with a golf course. The local council granted permission for the luxury project, but a court found the decision unlawful. An appeals court then upheld the local council's decision. The Cherkley Campaign has now appealed to the Supreme Court. Back in Westcott, Taylor Wimpey did finally win approval in 2012 for a scaled down development of 14 houses in Westcott four of which would be deemed "affordable," another requirement to address the out of reach nature of England's house prices for many people. The Westcott Meadow Action Group contested that pared down development, too. But Taylor Wimpey won, again, in July 2013. Since then, the developer has been working to meet 13 preconditions, including having extensive discussions about the "palette of materials" to be used and the creation of bird nesting boxes. Jill Flower, who lives in the 16th century house at the foot of the drive where the development will take place, has erected concrete barriers, hoping to guard against the vibrations of trucks bringing in materials. Sitting in her garden, with doves cooing and abundant flowers in bloom, she reflected on what lay ahead. "We came here for a quiet rural environment, and slowly this is being eaten away and turned into a suburb of Dorking," Ms. Flower said, referring to the closest town, about a half mile away. Just down the road from her garden, a demolition company was on hand to clear up possible asbestos from the renovations of other houses that were once part of Ms. Flower's property and to remove the chicken coop, which belonged to a local resident. "We have to move it without damaging it," the site contractor said of the coop. "Apparently it has sentimental value." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The physicist Klaus Fuchs (1911 88) is well known as the atomic spy who gave details of everything he worked on at the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. In this enthralling and riveting account, Nancy Thorndike Greenspan, the author of a biography of the physicist Max Born, has brought together new material that rounds out Fuchs's life, from his college days in Weimar Germany to his move to Communist East Germany in June 1959 following his release from prison in Britain. He had served nine years of a 30 year sentence for espionage. There have been several previous books on Fuchs and also on the other spies working on the atomic bomb. "Atomic Spy" covers a lot of familiar ground, but where it is particularly thorough and revealing is when it deals with Fuchs's youth in Germany. Greenspan shows him becoming a militant and dedicated Communist once he perceived the threat to democracy posed by Adolf Hitler and his storm troopers. Fuchs had originally been a member of the Socialist Party, but by 1932 he had come to believe that the harsh reality of the Nazis demanded a more militant stance. As a Communist he became a leader of many of the party's youth organizations, including the Red Spark, an agitprop theater group. After Hitler took power in 1933, and just hours before the Gestapo planned to arrest Fuchs, he fled, first to France and then to Britain. He graduated three short years later from the University of Bristol, and began work in theoretical physics at the University of Edinburgh. Unfortunately for Fuchs, the British government, fearing Nazi infiltration, rounded up all German refugees, and in 1940 sent them first to an internment camp in Britain and then to a freshly built camp in Quebec. When he was released in January 1941, Fuchs started working on Britain's atomic bomb project innocently called Tube Alloys. By August of that year, he began to hand over the data he was working on to one "Alexander," the code name for Simon Kremer, a Soviet agent. Although Fuchs signed the Official Secrets Act, he violated its terms and decided to aid the Soviet Union in whatever manner he could. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Our relationship history has taught me that we both have our strong points, to not fight the boundaries, that there are things I can't control, and that you need to give the other person room to try something they believe in. It's work to care for someone as much as you care for yourself with marriage and with children. Early in our marriage, I thought there's the wrong way, or my way. I'm still like that about a lot of things, but not with Liz. I'm used to being the one who says, 'Don't worry, I'll fix it. I got it.' It's very comforting to know someone who stands by you can also fix it, regardless of what people might think of you. She's enjoyable to sit with and listen to. We have a heightened sense of connection, communication and passion. If you don't look at your wife as the most special person in the world, why are you with her? Mrs. Symon: This is my second marriage, but this is the first time I've been able to breathe. Michael is very chill and nonconfrontational. When you're around that, it gives you the ability to trust and gain confidence. We had a great friendship first and that helps because you learn to like the person you're with. With Michael, I've learned I don't always have to be right. I don't always have to be first. And to have the confidence to admit when I'm wrong. That's very beneficial. If you're constantly combative, it doesn't bode well for a relationship. I can take a step back now and listen to what someone else is saying. I used to say anything, and that can be hurtful. I'm also little O.C.D. coffee handles to the right. Michael tries to live with it, but I've learned to let go more. It's my weirdness, not his, though he still believes a toilet paper fairy exists and changes the roll, so I've also learned patience. Our marriage is intertwined in personal and business because we work together, which is how we started, and really, that's all we know. The business part is simple. We have defined roles in what we do. Marriage is harder. It's a world without rules. You have to make your own. We've found our own strengths, and, in that, found each other's strengths and weaknesses. I will always have his back and he will always have mine. I don't think we'd be married if we didn't have that. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
In a follow up experiment, the researchers asked ten people to rapidly evaluate 1,800 photos each. They found that participants could accurately gauge up to 11 lightning branches. As the number of branches increased, people strongly underestimated the number of branches, with an exponentially growing gap between actual and perceived figures. The finding is consistent with the ways humans are known to assess numbers, the authors noted. Below five, we're able to subitize, or rapidly judge numbers of items without counting. Between six and ten, we count. Above ten, we estimate, with decreasing accuracy. This could explain why artists rarely portray lightning with more than 11 strands, Dr. Horvath said. Simplified, zigzag images of lightning are also culturally ingrained (think of the lightning emoji or the common symbol for electricity). The imagery originated with ancient Greek and Roman depictions of Jupiter's and Zeus's thunderbolts, Dr. Horvath said. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The new work fits into a long history of scientists drawing a boundary between artistic and photographic representations of lightning and an even longer history of scientists and artists pitting their fields against one another, said Jennifer Tucker, a history professor at Wesleyan University who was not involved in the study. In the mid 19th century, meteorology was a new discipline, and its practitioners struggled to move people's understanding of weather away from superstition and folklore. "They wanted to replace what they derisively called 'weather fallacies' with 'weather truths' or 'facts,'" Dr. Tucker said. Among such myths was the idea that thunderbolts were material objects that fell from the sky. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The dead lead lives of noisy desperation in "Beetlejuice," the absolutely exhausting new musical that opened on Thursday at the Winter Garden Theater. This frantic adaptation of Tim Burton's much loved 1988 film is sure to dishearten those who like to think of the afterlife as one unending, undisturbed sleep. Because as directed by a feverishly inventive Alex Timbers, and starring Alex Brightman as the manic ghoul of the title, this production proposes that not being alive just means that you have to try harder a whole lot harder than you ever did before. Otherwise, you'll wind up invisible, with nary a soul to acknowledge your starry self. And in today's world of chronic self advertising, this may be the true fate worse than death. Invisibility is definitely not among this show's problems; overcompensating from the fear that it might lose an audience with a limited attention span is. Though it features a jaw droppingly well appointed gothic funhouse set (by David Korins, lighted by Kenneth Posner), replete with spooky surprises, this show so overstuffs itself with gags, one liners and visual diversions that you shut down from sensory overload. The sum effect suggests Disney World's Haunted Mansion ride (and, hey, I've spent some very happy moments there) as occupied by an especially competitive meeting of the Friars Club. The industrious cast keeps spitting out spoken and sung jokes good, bad and boring at the velocity of those armies of bats that regularly swoop over the audience, summoned by the projection designer Peter Nigrini. But moviegoers swooned for Mr. Burton's stylized blend of morbid darkness and cartoon brightness, and it remains a cult favorite. Certainly, no one complained that it was understated. The biggest objection from its fans was that Michael Keaton's Beetlejuice the scurrilous phantom who wreaks havoc among both the living and the dead in a haunted middle class home didn't get enough screen time. The creators of this musical adaptation led by Eddie Perfect (songs) and Scott Brown and Anthony King (book) apparently concluded that everything people liked about the film should be multiplied ad infinitum, starting with Beetlejuice himself. But, oh dear fans, be careful what you wish for. Let me say that after Mr. Korins's set, Mr. Brightman is the best reason to see "Beetlejuice," which also stars the talented but misused Sophia Anne Caruso as his arch frenemy, a living teenager with a death wish. Mr. Brightman, who received a Tony nomination for the Jack Black part in the stage version of "School of Rock," again faces the unenviable task of reinventing a memorable madcap screen performance. As coiffed (by the wigmaker Charles G. LaPointe) and attired (by William Ivey Long) with a newly punkish edge, this Beetlejuice is no pale imitation of Mr. Keaton or anyone else. Or not one single person. Instead, he seems to be channeling the entire ensemble from the early years of "Saturday Night Live," with a soupcon of Jerry Lewis and Robin Williams at their most frenzied. The show's high point, by far, is Mr. Brightman's opening number, "Being Dead," one of the best meta theatrical songs since "The Book of Mormon." He materializes on a coffin in a graveyard, after the funeral for the mother of Lydia (Ms. Caruso), who has sung the first of what will be several tedious ballads of bereftness. "Holy crap! A ballad already!" exclaims Beetlejuice. "And such a bold departure from the original source material." What's new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter. I felt a thrill of relief at that point, a sense that this show might not be a chore to sit through, after all. (I was on guard, as "Beetlejuice" had been roasted to a crisp in an earlier incarnation in Washington.) What follows is an extremely lively introduction to the premise that death is indeed a laughing matter, punctuated with dark, rib jabbing asides. ("If you die during the performance, this show will not stop.") Still, Mr. Brightman is so electrically, relentlessly on here that you wonder if he can sustain that level of all out energy. As it turns out, Mr. Brightman and "Beetlejuice" can indeed sustain this anything for a laugh intensity. And it is not a trait that benefits from prolonged exposure. Nearly everything appears to be operating on the principle that it must somehow top what came before. So at the drop of a punch line, the show is suddenly crowded by throngs of ghostly cheerleaders, gospel singers, a dead football team (for a sequence set in hell), not to mention really big puppets (by Michael Curry). There's even (no, please, make it stop!) a phalanx of cloned, dancing Beetlejuices. (The hyper choreography is by Connor Gallagher.) This being a Broadway musical, "Beetlejuice" has been given a freshly broadened sentimental streak. There's an enhanced treacly through line, at odds with the prevailing frat house high jinks, about the search for family. At its center is the lonely, mom missing Lydia, who resents that her dad, Charles (Adam Dannheisser) has taken up with Delia (Leslie Kritzer, taking zany to the max), a perky but insecure life coach. In parts charmingly originated onscreen by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, the house haunting, newly dead young couple Adam and Barbara (the talented Rob McClure and Kerry Butler in thankless roles) are shown mourning the absence of the child they never got around to having while they were alive. Ms. Caruso, the precocious teenage actress who was an incandescent presence in the David Bowie musical "Lazarus," lacks the devilish, deadpan piquancy that Winona Ryder brought to the same role in the film. When this Lydia sings about a place called home, you can imagine what Britney Spears might have been like in the title role of "Annie." The music mostly exists in a loud, undifferentiated blur. That includes, I am sorry to say, "Day O (The Banana Boat Song)," in which the denizens of a dinner party find themselves possessed by a calypso spirit. In the film, the incongruity of stuffy, dressed up philistines making like Jamaican backup dancers was a hoot. Here, everybody, including every member of the support cast, has already gone so far over the top that there's no room for comic contrast. The disheartening moral of "Beetlejuice" is that when anything goes, nothing much registers in the end. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Fifty years ago in upstate New York, thousands came together for a defining cultural event that's never faded from the popular imagination: three days of peace, love, music and mud at Woodstock. What photos did you take? What items did you keep (a blanket, a poster, a set list, mud, a sheet of "brown acid")? If you were there, we want to hear from you for a future project. Please fill out the form below and upload your photos from the festival and photos of items you saved. Your images may be selected for publication. An editor may contact you to photograph your Woodstock keepsakes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
STONE TOWN, Zanzibar The particular geographic location of Zanzibar, an archipelago of semiautonomous islands off the coast of Tanzania, has created an interesting religious dynamic. Though the majority of Tanzania's 55 million people are Christian, nearly all of the 1.3 million residents of Zanzibar are Muslim. This dynamic dates to a time when the islands were trade outposts that connected Africa with the Arab world. Yet the population of Zanzibar has remained religiously distinct from the mainland. It is known, in particular, for its Eid al Fitr celebration which started last week and ended on Tuesday that marks the end of Ramadan and its month of fasting. "Eid al Fitr is unique in Zanzibar, because we are isolated, and so we have been able to retain some of the traditions that have faded away in bigger cities," Mr. Saleh, 50, said. His daughter Rifkah, a bubbly 20 year old who seemed to know everyone in town, was abuzz with excitement. She acted as a guide to the festivities, leading these reporters though Stone Town's narrow alleyways, past white walls and Zanzibar's arching wooden doors, her dark abaya, or robe, billowing behind her. Rifkah's mother had baked Eid cookies, filled with date jam, two days before. "On the night before Eid, the electricity usually goes out since everyone is using their ovens to cook for the celebrations," Rifkah said. Similarly, her mother went to have her henna done ahead of time. "The girl who does her henna is booked up the day before." Others had waited, and Zanzibar's henna salons, based out of people's homes, were filled with women sitting perfectly still while the ink on their outstretched arms and legs dried. The barbershops were also full, with men getting fresh cuts and shaves. Music blasting from the inside of one barbershop declared, in Swahili, "Let's fast and then we'll celebrate Eid!" Other Zanzibaris were scrambling to get their outfits ready. "You have to buy a new dress for Eid," Rifkah said as she led the way toward the Darajani Market, the central shopping district, on one of the last nights before Eid. Within the warren of brightly lit stalls, women pawed through piles of handbags, jewel toned velvety scrunchies, glittery necklaces and lacy red bras. "I bought my Eid outfit two weeks ago," Rifkah said with a laugh. "You pay too much money if you wait until the last minute." Still, she took the opportunity to buy a pair of jeans to wear beneath her abaya; for young Zanzibaris, Eid nights can end in a trip to the dance club. As the sun began to sink in the sky on the final day of fasting, Mr. Saleh's family gathered on the outside patio, kneeling on colorful fiber mats to share the last meal of Ramadan together. As anticipated, the power failed. "Too many stoves cooking for Eid!" said Mr. Saleh. A candle was lit, and suddenly the meal, and the quieted Stone Town streets outside, took on a magical energy. Across the city, eyes were cast upward, waiting to spot the crescent moon. In Islamic tradition, such a sighting signals that the fasting of Ramadan can finally end. A cannon blast sounded a declaration by the town cleric that Eid had begun and screams of happiness echoed through the neighborhood. The First Day of Eid The next morning, hundreds of Zanzibaris gathered in a large field in the center of town for the dawn prayer. A cannon was again fired, and then, it was showtime for Stone Town's children. They ran from door to door, knocking and asking for money, in a tradition that persists much like trick or treating in the United States. In the maze of Stone Town's streets, roving packs of little boys dressed in white robes (kanzu) with new hats (kofia) zoomed around corners, exploding with excitement. Through front door gates, older community members placed silver coins in the boys' tiny outstretched hands. A lot of Stone Town's kids come away with a sizable chunk of change on the first morning of Eid: One of Mr. Saleh's young sons declared that he collected 50,000 Tanzanian shillings last year roughly 20. This means that Eid is also a great time to be a toy vendor, and the streets and parks of Stone Town were filled with stands selling plastic toys, balloons, toy guns, oversized plastic diamond rings and bouncy balls. "In Zanzibar, the trust is still there for children during Eid," Mr. Saleh said, adding that he would usually never let his children go around unchaperoned . "It's part of what makes this place special." Many Zanzibaris spent the first day of the festival roaming around, greeting old friends and visiting family. But the heat of the day meant that even more of them waited until it was dark, and they had eaten biryani and pilau rice with their families, before they headed out to show off their Eid looks. Like all older siblings in Stone Town that night, Rifkah was also charged with chaperoning her younger siblings and cousins a squirmy gang of nine during the festivities in Forodhani Park, where Zanzibaris gather at night during Eid. Smoke billowed from grills where skewers of octopus and ginger marinated beef were being turned, and omelet like "Zanzibar pizza" were tossed on oiled skillets, creating a chorus of sizzles. The bright lights of the toy stands beckoned hoards of children, who dashed through the park with their new purchases. A row of TVs was set up for those who wanted to play video games. The adults mingled the men, freshly shaved, their shirts starched and white, and the women, bathed in fabrics of every color, dotted with jewels, and clutching new purses. Rifkah bounced between circles of friends. She was smiling from ear to ear. "Eid is really just about happiness. Everyone is beautiful during Eid. It's just the happiest day," she said. Shannon Sims was a 2018 African Great Lakes Reporting Fellow with the International Women's Media Foundation. Nichole Sobecki is a freelance photojournalist and writer in Nairobi, Kenya. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The exterior of Google's New York headquarters. The company and three other big technology businesses have become targets of major antitrust investigations. Each week, we review the week's news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry. Hello, my name is Steve Lohr. I cover technology and economics for The New York Times, and I'm this week's tour guide through recent tech news. One of the big stories of the year has been the Big Tech companies becoming targets of major antitrust investigations by the nation's federal enforcement agencies, Congress and states. The concern is not only the companies' market power but also how they handle personal data, spread disinformation and amplify partisan divisions. To someone who has covered technology and antitrust for The Times for more than two decades, this period seems different than anything I've seen before. To me, it raises a question: Are we entering a new, progressive era in antitrust? The answer to that question matters a lot. The official scrutiny of the big tech companies Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple is just getting underway. Whether it results in meaningful curbs on the companies will depend in good part on the persistence of the investigators. Investigations have a way of finding things. And the institutional commitment to antitrust, or lack of it, will be shaped by economics, ideas, politics and public opinion. There are intriguing parallels with the progressive era of the late 19th and early 20th century: growing gaps in wealth, concentration of markets and a perceived threat to democracy. Then, the technology engine was the industrial revolution. Today, it is the digital revolution. Then, the targets of enforcement were the industrial trusts, led by Standard Oil. Today, it is the digital behemoths. Then, the policy response was new antitrust laws the Sherman Act of 1890 and the Clayton Act of 1914 and aggressive enforcement. Today, the policy response remains to be seen. While reporting recent stories and a few interviews last week, I've been struck by two things: the very different climate now compared with the one surrounding the antitrust case against Microsoft in the 1990s, and the extent of the bipartisan support for pursuing the big tech companies. The Microsoft investigation and trial, which I covered, was fairly narrowly focused. It was about market dominance and the software giant's tactics to stifle innovation. The second half of the 1990s, when the Justice Department and a group of states investigated and then filed a major antitrust suit against Microsoft, were banner years economically. It was not only a period of strong overall growth but a time when productivity rose. For a few years, income gaps narrowed. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. Microsoft was a purely economic case. "But now we're seeing an evolution in antitrust, to take in greater social and political concerns, as well as economics," said Maurice Stucke, a former Justice Department antitrust official and a professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law. "Antitrust is starting to capture the public imagination in a way that Microsoft never did." Current antitrust thinking is expanding to take in matters like the control of data and privacy. Since the 1980s, a central focus of antitrust has been a dominant company's power to increase prices. But there is a lively debate now about so called nonprice components of competition. A loss of privacy to a data harvesting giant like Facebook or Google, for example, can be cast as reducing the quality of the service and thus as a signal of monopoly power. "Nothing's free," Makan Delrahim, head of the Justice Department's antitrust division, said at the Times's DealBook conference last month. "If consumers think they're getting any service for free, they're being misled." Data, Mr. Delrahim explained, is an asset for internet companies, and gathering and analyzing large amounts of personal data is not necessarily a problem. But digital data, he added, "can give you market power. And its abuse would be a violation of antitrust law." In the last couple of weeks, Representative Doug Collins, Republican of Georgia, who is the ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, has been a fixture on cable TV news as a hyperventilating, partisan opponent of impeachment. But in an interview last month for an article on a Judiciary subcommittee's antitrust investigation of the big tech companies, Mr. Collins was a voice of bipartisan reason. Mr. Collins is less critical of the tech giants than the Democrat leading the inquiry, Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island. And he dismisses the calls to break up the companies from the Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. But Mr. Collins supports the House investigation. And he thinks that consumers should be given greater control over how the tech giants use their data and that the companies should be prevented from buying up nascent competitors. "Those are genuine concerns of mine," he said. Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, a research and advocacy group, points to the states' investigation of Google, joined by 50 attorneys general and led by Ken Paxton, a conservative Republican attorney general in Texas, as a sign of the changing times in antitrust. An investigation of Facebook, led by Letitia James, the attorney general of New York and a Democrat, has nearly as many supporting states. "The environment is radically different than it was even a year or two ago," Mr. Lynn said. "It's a grass roots rebellion against concentrated power." But whether shifting sentiments will translate to a pendulum swing in antitrust, reminiscent of the progressive era of a century ago, is uncertain at best. Major enforcement actions would be challenged in court. For years, the courts have generally embraced the "consumer welfare" standard typically, though not always, dependent on higher prices. The courts have also been guided by the assumption that markets are self correcting. "I think antitrust should move, but it will really take the alignment of a lot of stars to move this ship," said Andrew Gavil, a law professor at Howard University. We'd love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to bits newsletter nytimes.com. Forward it to your friends, and let them know they can sign up here. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
In the 1960s, environmental destruction was upfront and personal. It was in your face. Los Angeles was shrouded in smog. The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire. Three million gallons of oil spilled off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif. New York City dumped raw sewage into the Hudson River. Bald eagles were teetering near extinction in the lower 48 states because of the ravages of DDT. Leaded gasoline poisoned children. "A lot of people were getting angry about dirty water, dirty air and litter," said Barbara Reid Alexander, Midwest coordinator for the first Earth Day, in 1970. "People were excited to talk about it." Part of the spark that ignited Earth Day came from Gaylord Nelson, a senator from Wisconsin, who proposed campus teach ins on the environment, modeled after gatherings on college campuses where students and professors met to talk about the Vietnam War. Organizers chose April 22 because it would be before college students were cramming for final exams but after the snow melted. On April 22, 1970, Mayor John Lindsay of New York shut down 45 blocks of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Across the country, 20 million people took to the streets. The National Education Association estimated that 10 million public school children participated in teach in programs where they learned about the costs of environmental inaction. "It was one of those transformational events," said Denis Hayes, the national coordinator. "In 1969, people really didn't talk about 'the environment.' By the middle of 1970, many Americans characterized themselves as environmentalists." The turnout catapulted environmental issues onto the political agenda. Democrats and Republicans took interest. Legislation followed: the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, Toxic Substances Control Act, Resource Recovery and Conservation Act, National Forest Protection Act, the designation of Superfund sites and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency. "For the next decade, environmental legislation was almost unstoppable," Mr. Hayes said. Today the story is different. Fifty years ago, the effects of burning fossil fuels on the atmosphere was only beginning to be understood. Now it is the looming threat to the planet as the earth steadily warms. And only now are people seeing, on a large scale, the consequences: record breaking heat, floods, intensifying storms, landscape fires in California and Australia, the disappearance of Arctic ice, shrinking glaciers, dying coral reefs. But it has been a slow build to creating a movement with the power and public support that emerged from the first Earth Day. What would it take for environmental fervor to reach the level of passions lit by Earth Day 1970? "Back in those days, the Democratic Party had a liberal wing and a very conservative wing, and so did the Republican Party," Mr. Hayes said. "You were able to put together legislation and get enough support from the progressive wings of both parties to have it be bipartisan. Today that is not true." In addition the issues bottom trawling, ocean acidification, floating plastic gyres and, of course, greenhouse gas emissions are international in scope. The climate, and the world, are changing. What challenges will the future bring, and how should we respond to them? What should our leaders be doing? Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, finds reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency. What are the worst climate risks in your country? Select a country, and we'll break down the climate hazards it faces. Where are Americans suffering most? Our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths in the U.S. What does climate devastation look like? In Sept. 2020, Michael Benson studied detailed satellite imagery. Here's the earth that he saw and the one he wants to see. "It doesn't make any difference who burns a ton of coal," Mr. Hayes said. "The atmospheric impact is the same." And while the U.N. can pass resolutions, it has no enforcement mechanisms. Arturo Sandoval, known for his work in the Chicano civil rights movement at the University of New Mexico, was the Western regional coordinator for the first Earth Day. He thinks the lack of diversity in the mainstream environmental leadership hampers its ability to create a broader coalition. "If for the last 50 years you've only had white, middle class, mostly male leadership, it's very difficult to move beyond that," Mr. Sandoval said. "The environmental movement was a victim, in a way, of its own early success," he added. "They thought they had a model that would last, and they didn't bother to reach out beyond what is a middle class, white constituency, and that is not enough people to fight off the kind of attacks that are happening now." Ms. Alexander is concerned at how economic inequality has limited the climate movement. "The current situation has resulted in a concentration of wealth at the very highest level and a deterioration in the middle class," she said. Many people, she added, "feel they have been left behind and that climate change is just a rich person's fancy." "The environmental movement is so pressed on their notion of carbon taxes and higher prices to pay for their subsidies it's like they are part of the elite," Ms. Alexander said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
This spring, the Missouri Chamber of Commerce urged the state Legislature to accept the federal government's plan to expand Medicaid for the poor and disabled. The business lobbying group had not suddenly gone rogue. Here is how Daniel P. Mehan, its president, summarized his feelings about President Obama's health care law: "We don't like it." But the Chamber was cognizant of the plea of its members directly affected by the issue: dozens of Missouri hospitals stood to lose 4.2 billion over six years in federal support for uncompensated care if the state refused to increase the income ceiling for Medicaid eligibility. Pragmatism suggested accepting the expansion. Washington would pay the extra cost entirely for three years and pick up 90 percent of the bill thereafter. And it would expand health coverage in the state's poor, predominantly white rural counties, which voted consistently to put Republican lawmakers into office. Missouri's Republican controlled Legislature heavy with Tea Party stalwarts rejected Medicaid's expansion in the state anyway. After their vote, a frustrated editorial in The Missourian, a faithfully conservative newspaper in Washington, Mo., asked of the state's elected Republicans: "Who Do They Represent?" Today, the same forces that blocked the expansion of Medicaid in Missouri are going all out in Washington in a bid to undo all of the Affordable Care Act. Bowing to the vehemence of its Tea Party faction, the House G.O.P. forced a government shutdown when Senate Democrats refused to delay or defund the president's health overhaul. House Republicans are threatening even further damage if they don't get their way, possibly unleashing financial chaos if they manage to force the United States into its first default ever on the government's debt. The law is imperfect. It has dozens of complicated, interlocking parts. Half of Americans say they don't understand how it will affect them and their family. Still, the law has many provisions that are likely to improve life for millions of Americans, including a big portion of what we know as the working middle class. Almost two thirds of uninsured Americans have a full time job, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. A further 16 percent are employed part time. The Department of Health and Human Services recently estimated that nearly six in 10 uninsured Americans could qualify for health coverage in the insurance market for less than 100 per person per month. According to an analysis by the Urban Institute, 28 million Americans would gain health insurance under Obamacare. Of these, eight million earn more than twice the poverty level of 47,100 for a family of four. A majority of those would get a subsidy to buy a plan. As it turns out, the core Tea Party demographic working white men between the ages of 45 and 64 would do fairly well under the law. Take Missouri. It has about 800,000 uninsured. Almost half of them would have been eligible for expanded Medicaid benefits, had the Legislature not rejected them. Many of the rest including families of four making up to 94,000 will be eligible to get subsidized health insurance. In St. Louis, for instance, a family of four making 50,000 a year will be able to buy a middle of the road "silver" health plan for 282 a month and a bottom end "bronze" plan for 32. Even Medicare recipients will get a benefit worth a few hundred dollars a year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
MONTCLAIR, N.J. The choreographer Deborah Hay has been known to ask, of herself and her dancers, "What if?" A Hay classic: "What if where I am is what I need?" That spirit of wondering and of letting a question dangle infuses her latest work, "Figure a Sea," which had its American premiere at Peak Performances here on Thursday. Performed by 20 dancers of the Cullberg Ballet, with an original score by Laurie Anderson, it's one sublime hour of asking without needing to know. Ms. Hay was among the rebels of Judson Dance Theater, which uprooted the rules of modern dance in the 1960s, embracing the idea of ordinary movement and ordinary bodies. Cullberg Ballet, from Sweden, is made up of some rather extraordinary bodies, but in Ms. Hay's work, they look no more or no less than candidly, inquisitively human. The whole group is onstage nearly the whole time, from the moment we enter the Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University. And the stage is wide open, with exposed wings that teem with activity, the margins as alive as the center. (One of Ms. Hay's guiding questions here: "How do you not get seduced by the center of the space?") What seems at first like pure improvisation resolves into structures assembled with the lightest touch. Two men settle into a hug, as a woman skips past them, a particle in her own orbit. One dancer's ballet adagio catches the eye. Suddenly half the group has formed a large "V," with another group clustered inside of it, or the whole ensemble has split into thirds, organized by costume. (Marita Tjarnstrom designed the three looks, all incorporating shades of blue and gray.) Shape keeps emerging from shapelessness, and it's hard to say how. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
EXPERIMENTER (2015) stream on Hulu or Netflix; rent on Amazon, iTunes, or Vudu; watch for free on YouTube. Peter Sarsgaard stars in this biographical drama about Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist who administered troubling experiments in the 1960s in which participants delivered what they believed to be electric shocks to strangers simply because they were ordered to. Writing in The Times, Manohla Dargis named the movie a Critic's Pick and called it a "nimble, low frequency high." TOGETHER on Acorn TV. If you gravitate toward romantic comedies with will they won't they couples, this six part British series is for you. Tom (Jonny Sweet) and Ellen (Cara Theobold), 20 somethings in London, hit it off immediately. But every step toward a relationship comes with a challenge like when Tom's parents reveal early on that he still lives with them. END GAME (2018) on Netflix. The documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman ("The Celluloid Closet," "Paragraph 175") shine a spotlight on two medical facilities in San Francisco that are spearheading innovative methods for palliative care. This Oscar nominated cinema verite documentary goes into hospital rooms where patients confront the end of their lives with trepidation, acceptance and support. Another nominated short documentary, "Black Sheep," about a black man living among racists, is available on YouTube or Amazon. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
When the Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal won a Golden Globe last Sunday for his portrayal of an impetuous orchestra conductor in "Mozart in the Jungle," television viewers were as stunned as he was. Even more so when the Amazon comedy about the fictional New York Symphony, directed by Paul Weitz, edged out contenders like "Veep" and "Transparent" for best comedy series. As the actor Albert Brooks put it on Twitter after it won its second Golden Globe, "If Mozart in The Jungle wins any more awards someone will have to see it." But maybe the rest of the world is just catching up with New York's classical music enclave. For the last year, the show has been the talk of symphony halls, conservatory corridors and orchestra pits, mostly because it is based on the 2005 memoir written by Blair Tindall, a former New York City freelance oboist whom many musicians know or have heard. In her tell all, Ms. Tindall, now 55, chronicled cocaine fueled late nights and freewheeling sexual high jinks among classical musicians in the 1980s and 1990s. The revelations were scandalous when published, in large part because the pseudonyms Ms. Tindall used barely veiled her paramours. She burned so many bridges then, it seemed the only people willing to embrace her worked in Hollywood. "Mozart in the Jungle, Sex, Drugs and Classical Music," the 2005 memoir written by Blair Tindall on which the TV show is based. Producers agonized over whether the show would reflect the author's singular experience or embrace a more contemporary New York sensibility. They arrived at something in between: a whimsical drama exploring a competitive world. Musicians who have watched "Mozart in the Jungle" say it is slowly finding an audience here among the classical music crowd, who have been drawn to the affable Mr. Garcia Bernal and the 20 something oboist played by Lola Kirke, the sister of Jemima Kirke from "Girls." It doesn't hurt that Bernadette Peters, a Broadway favorite, also stars, as the orchestra's manager. The producers have hired New York musicians as on screen extras, making for a fun peer spotting exercise. The second season is studded with classical world celebrity cameos, including musicians like Joshua Bell and Lang Lang, and the Grammy winning pianist Emanuel Ax, who played the interactive video game "Dance Dance Revolution" at a dive bar during one episode. Gustavo Dudamel, the wunderkind Venezuelan conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, makes an appearance as a backstage handler. "I've heard a lot of colleagues describe it as a guilty pleasure," said Lara St. John, a Canadian born violinist who has played with many of the major symphony orchestras. "But I don't see the guilt." Ms. St. John has watched the show since its premiere in 2014 and said the overall story is compelling, despite a few artistic liberties. "I too know people who do multiple gigs a night to make money," she said. "And we all know people like Pembridge," referring to an egomaniacal former conductor played by Malcolm McDowell. But Ms. St. John conceded that she has the luxury of professional distance. "I'm not familiar with the people in the book, so it doesn't bother me," she said. Jason Schwartzman, one of the show's producers, said it wasn't trying to recreate New York in the 1980s, nor were they aiming for a documentary about Ms. Tindall's life. AIDS had a sweeping impact on the Broadway community in that era. And drug use and casual sex were prevalent. "Our show is not an adaptation, but the book is the touchstone for this whole thing," he said in a telephone interview. "Blair's book was a moment when the sheen on classical music was lifted." Marilyn Cole, a freelance oboist, was hired to train Ms. Kirke for her role as Hailey Rutledge, the New York City comer with dreams of joining a world class orchestra. Ms. Cole, who has played in Broadway shows and numerous orchestras, said her primary concern was that the producers would portray her New York peers as petty and backbiting. They didn't. "I came here and found an oboe community that is really a community," she said. She oversees Ms. Kirke's "oboe playing" on set. (With a few exceptions for credits and selected scenes, the music is from existing recordings that have been licensed.) And, as one might expect, oboe players are the most nitpicky about the actress's performance. "A lot of the time they say she needs more of a roundness in the pursing of her lips," Ms. Cole said. "But the comment I hear from non oboists is that they are happy with her work." Indeed, everyone has an opinion. Mr. Weitz grew up in New York City and heard from Orin O'Brien, a family friend who in 1966 was the first woman to become a member of the New York Philharmonic. "She took me to task for all the swearing," he said, laughing. Ms. Tindall, who inspired Ms. Hailey's character, lives in Los Angeles and has had something of a colorful life outside the symphony hall. In 2007, her monthslong marriage to Bill Nye, better known as the Science Guy, was declared invalid. (The megachurch pastor Rick Warren had performed the ceremony the year earlier in front of 400 people at an entertainment conference.) Not long after, Mr. Nye filed a restraining order against her, claiming he caught her trying to poison his rose garden while clad in black clothes and a hat. Ms. Tindall said in a telephone interview that she was stressed at the time and never intended to harm Mr. Nye. Journalists critical of the show have also caused her tsoris. Last year, Ms. Tindall sparred online with Margaret Lyons, a television columnist from New York magazine, after Ms. Lyons tweeted that the oboe playing looked fake. "It was an observation," Ms. Lyons said. "The veracity of that kind of thing doesn't make or break a show." Ms. Tindall also lashed out at Anne Midgette, the chief classical music critic for The Washington Post, who panned the book in a 2005 review in The New York Times, and described the first season as "a seventh grader's notion of what life in this business might be like." "I get really angry when people write something but don't come from a background where they know what they are talking about," said Ms. Tindall, noting that most critics are not professional musicians. Ms. Midgette, who is married to Greg Sandow, a critic and composer, declined to comment on the kerfuffle. Her review of the show's second season was more favorable. "I'm glad she likes it better," Ms. Tindall said. "I hope she realizes now I'm not a monster." But some musicians from the author's era have a hard time watching the show or have avoided it altogether. "It is not that I hate Blair," said Randall Ellis, the principal oboist of the Mostly Mozart Festival. "I just resent some of the things she wrote in the book." He gave up, mostly, after the pilot, irked by a scene early on in which a cellist breezed in late for a performance. "You either don't go into the pit or get fired the next day," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. On the witness stand for a second day, Hulk Hogan was far from the chest thumping, T shirt tearing champion wrestler admired for years by his fans for his braggadocio and his swagger. Under quiet but relentless cross examination Tuesday by a lawyer for the website Gawker, which he has sued for invasion of privacy, the wrestler was subdued, even melancholy. Referred to in court by his real name, Terry G. Bollea, and wearing a cross on a silver chain around his neck, he appeared intent on keeping calm under the onslaught, with only the occasional trace of irritation in his responses. Even then, he consistently addressed the lawyer, Michael Sullivan, as "sir." "I'm not the same person I was before all this stuff happened," said Mr. Bollea, 62, and retired from the ring. "I don't have my guard up anymore." Mr. Bollea is seeking 100 million in damages from Gawker, which in 2012 posted a secretly recorded video of him having sex with a friend's wife. Mr. Sullivan zeroed in on the plaintiff's admission that as a larger than life celebrity in a rough and tumble profession, he was in the habit of exaggerating or being untruthful. By returning to the point again and again, Mr. Sullivan was clearly seeking to raise doubt among the six jurors about Mr. Bollea's veracity in the case. The defense attorney also spent considerable time focusing on the plaintiff's public behavior, much of it sexually provocative, to underscore the notion that the release of the video of him having sex could not have been, in the public's mind, an unusual or remarkable occurrence. The case, being heard in a courthouse in downtown St. Petersburg, near Mr. Bollea's hometown, has raised fundamental issues about privacy rights and freedom of the press in a technologically nimble age in which anyone can publish the most private and salacious pictures and videos online. While acknowledging his often outrageous self promotional behavior in the past, Mr. Bollea insisted that he had nothing to do with producing or posting the video recorded in the home of a Tampa shock radio host in 2007 and that its public airing was shocking and disturbing. "I was concerned that people would think I had something to do with this," Mr. Bollea told the jury. "I would never do that to my personal life." Asked by Mr. Sullivan why he had not insisted that interviewers like Howard Stern refrain from asking him about the video if he was so concerned about its dissemination, Mr. Bollea suggested that he had no power to alter the course of such a conversation. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. "I was on an entertainment show: I had to be an entertainer," Mr. Bollea said, referring to Mr. Stern's program. "When you're on his show, you know it's a character driven show, so you just roll with it. You have to take the good with the bad." Occasionally, the plaintiff bristled if only slightly at the lawyer's questions, as when Mr. Sullivan referred him repeatedly to an 835 page deposition in front of him on the witness stand. "I'm sorry, buddy," he said, in a rare departure from protocol. "You need to tell me what line you're starting on." Observed by a large contingent of reporters from around the country, the former wrestler gently rebuffed attempts by Mr. Sullivan to paint him as someone who carelessly and routinely flaunted his sexuality and his conquests, and for whom even the most intimate personal details were fodder for publicity. Mr. Bollea insisted that any such disclosures in public were purely an act, a crucial component of his character as Hulk Hogan. In that context, he defended radio and television interviews in which he discussed his love life, the size of his penis, and his daughter's sexuality. Mr. Bollea said also that his descriptions of a love affair in a memoir, and reality show scenes of him sitting on a toilet, his pants around his ankles, were similarly acceptable when viewed as part of his public persona. But the defense attorney's questions seemed to imply that Mr. Bollea's propensity for such disclosures which continued after the posting in 2012 of the video at issue was at odds with his claim that his privacy had been violated by the images taken from a security camera in his friend's bedroom. Mr. Bollea resisted that notion. "My problem," he said, "is with the videotape that you guys put out, that lives forever on the Internet." He acknowledged that a celebrity must put up with certain pressures not visited on ordinary mortals. "I'm kind of concerned about Hulk Hogan's privacy, but you kind of give it away," he said. "But in the privacy of your own home, no one invades my privacy." Under subsequent questioning by one of his attorneys, Kenneth G. Turkel, Mr. Bollea was pressed to speak again of his reaction to the release of the video. "When the sex tape hit, my whole world turned upside down," Mr. Bollea said, noting that he could not eat or sleep for days at a time. Later, when he found out that his shock radio friend, known as Bubba the Love Sponge, had been responsible for filming the encounter, he said, "I was down as far as I could go." "It's not something you can walk away from," he went on. "It stays with you." The camera in the bedroom had been installed by David Rice, the chief engineer on Bubba the Love Sponge's show, at the request of the radio host. Mr. Rice, whose testimony in a deposition was read aloud to the jury later in the afternoon, said the camera was deliberately set up so that it would operate only if someone slid a disk into the recorder and pushed a button, cementing the plaintiff's contention that the taping of Mr. Bollea's sexual encounter had not been an accident. Another witness on Tuesday was Jules Wortman, a former public relations executive at TNA Impact Wrestling, with which the plaintiff was once affiliated. In videotaped testimony, she described Mr. Bollea as getting "teary" after a "Today" show appearance in which he spoke about the video, and said the host Kathie Lee Gifford commiserated with him in a hallway. "Kathie Lee was hugging him, and she said, 'I understand when your private life gets played out in public,' " Ms. Wortman recalled. "He was emotional, and he excused himself to go to the bathroom. He was in there for a little while." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
With starting pitchers working fewer and fewer innings these days, relievers are more important than ever. That is how the Yankees see it, at least, and they showed it again on Thursday by giving another three year contract to an elite free agent reliever. The Yankees reached agreement on a three year, 27 million deal with Adam Ottavino, a right hander from Brooklyn who starred last season for the Colorado Rockies. The deal was confirmed by a person with direct knowledge of the deal who was granted anonymity because Ottavino must pass a physical exam before the deal is official. Ottavino, 33, joins Zach Britton, Dellin Betances and Chad Green as overpowering setup men for closer Aroldis Chapman. The Yankees re signed Britton the former All Star closer for Baltimore who joined the team in a trade last summer for three years and 39 million this month. Ottavino grew up rooting for the Yankees; in 1998, at 12 years old, he was in the stands for David Wells's perfect game. He attended P.S. 39 in Brooklyn, played ball at Prospect Park and graduated from the Berkeley Carroll School in 2003. Three years later, the St. Louis Cardinals drafted him in the first round out of Northeastern University. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
You know what they say about April showers. On Thursday, Tokyobike will host a shopping event from 6 to 10 p.m. for the outerwear label the Arrivals, during which you can sip sake and try on a water repellant bomber ( 325) or a waterproof leather moto ( 685) that should see you through the new month. At 1 Prince Street. That same day, Dover Street Market will unveil an installation for the Row featuring a Donald Judd desk and chair that showcases a single backpack (price upon request). At 160 Lexington Avenue. And Bloomingdale's will open a pop up for Aella, a newish workwear label with a Warby Parker like home try on model. It will offer smart pants options, like a skinny midrise ( 198) and high rise flares ( 245) in proprietary easy care fabrics. Also on Thursday, Bergdorf Goodman will host two personal appearances. First up: Libertine Johnson will show a selection of one of a kind pieces, like a patchwork jacket ( 7,500). And from 2 to 6 p.m., the Mother of Pearl designer Amy Powney will be on hand with her spring collection, which includes an off the shoulder floral print silk dress ( 895). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Shirley Criddle and her husband, Markus Flatscher, are 20th century design enthusiasts. Their Chicago home is filled with vintage furniture by the likes of Oscar Niemeyer and Paul McCobb, and Mr. Flatscher idolizes Frank Lloyd Wright, whom he considers one of the greatest architects of all time. So when Ms. Criddle was looking for a way to celebrate Mr. Flatscher's 40th birthday earlier this year, she hit upon the idea of renting a Wright house that she spotted on Airbnb: the four bedroom Bernard Schwartz House in Two Rivers, Wis., built in 1939 and based on plans the architect published in Life magazine. The couple and half a dozen friends spent a weekend there, reveling in the way sunlight streamed through the clerestory windows, cooking in the compact kitchen and sitting around the living room drinking Bloody Marys. "It was like being in a museum," Ms. Criddle, 33, said. "Except getting to treat it like it was our own." Preston Schlebusch for The New York Times That's the sort of unequivocal praise you don't hear much in connection with Airbnb these days, given all the recent controversy. The company, which was founded in San Francisco in 2008, is now the world's largest home sharing site, worth some 30 billion. It is also engaged in multiple legal battles around the world in cities that restrict short term rentals. Affordable housing advocates say it is responsible for driving housing costs up by taking full time rentals off the market, in effect turning them into illegal hotel rooms. And just last month, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York signed a bill imposing stiff fines on hosts who violate local housing regulations; the company immediately reacted by filing a lawsuit in federal court. All of this has made the Airbnb experience a bit fraught for both guests and hosts. But if you're a design obsessed traveler, the opportunity to try on someone else's style for a night is hard to resist, no matter how much contention surrounds it. And if you're a style minded host, Airbnb offers what may be your best chance to share your taste with others or even to market it, if your work involves design. Her IT House a glass enclosed, solar powered, prefabricated structure in Pioneertown, Calif., near Joshua Tree National Park was an experiment in using nontraditional construction methods, built with her then husband and business partner, Alan Koch, 10 years ago as a second home for themselves. Ms. Taalman and Mr. Koch have since divorced and no longer work together; Ms. Taalman now owns the house and rents it out on Airbnb for 380 a night. Guests enamored of the house have left glowing reviews on the website, as well as bottles of champagne for their host, and even a pair of socks (those particular visitors owned a sock company). A few have been so impressed that they've commissioned Ms. Taalman to design other homes like it. The Blue Jay Tipi, in the Catskills town of Bovina, N.Y., is experimental in a different way: The owners, Chris Langford, 34, and Lisa Candela, 45, are using it to test drive their idea for a boutique resort. The couple met in South Dakota, Mr. Langford's home state, when Ms. Candela, a photographer, was hired to take pictures at a wedding held on a wild horse sanctuary. She and Mr. Langford, a financial planner who was one of the wedding guests, both admired the tepees on the reserve. As they got to know each other, they realized they shared dreams that, if not similar, were at least distantly related he to live off the land and she to create a destination resort in a bucolic setting. After they became engaged they found a way to combine those dreams, living in a small house in Bovina, on land that flows down to a meandering creek, and erecting a tepee in a clearing nearby, furnishing it with rustic romantic furnishings in the vein of a Ralph Lauren photo spread. In April, they listed the tepee on Airbnb for 135 a night and immediately started to get bookings. Mr. Langford, who now spends his days splitting wood for the tepee's wood burning stove and bushwhacking paths for guests to use, said the first tepee has already paid for itself and they recently bought a second, which should be up and running soon. Eventually, he added, they expect to graduate to a larger piece of land with room for a proper inn and a collection of tepees scattered around it. Other hosts, like Kitty Mrache, have no such grand ambitions. Nevertheless, Mrs. Mrache, 66, owns one of the most booked listings on Airbnb: the Mushroom Dome Cabin in Aptos, Calif. The tiny fairy tale house, which is topped by a half sphere inspired by Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, was built in 1995 from a kit. Mrs. Mrache, who regarded it as a "fun art project" and embellished it over the years, simply wanted a place where her grown children could stay when they visited. In the description on the website, Mrs. Mrache is forthright about the home's quirks: "The cabin is not as big as it looks in this photo," warns the caption of a picture of the main level, which is just 100 square feet, with a sleeping loft above. Guests, who pay 115 a night, apparently aren't deterred. Mrs. Mrache takes her home's popularity, and all the comings and goings, in stride. "I raised four children," she said. "Being a host just fits my personality." Renting out a little cabin in the woods, of course, is one thing, but letting strangers make themselves at home in an architectural masterpiece is something else entirely. And Michael Ditmer, who owns the Bernard Schwartz House with his brother, Gary Ditmer, admits to having some concerns. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
A strange thing can happen to young couples in New York City. Just when it seems everything is going according to plan, they move in together. Love has something to do with it, of course. So do the challenges of New York real estate. With rents that can bring a checking account to its knees, living together can seem the only sensible option. But if the relationship goes sour in the middle of the lease, that decision can turn out to have been a wild gamble after all. Cassandra Seale and Mike Byhoff moved in together in 2010 after about a year of dating. He was 26 and worked at Gawker. She was his 24 year old intern; they both seem a bit sheepish about the cliche. "He was in charge of training the interns," Ms. Seale said, quickly adding, "but we didn't start dating until after." For months, the two spent cramped nights in Mr. Byhoff's Lower East Side apartment, a three bedroom shared with two friends and short on privacy, but seemingly a better bet than Ms. Seale's rental in Bedford Stuyvesant. "She had always lived in not the best areas of Brooklyn," Mr. Byhoff said. "She liked me, but a really big thing for her was she always wanted to live in Manhattan." When his lease was up, it seemed only rational for them to get an apartment together in the neighborhood. In other parts of the country, sharing a living space is a sign that young couples have taken a turn for the serious, with both pairs of hands firmly on the steering wheel. But in New York, where people platonically share windowless rooms with strangers in a trade for subway access, cohabitation and commitment do not necessarily go hand in hand. Living together is often driven as much by practicality as romance. And when the relationship unravels, one or both parties have to walk away from an apartment as well as a lover. In hindsight, Ms. Seale said that "part of the reason why the relationship accelerated was that he was in the Lower East Side and it was really convenient for me to stay there, like all the time." But a year and a co signed lease later, it became clear that somewhere along the path from Bed Stuy to a one bedroom on Norfolk and Delancey, the romance had made a quiet exit. Ms. Seale said Mr. Byhoff came home one evening and announced, without much fanfare, "I'm no longer attracted to you." With that, lovers became just roommates, with a hefty helping of history between them. Much has been said about romantic entanglement in an overconnected world, and how hard it is to get away from an ex in the Internet Age. But what if you're actually living with that person, cheek by jowl? What if half of your bed belongs to a person who prefers that you sleep somewhere else? "It was definitely awkward," Mr. Byhoff said. "It's just like, you're in the bed facing a different way. There is nothing else you can do." They continued living together in what Ms. Seale described as a "weird purgatory" for a month before she moved out and he took over the lease. During that time, said Ms. Seale, who was freelancing as a writer and acting, she would walk the dog they had bought together for eight hours a day, to avoid being in the apartment. And though she needed to see other people, to feel as though she was at least trying to move on, she took care to keep things civil. "I came home once from hooking up with a friend of a friend," she said, "and I remember coming home really early because I was like I don't want him to know." Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, a Harvard sociologist, is the author of "Exit: The Endings That Set Us Free." She says people frequently assume that simply declaring the end of a relationship will make it so. "There often comes a moment in our lives with exits, where all the forces and sensations come together and you say, 'I'm out of here,' " she said. But hitting the road is not always easy when you're stuck in a limbo of limited square footage. "These are protracted moves," Dr. Lawrence Lightfoot said, "and that makes this much, much harder." New York's real estate market was particularly unkind to Audrey Kovar and Chris Lambert. The two had lived together in a town house in Portland, Ore., before relocating a few years ago to a railroad style 1,000 square foot one bedroom in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for which the rent was 1,600 a month. Before their yearlong lease was up, they were at each other's throats. People who come to New York together, even when they're initially holding hands in common purpose, often find that the city and its demands can drive a wedge into what had been a solid partnership. It is, after all, a place where much is given and much is asked. Mr. Lambert, for his part, had a 9 to 5 job in construction, and Ms. Kovar was working the night shift at the Meatball Shop in the East Village. To relax after work, Mr. Lambert, now 27, said, he liked to have a couple of beers with friends. Ms. Kovar, 24, said it went beyond that. When she returned from waiting tables at 4 a.m., she said, he was rarely at home. But after a few months of living with a friend on the Lower East Side, "things fell through," Ms. Kovar said. "As in, the ceiling collapsed." That sent Ms. Kovar back to Greenpoint, where she and Mr. Lambert tried again to make cohabitation work. It didn't, and Ms. Kovar took a leave of absence from her job at the Meatball Shop and moved back to her family home in Philadelphia. "She was all over the place, she would come back for two or three months and then leave me again," Mr. Lambert said. "I was like: 'What is going on? Where is this going? Are you coming back?' " Ms. Kovar did return to New York, determined to stay out of her ex's apartment. But with few contacts in the city, she was at a loss. So Mr. Lambert stepped in again, this time to offer up a friend who needed a body to fill a slot in a three bedroom. "I never met this girl before, but we totally hit it off," Ms. Kovar said, describing the roommate. Then she found out how Mr. Lambert knew the woman: "They had a night together." The revelation was a reminder that, though it's one of the largest cities in the world, New York can still be a very small town. Given that she still had some feelings for Mr. Lambert, Ms. Kovar was initially squeamish. But she shrugged the feeling off, because the prospect of sifting through the offerings on Craigslist was too dreadful. Ivana Tagliamonte, an agent with Halstead Property, says she has seen so many breakups that they almost seem a rite of passage for young New Yorkers. "It's a life cycle for a lot of young couples in their early 20s," she said. "They move in together, sign a lease together, and then the relationship doesn't work out." Nor is it surprising that when the young and in lease fall out of love, shared real estate sometimes becomes a weapon. Ms. Tagliamonte said the worst case she had dealt with involved a couple who were sharing a studio for which only the woman had signed the lease. Toward the end of the lease, the rent payments were so far behind that Ms. Tagliamonte, on behalf of the landlord, went to evict the couple. But when she got there, she noticed that the closets contained only men's clothing. She realized that despite being the leaseholder, the girlfriend had moved out. Ms. Tagliamonte tracked down the woman, who had no idea that her credit was being ruined by an ex who was squatting in an apartment for which she was legally responsible. The young woman immediately called her former boyfriend, who within 24 hours paid the outstanding 9,000 in full. "The threat of a lawsuit and going to court was obviously not as threatening as getting an angry call from an ex girlfriend," Ms. Tagliamonte said. In some cases, the breakup itself can be less traumatic than the months that precede it, as two people who share almost everything begin to lose a sense of why, exactly, they're tied together at all. Dr. Lawrence Lightfoot, the sociologist, says part of what makes it so hard to detach completely is the codependence that comes with putting two peas into a very tiny pod. She cited many friends she had seen follow the same path. "There are kind of these parallel narratives of people our age doing this," she said, "and it kind of all seems to end the same. Our generation does a really good job of assuming that they can beat the odds." She and Mr. Halupka split before their lease was up, but were able to find replacement tenants in about 10 days. "It was another young couple," Ms. Nelson said. They probably loved the place. Whether they loved each other enough to make a go of living there together, only time and the vagaries of New York real estate will tell. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
For renters looking for new construction in Dumbo, a Brooklyn neighborhood with scant space to build, 60 Water Street has begun leasing 232 market rate apartments, many with stunning East River views. But for many residents, historians and preservationists, the glassy complex with a 17 story tower is an eyesore that obstructs historic views seen from the Brooklyn Bridge. Dumbo is defined by its gritty, industrial architecture, with hulking warehouses set along narrow, Belgian block streets that snake between the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. But 60 Water Street, with frosted fins tracing its facade, delivers to the area an unabashedly modern neighbor, with most units priced slightly higher than the neighborhood average. The complex, designed by Leeser Architecture and Ismael Leyva Architects, will eventually include a 300 seat middle school on Dock Street, ground floor retail on Water Street and a parking garage on Front Street. It also has 58 affordable units, with tenants selected from a pool of more than 10,000 applicants. "The product itself is not like anything else in the neighborhood," said Charles Homet, an associate broker at Halstead Property who lives in Dumbo. "It's shiny and new." Opponents of the 425,000 square foot development built by the Two Trees Management Company tried in vain to block it when the site went through a lengthy land use approval process in 2009. The roster of notable critics included the actors Helen Hunt and Gabriel Byrne, along with the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and the writer David McCullough, author of the 1972 book "The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge." Nevertheless, the development handily won City Council approval. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Credit...Eric Chakeen for The New York Times; Styled by Alex Tudela Welcome to a celebrity profile in which you learn almost nothing about the project the subject is promoting. As your tour guide, I do apologize. So does Kyle MacLachlan, and it's hard to be mad at him. The guy exudes a Pacific Northwest joie de vivre, one he has used to great effect over the years playing men who are all chipper surfaces high I.Q. Mr. Cleans with edginess or daffiness, or both, lurking beneath. In "Blue Velvet," he played an innocent seeming college student who didn't mind stumbling into a sadomasochistic murder mystery. On "Sex and the City," he was a blue blood incapable of getting aroused without an issue of Juggs at hand. And on David Lynch's creepy, brilliant "Twin Peaks," he played Dale Cooper, the cherry pie inhaling, coffee swilling F.B.I. special agent who waxes poetic about the majestic beauty of Douglas firs and turns out to have a dangerous past. Now, after a 26 year hiatus, "Twin Peaks" is gearing up for a new 18 episode series on Showtime starting May 21, with every episode written by its co creators, David Lynch and Mark Frost, and directed by Mr. Lynch. Mr. MacLachlan, 58, is elated to be stepping back into his black suit and working with co stars old and new Sherilyn Fenn, Naomi Watts, Laura Dern, David Duchovny save for one thing: "We all signed N.D.A.s," he said. Such is the state of appointment TV in the social media era that no one involved can discuss the show except to say that a few years ago, Mr. Lynch met Mr. MacLachlan for coffee and asked him if he was ready to take on the role of Agent Cooper again. Certainly, there isn't another character Mr. MacLachlan prefers playing or a director he likes working with more. As he put it one recent afternoon while walking up the High Line on Manhattan's West Side in a khaki Guess windbreaker, gray zip up cashmere sweater and Levi's jeans, "Without David, who knows if I'd even still be acting?" "It was a perfect fit from the very beginning," Mr. Lynch said in a phone interview. "Kyle is a great actor. He can play somebody quite pure and quite spiritual, and he can go to the opposite extreme." "Dune" turned out to be one of the biggest flops of the 1980s, but it led to Mr. Lynch's placing Mr. MacLachlan in "Blue Velvet," which the National Society of Film Critics named the best film of 1986 and has since gone on to appear on numerous lists of the greatest movies of all time. Then came their collaboration on "Twin Peaks," which focused on a small town It Girl whose murder is being investigated by an F.B.I. agent. The show was unlike anything that had ever appeared on network TV and garnered critical praise and Emmy nominations for its cast members, including Mr. MacLachlan. Then, with Mr. Lynch and Mr. Frost leaving the running of the series to others, it went off the rails in the second season, and ABC canceled it. "I was angry with him at the time," Mr. MacLachlan said of Mr. Lynch in a 2003 interview. His career suffered for a while. In 1995, Mr. MacLachlan starred in Paul Verhoeven's "Showgirls," whose embrace by drag queens and cineaste contrarians only seemed to confirm its grand prize status as the decade's most reviled film. "I remember seeing the movie for the first time in disbelief of how bad it was," Mr. MacLachlan said. "But what you do in your brain is you say: 'It's got to get better. The next scene is going to get better.' And then your hopes are dashed in the next scene." Mr. Lynch didn't hold Mr. MacLachlan's frustration against him. "It's a tough life for an actor waiting for the phone to ring," he said. "You want to work." And at a certain point he did. In 1999, Mr. MacLachlan went for an appointment with his chiropractor, and spotted a mystery brunette in the waiting room. Her name was Desiree Gruber. At 31, she was already a world class connecter who served as a vice president at the publicity firm Rogers Cowan, with clients including supermodels (Naomi Campbell, Heidi Klum) and big companies (Miramax Films, Victoria's Secret). Mr. MacLachlan talked with her briefly but "didn't have the nerve" to ask for her number before going into traction therapy. The next evening, he spotted Ms. Gruber at a Talk magazine party at the Mondrian Hotel. They talked the entire night and decided on an even less low profile date some 24 hours later: the Vanity Fair Oscar party. Almost immediately, he said, "I couldn't imagine not being with her forever." Ms. Gruber was pragmatic and gregarious in a way that brought him out of his shell and motivated him "to do better." In 2000, Mr. MacLachlan made his debut on "Sex and the City," a role he accepted when Ms. Gruber told him to stop vacillating and say yes. Not long after they met, Ms. Gruber left Rogers Cowan and started the marketing firm Full Picture. There, she helped Harvey Weinstein and Ms. Klum conceive "Project Runway," a show she owns a piece of. In 2002, after a string of gossip items, they married in Coral Gables, Fla. The bride wore Amsale; the groom, a custom Tom Ford tux. Ms. Klum and Ms. Campbell were guests. There was also a Cuban band with a cigar roller. In 2005, Ms. Gruber helped her husband start a wine business, Pursued by Bear. She took on clients such as Google and AOL and began practicing Transcendental Meditation while assisting the David Lynch Foundation with its benefits and partnerships. The couple had a child in 2008, Callum, and Mr. MacLachlan's career picked up with roles on "Desperate Housewives," "Portlandia," "How I Met Your Mother" and Marvel's "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." His deep knowledge of Pacific Northwesterners came in handy as he stepped into the Birkenstocks of his perpetually peppy "Portlandia" character, a mayor who not only runs Oregon's biggest city but also embodies its earnest progressiveness by playing bass in a Dub Reggae band and riding a bicycle to work. "We both grew up in Washington State, and that's something we bonded over," said Carrie Brownstein, who created and stars in the show with Fred Armisen. "There's a like mindedness, a feeling of being at the edge of the country, the last stop in this potentially false notion of what the American dream is." In fact, Mr. Armisen said, one of the reasons he was happy Mr. MacLachlan agreed to play the part is that "we definitely stole from 'Twin Peaks.'" The actor's unique gift, he added, was bringing humor to the character's "do good" impulse without ever seeming "sarcastic" or "overly ironic." Mr. MacLachlan's marriage also made him something of an off camera role model to his co stars. "They have an enviable relationship," Ms. Brownstein said of Mr. MacLachlan and Ms. Gruber. "They're not threatened by the other's success. Kyle is the first to admit she is the powerhouse of the two of them, and at the same time, that's given him an artistic freedom." So when a reporter suggested concluding the High Line stroll with a visit to Mr. MacLachlan's wife, the answer was yes. We arrived at her Flatiron district office around 2 p.m. Everyone from the doormen to the receptionists knew him. "I'll be right there, Boo," Ms. Gruber called out from her office. She pulled from a small refrigerator a couple of aluminum juice packets that she explained were made by a Silicon Valley company called Juicero. "Are you sure you don't want a juice?" Ms. Gruber said. "I'm going to have one." "Oh my God," Mr. MacLachlan said, examining a bag. It had bar codes on it and looked like something from a fancy hospital. "Do you have an IV to go with that?" "Ha, ha, ha, that's cute," she said. "It does look like an IV bag, but it's not. It's from the future, honey. From the future!" An assistant took the packets to the nearby Juicero juicer and soon returned with glasses filled with a mixture of kale, lemon, spinach, pineapple and apple. Ms. Gruber coaxed Mr. MacLachlan into taking a sip. "It's really good," he said, sounding by gosh, by golly excited to discover that his wife was right yet again. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
It's clogging the oceans, littering cities and tainting wilderness areas that are supposed to be pristine. Single use plastic items everything from disposable water bottles to shopping bags handed out like grocery store door prizes are among the most invasive forms of plastic. Single use plastics are inarguably convenient, but those forks from on the go meals have to wind up somewhere, and very often, they become litter. There is no comprehensive global plan to stop their spread. But places around the world are moving to ban some forms of single use plastics. Rwanda banned plastic bags in 2008. Washington, D.C., has for years charged 5 cents for plastic bags, and earlier this year banned plastic straws and drink stirrers. Other countries and cities are working on or have enacted their own policies. In some areas, tourism related businesses are leading the charge. Earlier this month, Barbados enacted a nationwide ban on single use plastics. It includes food service items from cutlery to Styrofoam containers, and, beginning in January, will be expanded to prohibit plastic shopping bags. "There will be an immediate sense that Barbados is much tidier and a cleaner location," said Connie Smith, a trustee of the Waste 0 Resources Trust in Barbados, a group that advocates for reducing plastic use. The goal, according to officials from the country, is to make Barbados more sustainable and protect the island's biggest tourist draw its natural landscape. Tourism, after all, is a major component of the economy in Barbados. "Irrespective of whether you're a local or a visitor, everyone is looking to make more responsible choices," said Petra Roach, the U.S. director of Barbados Tourism Marketing. "We need to be extremely protective of the space that we have." The officials from Barbados said most businesses and residents supported the new policy, and that educating visitors was fairly easy because many tourists who come to the island live in places that already have some form of their own plastic bans. The West Coast is often seen as an incubator for progressive environmental policies, and Seattle is among the locales leading the charge on reducing plastic waste. In 2012, the city enacted a ban on plastic bags, and earlier this year started enforcing a long planned ban on plastic food service items. So far, according to city tourism officials and business leaders, the policies have gotten little pushback. "It's been accepted broadly and widely as the right thing to do," said Tom Norwalk, president and chief executive of Visit Seattle. "It's something people have come to expect when they visit Seattle and the Northwest, that we have an extreme sensitivity to sustainability." Overall, he said, locals largely support the policies, and many visitors to the city are environmentally conscious. Even those that aren't generally respect the plastic regulations. Business owners, too, said the bans don't cause too much friction, and in some cases present teaching opportunities about environmental issues. "When people see it, they're curious about what we're doing," said Bob Donegan, president of Ivar's Restaurants, a chain of more than 20 restaurants around Washington state, with five restaurants in Seattle. The cutlery and plates used in the restaurants are now compostable, and the drinking straws biodegradable. He explained that at the chain's counter service locations, guests have to sort their own garbage into appropriate bins trash, recycling and compost. During the height of the summer tourist season, his busiest restaurants assign staffers to help unfamiliar diners throw things away properly. In 2014, Scotland instituted a 5 pence charge for plastic shopping bags. Although they're not banned outright, the country saw an 80 percent reduction in plastic bag use in the fee's first year. As a result, there's less plastic litter spread around Scotland's famed wilderness. "It's very important that we protect it and maintain it for its own sake but also for the tourism," said Janie Neumann, Visit Scotland's industry development manager for sustainability. She added that educating people about ways to reduce their waste and protect the environment makes them more motivated to do so. "Consumer awareness in a way is driving change." Scotland, along with the larger British and European Union governments, is considering legislation to introduce more stringent plastic policies, including laws that would ban straws or plastic food packaging. In Cambodia, a country that uses about 4.6 million plastic water bottles per month, the manager of a boutique hotel wanted to effect change on his own. Christian De Boer, the managing director of Jaya House River Park in Siem Reap, started a mission to reduce plastic water bottle waste in 2017. The Refill Not Landfill campaign is a voluntary program for hotels and restaurants to offer their guests reusable water bottles and make free filling stations accessible to participants. The bottles feature a square shaped QR code that thirsty users can scan to find the nearest refill site. The campaign is expanding across Southeast Asia and Oceania, and Mr. De Boer said he hopes it can be a model for plastic reduction worldwide, especially in places where clean drinking water is already available at the tap. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Casting a glance skyward in Manhattan these days may include the risk of beholding not sky but horizontal appendages that curve and jut outward from the sides of residential towers and hover like geometric mutants above the roofs of vertically challenged neighbors, inhabiting space once occupied by open air. Typically built of glass and steel and suspended in midair, they are not optical illusions. In fact, they are vista grabbing, profit generating cantilevers the likes of which Frank Lloyd Wright probably did not contemplate in 1935 when he designed a rural residence known as Fallingwater, which levitated, with assistance from cantilevers, above a 30 foot waterfall in Mill Run, Pa. Wright cantilevered for the aesthetic thrill of it. Piers and bridges cantilever for the sake of a design imperative. The cantilevered entrance of the former IBM building at 590 Madison Avenue, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes Associates, continues to be a piece of modernist eye candy that wows passers by. But the escalating popularity of cantilevers in luxury residential (and some commercial) developments is apparently driven by what else? economics. With "bigger is better" the prevailing mantra among developers, cantilevers are getting bigger, too: superior apartment layouts are the desired endgame. Enabled by advances in technology structural steel and reinforced concrete have conspired to make load bearing walls virtually obsolete cantilevers are the unsurprising sequel to the towers born of air rights transfers, made feasible by a tweak to the city's zoning codes in 1961 that established density quotas for every neighborhood. Small properties that wished to stay that way could sell their excess rights to developers, and piles of such transfers resulted in some very tall residential buildings, like One57, 845 United Nations Plaza and 432 Park Avenue. But why stop at building taller, when the opportunity presents itself to build wider via extensions into a neighbor's unused airspace? A rendering of 35XV, 35 West 15th Street, which will have two cantilevers, one over Xavier High School and a second over a rear courtyard. Cantilevers can be expensive and difficult to construct; some require support columns along the lines of the traditional flying buttress. But their ultimate cost effectiveness is determined by the added square footage, and upgraded views, they bring to a project. Their advocates are not shy in pointing out that transfer fees are a source of serious income to properties willing to relinquish their option for future expansion. So long as they don't violate density quotas, and hover at a respectable distance above the neighbor's roof, cantilevers are also architectural catnip because they reward creativity. "In New York, development is a three dimensional chess game," said Dan Kaplan, a senior partner at FXFowle Architects, "and the reason we're seeing an increase in the use of cantilevers above neighboring buildings is linked to the complexity of finding a site that can utilize all available development rights." FXFowle incorporated a pair of eight foot cantilevers at the Isis, 303 East 77th Street, a condo developed by Alchemy Properties. For Alchemy's new project, 35XV, FXFowle employed two cantilevers: the first extends west 17 feet into the airspace above Xavier High School, and the second projects 36 feet to the north over a rear courtyard. In a sense, the cantilever is the urban iteration of the suburban dormer: it is both space stretcher and brightener. According to Gerry Davis, an Alchemy principal, the cantilevers at 35XV account for some 40 percent of the square footage, in addition to providing improved views and a diversity of layouts. The building has 59 residential units on Floors 8 through 24. Alchemy paid 13.7 million for Xavier's development rights. "In the 1920s they used to build straight up, with wedding cake type setbacks," Mr. Kaplan added. "But with a cantilever, we can build outward as well as up, and in kind of an inversion of the wedding cake theme, the floors are bigger toward the top, where space is more valuable. "I picture it like a tree, where the trunk is the footprint and the building branches out above," he said. "The ingenuity in the process, from a developer's point of view, is to take full advantage of every potential dimension a site has to offer, and the cantilever is a key strategy in that regard." An optimally functioning cantilever is an essential design element, not an afterthought. Describing 35XV, Kenneth S. Horn, the president of Alchemy Properties, said, "The first cantilever begins 85 to 90 feet above the ground, and by virtue of the way it's constructed, when you're inside your apartment, you'll literally feel like you can reach out and grab the Empire State Building." The Extell Development Company has plans for the air, too. Its tower at 225 West 57th Street is to cantilever above an 1890s landmark, the Art Students League, to accommodate a 1,423 foot residential tower anchored by New York City's first Nordstrom department store. Still, whether the cantilevers boldly sprouting all over town are marvels of architectural and engineering ingenuity or capricious eyesores inflicted by developers remains in the eye of the beholder. The Nordstrom cantilever (Extell's first) passed muster with the Landmarks Preservation Commission after Gary Barnett, Extell's president, testified that it was an essential element of the design. One dissenting commissioner, however, referred to it as a gimmick. There has also been grumbling about the 24 foot cantilever built by Toll Brothers City Living at 160 East 22nd Street, a 21 story, 81 unit condominium. The cantilever starts at the sixth floor and hangs above a pair of townhouses (neither is a landmark). The additional square footage allowed the developer to include an extra line of apartments. "Some people may not like it," said David Von Spreckelsen, the president of the City Living division. "But I think it adds an interesting modern component, and with people not willing to sell their property to you, but willing to sell their air rights, the cantilever almost becomes a necessity." Cantilevers may be yet another fact of life in a city with a shortage of logical building sites but a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for new housing stock. "They were more commonly in the back of buildings and out of view," said Vin Cipolla, the president of the Municipal Art Society. "But with fewer highly desirable sites available, they're popping up to grab eye popping views and are becoming integral design features. Design matters so is this good design? And what about environmental impact? There needs to be an understanding of these hyper tall buildings and their effect on the streetscape." When New York City began selling the rights to its airspace in earnest in the last few decades, the objective of the developers who bought them was usually to push the skyscraper envelope. Buy the unused air rights of stodgy structures next door, and suddenly a 25 story project on a lot of less than lordly proportions could attain impressive heights. But what happens when vertical limitations are imposed on an already constricted or less than perfectly situated building site? What happens when a developer has spent millions of dollars on air rights to bolster a project and needs to find a way to use them that doesn't offend a neighborhood's contextual height and zoning codes? "Cantilevers are being done around the city, very often in nonlandmarked areas," Mr. Barnett said, "because there are a lot of places with height limitations, and cantilevering can get you a better layout and a larger floor plate." "In our case," he continued, "the constraint was that we needed to accommodate Nordstrom, which is used to a wide open, suburban style layout. It wasn't critical to cantilever for the residential portion of the project, but we needed to give Nordstrom the largest possible floor plate, and as it turns out, the cantilever gives the apartments a bit better view shot, too." On top of the original 23 million it spent for air rights, Extell paid the league nearly 30 million for the privilege of adding the cantilever. "I wouldn't call it a donation," Mr. Barnett said, "but I guess I'm happy it will assist an important and historic arts institution in making a huge chunk of some sorely needed repairs." He added that the Nordstrom cantilever definitely wouldn't be Extell's last. Other developers are on the same wavelength. Of late, what's showing up at developments around Manhattan (and at 64 Bayard opposite McCarren Park in Brooklyn) is a profusion of cantilevers that exponentially expand square footage and can also, thanks to lot line easements, legally transform unexceptional one or two bedroom units into three bedroom beauties with fabulous light and, often, uniquely positioned outdoor space. The cantilevers at 56 Leonard Street in TriBeCa, a 57 story condominium that doesn't have a single terrace overshadowed by that of its immediate upstairs neighbor, epitomize that innovation. (The tower, designed by Herzog de Meuron, paid New York Law School 150 million for land and air rights.) At 64 Bayard, a 53 unit rental with two 16 foot cantilevers, "it turned out to be an absolute home run for the developer, because each apartment in the cantilever has amazing views of Manhattan," said William Ross, a managing director of Halstead Property Development Marketing. A rendering of the Charles, a luxury tower at First Avenue and 73rd Street. The architect Ismael Leyva, whose firm has incorporated cantilevers in Midtown at Place 57 and the Icon and most recently at the Charles, a 31 story, 27 unit luxury tower at First Avenue and 73rd Street, says cantilevers have become the go to option for developers. "It's a good tool for increasing the ratio of salable square feet," Mr. Leyva said. "And it gives a building a different external dynamic: you have the movement of intercepting shapes instead of the typical box." The Landmarks Preservation Commission has reviewed the contextual appropriateness of cantilevers proposed at historic sites on just three occasions, two of them for the same site. Besides the Nordstrom tower, which it approved in October, the commission twice approved a cantilever for a condominium at 39 41 West 23rd Street, in the Ladies' Mile Historic District. The initial project was a victim of the downturn, but Anbau Enterprises bought the distressed site for 18.5 million in 2010 and eventually selected a redesign by Cook Fox Architects that retained the cantilever. "Our experience with cantilevers is sort of dramatic and intrinsically interesting," said Robert Tierney, the commission's chairman. It decided the cantilever above the Art Students League did not diminish the landmark, and on 23rd Street, it again ruled that the sculptural cantilever proposed for the condominium had been integrated into the design and was not an intrusion or a distraction at street level. But three approvals do not constitute blanket acceptance: "I would say it would be the exception rather than the rule for us to find a cantilever appropriate," said Sarah Carroll, the commission's director of preservation. "It is very site specific." Barbara van Beuren, a managing partner at Anbau, is not a cantilever enthusiast. "They've become an accepted part of building in the city now that you can build sideways if you own the air," she said. "But it's expensive to build a pretty building, so they aren't always pretty, especially where Landmarks isn't there to hold your feet to the fire designwise. Some are not obtrusive; others are horrendous. They may make a project viable, but they're not easy to do, and I would never do one if given a choice." "On West 23rd Street," she added, "we inherited a site and a design and wound up keeping the cantilever because it was a critical part of making the project work. We're proud of the design. We live in the 21st century, not the 19th, and even in a historic district, the point is not to reproduce what was. But the burden of proof is on the designer." Nancy Belsky and her husband, Mark, who live in a Georgian colonial in the Boston suburbs, bought their 17th floor penthouse at the Isis three years ago to use as a pied a terre. They were not looking to live in a cantilever building (she researched cantilevers after moving in). But they loved the apartment's layout the instant they opened the door. "Besides the floor to ceiling windows and the two terraces," she said, "there was this automatic, almost transcendent feeling, thrusting us into being a part of the beauty that is New York City. You don't feel contained; there's almost this Frank Lloyd Wright sense of being at one with your surroundings. It's like you're invited to be part of what's beyond your space." Vertigo is not, she said, part of the experience. "The ability to cantilever has been one of the real impetuses of modern architecture with a capital M," said Mr. Kaplan, whose firm designed the Isis. "It's an opportunity to make a great design and it unlocks the potential inherent in development rights." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
"We need a thousand stories. We need more than that, because there are so many different ways that people are finding their way through this country," said Jose Olivarez, right, with Jose Antonio Vargas and Julissa Arce. Soon after the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump, the superintendent of Jose Antonio Vargas's building in downtown Los Angeles reached out to him. Mr. Vargas had publicly outed himself as undocumented five years prior in a New York Times Magazine essay, and the super wanted to warn him: If Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) agents came knocking, he could not protect him. Since then, Mr. Vargas has been unmoored, hopping from friends' apartments to hotels relinquishing stability for bouts of safety. His memoir, "Dear America: Notes From an Undocumented Citizen," explores the emotional undercurrent of his experience, which he divides into three stages: lying, passing and hiding. He wrote "Dear America" "to understand my own sense of dislocation," he said. In mid September, I met with Mr. Vargas and two other writers, Julissa Arce and Jose Olivarez, at Boqueria in Midtown Manhattan to discuss their recent books, which touch on similar themes: immigration, belonging and mental health. Ms. Arce's young adult title, "Someone Like Me: How One Undocumented Girl Fought For Her American Dream," is about her childhood in Mexico and, later, her challenges growing up undocumented. Mr. Olivarez was born in the United States to undocumented parents, and the poems in "Citizen Illegal," his debut collection, center on his experience as a second generation immigrant, opening with a poem called "(Citizen)(Illegal)" that blurs the line between his parents' status and his own. Theirs are among a handful of recent and upcoming books that explore the immigrant experience in the United States: "American Like Me: Reflections on Life Between Cultures," edited by America Ferrera, compiles essays from dozens of actors, comedians, writers and others whose parents or grandparents emigrated from elsewhere, and "We Are Here to Stay: Voices of Undocumented Young Adults," edited by Susan Kuklin, will be published in January. Below are excerpts from our conversation. Jose, you haven't seen your mom since you left the Philippines. How has the separation affected you? And why was it important for you to include the people who "saved" you? JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS That was actually the psychological thing I was trying to unlock in the book, what the cost of that separation has been. I don't really have the language: How do I talk about the fact that I left when I was 12, and that I don't remember what I said to my mom or what she said to me? The moments are bigger than any language I can come up with. Home for me was her, and then she sent me here, and I had to come up with another home. What is really keeping me here are all of my other adoptive moms. In the book, when I say mixed status, I'm not just talking about undocumented people with citizen relatives. I'm talking about the fact that undocumented people could not be in this country if there weren't United States citizens who allow us to lie, pass and hide. There are millions of people in this country who employ us, who go to school with us, who mentor us, who have been part of this entire thing, and they are part of that family. JULISSA ARCE One narrative that I feel we don't often talk about is the children who are left behind by the immigrants who come here. There are towns in Mexico where there are no dads, because all of them are working here. That is one piece of my story that I had to push really hard for my editor and my publisher to let me spend that much time on in the book. I used to think my parents loved the U.S. more than they loved me. When did you become aware of what it means to be undocumented? JOSE OLIVAREZ My dad became a citizen when I was in fifth grade, and it wasn't until I saw him studying for the civics test that I realized that my parents were undocumented. For years before that we would spend every Saturday in the basement office of an immigration lawyer. My parents wouldn't tell us why; I just knew every Saturday we had to go to this office, and my parents would talk to the lawyer. When I found out, I was like, "How is it that me and my brothers are citizens but almost no one in my family is?" Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. My high school had a poetry slam team, and it was the first time I saw that you were allowed to write stories about all these questions I had been collecting big questions I had been taught, as a survival method, not to ask. ARCE When I found out I was undocumented, I was 14, and I was bugging my mom about going to Mexico for my quinceanera. I kept bugging her, and, finally, she blurted out, "You can't go to Mexico because your visa is expired, and if you go, you can't come back." Because I was 14, I couldn't process the weight of the thing my mom had just shared with me. To me, I was a normal teenager, like everybody else at my school. That's why this young adult book was so important for me. When I was in middle school I never read a book about undocumented people or in which the protagonist is a Latina. Today, I went to a school, and I talked to 200 fifth graders. We talked about what "someone like me" can do. These kids were like "Someone like me can become a doctor" and "Someone like me can become a biologist." Some of those kids were undocumented, and I really wanted them to feel like someone like them can even if they don't look like the people in all of the books they're reading. VARGAS I found out I was undocumented when I was a freshman in high school, and by then I was like, "I'm undocumented, so what's the point of trying?" Then, I learned that when you get a "byline," your name would be in the paper, and that's literally the only reason I became a journalist just so my name could be on a piece of paper. ARCE It's so interesting. Jose, you found out you were undocumented, and you wanted your name to be on a piece of paper, that meant something to you. When I found out I was undocumented, I decided, "I am going to get rich, and when I am rich it's not going to matter that I'm undocumented." It's what you do when you find out your status think of how you are going to solve it or be able to live with it. How did you reconcile wanting to live an "American" life with your immigration status? VARGAS By questioning the very meaning of American. In this book, I was very deliberate in including Toni Morrison and what "The Bluest Eye" meant to me as a kid. This young black woman in Morrison's book believed that she was ugly, believed that she was unworthy, believed that she needed blue eyes to be beautiful. Morrison said she wrote that book because she wanted to show what happens when somebody surrenders to the "master narrative." From the very beginning, assimilation whatever that means was this space of trying to understand the history of black people in this country, which really unlocks everything else. OLIVAREZ When I started going to schools with primarily English speakers, I thought: "If I am just the best at spelling, none of these white kids are going to be able to tell me anything about my accent; about my parents or where we come from. If I beat them at everything, they have to accept me." But what I found was that no matter how good I got at anything, I was never going to be accepted. And so when I started writing, and I turned to black literature, it did unlock this idea that I actually didn't want to participate in America as constructed. I wanted to construct a world where I didn't have to erase parts of myself. Poetry gave me a space to talk about the in betweenness that I felt and ask myself questions like, "What kind of home do I want to create for myself?" ARCE I very distinctly remember learning about the Civil Rights Movement in the seventh grade, and this American history that was black and white. I didn't see where Latinos fit in. I remember asking my parents, "What fountain did we drink from?" I had to fit one of these two American narratives, and unconsciously I decided that I needed to be white. Even before I came to live here, I used to watch "Dennis the Menace" and "Beverly Hills 90210," and everybody that was American was white. I didn't want to wear big hoops because I didn't want to "look Mexican" or for people to question me about being undocumented. Only now that I am an adult have I realized that I lived with this definition of America that was so narrow. Has the election of Donald Trump affected how you think about your status and identity? ARCE I had this naive idea that when I became a citizen everything would change, and I would just be American. There is obviously a really big weight lifted off my shoulders, but I am still dealing with so much of the trauma; papers don't change that. Since the election, there have been so many people that have been emboldened to say out loud what they have been feeling for a long time. So I still get: "You should be deported. You're not a real citizen. Why haven't they taken your citizenship away?" OLIVAREZ I work with teenagers a lot, and after the election I was here in New York, and we had open office hours for any of our young people who wanted to come and process what they were going through. We had a bunch of them come through, and they were just so hurt. If you were a teenager in 2016, it was your first big political heartbreak. Suddenly their conception of what was possible was shattered. VARGAS In the undocumented community, we don't talk about depression. I juggle a lot of things, and that's how I deal with my depression. OLIVAREZ It's totally appropriate to talk about mental health, because that's not unrelated from issues of immigration. One of the things that younger readers ask is: "How did you write this? In my family we don't talk about any of these things." People don't realize how many silences exist. There are things my mom and dad don't want to talk about, so I can't really ask them too many questions about how they came to the United States that's traumatic for them. The impact is that there were so many gaps in our relationships. I wanted to write toward those silences. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
SAN FRANCISCO A website intended to facilitate nationwide testing for coronavirus that was promoted by President Trump in a news conference on Friday quickly reached capacity when it went live in a small pilot project late on Sunday night. The website, created by Verily, a life sciences unit of Google's parent company, Alphabet, fell far short of the wide ranging capabilities administration officials described on Friday. In its initial rollout, it was meant to point people to testing locations in two San Francisco Bay Area counties. It ran into two issues: First, it was telling people with symptoms of the virus that they were not eligible for the screening program. And second, they were asked to create an account with Google or log in to an existing Google account and sign an authorization form. Still, within a few hours of launching, Verily said it could not schedule any more appointments at the time because it had reached capacity. Daniel Hom, 77, a pharmacist who lives in Berkeley, Calif., and works in nursing homes, said he filled out the survey on Sunday night around 8 p.m. and found out that he qualified for the test. He said he thought his age was the primary factor for becoming eligible, because his son, who is in his 30s and also works in health care, was not selected. On Monday morning, Mr. Hom said he drove to the parking lot of the San Mateo County event center where he got a nasal swab. "They stuck it way up there," he said. Mr. Hom was told that results should arrive within four days by email depending on how quickly Quest Diagnostics can process the test. "I was impressed how organized they were, considering it was the first day," he said. Verily said it was trying to help public health officials expand access to testing in areas with a high volume of known cases. The new site is supposed to direct so called high risk individuals to newly opened testing centers in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties, which include Silicon Valley. The first issue appeared to be a result of what the site was intended to do. It started with an initial survey asking whether people were "currently experiencing severe cough, shortness of breath, fever or other concerning symptoms." If they selected "yes," the site abruptly ended the survey and said in person testing through the program "is not the right fit." In smaller font, Verily suggested seeking medical help. Responding "no" to the symptoms led to more questions to gauge eligibility for testing by asking age, location and other factors. This caused confusion among people trying to use the site. When reporters and users asked if disqualifying people with symptoms was done in error, Verily said it wasn't a mistake. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. "The initial question is meant to ensure that anyone who is seriously ill does not come to our sites because they are not prepared to provide medical attention," said Carolyn Wang, a Verily spokeswoman, in a written statement. "We are early in this pilot and are going to be learning more that will help us refine this COVID 19 risk screening and testing." Once deemed eligible and depending on availability, people were directed to a mobile testing center run by Verily in conjunction with local health officials. The actual coronavirus test will be a nasal swab conducted by nurses and nurse practitioners with oversight from the company's clinical research staff. Ms. Wang declined to say how many tests were being performed. As more testing sites come online, the program aims to cover the entire state, Verily said. Verily is rolling out its virus screening tool at a moment when its parent company, Google, is facing intense scrutiny for it push to acquire and analyze health data. A group of U.S. senators is looking into a deal that Google made with Ascension, the nation's second largest hospital system, which gave the tech giant access to millions of medical records without patients' explicit knowledge or consent. Verily said that having people sign in with their Google account would allow it to connect people with tools like electronic screening that it has built for Project Baseline, its research effort to collect comprehensive health data and map human health. The company also said it would not connect people's virus screening data with their Google account data "without explicit consent." But some privacy experts said requiring a Google account for the virus screening could create barriers to participation or dissuade people concerned about what the company might do with their information. A free self assessment tool for coronavirus offered by government health services in Alberta, Canada, for instance, does not require any login. "What we need are substantive and absolute promises of care, loyalty and confidentiality that will keep participants safe and convince them that this project is being done entirely for public health purposes," said Woody Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University in Boston. The website has been mired in controversy from the start. In a news conference on Friday, Mr. Trump said Google had 1,700 engineers working on the project, claiming that the company had made great progress. The website was actually the work of Verily and Sundar Pichai, Alphabet's chief executive. Mr. Pichai said "a planning effort" was underway in an internal memo a day before the White House news conference. The project was limited to the Bay Area and the 1,700 engineers hailed by Mr. Trump appeared to be the number of Google employees who had volunteered to help Verily. A Verily spokeswoman has said there is no current timetable for a national rollout of its screening program. The website became publicly available one day before a Monday deadline that Verily had announced. Separate from Verily's efforts, Google announced that it was working on a "nationwide website" to provide information on virus symptoms and testing sites. The company had made no mention of that project on Friday when it directed all inquiries about Mr. Trump's website announcement to Verily. Daisuke Wakabayashi reported from San Francisco and Natasha Singer reported from New York. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Doh Ouattara drove for Uber and Lyft from 2016 until mid March of this year, when he became concerned about the pandemic. With three children under 6 to provide for, he decided to apply for unemployment benefits. But despite hundreds of calls to the New York State Department of Labor and two prominent rulings that deemed gig workers like him to be employees eligible for the state's unemployment insurance, he has yet to receive any payment, and time is running short. Mr. Ouattara, who was trained as an accountant in the Ivory Coast before moving to the United States, could afford to pay only half his rent in April and none of it this month. "My savings are almost gone I've used them for food, basic necessities," he said in an interview. "It is getting very, very stressful." On Monday, Mr. Ouattara and three other Uber and Lyft drivers, along with an advocacy group called the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, filed a complaint in federal court against Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and the state's Department of Labor, saying drivers were not paid standard benefits to which they were entitled in a timely way. The action comes at a time when drivers have been increasingly vocal in demanding the protections afforded to employees, which states like New York and California have granted them to varying degrees, even as the companies continue to maintain that drivers are contractors. The lawsuit says drivers must wait months to receive standard unemployment benefits, if they receive them at all, compared with the two to three weeks that the state has said is typical for other workers. The plaintiffs are seeking an injunction requiring the state to immediately pay their benefits and the benefits of other drivers to whom they are owed. "The issue of Uber driver employment status has been settled for over a year by the state's own decision," said Zubin Soleimany, a lawyer for the taxi workers group. "But it hasn't been able to provide people benefits when they need them. It's been a catastrophe for these guys." Jack Sterne, a spokesman for the Cuomo administration, said, "During this pandemic emergency, we have been moving heaven and earth to get every single unemployed New Yorker their benefits as quickly as possible including Uber and Lyft drivers, who are treated no different than any other worker." According to the lawsuit, a key problem is that the state has not forced companies like Uber and Lyft to provide the data on workers' earnings that employers must typically supply. Lacking such data, the suit says, the state has required drivers to complete a lengthy application process that involves more steps and paperwork than other workers face to receive standard unemployment benefits. Josh Gold, an Uber spokesman, said the company had provided the state with the earnings data it had requested, though he declined to elaborate on whether the data would be sufficient to calculate unemployment benefits promptly. The company said in April that it had agreed to comply with a state request for earnings data, but that it had not yet done so. Lyft said the company was working with the state to provide access to earnings data. "The special interests behind this lawsuit aren't interested in what's best for drivers, since filing this lawsuit will do nothing to help them get assistance quickly," said Julie Wood, a Lyft spokeswoman. 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. Uber and Lyft have encouraged drivers to apply for benefits under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which Congress passed in March to replace income for out of work contractors and other workers who might fall through the gaps in the safety net. Under federal rules, only those ineligible for traditional unemployment benefits are supposed to receive pandemic assistance. But even though New York and California consider many drivers to be employees eligible for traditional benefits, the states are helping drivers obtain the pandemic assistance, arguing that it is often the fastest way for them to receive financial support. New York State introduced a single benefits application on April 20 that routes workers into traditional unemployment benefits or pandemic assistance, depending on which program the state considers them eligible for. Lyft said that pandemic assistance was a better deal for many part time drivers, because the minimum payment under that program was higher than the minimum unemployment benefit. But for full time drivers, pandemic assistance can be a weak substitute for traditional unemployment benefits. The complaint calculates that Mr. Ouattara's benefit under the pandemic assistance program would be less than 250 a week, compared with 504 that he would receive in unemployment benefits. (He and other drivers would receive a 600 a week federal supplement on top of either program through the end of July.) The difference arises because pandemic assistance is based on income net of expenses like gas and maintenance, whereas unemployment benefits are based on gross earnings or about 26,000 versus about 55,500 for Mr. Ouattara in 2019. Other drivers face similar disparities, according to the complaint. Mr. Ouattara said he received a notice from the state this month indicating it had no record of earnings for him from Uber or Lyft. After he sent the state his documentation, he said, it urged him to apply for pandemic assistance. He did so, but continues to pursue traditional unemployment benefits as well. A second plaintiff in the case received a notice last week saying he was approved for pandemic assistance, but he continues to press for conventional unemployment benefits. Other drivers who believe they are employees have sought traditional unemployment benefits rather than pandemic assistance as well, but have encountered problems similar to those of Mr. Ouattara and his fellow plaintiffs. Carole Vigne, a staff attorney for the nonprofit Legal Aid at Work, said she had represented Uber and Lyft drivers during the pandemic who received traditional unemployment benefits in California in about six weeks. But she said that some of her clients there were still waiting for benefits they applied for more than two months ago, and that some had been routed to the pandemic assistance program with no explanation, despite intending to apply for traditional benefits. Crystal Page, a spokeswoman for California's labor agency, said in an email, "There are a number of different scenarios that apply to ALL benefit claims which could determine how quickly a claim can get processed and paid if the individual is eligible." The New York lawsuit, brought with the help of the nonprofit group Legal Services NYC, cites two state decisions that found drivers eligible for unemployment benefits. The first was a 2018 ruling of the state's unemployment insurance appeal board, the final authority on eligibility questions in the executive branch, which found that three Uber drivers and all "similarly situated" drivers were eligible for benefits. The second was a ruling involving Postmates, an app based delivery service, which found the company's workers to be employees for purposes of unemployment benefits. The ruling did not apply to Uber and Lyft directly, but strongly suggested employee status for their drivers given the similarity of their business models to Postmates'. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
WASHINGTON The Federal Reserve is still waiting for clear evidence that the economy can grow decently without its help. The Fed's widely expected announcement on Wednesday that it would press ahead with its stimulus campaign of asset purchases and low interest rates reflected the reality that the nation's central bankers gained little clarity in the six weeks since their last meeting, in part because the government shutdown delayed and distorted key economic indicators. The statement, issued after a scheduled two day meeting of its policy making committee, amounted to a declaration that the Fed is not yet ready to decide, and it shed little light on how soon changes may come. The Fed maintained its optimistic assessment of "growing underlying strength in the broader economy," contrasting the recovery of the private sector with the continued drag of federal spending cuts. It said that the availability of jobs was improving and that it expected inflation to rebound from its sluggish pace. Notably, it made no direct mention of the shutdown. But despite the relatively sunny forecast, largely unchanged from the Fed's last meeting in September, Fed officials remain reluctant to pull back. As a result, the central bank will continue to add 85 billion a month to its portfolio of Treasury securities and mortgage backed securities. And the Fed, if anything, has reinforced its commitment to hold short term interest rates near zero through next year and well into 2015. "Taking into account the extent of federal fiscal retrenchment over the past year, the committee sees the improvement in economic activity and labor market conditions since it began its asset purchase program as consistent with growing underlying strength in the broader economy," the Federal Open Market Committee said. "However, the committee decided to await more evidence that progress will be sustained before adjusting the pace of its purchases." Analysts and investors reacted to the statement as moderately increasing the chances that the Fed would begin to retreat, or taper back on its purchases, in December, when the committee holds its final scheduled meeting of the year. Stocks fell slightly. Yet most analysts said they continued to regard the Fed as more likely to wait until the spring. "This is a somewhat hawkish statement, but we don't think it's so hawkish as to change our expectations for a first tapering in April," Michael Feroli, chief United States economist at JPMorgan Chase, wrote to clients. Fed officials spent much of the summer preparing investors for a retreat from its stimulus campaign before the end of the year. But there is still little sign that the Fed has succeeded in increasing job growth. The share of adults with jobs remains at roughly its post recession nadir. The unemployment rate has fallen largely because fewer people are looking for jobs. Some analysts saw the Fed's upbeat description of the job market as evidence of its desire to retreat, even if it is not prepared to set that in motion yet. The description "is not true, and we know it, the data has been weakening on this front," wrote Eric Green, global head of rates research at TD Securities. "One must view the emphasis here as reason to lean against the view that the Fed has gone soft." Mr. Green added, however, that he still did not expect the Fed to begin its retreat until March, because its desire remained constrained by the weak economic reality. Inflation has fallen well below the 2 percent annual pace the Fed has established as its goal. Prices rose in August at an annual pace of 1.2 percent, excluding food and fuel, according to the Fed's preferred measure, the Commerce Department's index of personal consumption expenditures. The statement said persistently low inflation "could pose risks to economic performance," but reiterated the Fed's expectation that inflation will rebound to a healthier level. The combination of persistently high unemployment and low inflation has prompted some Fed officials, and outside critics, to question whether the asset purchases are worthwhile. "With the benefits of quantitative easing essentially at zero, this equivocating action by the Fed is less about the economy and more about its unwillingness to begin the tapering that everyone knows must begin," Representative Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican who is chairman of the congressional Joint Economic Committee, said in a statement. Wednesday's decision was supported by nine of the 10 voting members on the Fed's policy making committee. Esther L. George, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, dissented as she has done at each meeting this year, repeating her concerns that the Fed's campaign risks destabilizing financial markets and unleashing inflation. Other critics, by contrast, draw the lesson that the Fed is being too cautious. Some contend the Fed should increase the volume of its asset purchases; some want the Fed to consider more radical measures, like explicitly targeting a temporary increase in inflation. The Fed's internal debate, however, has mostly been restricted to a narrow middle ground, pitting those arguing for more of the same against those pressing for just a little less. After surprising Wall Street by deciding in September not to scale back their stimulus programs, Fed officials said this month that a resumption of that debate was likely to be postponed until December because the government shutdown had obscured their view of the economy. Temporary job losses during the shutdown are expected to blur the monthly unemployment reports for both October and November. The next clear snapshot of the job market will not be published until early January. Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, said in 2010 that he had accepted a second term as Fed chairman in part to manage the Fed's exit from its stimulus campaign. But he is scheduled to step down at the end of January, making it increasingly likely that the pullback will be directed by Janet Yellen, the Fed's vice chairwoman and President Obama's nominee to succeed Mr. Bernanke. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The British dancer Aakash Odedra first presented "Rising," a suite of four solos by four choreographers (including himself), in 2011. Though he had shown parts of it in New York, the full production did not arrive here until Friday, when it came to the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts for one night. The program showcases Mr. Odedra's extensive background in Bharatanatyam and Kathak, two forms of classical Indian dance, and his departures from it. When he embarked on the project, contemporary dance was relatively unfamiliar to him. The high profile European choreographers whom he enlisted Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Akram Khan and Russell Maliphant drew from his classical Indian training while nudging him in new directions. "Rising" reveals an exceptionally agile dancer who, it appears, has no trouble slipping between styles, effortlessly multilingual. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
A boarded up Louis Vuitton store during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in Soho.Credit...Haruka Sakaguchi for The New York Times In the U.S., Luxury Brands Board Up the Store In Shanghai, day to day life for many luxury retailers has started slowly returning to normal. After almost two months of stringent lockdowns enforced by Chinese authorities hoping to contain the spread of the new coronavirus, retailers and restaurants are cautiously reopening for business, alongside the first sunny rays of spring. In Europe, however, where millions of citizens have been living under national shutdowns for more than a week, stores in famous retail destinations have bolted their doors. Grates and window shades have been drawn at flagship luxury stores on the Place Vendome in Paris and Via Montenapoleone in Milan. In London, department stores like Harrods and Selfridges, and Bond Street boutiques like Burberry and Chopard, have cleared jewels and stock from plain sight. Little wonder, given that for the next three weeks at least not a single customer will be walking through the doors. But in New York, where the cobbled streets of SoHo have shuddered to a standstill as state measures to slow the spread of the virus have taken hold, a number of elegant luxury boutiques, including Fendi, Celine and Chanel, did not just shutter storefronts this week; they had them boarded up with vast sheets of plywood, as if in anticipation of riots and civil disobedience, similar to how they react to European protests. The decision by President Trump last Friday to declare a state of emergency brought thousands of temporary store closures across the country. Many retailers are now facing difficult decisions about staff and consumer safety, as well as their long term financial survival. But the move by some well heeled SoHo stores to fortify themselves indicated that preparations for coming weeks are being undertaken with every eventuality in mind. Clearly, their owners were not allayed by reports from the New York Police Department that crime levels had dropped significantly in the last week. According to N.Y.P.D. data, major felonies fell 17 percent between March 16, the day after Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered schools closed, and March 22, compared to the same period last year. Grand larceny was down 31 percent, misdemeanor assaults by 21 percent and major felonies by 17 percent. Few of the retailers with boarded up stores were willing to discuss their measures or why their approach in the United States is different from that taken elsewhere. LVMH Moet Hennessey Louis Vuitton, Kering and Chanel, all French companies that grappled with looting in Paris during the gilets jaunes protests last year, could not be reached for comment. (Toward the end of the week, the Louis Vuitton store on Place Vendome added additional plexiglass guards over its windows.) Others alluded to overarching motivations and security measures without dwelling on specifics. "Our first priority is to help protect our employees, consumers, partners and communities and to ensure we are doing our part to prevent the spread of Covid 19," said John Idol, the chief executive of Capri Holdings, which owns Versace, Jimmy Choo and Michael Kors. "I am proud of our team and our partners as they support each other and their communities during this time of uncertainty." Mark Dicus, the executive director of the SoHo Broadway Initiative business improvement district, said he had reached out to SoHo landlords and retailers last week urging them to consider alternatives to boarding up windows. Owners worried about securing their businesses, he said, should first consider hiring security firms or keeping interior lights on. "Boarding up your storefront makes it so that people on the street can't see inside," he said. "That might be more appealing to those looking for break in opportunities." Mr. Dicus added that the approach could add to residents' anxieties at an already stressful time. "We want to maintain a sense of normalcy and make sure our neighborhoods are safe," he said. "We feel there are ways to take care of that without resorting to drastic measures like boarding up storefronts." Shoppers reported a queue forming outside a Chanel boutique in Shanghai, while customers emerged with bags from stores such as Prada and Gucci. "Everyone, and I mean everyone, is still wearing a face mask they are required for entry into most stores," said Heather Kaye, a swimwear brand entrepreneur who had ventured out to buy headphones. No one asked to see her Alipay generated health QR code, part of system that assigns users a color code green, yellow or red indicating their health status. (Cafes, restaurants and shopping malls throughout China are increasingly requesting to see the green QR code before granting permission to enter.) "Things aren't quite back to pre virus levels," Ms. Kaye continued. "But the malls are definitely buzzing once again." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Sven almost didn't make it to Broadway. When Disney decided to adapt its megahit animated film "Frozen" for the stage, the creative team seriously considered killing off the reticent reindeer (a fate that did befall the marauding ice monster Marshmallow as well as the menacing pack of wolves). "We were going to not have Sven in the show," said Thomas Schumacher, the president of Disney Theatrical Productions, "because we were afraid it would just occupy space onstage and be distracting." But the company invited its longtime puppetry collaborator, Michael Curry ("The Lion King"), to experiment with ways the shaggy creature might be represented onstage. He tested two performer pantomime before deciding to fashion a full scale figure that could wordlessly engage with the unfolding plot that could act when brought to life by a single actor within. Sven's head is molded out of carbon fiber composite, his body is shaped foam covered with braided raw silk, and his hooves are rubber coated foam sculpture mounted around aluminum and stainless steel orthopedic braces. Underneath, the performer wears a full body wicking suit, a carbon fiber head mount held in place by a soft urethane skin, knee and elbow pads, biking gloves, and a mouth guard. Sven is a slightly larger than life eight and a half feet long, and his frame weighs about 14 pounds. There is a screen hidden in the animal's neck, allowing the actor to see, although his field of vision is sharply limited so much so that Sven has the de facto right of way onstage. The reindeer's predominant coloring is a tan like hue called raw sienna, but he also has a bit of pink (to warm him up visually), some red and blue highlights (the colors of the Norwegian flag) and flecks of green (moss). Up close, there are some touches a theatergoer would never see hoof carvings, for example, that echo Scandinavian design patterns in the set. "He is a compromise between the caricature of the animated feature, a real reindeer and what I know would look human in a way," Mr. Curry said. "When you look at his mug, we did some things to the orbits of the eyes and the cheekbones and the mouth that really make the audience relate to the human quality." The role was originated by Andrew Pirozzi, an actor who has been dancing (starting with ballet and tap) since he was 4, and who had learned tumbling and hand balancing by studying at a circus school and performing with an acrobatic team. Sven is onstage for about 40 minutes of the show, and the role is physically taxing the performer inside is on all fours, essentially planking for up to seven minutes at a time, with 11 inch stilts attached to his hands, and five inch metal shanks attached to his feet. Sven's head pivots by a linkage system connected to the performer's head and body; the weight of his head is cantilevered away from the performer's neck by a custom orthopedic back brace. A cable connects the performer's right hand to Sven's eyes, to make the animal blink; another connects his left hand to Sven's ears, which generally swing freely but can also be rotated or pulled back to express excitement or happiness. The mouth moves only when another character (Kristoff or Anna) rubs his throat. Mr. Pirozzi was the only Sven during last summer's pre Broadway run at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. But once the mechanics of the role became fully clear, Disney decided it was too much for one actor to do eight times a week, so on Broadway Mr. Pirozzi is Sven at six performances , and Adam Jepsen, an actor who was once a competitive gymnast, does the other two. (The goal is that neither actor does it more than once a day.) "We spend a lot of time in the gym, with stabilizer exercises and shoulder exercises, strengthening really small muscles that I didn't know existed," Mr. Jepsen said. Mr. Curry, who has studied animal anatomy, and Mr. Pirozzi, who simply loves animals, each spent hours watching YouTube videos of migrating reindeer, trying to understand how they move. "It turns out they're really gangly, just like our guy they're not graceful," Mr. Curry said. They worked with a movement consultant, Lorenzo Pisoni, to figure out how the animal would behave. Mr. Pirozzi also spent a lot of time lying on the floor with his dog Bella, a Great Dane pit bull mix observing how she responded to being addressed, as well as where her gaze went in moments of silence. One more thing: "I actually trained with my daughters on my back," he said. "I can do all the planking and the lifts, but I needed the agility on stilts, so Disney let me take those home, and my kids knew every time I was rehearsing I could give them a ride. They're 7 and 8, so the perfect ages like a little Anna and Elsa." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
My father said on numerous occasions when I was growing up that he would see other families that had problems like divorce and drug use, and he would thank God that his family was so perfect. Things would change, though. They always do. And that perfect family would face just as much struggle as any other. Growing up in the mountains above Boulder, Colo., our life was good. My parents had left their life in Chicago behind for an ideal they saw in a piece of art they found at a flea market, a haphazardly painted picture of a cabin next to a river with the mountains towering in the background. Born in the early '80s, my brothers and I shared a bond as best friends in our small neighborhood, isolated from town, where we spent time outside sledding, building forts and making dams in the ditch that ran by our house. The biggest problems we seemed to face were bloody knees and the occasional broken bone from snowboarding and bike accidents. My dad, a subscriber to "Mother Earth News," relished our family's home in the mountains. There were backpacking trips to the national park 30 miles away, where he taught us how to build a fire and to hang our food from tree limbs to keep it out of reach of bears. Other times he would take us on long father son road trips, where we would drive the long highways with nothing to look at but the passing fields and nothing to pay attention to but the books on tape from Focus on the Family that my father put on the car stereo. Those tapes provided a Christian look at what it meant to be a man, covering issues like lust, sex and puberty, and he'd answer our questions about girls and all manner of things relating to our growing into healthy young men. Around 2001, as my brother was just graduating from high school, my parents found out he was gay. That's his story to tell, but it was hard for my dad to accept. My brother went about as far as he could, to Montana, for college. When I went away to college, I began smoking weed pretty regularly and doing other drugs, and slowly I started to lose my grip on reality. Coincidences turned into connections, connections into paranoia, and paranoia into delusions. Seeing the change, my mom and dad were at a loss. When I mentioned a few times that I thought I was going crazy and told them that I'd like to see a doctor, they would say it was just the pot, just please stop. Months went by like this, as I grew increasingly paranoid and delusional, until, thinking I was a prophet who was meant to save the world, I left on a "mission" to the United Nations in New York. I spent nights sleeping on the streets and in metro trains, from Boston to Woods Hole, Mass. The experience culminated in a bittersweet homecoming, where I spent the next week in the psych ward of my local hospital one of the hardest weeks of my life. I was, in the truest sense of the word, broken. My parents were bereft. Panic is the word they've used over and over in my questions about how they were feeling during this time. After hearing my diagnosis schizophrenia they went to the bookstore that evening and bought every book on the shelf about it. My dad's perfect family had devolved into something he couldn't recognize. When I got out of the hospital, I moved back in with my parents. My mom tells me the moment I got home, I pulled a chair into the closet to look up into the attic. When my parents asked what I was doing, I said I was checking to see if there was anyone spying on me. My mixed up brain chemistry was telling me that others were conspiring against me, and judging me. While working on my car with my dad, the thought came into my head that he had cut my brake line in order to cause me to swerve off the road and die. Soon after I got home, my dad met with a couple at church whose son had been suffering from bipolar disorder. That get together, he says, scared the wits out of him, because he had no idea how bad mental illness could be. He says it also brought him an epiphany: that people have struggles in their lives that they don't share willingly, for fear of stigma, ridicule and misconception. My parents went to a class called Family to Family sponsored by NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and my dad fervently pored over the class material for tips on how to deal with my situation. My mom told me that she and my dad would sit through the class and she'd cry the whole time and then come home and cry the rest of the evening. The class moved my dad, though, because when he finished he underwent the training to teach the class himself, and he did teach it for two 12 week sessions. As I gradually got better, and my father got more informed, he learned to accept the fact that you can't control what life throws at you. Ten years have passed since my breakdown, and in that time I've gotten off drugs, taken my meds, worked various jobs, gone to therapy and am relatively stable. My father's a much calmer man these days, and he beams when he talks about how proud he is of me and my brothers. When I was little, for example, he might yell at me for waiting half an hour before taking the dog for a walk. In our interactions now, though, he might ask me kindly if I want to come into the office for a day and do a little work, but only if I'm feeling up to it. I still have a demon on my shoulder, my constant friend and enemy that sits with me at every moment of my day, from waking up with coffee on my porch to dinners out. It will make itself known if I overhear laughing or a snippet of conversation and I imagine that others are talking about me. That's paranoia. But in the years after I broke, I've come to realize that family, although complicated, is the one major constant in my life that I can rely on. If nothing else, it reinforces the ultimate importance of unconditional love, that no matter how messy life gets, my family will always be there for me, as I am for them. For that I can only be thankful. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
You probably don't think twice when you queue up at the grocery store or join a conga line at a wedding. But this type of single file organization is a sophisticated form of collective social behavior. And as suggested by the children's song "The Ants Go Marching One By One," humans are not the only animals that appreciate the value of orderly lines. But how far back in the history of living things on Earth does this behavior go? At least 480 million years, according to a study published on Thursday in Scientific Reports. It points to evidence of fossilized marine animals called trilobites lining up one by one during a time when complex life was still coming of age on Earth. "Probably, collective behavior developed very early among various groups of arthropods," said Jean Vannier, a paleontologist at the Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1 in France, and the study's lead author. Dr. Vannier and his colleagues examined specimens of Ampyx priscus found in Moroccan fossil beds, which preserve single file lines containing as many as 22 of the small spiny arthropods. The fossils represent some of the oldest evidence of collective synchronized behavior in animals. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
For armchair travelers, a film may be the best way to get to, say, Italy or, if you're a "Star Wars" fan, the planet of Ahch to. But for those who actually like to get on a plane, a movie's location can determine an entire itinerary. In fact, films and television shows often serve, long after the fact, to drive tourism. Roughly 60 million people annually choose travel destinations based on what they see on big and small screens, according to Stefan Roesch, the author of "The Experiences of Film Location Tourists" and the director of FilmQuest, which offers tours to film locations. Some films attract travelers based on their connection to place. "Sideways," the 2004 film set in the California wine country outside of Santa Barbara, created a tourism boom that still resonates today, particularly around Buellton, which is home to several "Sideways" locations. "It's a cult film that people will watch before coming here to refresh their familiarity with the place," said Kathy Vreeland, the executive director of the Buellton Chamber of Commerce Visitor's Bureau. Other movies become tourist attractions even when the story is otherworldly. In New Zealand, where "The Lord of the Rings" was shot, travelers still flock to the film sets and production sites related to the trilogy that was released between 2001 and 2003, thanks in part to Tourism New Zealand's campaign promoting them. Whether intimately associated with their settings (like "Dunkirk") or relying on alluring destinations to create fictional locales (like "Star Wars: The Last Jedi"), below are the most travel related films of this year's nominees and how to visit them. The town of Ebbing in the director Martin McDonagh's film is fictional. But Mr. McDonagh, who also wrote the screenplay for "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" about a mother's efforts to get her daughter's murder solved brought the place to life via three North Carolina towns. "He wanted a Main Street, U.S.A., feel that people could easily relate to and looked like it could be Anywhere, Middle America," said Guy Gaster, the director of the North Carolina Film Office. Sylva, in western North Carolina, played a central role, hosting the Ebbing police department (actually a home decor store) and the advertising company across the street from which Frances McDormand's character, Mildred Hayes, hurls flaming bombs. In nearby Dillsboro, Country Traditions, a food and wine store, played the gift shop where Mildred worked. The titular billboards were constructed on a scenic road near Black Mountain. Visit North Carolina has created a three day itinerary that identifies many of the film locations. Mr. McDonagh's story can't be called inspirational, but viewers have responded to the backdrop in the region's wooded, rolling hills rather than the plot, explained Mr. Gaster. He noted that fans of "The Last of the Mohicans," a 1992 film with a tragic conclusion, still seek out filming sites such as Chimney Rock State Park. "People do see the difference between what is really there and what the story line is," he said. Nominated for eight Academy Awards, including best picture and director, "Dunkirk" captures the World War II evacuation of Allied soldiers from the port of Dunkirk in northern France in 1940. The plan, known as Operation Dynamo, saved more than 338,000 troops. The director Christopher Nolan shot much of the film in Dunkirk , where a walking tour visits Malo les Bains, the seaside area depicted in the movie, and East Mole, the breakwater that was vital to the evacuation and was partly rebuilt by the production (EUR120 for up to 30 people, or about 150). Like the popular D Day beaches in Normandy, the real life Dunkirk is strewn with World War II wreckage, especially visible at low tide. Near the beach, the Dunkirk 1940 Museum tells the Operation Dynamo story. Travelers can see Dunkirk from the point of view of a Royal Air Force pilot on a 15 minute aerial tour aboard a light aircraft (EUR 120 for up to three people). The opening frames of the best picture nominee "Call Me by Your Name" indicate the setting is "somewhere in northern Italy." And indeed, the film location, including the homey villa where the main characters reside, is in Lombardy, the northern region of the country that includes Milan and the Lakes Region. The enchanting countryside where the protagonists have long meals in gardens, swim in idyllic ponds and cycle through medieval towns is a seductive character in its own right. "Italy is often the backdrop for romantic stories, both onscreen and off, but the better known destinations Venice, Tuscany, the Amalfi Coast are usually the settings," said Kathy McCabe, the host of the TV show "Dream of Italy." "This movie reminds us that there are so many more layers of Italy for travelers to explore." The film's director, Luca Guadagnino, centered production around the town of Crema, roughly 30 miles east of Milan, and his characters made jaunts to Lake Garda, one of the region's lakes with an Alpine backdrop. They also visit Cremona, saluted by Unesco for its traditional violin making, the walled city of Bergamo in the Alpine foothills and, outside of Bergamo, the dramatic Serio Waterfalls, Italy's highest cascades. "Star Wars: The Last Jedi," nominated for four Academy Awards, including original score, picks up Luke Skywalker's story line where the previous film left off on the planet of Ahch to, the fictional shelter played by the real life monastic retreat Skellig Michael, a steep and rocky island off the southwest coast of Ireland. Though the film was also shot on location in Bolivia and Croatia, the production expanded to feature more of Ireland, including coastal locations such as Loop Head in County Clare and Malin Head in Donegal. Most of these areas lie along the Wild Atlantic Way, a name given by Irish tourism to the country's west coast. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
If we really want to balance school budgets in the wake of the coronavirus and create more long term equity in our public school system we need to come to terms with the idea that we need far fewer than the 13,000 school districts that are currently in operation in the United States. Today, the lines that define school district borders are largely arbitrary. They're zigzagging areas of local control, a term that conflates two separate concepts: the ability to oversee a group of neighborhood schools and the right to keep the proceeds from property wealth in narrow jurisdictions. The more exclusively these borders are drawn, the more advantage accrues to wealthy districts, each of which has an independent financial structure, at the expense of the students next door. This structure may explain the educational geography of Camden County in southern New Jersey, which contains 35 school districts, 23 of which are within a five mile radius of the city of Camden. Half of these districts serve fewer than 1,000 students apiece, with wide wealth disparities. The median property in Gloucester City School District is worth about 120,000, but four miles away in Haddonfield Borough a median home sells for 500,000. From this wealthy tax base, Haddonfield can raise 13,500 per student, four times higher than what can be collected in Gloucester City. This localism with regard to schools has been challenged legally many times, and state courts have repeatedly ruled that funding based on property taxes is unconstitutional. In all but a handful, they have ordered states to remedy the financial difference, but not to fix the borders that create the root inequity. So every year, legislatures use state money to try to fill in the gaps between what low wealth communities can raise from confined property tax areas and what they actually need to operate. This approach has not done the job. The average predominantly nonwhite district in the United States starts with a local wealth deficit of almost 2,500 per student. State aid is so limited that on average, state legislatures are able to contribute only 260 toward closing the gap. As a result, predominantly nonwhite school districts receive a collective 23 billion less in school funding than their predominantly white counterparts, even though these districts serve the same number of students. It is clear that this approach wasn't working before the coronavirus hit, and the economic fallout from the pandemic will demonstrate exactly how flawed this system is. Sales, energy and income taxes are plummeting, and these are the receipts that states use to close the property tax gap across school district borders. Without intervention, we will soon watch education budgets for middle and lower income communities unravel. But if we envision a new map of property taxation for schools one in which district borders no longer define "local" for the purposes of education dollars, we can tap into funding that is already in the system and offset this challenge. Because larger borders encompass more communities, they can smooth out the major differences in neighborhood wealth that we see across the country. If a typical U.S. county like Berrien County, Mich., were to combine all of its local taxes into one pool instead of independent collection among 15 different school districts, we could flatten the tax disparity between the highest local tax district at 25,000 per student, and the lowest wealth district in the same county that generates just 750. According to analysis for an upcoming EdBuild report, sharing taxes across Berrien County would increase funding for 79 percent of all students (and 87 percent of low income children). If we adopted this plan, the lowest income areas could withstand a state funding reduction of upward of 3,332 in the next year without seeing an overall decline in available resources. More from "The America We Need" We know that these kinds of state cuts are coming, but pooling the wealth that already exists in the community means that we can buffer the impact for the majority of children in Berrien County, and those nationwide. This solution isn't unique to Michigan. State after state turn in positive results under this model. County pooling around Fayetteville, Ark., would deliver more money to 84 percent of low income students. In the Kansas City suburbs, more than three quarters of all students would benefit. In Johnstown, Pa., 86 percent of nonwhite students could gain access to the money that is already in their neighborhood. And back in Camden, 69 percent of low income students would benefit from this change. Reimagining school funding geography would bring two distinct benefits. In the short term, we could find the money to buffer the impact of impending state cuts. On a longer term basis, we could start to truly balance cross border funding inequities and take on the racial and socioeconomic segregation that these borders enable and protect. By expanding the definition of "local" just a bit, without finding any new state revenue or increasing any local tax rates, we can immediately get more money to a significant majority of all children. Under this kind of new nationwide map, 69 percent of all of the country's children and 73 percent of minority and 76 percent of low income students would get access to about 1,000 more in local property tax funding. This money is not insignificant. It would enable distance learning by covering the cost of a Chromebook and home internet access for every student who stands to gain funding. Alternately, the average district could use this new money to hire five mental health counselors and five remedial education coaches for every school in the district. In essence, we can find the money that districts currently and urgently need to address the impact of the pandemic within our own education budgets. The money is already there. The borders that determine the jurisdiction of local school taxes are not ordained by nature. We draw them, and we can change them whenever we decide. The coronavirus era is a good time for us to think more broadly about school district geographies in terms of funding, but also how we define schools, taxes and community. Some of us may see this financial proposal as a quiet first step toward income and race based integration. Others will see it merely as an urgent financial fix. Either way, this proposal won't lead to an immediate overhaul that satisfies either group fully, nor will it solve all of our education problems. There are so many challenges to overcome to achieve an equally accessible future for all of our children. But if we take the first step of broadening the definition of local in order to pool money more equitably, we may be able to look back at all the good that came from that redefinition and see the enormous step forward that this was. Rebecca Sibilia ( rebeccasibilia) is the chief executive of EdBuild, a school funding advocacy organization. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Aleks Musika, left, and Davidson Petit Frere have drawn a clientele that includes Jay Z and Stephen Curry. Two men one in Miami, the other in New York, both passionate about suits stumble upon each other on Instagram. They feel a connection. Mutual respect on social media turns into real life camaraderie. They meet, they click, they draw up a plan. "We take inspiration from the '20s, '30s, and remix it," Mr. Petit Frere said. "We call it neo classical tailoring." Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times That is the origin story of Musika Frere, a label that specializes in custom suits that often come in unusual colors or patterns, and has drawn a clientele that includes Jay Z, Michael B. Jordan, Stephen Curry, Kevin Hart and even Beyonce. Its founders, Aleks Musika, 32, and Davidson Petit Frere, 27, are somewhat famous in their own right: Mr. Petit Frere has over 200,000 followers on Instagram, and Mr. Musika more than 178,000. Musika Frere specializes in custom suits that often come in unusual colors or patterns. Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times "Guys in suits and guys taking pictures of themselves really didn't happen back then," Mr. Musika said of the period when he and Mr. Petit Frere first started their pages, about five years ago. Mr. Petit Frere said: "We had a following. We just didn't have a product." The brand they eventually came up with, at a Miami public library in 2013, reflects their particularities and interests. "We take inspiration from the '20s, '30s, and remix it," Mr. Petit Frere said. "We call it neo classical tailoring." "It came down to a buttonhole with one factory," he added. "The suits were good, but they wouldn't do this one buttonhole that we needed. They said it takes too much time. So we left." Neither designer comes from a traditional fashion background. Mr. Petit Frere, a native New Yorker, began working in real estate at 18. "I was wearing polo shirts and pants and square shoes to the office," he said. "I realized I wasn't a sharp dresser." One of his co workers referred him to his tailor, Badger Welsh Bespoke, in Midtown. "As I made more money, I started to buy more suits," he said, "and I realized my business was getting a big boost from that." Mr. Petit Frere sent friends to Badger Welsh, and he was eventually offered a line of his own, P. Frere, under the company's umbrella. "In the beginning, I was more of an apprentice," he said. "I learned about measuring, tailoring, the construction of suits. I learned the lingo and the history." As a boy in Philadelphia, Mr. Musika noticed that his father, a teacher, commanded respect by dressing up daily. "From the janitor to the principal, they all addressed him a certain way," he said. Like his father, Mr. Musika became a teacher, but he worked in retail to make extra money to afford the clothes he wanted. His career path took him from a job at an AllSaints store in Miami to the Tom Ford Made to Measure program. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
A song Elvis Costello and Carole King wrote in the 1990s, "Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter," is finally being released on Costello's new album, "Look Now." Two decades ago, Elvis Costello and Carole King kept running into each other at a Japanese restaurant in Manhattan. "It was the lure of the sea urchin," Costello said. And the meals paid off: Over the course of several omakase dinners, the musicians developed a friendship that led to a writing collaboration but not before they went through a harrowing experience. In 1995, the two were performing with Bob Dylan and Van Morrison in Dublin. "At the end, it was too dark and when everyone went offstage left, I went stage right," said King. "Boom! I fell 15 feet onto a concrete floor." Costello said it was "truly horrifying." King broke her right wrist and left thumb in the accident. "I think I was saved by landing on a pile of cables," she said. Not long after, the two musicians decided to write a song together. For more than 20 years, the piece, "Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter," only existed as a demo, though Costello performed it live on several occasions. But the track finally has a home on "Look Now," his new album with the Imposters, out Friday. Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder. Several weeks ago, the two met at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village (where he recorded the album's strings) to talk about their work together, as well as their separate histories as collaborators, writers and performers. Settling down on a plush red sofa, King, 76, kept referring to her collaborator by his birth name. "Burnt Sugar" fits right into "Look Now," which recalls the grandeur of those highly arranged, early '60s pop hits written by artists like you, Carole. When you heard the album, did you recognize yourself in it? CAROLE KING I didn't, but I did recognize a value I hold dear, which is authenticity in presentation. You take a song that's good, and you go into the studio and you present it to the band, and they find themselves feeling the groove. Then you give them direction, and they take it to levels you didn't quite imagine. You Elvis probably have more of the big picture going in than I do. ELVIS COSTELLO That's really true of this record. It's one of the only ones where I recorded the vocals last. Normally, I arrange outward from a core vocal, which tortures the band. Sometimes the drummer says I drag or speed up a verse. Here, I had it all arranged in my head. In your memoir, Elvis, you wrote about seeing Carole in concert in Manchester in 1971 when you were 17. Do you remember that show? COSTELLO The two most memorable concerts I saw that year were you, with James Taylor, and Joni Mitchell doing "Blue" before that album came out. Can you imagine today someone touring before their album came out? You were playing all these songs that had been standards from the '60s and then your songs from "Tapestry." But you made sure not to tour until your album was in shops! KING That wasn't me. It was Lou Adler the head of her record company, Ode . COSTELLO I have a Lou Adler story. I was sitting at the Whiskey A Go Go in 1978 watching the band Rockpile, and this gentleman passes a piece of paper over the table, so I signed it. I thought he wanted my autograph. Looking floored, he handed the paper back to me and, after I turned it over, I saw it said, "Lou Adler" with his phone number on it. He was trying to sign me! KING He knew your talent. We all knew! You did so many different things and did them all well. If you had begun in our generation of writers you'd be right there with us. COSTELLO I can't believe you said that! KING A lot of it is just time and place. In some ways, I feel that it's all undeserved for me. I know that I've done the work and I have the gift, but I feel grateful that circumstances put me in a time and place where people have gotten to hear it. COSTELLO Do you remember the first reaction you got performing for people in the business? When I started doing it, they thought I would be coming in with a tape and I could see the look on the guy's face when I walked in with my guitar. I made him listen to me play, and I'm super loud. I could see him thinking, "When is he going to stop?" I imagine it would be different if you come in playing "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow." KING I have to say this as if I'm speaking of someone else: I got everybody's attention. I think they weren't expecting a small Jewish girl to have that much power or confidence. They were hungry for new talent. They were small start up companies. Atlantic Records was in a tiny office on 54th Street. Carole, you made history twice: first as one of the young, New York writers of the '60s hits; then as part of the singer songwriter movement of the early '70s, which asserted that the quirky writer's voice was more authentic than the "professional" singer. Given your unusual voice, Elvis, was that aesthetic shift an inspiration? COSTELLO You hit the nail on the head. I never planned to be a singer. I was a songwriter. My role model was Robbie Robertson, but I couldn't find a Levon Helm or a Rick Danko, so I was forced to sing. Had I come up in Carole's time, I tell myself I wouldn't have been a performer, which, for a lot of people, would have been a relief because they wouldn't have to hear me sing. KING I beg to differ. Probably you would have started off as a songwriter, but your vocal ability would have emerged. Your interpretations of your songs are magnificent. COSTELLO When you went from songwriting to singing, you were reclaiming songs that made their name played by other people. KING Look, if you're following Aretha Franklin on "Natural Woman" it's like ... I wasn't going to try to compete with her vocally because that would be silly. What I did was just present the song I had written. In a way, Carole, that makes you an unlikely collaborator with Elvis. Your songs are unfussy, and his are ornate, especially lyrically. COSTELLO That's probably because I thought of myself as a writer before I thought of myself as a musician. I knew I was some kind of writer from when I was 8 or 9. I didn't know I was a musician until I was 17. KING Your lyrics aren't linear, but you get all the emotional components of what's going on. There's a freedom to it, even though you might not be able to draw a line from Point A to Point B. COSTELLO That's why you listen to the song more than once. KING Well, I go directly from Point A to Point B, and they listen too! Elvis, you're known for full album collaborations with everyone from Paul McCartney to the Roots. Carole, you've teamed with artists from Paul Westerberg to Mariah Carey. Why do you enjoy the collaborative process? COSTELLO It's the speed with which it's done. When I did the songs with Paul McCartney, it was like a tennis match. Reaching across the table, I've got this line. I've got that line. And then the song was done. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
There is an expansive, 13 room duplex at 730 Park Avenue where time has stood still. A typewriter gathers dust atop a table in the office; gold rimmed China remains stacked in cabinets awaiting a dinner party never held. Large swaths of plaster have peeled off the ceiling and drifted down like dried leaves from a tree, blanketing the floors. The apartment once served as the official residence of the ambassador to the permanent mission of Yugoslavia to the United Nations, its four terraces and grand foyer hosting heads of state and world leaders. When war erupted in the early 1990s, the Yugoslav ambassador left and closed the door behind him. The successor countries formed after the dissolution of Yugoslavia have spent the intervening years locked in inertia, as the apartment, which holds glimmers of its former glamour, remains vacant and in increasingly desperate shape. The apartment's ownership is fractured among the five successor countries, including Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Serbia, with 39.5 percent, owns the largest stake and, not surprisingly, is frustrated with the lack of a sale. To remain in good standing with the co op board, the country has been paying the unit's monthly maintenance, which is not an insignificant amount, totaling more than 13,400 a month or 161,000 a year. "I wish we could put it on the market and get some money and finish this already," Mirjana Zivkovic, the consul general of Serbia in New York, told me recently. While Washington is the nucleus for world diplomats, New York, as the home of the United Nations, has its fair share of foreign dignitaries. For decades, many of these governments were based around the quiet, elegant streets of the Upper East Side, where elite buildings beckoned them with their prewar detailing and traditional beauty. At 740 Park Avenue, for example, the building is notorious for rejecting many prominent would be buyers, but its co op board over the years has welcomed ambassadors to the United Nations from France, Turkey and Japan, as well as the German consul general. But just like airline flying was once considered chic, boasting a foreign ambassador as a neighbor no longer seems to carry the same cachet as it once did. More co ops look askance at foreign governments in the wake of greater political turmoil and turnover. There are also legal issues to consider, such as diplomatic immunity, which can rankle many co op boards. And for the foreign governments, a number of them have capitalized on higher real estate values and sold their properties uptown to consolidate closer to the United Nations. The cash strapped government of France recently listed two uptown properties in order to downsize and relocate closer to the United Nations. It has put on the market an 18 room duplex at 740 Park Avenue that serves as the residence for its ambassador to the United Nations for 48 million, as well as a 30 foot wide townhouse at 1143 Fifth Avenue opposite Central Park for 32.5 million. The country has owned a home at 740 Park since 1949; it bought the duplex, which has six bedrooms (not including the maids' quarters), five fireplaces and 38 windows, in 1978 for just 600,000. "It is hard to make the argument that you are cutting back on social welfare for your people, but yet you have this asset worth 48 million; it just is not a very good story," said Jed H. Garfield, an owner of the brokerage firm Leslie J. Garfield who is representing France in the sale of the townhouse at 1143 Fifth Avenue with his partner Francis O'Shea. France has set a deadline of Monday for accepting bids on the Fifth Avenue building, after which it will vet the best three or four offers. "Transparency is very important for countries like France; it is vital because they don't want anyone coming back and saying the process wasn't fair," Mr. Garfield said. Easing this transition for foreign diplomats are the condominium developments underway around the United Nations, such as the 88 unit 50 United Nations Plaza and a planned tower at 616 First Avenue. Yet, with the city's real estate rules and quirky market forces, diplomatic dramas still abound. At 34 East 69th Street, for example, the art dealer Richard L. Feigen rents a large home that was owned by the government of Iran. It is now under the auspices of the United States Department of State's Office of Foreign Missions, according to Mr. Garfield, who rented the building to Mr. Feigen a dozen years ago. And a 40 foot wide mansion at 124 East 80th Street that belongs to the government of Iraq has sat mostly abandoned for years, according to brokers. As for the apartment at 730 Park Avenue that once belonged to the former Yugoslavia, if it were sold today in its current condition it would be worth 15 million to 20 million, and likely twice that amount if it were renovated, said Tristan Harper, an associate broker at Douglas Elliman Real Estate. Mr. Harper, who was born in the former Yugoslavia, visited the apartment several times when it was still in use in the early 1990s, and has been back recently to witness its deterioration. "It was a gorgeous place very grand and even though it hasn't been maintained, you can still see how glamorous it was," he said. For well heeled co ops that in the past welcomed a foreign government into their midst, many are more cautious. Foreign governments are protected by diplomatic immunity, which means that if they stop paying their maintenance, for example, a court may grant the co op a monetary judgment. But unlike with a typical shareholder, the co op cannot evict the government and sell the apartment to recoup its losses. Co ops will often ask the government to waive its immunity, but in many cases they are unwilling to do so. "It raises very significant issues for a co op or condominium," said Eva C. Talel, a partner at the law firm Stroock Stroock Lavan. "Because of a combination of law and the lifestyle of diplomats, sometimes, and not so infrequently, it just doesn't work." But it isn't all bad news. The nation of Qatar has been bucking the trend and lavishing hundreds of millions of dollars on New York real estate. Earlier this year, it went into contract on an Upper East Side townhouse for 100 million, which would set a record for the city's priciest commercial townhouse, and last year it bought the Ellen Biddle Shipman Residence at 21 Beekman Place for 34.45 million. In 2012, Qatar tried to buy two apartments formerly owned by the heiress Huguette Clark at 907 Fifth Avenue, but was reportedly rejected by the co op board. While countries like Serbia and France are looking to give up their luxury properties for less glamorous quarters, countries like Qatar give me hope. It would be a sad commentary to see the many governments that are now ensconced in grand Upper East Side spaces all choosing to rent dowdy offices in Midtown and resorting to cramped condominiums elsewhere. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Liz Feldman had planned on taking a trip after she finished working on the most recent season of "Dead to Me," in hopes of sparking some creative inspiration. But now, stuck at home during a pandemic, the Emmy winning TV writer has discovered the next best escape: "Too Hot to Handle." Shot on the beaches of Punta Mita, Mexico, and starring a cast of scantily clad contestants, the Netflix dating show has become Feldman's new obsession. "I'm sort of just leaning into it," she said. "In the past I was a little bit snobby about reality television." With the coronavirus shutting down most productions, TV makers are now primarily TV watchers, holed up indoors with time on their hands, indulging in soothing rewatches and adding new discoveries to their queues. (Showrunners: They're just like us!) From period pieces to foreign thrillers, here's what 11 of them are bingeing. Liz Tigelaar was a writer on "Nashville" and "Casual," among other shows, before creating Hulu's high profile literary adaptation "Little Fires Everywhere." In her spare time, she usually likes to dive into sharp single camera comedies like "Better Things," "Fleabag" and "Catastrophe," but those haven't been doing it for her lately. Instead, she's turned to the high drama and deadly stakes of "Homeland." "I'm actually enjoying getting sucked into something that's bigger than what we're going through," Tigelaar said. The writers really know how to "arc out a season," she said, and make it "so twisty turny and action packed and compelling." She dreaded the show's final episode, which aired on April 26, and might start again from the beginning now that it's done, she said. Tigelaar worked with the "Homeland" showrunner Alex Gansa during her first television job, on the teen soap "Dawson's Creek." Dan Levy created "Schitt's Creek" with his father, Eugene, and served as showrunner, star, writer and occasional director for the beloved Canadian comedy, which wrapped its final season in April. During production, he would take mental breaks by plowing through British crime television ("Happy Valley," "Broadchurch," "Sherlock"). Now, he's finding a new kind of breather with the Japanese dating series "Terrace House." "It's a reality show about six young men and women who share a house or an apartment with the intention of coupling up, and it's very slow in a way that's incredibly calming for me," Levy said. "I've gone, I think, 36 episodes into a single season and none of them have even kissed." Levy warned that the show takes a bit to get going. "At first you don't really know what's going on it's just six people having small talk for an entire episode," he said. But the payoff is gratifying. "There's a warmth and a generosity to the experience of what goes on in that house," he said. "It's been a really nice, safe place knowing that at the end of the night, I can always go back to these people." Dahvi Waller's writing resume includes "Desperate Housewives" and "Mad Men," as well as "Mrs. America," her new critically acclaimed FX mini series. "Mrs. America" chronicles the real life battle over the Equal Rights Amendment and the soul of feminism. But when it came time to shelter in place, she preferred the lighter side of television. "I didn't want anything that was too realistic or dystopian," she said. "I'm definitely looking for an escape." Waller discovered "Schitt's Creek" during quarantine and is glad she did. "First off, I'm from Canada, so watching a show filmed in Canada is very comforting," she said. "It's also just so funny." "You can digest three or four a night," she added. "It's really going to get me through." Before the pandemic, whenever she was working and found herself losing comedic steam, she would tune into late night talk shows to get in the right mind set. These days, her television consumption has turned into a steady diet of "lush BBC mini series adaptations of novels and dark, moody spy dramas." Meriwether wants entertainment that transports her to another time and place, like "Little Drummer Girl," the AMC mini series based on the John le Carre novel, and "Deutschland 83," the Sundance thriller about an undercover spy living in 1983 West Germany. "A good spy drama is always a little bit lonely; the spy lives with a secret that separates him or her from the rest of the world," Meriwether said. "Instead of wanting to watch comedy where I can pretend that everything is happy and fine, I seem to want to watch something that meets me where I am a little lonely and sad." It's a cliche to call someone "the hardest working person in show business," but if anyone has a legitimate claim on the title, it's Greg Berlanti. The executive producer of more than 20 shows, he also has recent writing credits on shows like "You," "Titans" and "All American" and is responsible for the CW's sprawling Arrowverse, including the concluded "Arrow," "The Flash" and "DC's Legends of Tomorrow," among other series. So it's surprising to discover that there are corners of television where he has never ventured before. Namely: survivalist reality shows. "My husband and I have watched every season of 'Alone,'" he said, "Survivalists get placed somewhere horrible and alone and see how long they can survive off of whatever they can forage." As a creator, with Bill Hader, of HBO's "Barry," Alec Berg has spent two seasons weaving comedy from assassinations, sensitive Chechen gangsters and at least one feral young martial artist. But even he was stunned by what he saw in "Tiger King." "What a menagerie of lunatics it was kind of awesome," he said. "They're talking about making it a dramatic limited series and I'm sort of like, what do you do to make it more compelling than it already was?" Berg, who has spent much of his career writing and producing acclaimed sitcoms ("Silicon Valley," "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "Seinfeld") also found time to finally finish watching TV's reigning Emmy winner for top comedy, "Fleabag." It was the rare show that he found himself bingeing, he said, thanks to its terrific pacing and Phoebe Waller Bridge's performance. "As much of a bummer as it is to go to the Emmys and lose every damn year like I do," he said, "to lose to that show didn't bother me at all." After two years writing for "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," Liz Feldman made the transition into narrative television, working on "Two Broke Girls" and then creating Netflix's dark comedy "Dead to Me," starring Linda Cardellini and Christina Applegate. Perhaps fittingly for the creator of a show about death and loss, Feldman spent the first part of quarantine immersing herself in true crime documentaries. But that didn't last. "I was looking for content to show me times that were worse than the ones we were in," she said. "Since then, I've taken a little bit of a break from the darkness, and now I've completely devolved into trashy reality television." She's hooked on "Too Hot to Handle," and despite its "ridiculous premise," as Feldman put it, the show is produced well and has a sense of humor about itself. "You do see growth from people," she said. "There's that tinge of humanity that makes you feel like maybe it's not the worst thing to watch." Tanya Saracho wrote for "Devious Maids" and "How to Get Away With Murder" before creating the Starz family drama "Vida," which just started its third and final season. When she's writing her show, Saracho makes a conscious effort not to indulge in any television watching. "I only want to listen to my world and my characters," she said. During the pandemic, she's catching up on everything she missed. First up, the British comedy "Lovesick." "I watched all three seasons," she said. "It's just three friends, hapless and feckless." Next, she dived into "Feel Good," a semi autobiographical series written and starring Mae Martin. "It's lovely, even in the dark edges," she said, calling "Martin "luminous." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Credit...Andrew White for The New York Times To that pocket square wearing, sidecar sipping human known as the "Esquire man," this was life as it was intended to be: a roomful of wags in natty suits throwing back cocktails and trading banter in one of Manhattan's hottest restaurants, as willowy models and square jawed movie stars circled the room. At Esquire magazine's "Mavericks of Style" dinner, held at Le Coucou on a rainy night this past November, spirits were so high, and consumed so freely, that it might as well have been 1966 doubly so, since Gay Talese, Esquire's living monument to the New Journalism of the 1960s, was holding court, dry gin martini in hand, a few yards away from Jay Fielden, Esquire's new editor in chief. "There was a period of time when Esquire had a real literary charisma, and there was a culture that responded to it," said Mr. Fielden, 48, sounding nostalgic as he reclined in a banquette, wearing a steel bluel Ferragamo suit and sporting what may be the best head of male hair in the magazine industry, a cascade of artfully coifed curls that calls to mind both the belletrist whimsy of Oscar Wilde and the gunslinger gusto of Wild Bill Hickok. "How do you make that urgent to a younger generation?" But times have changed. As we move into the era of transgender bathrooms and L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. studies, when millennials are more likely to take their cultural cues from Justin Bieber's Instagram feed than 6,000 word profiles of Sean Penn, Mr. Fielden is charged not just with bringing back Esquire's glory days, but with also figuring out exactly what the Esquire man that is, the American man is in 2017. It is up to the 13th editor in Esquire's history to decide if this is a crisis or an opportunity. "It felt like Armageddon," Mr. Fielden said, recalling the fire that ripped through his modernist Connecticut home in 2010. "It just sent this noxious smoke throughout the house. You close your eyes. You can't breathe." On that pale winter afternoon, Mr. Fielden, wearing a blue windowpane Cifonelli suit, was reviewing the 102 editorial pages of the March issue, all taped on a wall before him. That issue, complete with a redesign, is the first that fully shows his vision for the magazine. The cover subject is not a chiseled hunk in the mold of Ryan Gosling or George Clooney, but James Corden, the host of CBS's "Late Late Show." After seeing a Carpool Karaoke segment featuring Mr. Corden, Rod Stewart and ASAP Rocky, Mr. Fielden began wondering if Mr. Corden was a good model for the new Esquire man. "He represents a lot of what I'm after," he said, explaining that his version of Esquire "is aimed at a reader who's an upstart, an iconoclast, an independent thinker, the most charming guy in the room." A portly Everyman with an impish wit, Mr. Corden is at heart a disrupter, Mr. Fielden said, the kind of man who looks totally at home in a red custom made Gucci suit and silk Gucci loafers embroidered with tigers, as he appears in the issue. "I mean, here's this bloke from England who's a little overweight, with his zaftig charisma showing up, taking the latest slot that potheads and college students watch, and suddenly he's become a viral sensation that's global," Mr. Fielden said, a trace of his Texas twang poking through. That talk show host was hardly the only peacock to grace the pages of that issue. In a telling sign that Mr. Fielden plans to blow out fashion coverage, adding color and spectacle, the March issue features a model wearing a "cyberpunk meets Outward Bound" foul weather ensemble by Prada, including pink scuba sneakers and a raincoat with a print inspired by Google Earth, that might give Jared Leto pause. "There's no cigar smoke wafting through the pages," Mr. Fielden said, "and the obligatory three B's are gone, too brown liquor, boxing and bullfighting." As a straight white man, Mr. Fielden does not exactly represent a departure for the top of the Esquire masthead. Indeed, his profile is almost too perfect for the job. Craggily handsome in a vaguely Willem Dafoe way, he grew up in San Antonio with a father who enjoyed hunting and fly fishing, so he has the "arts of manhood" element deep in his DNA. His ability to cross boundaries was on display at Town Country, a magazine associated with ladies who lunch, where Mr. Fielden managed to increase revenues 46 percent over his five year reign there, in part by attracting more male readers. "I gave Town Country some teeth, reporting on behavior that wasn't always that which, well, Emily Post would approve, like having an evening toke instead of a Scotch on the rocks," said Mr. Fielden, who still serves as that magazine's editorial director. While he aims to do the inverse at Esquire, and bring in more female readers, Mr. Fielden nevertheless has a legacy to protect at Esquire. Esquire, after all, has been the industry's most exclusive boys club for eight decades running. When Esquire debuted from its Chicago headquarters in 1933, it was a magazine with a mandate. "Esquire aims to be the common denominator of masculine interests," a mission statement in that first issue read. Esquire, the statement said, would be a pointed rebuke to the "mad scramble" for female readers (and their advertising dollars) by the general interest magazines of the day, which provided features for men only "after the manner in which scraps are tossed to the patient dog beneath the table." Esquire provided anything but scraps. That first issue was like the publishing equivalent of "Meet the Beatles," with Arnold Gingrich, the founding editor, serving up articles by a future Nobel Prize winner (Ernest Hemingway), a future poet laureate of the United States (Joseph Auslander) and a heavyweight champion (Gene Tunney), not to mention work by literary lions including Ring Lardner Jr., Dashiell Hammett and John Dos Passos. Through the Depression and the war years, the pages of Esquire were the place to be for the brightest and brawniest of American writers. Hemingway published his classic story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" in the magazine in 1936. F. Scott Fitzgerald seemed to spend more time in Esquire than in the Commodore Hotel bar, publishing 43 stories in the magazine in just seven years before his death in 1940 at age 44. Despite its literary bona fides, Esquire was no undergraduate seminar. Thanks to steamy pinup illustrations by artists including Alberto Vargas, Esquire was basically Playboy before Playboy. A ban of Esquire by the Office of the Postmaster General led to a watershed 1946 Supreme Court decision on censorship that helped open the floodgates for Hugh Hefner's topless Playmates the next decade. Observers might have expected this monument to bourbon and shotguns manhood to crumble when faced with the rise of feminism, flower power and civil rights in 1960s. Instead, Esquire entered a second golden age. "A successful magazine has to build a myth its readers can believe in," decreed the celebrated editor Harold Hayes, and under his watch, Esquire did not just cover the '60s, it became part of the story. The art director George Lois, known for his cover showing Andy Warhol being sucked into a can of Campbell's soup, turned the Esquire cover into a form of pop art: the boxer Sonny Liston as "the first black Santa Claus"; the Italian actress Virna Lisi with a face full of shaving cream for a 1965 article on "The Masculinization of the American Woman." Showing off his instincts for journalistic anarchy, Mr. Hayes dispatched the literary pranksters Terry Southern, Jean Genet and William Burroughs into the tinderbox of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Facing down the armies of the police in the riot torn city, the kimono clad Mr. Genet, a prostitute and thief turned novelist, concluded that America would be better off being "reduced to powder." Industry skeptics reacted as if Tiger Beat had snapped up The New Yorker, but the new regime rode the "hip to be square" 1980s, when classic Eisenhower era suits, cocktails and social climbing roared back into fashion, to a striking turnaround, selling the magazine to Hearst in 1987. But by 1994, Esquire's rival, GQ, had surpassed it in circulation and advertising pages, with titles like Details making a claim on Generation X. Esquire replaced the highly regarded editor Terry McDonell with the longtime New York magazine boss Edward Kosner, who vowed to revive its legacy as a writer's magazine. Sometimes it worked. Other times, attempts to channel the spirit of Mr. Hayes fell flat, such as when Norman Mailer, then 71, took on the Madonna phenomenon. Writing in the third person, Mr. Mailer caught up with the star after a draining photo shoot, writing, "Of course her breasts would be the first part of her to express such physical discontent, even as any good fellow's penis would shrivel when low in spirit." It is easy to blame the internet, but to Mr. Fielden, that is a tired excuse. "There are a lot of false narratives out there," he said. "You tell me about the last time you had an amazing experience on a website that you wanted to print and hang on your wall? If that's the Holy Grail, that's something we've done with newspapers and magazines for our entire existence, and that's where this thing has to hit, because the human race is not getting stupider." Even so, Esquire is pouring new resources into the web. This past December, Esquire's 48 hour pop up channel, "The Esquire Guide to Grooming" on Snapchat's Discover platform, reached more than three million unique viewers. Hearst recently hired Steve Kandell, the former executive editor for features at BuzzFeed, to direct Esquire.com, a site that has received a traffic boost of 20 percent in the past six months. The site managed to insert itself into the cultural conversation at numerous points during the recent election cycle, such as with an online only reboot of the seminal '80s satirical magazine Spy, or Peter J. Boyer's bite size scoop that Donald J. Trump was considering evicting the press corps from the White House, which became the talk of the Sunday morning political shows. This is not to say that an Esquire editor who reads the literary critic Christopher Ricks for fun in airports has any plans to scuttle Esquire's prized long form literary tradition to fit Twitter attention spans. Vicky Ward's feature article in August, "Jared Kushner's Second Act," a prescient look at the political rise of Mr. Trump's 36 year old son in law, was just one of the 6,000 word plus features under Mr. Fielden to create buzz within the industry. "Bad short pieces read long, and good long pieces read short," Mr. Fielden said. "I don't think shrinking is necessarily bad. I'm a great fan of the haiku." If Mr. Fielden's only challenge were competing with the internet, that would at least be a familiar problem. More confounding is the rapidly changing cultural landscape. In the year since Mr. Fielden took over Esquire, the country has entered what seems like a full fledged culture war. With so called alt right provocateurs like Stephen K. Bannon marching into power, and armies of women in bright pink hats marching in protest, it's a little hard to say where the literate centrist coastal male with a taste for Raymond Carver that is, the traditional Esquire man fits in. "I understand what the hurdles are, what the difficulties are," Mr. Fielden said. "They're certainly things that keep me up, and sometimes ruin my weekend." But, he added: "I look back on what the New Journalism invented, what Gay did, what Tom Wolfe did, what Norman Mailer did. They had to up the literary horsepower with new tools and techniques in order to compete with the speed and seismic shock of one insane event after another in the '60s and '70s. We're just having to do the same thing." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Opened in 1998, the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge predated the wave of hotels that have more recently opened in the booming borough. Now, with a 43 million budget, it aims to update its appeal. "We need to catch up with what's going on with Brooklyn," said Sam Ibrahim, general manager of the hotel, who noted an influx of leisure travelers crossing the bridge from Manhattan. Phase 1 in the plan opened earlier this month, with a redesigned lobby, restaurant and concierge lounge. The Bar, a casual, loungelike space with food and drink service, replaces a more formal dining room. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
LOS ANGELES The 20th Century Fox thriller "Red Sparrow" flew low at the domestic box office over the weekend, collecting an estimated 17 million and becoming the third lackluster opening in a row for Jennifer Lawrence. "Red Sparrow," starring Ms. Lawrence as a Russian intelligence operative who specializes in sexual manipulation, ran into stronger than expected competition from "Black Panther," which remained a huge No. 1 at North American theaters in its third weekend. "Black Panther" (Disney) collected about 65.7 million, for a new domestic total of 501.1 million; worldwide ticket sales now stand at roughly 900 million. But the R rated "Red Sparrow," which cost Fox at least 100 million to make and market, divided critics and received a lukewarm B grade from ticket buyers in CinemaScore exit polls. "Red Sparrow" had the hardest time attracting young adults; 79 percent of its audience was over the age of 25, according to Fox. Ms. Lawrence, one of Hollywood's most popular and highest paid actresses, was last seen in Darren Aronofsky's "Mother!" Released in the fall by Paramount, "Mother!" failed in wide release. Before that, Ms. Lawrence co starred with Chris Pratt in Sony's expensive "Passengers," which arrived to a wobbly 14.9 million in 2016. Sony ultimately pushed "Passengers" to about 100 million in domestic ticket sales. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
In the summer of 2006, as President George W. Bush was pressing to make permanent the tax cuts he had pushed through Congress in 2001 and 2003, the Treasury Department published a so called dynamic analysis that, the administration hoped, would prove the undoubted economic benefits of the extension. But its conclusions didn't draw much applause from the White House: In the long term, the Treasury's Office of Tax Analysis found, the tax cuts would expand the economy by all of 0.7 percent. It never specified what it meant by "long term," but on the assumption it means a couple of decades, the tax change would add 0.035 percent to annual economic growth over the period. Math and economics have changed little since that exercise. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin insists that the tax overhaul passed by Republicans in the Senate this month would increase annual economic growth by 0.7 percentage points over the next decade. But an analysis by Congress's nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation projected less stellar results: In the course of 10 years, the tax cuts would make gross domestic product 0.8 percent larger. This amounts to increasing growth by 0.08 percent per year. On Monday, the Penn Wharton Budget Model chimed in with similar estimates: Under standard economic assumptions, G.D.P. would be 0.5 percent to 1.0 percent larger by 2027 than if tax rates hadn't changed. Apparently economic analysis does not always carry the day. Hoping to push their latest round of tax cuts into law, Republicans in Congress decided to ignore the dynamic analysis they once praised and follow their gut and their preferences instead. Still, the evidence underscores a not insignificant weakness in the Republicans' longstanding economic platform: Tax cuts are not the secret sauce to power the American economy. They have, in fact, very little power to affect economic growth. However strenuously Republicans may argue that tax reform is about increasing economic efficiency, encouraging investment or promoting competitiveness, tax cuts are always primarily about redistribution. That's because the main effect of tax cuts is in changing how the fruits of economic growth are distributed. This means that for policymakers interested in improving the welfare of the American people, the first and most important item to consider is whose welfare is most worth improving. A decade ago or so, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center and the liberal leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that making the Bush tax cuts permanent rather than letting them expire in 2010 would increase the after tax income of people earning 1 million or more up to 7 percent, an order of magnitude more than it would increase the size of the economy in the long term. The bottom 80 percent of American families, by contrast, would actually be worse off because they would bear the brunt of paying for the cuts. Republicans' current efforts are just as skewed. The Joint Committee's analysis of an early version of the Senate Republican plan found that 10 years from now, millionaires would get a tax cut worth 8,500, on average. People earning 75,000 or less, by contrast, would experience a tax increase. Adding in the cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, education and other programs that Republicans are planning to cull to pay for the tax reductions, the cost to poor and middle income families would be even greater. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. And this presents an immediate ethical problem. Students of the history of economic thought learn early on that taking money from the poor and the middle class to give to the rich tends to reduce overall welfare for the simple reason that an extra dollar provides much more to those who have few of them than to those already rolling in money. Most conventional proposals to increase general welfare support redistributing in the other direction. Indeed, from Charles I. Jones and Peter J. Klenow at Stanford University to economists at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, most analysts agree that pumping up income growth is not automatically equivalent to increasing welfare. It depends on whose income grows. There are policies that might trim economic growth and still vastly improve living standards for most Americans. And there are others that might nudge growth ahead and still do more damage than good. This is particularly important to keep in mind when policies to increase growth are so hard to come by. Jason Furman, who headed President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers during his second term, notes that this is not limited to taxes. Whether it is changes in regulations or trade agreements, tax cuts or public investment, policy can't do much to bolster growth in a well developed economy like that of the United States. It mostly just changes how the economic pie is shared. "For mature economies with mature institutions, the difference in growth rates that results from different policies is considerably lower than one might suspect," he wrote. "The growth effects of tax changes are about an order of magnitude smaller than the distributional effects of tax changes." According to Mr. Furman's analysis, changes in tax policy since 1986 including the Bush tax cuts and increases in taxes in the Clinton and Obama administrations altogether raised the after tax income of the bottom 60 percent of Americans by more than 6.5 percent. Meanwhile, they reduced the income of the 1 percenters at the top by more than 12 percent. The American economy has not been doing great distributing the spoils of growth. Since 1993, the pretax income of the richest 1 percent of Americans has been growing at a steady clip of over 3 percent per year, according to data from Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics. For the bottom 99 percent, income growth has averaged only 0.6 percent per year. Of the world's seven richest large economies, the United States and Britain have experienced the highest growth in income per person since the mid 1990s. But the United States ranks second from the bottom in the income gains of the poorest fifth of households over the period. And it also fares poorly when it comes to incomes in the middle of the distribution. This lopsided distribution of riches imposes a question on Republicans perpetually pushing for tax cuts on corporations and high income Americans: What understanding of national welfare justifies the upward redistribution they are proposing? Using growth as a justification seems like a ruse. Mr. Furman's conclusion is, in the end, fairly dark. Politics won't be pretty in a world in which policy has little power to improve average living standards and must content itself with slicing and reslicing the economic pie. This is a world of near zero sum games, where somebody's gain means somebody else's loss. Politics, in this world, is defined by class warfare. And yet reading about Republicans' latest step in their long march to cut tax rates at the top of the distribution redistributing income from the bottom to the top I can only agree that that's the world we live in. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts houses the archives of dance titans like Merce Cunningham, Jerome Robbins and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Now it will also be a home to the history of hip hop dance. The library has acquired the archive of Michael Holman, a hip hop polymath who since the late 1970s has been a downtown dance impresario, filmmaker and journalist, as well as a musician and choreographer. This acquisition will become the library's first hip hop collection. "The library is making a statement," Mr. Holman said in an interview. "Ballet, modern dance, tap the library is placing hip hop culture on the same pedestals as other established dance movements." Much of Mr. Holman's archive is video: filmed underground performances by b boys and break dancers, with appearances by Jean Michel Basquiat and other artistic luminaries. Among the collection's highlights are projection reels from Mr. Holman's experimental films and drafts of his screenplay for the 1996 biopic "Basquiat." Oral history is captured on hours of audiotape recordings, and over 100 photographs provide crude glimpses of the hip hop scene. Mr. Holman even gave the library an old Macintosh computer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The name Blue Note Records calls to mind a once regnant sound in jazz: the hard bop of the 1950s and '60s, with its springy four beat swing rhythm, its spare but lush horn harmonies, its flinty, percussive piano playing. Imagine a smoky room with a horn player blowing fiercely over a strolling standup bass, and you're hearing the Blue Note sound. Think of a modernist, cobalt hued album cover, with blocky title text and a photo of a studious young musician hunkered over an instrument, and you're envisioning the Blue Note look. It's been a long time since that fantasy was a reality for jazz or for Blue Note , which turns 80 this year. Since the 1960s, the label has been through numerous corporate mergers, partial shutdowns and creative readjustments, all while working to keep pace with shifts that have left jazz in a state of diffusion: Much of its forward motion is happening on the fringes, and there's hardly a mainstream sound to speak of. "Jazz" today encompasses an entire ocean of post collegiate musical work: highbrow traditionalism, renegade funk, droning free improvisations. Jazz musicians now have to be improvisers deeply trained in the American tradition, with roots in the blues. Beyond that, almost anything goes. Blue Note knows that history is its greatest asset. Each time the label hits a major anniversary, it takes a long look back, and repackages the past. This year, Blue Note has been rolling out vinyl reissues from its midcentury glory days; limited run canvas prints of old album covers; even a commemorative G Shock watch, with release party concerts in New York and Los Angeles. The label started as a passion project. Its first stewards, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, were German Jewish immigrants who had fled the Third Reich, and shared a devotion to jazz. Their early recordings came with a manifesto printed on the cover: Jazz, it said, "is expression and communication, a musical and social manifestation, and Blue Note records are concerned with identifying its impulse, not its sensational and commercial adornments." From the start, Lion and Wolff were concerned with finding the musicians on jazz's cutting edge, and letting them tell their stories. Before hard bop became Blue Note's stock in trade, their releases ranged from swing to Dixieland. In "Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes," a thoughtful documentary looking at Blue Note's first 80 years and its present day, Mr. Shorter recalls that Lion and Wolff were openly hostile to commercial imperatives, but aware of the music's real worth. "They were hearing this music not only as music," he says, "but as a valued treasure." By the mid 60s, Lion's deteriorating health led him and Wolff to sell the label to Liberty Records, which was quickly acquired by an insurance company. Jazz's popularity was on the wane, and under new supervision Blue Note's output took a turn toward airy funk records. Many have not aged particularly well, though some like Donald Byrd's "Black Byrd" and Bobbi Humphrey's "Blacks and Blues" caught the spirit of the times, and became hits. In the late 1970s, the higher ups at EMI which had acquired Liberty's catalog let Blue Note wind down. Mr. Cuscuna, the record producer, continued to reissue a handful of items from the back catalog, but for the better part of a decade, the label released no new albums. Finally, in the mid 80s, after coming under the aegis of Capitol Records, Blue Note was revived, and the executive Bruce Lundvall came in to run it. He brought a dedication to jazz, and to the original ideals set out by Lion and Wolff. He took seriously the Young Lions a group of fresh faced musicians intent on reviving that classic hard bop sound, among other parts of jazz's earlier history but he also invested in artists uninterested in traditionalism: kitchen sink conceptualists like Geri Allen, Greg Osby and Jason Moran. It's possible to hear multiple different histories of jazz in the 1990s, depending on which Blue Note records you pick up. The trumpeter Terence Blanchard, who joined Blue Note in the '90s and still records for the label today, straddled the divide. But he felt at home with Lundvall. He'd gotten pressure while on Columbia to make "concept records," which are easier to market, but at Blue Note, he said, "Bruce wanted me to be me." In a 2009 article in The New York Times, Lundvall said that he had begun to reimagine Blue Note's profile after that release, envisioning that albums in "the adult sophisticated pop area" could now help subsidize the label's investment in cutting edge jazz. After Ms. Jones broke, he signed Van Morrison, Al Green and others with broad baby boomer appeal. But it's possible to see Ms. Jones's album lazing in the breach between folk, jazz, country and soul as part of a tradition that already existed at Blue Note. The vocalist Cassandra Wilson had recorded a couple of boldly spartan, creatively devastating albums for Blue Note in the mid 1990s, when she was one of those anti conservatism dissenters. They directly inspired Ms. Jones. "To me, that was sort of like, 'Oh yeah, I can totally be on this label and still find myself in other genres,'" Ms. Jones said. "It was very inspirational." Ms. Jones, in turn, became an inspiration to Kandace Springs , a young vocalist and pianist who is currently preparing her third full length album for Blue Note. It will feature a duet with Ms. Jones, both women singing and accompanying each other on electric keyboard. But the label reinvests much of that revenue in promoting its new artists even when the returns tend to be modest. With jazz and experimental music catching a fresh gust of interest from young listeners, Blue Note sees an opportunity to put its cachet to work, and re establish itself as an influence on the music's future. If Mr. Lundvall found his meal ticket in the Starbucks set, Mr. Was is tilting toward a more youthful listenership. He appears to be thinking about the twin popularity of streaming and vinyl among consumers under 50. But he's also staying the course with older Blue Note fans: the seasoned straight ahead jazz listeners, and those boomers at the coffeehouse. Mr. Was's first signee for Blue Note was Gregory Porter, a baritone whose powerful gentility has made him one of the label's biggest sellers. A month after Mr. Was's arrival, Mr. Glasper released "Black Radio," the first full album with his electric band, the Experiment. It sold the equivalent of more than 300,000 albums, and won the Grammy in 2013 for best R B album. Mr. Was, for his part, said Blue Note intends to come along for the ride. "I think in the '60s there was a Blue Note sound, and you could put the needle down and you'd know that it was a Blue Note record before you even knew whose record it was," he said. "You can't do that today, mainly because artists are used to having a little bit more freedom. You can't tell them who's going to design their cover for them, you can't tell them who's going to mix their record, and you can't force them to conform to a company sound," he added. "So they're all different, and I'm proud of all of them, and they all add up to a total picture." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
It all began with a floating leg. Or, more specifically, an idea came tattooed on the leg of a woman kicking through the water in Key Largo, Fla., seen clear as day through Patrick Duffy's diving goggles. Mr. Duffy, who ran a scuba diving therapeutic program for military veterans with his father, was inspired by the tattoo; it was her dedication to her late husband, a Navy SEAL killed in combat. "In that moment, I thought, 'Wouldn't it be cool to turn that tattoo into a reliquary?'" Mr. Duffy said. "To put a piece of something she cared about, maybe even her husband, into the tattoo itself?" Four years, a handful of dedicated colleagues and nearly a dozen patents later, Mr. Duffy has brought the idea to life with Everence, a product he and his partners hope will deepen bonds in the most literal and physical way between family, friends and loved ones. It is about as biologically intimate as one can get. Everence is a powdery substance synthesized from a sample of DNA, something as simple as a few thousand cells from a swab of a person's inner cheek, or from cremated ashes. A small vial of Everence can be brought to a tattoo artist and added to any type of inks. The result: A tattoo imbued with the DNA of another human being or, if you prefer, a dog, cat or other furry friend. In so doing, Mr. Duffy and Endeavor Life Sciences, his company, join the ranks of a winding list of biohackers, artists and technologists dabbling in the world of biogenic tattoo artistry. Many have mixed ash, hair or other material with inks to include organics in tattooing for years. But that practice has long been left to underground artists, a subculture unto itself with a dark, self aware nickname: "morbid ink." So far this has been something of a symbolic gesture, as the organic material introduced into their inks would eventually be absorbed into a subject's body. Others write off the practice as part of the growing bodyhacking movement think "Neuromancer" meets "Miami Ink." Biohackers are often looked down on by scientists for their more relaxed, or more adventurous, approach to ethical questions in medicine. In recent years, the practice of has been reanimated, so to speak, by armchair enthusiasts. There is the D.I.Y. crowd, such as Skin46, who seek to raise money on Kickstarter for biogenic tattoo efforts based on hair samples. CGLabs, a Canadian outfit, is pioneering its own method, primarily marketed as DNA preservation (though not necessarily for the ink stained crowd). Everence takes a different approach. Customers are asked to mail their DNA samples to Endeavor's laboratory in Quonset, R.I., where the material is milled, sterilized and enclosed in microscopic capsules of PMMA you know it as plexiglass which is often used in medical applications like dentures, bone cement and cosmetic surgery. Thanks to its little envelope, instead of the DNA disappearing into the body, it is captured permanently in the ink of the tattoo. Mr. Duffy and his partners believe this creates an even more palpable, resonant bonding experience. The pitch is a curious, emotionally poignant one coming from Mr. Duffy, a gruff, plain spoken New Yorker with a background in real estate and a degree in political science. But after starting the nonprofit therapeutic scuba diving program for veterans with his father nearly a decade ago, Mr. Duffy, 40, said he was inspired to find new ways of connecting people while honoring those they may have lost. Mr. Duffy and Dr. Edith Mathiowitz, a professor at the Center for Biomedical Engineering at Brown University, have patented the technology. Dr. Mathiowitz's work has focused on what applications polymers like PMMA can have in the human body, and she previously worked on removable tattoo ink projects. Under the United States Food and Drug Administration, tattoo inks are viewed as cosmetics, a designation that Everence will also adopt. Historically, the agency has not regulated them, though it continues to warn consumers of the inherent risks of tattooing, including infection, allergic reactions or developing granulomas from foreign particles in the body. Mr. Duffy insists that he has done his homework on safety. And, in an interview, Dr. Mathiowitz noted that the company will follow the strict regulations around how cosmetics must be created, as outlined by the F.D.A. Mr. Duffy also found a partner in Virginia Elwood, a 37 year old tattoo artist in Brooklyn who was taken by the idea almost immediately after Mr. Duffy pitched it to her over email. Their meeting was a stroke of fate: Mr. Duffy's email was sent to her spam folder, and she opened it only because she thought he was the actor who played the father on the 1990s sitcom "Step by Step." "We're connected to so many things in this world right now, be it through social media or sticking photos in the cloud, and I find that personally to be a bit hollow sometimes," Ms. Elwood said. "So instead of taking something precious to me and uploading a picture of it to a server, I'm actually carrying it on my body, in my skin." Ms. Elwood, Mr. Duffy and their partner Boyd Renner have also managed to gain the support of dozens of top tattoo artists like Scott Sylvia, Valerie Vargas and Mike Rubendall, all of whom will promote Everence to their sizable followings. Signing up such marquee names of the tattoo world was no easy feat, considering the delicate nature of the subject matter. It won't be as fast or cheap as picking a piece of tattoo flash from the wall on a less than sober Friday night. Everence will sell for 650, which includes the kit, the process of creating the powder and eventual return to the client months later. That is, for now, the price for a permanent product that will become a part of the customer for the rest of her life. (Initially, Everence will take a limited amount of pre orders to gauge demand, and the company will offer payment plans for those who cannot afford to pay all at once.) The possibilities could extend beyond tattoos. Mr. Duffy sees a future in which paintings, textiles or other emotionally resonant items are imbued with Everence. For him, the point is to continue carrying that idea that came to him in the shape of a tattooed leg years ago. "It's not meant to deliver a drug, and it's not meant to augment the body," said Mr. Duffy, whose half sleeved arm contains Everence from his daughter, tattooed into a smattering of black birds in flight. "It's about the emotion." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. We're all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now. Some late night hosts are taking a break for the week, but Jimmy Kimmel and Trevor Noah were on the job Tuesday to mock President Trump's first rally since his Covid 19 diagnosis. Trump appeared maskless in Sanford, Fla., on Monday, telling the crowd he was feeling great. "The president claims to be off his Covid meds, but he seems to be on something, because last night, he was feeling little droplets of love in the air," Kimmel said. He was referring to Trump's remark that he wanted to walk into the audience and "kiss the guys and the beautiful women." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
RIO DE JANEIRO It is said that "Cariocas," people from Rio de Janeiro, like to think that the world comes to them, and that was certainly the case over the last several years as Brazil commanded the global stage like never before. Turim Family Office and Investment Management, a Brazilian wealth management firm led by Gustavo Marini, had a front row seat. The office is within walking distance to the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon, the site of the Olympic rowing events in August, and to some of the Rio Olympics' hobnobbing hospitality suites like Club France where the swimmer Ryan Lochte's infamous adventure began. Now all is quiet on the lagoon, and Latin America's largest economy remains mired in its worst recession in decades. So what can an investor in Brazil, the world's fourth largest democracy, do? Cariocas can often seem insular. That attitude is evident among the wealthy and business classes here, where old money predominates. When new Brazilian entrepreneurs start companies, they usually move to Sao Paulo rather than to here. Yet Turim and its founding partner, Mr. Marini, who is 57 and a Carioca, seek to chart a different course. He and his partners increasingly say they need to be proactive to diversify their portfolio better even if Brazil's economy eventually recovers and they are cautiously optimistic that it will. The firm's partners visited India in September, and they have traveled to Silicon Valley three times this year. Despite widespread concerns over "Brexit," they are keeping one partner, Nelson Isaac Abrahao Jr., in London to lead overseas investments. Turim, founded in 1999, had about 1.38 billion (4.50 billion Reais) in assets under management as of Dec. 31, 2015, according to an annual filing with Brazil's securities regulator, the C.V.M. Brazil's family offices, which manage assets for very rich families, hold immense wealth, but they have an aversion to risk that has long puzzled foreign institutional investors. During an interview at his firm, Mr. Marini said at least four times, "We are very conservative investors." Still, Turim is among the largest and most respected family offices. One private equity firm manager called it "the most sophisticated." Turim's bullishness on India, even though the country is a tiny part of its portfolio, is noteworthy. The business classes in India and Brazil still know very little about each other and do very little business together. But Turim is impressed with the economic management of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India. "He is doing a good job with economic reforms," said Mr. Marini, who visited the country with Mr. Abrahao. The firm made its first small investment there in public equities. Turim also plans to invest in the country's private equity market. Over all, India "is a huge opportunity," Mr. Marini said. In 2015, the firm made its maiden investment in Silicon Valley, in the NEA 15 fund run by the venture capital firm NEA. In London, Mr. Abrahao is monitoring the continuing fallout from the Brexit vote. He said that the business intelligence concentrated in London would most likely continue unabated, which would help the firm make decisions on investments in Asia from that office. "London will still be a gateway to Asia," Mr. Abrahao said. "We don't think any other city in Europe is equal." Turim invested overseas in its early days, but no more than about 30 percent of its total assets. That started to increase in 2011 as Brazil's economy showed signs of problems, and reached 60 percent by the second half of last year. The firm is not a stranger to global transactions. It invested in deals to acquire Heinz in 2013 and Kraft in 2015, led by the global investment firm 3G Capital, whose founders include the Cariocas Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Herrmann Telles and Carlos Alberto Sicupira. Until now, the firm has allocated much of its capital to Brazilian treasuries, which have payouts that are indexed to inflation plus interest rates. Brazil has long had some of the highest interest rates among emerging economies, giving family offices an easy way to make money. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
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