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Credit...Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times A few days before Los Angeles announced a shelter in place order in March, Colson Baker, who raps under the name Machine Gun Kelly, sat down on a sofa with an acoustic guitar. His tattoos peeked through a white tank top. Tousled blond hair poked out of a Cleveland Cavaliers cap. Mr. Baker had another surprise in store. Accompanied by a bandmate, he tore into a giddy instrumental cover of Paramore's "Misery Business," a song in which a teenage girl brags about the boy she stole. Then he uploaded the video to Instagram caption: LockdownSessions Day 1 where it ran up more than 1.2 million views. His music, however, is sometimes overshadowed by his tabloid antics, like the time he smoked a joint with Pete Davidson at the Golden Globes, as well as his string of famous girlfriends: both real (Amber Rose, Sommer Ray) and rumored (Halsey, Noah Cyrus). And his albums compete with a flourishing film career, including, most recently, Mr. Davidson's "The King of Staten Island." An unlikely fashion darling angel blond hair, bedroom eyed, 6'4" in socks he has modeled for John Varvatos and been dressed by Berluti and Balmain. But in lockdown, with film sets closed and a wardrobe devoted to dirtbag chic, attention has returned to his music. Well, his music and his much discussed possible relationship with the actress Megan Fox. In addition to the Paramore post, Mr. Baker has performed impromptu covers of Oasis, Rihanna and John Mayer. The songs a miscellany of pop, rap, oldies, newbies are about as hard core as a squeeze toy. His label has told him that these off the sweatshirt cuff posts have attracted more online engagement than any of his professionally shot and edited videos. Instead of calling him a fake, a softy, a poser the occupational hazards of white rappers, perhaps fans have responded with countless and emojis, and pleas to upload the songs onto Spotify. "I'm one who's been driven by a hunger for respect forever, since I was the only white boy in a rap cipher battling to make a name for myself," Mr. Baker said. "If that doesn't tell that super insecure person inside of me that like, 'Yo, just being yourself is good enough,' I don't know what else could." That split between Colson Baker, introspective stoner, and Machine Gun Kelly, rap devil, surfaced in early March, when Mr. Baker spent a few nights in New York City promoting "Big Time Adolescence," a movie starring Mr. Davidson, in which he has a supporting role. A few hours before a flight to Cleveland to see his 10 year old daughter's volleyball game, he detoured to La Biblioteca, an underground tequila bar near Grand Central Terminal, for a mezcal tasting. "I'm just high and in a vibe," he told the bartender. On the drive over, he had smoked a cannoli sized blunt. At the bar he sipped his way through five shots of mezcal, one of them seasoned with a scorpion. Then he ordered a beer. "Will they let you on the plane?" a publicist asked. Leaning back into a banquette with his feet on the table, his eyes went sleepy and his voice slurred. He talked about his forthcoming album, "Tickets to My Downfall," due out in July, which hurtles away from rap and toward pop punk, which he regarded as progress. "It took me 10 years to evolve into this sound," he said. He then talked about robots ("Dude, robots can't feel and feeling is all we have left") and dreams ("I don't have dreams when I sleep, but when I wake up all I do is dream"). He also discussed his career, which he saw as a breathless sprint from single to single, persona to persona, film to film. He said he found it hard to take pleasure in his success. "Is it everything I thought it'd be? It should be," he said. But it wasn't. He has realized that he does not want to be Machine Gun Kelly anymore, at least not everywhere or all the time. In 2016, the director Cameron Crowe encouraged him to use his birth name for "Roadies," a Showtime drama series in which he plays a roadie and occasional barista for touring rock band. And in the past year, he started asking friends to call him 'Colson.' "People were like, 'You have a name?' And even I was like, 'Yeah, weird, huh?,'" Mr. Baker said. About two hours later, in a chauffeured S.U.V. parked on a residential side street a few blocks from La Guardia Airport, with the windows rolled up and another blunt the size of a baby's arm in his hand, he wondered how long he could keep up with late nights and the hard partying, the driving too fast, the living like he wants to die. "I'll just be like controlled at 8 p.m. and then I'm out till 8 in the morning what did I just do?" he said, with an added expletive. The adults around him are also concerned. "You just want him to not fall off one of the many ledges he dances on the edge of, daily," Mr. Crowe said. Jason Orley who directed "Big Time Adolescence" put it this way: "Anybody that can access a dark side so easily, that's just who they are. You have to worry about it." Mr. Baker worried, too. "When you're young, you still have the energy to go through all that stuff," he said, as he took another epic inhale. "Then when you're grown, you get to a point where you're like I'm over it. I want to learn how to make roast for my family. And I want to not worry about getting in a bar fight tonight." Mr. Baker, the child of missionaries, had an itinerant boyhood: Texas, Kenya, Egypt. After his mother left the family, he and his father settled first in Denver and then in Cleveland. At 11 scrawny, bullied Mr. Baker discovered rap and he worked at his beats and bars throughout his teens. "I was just always roaming, the hallways, rapping for everybody," he said. He would tell his friends that he would one day appear on the biggest stages, that other people would sing his lyrics. "They were like, 'Dude, shut up. We're in math class. In Cleveland," he said. Working at an airbrush T shirt shop at the mall, he emceed for anyone who would listen and released a series of brash, breathless mix tapes that drew a local following. At 19, he fathered his daughter, Casie, with his then girlfriend Emma Cannon. In 2011, after a performance at the SXSW festival, Sean Combs approached him and signed him to the Bad Boy Records imprint. The next year, he released his major label debut album, "Lace Up," with its cocksure single, "Wild Boy.". "He can make that real hard core dirty trap or an emo rap song that will make you cry," Mr. Combs said. "He's somebody that could possibly have EGOT by his name one day. That's how versatile he really is." Before Mr. Baker released his second album, "General Admission," in 2015, he made his acting debut in "Beyond the Lights," playing a rapper named Kid Culprit who humiliates his pop star girlfriend. "I was always the one who had a camera wherever I went," he said. "So I guess I always wanted something to do with film." Is Mr. Baker dating Ms. Fox, who electrocutes him in "Bloody Valentine," the first video from his next album. (They met while filming the upcoming crime thriller, "Midnight in the Switchgrass," and she has reportedly left her husband, Brian Austin Green.) He wouldn't say. But paparazzi photos and Twitter posts certainly suggest an intimate relationship. In recent weeks, he has been vocal in his support for Black Lives Matter, holding up a "Silence Is Betrayal" sign at a Los Angeles protest, which he posted on Instagram; telling racist fans "I don't want your business"; covering Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name," a protest song about police brutality. So is this the older, and mellower Machine Gun Kelly a man who involves himself in politics, who apologizes to his neighbor with premium champagne? Not quite. While he clowns and inhales his own smoke rings for the camera, his father, with whom he recently reconciled, has been in the hospital in Denver. (The illness isn't Covid 19 related.) "It sucks because I really just want to just scream and cry and sit in my room and just wait for someone to come tell me it's going to be all good," he said. But it's his job, he said, to suck it up and show the good. So instead of screaming, he sits on the floor, one knee, tattooed with a marijuana leaf peeking out from torn sweatpants, and plays electric guitar to Avril Lavigne's star crossed teen anthem "Sk8ter Boi," headbanging as he slides up and down the frets. "He's so stoked that I'm playing guitar now. He called me the other day and told me that he's really starting to enjoy my music," Mr. Baker said. "And he's super proud of me." A couple of weeks ago, he posted a new video, a compilation of fans making their own LockdownSessions out of "Bloody Valentine," using his lyrics as a soundtrack for their own passions and confusions in lockdown. "I'm trying to give people an outlet to smile during such dark times," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Adjusting the acoustics of modern automobiles is not only about comfort or pizazz. There are safety considerations, too. Advanced driver assistance features like lane departure warnings, automated braking systems and vehicle or pedestrian proximity alerts generate their own bells and chimes. But such sonic alerts can create dangerous distractions, leaving drivers unable to determine which sounds are critical. "We spend a lot of time tuning those beeps and pings and assessing the quality of the chimes," said Alan Norton, senior technical leader for audio quality at Ford Motor. Electric vehicles, with their virtually silent motors, present a separate set of challenges. Especially at low speeds, an electric vehicle provides no audible sounds that might alert pedestrians, cyclists or other drivers to the car's presence. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Republicans and Democrats disagree about many foreign policy issues, but not about the perception that the United States risks losing out to China. For the Republicans, China is an existential threat, and President Trump warned recently, about the former vice president, "China would own our country if Joe Biden got elected." For the Democrats, China is a challenge, but manageable. Still, Mr. Biden has pledged that as far as pandemic preparedness goes, America "will never again be at the mercy of China and other foreign countries in order to protect our own people." Even if this tough talk is mostly campaign trail rhetoric, the next president of the United States should beware of casting America's China policy in nationalistic terms. Over the long run, Beijing's brand of hyper nationalism is likely to undermine the Chinese Communist Party's bid for world leadership; that posture worries too many governments. In the short term, though, it is an effective rallying cry within China, and Washington must be careful not to inflame the sentiment which could compel Beijing to further harden its positions. Nationalistic U.S. policies also complicate America's efforts to mobilize its partners to push back together against China, and they risk alienating individuals of Chinese heritage who contribute to the dynamism of the American economy. In short: The U.S. government should not try to out China China. Beijing has tried to turn the coronavirus pandemic into a public relations opportunity. Deflecting criticism about its early handling of the outbreak in Wuhan, it has boasted about its response at home and its exports of personal protective equipment, while criticizing the performance of Western countries. In one survey from April of nearly 20,000 people across China, 81 percent of respondents said they were satisfied with the national government's "information dissemination" during the pandemic. Some 89 percent said they were satisfied with its provision of "daily necessities and protection materials." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
After the release of a tantalizingly brief teaser earlier this year, the streamer has put out the film's first official trailer, which subtly showcases the "de aging" technology used to make the actors look younger for scenes set in the earlier years of the story. De Niro plays the World War II veteran and hitman Frank "The Irishman" Sheehan, with Pacino as the union leader Hoffa, and Pesci as Russell Bufalino, a Pennsylvania crime family boss. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
This three bedroom house is perched on a hill in Pantogia, a bucolic residential area on the northeastern coast of the Italian island of Sardinia overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. Built in the early 1900s as a farmhouse, called a stazzu, the home was restored and expanded in the 1970s into a 1,399 square foot, cottage style villa by the prominent French architect Savin Couelle, said Julia Bracco, head of sales for the Costa Smeralda area at Immobilsarda, which has the listing. Set on a third of an acre delimited by a traditional rock wall, the property includes a swimming pool, a flower garden, and olive and juniper trees. The original stazzu is now the first floor master bedroom, which has field rock walls, terra cotta floors and a traditional ceiling of bamboo cane and juniper beams, Ms. Bracco said. The remainder of the two story villa, made of rock, wood, wire and plaster, was designed by Mr. Couelle in his distinctive style, which reflects the Costa Smeralda area as well as the history of the property, she said. The home's furniture is included in the price. A stone pathway from the two car parking area winds through a garden and leads to a door opening to the kitchen, which has walls of stone and plaster, along with barrel vaulted ceilings with juniper beams, all painted white. The floors are marble, as is the backsplash, and the sink and counters are made from a solid slab of granite. One side of the kitchen has a built in shelving structure with a floor to ceiling glass window behind it. All the doors, shutters and built in cabinets were designed by Mr. Couelle, who filled the home with his hallmark "niches," Ms. Bracco said, such as a curved wall bench in the kitchen that wraps around a wood dining table. The living room has a wood burning fireplace that was the stazzu's original bread oven, Ms. Bracco said. A door opens to a tree shaded patio and pathway to the swimming pool. Beyond the living room is a hallway leading to the master suite, whose bathroom has marble walls and floors. The granite staircase ascends to a second floor hallway, with a reading nook on one end and a door to a terrace with sea views on the other. An external bougainvillea draped staircase descends from the terrace to a patio near the kitchen entrance. A bedroom on the second floor has a rare traditional cork ceiling, Ms. Bracco said, along with a hexagonal window and built in wardrobe. The en suite bathroom is inside a cubby within the bedroom another signature of Mr. Couelle, she said. Pantogia is about a mile from the upscale resort community of Porto Cervo, the closest area for shopping and entertainment. With about 400 residents, Porto Cervo is the epicenter of the Costa Smeralda, or Emerald Coast, a 35 mile long region offering sandy beaches, golf clubs, expensive hotels, marinas and other luxury services. This home is close to several beaches, recreational activities, and ancient ruins such as tombs and Bronze Age stone structures called nuraghi that can date back some 3,000 years. Olbia, a city of about 60,000 residents 20 miles to the south, has the closest international airport and a seaport with ferry service to mainland Italy. The Sardinian capital of Cagliari is 190 miles south. The housing market on Sardinia the second largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, behind Sicily has reflected the global market over the past four years, with home prices rising, though certain markets are stronger than others, said John Bracco, a co owner of the local brokerage Waterfrontaly, and Julia Bracco's brother. "The most appealing areas are the ones that offer exclusivity, high level services and uniqueness in terms of scarce availability," Mr. Bracco said. "Sardinia, with its strict environmental laws, has shown a great strength, as no new buildings are allowed on the coast since 1975." The 35 mile Costa Smeralda is the most prestigious area on the island, and by some measures, the most expensive in Europe. The dearth of available properties has kept prices high, though in recent years that has begun to thaw, brokers said. Foreign home buyers most often seek residences on the coast and within an hour's drive of Olbia's airport, John Bracco said. In the past decade, though, buyers have increasingly looked inland in the Gallura region of northern Sardinia, brokers said. "The characteristic home of this area is the stazzu Gallurese a rectangular house with thick walls, made of blocks of granite and traditionally on a single floor, cool in summer and warm in winter," said Melania Borrielli, the owner of ResRei Real Estate Sardinia. Further inland, regulations limiting plot size keep the density of new homes low another check on development, brokers said. Home buyers are also beginning to explore less expensive areas in southern Sardinia, Ms. Borrielli said. "Chia and Santa Margherita, and the area of the Sarrabus, which includes Villasimius and Costa Rey, are destinations where the number of sales is constantly increasing," she said. There is a wide range of home prices on Sardinia, where seaside homes on the Costa Smeralda can stretch into the tens of millions of euros, said Daniela Ciboddo, a partner with Engel Volkers in the Costa Smeralda area. A stazzu, typically less expensive than a newer home, could sell for as little as 600,000 euros (about 670,000) or as much as 3 million euros ( 3.35 million), depending on location, plot size and sea views, she said. Prices for seaside homes outside Costa Smeralda range from 2 million euros ( 2.23 million) to 10 million euros ( 11.2 million), Ms. Ciboddo said. Banks are currently offering mortgages to foreign clients at 50 percent loan to value with a fixed rate of 1.7 percent, Ms. Ciboddo said. Annual taxes for this property are about 3,000 euros ( 3,300), plus an annual fee to the Costa Smeralda Consortium of about 2,500 euros ( 2,800). For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
A local family that invests in real estate has bought this 9,475 square foot five story walk up, with 5,525 square feet in air rights, in Chinatown. The comedian, singer and dancer Eddie Cantor once lived in the building, which now has 18 one bedroom apartments 16 rent stabilized and two rent controlled as well as two vacant retail spaces, a Chinese temple and an office. 164 20th Street (between Fourth Avenue and the Gowanus Expressway) A fitness center, expected to open in December, has signed a five year lease for a 3,000 square foot ground floor space in this four story 2005 commercial building. The tenant received three months rent free for its build out. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
For years, scientists have disagreed about which species of baleen whale came first, and how the toothless species were related. Body structure suggested one set of relationships; molecular data suggested another. Now, researchers in Germany and Sweden have sequenced the DNA of six of the living species, of which there are at least 10. The relationships are so complicated, however, that the senior researcher Axel Janke said "family tree" is too simple a metaphor. Instead, the species, all part of a group called rorquals, have evolved more into a network, sharing large segments of DNA with even distant cousins. Scientists expressed surprise that there had been so much intermingling of baleen whales, given the variety of sizes and shapes. Humpback and sei whales are relatively similar in size, for instance both usually measuring longer than a school bus. But the blue whale, which is the largest animal to ever live and would dwarf an 18 wheeler, is a close relation to the sei, and relatively distant from the humpback, according to the study, published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. The North Atlantic right whales and bowhead whales split from the other baleens about 28 million years ago; among the rorquals, minke whales seem to have begun diverging more than 10 million years ago; and the blue and sei whales split from the remaining around five million years ago, the study found. The study of rorqual evolution also defies simple Darwinian theories. Darwin explained that many species evolved when they became isolated from others of their kind, accumulating genetic differences and adapting to a new environment. But whales roam the entire ocean, where there are no geographic barriers that would isolate them. Instead, Dr. Janke said, at least some of the whale speciation has been driven by personal taste. Baleen whales developed sophisticated systems to open their jaws wide enough to suck in almost their own body weight worth of water, along with the tiny creatures swimming or floating in it. Gray whales are part of the same family, but preferred to eat krill and other organisms, slurping them up as they swam along which possibly led them to become their own species. "Whales can tell us new stories of how species can evolve into different forms," said Dr. Janke, also a professor of evolutionary biology at Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, and Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The idea that species can intermingle is new, even to scientists, said Scott Edwards, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, who was not involved in the new study. "Ten years ago, most evolutionary biologists would have assumed that a species is a species, especially when they look phenotypically distinct," Dr. Edwards said. Recent research has shown that humans, too, are the product of species intermingling. There are varying levels of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA across the human population. Dr. Janke said he was also struck by the wide range of genetic diversity he saw within whale species. Genetic diversity helps animals survive change. "The whaling moratorium, where they stopped whaling in 1978, came just in time to prevent this biodiversity from being genetically more monotonous," he said. "If that had been the case, it would have been difficult to envision how the species could survive." The DNA samples in the study were taken mainly from biopsies collected with remote darting; the gray whale samples came from Alaska, where the Museum of Fairbanks secured samples from deceased animals, Dr. Janke said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
In dance after dance, the 19th century Danish choreographer August Bournonville took innocent joy as his subject and made it intoxicating. His ballets also contain despair, jealousy and satire, but he confined those things to acting. He expressed delight by means of dances, made especially in terms of pure classical ballet. This week, principals and soloists of the Royal Danish Ballet perform six of those dance sequences at the Joyce Theater. The rush of happiness that keeps flooding the theater is so pure that it may well bring tears to the eyes; it did to mine, more than once Tuesday, the opening night. The skill and charm with which these performers put across this choreography is glorious to behold. For decades, this company has spent the majority of its seasons performing choreography miles away from Bournonville in style and temperament. Since at least the 1970s, there have been fears that the old style has been lost. These anxieties have been loudly voiced of late: Nikolaj Hubbe, the company's director since 2008, has radically restaged three Bournonville classics in ways upsetting to traditionalists. Yet there is powerful evidence at the Joyce that the Danes have maintained their loving connection to the old master's work. Not just that: It seems that Mr. Hubbe and his colleagues have actually been refreshing, rather than eroding, Bournonville's dance heart. Most of these dancers are remarkably young. Not only do they exemplify the modest good manners that are so touching an element of this idiom, but they also show high technical command. A hallmark of bygone Bournonville style (seldom found elsewhere) was the male dancers' equal ease in delivering double air turns to both right and left. In recent years, few Danish men showed mastery of this feat. Yet watch these dancers at the Joyce! Several perform it with blithe naturalness. The fascination of Bournonville's choreography lies in the way he showed euphoria to be a condition worthy of endless variations. His dancers calmly execute long, rapid, complex phrases of tricky steps and then devote equal attention to fitting a single step, much simpler and slower, lovingly to the next phrase of music. Jumps abound: jumps in which the dancer takes off from both feet to land on one, or takes off from one foot and arrives on both. In others, both feet crisscross in the air, or one raised foot quivers as it writes rings. Bournonville's phraseology is breathtakingly complex and modern. Often a phrase ends surprisingly, not with a closure but with an opening: The dancer's punch line is to extend one leg sideways into the air. Contrasts abound. As soon as a woman has bounded forward along a diagonal, she sweetly brushes a foot in a half circle backward, and then she does both steps again. Almost never does a woman hold a static balance on point; having arrived on that toe, she then adjusts the rest of her body further up into the air or toys with the momentary fun of imbalance. The thought within the dance stays in perpetual motion. The six dances here span from 1836 to 1876. There is no scenery; and music, alas, is taped. The recordings used are all on the fast side. But in an era when tempos tend to be slowed down to suit the higher extensions of today's dancers, even this is welcome; and the dancers respond to the accompaniment with keenly revealing attentiveness. The scene from Act II of "La Sylphide" (1836) is the sole sequence in which we move from dance to mime and from delight to tragedy. We're given not just the climax of the dances for the sylph heroine and James, the Scottish farmer who has followed her into her glade; we then meet Madge, the witch who is James's vengeful nemesis and who ruins his hopes. Sorella Englund, the great Madge of the last 35 years, brings her own thrillingly sharp vehemence to the role once more. As the Sylph, Gudrun Bojesen was a perfect embodiment of tantalizing grace; Ulrik Birkkjaer played James with marvelous directness. Like Ms. Englund, they told the story as if for the first time, without fuss or mannerism. The same touching simplicity occurs throughout, not least in the classic pas de deux from "Flower Festival in Genzano" (1858). In this, Ida Praetorius and Andreas Kaas captured the lovelorn naivete of youth: the moment when lovers' eyes meet and are locked, the enchanting give and take dance felicities that follow, the decorous ebullience of the heart. These two are among this troupe's youngest stars, and especially winning; Mr. Kaas's courtesy and prowess, Ms. Praetorius's ingenuous tenderness, all radiantly renewed one of Bournonville's best known items. The pas de deux contains one of his most modern inventions: The man places his hands on the woman's waist, but it is she who turns him he keeps one leg raised while she, circuiting him on point, makes him rotate. From Bournonville's final ballet, "From Siberia to Moscow" (1876), comes Jockey Dance, a comic piece in which the racing competitiveness of two English jockeys (on Tuesday, Sebastian Haynes and Marcin Kupinski) is infectiously caught. The program opens with the exuberant gypsy pas de sept from the final act of Bournonville's most touching and imaginative work, "A Folk Tale" (1854). The pas de trois from "Conservatoire" (1849), in which Bournonville revisited the ballet classroom he had known in Paris in the 1820s, demands feats of breathtaking control. Finally, there is the best loved suite of dances in all Bournonville, the pas de six and tarantella from Act III of "Napoli" (1842), in which community, camaraderie, fun and love all meet in an unmatched dance cornucopia. I watched these dances Tuesday as if for the first time: these dancers create worlds that are forever young. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
There are so many ways a supermarket tabloid could trumpet this. "HILLARY'S NIGHTMARE! FORMER SVENGALI TO REVEAL HER DARKEST SECRETS!" "FLY ON CLINTONS' WALL BECOMES FLY IN CLINTONS' OINTMENT!" Any of those headlines would befit The National Enquirer's hiring of Dick Morris, a tabloid worthy twist if ever there was one. For one thing, Mr. Morris, a political strategist and commentator, was for the Clintons before he was against them. The man who began working for Bill Clinton in 1978, during his first run for governor of Arkansas, ended up eclipsing his boss's sex scandals with one of his own. On the last day of the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Mr. Morris resigned as chief campaign strategist for President Clinton's re election bid because The Star, the sister publication of The National Enquirer, revealed Mr. Morris's affair with a prostitute who claimed he had a penchant for sucking her toes. The National Enquirer followed that bombshell with news of another mistress and a love child in Texas. When he quit the Clinton campaign, Mr. Morris issued a statement: "I will not subject my wife, family or friends to the sadistic vitriol of yellow journalism. I will not dignify such journalism with a reply or an answer. I never will." Now he is the chief political commentator and correspondent for The National Enquirer. Mr. Morris said he didn't bear ill will against either of the scandal sheets that brought him down. "Listen, the story was accurate," he said quietly. "It changed my life completely, and it made my marriage much stronger." In a zigzag career, Mr. Morris has had many highs and lows and reboots. In recent years, he has had many foreign clients, including the nationalist Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary; in 2002 and 2004, he did media strategy in Britain for the party of Nigel Farage, a cheerleader for the so called Brexit. Mr. Morris has made a living denouncing Bill and Hillary Clinton in books, columns, blogs and television appearances. In a video on his website, Mr. Morris argues that Mrs. Clinton's email scandal still has legs, saying "Indict Hillary for lying to Congress!" Mr. Morris has been astute about many elections, but he was famously wrong about Mitt Romney on Fox News. After he predicted on the eve of the 2012 election a landslide victory for the former governor of Massachusetts, Fox did not renew his contract. At the moment, The National Enquirer provides Mr. Morris with a more welcoming perch. "Not only is Dick our first political columnist, but he is the only one we could have turned to for such a role," Dylan Howard, the editor of The National Enquirer, said in an email. "He knows where the bodies are buried." The headline to Mr. Morris's June 27 column read, "HOW CROOKED FIRST LADY ESCAPED JUSTICE!" The next week, in a column entitled, "Hill Bill, THE WORST SHAM MARRIAGE EVER!," Mr. Morris reported that in 2012, "they were together less than one quarter of the time!" David Pecker, the head of American Media, which owns The Star and The National Enquirer, is a friend and supporter of Mr. Trump, so perhaps not so shockingly a recent Enquirer headline screamed: "JOHN F. KENNEDY'S SECRET SON ENDORSES DONALD TRUMP!" The National Enquirer may seem an unlikely workplace for a globe trotting consultant who lives in a wealthy suburb outside Manhattan, went to Columbia University (class of '67) and speaks French. But Mr. Morris said the tabloid is a great platform to reach the masses. "I love it: I believe politics is increasingly not left versus right, but insider versus outsider," he said. "The Enquirer gives me a marvelous opportunity to speak to that newly emerging force." Mr. Morris, who was an insider before he was an outsider, said he didn't know that the newsstand price is 5, admitting he has never bought The National Enquirer, but saying he reads it online. Compared with the tabloid's news reports, Mr. Morris's column seems almost tame. While he writes about Mrs. Clinton's hiring detectives to dig up dirt on her husband's affairs, an adjacent "news" article suggests that she may have hired a hit man to have another woman killed. That is one conspiracy that even Mr. Morris doesn't subscribe to. "I don't know anything about that," he said. Mr. Morris and his wife, Eileen McGann, had been married almost 20 years when his scandal broke. Ms. McGann, a lawyer, stood by him in the immediate aftermath and even posed at his side for a damage control Time cover story. A few months later, Ms. McGann announced that she would seek a divorce; instead, the couple reconciled and began a long collaboration on articles, blogs and books. "We are constantly talking about politics," Mr. Morris said. "As we talk back and forth, it's like attaching a hose to a spigot that's flowing anyway." Many of their books have apocalyptic titles: "Outrage," "Catastrophe" and "Here Come the Black Helicopters!" They have also written three children's books about their late dog, Dubs, a patriot who takes on enemies like Fido Castro and Vladimir Poodle. Mr. Morris takes pride in what he says is an insider's view of the Clinton marriage, which he analyzes with Gail Sheehy like intimacy. He calls Mrs. Clinton an "enabler," likening the former first lady to battered women who stay in abusive marriages. "They put up with the abuse because of the rewards they get when it is over," Mr. Morris said. "Hillary always wanted more of Bill's time and attention; by putting up with his behavior, she got more of his attention than she would normally get and more power than she would normally get." Some psychologists may quibble with his description of why women put up with domestic abuse; others may wonder if projection plays a role in the couple's hostility to the Clinton marriage. Ms. McGann, after all, forgave her husband's trespasses and is now constantly at his side. She declined to discuss the decades old scandal, dismissing any parallel between the Clintons' marriage and her own. She noted that she didn't deal with the scandal "by lying about it and attacking the women." And it's the cover up as much as the crime that seems to goad Mr. Morris and his wife. Their books and articles focus on the Clintons' denials, deceit and what they see as their behind the scenes efforts to discredit the women who said they had sexual relationships with Mr. Clinton. David Brock, formerly a conservative journalist, is the bizarro version of Mr. Morris he wrote an unflattering biography of Mrs. Clinton, later recanted, and now runs a PAC that counters attacks on Mrs. Clinton. He said Mr. Morris's firsthand observations are far from credible. "His experience is 20 years out of date," Mr. Brock said. "Whatever he knew, he mortgaged long ago." There are conservatives who are just as dismissive. "I think mostly people think he's a charlatan and self promoter (though an intelligent one)," is how William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, described Mr. Morris in an email. "Perfect for the age of Trump!" There are plenty of former colleagues, especially overseas, who speak highly of Mr. Morris. Fredo Arias King, a campaign aide to former President Vicente Fox of Mexico, recalled that Mr. Morris was brought into Mr. Fox's 2000 presidential campaign in secret, so as to not rile nationalist pride, and masterminded a victory. Mr. Arias King remains friendly with Mr. Morris but was taken aback when informed of Mr. Morris's new job. "The Enquirer? You mean the one with the aliens?" he said, startled. "Well, we don't know what Dick is thinking," Mr. Arias King said. "This could be marketing brilliance." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
" Porto ," which was presented at the Bushwick Starr as part of the 2017 Exponential Festival, reopens at the WP Theater (in a coproduction with the Bushwick Starr and New Georges), 2162 Broadway, Manhattan; 866 811 4111. Here is the original review which appeared in The New York Times on Jan. 16, 2017. The Edison lights are a tipoff, glowing amber above the L shaped, dark wood bar. Also the foie gras sausage on the menu, and the snacks for nibbling: fried chickpeas, jerky popcorn. And no, that is not jerky as in beef. This neighborhood spot, in gentrifying Brooklyn, is "a boushy bar," the unseen narrator tells us in Kate Benson's stealthily ferocious, comfortingly hopeful, very funny new play, " Porto ." The term "boushy" is a portmanteau, related to "bougie." Its ridiculous pretensions notwithstanding, the place is a kind of refuge for Porto (Julia Sirna Frest), who would really like to be leading a healthier life in a slimmer body: less indulgence, more moderation. But the warmly lit bar promises company and conversation. And the main voice in Porto's head a.k.a. the narrator (Ms. Benson), who wields a godlike influence makes a compelling argument involving the actress Lillie Langtry, who, in the early 1900s, sued Keens Steakhouse to force it to admit women. "So really," the narrator says. "You sitting alone at the bar: A feminist act. Do it." Porto does. The play, too, is a feminist act, placing a Hermione type a bookish, whip smart woman at its center and forcing her to do something about her own loneliness. Fearful, guarded, dogged by self doubt, Porto is intensely weary of being alone but certain she is doomed by her appearance never to get the hot guy. In her head, a Chorus of Dumb Bunnies human size, in furry rabbit suits berates her about the things she needs to change if she wants to catch a man. The insistent voices of feminist intellectuals are in there, too, urging her not to be such a soft touch. This production reunites Ms. Benson and the director Lee Sunday Evans, who won a joint Obie in 2015 for "A Beautiful Day in November on the Banks of the Greatest of the Great Lakes," at New Georges. " Porto " is a quieter play, less attention grabbing and not as seamlessly staged. A delicate mechanism, it hasn't fully found its rhythm off the page, despite a largely excellent cast led by the wonderful Ms. Sirna Frest. Here, in this unnamed bar, the customers are known by their tipples, the staff by their jobs. The new guy, a bearded beer drinker with an awkward sexiness about him, is Hennepin (Jorge Cordova), who lets Doug the Bartender (Noel Joseph Allain) bully him out of ordering anything lame. When Porto's pretty, not so bright friend Dry Sac (Leah Karpel) comes in, already drunk, Hennepin is semi smitten. But then there is Raphael the Waiter (Ugo Chukwu), a soulful sort with a weakness for the Hermiones of the world and a wistful fantasy of opening a bar that sells books. Remember the monologue from "Bull Durham," the romantic one that Kevin Costner uses to melt Susan Sarandon's every last defense? Ms. Benson gives Raphael a speech like that an ode to what he calls "the serious ones," the women "who carry two books to work in case they finish one on the train" and it is a glorious thing. There is plenty of longing to go around in " Porto ," which begins with instructions for (this is Brooklyn, after all) making your own sausage. The path to pleasure in sausage, as in life, can be brutal, messy and seriously disgusting. A little precious, too. Yet the play is ultimately an exhortation to get out of your head and live, in thoughtful pursuit of joy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Since the time of the ancient Greeks, people have wanted to smell like the ocean. Archaeologists have found archaic perfume vessels from around 550 B.C. that are shaped like the mythological sirens of the sea, the idea being that fragrance could be so alluring it might cause a shipwreck. The modern zeal for aquatic scents began in the 1980s, when a briny Neptunian aroma chemical called calone became popular at fragrance houses. By the '90s, minimalist seaweed smells were all the rage: CK1, Acqua di Gio and L'Eau d'Issey were among the most popular scents of the decade, all with shimmering nautical notes: sea grass, cold melon, pulverized oyster shells. Suddenly everybody wanted to smell as if they had just emerged from a kelp forest, bathed clean by the waters. The trend even made its way into an 1992 episode of "Seinfeld" in which Kramer comes up with one of his signature big ideas. He tells Jerry he wants to "make a cologne that smells like the beach." Even Jerry admits that this isn't his worst scheme. Unfortunately, by the end of the episode Calvin Klein runs with Kramer's idea and makes millions. In 1996, the Italian house Profumum Roma introduced Acqua di Sale, a scent that gave one's skin the smell of having been immersed in saline. It became something of an instant classic, and you can catch breezes of it across Europe to this day; on a hot day in Rome, the scent of conch and hot sand fills cafes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
This flu season, many children who were expecting drops in their nostrils are going to get needles in their arms instead. That's because a federal health committee decided that nasal flu vaccine (the brand name is FluMist) should no longer be used because it has been less effective in protecting people the past couple of flu seasons. For the first time since FluMist was introduced 13 years ago, everyone is supposed to get the shot. On hearing this news, some children will shrug and roll up their sleeves. But others will burst into tears at the thought. Turns out, there's a lot of research on what makes immunizations less painful and what helps children handle them without too much distress. Parents can ask the pediatrician in advance for topical anesthetics that can be applied to the skin before the shot is given. And modifications in immunization technique can reduce the pain. For example, in the past, doctors and nurses were sometimes taught to add an extra step pull back on the syringe to make sure the needle hasn't inadvertently landed in a blood vessel; that's no longer recommended. If you do that, "you add a lot of time to the procedure, you wiggle the needle around and create more tissue trauma," said Dr. Anna Taddio, professor of pharmacy at the University of Toronto, and the first author on a 2015 set of Canadian clinical practice guidelines for reducing pain during vaccinations. Much has been written about psychological strategies that can help reduce the distress around immunizations even for young children. In a 2013 review of psychological interventions for "needle related procedural pain and distress," researchers found that there was strong evidence that distraction techniques work for children, including such simple strategies as reading stories or watching television. "The primary message is that the most proven technique is distraction," said Lindsey Cohen, a professor of clinical psychology at Georgia State University. "Simple things like breast feeding or sugar water for kids younger than 1 have been really shown to be pretty powerful in terms of reducing pain," said Mark Connelly, pediatric psychologist at Children's Mercy Kansas City and professor of pediatrics at University of Missouri Kansas City School of Medicine. For older children, he said, you want something that actively engages the child's attention, whether it's reading a book, spinning a pinwheel or blowing bubbles. "Something that changes what they're attending to is enough to change what the brain does, so the child doesn't feel it in the same way." There is also research, Dr. Cohen said, on how parental behaviors affect children's distress. There's some evidence suggesting that more extensive parental reassurance is actually correlated with more prolonged distress though that doesn't tell you whether more child distress prompts more parental reassurance, or whether more parental reassurance prolongs the distress. Parents should instead concentrate on helping with distraction. "Encourage children to deep breathe, count backward from 10," Dr. Cohen suggested. "More distraction, less reassurance." "A lot of parents spend a lot of time on, it won't hurt too much, it'll be O.K.," Dr. Connelly said. "That makes kids worry more." On the other hand, parents should help prepare children beforehand, so they know what's going to happen, and know that they have some strategies for coping. "Everybody's anxious when they don't know what is going to happen to them," Dr. Taddio said. "The idea is to tell kids with words what's going to be involved in the procedure a pinch, pressure on your arm, then it goes away this bothers some kids, doesn't bother other kids, we're going to try to find a way to help you so it doesn't bother you." And then, she said, parents can bring along the iPad or the iPod or whatever is most likely to distract. But it's also the clinic's job to build in distraction techniques, and to build in those other strategies for minimizing the pain of getting shots. "Immunizations are necessary, but the pain is not always necessary as a side effect," Dr. Connelly said. "Getting immunizations doesn't absolutely have to lead to a lot of distress and pain." It's kind of amazing to see, in the clinic, how children vary in their approach to needles. Even by the age of 5, there are kids who are proud to show you that it's no big deal, or interested to watch the needle go in and of course, there are kids who are terrified, crying so hard before they get the shot or the blood draw that it's hard to believe the actual needle makes any difference at all. Children who remember extreme distress will be much more frightened the next time around. "Do your best not to make it a big event," Dr. Taddio said You can trace the development of needle fear as children grow up; about a quarter of adults continue to fear needles, she said. Adults who dread needles can also request topical anesthesia to reduce pain, and those with serious needle phobia may find that cognitive behavioral therapy can offer useful strategies, so that they can help their children get that annual flu shot or come in for their own. And that, of course, is the whole point: making it easier to do the thing that keeps you safe, said Dr. Flor Munoz, an associate professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Baylor College of Medicine who is a member of the committee on infectious diseases at the American Academy of Pediatrics. "The goal of people who vaccinate is to protect their kid against the disease," Dr. Munoz said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Luciano Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland and Spiro Malas in Donizetti's "La Fille du Regiment" at the Royal Opera House in London in 1966. Mr. Malas, a bass, performed often with those two stars and found stardom himself in "The Most Happy Fella." Spiro Malas, a charming bass whose career in supporting roles at New York City Opera and the Metropolitan Opera blossomed, after decades, into an acclaimed Broadway star turn in "The Most Happy Fella," died on June 23 at his home in Manhattan. He was 86. His death was confirmed by his son Nicol. With a resonant voice and sly comic timing, Mr. Malas was an operatic company man, well regarded as the kind of piquant (and often nameless) innkeeper, police commissioner, mayor, landlord, tutor, sacristan or army officer who lends scenes color and moves plots forward. He was part of the landmark City Opera production and subsequent recording of Handel's "Julius Caesar" that cemented Beverly Sills's celebrity in 1966, and he toured with and recorded alongside Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti. But it was as the lovelorn Everyman grape farmer Tony Esposito in a 1992 Broadway revival of "The Most Happy Fella" the 1956 musical considered by many to be the composer Frank Loesser's masterpiece that Mr. Malas, who was nearly 60 at the time, was able to come fully into his own. "I really wanted to do it," he told The New York Times in 1992, "because this music has such heart. It's like the music that tenors get to sing all the time. Basses get that kind of music so rarely." "This music has such heart," Mr. Malas said of the role of Tony in "The Most Happy Fella." "It's like the music that tenors get to sing all the time. Basses get that kind of music so rarely." Spiro Samuel Malas was born on Jan. 28, 1933, in Baltimore, where his parents, Lillian and Samuel Malas, who had immigrated from Greece, owned Duffy's, a seafood restaurant and city fixture. When his mother died in 1999, Mr. Malas told The Baltimore Sun that she had never understood why he chose singing over Duffy's. "Come home and get a job in the restaurant and stop all this running around," he recalled her telling him. But, spurred by listening to the Met's radio broadcasts as a child, he decided that a career in music was what he wanted. He studied at Towson State College (now Towson University) in Maryland and the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, and he was a winner of the Met's National Council Auditions in 1960, the year he made his City Opera debut. While singing at Santa Fe Opera he met Marlena Kleinman, a mezzo soprano who later became a voice teacher. The Times reported that after they were married, at City Hall in Manhattan in 1963, they "promptly journeyed back to continue rehearsals" at City Opera, where he was singing in "La Boheme" and she was singing in "Rigoletto." In the midst of a busy schedule with that company, Mr. Malas was cast in a Boston Opera Group production of Bellini's "I Puritani" in 1964. The conductor was Richard Bonynge; the star was Joan Sutherland, Mr. Bonynge's wife. It was the beginning of a spirited collaboration with the two of them that brought Mr. Malas on a 1965 Australian tour, joined by Pavarotti, then a little known tenor. Three of their major recordings together Donizetti's "L'Elisir d'Amore" and "La Fille du Regiment" and Rossini's "Semiramide" are considered classics, with Mr. Malas particularly in his witty element as the quack doctor Dulcamara in "Elisir" and the roguish Sergeant Sulpice in "Fille." Mr. Malas sang Sulpice opposite Sutherland, conducted by Mr. Bonynge, for his Met debut in 1983. He went on to appear in more than 150 performances with that company. He had had some scattered credits over the years in musical theater, but it was nevertheless something of a swerve when the producers of "The Most Happy Fella" invited him to audition for a run at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut. Mr. Malas felt that the music, usually sung by baritones, lay too high. (In the end, a few of the songs were transposed down a third for him.) But he was a natural as Tony, the aging farmer who marries a much younger mail order bride. Frank Rich, in his review in The Times after the production transferred to Broadway, wrote that Mr. Malas "immediately wins us over, not with a fat man's musical comedy jolliness but with the plaintive hunger and deep humility in his sweet, timid hopes for happiness." The show ran for more than 200 performances; it lost the Tony Award for best revival to another Loesser show, "Guys and Dolls." (Mr. Malas admitted to being hurt by not even being nominated for best actor.) His time as Tony led to wider exposure. After the Goodspeed run of "The Most Happy Fella," he was offered a juicy part opposite Jack Nicholson in the movie "Hoffa," but filming would have conflicted with the Broadway opening. Mr. Malas did appear on television, on shows including "Law Order," "Sex and the City" and "Spenser: For Hire." He also taught at the Manhattan School of Music and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. In addition to his son Nicol, Mr. Malas is survived by his wife; another son, Alexis; his sister, Mary Aiello; and five grandchildren. Even after a bit of mainstream fame beckoned, Mr. Malas remained modest, especially about his art. His longtime touring recital program, in which he talked about and demystified opera as he sang it, was called "Spiro in Spirit Gum" a reference to the adhesive used for stage prosthetics. Asked by The Baltimore Sun about the reason for his success in "The Most Happy Fella," he answered simply: "Something about this character and what I have inside of me makes this work for people." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
ANN ARBOR, Mich. IN Japan, the automaker Mitsubishi Motors is mired in a heap of trouble. Last month, it acknowledged cheating for the last 25 years on gas mileage tests for cars in Japan, embarrassing top executives and tarnishing a name that has been dented by scandal before. Since then, its stock price has plunged, and it has had to halt production of the tiny models at the center of the scandal. But in the United States, it's a brighter picture. Although Mitsubishi is a bit player, it is increasing new car sales faster than most other automakers and is expanding its sliver of the American market. Helping the surge are a few affordably priced models that can appeal to consumers on tight budgets, a group other car companies often ignore. The company says the vehicles it sells in the United States like the Outlander sport utility vehicle and the Lancer compact are not affected by the fuel economy deception that took place in Japan. American customers and dealers seem unfazed. "I read about it; it doesn't change my mind a bit," said Timothy Harig, a retired factory worker in Canton, Ohio, who bought a metallic brown Outlander in October for about 24,000, a few thousand less than competing models from Honda and Nissan. "I track my gas mileage on every tank and I'm happy with what I have." There are others like Mr. Harig. In April, while the gas mileage scandal was making headlines in Japan, Mitsubishi's sales in the United States rose 18 percent. Its performance stands in contrast to that of Volkswagen, which has been mired in an emissions scandal of its own. Last month, Volkswagen sales fell 9 percent, continuing a steady decline since the disclosure in September. If anything, Mitsubishi's low profile has helped it weather the storm in the United States. "With Mitsubishi, it's a very small number of people who even possibly care" about its troubles at home, said Karl Brauer, an analyst with the auto research firm Kelley Blue Book. He added that Mitsubishi enjoyed the continuing support of its major shareholders, including the Mitsubishi Corporation, Japan's largest trading company with holdings in electronics, finance, machinery and chemicals. "They still think there's potential in the U.S. market and so they stick with it," Mr. Brauer said. Although it is growing in the United States, Mitsubishi still faces hurdles. The gas mileage controversy has caught the eye of American regulators, and the Environmental Protection Agency has asked the company to provide more information about its vehicles and to repeat one test that is used to determine a car's official fuel economy rating. Don Swearingen, chief operating officer of Mitsubishi Motors North America, said the company was complying and was confident there were no irregularities with the fuel economy ratings of its American models. He added that he had no concerns that the scandal in Japan could hamper Mitsubishi's push to grow in North America. "I think they are very committed," Mr. Swearingen said. "We add tremendous value to the company." Mitsubishi recently reported that its North American business generated 58 million in operating profit in 2015, the second annual profit in a row in the region after seven years of losses. Still, in the highly competitive American market, Mitsubishi struggles to measure up. Its brand is not a household name like Ford, Chevrolet, Honda or Toyota, and it trails in quality. Last year in J. D. Power's closely watched initial quality study, Mitsubishi ranked well below average. Automakers also increasingly push dealers in the United States to build megashowrooms offering coffee bars and other plush amenities. Mitsubishi showrooms are often small and spartan. Ann Arbor, Mich., for example, has a Mitsubishi dealership, but it is tucked behind Hyundai and Nissan franchises, and is overshadowed by Toyota, BMW and Chevrolet showrooms down the street. On Tuesday, the dimly lit Mitsubishi showroom was occupied by four Outlanders and no sales employees. Ryan Lester, the sales manager, acknowledged that selling Mitsubishis could be tough. "It is what it is," he said. Not so long ago, Mitsubishi's future in the United States was uncertain. In 2000, it admitted that it had covered up safety defects in its vehicles for years. Then, like other automakers, Mitsubishi was hit hard by the recession. In 2011, a devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan disrupted auto production for months. Lacking inventory, Mitsubishi saw its American sales slump in 2012 to fewer than 58,000 vehicles, half the number in 2007. The next year, another small Japanese automaker, Suzuki, exited the United States market, a move that followed Isuzu's departure in 2008. It seemed Mitsubishi could be next. To turn around its North American business, Mitsubishi trimmed its model line, ending production of one of its most popular cars, the Galant, and leaving itself without a midsize sedan. It also decided to close its lone American plant, in Normal, Ill. Production ended in November. At the same time, Mitsubishi redesigned the Outlander sport utility vehicle, just in time to catch the wave of consumers moving out of cars and into S.U.V.s. The company also added a small car, the Mirage, that could travel 40 miles or more on a gallon of gas. Both vehicles are aggressively priced. The Mirage, for example, starts under 15,000. In the last two months, Mitsubishi offered rebates of 3,500 that brought prices on 2015 Mirages down further, said Doug Waikem, owner of a Mitsubishi dealership in Massillon, Ohio. "I like the brand," he said. "It's not huge volume, but I can take someone who's looking at a used car and say, 'Hey, I can get you into something new for about the same price.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
"A Doll's House, Part 2," an ambitious and much admired sequel to the classic Ibsen play, will close on Broadway on Sept. 24. The closing is earlier than expected the play had been scheduled to run until Jan. 7. But the run will still have been longer than that of many contemporary nonmusical productions; at the time of the show's closing, it will have played 30 preview and 173 regular performances. The play, a witty drama, imagines what happens when Nora Helmer, who walked out on her husband and children at the end of Ibsen's 19th century play, returns for a visit 15 years later. "A Doll's House, Part 2" is the Broadway debut for its playwright, Lucas Hnath, whose earlier work, "The Christians," is being widely staged around the country. Directed by Sam Gold, "A Doll's House, Part 2" was nominated for eight Tony awards, and won one, for the actress Laurie Metcalf. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
"I like to watch Trump because he takes my mind off stuff," says a 1 percenter in Gary Shteyngart's "Lake Success," the summer after the election. "No matter what happens personally, there's this much greater disaster taking place." Shteyngart and a handful of novelists are already processing the psychic aftermath of Election Day, 2016. Of course, "what happens personally" can't be so easily separated from the fire and fury emanating from the White House, a point made in James Sturm's wrenching OFF SEASON (Drawn Quarterly, 24.95) and Elly Lonon and Joan Reilly's AMONGST THE LIBERAL ELITE (powerHouse Books, 19.95). Both graphic novels were partially serialized online; the jump from screen to page has been quick enough that the way we live now is pretty much the way we lived then. Alex and Michael, the white heterosexual couple in "Amongst the Liberal Elite," have framed a summer road trip as an act of resistance, one of many absurdities in this overflowing satire. Their idea of getting in touch with Middle America is to eat at Cracker Barrel, visit every town claiming to have the World's Largest Frying Pan, and upload their adventures to Instagram with a blizzard of hashtags. The pair idolizes Lin Manuel Miranda, Jon Stewart and Elena "Legs" Kagan, and uses "Sweet Stormy Daniels!" as an oath. Lonon published the first of Alex and Michael's madcap, almost stream of consciousness dialogues on the McSweeney's website, without illustrations, in February 2017. (The series, currently at 27 installments, is still running.) Reilly's drawings, which recall Alison Bechdel's decisive linework, are new to the book; they conjure geographical reality and turn the disembodied voices into actual characters. The rapid fire banter can at times reach "Gilmore Girls" density, each page crammed with zingers finely tuned for the almond milk sipping set. Alex recalls an afternoon "as enjoyable as a Terry Gross cameo on 'Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me.'" When Michael puts a slimming filter on pictures of their cat, suspecting she's put on a few pounds, Alex slams him for "gaslighting." (He blames his passing misogyny on gluten.) Anyone who's ever thought the title might apply to them will laugh, while also resolving not to be such a cliche in the future. Mark, the narrator of James Sturm's "Off Season," wouldn't classify himself as elite, liberal or otherwise. He's a builder in Vermont, going through a personal crisis just as the presidential campaign enters the home stretch. "It's hard to believe it was only three months ago that Lisa and I were together and both for Bernie," he notes in the first chapter, which originally appeared on Slate in September 2016, with Election Day on the horizon. Separation from his wife means getting his own apartment, which means selling his truck, which means working for contractors like Mick, perpetually late with the check and with a Bernie Sanders bumper sticker on his BMW station wagon. 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. The class conflict is palpable. With Sanders out of the running, Mark isn't sure whom to support. His wife knocks on doors for Clinton, but their marital split (she's "got the house, the rich parents, and plenty of time") sours his view of the candidate. (Hillary's campaign slogan, "Stronger Together," gives the chapter its ironic title.) "Not that I'd vote for Trump," he tells himself. "But at least he's his own man." When their young daughter, Suzie, tells him he has to choose, he just says: "I did pick someone." End of conversation. Divided into 13 emotionally stunning chapters, its gorgeous blue gray ink washes evoking the New England winter, "Off Season" is a revelation. Sturm's earlier graphic novels, "The Golem's Mighty Swing" (2001) and "Market Day" (2010), are set safely in the past. "Off Season" is the more vital work, a seamless contemporary take on economic despair, political confusion and the challenges of parenting. Mark's dislike of Clinton would make his story a nonstarter for Alex and Michael, but he lives in a reality that they barely graze as they zip around the country taking selfies. "Would anything have changed anything?" Mark wonders, reflecting on missteps in his marriage; the words resonate, seeming to encompass the country as a whole. "Off Season" includes chapters that weren't in the original online serialization, as well as smaller adjustments. The most telling tweak is to the last frame of a six panel chapter entitled "It's Not Over." Mark is leaving a message for Lisa the day after the election, sincerely upset for her. In its original form, each of the last four panels carries one sentence: "I hope you're all right. Call me, O.K.? I love you. It's going to be all right." The book version cuts the last one. Instead, Sturm gives us a panel of silence, Mark with the phone to his ear. The visual aspect of comics makes them particularly well suited to capturing our digital lives. If Instagram is the inane god Alex and Michael propitiate in "Amongst the Liberal Elite," Facebook is a sort of demonic secret sharer in "Off Season," drawing out our worst impulses. A child care issue, post inauguration, escalates in Mark criticizing Lisa: "I don't have the luxury of spending all day on Facebook planning the revolution." Later Mark falls into a dark text spiral while trying to get hold of well heeled Mick for an overdue check ("What's going on??" "Any day now"); he blows up when he sees Mick's status update: "Flew out to Vineyard for a steak dinner and the Avett Brothers with my buddy Ron. 3rd row!" In one cruelly believable panel, Sturm identifies a tech driven source of populist rage. In the book's single glimpse of Trump a frame from a televised debate he's depicted as a literal pig. The grotesque drawing is all the more shocking because it reminds the reader (some 50 pages in) that Sturm has drawn all the characters in "Off Season" as animals dogs, specifically. (It's perhaps no coincidence that Americans appear as dogs in Art Spiegelman's "Maus.") At one point, Mark recalls listening to a theater troupe describe how "using animals as stand ins is as old as storytelling ... As an actor, it's liberating to wear the mask." The reader, too, falls under a spell: The soulful faces of Sturm's nonhuman, all too human characters ask us to withhold judgment, hear out the other sides of the story. Which is not the M.O. of SEPTEMBER 12TH AND OTHER STORIES (Kilgore Books, 6), Robert Sergel's killer pamphlet from last July. The scabrous one pager "Future Presidents" features nine putrid possibilities for the country's highest office, now that the bar has been lowered; "Infected Robert Durst Hangnail" is perhaps the only one that can be printed here. (The contrast between Sergel's antiseptic style and his partisan disgust is half the joke.) "The Best Eight Seconds of Every Day" needs just six panels to inscribe itself upon the brain. The title is the punchline, identifying the paradisiacal sliver of time between waking up and one's first conscious thought about the rage machine in chief. If you find a copy, you know what to do: Sergel's comics have just the right dimensions for a self righteous, heart grabbing Instagram post. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Can a Quote Unquote Band Drag Rock Into the Future? The 1975 Is Trying Its Hardest LOS ANGELES To be a young rock star in 2018 is to be racked with anxiety and self consciousness about what it means to be a young rock star in 2018. New ones are hardly being minted, especially within the confines of what is traditionally considered rock 'n' roll, and live instrumentation tends not to resonate on the rap drenched Billboard, Spotify and Apple Music charts. Rock concerts persist on a grand scale, but legacy reigns. Guitar heroes are more of a novelty than a fixture. Matty Healy, 29, is exactly the kind of music obsessive who lives to think and talk about this kind of thing. With his flirty eyes and fashion sense, lunatic energy and history of substance abuse, he also happens to be the perfect man for the job. "I don't listen to rock bands," Mr. Healy, who sings, produces and plays guitar, said last month in a sleek rented home in the Hollywood Hills strewn with designer clothes, workout equipment, instruments and pool floats. The 1975, then, is designed strictly, by his edict, as a vehicle for progress. Together for more than 15 years, but successful only since 2012, the group, which started in Manchester as not much more than a teenage emo band, has developed over the course of four EPs and two albums into an intentional anomaly: a quote unquote band that takes the playlist age's lack of boundaries around genres as a given and aims, as its mantra goes, to create as it consumes. "The way that I write music is that I listen to a song I love and I copy it," Mr. Healy said, generously peppering his always self assured statements with expletives. "And songs that I love are not songs by rock bands, unless they're old classics." Written and produced entirely by Mr. Healy and his studio whiz partner and drummer George Daniel, the music borrows from formulas the 1975 tinkered with on its first two albums, but ventures further and more believably afield, cementing the group as a rock band that can reference rap, cross into pop and still feel alternative. The 1975 is not resting there. After finishing "A Brief Inquiry" in September, Mr. Healy took a weekend trip with his girlfriend and then returned immediately to the band's temporary Los Angeles headquarters to dive into its fourth album, "Notes on a Conditional Form," which he has promised will be released in May. The deluge of new music, with a tour in between, not only nods to the pace of modern hip hop and the online content flood, it also solidifies the 1975's reputation as a fan's band: Mr. Healy invests as much in his young and hungry followers as they do in him. "It's not about selling stuff," he said. "Superserve your fans or don't. But it's not quite good enough anymore to just have an album." John Janick, the chief executive of Interscope Geffen A M, which releases the 1975's music in the United States in collaboration with the band's own Dirty Hit label, called Mr. Healy a "mad genius" and a "true rock star." (Summing up his own frontman shtick, Mr. Healy played the conflicted voice inside his head: "I'm Jim Morrison. Am I Jim Morrison? I'm sorry that I'm Jim Morrison. I'm expletive Jim Morrison!") Mr. Janick said: "They understand their audience because they were those kids. They are those kids still to this day." He added, "These guys have done all this grass roots work, figuring out who they are and experimenting. There's not many acts like them that check every box." Marketers as much as musicians, Mr. Healy and the rest of the 1975, which also includes the guitarist Adam Hann and the bassist Ross MacDonald, are meticulous about their aesthetic presentation, both online and onstage. (The band's manager, Jamie Oborne, is a sort of unofficial fifth member, tasked with making Mr. Healy's visions a reality.) Building on the anonymous mystique employed early on by the Weeknd, the 1975 kept a clean black and white palette for its hype building EPs and self titled debut album before exploding into neon for its follow up "I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It," which debuted at No. 1 in 2016. ("The 1975" is platinum in the United States, while "I Like It" went gold, selling more than 685,000 copies, according to Nielsen.) Zane Lowe, the Beats 1 host who helped break the 1975 as a D.J. on BBC Radio 1, credited the Mr. Healy and the group with being ahead of the curve in their ability to capture people's attention by presenting themselves as a mysterious secret club. "When they did that early on a lot of people were like, 'What's with all this pretentious behavior?'" he said. "But now that's just standard. If you're a new artist, you're finding new ways to distribute your music and reach your audience creatively." Mr. Healy, who is the band's ideas engine, public face and sole motor mouthpiece, compared the 1975 to the collage heavy social network Tumblr, where intense niche fan communities proliferate: "We're the Tumblr band, really, in every sense," he said, describing the demographic and conceptual overlap: " Young girls, kind of an idealistic sense of romance, edgy but actually kind of beautiful, and you can play it in your mom's car." Born to the well known British actors Denise Welch and Tim Healy, Mr. Healy had the eclectic taste of his generation, worshiping experimental rappers like Dizzee Rascal and the Streets' Mike Skinner as much as pop punk and screamo bands like Motion City Soundtrack and Thursday. So while the 1975 eventually slid into the familiar role of a British It band, championed by the NME and BBC stations, Mr. Healy bristles at the narrow expectations that come with such exposure. "People are like, 'Also listen to the Arctic Monkeys,'" he said. "No! It has nothing to do it's not remotely ... We have guitars, but you might as well call us a microphone band we have those, as well." "A Brief Inquiry" is another step toward shaking those associations. On the single "Love It if We Made It," which may very well become the band's defining song, Mr. Healy shout raps a current events data dump that has been compared to a modern "We Didn't Start the Fire." ("Billy Joel, right?" Mr. Healy said. "I always thought it was INXS for some reason. Cool song.") Jumping from race ("selling melanin and then/suffocate the black men") to internet culture ("poison me, daddy") to politics ("I moved on her like a bitch/excited to be indicted") to music ("rest in peace Lil Peep"), the song is nearly impossible to classify. In its recurring, all caps hook, the track also provides a thesis statement for the album and maybe the 1975 as a whole: "Modernity has failed us," Mr. Healy sings. "But I'd love it if we made it." The other preoccupation on the album, besides technology, is heroin. Late last year, in the middle of writing "A Brief Inquiry," Mr. Healy sought treatment for what he said was an on and off four year addiction to heroin and benzodiazepines. The singer, who isolated himself at a ritzy clinic in Barbados, stressed how lucky he was to not have spiraled out of control. "I didn't lose everything," he said. "I scared the expletive out of everybody that I love, and that was enough for me." And restless as he is, Mr. Healy was already plotting his next phase before this one solidified. While "A Brief Inquiry" represents an awakening and emergence from the fog, he described "Notes on a Conditional Form," the next album, as the 1975's "U.K. nighttime record": "in cars smoking weed, Burial and McDonalds and the M62 and Manchester just England!" he said. From a file of more than a dozen demos, Mr. Healy played a beat he described as "early Kanye," featuring a chopped up Temptations sample, and then a bluesy guitar romp that was pure Rolling Stones. "This sounds like name dropping, but I was on the phone to Mick Jagger," Mr. Healy said by way of explanation. (In lyrics, Mr. Healy has described himself as "a millennial that baby boomers like.") The fact that both songs could potentially exist on the same album is the entire point of the 1975, the singer said, and a sign of his autonomy. "No record executive or the idea of an external influence has ever come into my life ever," Mr. Healy said earlier. "I'm completely uncompromised." The success of the experiment the sold out shows, hundreds of millions of online streams and the flock of devotees is self evident, he said, and so his leash is only getting longer. He hopes to be dragging a generation of listeners along with him. "When it comes to the 1975, just trust me," Mr. Healy said. "We've done it right so far." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Misty Copeland inched toward the front of the stage with her powerful back leading the way. It wasn't the only time that Ms. Copeland, one of ballet's brightest stars, showed her fans a different side of herself in "Ash," a new solo by Kyle Abraham. But it set the tone. Ms. Copeland was strong in "Ash," and breathtakingly so. Rarely has she seemed as womanly, as self assured as towering (she's smaller than you might imagine) as she was in this soulful, sophisticated performance, unveiled at the first program of City Center's Fall for Dance Festival on Tuesday. Wearing a gold leotard under a gossamer tunic by the talented designers Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, Ms. Copeland shimmered as if in a cloud. Her arms rose and fell as she retreated to the back of the stage and, for a brief moment, undulated like a swan's wings. As she glided across the stage, advancing with spins that came to sudden stops or extending a leg to the side in developpe, her progression through the steps could be read as an unwavering journey, refined and forthright. Ms. Copeland, American Ballet Theater's first African American female principal and a dancer idolized by many, isn't playing a role in "Ash." Mr. Abraham designed it so that the material is her body; she's in control. Curatorial authority was less evident in other parts of the opening night program, which began with Crystal Pite's "A Picture of You Falling," a self conscious duet with moody spotlights and text about a frayed relationship, performed by Hubbard Street Dance Chicago . (The company performed it in New York last spring.) The South African company Vuyani Dance Theater presented the United States premiere of Gregory Maqoma's "Rise," an optimistic group work about, well, rising up, which featured ebullient dancing to a soundtrack of artists including Drake and Billie Holiday. As the cast took turns bursting into springy jumps and spins within boxes of light joined from time to time by the lithe Musa Motha, a remarkable performer missing a leg and dancing with the help of an arm brace the work stuck to the same note. It was adapted for the festival. Did some deeper intention fall away? The second, more rewarding half of the program began with "Ash" and concluded with a radiant work by the tap choreographer and dancer Caleb Teicher: "Bzzzz." A collaboration with the beatboxer Chris Celiz, the piece is a rich exploration of sound that shows how dancers become musicians with their bodies, capable of creating their own score whether soft or hard. The playful Mr. Celiz began the performance in front of the curtain where he vocalized on a microphone; taps could be heard behind it. It rose on three squares or platforms for dancing, and in this handsome setting Mr. Teicher's spirited, seamless brand of tap flourished. As duets slipped into group numbers and solos into trios, the stage constantly (and aptly) buzzed with life sunny, sweet, yet full of power. On Thursday, the festival's second program opened with the splendid Mark Morris Dance Group in one of the choreographer's most lilting, idyllic works: "Eleven," named for the Mozart piano concerto to which it is set and part of his trilogy "Mozart Dances" (2006). Men appear at the start, but they soon abandon the stage to a contingent of women led by the quicksilver veteran Lauren Grant, who is both fleeting and standoffish. Here, Mr. Morris highlights his dancers' femininity and sisterhood by flaunting their strength, not their daintiness. Whether spinning with outstretched arms or loosely holding the napes of their necks elbows pointed out sharply before rocking on their heels and letting their arms melt forward they embody the music's sweep . Sadly, nothing else on the program came close to "Eleven," which was granted the most polite applause of the night. The French hip hop company Dyptik, led by artistic directors, Mehdi Meghari and Souhail Marchiche, presented "Dans L'Engrenage" (or "In the Gear") in its United States premiere. In this jumbled production, flashes of hip hop movement and hints of folk dancing took place under Richard Gratas's spotlights that both illuminated the performers and manipulated the crowd. The Washington Ballet, under the direction of the former American Ballet Theater principal Julie Kent, offered Dana Genshaft's "Shadow Lands," set to music by Mason Bates a score more suited to a movie than a ballet. At the centerpiece of this swiftly moving dance, which seemed to have something to say about the individual versus the group, was the Outlier (Katherine Barkman, who has some of Ms. Kent's understated elegance) and her encounter with the Observer (Javier Morera). "Shadow Lands" was like driving too fast along a scenic road and never stopping long enough to take in the sights; it had polish yet added up to little. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
To start, they're living rocks, faceless and mostly motionless. When all is well, they hide out of view, tightly shut and burrowed into river beds, doing the ecological heavy lifting of filtering water, storing nutrients and anchoring freshwater food webs. And when they're in trouble, mussels aren't particularly charismatic poster children for ecological strife. But this could be the year that freshwater mussels get the attention that Jordan Richard, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the University of Wisconsin, believes they're owed. After years of searching for a potential explanation for the mysterious and massive die offs that have suddenly killed thousands of mussels in streams from Washington to Virginia, Mr. Richard and his colleagues have finally identified a potential "mussel bola" culprit. In a study published earlier this month in Scientific Reports, the research group used genetic testing to identify viruses in healthy and diseased mussels. One novel virus, they found, was 11 times more likely to be present in sick mussels. With the public keyed into the complex importance of viruses in human health and ecosystems, Mr. Richard said, "It's a great time to be talking about viruses and obscure animals." Federal estimates suggest more than 70 percent of North America's freshwater mussels have been driven to endangerment or extinction. While pollution, habitat destruction and other human caused hazards can explain some of that loss, the sudden die offs have remained thoroughly unexplained. "Mussels are disappearing at an alarming rate, but we just don't understand why," said Wendell Haag, a research biologist at the Center for Mollusk Conservation in Kentucky who was not involved in the new paper. "It drives me crazy that we've got no idea what's going on." This month's paper is the first solid evidence of a pathogen as a possible cause, Dr. Haag said. "It's an excellent and very promising lead." The study is among the first to examine mussel die offs through an epidemiological lens. The Wisconsin based researchers focused on blood samples from 58 healthy and diseased Pheasantshell mussels, a subset of hundreds collected from the Clinch River in Tennessee and Virginia where about 80,000 mussels have perished since 2016. In all, they discovered 17 viruses in the mollusks' blood. One of those, a densovirus, belongs to a class of viruses linked with lethal epidemic disease in shrimp, cockroaches, crickets, moths, crayfish and silkworms. It was much more likely to be present, and in higher densities, in sick mussels compared with healthy control subjects. "Before, we were throwing our hands up, said Tony Goldberg, a veterinary epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin and a co author. "Now we have a clear hypothesis." The findings do not conclusively show that the virus causes die offs. Other factors bacteria, invasive bivalves, warming waters could be interacting with the novel virus to weaken or kill off freshwater mussels. Traci DuBose, an ecologist at Virginia Tech not involved in the paper, has studied the role of droughts in mussel die offs. "I think it's very complementary," she said of the new findings. Given how little we know about mussel biology and mortality, Dr. DuBose said, "It all goes hand in hand." Next, the Wisconsin researchers will isolate and study the novel virus in a lab setting and, eventually, use it to experiment on thousands of tiny live, hatchery grown mussels. Further down the line, they could even develop a rapid test to detect the virus in cultured or wild mussel populations. But there are major obstacles to studying the mussels. Unlike with humans, chimpanzees or even oysters (where there's a financial or humanitarian drive for this kind of virology), the researchers don't have an established model for working with freshwater mussel cells. That means they don't have a clear picture of how to grow mussel cells or the virus in a lab. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
As its title implies, this is not just a memoir but a call to action. Richards wants you to know that you too can make social change. She also wants you to know that a life of social activism is fun. She offers career advice ("never turn down a new opportunity") and even travel tips ("try to know where the best ice cream is in any given airport terminal"). Considering how often progressives are portrayed as joyless scolds, this is a message that needs to get out more. There's a lot of satisfaction in activism, even if you don't win every battle. Those battles are something I wish Richards had gone into more deeply. Although she opens with her appearance before the congressional committee investigating Planned Parenthood for profiting from fetal remains the same committee that investigated Hillary Clinton over Benghazi, with as little to show for it her take is basically upbeat. She and her daughter may curl up in bed and weep together on election night 2016, but a few pages later she's knitting a pussy hat for the women's march held the day after Donald Trump's inauguration. She doesn't spend much time analyzing the current state of reproductive rights in this country, the number of abortion clinics closing or the continuing threat to defund Planned Parenthood and cancel Obamacare's expansive birth control benefit (which has no co pay requirement), to say nothing of the hundreds of state restrictions on abortion passed in the last few years. Richards is absolutely right that Planned Parenthood is popular one in five American women has visited one of its clinics. Almost all women have used birth control at some point, and one in four will have had at least one abortion by age 45. Given those facts, I would have liked to read why she thinks the enemies of reproductive rights have been so successful. The once pro choice Trump who said Hillary was willing to "rip the baby out of the womb" right before birth is in the White House. As a congressman, Mike Pence wanted to shut down the federal government in order to defund Planned Parenthood; today he's the vice president. She describes as a big win the storm of outrage that resulted when the breast cancer charity Komen Foundation decided to drop Planned Parenthood from its list of recipients (it had to backtrack within days). But she doesn't say that the woman behind Komen's ill fated plan, Karen Handler, defeated Jon Ossoff in a much publicized Georgia congressional race. Nor does she mention the 2015 murder of three people at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic by a deranged abortion opponent. "For the first time in my life, I'm wondering whether my own daughters will have fewer rights than I've had," Richards writes. She's hardly the only one to have that fear: After the election, Planned Parenthood experienced a 900 percent increase in requests for IUDs from women looking for birth control that would outlast the Trump administration. It is not going to be easy to undo the damage that every day seems to bring to women's rights, status, opportunities and well being, but if you're looking for books to fill you with energy for the long haul that lies before us, this one is a great place to start. After all, with a man in the White House accused of sexual harassment by over a dozen women and Health and Human Services staffed from top to bottom with opponents of reproductive rights, what better time to make trouble? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
ART IN ODD PLACES at various locations (Oct. 17 20). Dedicated to increasing public access to art, this free festival will focus specifically on the theme of invisibility this year. For LuLu LoLo, a festival veteran and the curator of this iteration, aging is among the things we tend to ignore, and that is why the festival will also celebrate work by artists 60 and older. Throughout the weekend, 44 projects led by artists from this age group will be displayed on the sidewalks and environs of 14th Street, from Avenue C to the Hudson River, and contributors will parade their work along that thoroughfare on Saturday and Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m. (Peter Libbey) artinoddplaces.org 'ARTISTIC LICENSE: SIX TAKES ON THE GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION' at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through Jan. 12). Displays that artists select from a museum's collection are almost inevitably interesting, revealing and valuable. After all, artists can be especially discerning regarding work not their own. Here, six artists Cai Guo Qiang, Paul Chan, Richard Prince, Julie Mehretu, Carrie Mae Weems and Jenny Holzer guided by specific themes, have chosen, which multiplies the impact accordingly. With one per ramp, each selection turns the museum inside out. The combination sustains multiple visits; the concept should be applied regularly. (Roberta Smith) 212 423 3840, guggenheim.org 'AUSCHWITZ. NOT LONG AGO. NOT FAR AWAY' at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (through Jan. 3). Killing as a communal business, made widely lucrative by the Third Reich, permeates this traveling exhibition about the largest German death camp, Auschwitz, whose yawning gatehouse, with its converging rail tracks, has become emblematic of the Holocaust. Well timed, during a worldwide surge of anti Semitism, the harrowing installation strives, successfully, for fresh relevance. The exhibition illuminates the topography of evil, the deliberate designing of a hell on earth by fanatical racists and compliant architects and provisioners, while also highlighting the strenuous struggle for survival in a place where, as Primo Levi learned, "there is no why." (Ralph Blumenthal) 646 437 4202, mjhnyc.org 'PIERRE CARDIN: FUTURE FASHION' at the Brooklyn Museum (through Jan. 5). He was never a great artist like Dior, Balenciaga or Saint Laurent, but Pierre Cardin still at work at 97 pioneered today's approach to the business of fashion: take a loss on haute couture, then make the real money through ready to wear and worldwide licensing deals. He excelled at bold, futuristic day wear: belted unisex jumpsuits, vinyl miniskirts, dresses accessorized with astronaut chic Plexiglas helmets. Other ensembles, especially the tacky evening gowns souped up with metal armature, are best ignored. All told, Cardin comes across as a relentless optimist about humanity's future, which has a certain retro charm. Remember the future? (Jason Farago) 718 638 5000, brooklynmuseum.org 'ELECTIVE INFINITIES: EDMUND DE WAAL' at the Frick Collection (through Nov. 17). How does a contemporary artist enter a scene as formidable as Henry Frick's Gilded Age mansion? For de Waal, the English ceramist and author of the acclaimed family memoir "The Hare With Amber Eyes," the answer is with modesty. Only as you follow de Waal's site specific installations in nine of the museum's galleries does his own restrained music begin to ring out. Below Ingres's dangerously seductive "Comtesse d'Haussonville," he installs little strips of solid gold leaning against two huddles of white porcelain; in the richly appointed West Gallery, two pairs of overlapping flat screen shaped glass boxes ("From Darkness to Darkness" and "Noontime and Dawntime") distill the experience of being overwhelmed by painted imagery into a lucid kind of serenity. (Will Heinrich) 212 288 0700, frick.org 'THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION' at the Museum of the Moving Image (ongoing). The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America's great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program "Sam and Friends" before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother's old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace and love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Farago) 718 784 0077, movingimage.us 'ERNST LUDWIG KIRCHNER' at the Neue Galerie (through Jan. 13). You could be forgiven for drawing a connection between Kirchner's shocking color palette and his character. It would be understandable enough, considering his problems with morphine, Veronal and absinthe; the nervous breakdown precipitated by his artillery training in World War I; and his suicide in 1938, at the age of 58, after the Nazis had denounced him as a degenerate. But to linger on Kirchner's lurid biography would be unfair to the mesmerizing technical genius of his style, amply on display in this exhibition. Surrounding more or less sober portrait subjects with backgrounds of flat but brilliant color, as Kirchner did, wasn't just a youthful revolt against the staid academic painting he grew up with. It was also an ingenious way to articulate subjective experience in an increasingly materialist modern world. (Heinrich) neuegalerie.org 'THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALVIN BALTROP' at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (through Feb. 20). New York City is a gateway for new talent. It's also an archive of art careers past. Some come to light only after artists have departed, as is the case with Baltrop, an American photographer who was unknown to the mainstream art world when he died in 2004 at 55, and who now has a bright monument of a retrospective at this Bronx museum. That he was black, gay and working class accounts in part for his invisibility, but so does the subject matter he chose: a string of derelict Hudson River shipping piers that, in the 1970s and '80s, became a preserve for gay sex and communion. In assiduously recording both the architecture of the piers and the amorous action they housed, Baltrop created a monument to the city itself at the time when it was both falling apart and radiating liberationist energy. (Holland Cotter) 718 681 6000, bronxmuseum.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. 'NOBODY PROMISED YOU TOMORROW: 50 YEARS AFTER STONEWALL' at the Brooklyn Museum (through Dec. 8). In this large group show, 28 young queer and transgender artists, most born after 1980, carry the buzz of Stonewall resistance into the present. Historical heroes, including Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, are honored (in a film by Sasha Wortzel and Tourmaline). Friends in life, Johnson and Rivera are tutelary spirits of an exhibition in which a trans presence, long marginalized by mainstream gay politics, is pronounced in the work of Juliana Huxtable, Hugo Gyrl, Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski and Elle Perez (whose work also appeared in this year's Whitney Biennial). (Cotter) 718 638 5000, brooklynmuseum.org 'OCEAN WONDERS: SHARKS!' at the New York Aquarium (ongoing). For years, the aquarium's 14 acre campus hunkered behind a wall, turning its back to the beach. When aquarium officials last year finally got around to completing the long promised building that houses this shark exhibition, maybe the biggest move, architecturally speaking, was breaking through that wall. The overall effect makes the aquarium more of a visible, welcoming presence along the boardwalk. Inside, "Ocean Wonders" features 115 species sharing 784,000 gallons of water. It stresses timely eco consciousness, introducing visitors to shark habitats, explaining how critical sharks are to the ocean's food chains and ecologies, debunking myths about the danger sharks pose to people while documenting the threats people pose to sharks via overfishing and pollution. The narrow, snaking layout suggests an underwater landscape carved by water. Past the exit, an outdoor ramp inclines visitors toward the roof of the building, where the Atlantic Ocean suddenly spreads out below. You can see Luna Park in one direction, Brighton Beach in the other. The architectural point becomes clear: Sharks aren't just movie stars and aquarium attractions. They're also our neighbors as much a part of Coney Island as the roller coasters and summer dreams. (Michael Kimmelman) 718 265 3474, nyaquarium.com 'PUNK LUST: RAW PROVOCATION 1971 1985' at the Museum of Sex (through Nov. 30). This show begins with imagery from the Velvet Underground: The 1963 paperback of that title, an exploration of what was then called deviant sexual behavior and gave the band its name, is one of the first objects on display. Working through photos, album art and fliers by artists like Iggy Pop, the New York Dolls, Patti Smith and, yes, the Sex Pistols, the exhibition demonstrates how punk offered a space for sexual expression outside the mainstream. In the story told by "Punk Lust," much of it laid out in placards by the writer and musician Vivien Goldman, one of the show's curators, graphic sexual imagery is a tool for shock that frightens away the straight world and offers comfort to those who remain inside. While some of the power dynamic is typical underage groupies cavorting with rock stars images from female, queer and nonbinary artists like Jayne County and the Slits make a strong case for sex as an essential source of punk liberation. (Mark Richardson) 212 689 6337, museumofsex.com 'STONEWALL 50 AT THE NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY' (through Dec. 1). For its commemoration of the anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion, the society continues with two micro shows: "By the Force of Our Presence: Highlights From the Lesbian Herstory Archives" documents the founding in 1974 by Joan Nestle, Deborah Edel, Sahli Cavallero, Pamela Olin and Julia Stanley of a compendious and still growing register of lesbian culture. And "Say It Loud, Out and Proud: Fifty Years of Pride" turns a solo spotlight on charismatic individuals: Storme DeLarverie (1920 2014), Mother Flawless Sabrina/Jack Doroshow (1939 2017), Keith Haring (1958 90) and Rollerena Fairy Godmother. (Cotter) 212 873 3400, nyhistory.org 'T. REX: THE ULTIMATE PREDATOR' at the American Museum of Natural History (through Aug. 9). Everyone's favorite 18,000 pound prehistoric killer gets the star treatment in this eye opening exhibition, which presents the latest scientific research on T. rex and also introduces many other tyrannosaurs, some discovered only this century in China and Mongolia. T. rex evolved mainly during the Cretaceous period to have keen eyes, spindly arms and massive conical teeth, which packed a punch that has never been matched by any other creature; the dinosaur could even swallow whole bones, as affirmed here by a kid friendly display of fossilized excrement. The show mixes 66 million year old teeth with the latest 3 D prints of dino bones, and also presents new models of T. rex as a baby, a juvenile and a full grown annihilator. Turns out this most savage beast was covered with believe it! a soft coat of beige or white feathers. (Farago) 212 769 5100, amnh.org 'VIOLET HOLDINGS: LGBTQ HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE N.Y.U. SPECIAL COLLECTIONS' at Bobst Library (through Dec. 31). With the Stonewall Inn now a National Historic Landmark (and a bar again; it was a bagel shop in the 1980s), nearby New York University has produced a homegrown archival exhibition at Bobst Library, across the park from Grey Art Gallery. Organized by Hugh Ryan, it takes the local history of queer identity back to the 19th century with documents on Elizabeth Robins (1862 1952), an American actor, suffragist and friend of Virginia Woolf, and forward with ephemera related to the musician and drag king Johnny Science (1955 2007) and the African American D.J. Larry Levan (1954 92), who, in the 1980s, presided, godlike, at a gay disco called the Paradise Garage, which was a short walk from the campus. (Cotter) 212 998 2500, library.nyu.edu 'ALICJA KWADE: PARAPIVOT' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Oct. 27). This shrewd and scientifically inclined artist, born in Poland and based in Berlin, has delivered the best edition in five years of the Met's hit or miss rooftop sculpture commission. Two tall armatures of interlocking steel rectangles, the taller of them rising more than 18 feet, support heavy orbs of different colored marble; some of the balls perch precariously on the steel frames, while others, head scratchingly, are squinched between them. Walk around these astral abstractions and the frames seem to become quotation marks for the transformed skyline of Midtown; the marbles might be planets, each just as precarious as the one from which they've been quarried. (Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'SIMONE LEIGH: LOOPHOLE OF RETREAT' at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through Oct. 27). Leigh's sensuous, majestic sculptures of black female figures fuse the language of African village architecture and African American folk art, and sometimes racial stereotypes, like the "mammy" figurines produced and collected in earlier eras in America. Sculpture is only one part of the practice that earned Leigh the Hugo Boss Prize 2018, but it is the one that inspired this show of three large objects in a gallery off the rotunda. The title comes from the writings of Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman who spent seven years hiding in a crawl space to escape her master's advances. In the exhibition, the "loophole" becomes a kind of artistic conceit, too, in which Leigh moves deftly between mediums, styles and messages, addressing multiple audiences but always, as she has stated, black women. For Leigh, loopholes might include representations of women that link back to ancestors or empower women by drawing on the freedom available through art. In that sense, these sculptures are sentinels, and placeholders. (Martha Schwendener) 212 423 3840, guggenheim.org 'AMY SHERALD: THE HEART OF THE MATTER ...' at Hauser Wirth (through Oct. 26). This realist painter goes big with her New York debut, starting at the top of the gallery food chain, and confirming the talent that landed the commission to paint Michelle Obama's official portrait in the first place. But by limiting herself to fewer than 10 meticulously worked paintings, she also makes this art palace look less mercenary than usual. (Smith) 212 790 3900, hauserwirth.com | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
At a crucial moment in late night television, a new showrunner is taking over "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," a onetime ratings winner that lost its lead in total viewers soon after the inauguration of President Trump. A 27 year veteran of NBC, Jim Bell, will become the so called executive in charge at "The Tonight Show" immediately, the network said on Wednesday. Mr. Bell is taking over the program at a time when "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" is not only dominating the late night ratings, but also cutting into Mr. Fallon's lead among a group of viewers prized by advertisers: adults between the ages of 18 and 49. Mr. Fallon took over "The Tonight Show" from Jay Leno in 2014. His cheerful, enthusiastic style made him the leader in total viewers until the spring of 2017, when Mr. Colbert leapfrogged him in the Nielsen ratings. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Last month, the Order of the Good Death, a group of academics, artists and death professionals, held its annual Death Salon, which this year took place at Mount Auburn cemetery in Boston. Among the events was a tribute to Edward Gorey, the artist and author of such illustrated books fiercely beloved by certain dark hearted children, and adults too as "The Gashlycrumb Tinies" and "The Doubtful Guest." "The dress code was 'haute macabre,'" said Megan Rosenbloom, the co founder and director of Death Salon. "Just to have a little fun." There were artifacts and ephemera from the Edward Gorey House, on Cape Cod. Several attendees came as Gorey characters, including two who recreated "A Dull Afternoon," his drawing of Victorian era women on a lawn playing catch with a human skull. "There's an absurdity to Gorey's work that resonates with people," Ms. Rosenbloom said. "It helps people deal with the uncontrollable nature of death." Whether through his sets for the 1977 Broadway revival of "Dracula" or his animated introduction to the PBS series "Mystery!" or his more than 100 slim and strange books, sometimes called children's literature but more often unclassifiable, Mr. Gorey created a genre all his own. Goreyland favors Victorian and Edwardian settings and costumes, is darkly comic to the point of absurdism and is hard to categorize except with hyphenated terms like camp macabre, ironic gothic or dark whimsy. The style has been popularized to greater commercial effect by the authors Neil Gaiman and Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket) both admitted Goreyphiles and the films of Tim Burton, whose "Corpse Bride" and "The Nightmare Before Christmas" bear the stamp of Gorey's aesthetic. The fashion designer Anna Sui is a Gorey acolyte as well. This Halloween , Gorey fans will pay tribute to the man who stored a mummy's head in the closet of his Manhattan apartment and counted as his most intimate life partner a herd of cats: dressing up as his characters, performing his work or just engaging in acts of Goreyesque weirdness . What would Mr. Gorey make of his status as an All Hallows' Eve grand ghoul were he alive to see it? "That would have given Gorey himself the fantods," said Mark Dery, using one of the antiquated words the artist loved to collect and trot out in his books. (It means a state of uneasiness.) "Gorey shrank from the obvious. Gorey is deep." The cover of "Born to Be Posthumous," by Mark Dery. A cultural critic and author, Mr. Dery has written a new biography, "Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey" (Little, Brown). He spent seven years on the project, time he needed to wrap his head around "the panoramic sweep" of his subject's mind. For Mr. Dery, and for anyone else, plunging into Goreyland means becoming acquainted with Diaghilev's "Ballets Russes ," with French silent films, the surrealist collage novels of Max Ernst, Victorian children's literature, the ancient Japanese novel "The Tale of Genji" and so forth. It means looking through a pre Stonewall lens, when many gay men and women led closeted lives and their sexuality didn't necessarily figure in their expressed personal politics. It means trying to solve the riddle of a man who was outwardly gregarious "As beguiling a conversationalist as Oscar Wilde," as Mr. Dery put it and flamboyantly fashionable, walking the streets of New York in the 1960s and '70s in floor sweeping fur coats that caught the attention of the photographer Bill Cunningham, yet forever enigmatic. "Gorey was supremely skilled in the art of evasion and misdirection," Mr. Dery said. When pressed about his sexuality, or probed about his childhood as an intellectually gifted only son in Chicago, "he would respond with a long anecdote about the use of wallpaper in the TV series 'Knots Landing.'" Perhaps the biggest challenge of writing a Gorey biography is that Mr. Gorey, by his own admission, was a man to whom nothing happened. By all accounts, he had no real love affairs as an adult and his sex life was almost nonexistent. Despite being a lifelong Anglophile, he made just one brief visit to Scotland and England, his only trip abroad. He took the self administered Proust Questionnaire for Vanity Fair and wrote that the greatest love of his life was "cats" and his favorite journey was "looking out the window." Instead, Mr. Gorey appears to have spent much of his life with his nose between the covers of a book. An obsessive cinephile, one year he claimed to have seen 1,000 movies. When Mr. Gorey wasn't in the cinema or reading, he was watching George Balanchine's ballets, around which he based his entire schedule for nearly three decades, rarely missing a single performance. (Mr. Gorey's permanent move from New York to Cape Cod, in the mid 1980s, coincided with the death of Mr. Balanchine: "an act of aestheticism worthy of Oscar Wilde," as Stephen Schiff wrote in a 1992 New Yorker profile.) And Mr. Gorey's work, in turn, has imprinted itself on the consciousness of generations of oddballs and bookworms, who have found in his offbeat world a measure of existential solace. For A.N. Devers, a writer and rare books dealer, Mr. Gorey's books, which she discovered through a cool high school friend, pointed the way out of her conformist suburban Virginia town. "I don't think I quite understood him then. I just knew that he was getting at something ludicrous about life," Ms. Devers said. "Gorey seemed like an outlet." Years later, living in New York, Ms. Devers attended an auction of the artist's fur coats and won a Lorraine mink stroller, an unexpected turn of events she wrote about for The Paris Review. (As previously reported by The New York Times, she has also bought a green tartan kilt belonging to Sylvia Plath.) After the auction, a man in the elevator, a fellow bidder and Goreyphile, told Ms. Devers, "You must live up to this coat!" Speaking by phone from her home in London, she said: "I wore it a lot in the New York City winters when I would get invited to parties. It ended up being a really fun party favor." The coat was one of the few items Ms. Devers hand carried on the plane to England when she moved there, prized too much to entrust it to shippers. Alison Bechdel, the cartoonist whose graphic memoir "Fun Home" was the basis for the Tony Award winning Broadway musical, said she "was really fortunate to discover Gorey as a little kid," in her parents' book of poems by John Ciardi (he did the illustrations). Later, as a teenager struggling with her sexual identity, Ms. Bechdel found one of the Amphigoreys, the omnibus collections that introduced Mr. Gorey to a wider readership starting in the 1970s, and the latent queerness she read in his work resonated. "I think part of what was so entrancing for me when I was 17 and found his work was it touched on some weird sexuality I was sensing in myself but hadn't acknowledged," Ms. Bechdel said. Mr. Gorey himself never really acknowledged his own sexuality. To Mr. Schiff, he described himself as "reasonably undersexed." To another interview's probing question about his sexual orientation, he said, "I'm neither one thing nor the other particularly." Later in the interview he added: "What I am trying to say is that I am a person before I am anything else." While today's L.G.B.T.Q. community may read that as a closeted gay man from an earlier generation refusing to come out, "it's far more complicated than that," Mr. Dery said. The few romantic feelings Mr. Gorey confessed to in letters to friends, most of them for other men and best described as infatuations, show him as someone for whom the messiness of human relationships was much too much. Perhaps for that or other reasons he kept himself buttoned up. Mr. Dery honored that. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
"And Trump must be especially butt hurt that the justices he appointed didn't do anything about this, because in his mind, he thinks that they owe him big time. He's probably like, 'What the hell, Brett? I stuck with you when everyone said you were a creepy drunk, but now you won't let me be president just because I didn't get enough votes? All of a sudden, now you know the meaning of the word "no," Brett? Huh? I hate all of you Neil, Brett, and you hurt me most of all, Amy Coney Island!'" TREVOR NOAH "All of the justices were like, 'We put on our robes for this?'" JIMMY FALLON "Trump put three judges on the court, and he was very explicit about the fact that he wanted them to jump in and steal the election for him, Bush v. Gore style, and he still lost. When those three saw the actual court filing, it was probably like meeting someone you matched with on Tinder in person: 'So that picture you posted, that was before the explosion?'" SETH MEYERS "The right wing judges on the Supreme Court are Trump superfans they're desperate to side with him. If he could have given them a case with even a little meat on it, they were ready to Hamburger Helper it into a full meal, but there was nothing there." SETH MEYERS "The court really tried to do Trump a favor, though. They figured if it was one sentence, he would actually read it." JIMMY FALLON "For Trump, it felt like applying to college and getting back a thin envelope. It's like, 'Well, this can't be good.'" JIMMY FALLON | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Hulu announced on Wednesday that Joel Stillerman, AMC's longtime head of programming, would become the streaming service's first chief content officer. The news was months in the making: Hulu has been looking to create and fill the position for some time as it tries to make up ground on rival streaming services like Netflix and Amazon. Mr. Stillerman, 55, has been the head of programming at AMC since 2008. He was involved with the later seasons of "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad" and then helped the network make the transition to a new era by bringing hits like "The Walking Dead," "Better Call Saul" and "Into the Badlands" to life. While Netflix and Amazon have made, for the last several years, dramas and comedies that have been at the heart of the cultural conversation and have taken home prestigious awards, Hulu has been left behind. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
SHANGHAI The electric car maker Tesla said on Monday that it had sent a team to investigate why one of its cars appeared to spontaneously combust in Shanghai over the weekend, an incident that the authorities said had left no one hurt but that has raised fresh questions about the safety of the company's cars. The explosion occurred Sunday evening in the basement parking garage of an apartment complex in Shanghai's Xuhui District, according to a post by the local fire department on the Chinese social media platform Weibo. Security camera footage accompanying the post showed smoke creeping from beneath a parked Tesla sedan for a few seconds before the car bursts into flames. Two other cars were also damaged, the fire department said. "Last night we dispatched a team at once to the scene," Tesla said in a Monday morning post on its Weibo account. The fire department said the cause of the explosion was still being investigated. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
What We Know and What We Don't Know About the Zika Cases in South Florida Zika transmission has been confirmed in two neighborhoods in the Miami area, and pregnant women have been advised to avoid both locations. Federal health officials have also suggested that pregnant women and their sexual partners consider avoiding the entire Miami area. Zika infections are also occurring in Puerto Rico and in Latin American and Caribbean countries. The vast majority of Americans have little to fear from the Zika virus. For almost everyone, including older adults, young children and people with compromised immune systems, it is a mild disease that usually causes nothing more serious than a low fever and an itchy rash. But because it can cross the placenta and attack fetal brain cells, it is dangerous to unborn children. Health officials have emphatically advised pregnant women to do everything they can to avoid it. Although thousands of Americans have returned from Latin America and the Caribbean with the virus, almost all have recovered within a week or two. A few have passed it to sexual partners, but in nearly all cases, those partners have also recovered quickly. Once people have had Zika, they are immune to the virus. They cannot get it again or pass it to their child. It is not yet known whether this immunity is for life, but it appears to be long lasting. People can also pass the virus to Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which can spread it to other people. So far, that type of transmission has been found only in one small area of the continental United States, in Miami Dade County. How far it will spread is unknown, but mosquito borne diseases in that region normally begin to decline only when cold weather kills mosquitoes or makes them dormant. Although Aedes aegypti mosquitoes have been found in 30 states in the past, it is unusual to find them in large numbers or for long periods anywhere except along the Gulf Coast and in parts of Hawaii. Mosquitoes can pick the virus up from a human during the roughly 10 day period that it is in a person's blood. What We Know Thirty six people in southern Florida are believed to have caught the Zika virus from local mosquitoes. Of those, health officials believe 25 were bitten in or near Miami's Wynwood neighborhood and five were bitten in or near the South Beach section of Miami Beach. In the remaining cases, some of them as far as 70 miles away, it is unclear where the patients were infected. Most of the Miami area cases were found in local residents, but some were not detected until visitors had returned home to New York, Texas or Taiwan. Intense mosquito control efforts, including aerial spraying, truck and backpack foggers, water treatments to kill larvae and requests to homeowners to empty water filled containers, have been conducted in the Wynwood area since July. Aedes aegypti mosquito populations there have been reduced, but not eliminated. Control efforts will be intensified in Miami Beach, but aerial spraying cannot be included because the area has too many tall buildings and too much wind. Tourists and residents will be asked to wear repellent, but officials acknowledge that avoiding bites will be difficult because people there often wear shorts and bathing suits. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have advised pregnant women to avoid both affected neighborhoods, and also suggested that pregnant women and their sexual partners stay away from all of Miami Dade County. Obstetricians in the area have been asked to distribute "Zika prevention kits" to pregnant women. They contain insect repellent, condoms, mosquito nets and other items to help prevent mosquito borne and sexual transmissions. No cases of Guillain Barre syndrome, or other immediate but rare consequences of Zika infection, have been detected. Studies from other areas suggest that Guillain Barre syndrome occurs in about one out of 4,000 infections. The syndrome, a form of ascending paralysis that is usually temporary, can strike anyone but is more common in men and people over 50. What We Don't Know How much of southern Florida now has mosquitoes transmitting Zika is undetermined. There can be long delays between the time transmission starts and when it is detected. Most victims have silent infections and are never tested. When symptoms do occur, they can take three to 10 days to appear. Testing can take another two weeks and then, to confirm local transmission, officials must interview people about their travel histories. The state has many kinds of mosquitoes and only a fraction of the relevant species, Aedes aegypti, need to be infected to sustain an epidemic. In fact, no mosquitoes containing the virus have been found in Florida, but officials said they are not surprised. Finding an infected mosquito is like finding "a needle in a haystack," officials have said. How long cases will continue to occur is also unknown. The C.D.C. has said it expects Zika outbreaks to resemble those of similar viruses, like dengue and chikungunya, because they are carried by the same mosquito. In 2009, three dengue cases were found in Key West, the first occurrence of dengue in Florida since 1934. Although the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District rolled out a huge campaign, employing helicopter sprayers, backpack foggers, larvicide and teams of officers, the outbreak lasted two years. During that outbreak, 90 symptomatic cases were confirmed and blood samples showed that 5 percent of Key West had been infected. Key West is a small vacation island with a wealthy, highly educated population. Miami Dade County has a population of 2.7 million. How many of the Florida cases are in pregnant women. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Eight years ago, Jean Holland moved with her family from West Hempstead, N.Y., to Levittown, about seven miles east on the Hempstead Turnpike. Drawn to the legendary Long Island hamlet by its reputation for safe streets and good schools (her son, Brandon, was a teenager at the time), she settled in a 3,000 square foot house. It was a far cry from the modest two bedroom boxes that the developers, Levitt Sons, had built from 1947 to 1951 for returning World War II servicemen. But it was typical of what Levittown has become in the decades since: a collection of more than 17,000 snowflakes customized with dormers, bay windows, porticos, shingles and garages. Ms. Holland, a paralegal, found the house had more space than she needed, and the 3,200 monthly mortgage was a strain. So she and her family moved again. And again and again and again. As life threw them curves, or they simply got itchy, they changed addresses, but always within the community. Now Ms. Holland, 67, is on her fifth Levitt house, a circa 1950 extended ranch on Blacksmith Road with five bedrooms and an in ground swimming pool. She and her husband, John, 63, a waiter, paid 432,000 for the property in 2016. Brandon has the second floor to himself. "Even if I won the lottery, I wouldn't leave here," she said. "I may build my dream house, but I wouldn't leave Levittown." Many children of the original homeowners have grown up and grown old in these seven square miles. The needs of older residents have become so pronounced that one of the suburb's two bowling alleys is being replaced by an assisted living community. At the same time, a new generation is turning up in search of an affordable place to start families. "If you're a young couple getting married, and you want to live in a good community and can only spend around 400,000, Levittown is the only place to go," said Nancy Kalberer, an agent with Century 21, who has been selling real estate in the area for 28 years. "You sacrifice your basement, but so what?" Yes, Levittown has no basements. The mass construction methods that yielded more than 30 houses a day at the peak of development left no time to dig foundations. The houses were built on radiant heated slabs. Buried oil tanks are another quirk, Ms. Kalberer said. And she often broods over the poor planning that, as she sees it, left no reasonable place for a washing machine. But Levittown still has its original nine community swimming pools with playing fields and playgrounds, as well as remnants of the seven intimate shopping strips known as village greens. It also still has active VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) and American Legion posts. And volunteerism is strong in traditional service clubs like the Kiwanis and Lions. "People are very attached to this community, even the people who move away," said Louise Cassano, who grew up in the original Levitt house her parents bought in 1951. In 1964, she and her husband moved into their own home, on Lilac Lane. Now 74 and president of the Levittown Community Council, which organizes festivals and anniversary celebrations, she has never lived anywhere else. But attachment comes at a steep price: Levittown, which lacks a commercial or manufacturing base, has painfully high property taxes. For instance, the taxes on a 1,200 square foot house on Lilac Lane currently listed for 459,000 are 10,849. And now, after an eight year freeze, reassessments are expected to raise taxes for 52 percent of Nassau County's homeowners. Also, the community's much documented history includes ugly chapters of racial exclusion and book banning. The early leases barred homeowners from renting or selling to those who weren't "Caucasians," although they stipulated that people of color could work as domestics. Bill Griffith, the cartoonist who for more than 40 years has revisited his Levittown childhood in his "Zippy the Pinhead" strip, recalled ethnic blocks of Italians and Jews ("I was neither," he said) reflecting the makeup of settlers from Queens and Brooklyn. The demographic shift is pronounced in local churches. The building on Periwinkle Road that was once the Unitarian Levittown Community Church has since 2016 been home to the India Christian Assembly. Mr. Griffith, who left Levittown after high school, recalled knocking on the door of his old home on Harbor Lane a decade ago, just to say hello. It was opened by a Chinese family, who "immediately tried to sell me the house," he said. Developed on 4,000 acres of potato farms, Levittown is a hamlet and census designated place in the town of Hempstead. Its boundaries are commonly identified with the 11756 ZIP code. Ms. Kalberer, the real estate agent, estimated that 80 percent of the housing stock is modified versions of the 750 square foot Cape Cods and 800 square foot ranches built by the Levitts. The remaining 20 percent, she said, was built by competing developers or on the sites of teardowns. You won't find many stoop huggers seeking protection for the original buildings. These houses were meant to be altered, with their unfinished attics and roomy 60 by 100 foot lots. A close example of a pristine Levitt house, on Oak Tree Lane, lost bragging rights when its owners replaced the original asphalt shingles. Local commercial establishments have similarly expanded. "When Levittown was built, each section had a village green, and those businesses were all owned by small business owners, with the exception of a supermarket," Ms. Cassano said. "Even the major shopping center on Hempstead Turnpike was basically small stores." Today Hempstead Turnpike, the main consumer corridor running east west through the hamlet, is lined with big box outlets like Staples and fast food spots like Dairy Queen. Retail at the village greens which were designed to be within walking distance, so housewives left stranded by their commuting husbands in the age of one car families could buy necessities has grown spotty or been supplanted by housing. Many small businesses, Ms. Cassano said, are now based in the owners' homes, like her own public relations and marketing company. Locals say they can find everything they need within Levittown or in shopping centers like the Broadway Commons mall in neighboring Hicksville. For recreation they enjoy the community pools, block parties, league sports and a branch of Governor's Comedy Club. The Levittown Community Council holds a February Winterfest and a July event called Lazy Days of Summer. "Around the Fourth of July, it's like a war zone with all the fireworks," said Ms. Holland, the peripatetic Levittown resident. "Oops, I guess I shouldn't say that." Levittown's housing inventory is mostly single family. Among the 114 properties on the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island website as of Dec. 17, the least expensive house in good condition (and not in foreclosure) was an expanded Cape Cod with three bedrooms and one bathroom, priced at 379,000 (taxes: 11,506). The most expensive was a colonial style house built in 2015, with four bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms, priced at 729,000 (taxes: 34,774). According to Trulia, the median sale price of a home in Levittown, as of Oct. 18, was 449,000, a year over year increase of 8 percent, based on 1,378 transactions. Bob Koenig, the vice president of the Levittown Historical Society and Museum, who has lived in the hamlet since 2002 and has composed and recorded affectionate songs about it, described Levittown as "a starter community." It set the tone for suburban America and keeps a tight hold on old school values like civic responsibility and neighborliness, he said: "You feel like you walk out of your house and you see a real enactment of 'Father Knows Best' or 'Leave It to Beaver.' But not necessarily in a bad way." Many residents opt to drive to the train stations in Wantagh, Bethpage, Seaford or Merrick, where parking is usually easier and cheaper. Before there was Levittown, N.Y. the first of seven Levittowns in the U.S. and Puerto Rico there was a grove of pitch pine trees that grew at the present day intersection of Hempstead Turnpike and Jerusalem Avenue. The pines looked so anomalous surrounded by a sea of grasses that the area was known as Island Trees. Mr. Koenig of the Levittown Historical Society said that before World War II, pilots who flew into the three nearby airfields used the trees to navigate. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The choreographer Yvonne Meier can turn a tomato into theater. With an agile imagination and breathtaking defiance of convention, she transforms ordinary objects Ms. Meier loves a good hardware store into tools for artistic expression. On Friday night at the Invisible Dog Art Center, she did just that. There was a fantastical edge to her double bill of "Durch Nacht und Nebel (By Night and Fog)" and "Durch Dick und Duenn (Through Thick and Thin)," presented by Invisible Dog and Danspace Project. The companion works reframed Ms. Meier's 2016 solo in which she used her body as a canvas. The raw, industrial setting of the Invisible Dog provided the right ambience for Ms. Meier's brand of experimentation: Covered in Band Aids, she stoically jiggled her flesh, the first of several shape shiftings of the night. She also used objects to transform other people into art. (The show's costume, prop and scenic design consultant and fabricator was Esther Neff.) After Ms. Meier's solo bled into the group work, the performers Lorene Bouboushian and Lisa Kusanagi emerged as superheroes out of Ms. Meier's bizarre playbook. The mood was light and lively, as were the short videos in which toy babies engaged in sex acts with butter and tomatoes. The backdrop, later revealed, was a lattice affixed with rows of actual tomatoes. The question of the night was, What would happen to those tomatoes? Would Ms. Meier stage a food fight against a defenseless audience? Instead, Ms. Kusanagi and Ms. Bouboushian, with the help of a pitching machine, shot rocks at the tomatoes; Ms. Meier took a rake to them. There was the right amount of lunacy, but for Ms. Meier, it seemed a little tame, a little too beholden by choreographic structure. Despite all those toy babies having sex, the evening, at just 45 minutes, felt like a quickie. Ideas about memory permeated the choreographer Jillian Sweeney's new "Arrows Errors," a meticulously paced two act production meant to remind us, as she wrote in the press notes, "that another reality exists beneath the histories we write down." The methodical movements of the dancers and Ms. Sweeney's allure as a storyteller imbued the work, which ended its run at the Performance Project at University Settlement on Sunday, with a sense of suspense. Jodi Bender, Laurie Berg, Tara O'Con and Lindsay Reuter navigated the stage like interlocking pieces of a puzzle, while Ms. Sweeney served as a kind of master of ceremonies. At first, the dancers took turns sitting and staring; outwardly they were placid, but inwardly, as their flickering eyes hint, their bodies were on high alert. In waves, they mimicked one another's movements. "Turn, lean, circle, circle, circle," Ms. Sweeney said, before pausing briefly to snap her fingers. "Snap. This will signal that later in the dance a mountain lion will appear." Inspired by social and tap dances, the cast traversed the stage in rhythmic sequences of hops, glides and claps that revealed the effectiveness of muscle memory, or not: In one moment, the amusingly hapless Ms. O'Con tried to keep up with the claps and snaps of the others but was always a beat or two behind. If the first half, "Arrows," simmered slowly, the dreamlike "Errors," which began after a brief blackout, boiled over with Ms. Sweeney's fantastical tale about that mountain lion. Figuring out how to parse fiction and reality is a part of life nowadays, and Ms. Sweeney, with her punning title and way of questioning perception through movement, showed how delicate the line between them is. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Whitney Donhauser, the director of the Museum of the City of New York, had hoped that, come next Thursday, the museum's halls would play host to its first masked, socially distanced visitors. Not so fast, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Friday. Mr. Cuomo said that when New York City enters Phase 4 of its reopening plan on Monday, indoor cultural attractions, malls and indoor dining will not reopen yet. "We're not going to have any indoor activity in malls or cultural institutions," Mr. Cuomo said on a conference call. "We'll continue to monitor that situation, and when the facts change, we will let you know." He added that he was looking at the potential of a second wave "a man made wave" with the potential to arrive by plane, car and train from the West and the South, where Covid 19 cases are increasing. "We are still in a precarious position, not because of anything we have done, but because of the negligence of the federal government, and the states that, frankly, listen to the federal government," Mr. Cuomo added. "I am very worried about the spread that we see across the country, and the inevitability that the spread will be here." Zoos and botanical gardens will be allowed to reopen at 33 percent capacity. Four city zoos plan to reopen to the public July 24 at limited capacity, with masks required for all visitors over age 3. The New York Botanical Garden has announced plans to reopen on July 28 with visitors required to reserve timed entry tickets in advance. Monday had been the earliest date that cultural venues could potentially have reopened, but most of the city's museums had adopted a wait and see approach, with a few exceptions. The Museum of the City of New York had announced plans to reopen July 23. Fotografiska, a photography museum in the Flatiron district that opened last December, only to close its doors in mid March, had initially planned for July 29, with timed entry admission in half hour increments and an overall capacity of 25 percent. But the museum announced Thursday, even before the governor's announcement on Friday, that it would be postponed. The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced weeks ago that it would reopen Aug. 29, and it remains to be seen whether the virus situation in the city will remain stable enough for cultural attractions to reopen by that date. "Embedded in our announcement is that it is merely a plan, which of course is still subject to state and city approval and this week's public health developments underline exactly why that is the case," said Kenneth Weine, chief spokesman for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Many institutions, like the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, have not publicly announced their reopening plans. Ms. Donhauser said in an interview on Thursday that while she supports the governor's decision, the museum feels confident it can reopen while keeping visitors safe. She said the museum's small size and simple layout make it easy for visitors to navigate with social distancing. "We're ready to go as soon as the governor tells us we can," she said. Many museums are already planning measures to protect visitors, once they are allowed to return. The Museum of the City of New York will use a timed ticketing system and limit visitors to 25 percent of its capacity. Plexiglass barriers will separate cashiers from visitors, and touch screen experiences will be temporarily closed. The Met has said it will require masks and will also cap visitors at a quarter of the museum's capacity. The New York Historical Society, which is now planning on a Sept. 11 reopening, will also require masks for anyone over age 2, provide hand sanitizer stations and conduct temperature checks for all staff and visitors. In Los Angeles, some museums opened their doors in mid June, only to close them earlier this month after an order from Gov. Gavin Newsom of California when coronavirus cases surged in the state. Several Texas museums, including the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum and the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, pushed back reopening plans after a similar spike in cases in Dallas County. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
LOS ANGELES Bryan Cranston, Lou Gossett Jr., Harry Hamlin, Lou Diamond Phillips, Patrick Warburton, Dan Lauria, Samm Levine and Alex Trebek were sitting at a large oval table in the dining nook of a Westside condo on a recent Wednesday night, playing seven card stud poker. Their host, Norby Walters, was barefoot and wearing slacks with a short sleeved cabana shirt, the top buttons unfastened to reveal a scar from heart surgery. Mr. Walters, 83, was playing but also worrying the time. He cut off the game (low stakes, which keeps the mood convivial) at 10:30, and this night, he and his wife, Irene, were presenting Mr. Cranston with a cake for his best actor nomination in "Trumbo." Around 10, the game stopped and everyone sang "Happy nomination to you." Mr. Cranston, abashed, began to make a faux acceptance speech. "You know, when I was a child ..." Mr. Phillips repeated a joke, slightly raunchy, that Harvey Korman used to tell at the game. Mr. Walters asked Mr. Cranston if he would like a glass of milk. On Sunday, Mr. Walters will host another gathering: an annual Oscar viewing party that he calls Night of 100 Stars. Let us get this out of the way: Night of 100 Stars (estimates vary) is not as hot a ticket as Graydon Carter's party for Vanity Fair (outside the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills) or Elton John's with InStyle at the Pacific Design Center. Mr. Walters's event occupies the grand International Ballroom at the Beverly Hilton (after years at the Crystal Ballroom at the Beverly Hills Hotel), and the party's publicist, Edward Lozzi, is this year confirming Vince Vaughn, Rumer Willis and Cloris Leachman. True, Night of 100 Stars lacks the product promotional opportunities that have become Oscar night's overarching purpose. The event's chief underwriter and title sponsor is not a Hollywood power broker but Peter Nygard, a Finnish born Canadian retail tycoon and aging playboy who has lately been at war with a hedge fund billionaire over their neighboring manses in the Bahamas. Mr. Nygard is among the more outre figures strutting a red carpet that tends also to feature Oscar royalty (Jon Voight, Shirley Jones, Martin Landau), actor stalwarts, former sitcom parents (Alan Thicke), a gadfly civil rights lawyer (Gloria Allred), a man who went to the moon (Buzz Aldrin), and qualified eye candy because a party without beautiful women is a dud, Mr. Lozzi said. Night of 100 Stars's raison d'etre charitable until an investigation of the financing by the California attorney general's office in 2004 is now, for all intents and purposes, Mr. Walters himself. His particular place in the entertainment industry constellation eludes easy metaphors, the shorthand of "superagent" or "uber manager." "I'm bottom of the totem pole, to them," Mr. Walters said. "But I know who I am, and I know what I am." He added: "As I always say to my wife, 'I used to be important.'" Mr. Walters's son, Gary Michael Walters, chief executive of Bold Films, which had "Whiplash" in Oscar contention last year, called his father a cult figure in Hollywood. "You're in a town of strivers who are looking for the next job," the younger Mr. Walters said. "Norby is never going to give you a job. He's going to give you a cookie." In late January, in his living room, Mr. Walters offered not cookies but reminiscences about his life, surrounded by pictures of his actor friends in 8 by 10 frames, alive (Lolita Davidovich, Mimi Rogers, Bruce Davison) and no longer with us (Rod Steiger, Charles Durning). In every group picture, someone was holding a straight flush. The weekend before, from a disadvantaged table at the back of the same ballroom he will command on Oscar night, Mr. Walters had attended the Golden Globes. "I got ahold of Jon Hamm and reminded him to come to the poker game," Mr. Walters said. "I got ahold of Terrence Howard, whose number I had lost. Who is one of my players." Also Mark Ruffalo. Another recent poker lineup included Richard Dreyfuss, Jason Alexander, James Woods, Diane Lane and Joe Bologna. "I mean, everybody there is Academy Award winners and nominees," Mr. Walters said. The stakes are lower, as it were, for Night of 100 Stars. "It's my party, that's all it is," he said. "It has nothing to do with the stars, it has nothing to do with the Oscars." It's just: "That's the night that everybody's hot to go out." In the 1960s, Irving Paul Lazar, the famed literary agent and dealmaker known as Swifty, had the same thought, inviting a coterie of the Hollywood elite to dine with him while watching the Oscar broadcast live. Lasting nearly three decades, until Lazar died in December 1993, and long residing at Wolfgang Puck's original Spago restaurant above Sunset Boulevard, this party is now held up as a bygone example of true Oscar glamour. On the night Lazar was holding what turned out to be his last Spago party, Mr. Walters was a dinner chairman (along with Donald J. Trump and Anthony Quinn) of a rival Oscar party in Century City put on by Michael Bass, the son of a Beverly Hills dentist. The previous year, Mr. Bass had promised a cultural moment: the Oscar winning actor Jack Lemmon helping to bestow a humanitarian award on Boris Yeltsin, then president of Russia. Mr. Lemmon didn't show. Mr. Yeltsin beamed in. But Mr. Walters has accumulated more respect. His actor associates invariably recall meeting him at some party or charity function. Mr. Landau couldn't remember what the occasion was. Mr. Hamlin figured it must have been an awards show. Mr. Thicke thought it probably had something to do with a golf or tennis charity tournament. "There are so many promoters, as you know, in Hollywood, people who round up celebrities for one purpose or another," Mr. Thicke said. "And you come to know who the good ones are and who the fly by night ones are. And you put the good ones on your calendar every year. You know that if a certain promoter calls you to come and do a charity golf tournament, it's going to be done first class, and it's going to be what they promised, and no surprises. Norby delivers that way." Norbert Meyer came of age in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. His father, a Polish immigrant, served and boxed in the Army through World War I and then opened a bar and nightclub in the neighborhood. When Mr. Walters and his brother, Walter Meyer, took it over, they rechristened the place Norby Walter's Bel Air. As Mr. Walters tells the story, the sign lacked the ampersand. Norby Walters was born. In the 1950s and '60s, Mr. Walters opened a series of mambo joints and pizzerias and a Chinese restaurant named House of Wong in Howard Beach, Queens. He soon took over a small, struggling nightclub in the shadows of Manhattan's Copacabana on East 60th Street, calling it Norby Walters's Supper Club. "What was I going to do?" Mr. Walters said. "Become a bank robber?" He and his wife had "three rabbits at home," all boys. Mr. Walters says the club was forced to shut down after two mobsters began harassing an African American patron, who returned and shot both mobsters dead. "Everybody hit the floor," Mr. Walters said. "And this guy was very calm about it. He sat down at the bar, put the pistol down and waited to be taken." Mr. Walters, down again but never out, gratefully left what he calls "the saloon business" and went into the music business as a booking agent. At first, he built his roster with regional lounge acts, until a singer from New Jersey, Gloria Gaynor, soon to reach the stratosphere with "I Will Survive," scored her first hit record with "Never Can Say Goodbye." Mr. Walters, more a jazz and standards man than a disco man, followed the money nonetheless. He became a "chart chaser," hustling disco era track dates. With two young partners, Jerry Ade and Sal Michaels, he formed Norby Walters Associates, later General Talent International. "It was a mentoring situation in the early days, and then it was more me mentoring him, trying to hold on to him because he was a wild man," Mr. Ade said of Mr. Walters. The hip hop pioneers Eric B. Rakim would name check Mr. Walters in a lyric. The booking agency had Teena Marie, Frankie Beverly, the Bar Kays, Peaches and Herb, the Commodores, the Four Tops, Luther Vandross, Patti LaBelle, George Clinton, Rick James, Kool and the Gang and the Gap Band. According to Mr. Ade, General Talent represented 80 percent of the R B and funk charts. "If they wanted to make it big and get on the right tours and grow their business," he said of the performers, "they had to be with us." As it happened, Mr. Bloom was already in Los Angeles, trying his hand at movie industry dealmaking. In the summer of 1993, he was shot to death in his rented Malibu home. But with apologies to his onetime client, Ms. Gaynor, Mr. Walters has survived. In transforming what used to be Mr. Bass's party into Night of 100 Stars, he adroitly borrowed the name and charitable concept of a trio of network TV variety specials put on by the theatrical impresario Alexander H. Cohen at Radio City Music Hall. The first "Night of 100 Stars" aired on ABC in 1982, to celebrate the centennial of the Actors Fund. That night, Liza Minnelli performed "New York, New York" with Yankees holding bats, Princess Grace of Monaco gave a speech, a young David Letterman did stand up and the child star Melissa Gilbert modeled Perry Ellis during a celebrity fashion show. The contemporary Night of 100 Stars cannot claim such luster. In 2004, around the time the fund raiser was being looked at by a state attorney general's office that was toughening disclosure rules for charitable organizations, Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation cut ties with Night of 100 Stars. Mr. Walters subsequently settled a lawsuit for failing to register as a commercial fund raiser and file financial reports with the state. This matters not a whit to those who find in it a blessed refuge from Instagramming and mani camming, or just Somewhere to Be on a night as fraught for Hollywood as New Year's Eve. "It's a party that's being thrown by Norby for his own reasons," Mr. Hamlin said. "I've never even gotten into trying to figure out what they are. But I can go to that party and I can look at a table next to me and I'll see somebody that I worked with 25 years ago. Or I'll see somebody I worked with a year ago." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
In late January, about a half dozen reporters from The Las Vegas Review Journal gathered at a colleague's apartment after work. An article about a long running lawsuit against Sheldon G. Adelson, the paper's new owner, had just been cut in half for the print edition on orders from the top editor, and the reporters were disturbed by what they considered editorial interference. With two other colleagues conferenced in, they discussed the possibility of a byline strike. "There was a lot of frustration, a lot of venting," Jennifer Robison, a reporter who was at the meeting, recalled in a recent interview. "I remember someone talking about ordering a pizza but nobody was in the mood for anything like that." The byline strike never materialized. But the hastily arranged meeting underscored simmering tensions in a newsroom experiencing a tumultuous transition under new ownership. With newspapers struggling to survive, it is not uncommon for wealthy businesspeople to step in and buy them Jeff Bezos with The Washington Post, for instance, and John Henry with The Boston Globe. Each case presents potential conflicts in covering the owner's businesses, as well as concerns that the owner might attempt to influence coverage. The problem is particularly acute for The Review Journal. Mr. Adelson, the chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, is a casino magnate, a powerful Republican donor, a patron of education and a fierce defender of Israel, and his myriad interests present an almost singular example of how aggressive journalism can collide with the pursuits of a paper's owner. That new dynamic has roiled the ranks of the newsroom, creating a divide between top editors who see it as part of their job to review coverage of Mr. Adelson, and staff members who chafe at what they perceive as inappropriate interference. In the nearly six months since Mr. Adelson purchased the paper, at least a dozen journalists have quit, been fired or made plans to leave soon; many cite a strained work environment and untenable oversight, in particular regarding the coverage of a bitter legal dispute related to Sands's operations in Macau. There are advantages to having a billionaire as an owner, staff members agree. The newspaper has hired reporters and a graphic artist, and is upgrading its videography and photography equipment. Some employees, including Ms. Robison, have been given pay raises. A broken sewer pipe under the building has been fixed. Recently, the paper bought drones to use for news coverage. "We're doing a lot of investment in this newspaper, in the people," Craig Moon, the new publisher, said. "Not only do we want it to be a great place to work but also a great newspaper and a great website." Mr. Moon and Glenn Cook, the managing editor, say neither Mr. Adelson, 82, nor his associates review articles or direct news coverage. "There's never been any type of correspondence or information or calls from the Adelsons to do anything at this newspaper," Mr. Moon, who reports directly to the Adelson family, said in a telephone interview. In his first extensive comments on his ownership, provided in written responses to questions from The New York Times, Mr. Adelson said his family bought The Review Journal "as a financial investment" and hoped to improve its profitability. "We believe it's important that our Las Vegas community has a strong, growing, financially sound newspaper," he said. Still, current and former staff members describe a newsroom in which employees are mistrustful of top management a wariness that began with the secret sale of the paper to Mr. Adelson last December and was amplified by the handling of articles related to his family and business interests. "Morale was already not great, but when Sheldon acquired the paper it was like a boom got lowered," Ms. Robison said. "People would literally joke about, 'What's going to happen if Sheldon buys the paper?' So when he actually did, it was this bizarre feeling, it was just surreal." After 11 years at The Review Journal, Ms. Robison left on Friday for a job in corporate communications. James G. Wright, a deputy editor, plans to leave in June. Another staffer who has departed is John L. Smith, a longtime columnist who filed for bankruptcy in 2007 while defending himself against a libel lawsuit brought by Mr. Adelson. After the casino magnate bought the paper, Mr. Smith was told by upper management that he was barred from writing about Mr. Adelson and another casino owner, Steve Wynn. Among the others who have left are two reporters who covered areas aligned with Mr. Adelson's interests: gambling and stadium subsidies. "There's no doubt about it it's disappointing; I've been sorry to see every one of them go," Mr. Cook said in a telephone interview. "But we're going to replace them." Mr. Adelson said he "didn't ask for the policy" but believed it was appropriate. "I hope the people in charge are fact checking to ensure that whatever is written about me or my family or my interests is fair," he said. Mr. Wright, Ms. Robison and others say they think that top editors are not just reviewing articles, but trying to shape them in ways that make them more favorable to Mr. Adelson. "The tipping point for me was at the point where every day I was being asked to do things that made me feel uncomfortable that took me farther away from doing what I would consider quality journalism and more into the realm of presenting things in tune with the owner's other interests," Mr. Wright said. He is leaving next month for a yearlong journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan. Mr. Moyer was traveling last week and was not available for comment. Mr. Cook said: "Keith and I simply want to make sure that our coverage is beyond reproach and is as fair as it can possibly be. We recognize that, especially in the eyes of some people, we're never going to get it right." Journalists say they have become accustomed to periods of calm in the newsroom interrupted by flare ups; Mr. Wright, Ms. Robison and others describe a strained, and at times adversarial, relationship with the paper's new leaders. After Mr. Smith, the columnist, resigned in April, Mr. Moyer held a meeting and effectively told reporters that if they were unhappy with his decisions, they could quit. Immediately after the sale, there was a kind of "we're in this together" mentality. But now, with so many departures, that sense of connection to the newspaper has largely disappeared. "Most of what happened breaks my heart," said Ms. Grimes, the former features editor. "We've lost so many good journalists, some that I know wouldn't have left without this happening." Mr. Adelson runs his business empire from an office at his Venetian resort, reached by a guarded private elevator. It is decorated with magazine covers featuring images of himself. Models of the jets he owns hang from the ceiling over a boardroom table at which he often sits. Mr. Adelson has not set foot in The Review Journal's newsroom since the sale, and Mr. Moyer said in an interview last month that the owner "doesn't have anything to do with stories that run in the paper." In his responses, Mr. Adelson said, "I have never spoken to anybody in the newsroom, nor have we called them to establish news gathering policies." He added: "By the way, newspapers are the first of over 50 companies that I started where my employees tell me how to run my business." In some cases, Mr. Wright and several others said, the paper's new leaders may be making decisions pre emptively that they think will please the casino magnate. But they also say they believe that the handling of articles related to Mr. Adelson suggests there is influence from above. Much of the controversy over editorial interference involves coverage of the Macau related lawsuit against Sands. Filed in 2010 by a former employee, Steven C. Jacobs, it contains allegations of bribes to officials in Macau. The case, which carries significant ramifications for Sands's casino operations, is sensitive and acrimonious. Mr. Adelson's legal team has repeatedly tried to have the judge in the case removed (unsuccessfully), claiming she is biased. Suspicions about interference were heightened shortly after Mr. Adelson bought the paper, when The Review Journal reported that several of its reporters had been asked to monitor three local judges in the weeks before the purchase, including the judge overseeing the suit. In the ensuing months, Mr. Wright and others say, articles about the suit received particularly close scrutiny. In February, Mr. Wright said, Mr. Cook instructed him to produce an article about a motion filed by lawyers for Sands. Mr. Cook mandated that the article include 12 bullet points from the filing that the Adelson side said showed the judge's bias, without regard for the article's length. "We were not allowed to summarize or edit them in any way," Mr. Wright said. When Mr. Jacobs filed a court document, the paper's management chose not to run an article but instead posted the document online. Mr. Cook said the document was so heavily redacted that it was "basically impossible" to write about. For another article about the case, Mr. Wright said, Mr. Moyer removed or condensed material that outlined Mr. Jacobs's arguments, saying the story was too long. Staff members also point to coverage of Las Vegas Sands's attempt to build an N.F.L. ready stadium using hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding. The original version of an article that ran in early February, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, quoted an economics professor as saying it was "the height of hypocrisy" that Mr. Adelson was "preaching to get government out of people's lives, and he turns around and says he needs 780 million to build a new stadium." Word came down through Mr. Cook that Mr. Moon thought the article focused too much on criticism of Mr. Adelson's proposal, Mr. Wright said. The "hypocrisy" quote, and another saying the plan was "highly risky," were removed before the article was published. Mr. Wright said the message was sent that "Moon felt that the comments about Sheldon were personally directed and wouldn't be allowed in the story." Mr. Cook said the quote was removed because it incorrectly characterized Mr. Adelson's viewpoint. In response to claims of editorial interference, Mr. Cook said: "The notion that editors shouldn't edit stories is pretty silly. The reality is we're supposed to be editing stories, we're supposed to be trying to make them better." He said it was "not my motivation" to be kind to the owner. The constant review, though, has fueled frustration in the newsroom. One day in February, a reporter sent an email to editors just after 4 a.m. (a copy was obtained by The Times). Distressed and unable to sleep, the reporter complained that details were inserted into his story that made it inaccurate. If this continued, the reporter wrote, "the newspaper is nothing more than the PR extension of Las Vegas Sands through the Adelson publisher." "I can't live with that," the reporter wrote. "And I hope you can't either." In his written responses, Mr. Adelson said he and his family would "continue to invest in the paper and its people." He laid out a vision that included creating an investigative team, adding health and political sections and forming a fact checking department. Mr. Wright said he thought there was a "silver lining" to having a billionaire as an owner. "I think he legitimately is interested in having a quality publication, and he doesn't have to worry about the bottom line." "But it's like a lot of things in life," Mr. Wright added. "Eventually you have to pay the bill. In this case, the bill is you sacrifice some editorial independence to the interests of the owner." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
On Tuesday, President Trump released his long gestating plan for Middle East peace, the so called "deal of the century." It calls for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza; for Jerusalem, including its Old City, to be the undivided capital of Israel; and for Israel to annex all settlements, as well as the Jordan Valley which makes up nearly a fourth of the West Bank, including its eastern border with Jordan creating a discontiguous Palestinian archipelago state, surrounded by a sea of Israeli territory. Mr. Trump announced that the United States will recognize Israeli sovereignty over all the territory the plan assigns to Israel, and shortly after, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel pledged to annex all settlements and the Jordan Valley beginning on Sunday. Members of the Israeli right and other opponents of a two state solution celebrated the deal as the definitive end of the possibility of an independent Palestinian state. The Israeli left, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and other supporters of a two state solution condemned the plan for the very same reasons, calling it the final nail in the coffin of the two state solution. So there was agreement among both supporters and detractors that the proposal marked a momentous break from decades of American and international policy. But is the plan truly the antithesis of the international community's longstanding approach to the conflict? Or is it in fact that approach's logical fulfillment? For over a century, the West has supported Zionist aims in Palestine at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population. In 1917, the British government promised to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, where Jews made up less than 8 percent of the population. Thirty years later, the United Nations proposed a plan to partition Palestine: The Jews, who made up less than a third of the population and owned less than 7 percent of the land, were given the majority of the territory. During the ensuing war, Israel conquered more than half the territory allotted to the Arab state; four fifths of the Palestinians who had lived in what became the new boundaries of Israel were prevented from returning to their homes. The international community did not force Israel to return the territory that it had seized, or to permit the return of refugees. After the 1967 War, when Israel conquered the remaining 22 percent of Palestine, as well as the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria, Israel illegally established settlements in the territories it occupied and created a regime with separate laws for different groups Israelis and Palestinians living in the same territory. In 1980, Israel formally annexed East Jerusalem. As with Israel's settlement activity, there was some international finger wagging and condemnation, but American financial and military backing for Israel only strengthened. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." In 1993, the Oslo Accords granted limited autonomy to Palestinians in a scattering of disconnected islets. The accords did not demand the dismantling of Israeli settlements or even a halt to settlement growth. The first American plan for Palestinian statehood was presented by President Bill Clinton in 2000. It stated that large Israeli settlements would be annexed to Israel and that all Jewish settlements in occupied East Jerusalem would also be annexed. The Palestinian state would be demilitarized and contain Israeli military installations as well as international forces in the Jordan Valley that could be withdrawn only with Israel's consent. As with the "deal of the century," this plan, which formed the basis of all subsequent ones, gave the Palestinians increased autonomy and called it a state. There are now more Palestinians than Jews living in the territory under Israel's control, according to the Israeli military. Whether in Mr. Trump's vision or Mr. Clinton's, American plans have confined most of the majority ethnic group into less than a quarter of the territory, with restrictions on Palestinian sovereignty so far reaching that the outcome should more appropriately be called a one and a half state solution. Mr. Trump's plan has many severe faults: It prioritizes Jewish interests over Palestinian ones. It rewards and even incentivizes settlements and further dispossession of the Palestinians. But none of these qualities represent a fundamental break from the past. The Trump plan merely puts the finishing touches on a house that American lawmakers, Republican and Democrat alike, spent dozens of years helping to build. During the last several decades, as Israel slowly took over the West Bank, putting more than 600,000 settlers in occupied territory, the United States provided Israel with diplomatic backing, vetoes in the United Nations Security Council, pressure on international courts and investigative bodies not to pursue Israel, and billions of dollars in annual aid. Some of the Democrats now running for president have spoken of their disapproval of Israeli annexation, even as they propose nothing to stop it. Thus a mainstream Democrat like Senator Amy Klobuchar could declare her opposition to annexation and sign a letter criticizing the Trump plan for its "disregard of international law," when she had also co sponsored a Senate resolution "expressing grave objection" to a 2016 United Nations Security Council resolution that demanded Israel halt illegal settlement activity. Other Democrats, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, say they would be unwilling to provide American financial support for Israeli annexation. But that is little more than a slick formulation that allows them to sound tough while threatening nothing, since American assistance to Israel would not, in any event, go directly toward the bureaucratic tasks involved, such as transferring the West Bank land registry from the military to the Israeli government. Aside from vague references to using aid as a lever, no presidential candidate except Senator Bernie Sanders has put forth proposals that would begin to reduce American complicity in Israel's violation of Palestinian rights. Declarations of opposition to annexation ring hollow when they are not accompanied by plans to prevent or reverse it: banning settlement products; reducing financial assistance to Israel by the amount it spends in the occupied territories; divesting federal and state pension funds from companies operating in illegal settlements; and suspending military aid until Israel ends the collective punishment of two million people confined in Gaza and provides Palestinians in the West Bank the same civil rights given to Jews living beside them. The Trump plan, much like the decades long peace process that it crowns, gives Israel cover to perpetuate what is known as the status quo: Israel as the sole sovereign controlling the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, depriving millions of stateless people of basic civil rights, restricting their movement, criminalizing speech that may harm "public order," jailing them in indefinite "administrative detention" without trial or charge, and dispossessing them of their land all while congressional leaders, the European Union and much of the rest of the world applaud and encourage this charade, solemnly expressing their commitment to the resumption of "meaningful negotiations." Israel's defenders like to say that Israel is being singled out, and they are right. Israel is the only state perpetuating a permanent military occupation, with discriminatory laws for separate groups living in the same territory, that self identified liberals around the world go out of their way to justify, defend and even fund. In the absence of advocating policies with actual teeth, the Democratic critics of the Trump plan are not much better than the president. They are, not in words but in deeds, supporters of annexation and subjugation, too. Nathan Thrall ( nathanthrall) is the author of "The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine" and the director of the Arab Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group. 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 |
When Michael T. Osterholm, a prominent epidemiologist, heard that the White House coronavirus task force was "ramping up" its work this month, he was elated. Maybe now the United States would finally tackle the virus with the seriousness needed. Then he realized that he had misheard. The task force wasn't "ramping up" but "wrapping up." "I was in shock," said Osterholm, a professor at the University of Minnesota. "We're just in the second inning." The White House plan to disband the task force is in characteristic disarray, with President Trump reversing course on Wednesday and saying that the task force would continue but change its focus. The confusion perfectly reflects the incoherence of the American "strategy" toward Covid 19. Vice President Mike Pence had earlier said that the disbanding of the task force was possible because of "the tremendous progress we've made" against the virus. Hmm. It's actually the virus that has made tremendous progress, eclipsing heart disease to become the No. 1 cause of death in the United States. In less than two months, we have lost more Americans to the coronavirus than in the Vietnam, Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq wars combined. While Spain and Italy have emerged from their Covid 19 outbreaks and enjoyed significant falls in new infections, that has not happened in the United States. For five weeks, new daily infections in the United States have been stuck roughly in the 25,000 to 30,000 range, declining only a bit. Even the small decline in new cases in the United States is misleading, for it's simply a result of great progress in the New York City metropolitan area. Exclude New York and new cases in the United States are still increasing. About half of states are easing some restrictions this week. But to manage the reopening safely, we need massive levels of testing and contact tracing and one more sign of how we have bungled our Covid 19 response is that while testing has, very belatedly, increased significantly, on most days the United States is still testing fewer people per capita than Britain, Iceland and Portugal. Trump announced back on March 6 that "anybody that wants a test can get a test"; this is still not true. Nor have we compensated for testing kit shortages by embracing widespread testing of sewage to look for the virus in wastewater, as the Netherlands has done. Even in impoverished Pakistan, sewage testing has been widely used to monitor polio virus outbreaks, so the United States should be able to use sewage testing for surveillance of the coronavirus and early identification of hot spots. While the United States has poured 3 trillion into relief from the effects of Covid 19 money that will run out soon and that hasn't prevented young children in one in six households from not having enough to eat the nation hasn't invested nearly enough in science and in the scientific tools, like testing, vaccines, therapies and research, to combat it. "We're significantly hampered by lack of funding," said Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at U.C.L.A. who studies transmission of the coronavirus by people who are asymptomatic. Bravo to those local leaders who acted early and saved many lives I'm thinking of Govs. Jay Inslee of Washington, Gavin Newsom of California and Mike DeWine of Ohio but governors are now in an impossible situation. It makes sense to experiment with reopening in areas with fewer infections (perhaps using randomized controlled trials to gain a better understanding of what is safe), and epidemiologists note that there's a particularly good case to be made for reopening parks and beaches if social distancing is practiced. But we still don't have the testing and contact tracing to be confident that we can get the easing right or to clamp down quickly when we get it wrong. And Trump and Pence still seem oblivious. "By Memorial Day Weekend we will largely have this coronavirus epidemic behind us," Pence told Fox News only two weeks ago. That magical thinking seems to be shared by many politicians and investors alike. Let's be very clear: There's huge uncertainty, so we need great humility in looking ahead, but most epidemiologists anticipate a long, wrenching struggle against the virus. "If we have a big wave in the fall, it'll make everything we've had so far seem not all that serious," said Osterholm, whose infectious disease institute recently issued an excellent and sobering report about the road ahead. "But that's the reality of this. I tell people my job isn't to scare you out of your wits; it's to scare you into your wits." A new Columbia University study suggests that we may face a rebound in deaths by late this month because of the easing of restrictions, just as a model used by the Trump administration shows deaths increasing to 3,000 daily by June 1. "This is here to stay, in all likelihood, until we have a vaccine, and a vaccine could be a year or two away," said Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Or it could be never." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Q. I signed up for alerts from a bunch of news sites on my iPhone to keep up with the headlines, but now they're waking me up at night with their sounds and turning on the phone screen. Is there a way to mute them before bed? I don't want to turn off the phone because I use it as an alarm clock. A. The iPhone's iOS software includes a feature called Do Not Disturb, which you can use to disable app notifications, phone calls and other alerts whenever you prefer not to be interrupted. You can enable and disable the Do Not Disturb setting manually for whenever you want a period of silence, or you can schedule regular hours for Do Not Disturb to kick in automatically like overnight when you are trying to sleep. To set up Do Not Disturb, tap open the Settings icon on the iPhone's home screen. Scroll down to Do Not Disturb, and select it. On the next screen, you can choose to allow calls from people on your iPhone's Favorites list of contacts to get through even if Do Not Disturb is on. You can also allow repeated calls within three minutes from the same person, in case someone is trying to reach you in an emergency. Additionally, the settings screen provides the option to silence incoming calls and alerts whether the phone's screen is locked or unlocked. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Re "Could Trump Have Saved More Lives?," by Ross Douthat (column, Sept. 6): Mr. Douthat spends most of the article comparing the U.S. Covid deaths with those of "peer countries." This premise is faulty, as there are no comparable countries. The United States is far wealthier than any other country; we had a pandemic playbook all ready to go; we have some of the best medical facilities and most well trained medical personnel in the world. In both theory and practice we were primed to meet this challenge. Only President Trump's incompetence has made us comparable. Had Mr. Trump not thrown away the pandemic playbook handed to him by President Barack Obama and disbanded the team responsible for pandemic preparedness, the death toll would have been far smaller. The financial toll would have been far smaller as well. So to answer Mr. Douthat's question, Mr. Trump's response has not been "mediocre"; it has been "catastrophic." A "normal" president would have used the playbook to direct a comprehensive national response, including invoking the Defense Production Act right away to provide personal protective equipment, testing equipment, ventilators at reasonable cost and innumerable other essential items we lacked. If ever there was a national disaster requiring a competent president, this was it. About 145,000 deaths too many (the number suggested by David Leonhardt) are on Mr. Trump's watch, if not on his conscience. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
SAN FRANCISCO Amazon on Friday asked its employees to delete the Chinese owned video app TikTok from their cellphones, putting the tech giant at the center of growing suspicion and paranoia about the app. Almost five hours later, Amazon reversed course, saying the email to workers was sent in error. In the initial email, which was obtained by The New York Times, Amazon officials said that because of "security risks," employees must delete the app from any devices that "access Amazon email." Employees had to remove the app by Friday to remain able to obtain mobile access to their Amazon email, the note said. In a statement sent later on Friday, company spokeswoman Kristin Brown said, "There is no change to our policies right now with regard to TikTok." But by then, the initial email had already added to the storm surrounding TikTok, which has been popular with young audiences in the United States for its short, fun videos and is owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance. Because of its Chinese ownership and heightened tensions between the United States and China over issues such as trade and technology dominance, TikTok has come under increasing scrutiny in Washington over its security. Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, said on Monday that the Trump administration was considering blocking some Chinese apps, which he has called a threat to national security. Many users who have built community and business on TikTok are fearful of a broad ban. Some Amazon employees publicly shared dismay at not being able to use the app. Last year, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a federal panel that reviews foreign acquisitions of American firms on national security grounds, opened a national security review of ByteDance's acquisition of the American company, Musical.ly, which eventually became TikTok. In December, the Defense Department began telling military personnel to delete the app from government issued phones. The same month, the Democratic National Committee warned campaigns, committees and state parties about TikTok's "Chinese ties and potentially sending data back to the Chinese government." With TikTok making headlines for similar security concerns, the D.N.C. reiterated the previous warnings about TikTok in one of its regular security emails this week. Other companies are scrutinizing use of the app among employees. Wells Fargo said it told some workers who had installed TikTok on company owned phones to delete the app. "Due to concerns about TikTok's privacy and security controls and practices, and because corporate owned devices should be used for company business only, we have directed those employees to remove the app from their devices," a Wells Fargo spokeswoman said in a statement. ByteDance has made a series of moves in response to the concerns. The company said that it would separate TikTok from much of its Chinese operations, and that users' personal data would be stored in the United States and not in China. In May, ByteDance hired Kevin Mayer, a former Disney executive, to be chief executive of TikTok based in Los Angeles. It has said that managers outside China call the shots on key aspects of its business, including rules about data. On Monday, TikTok also said that it would withdraw from app stores in Hong Kong, where a new national security law from China was enacted. The company said it would make the app inoperable to users there within a few days. After Amazon's first email on Friday, TikTok said in a statement that user security was "of the utmost importance" and that it was committed to user privacy. It added, "While Amazon did not communicate to us before sending their email, and we still do not understand their concerns, we welcome a dialogue." Before Amazon sent out its second message on Friday, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, who has called for investigations into the national security ramifications of Chinese apps, said, "The whole federal government should follow suit." TikTok has long been a concern of American intelligence officials, who fear the social networking app is a thinly veiled data collection service. Over the past six months, security researchers have only furthered those concerns with a series of discoveries. Last month, a researcher uncovered that TikTok had the ability to siphon off anything a user copied to a clipboard on a smartphone passwords, photos and other sensitive data like Social Security numbers, emails and texts. The researcher began posting the findings on the online message board Reddit. The researcher, who goes by the handle Bangorlol, also said that TikTok was capturing data about a user's phone hardware and data on other apps installed on the phone. Many of these abilities are found in other apps, but TikTok's developers had gone out of their way to prevent anyone from analyzing the app, the researcher said. "This was very concerning and very rare," Oded Vanunu, who leads research into product vulnerability at the Israeli security firm Check Point, said about the findings. "There's been a lot of fear and speculation about this app, but the recent findings are raising big questions." TikTok's Chinese ownership has also been problematic for other governments. India banned nearly 60 Chinese mobile apps including TikTok last month, citing national security concerns. India and China recently clashed along a disputed border, leaving 20 Indian soldiers dead and an unknown number of Chinese casualties. The video app has soared in popularity over the past few years, especially among teenagers and young adults, who use it to make and share short videos. The app has minted its own influencers, with celebrities such as Reese Witherspoon also posting their own videos on it. Young people on TikTok have also recently exercised their political clout by claiming to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for one of President Trump's recent campaign rallies as a prank and then not showing up. The app has been downloaded roughly two billion times worldwide, according to data from analytics firm Sensor Tower. About 170 million of those downloads were from users in the United States. It has been installed more than 610 million times in India. TikTok has been viewed as a competitive threat by some American internet companies, which are eager to tap into younger audiences. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, has said that he worries about the popularity of TikTok, and his company has been building competing products like Reels, an app similar to TikTok that capitalizes on the social video format. Mike Isaac reported from San Francisco, and Karen Weise from Seattle. Nicole Perlroth contributed reporting from Palo Alto, Calif., and Nick Corasiniti from New York. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The talks between the United States and the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, which were abruptly canceled by President Trump in September, are back on track. After several months of diplomatic regrouping, American and Taliban negotiators are once again on the verge of sealing a deal. The negotiators haven't revised the basic transaction they set out last August an American commitment to withdraw troops from Afghanistan for a Taliban promise not to allow the country to be used by transnational terrorists. Rather, they have added sweeteners to the bargain: As a Taliban concession, a seven day "reduction in violence" before the United States will sign the deal, possibly followed by further steps to keep violence down, and the release of prisoners demanded by the insurgents. These measures may help build confidence in the plausibility of good faith negotiation, but they are primarily face saving devices. The violence reduction allows President Trump to reverse his repudiation of the talks and the Afghan government to stop insisting that it would not participate in the next stage of negotiations unless the Taliban declare and hold a cease fire for at least a month. "Reduction in violence" is a tricky concept and hinging the finalization of an agreement on it puts the tentative deal on unsteady footing. The phrase is probably being used to skirt the Taliban's rejection, for now, of a cease fire, but its meaning is effectively the same as a temporary and limited cease fire. (The scale and geographic spread of the reduction in violence has not yet been revealed.) Its terms are likely to be ambiguous; compliance may be difficult to verify. Any type of cease fire early in a negotiating process, when the parties have not yet built any momentum, will be especially vulnerable to violations. If the violence reduction deal falls apart, hopes for a peace process would probably shatter. It's unlikely the pieces would be picked up any time soon. Time and trust were lost after Mr. Trump called off talks in September. The United States seemed fickle because, in fact, it was. Another round of Trumpian fickleness could be an irredeemable error. But if the Taliban do reduce violence as promised, an agreement between the United States and the Taliban would be signed later this month. It will be a major milestone the first of such significance in ten years of on and off efforts to launch a peace process. Important as that will be, the expected agreement is not actually a peace deal. It is a chance to get one. The agreement will break the logjam of the Taliban's longstanding unwillingness to sit in talks with the Afghan government and other Afghan power brokers without first achieving an American commitment to withdraw forces. That the Taliban won the commitment in the Doha talks which excluded the Afghan government will burnish its legitimacy as a worthy interlocutor with the United States. The group will start the so called "intra Afghan" talks the agreement requires with its leverage enhanced. The agreement's value lies in opening the door to an Afghan peace process it will retain its salience only if it is followed by that next phase. So the details may not matter all that much. Some have criticized the possible U.S. Taliban agreement as nothing more than a fig leaf for American military withdrawal. But if all the United States wanted to do was leave Afghanistan, it could do so without making a deal with the Taliban. And if intra Afghan negotiations fall apart, it is hard to imagine the United States will feel bound by whatever it has agreed with the Taliban. Ultimately, America will pull out of Afghanistan on its own terms just as it invaded and dialed up and down its troop numbers in accord with American interests. On the flip side, the Taliban will only have reason to abide by its antiterrorism promises if a peace agreement helps it become part of the political mainstream and gain a stake in maintaining the legitimacy it has already begun to enjoy. Making the most of this opportunity will not be simple: The next stage of talks could easily consume a year or more. They will have to tackle much thornier questions of how to share power and security responsibilities and how to modify state structures to satisfy both the government's interest in maintaining the current system and the Taliban's interest in something they would regard as more Islamic. What's more, there are no doubt some on both sides who maintain maximalist aspirations, still hoping to exclude the other side from power by any means. These elements will be inclined either to provoke failure of the talks or to outlast American and other outsiders' pressure to persevere. The most important task now is to start and generate traction in intra Afghan negotiations, without getting distracted by those who might seek to capitalize on the fragility of the "reduction in violence" pledge or any cease fire agreements that follow. It is nearly certain there will be continued violence during the talks. Patience is an absolute necessity. A peace process won't be done as fast as long suffering Afghans hope, nor quickly enough to produce a definitive political win before the American presidential election. And a durable peace process needs a neutral mediator to manage it, help to bridge mistrust and nudge the parties toward compromises. This can't be the United States, which isn't neutral in the Afghan war. But there won't be a neutral mediator without American backing for the idea. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Hulu's new so called skinny bundle is beginning to take shape. Hulu has signed deals that will make networks like ABC, ESPN and Fox News a part of its forthcoming live streaming service, the company announced on Tuesday. Through the deal, 21st Century Fox's and Disney's collection of broadcast and cable channels both companies are part owners of Hulu will join the new service. Hulu previously made a deal with Time Warner, which owns channels like TNT, TBS and CNN, and is also an owner. Hulu's fourth owner, Comcast, which has a vast array of cable channels through NBCUniversal like USA, Bravo and E, has not reached an agreement to join the service. The live service is expected to make its debut in early 2017, and though Hulu has not said exactly how much it would cost, media executives have said that it may be around 40 a month. Hulu's live offering will be the latest cheaper and slimmer television package at a time when more people are canceling traditional and more expensive cable subscriptions. Other skinny bundles include SlingTV, which goes for about 20 a month, and PlayStation Vue, which goes for about 40 a month. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
New Yorkers are reluctant to return to the theater this fall, according to a survey commissioned by The New York Times. What about out of towners, who make up more than two thirds of the Broadway audience? What would it take for them to be comfortable? We put that question to readers of the Theater Update newsletter (subscribe here) and received hundreds of responses, most of them pessimistic and pained. Here is an edited sampling: I'm ready now. I'll wear the mask, I'll wash my hands, I'll sit every third or fourth seat. Whatever I need to do to get back in front of a live performance while safely and respectfully protecting my neighbors and theater staff! CORINNE ROSSI, Stonington, Conn. Without a vaccine or a cure, to attend a performance would not be a rational choice. The issue is not the statistical probability of getting the virus. Rather, it is the anxiety of being infected that prevents devout thespians, like yours truly, from going back. I actually had the virus and survived, and I do not wish this experience on anyone. ALEXANDER WAINTRUB, Los Angeles My husband and I talked about this because we miss the theater so much. He would go back right now to Broadway as long as people were wearing masks. I would go back at 50 percent capacity. BARBARA PARKER, Miami What might it take for us to come to Broadway again? Well, to start, probably a car drive rather than a flight, and socially distanced seating with mask wearing. Does that mean Broadway would have to present twice as many performances to accommodate playgoers at a safe distance? Have to leave that to the analysts, bean counters and presenters. PHILLIP LEVY, Raleigh, N.C. I am 29 and would be comfortable going back. At all the shows I've been to, people are kind, respectful and well mannered. So I trust them to use their best judgment. If theaters offered flexibility and refunds due to sickness, I believe that would help people feel less pressured to go if they were feeling the slightest bit under the weather. JOSHUA CHANG, Tempe, Ariz. My husband and I live in rural Northern California. On our last three week trip to New York in January, we attended 14 performances: theater, opera, music and contemporary dance. We want to come back, but we are 83 and 81 years old and live in a retirement community. We feel a special responsibility not to inadvertently bring the virus back home with us. For that reason it is unlikely that we will return to New York theater until there is a vaccine and/or a dramatic reduction in transmission rates. MERNA VILLAREJO, Davis, Calif. There is no aspect of life that theater doesn't help me understand. You ask what it would take for me to feel comfortable enough to come to New York? A ticket and a free Saturday. I can provide my own face mask. SEBASTIAN RYDER, Burlington, Vt. There would have to be: a vaccine; effective and viable treatment; checking for symptoms at the door; reliable social distancing and protection interventions; significant and effective ventilation; hand sanitizing stations throughout the theater; all metrics for reopening to have been reached and maintained for a 12 month period. I am sure this is not what you want to hear, but my love of theater is not so important to me that I risk dying for it. FRANK GREENE, Nashua, N.H. I am not ready to sit in a theater. No reason to! Take your performances to the parks and use bleachers. Make something fun about the seating. Make a section of audience that is interactive with the performance. Design new spaces for performers where 6 to 10 feet of distance feels like part of the whole fun experience. But surely keep dancing and singing and playing. We need you! I need you. SUZANNE O'ROURKE I am in the same cohort that many Broadway theater goers are. I will be 65 this year and have co morbid conditions. Getting on a plane from California has always been somewhat risky, but now it feels impossible. Going into a packed theater also feels impossible too. All of it breaks my heart. On the bright side, I think a lot more can be done in the virtual space. I watched "Love Letters" I had never seen it and thought it was perfect for that presentation. BETH EAGLESON, San Clemente, Calif. I'm a subscriber at three theaters in Baltimore: Center Stage and Everyman, both small houses with a generally gray haired clientele (though Center Stage has become more diverse), and the 2,000 plus seat touring company venue the Hippodrome. As a gray hair myself, I can't imagine how I'm going to comfortably attend the Hippodrome, with its claustrophobically tight seating and mob scene lobby. I can more likely imagine the smaller theaters devising a safer, spaced out seating arrangement. But with fewer ticket sales, how will they pay the bills? JANA KORMAN, Owings Mills, Md. I think I'd be OK with face masks. Longer intermissions (so the bathroom line could be spaced out). Maybe maxing out at 50 percent capacity (not even sure if that is financially viable, however). I honestly, though, would most likely want to see how things go in the fall whether there's a re emergence of the virus, or if it fades away. But if theaters open in the fall I would seriously be weighing the risks and deciding whether to go or not and my feeling now is that I most likely would go. RACHEL DORRIAN, Neptune Beach, Fla. I'm a married 68 year old woman with good health. Put me in a theater. Block off alternate rows and seats, distribute masks, Plexiglas the merch stands and bars, discontinue the beloved stage door appearances and put me in Row G! I will take a chance. BARBARA LARONDE, Walpole, Mass. Assuming there is no second wave in the fall, I would come back with adjusted seating and masks worn by audience and staff members. I would also pay a reasonable surcharge to make up some of the lost revenue from lost seats. Prayers for you, New York! JULIE MOORE, Brownsburg, Ind. I bought tickets last year to see Hugh Jackman in "The Music Man," in September. I would wear my mask, not go to the bathroom and wash hands and do almost anything to be there if it could happen. Given the issues of putting on a production, I am getting a sinking feeling it won't. JOANN BERKSON, McLean, Va. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
LONDON Where's Meghan Markle when you need her? Helping to raise money for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire via a new cookbook, apparently, and shrugging off the public's pregnancy obsession. Admirable enough. But where's the influence we all thought was coming: The reverberations from a thoroughly nontraditional royal, a woman who upended tight lipped wedding protocol to orchestrate an event that changed expectations about everything the word "princess" (or even "duchess") could mean? Not at London Fashion Week. Not in any obvious way, that is. There were some echoes of a revolution in female identity on a few catwalks. And women's history was clearly on a number of designer minds, whether the end product was seen via a computer, as I viewed some collections before I arrived, or in person. But aside from the surprise appearance of Rose McGowan leading an army of female hackers in sci fi tech bootees and cantilevered cyber wedges at Nicholas Kirkwood (Heels as the weapon of the MeToo resistance! Why not?), the clothes weren't really about how to dress for the future. Instead, they seemed preoccupied by the past. Also animal sex and string theory (the dangling kind). More on that later. At Erdem, for example, a precis on every seat told a story about two 19th century cross dressers who proved "self expression was not a crime" and inspired a host of quasi Victorian day dresses in elongated lace and tulle and blurry, watercolor florals topped by long moire bows (at the shoulders, the spine, the throat), veiled hats and elbow length gloves. There were some nods to modern exigencies in the form of houndstooth trouser suits in the same lean, puff sleeved silhouette and a flirtation with the question of gender identification (those veils hid boys as well as girls), but the mood was almost spectrally mysterious. Indeed, bows, trains, veils and capes the accessories most associated with the ghosts of femininity long ago were a peculiar leitmotif of the season. Big, sweeping bows made another appearance at Emilia Wickstead, interrupting the parade of executive basics with a giant apple green ribbon that backed a long pink sheath, not to mention Princess Margaret caps bedecked with slightly smaller versions at the base of the skull; so did capes, which were rendered seemingly sleeveless in layers of sparkling magenta tulle or volumetric florals. There were trains and more bows, this time in velvet, at Roksanda, in an otherwise earthy exploration of nomadic ease. And veils shadowed Simone Rocha's posy speckled bubble tulle twist on her Chinese heritage, featuring paintings of Tang dynasty concubines sourced from Hong Kong flea markets "imitations of imitations," she said backstage all offset by cool culottes and belted jackets. The effect was romantic and quirky and charmingly melancholy, which is her signature. But they still had an air of costume drama, as did Richard Quinn's diamond sprinkled roses and leopard print whistle stop tour through the cocktail dresses of the decades (though perhaps he could be forgive for having Windsors seemingly on the mind; Queen Elizabeth did attend his last show). Yet "The Crown," with Claire Foy's recent Emmy Award notwithstanding, if the palace has moved on, shouldn't we? Matty Bovan did, in a riotous pastiche of kitchen table pouffery. So did Hussein Chalayan, in a swing through time and regional values, from the Roman abduction of Sabine women to Eastern protectionism (his words, via some show notes), where thankfully the portentous starting points were lightened up into something more abstract and compelling: jackets pulled off the shoulders; dresses cinched at the side; collars stretched into points that dripped down the shoulders. It was more modern than the lame in a tiki bar celebrations of 1970s louche luxe at Peter Pilotto. But it wasn't until Christopher Kane that any real sense of the provocation of female strength and rule breaking was put on show. In recent seasons, Mr. Kane has gone down something of a sex rabbit hole, a focus that veered into the sophomoric, but here it was subtle enough (Just ignore the "sexual cannibalism" T shirt featuring a pair of preying mantises; the "Foreplay" sweats with two cheetahs) to provide an additive frisson to deconstructed lace boning that suggested skeletal structures as much as corsetry, jutting power shoulders and gray sweater dressing handcuffed in Swarovski. Maybe the problem is the continuing, understandable preoccupation with the country's departure from the European Union, a.k.a. Brexit, which seems to have everyone in a holding pattern waiting to see what comes next. "It's all anyone wants to talk about in interviews," Stephanie Phair, the new chairwoman of the British Fashion Council, lamented before a show of up and coming designers at Fashion East full of ties that bound: arms, torsos, busts. There's a reason the collections ended with a reception hosted by Prime Minister Theresa May at 10 Downing Street to "celebrate British fashion and international trade." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
A curator who accused MoMA PS 1 of gender, pregnancy and caregiver discrimination has settled the claim she brought against the museum saying it had rescinded a job offer upon learning she had recently given birth. Nikki Columbus, who is also an art editor, filed the claim in July 2018 with the New York City Commission on Human Rights. The settlement, made public by the law firm that represented Ms. Columbus, Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady, includes financial compensation for Ms. Columbus as well an agreement by the contemporary art museum in Queens to update its written policies designed to protect women, working parents and other caregivers who apply for jobs or work there. "What happened to me was wrong and clearly against the law," Ms. Columbus said in a statement on Tuesday. "I decided to speak out in order to protect other women at MoMA PS1 and beyond." The financial terms were not disclosed, but Ms. Columbus said in an interview that she made it a point that her agreement not bar her from discussing other details of the case. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Previously unreleased footage shows the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein leading one of his final rehearsals. Fittingly, it shows him teaching a Copland symphony to students at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer home in the Berkshires, in 1990 50 years after he had studied there with Copland. In the rehearsal, which he led just two months before his death, at 72, Mr. Bernstein urges the young players of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra to loosen up as they play Copland's Third Symphony, telling them to imagine themselves "standing on the sidewalk, thumbs in your jeans, whistling casually." Seated, he looks quite weak but fully engaged with the music. At one point he suggests that the players invent lyrics to help them capture the rhythms of the phrases. "I love the way my baby walks, I love the way my baby talks," he sings to them. "Make up any words you want to it, but it should be that casual, and that American." The video was unearthed by a new classical music website, Classical.org, which is being started on Thursday, Jan. 25, by WGBH, the Boston based public broadcaster. The site will be devoted to Bernstein this year to mark the centennial of his birth, and will offer archival material and a round the clock audio stream of music written or performed by him, said Anthony Rudel, the site's executive director and the station manager of WCRB, Boston's classical radio station. When the Bernstein centennial year ends, Mr. Rudel said, the site will expand into other areas, and add more music streams, which are seen as increasingly important in an era when large swaths of the United States have lost their local classical radio stations. In the video, something of a late master class, Bernstein grows animated as he leads the students in the symphony's rousing finale, which incorporates music from Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man." At several points he rises from his chair. "Well, that's as good as I ever hear it, that end," he tells them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
On my 25th wedding anniversary, I received a silver ring covered in diamonds via United Parcel Service. It came with a gift receipt but without a gift card. Oddly, the price tag was attached: 2,350, which, if calculated in cubic inches, was almost a bargain. Shaped like an oval shield with a sapphire in the center, the ring was so gigantic it extended beyond the knuckle of my index finger. It was a "statement ring," and here's what it said: My husband, after 25 years of marriage, still didn't get my taste in jewelry. Decades earlier, there was the chunky Art Deco engagement ring that became a nonengagement ring when we postponed the wedding. Though we had been engaged for only 15 minutes, it was long enough for me to decide that while I still loved my former fiance, I definitely didn't love the ring. Five years later, when we finally decided to marry, I ordered a simple eternity band, which arrived too big. To keep it from falling off at our wedding, I secured it with my nonengagement ring, which made me think of all the years we had wasted being nonengaged. For our 10th anniversary, my husband presented me with a delicate Burmese ruby to make up for the Art Deco disaster. I was moved but conflicted: "pigeon blood" rubies derive their name from the color of the first two drops of blood dribbling from a butchered pigeon's nose. I have no great fondness for pigeons, but I didn't want their symbolic blood on my finger. Luckily, the United States government gave me the perfect out. "Myanmar is violating human rights, and the U.S. has banned Burmese rubies," I told my husband. "I bought the ring before the ban," he said. "Other people don't know that. Besides, I feel bad for the pigeons." "That's the last time I ever get you a ring," he said. He stayed true to his word, until the delivery of this diamond shield. "What were you possibly thinking?" I asked, waving the weapon in his face. "I'd never get you something like that," he said. As it turned out, he hadn't. His gift was a beautiful bangle bracelet that immediately fell off my wrist. To be fair, I'm very small boned, but now it would have to be returned for resizing to the jeweler's workshop in Jaipur, India. Still, I was so happy he hadn't given me the shield ring that I didn't care. "So who gave you the ring?" he asked. The gift receipt was from Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills, Calif., but the U.P.S. box had a Texas address. I wondered if it was meant for the other Patricia Morrisroe who lives in Oregon and sells tiny "teacup pigs" to celebrities. I called the Texas number on the label. The woman who answered assured me that the package had been delivered to the correct address. If I faxed her the gift receipt, she said she would provide the identity of the ring's sender. After being married for so many years, I loved the idea of having a secret admirer. Who could it be? I was a little disappointed when the sender turned out to be a stranger named Stefan from Studio City, in Los Angeles. His Eastern European surname was unrecognizable. When I told the woman I didn't know him, she emailed back that Tom from customer service would be in touch. Tom never called. I tried to get through to him but was placed on hold. When I finally reached an actual person and went through the whole story, the woman said, "You need to talk to Tom." I then contacted someone in the executive office, who said he'd call back, and surprisingly he did. "The ring was supposed to go to Vera in Michigan," he said. I asked what I should do, and he said he'd get back to me. You can guess the rest. I called information to get Stefan's phone number. The operator told me there was no such listing in Studio City. I searched for him on Facebook. Most of the men with his last name were from Bulgaria, but I picked the one most likely to shop in Beverly Hills. After searching his 691 friends, I found a Vera, but she lived in Bulgaria. Her Facebook profile picture was of a boa constrictor. I sent a Facebook message to Stefan explaining the situation. I never heard back. Neiman Marcus doesn't have a branch in Manhattan, so I brought the ring to the Neiman owned Bergdorf Goodman. The woman at client services suggested taking it to Neiman Marcus in White Plains. Two days later, my husband announced that he had made a reservation at one of our favorite restaurants. "You know what I'd really like to do?" I said. "Go to White Plains." "I know, but I've got to get rid of the diamond shield ring." "I was hoping we could have a nice romantic dinner," he said. Reluctantly, my husband drove me to Neiman Marcus, where I found a customer service representative and dived into the story of Stefan and Vera, which had now assumed the tragic dimensions of Romeo and Juliet. "I can't help with rings," she said. "You'll have to go upstairs to jewelry." When the jewelry saleswoman asked if I wanted the gift receipt transferred to my Bergdorf's charge, I just said yes, figuring I'd straighten it out later. Back home, I spotted a familiar box on the coffee table. Inside was my bangle bracelet. The jeweler had been able to resize it in her New York workshop. Now I realized why my husband had made dinner reservations. He had wanted to make it a special night. The bracelet was beautiful. It was also very small, but after I used soap and ignored the pain in my thumb joint, I was able to get it on. "Don't tell me," he said. "It doesn't fit." "It's perfect," I said. "Besides, I'm never going to take it off." For the next several weeks, I forgot about Stefan and Vera. My 93 year old father was in a nursing home in Massachusetts, and I worried constantly about him. My mother had died a year earlier, a month after their 65th wedding anniversary. He was lost without her. I'd never seen him shed a tear until she died, and afterward he couldn't speak her name without crying. My father had been a college student when he proposed, presenting her with a tiny diamond that she subsequently lost. Years later, he bought her a slightly larger one. She cherished it so much that when it no longer fit on her arthritic finger, she took it to the jewelry store to have it enlarged. At the time, she was 92 and could barely walk, but she got there on her own. After she died, I spoke to my father on the phone every day. One afternoon, after telling him we were coming to visit that weekend, he said not to bother. It wasn't like him. The head nurse assured me he was fine, but I sensed something was wrong. Though my husband had a busy work schedule, he took the day off and we drove to Massachusetts. The minute I saw my father, I knew he was dying. My husband and I sat vigil for the next two days. As I held my father's hand, I traced the contours of his wedding band. He hadn't taken it off since my mother had put it on at their wedding. His finger was now so thin my sister had secured the ring with surgical tape. My father, who could barely speak, pointed to the phone and began tracing our old number. He wanted to talk to my mother. "Eileen, Eileen, Eileen," he whispered, repeating her name. I looked over at my husband. He had tears in his eyes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
A street vendor in Bogota. Volume sales of carbonated drinks in the country have climbed more than 25 percent over the past 15 years. She Took On Colombia's Soda Industry. Then She Was Silenced. BOGOTA, Colombia It began with menacing phone calls, strange malfunctions of the office computers, and men in parked cars photographing the entrance to the small consumer advocacy group's offices. Then at dusk one day last December, Dr. Esperanza Ceron, the head of the organization, said she noticed two strange men on motorcycles trailing her Chevy sedan as she headed home from work. She tried to lose them in Bogota's rush hour traffic, but they edged up to her car and pounded on the windows. "If you don't keep your mouth shut," one man shouted, she recalled in a recent interview, "you know what the consequences will be." The episode, which Dr. Ceron reported to federal investigators, was reminiscent of the intimidation often used against those who challenged the drug cartels that once dominated Colombia. But the narcotics trade was not the target of Dr. Ceron and her colleagues. Their work had upset a different multibillion dollar industry: the makers of soda and other sugar sweetened beverages. The harassment of Dr. Ceron and her colleagues was never proven to be carried out by the industry, and federal prosecutors declined to investigate. In response to questions from The New York Times, Coke and Pepsi said they were not involved, and Postobon, the soda company that filed the complaint about the organization's ad, deferred comment to The National Business Association of Colombia. The association, which represented national and international beverage makers on the soda tax issue, said it had nothing to do with the episodes. The International Council of Beverages Associations, the parent organization of trade groups around the world fighting the taxes, would not directly answer the question about whether its allies in Colombia were connected to the alleged harassment, but it condemned such actions. "We reject under any circumstance the improper influence or harassment of any individual or organization for any purpose, at any time, in any way," Katherine W. Loatman, executive director of the organization, said in a statement. The experience in Colombia may be the most extreme, but a juggernaut of industry opposition has killed or stalled soda tax proposals around the globe, including in Russia, Germany, Israel and New Zealand. Nevertheless, the idea is gaining momentum; such levies have been enacted in 30 countries, including India, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, Britain and Brunei. More than a billion people now live in places where such taxes have driven up the price of sugar sweetened beverages. The battles have been particularly intense in emerging markets as the industry seeks to make up for falling soda consumption in wealthier nations. Latin America has surpassed the United States as the world's biggest soft drink market, according to the World Health Organization, with sales of carbonated soft drinks doubling there since 2000 while they declined in the United States. The beverage industry asserts that soda taxes unfairly burden the poor, cause higher unemployment by squeezing industry sales, and fail to achieve their policy goal: reducing obesity. Studies of soda taxes have shown they lead to a drop in sales of sugar sweetened beverages a 10 percent sales decline, for example, over the first two years of Mexico's tax however, such measures are so new that there is not yet evidence of their impact on health. The Australian Beverages Council wrote in its 2016 annual report that fighting a soft drinks tax "has been consuming vast amounts of resources," and that "our learnings from other markets through our international network tells us that these types of threats must be constantly challenged before they get before a parliament for debate." In Colombia, where soda is often cheaper than bottled water, the soda tax fight took place in a key market for beverage makers. Sales volume of carbonated drinks here has climbed more than 25 percent over the past 15 years; during that same time in the United States, it fell 12 percent, according to Euromonitor, a market research firm. Coke and Pepsi were far less visible in the Colombia battle, leaving the big national beverage company, Postobon, in the spotlight. Postobon, a drinks maker and distributor for Pepsi, is part of a huge conglomerate that includes sugar cane growers, sugar mills and the country's biggest media company, RCN Television, which helped disseminate the anti tax message. Postobon and RCN declined interview requests. The stage was set for a clash between a powerful industry and a stubborn public advocate. In early 2016, Colombia, a nation of 49 million, was facing the unfamiliar prospect of stability and peace. After decades of civil war and narco terrorism, Colombians were enjoying the fruits of an aggressive United States backed military campaign that had largely decimated the country's drug cartels. Unemployment was near historical lows, the poverty rate was dropping and millions were hopeful about the possibility of lasting peace with the country's main rebel group, the FARC. In March 2016, the country's health minister, Alejandro Gaviria Uribe, proposed a 20 percent tax on soda and sugar sweetened beverages the equivalent of about 10 cents on a liter bottle that became part of a larger tax overhaul backed by Colombia's president and the Ministry of Finance. "For the first time in our lives, we thought we might become a normal country and be able to deal with issues other than violence," said Diana Guarnizo, a lawyer with Dejusticia, a rights group that helped promote the soda tax. "Here we were, an organization that had dealt with peace, violence, land reform and gross injustice, and suddenly we had the luxury to talk about what mothers are putting in their children's lunchboxes." The issue attracted the attention of Dr. Ceron, whose 10 employee organization had previously worked on climate change, smoking restrictions and the lack of potable water in poor communities. Encouraged by the health minister's soda tax announcement, they formed a coalition of three dozen civic organizations they called the Alliance for Food Health. They received crucial support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, a foundation created by Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, which dispatched experts from the United States. It also provided pivotal funding, including 260,000 for the public service ad an amount nearly equal to Educar's entire annual budget and paid for enhanced security at the group's offices. Opinion polls showed that 70 percent of the public embraced the tax. Legislative backing was harder to come by, however: 42 legislators in the 268 seat Congress said they supported the measure. The debate escalated in August, with Congress still months from a vote, when television stations across the country began airing a public service announcement in support of the tax. The 30 second spot, produced by Dr. Ceron's group, used data from the W.H.O. and featured a smartly dressed man drinking a series of sugary beverages throughout the day. Four sweetened drinks a day, the ad said, could deliver up to 47 teaspoons of sugar. Then it showed an overweight couple, a gangrenous foot and what appeared to be a man in cardiac arrest, followed by an admonition. "Better to drink water, milk or teas without sugar," the narrator said. "Take care of your life. Take it seriously." Postobon, the soft drink company, promptly filed a complaint with the government's consumer protection agency, the Superintendent of Industry and Commerce, claiming that the ad's use of the teaspoon as a unit of measurement was imprecise and that it unfairly suggested that all sweetened drinks were unhealthy. Nutrition experts countered that the ad was wholly consistent with established science showing the impact of excess sugar consumption on weight and metabolic diseases like diabetes, gout and heart disease. The Harvard School of Public Health has chronicled multiple studies backing up this assertion, including a point nutritionists make repeatedly: that sugary beverages lack nutritional value and add calories without leaving consumers feeling full. Dr. Luis Fernando Gomez, a professor of preventive medicine at Javeriana University in Bogota who backed the tax measure, said Postobon's allegations about the commercial were disingenuous. "Every fact and figure cited in that ad was backed up by mainstream science," he said. But the head of the Colombian consumer protection agency, a presidential appointee, sided with the industry petitioners. Just two weeks later, in a decision that Colombian legal experts described as unusually swift, the agency ordered the commercial withdrawn. Borrowing almost identical language from Postobon's complaint which had been filed by a company lawyer who had previously led the agency the superintendent's office said consumers had the right to truthful information, not messages that were "misleading, imprecise and confusing." The ruling went on to bar Educar Consumidores employees from speaking publicly about the links between sugar and obesity, an edict so sweeping it included the Health Ministry's own research on the subject. The consumer agency did not respond to requests for comment. The actions stunned legal analysts and health advocates. "It was unprecedented," said Ch'uya H. Lane, regional director for obesity prevention efforts at the Global Health Advocacy Incubator, which is affiliated with Bloomberg Philanthropies. An RCN lawyer demanded she delete the post, claiming it was intellectual property theft. She complied, but the network filed a complaint with federal prosecutors who, in turn, opened a criminal investigation. The case, still pending, carries a possible fine of 300,000. "If they win," she said. "I will be financially ruined." It was around this time that employees at Educar's offices began to complain about echoes and other voices on their cellphones. They suspected they might be under surveillance. Others found it hard to use the internet in the office. In October, Dr. Ceron's office phone ceased functioning entirely. "Sometimes we could not work at all because our laptops would stop following orders and the mouse would just do what it wanted," Diana Vivas, the group's lawyer, said. Ms. Lane of Bloomberg Philanthropies was so concerned that she stopped using email and the phone to discuss strategy with Educar. Instead, she moved communications to some of the same encrypted apps used after the surveillance of soda tax advocates was discovered in Mexico. Called in to investigate, Andres Erazo, Educar's longtime tech consultant, said he discovered that antivirus software on workplace computers had been disabled. He also found spyware on the office router that gave an unknown outsider access to the organization's web traffic and online communication. According to Mr. Erazo, three cellphones including those used by Dr. Ceron and Ms. Vivas had been compromised by spyware. Mr. Erazo urged Dr. Ceron to buy new cellphones but she refused. "If they're listening to us, what are they going to hear?" he recalled her telling him. "We're talking about a public health campaign!" An independent examination of Educar's computers conducted for The New York Times by CSIETE, an internet security firm in Bogota, did not turn up any malware. Giovanni Cruz Forero, the firm's chief executive, said Educar employees had reformated one of the two office laptops the firm examined, which would have largely erased evidence of tampering. Mr. Cruz said it was also possible intruders took steps to erase their digital footprints. The firm did not examine cellphones of Educar employees. One morning in mid November, Dr. Ceron was startled awake at 5 a.m. by a call to her cellphone. "Shut up, you old wench," the caller yelled, according to a report she filed with the Fiscal General de la Nacion, Colombia's prosecutorial agency. In early December, Dr. Ceron was walking to the gym when a man, his face obscured by a hooded sweatshirt, accosted her with the same message. "Callese," he yelled before walking away, or, "keep your mouth shut." She reported both episodes to prosecutors. A spokesman for the prosecutorial agency declined to comment on Dr. Ceron's complaints, citing privacy rules that bar discussion of cases with anyone not directly involved. Dr. Ceron stopped driving alone. And she pressed the local news media to cover the intimidation, but it was facing its own challenges from tax opponents. With its cordon of armed guards, bomb sniffing dogs and airport style X ray machines, the headquarters of Colombia's oldest newspaper, El Espectador, is among the most heavily fortified compounds in the country. The need for such measures is driven home by a sixth floor display: showcased behind glass is a yellowing front page reporting the assassination of El Espectador's editor, Guillermo Cano, who was gunned down on Dec. 17, 1986, as he drove home from work. Three years later, a huge truck bomb shattered the newspaper's offices, killing a reporter and wounding 83 others. During the 1980s and 1990s, violence claimed the lives of a dozen El Espectador employees all victims of Colombian drug cartels angered by the newspaper's unflinching coverage. Reached by phone, the newspaper's vice president for advertising, Mauricio Umana, disputed Mr. Cano's account, saying he had not received a call from Coca Cola or any other soda company executive. At the Colombian branch of the online news site Vice, the editorial staff clashed with advertising executives over their efforts to squelch a column criticizing the soda industry. Vice had previously run two opinion pieces in favor of the soda tax and the disputed third column did ultimately run, though not on the home page, making it hard for readers to find. The incident was part of what prompted Vice Colombia's founding editor, Juan Camilo Maldonado, to resign. Mr. Maldonado declined to be interviewed for this article but colleagues with direct knowledge of the incident said he was dismayed the company would cave to pressure from advertisers. A spokesman for Vice did not address the reasons for Mr. Maldonado's resignation, but said, "The fact that all of the stories were published and were critical of the soda industry speaks for itself." On the last day of 2016, opponents of the tax were victorious. Using a complex procedural maneuver, congressional leaders killed the soda tax, dropping it from the larger tax overhaul package. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Chenxue Luo, a performer with the Shanghai Kunqu Troupe, in "Nightwalk in a Chinese Garden." Only 40 people a night get to see "Nightwalk in the Chinese Garden," a site specific production staged beneath the evening sky at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif. They are among the few members of the public to wander the garden formally called the Garden of Flowing Fragrance after its usual 5 p.m. closing time. The play they see, by following performers along specially illuminated pathways, bridges and pavilions, is inspired both by classical Chinese drama and early 20th century California history. Mr. Lai is a prominent Taiwanese dramatist and director whose works have earned acclaim throughout the Chinese speaking world. The dreamlike "Nightwalk," which runs through Oct. 26, combines elements of the Ming dynasty era opera "The Peony Pavilion," sung in Chinese, with a new English language story about an artist in 1920s California. The production is an unusual collaboration between the Huntington and CalArts Center for New Performance; the cast of 20 includes CalArts students and alumni, and members of the Shanghai Kunqu Troupe. "The Peony Pavilion," written in 1598 by the dramatist Tang Xianzu, can run almost a full 24 hours if performed in its complete form. In it, a sleeping young woman dreams of a love affair with a man she has never met and, after she awakens, dies of disappointment. But she returns to life after the man learns of her in his own dreams. Excerpts from the opera are featured in "Nightwalk," and as in many site specific works, the narrative unfolds differently depending on how an audience member proceeds. "This, along with the dreamlike quality of the Chinese Garden at night, enhances the inherent subject matter I deal with: the borders between dreams and reality, composer and composed, cause and effect, art and life, life and death," Mr. Lai wrote. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
WHAT IS IT? The unrivaled sexpot of semi attainable sports cars. HOW MUCH? 65,925 to start; 105,875 for R version as tested. WHAT MAKES IT RUN? A supercharged and superloud 5 liter V8 making 550 horsepower. HOW QUICK IS IT? Scalded cat fast, at 3.5 seconds from 0 to 60 m.p.h. IS IT THIRSTY? E.P.A. rating is 16 m.p.g. city, 23 highway. If the industry awarded a Best Soundtrack statuette, the 2014 Jaguar F Type convertible would win handily. For 2015, the F Type becomes more of a bombshell with the addition of a lithe coupe whose knockout beauty matches the song of its supercharged engine. Ian Callum, who took his talents from Aston Martin to Jaguar, is among the designers who acknowledge that a well executed coupe will look better than its convertible counterpart. Taking nothing away from the lovely F Type convertible, the coupe's plunging roofline accentuated by beautifully drawn rear glass and flared hips give it an unfair advantage. Fortunately, the F Type is more than a pretty face. Jaguar says the aluminum intensive coupe is the most torsionally rigid model in company history, 80 percent stiffer than its open roof sibling. To increase the strength of the "pillarless" design, which eliminates a roof support bisecting the side glass, a pair of hydroformed aluminum beams span the entire roof arch. Compared with the heavier, more pliable convertible, the increased core strength has helped to create a notably more athletic, focused performer. I tested the pick of the litter, the F Type R coupe, which starts at 90,925. (A pair of supercharged, 3 liter V6 models, with 340 or 380 horsepower, start at a respective 65,925 and 77,925.) An optional panoramic roof ( 1,200) doesn't open, but it creates the illusion of a single piece of glass stretching from behind the windshield to the rear deck. Peer through that glass, and you'll see the integrated air deflector that rises at 70 m.p.h. to reduce aerodynamic lift by 265 pounds; it tucks away below 50 m.p.h. All great so far, including flush mounted handles that pivot out when you unlock the doors. But one year into its run, the F Type's cabin looks and feels even more like a pretender. Coupe or convertible, the Jaguar is like a star architect's big city hotel: The facade is eye popping, but inside the actual room there are bare walls and a warm Diet Coke in the minibar. Stitched leather on the dash hits the right luxury note, as do sport seats with integrated headrests and cool, clear lensed climate control knobs. But other materials and switches give off a plasticky, rubbery vibe. Two of a sports car's most crucial elements seem like compromises: the bland driver's gauges and the automatic shifter, a stubby rectangle whose touch yields no pleasure. And while the Corvette and the Porsche 911 offer 7 speed manual transmissions, the Jaguar has only an 8 speed paddle shifted automatic, though it is smooth and swift in all facets. And to its credit, the Jaguar is so vivid, aggressive and desirable that I stopped noticing its cabin blemishes. On a summer day in the horse country of Dutchess County, N.Y., the F Type came into its own, hammering and haunting back roads like no Jaguar I've driven. Pushed harder at Gingerman Raceway, a charmingly scruffy road course in Western Michigan, the coupe proved it was more than a stylish British fop: Swinging its tail wide under power and using its robust brakes and monumental thrust almost an unfair advantage to eke out a lead over a formidable BMW M4 in hot pursuit. Not surprisingly, the F Type doesn't steer as sensitively as a Porsche; few cars do. But history's most powerful production Jaguar does accelerate more quickly than a 911 S or a Stingray. And with its ability to bomb into curves and howl out again, fully vested in the road sensing adaptive suspension and brake based torque vectoring system, the F Type R would surely claw any rival's tail on public roads. Those are things that haven't been said about a Jaguar since the legendary E Type of 1961 75. After 40 years with no two seater in its lineup and a long period of corporate slumber the F Type R continues Jaguar's fairy tale revival. It's one part beauty, one part beast. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
The Trump administration is taking its campaign against illegal immigration to the workplace. The raids by federal agents on dozens of 7 Eleven convenience stores last week were the administration's first big show of force meant to convey the consequences of employing undocumented people. "We are taking work site enforcement very hard," said Thomas D. Homan, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in a speech in October. "Not only are we going to prosecute the employers who knowingly hire the illegal aliens, we are going to detain and remove the illegal alien workers." When agents raid workplaces, they often demand to see employees' immigration documents and make arrests. But after the agents leave, it is difficult for the government to meaningfully penalize businesses that hire unauthorized immigrants. Instead, according to law enforcement officials and experts with differing views of the immigration debate, a primary goal of such raids is to dissuade those working illegally from showing up for their jobs and to warn prospective migrants that even if they make it across the border, they may end up being captured at work. Targeting 7 Eleven, a mainstay in working class communities from North Carolina to California, seems to have conveyed the intended message. "It's causing a lot of panic," said Oscar Renteria, the owner of Renteria Vineyard Management, which employs about 180 farmworkers who are now pruning grapevines in the Napa Valley. When word of the raids spread, he received a frenzy of emails from his supervisors asking him what to do if immigration officers showed up at the fields. One sent a notice to farmhands warning them to stay away from 7 Eleven stores in the area. "Our work force frequently visits 7 Elevens," said Mr. Renteria. "They're very nervous. It's another form of reminding them that they're not welcome." "The consequences are not that harsh, and the effect of the enforcement is less than it should be," said Jessica M. Vaughan, the director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates tighter restrictions on immigration. The law requires employers only to ensure that documents appear to be valid, and federal law prohibits them from requiring specific types of identification from workers. Employers negotiate reduced administrative fines and sometimes put political pressure on local officials when they become targets, making the punishment for companies "weaker than it should be," Ms. Vaughan said. "There are employers for whom the penalties are just the cost of doing business." The more lasting effect of raids is to spread fear among undocumented workers, who often end up bearing the brunt of enforcement action at the workplace. "Having some semblance of a fear of workers' being arrested will have a behavioral shift," said William Riley, who spent 20 years as an ICE special agent, under both Bush presidencies and the Clinton and Obama administrations, and is now a consultant at Guidepost Solutions, working on corporate compliance. Mr. Riley said that under the last administration, people were more lax about working illegally, assuming they wouldn't be arrested. "There was slightly more complacency when it was pretty well known that there wasn't a fear of being arrested in your workplace," Mr. Riley said, nor much of a deterrent to "using fake documents to get a job." Mr. Renteria said he expected raids on farms soon, because the industry is a big employer of "people with complicated immigration status." More than half of California's agriculture workers lack documents, according to a federal survey. Mr. Renteria worries that if agents home in on the Napa area, no one will stay to harvest the grapes. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. "They will start calling their cousins, aunts and uncles and finding the safest place where the work is," he said. The last flurry of public, on site investigations happened under President George W. Bush, who sent immigration agents to several meatpacking plants and other workplaces. Those raids led to hundreds of arrests of workers and prompted many other employees to stop reporting to work, according to local news reports. But they also enraged advocates for immigrants and drew complaints from business owners. The Obama administration changed tack and pursued employers mainly by inspecting their paperwork. Such audits doubled from fiscal years 2009 to 2013, reaching 3,127, then declined sharply. Law enforcement may welcome a more aggressive approach under the new administration. But sending armed agents to the doorsteps of American companies could prove politically uncomfortable for Mr. Trump, who has portrayed himself as an ally to business. Doris Meissner learned how quickly local politicians can spring into action when their hometown industries feel threatened. As head of the agency that preceded ICE, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, from 1993 to 2000, Ms. Meissner tried to focus on holding employers accountable. She approved the start of Operation Vanguard in the 1990s, in which the agency asked for employee records in several Nebraska meatpacking plants. When it came time to pursue charges against some employers, Ms. Meissner said, she started receiving frantic calls from Nebraskans on Capitol Hill. "The politics gets hot and heavy," Ms. Meissner said. "These are communities that are heavily reliant on these industries. This is the major employer. These are the major consumers at the stores and the bowling alleys." Ms. Meissner says work site raids don't work in the long term because they fail to address the real magnet drawing people into the country: a need for laborers. Cracking down on employers who violate the law is crucial, she said, and it isn't right to employ people who are here illegally. But without a visa system allowing unmet labor needs to be addressed with foreigners, she said, ICE shouldn't expect patchwork enforcement stings to persuade farms, hotels or meatpackers to stop employing unauthorized workers. "When your laws don't align with the market, then the market is always going to win," Ms. Meissner said. "When you have such a public thing happening close to home, folks feel the presence of ICE constantly," said Mariela Martinez, the organizing director of the Garment Worker Center in Los Angeles. But her clients have families and children here, Ms. Martinez said, so they can't just pack their bags and go. "It's not motivating people to self deport," she said. "It's motivating people to not use their labor rights. It's causing people to distrust government agencies." Ms. Martinez helps people in the garment industry file claims for back pay with the state when their employers pay them less than they're owed. She said far fewer workers asked for restitution last year compared with 2016, partly because of concern that their bosses would call ICE if they spoke up. That was the punishment one manufacturer meted out to Pablo, a 36 year old sewing worker in Los Angeles who would not give his last name because he lacks papers and fears being identified by ICE. When he received a check for 92 after working three 11 hour days at a garment factory last month, Pablo insisted that he deserved more. His boss responded by offering to pay him what he was owed, but only if Pablo offered up his home address. After signing another check, Pablo said, the factory owner said that he would call immigration officials and direct them to Pablo's door. "You feel terrible. You feel uncomfortable," Pablo said. "I was so scared." He called Ms. Martinez and they returned together the next day to tell the employer that the threat constituted illegal retaliation under California law. The employer backed down. The 7 Eleven raids will give garment bosses even more control over their workers, Pablo said. "Now they know the president is on their side," he said, "so they feel like they can intimidate people and treat them badly and they will never talk." Still, Pablo has been here since he was 17, and has no plans to leave yet. He has bills to pay. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
From my hotel room's balcony, Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, lay before me like a curiosity shop at the crossroads of antiquity and absurdity. Its shelves were crammed with symbols of long gone epochs, genuine collectibles and dubious tchotchkes. An Eiffel Tower topped one building. A Statue of Liberty adorned a hotel. Beyond them, authentic monuments like the crenelated Kale Fortress, with sixth century foundations, the minimalist Museum of Contemporary Art and the domed St. Clement of Ohrid Church crowded the vista. But it was the city center's new hodgepodge of mammoth monuments and applique wedding cake facades that demanded my attention. Hellenic statues held watch over squares and streets. Macedonia's main government complex, recently recast as a copy and paste White House, complete with square portico and tympanum, begged for recognition. This novel retro collection was part of a controversial urban renewal project, starting in 2010, called "Skopje 2014." For some, the undertaking, which includes statues, buildings and renovations, was an attempt to refashion the center and attract tourism. For others, it was a political scheme to leave an inappropriate stamp on the culture's legacy with a ballooning price tag. "The main conclusion of most of the tourists is that Skopje became Europe's new capital of kitsch," Andrej Zernovski, the mayor of Skopje's Center Municipality, wrote in an email. Mr. Zernovski is a member of the Liberal Democratic Party, which opposes the country's ruling party. "The consequences of changing the look of the city are changing the identity of the city, because neoclassic and Baroque style have never been present in Macedonian history." On a crisp spring day, I headed for the center, alongside men in shirt sleeves carrying leather man bags (omnipresent in Southeastern Europe) and women with oversize sunglasses and defiantly high heels. I passed through the recently erected Arc de Triomphe like Triumphal Arch. The Paris cum Skopje monument was still meringue white, not yet the blank canvas for protest against growing concerns about corruption within the ruling party it would become a week later. At Gallery Osten, a venue dedicated to drawings with monthly exhibitions and permanent pieces by Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso, I met Angel Sitnovski, a local architect. We went around the corner to Gostilnica Kaj Jole, a restaurant with traditional dishes like tas kebab, slow cooked pork and onions, which cost 280 denars, or about 5. In the same building as the Macedonia Writers' Association, the bohemian hub was established in 1963, when an earthquake rocked the city center and killed more than 1,000 people. I ordered the stew and a local pilsner called Skopsko. "The only good thing is they chose a small area to build all of this about one square kilometer," Mr. Sitnovski said of Skopje 2014's effect on the city. He shook his head. "It's really necessary for travelers to see the old parts that haven't been destroyed." A list of suggestions in hand, I set out. At sunset, I crossed the Vardar River, which bisects town, to the Ottoman era quarter, known as Carsija. I stood atop the Stone Bridge, built in the 15th century on Roman footings. Behind me, the fountain beneath Alexander was now illuminated by a kaleidoscopic light show as Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" blasted on a loop. Looking forward (northeast), the warrior's father, a Brobdingnagian Philip II, stood at the edge of Carsija with a fist raised in salute to his Day Glo son. An aha moment washed over me. To discover Skopje's core, one must crack its shell and dig into its neighborhoods to peel back the layers of this unexpectedly delicious city, renowned for fresh food and venues spotlighting Macedonia's musicality. I entered the old bazaar district, the center of life during a 500 year Ottoman rule beginning in 1392. Stone block medieval mosques and minarets anchored flagstone streets lined with terra cotta roofed shops selling jewelry, copper coffee sets and leather goods. Today, former hammams and hans (inns) serve as galleries and museums. I walked up a steep alley, past tiers of bar patios, to Sveti Spas Church, which contains a 30 foot, intricately carved iconostasis and a 17th century fresco. Next door, I took a seat at Pivnica Star Grad, which opened in 2009, brews 10 beers and had a band playing American rock to a packed terrace. I ordered an IPA. "I think the best place in Skopje is Carsija," said Pane Temov, the brewery's owner, who also directs the annual Buskerfest, and helped re establish the ancient neighborhood as a night life magnet. "I see this as an asset to the city and the diversity that comes with it." Two neighboring sites, on the edge of Carsija, occupy diametrical ends of that diversity. The Kale Fortress (free entry), Skopje's calling card, was built upon the city's original settlement, likely from the Bronze Age. The medieval ramparts one walks today, with sweeping views, were fortified many times from the sixth century to the Ottoman Empire. The Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in 1970 behind the fortress, is perhaps Skopje's best kept secret. Natural light floods the three wing, 32,000 square foot exhibition space containing 3,000 pieces from 65 countries. Artists include Alexander Calder, Picasso and the photographer Robert Adams. In the days that followed, nearly every conversation I had became political. As we hiked a trail to Vodno, the 3,497 foot mountain to the city's southwest, my friend Aleksandar Donev, born and raised in Skopje, spoke emphatically. "This has always been a complicated and mixed city historically and ethnically when you think about territorial issues with Greece, Bulgaria and Albania but right now we're really having an identity crisis." Our path took us below the cable car ferrying families to the summit and the 216 foot Millennium Cross, built in 2002. We stared down into the center and the denture white, Skopje 2014 structures surrounded by comparatively tasteful Communist era Brutalist architecture. "The main square used to have flowers and an understated kind of cool," Mr. Donev continued. "You have to scratch the surface of this city, because coming here just to take pictures of that means nothing." Back in town we headed to the Debar Maalo neighborhood, a 10 minute walk from the main square, but a world away. Bistros and cafes lined leafy streets. Tattooed parents pushed baby carriages. Friends clinked wineglasses at streetside lounges. We grabbed a table under a sprawling walnut tree in Casa Bar's patio. Opened in 2013, Casa keeps R B playing during the day and D.J.s spinning at night. I ordered a mojito and settled into a laid back Skopje rhythm more concerned with eating and drinking than erecting monuments. When the subject of Skopje 2014 came up, one new acquaintance said: "It would be cool if we can use this in a good way. Maybe paint the buildings and statues different colors." "We are in some interesting crossroads between the East and the West," Vlatko Stefanovski, the globally renowned guitarist and Skopje resident told me over Skype on a break between European gigs. Mr. Stefanovski, who mixes traditional and popular styles, was a stalwart of the Yugoslav rock scene in the 1970s and 1980s. "We have influences from the old Byzantine music, we have influences from the Ottoman times, and we also have influences from the classical music of Europe. And in recent times we have big influences of pop music and rock and jazz." As my week came to a close, I put aside a day to visit two places that highlight the city's strengths: Matka Canyon and Sektor 909, a seminal nightclub opened in 2003. I first headed to the canyon, 10 miles southwest of Skopje. The gorge, cut by the Treska River, covers nearly 20 square miles. Around the river and lake, created by the Matka Dam, trails wind through forests that act as arboretums with 77 butterfly species. Trekking along one path, I watched climbers and a kayak competition. I passed three monasteries, wedged into rocky nooks, built between the 14th and 17th centuries. By the time I arrived back in Skopje, there were already murmurings of marches to protest the country's ruling party, which was under investigation for offenses including wiretapping, blackmail and electoral fraud. However, when I walked into Sektor 909, thoughts of protests dissolved with the beats pulsing through the mirrored space bathed in seductive red strobes. Dancers mixed with off duty D.J.s checking out the competition. "When we started, a few promoters fought for different styles of music we were Detroit Funk House," the owner, Ognen Uzunovski, told me. Mr. Uzunovski said one reason he continued to promote eclectic styles was because he had a role "to educate young people, especially in this political situation." The Colorful Revolution, as it has become known, began the next day. Men and women, young and old, all took to the streets. Frustration and creativity intersected in the form of peaceful marching, plastic whistles and, definitively, paint. Within a week the bedizened emblems of kitsch became vehicles for Pollock esque, purposeful art as protesters hurled balloons filled with paint on government buildings, the Equestrian Warrior, the Triumphal Arch. The symbols of corruption became the substrata for liberation. The shell was cracked. Beneath the surface, an ancient capital on the verge of a Renaissance was making its debut. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
SAN FRANCISCO Whether it is a video claiming the earth is flat or the moon landing was faked, conspiracy theories are not hard to find on Google's YouTube. But in a significant policy change, YouTube said on Friday that it planned to stop recommending them. After years of criticism that YouTube leads viewers to videos that spread misinformation, the company said it was changing what videos it recommended to users. In a blog post, YouTube said it would no longer suggest videos with "borderline content" or those that "misinform users in a harmful way" even if the footage did not violate its community guidelines. YouTube said the number of videos affected by the policy change amounted to fewer than 1 percent of all videos on the platform. But given the billions of videos in YouTube's library, it is still a large number. YouTube and other powerful technology platforms have faced rising criticism for failing to police the content that users post. YouTube's recommendation engine has been denounced for pushing users to troubling content even when they showed little interest in such videos. It has also been blamed for widening the political divide in the country, pushing already partisan viewers to more extreme points of view. The new policy is also the latest example of YouTube's taking a more aggressive approach to content that many find distasteful even if it is not in violation of the service's community guidelines. In late 2017, YouTube started putting "controversial religious or supremacist" content in a "limited state" so the videos are not monetized with advertising, and features such as comments and likes are turned off. Some videos appear behind a brief message saying the videos may be inappropriate or offensive. YouTube provided only three examples of the types of videos that it would stop recommending: those promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, ones claiming the earth is flat or content making blatantly false claims about historic events like the Sept. 11 attacks. The company declined to provide more detail on what other videos would be classified borderline. YouTube is not taking down the targeted videos, and it will still recommend them to users who subscribe to a channel that creates such content. Also, YouTube will not exclude the so called borderline videos from search results. "We think this change strikes a balance between maintaining a platform for free speech and living up to our responsibility to users," YouTube wrote in the blog post. YouTube said it was constantly adjusting its recommendation system, noting that it made hundreds of changes last year. In its early years, YouTube said, it suggested videos the company thought would lead to more clicks or views, but it found that people who created videos had started trying to game the system with clickbait titles. YouTube recently said it wanted to recommend videos that viewers would consider "time well spent." YouTube also said it had been working to broaden recommendations so that they weren't too similar to the most recent video. Much like the powerful and opaque algorithms that govern the search results of YouTube's parent company, Google, the video service is secretive about the factors weighed by its systems that dictate which videos are recommended. YouTube did not reveal much about how it would determine which videos would be excluded from its recommendations. The decisions on specific videos will be made not by YouTube employees, but by so called machine learning algorithms. Human raters from "all over the U.S.," the company said, will watch different YouTube videos and provide feedback on the quality of those videos. Those judgments will help inform what the algorithm flags. Google has adopted a similar approach in determining the quality of its search results. YouTube said it would start making a gradual change on a small set of videos in the United States, but it plans to introduce the alterations globally as the system becomes more accurate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Halfway through "Bad Hair," Justin Simien's horror comedy on Hulu, a group of Black women sit in a conference room and debate the merits of changing their hairstyles to conform to the new corporate climate at Culture, the Black music television network where they work. Donning large gold hoop earrings, a slouchy beanie hat and a head full of natural coiled curls, Sista Soul (Yaani King Mondschein), a VJ there, is the last holdout. "I'm not changing who I am just to appeal to some whiter," she asserts, before pausing and then correcting herself, "wider demographic." After flipping her own newly sewn in hair weave, Anna (Elle Lorraine), Sista's colleague and the focus of the movie, calmly retorts, "No one is asking you to change who you are. Just the way you look." Simien ("Dear White People") has described his satire horror as "a very weird love letter to Black women and the unparalleled power they possess to endure and persevere," and he set his film in 1989, the year that Black Entertainment Television debuted "Rap City." That hip hop music video show featured an astounding number of Black women entertainers and dancers wearing weaves. At the same time, regular women found weaves more available, though still quite expensive, as well as more diverse in color, texture and application techniques, making it substantially harder to discern whether the look was real or fake. Simien's love letter is more a cheeky lament that mourns the huge financial costs and psychological toll those early hair weaves took on Black women. But the real loss is the movie's portrayal of Black women's hair as a commodity and competition for which they are willing to die or kill. In contrast, a recent crop of French and American films, including "Hair Wolf," "Nappily Ever After" and "Le Bleu Blanc Rouge De Mes Cheveux," has also taken up themes involving hair and cultural assimilation. But these films, along with "Chez Jolie Coiffure" and "Liberty," all directed by women of color, reveal what also might be gained when Black women shape their own hair cultures as spaces of ingenuity, intimacy and communal pride. In many ways, "Bad Hair" is very much like "Good Hair," the 2009 documentary narrated by Chris Rock and inspired by his desire to understand the obsession that his daughters and other Black girls and women have with "good hair." That term is often used among African Americans to valorize naturally straight or wavy hair, and denigrate the more tightly coiled "bad" hair textures. In addition to traveling to hair shows in Atlanta and beauty parlors and barbershops in Brooklyn, Rock journeys to India in search of the women who sell their hair for weaves. In one particularly notable discussion with the Rev. Al Sharpton, both men bemoan the amount of money Black women spend on their hair, only to commiserate over what seems to really bother them: how expensive it is for them and other Black fathers and husbands who are expected to bear the costs. That scene did not age well. Watching the movie again recently, I was struck by how much Rock diagnosed "good hair" as a desire of mainly Black women, without reflecting on how often, even in the casting of his movies, Black women with long, wavy hair are considered more attractive, and thus imbued with more social capital, than other Black women. It's a different story when women are in charge of the narratives. "Hair Wolf," by Mariama Diallo, and "Nappily Ever After," by Haifaa al Mansour ("Wadjda"), also take those contradictions head on, but from the vantage point of Black female protagonists who must learn to embrace their natural hair as a form of racial resistance and women's empowerment. The horror comedy short "Hair Wolf" (available on HBO) takes place in a Black salon whose staff has to stick together to fend off the vampiric impulses of Rebecca, a white woman who appropriates African American culture Black hairstyles, the Black Lives Matter movement, even Black men. The only way that the glamorously dressed, natural hair wearing Cami (Kara Young) and Eve (Taliah Webster) who work there can resist these incursions is by conjuring up the names of Black women like Tina Turner, Janet Jackson, Angela Bassett, and Gabrielle Union, whose enduring beauty seems to resist the demands of aging and time. The Netflix romantic comedy "Nappily Ever After" (based on the novel of the same name by Trisha R. Thomas) stars Sanaa Lathan as Violet, a marketing executive who accidentally loses her hair after wearing a chemical relaxer for too long. When she breaks up with her noncommittal boyfriend, the movie explores her many stages of grief and various hairstyles. (She tries weaves, going blonde, shaving it all off, and the press and curl.) As with Anna from "Bad Hair," Violet's hair drama began as childhood trauma, and to overcome it, she must shed the baggage of her past, as well as cut all her hair off. And yet, sometimes one woman's liberation might be another girl's oppression. At least this is true of Josza Anjembe's 2016 "Le Bleu Blanc Rouge De Mes Cheveux," a short about Seyna (Grace Seri), a 17 year old Cameroonian who wants to be a French citizen. Against her father's wishes, Seyna is ready to denounce her nationality and tries to submit her paperwork for naturalization, only to be turned away because her Afro sticks out too much for her official photo ID. After all her locks are shaved off, Seyna must decide if becoming a French national is worth losing so much of her identity and culture. While debates about immigration partly inspired Rosine Mfetgo Mbakam's 2019 documentary "Chez Jolie Coiffure," it is also about Sabine, a Cameroonian immigrant who runs the Jolie Coiffure salon in what's known as the African quarter of Brussels. Much like the 2005 "Beauty Shop" starring and produced by Queen Latifah, Mbakam's movie highlights the ingenuity of Black stylists who are expected to be as versatile as Black women's hair itself and be able to cut natural hair, add extensions and put in chemical relaxers. But, because "Chez Jolie Coiffure" is shot entirely in the confines of the shop, the film also reveals how Black immigrant women value the salon as a familiar space in an unfamiliar country, a center where they can also go to seek legal advice and join informal professional networks. Displacement and loss drive Faren Humes's "Liberty," a short about two girls, Loggy (Milagros Gilbert) and Alex (Alexandra Jackson), who are preparing to dance at a groundbreaking ceremony for the development of new homes at Liberty Square, one of the oldest public housing sites in the country. The construction not only interrupts their rehearsals with its noise but also tests the bond of their friendship when Alex tells Loggy that she has to move because her building is scheduled to be demolished. In images evocative of the braiding scenes in Julie Dash's "Daughters of the Dust," Humes offers up the intimacy of Black girls doing each other's hair as a salve providing a sense of sisterhood in the face of the unknown. In that tense conversation with Sista Soul in "Bad Hair," Brook Lynne (Lena Waithe) tries to convince her to change by noting, "Black women are magic, you know that. We could put our hair all the way up to the sky, drape it down to our shoulders, or somewhere in between." These movies show that vitality and much more by reminding us of how Black women have used their hair to reveal its other powers: its ability to inspire, connect and heal. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
TIANANMEN: THE PEOPLE VERSUS THE PARTY (2019) 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Earlier this month thousands of Hong Kong residents began marching against a bill that would allow extraditions to the mainland. The timing of the demonstrations makes them ever more potent: This month marks the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, when Chinese troops unleashed their firepower on a throng of protesters in Beijing who were calling for democracy in the Communist country. This new documentary revisits the seven weeks that led up to the killings and maps out how a peaceful, student led movement ended in unthinkable carnage. The director Ian MacMillan weaves archival footage with testimony from protesters, witnesses and Communist Party insiders who watched the tragedy unfold. MIKE EPPS: ONLY ONE MIKE (2019) Stream on Netflix. Throughout his 20 years in entertainment, Mike Epps ("Next Friday," "How High") has usually appeared on the sidelines playing goofy secondary characters. But when it comes to comedy, he steals the show. In this new special, the actor and comic performs in front of a packed house in Washington, delivering salacious one liners (some more juvenile than others) and ruminating on relationships and family. One moment he's flashing a toothy smile and explaining how old age can slow down a man's sex drive. The next he's recalling how his daughter's boyfriend won him over (it involved some potent weed). MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE (1986) Stream on the Criterion Channel; rent on Amazon, iTunes or Vudu. This beloved dramedy, directed by Stephen Frears, tackles homophobia, racism and sociopolitical inequality with one too many subplots. But the thread that holds it together is the impenetrable romance between Omar (Gordon Warnecke), a young Pakistani man in South London, and Johnny (Daniel Day Lewis), a childhood friend who grew up to be a street punk. After his uncle asks him to take over a rundown laundromat, Omar crosses paths with Johnny and enlists his help. The two transform the dirty establishment into a glamorous one, rekindle their spark and get caught up in a drug deal along the way. Writing in The New York Times, Vincent Canby called the movie a "rude, wise, vivid social comedy." He added: "'My Beautiful Laundrette' has the broad scope and the easy pace that one associates with our best theatrical films." DAMNED Stream on Britbox. Before Himesh Patel landed the lead role in the upcoming Beatles movie "Yesterday" (opening Friday), he co starred in this British workplace sitcom about social workers who focus on children services. The show deftly balances its weighty subject material some cases involve student teacher relationships, missing teenagers and prostitution with a hilarious portrayal of humdrum work life akin to that of "The Office." "Damned" only ran on Channel 4 for two seasons, but critics gave it a thumbs up: The Telegraph called it "unforgiving, warm and extremely funny." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Meiacanthus nigrolineatus, an example of a venomous fish from the family of fang blennies. It's a small fish, only a couple of inches long, and its bright colors make it pop in the Pacific coral reefs it calls home. The first thing that makes this fish peculiar is the striking pair of large lower canines it sports. But when attacked by a predator, this fish, part of a group called fang blennies,does something even more strange. A predator that puts this fang blenny in its mouth would experience a "violent quivering of the head," according to George Losey, a zoologist who observed this species up close in a series of feeding experiments in the 1970s. Then the predator would open its jaws and gills. The little blenny would swim away, unscathed. A study published on Thursday in Current Biology now lays bare the details of the fish's unusual defense mechanism: Unlike most venomous fish, which inject toxins through their fins, fang blennies deliver venom through their bite. Furthermore, fang blenny venom does not appear to produce potent pain, at least in mice. Instead, it causes a sudden drop in blood pressure, which might temporarily stupefy predators. The authors of the study took a multipronged approach to studying venomous fang blennies. First, they imaged the jaws of fang blennies collected from around the Pacific and Indian Oceans to confirm what scientists long suspected: Not all fang blennies have venom glands at the base of their teeth. Out of 100 fang blenny species, only about 30 are venomous, said Nicholas Casewell, a lecturer at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and an author of the study. This pattern suggests that fang blennies first evolved large teeth, which certain species then coupled with venom. Analyzing venom extracted from one fang blenny species, the scientists identified three toxins: an enzyme, a molecule used in neuron signaling and an opioid, in the same class as heroin and some prescription painkillers. Though the toxins have never been reported in fish before, other animals including snakes, bees, scorpions and cone snails have independently evolved to use similar ingredients in their venoms, Dr. Casewell said. When his team injected small amounts of fang blenny venom into the paws of mice, the mice showed no significant signs of distress. However, their blood pressure plummeted by nearly 40 percent. "If you had such a big crash in blood pressure, you would immediately feel faint and dizzy," Dr. Casewell said. "We don't know that fish get faint or dizzy, but it's extremely likely such a large drop would impact coordination and swimming ability." It's noteworthy that fang blenny venom does not cause "instant, severe pain, which is a hallmark of other fish venoms," said Jeremy Wright, an ichthyologist at the New York State Museum who was not involved in the study. Though it may not be acutely painful, fang blenny venom is unpleasant enough to send a serious message to fish predators. Up to 20 species some nonvenomous fang blennies and some fish that aren't blennies at all copy the bright colors, patterns or cruise and dart swimming style of the venomous fang blennies to escape predation themselves. A handful even use mimicry to feast on the scales and skin of larger fish without being eaten. Though venom has evolved 18 separate times in 2,500 venomous fish species, fish venom is understudied, said Leo Smith, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas who was not involved in the research. This study has the potential to break the field "wide open," he said. "It will serve as a blueprint for future work." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
India has collected biometric data on most of its 1.3 billion residents, to be used in a nationwide identity system called Aadhaar, meaning "foundation." NEW DELHI Seeking to build an identification system of unprecedented scope, India is scanning the fingerprints, eyes and faces of its 1.3 billion residents and connecting the data to everything from welfare benefits to mobile phones. Civil libertarians are horrified, viewing the program, called Aadhaar, as Orwell's Big Brother brought to life. To the government, it's more like "big brother," a term of endearment used by many Indians to address a stranger when asking for help. For other countries, the technology could provide a model for how to track their residents. And for India's top court, the ID system presents unique legal issues that will define what the constitutional right to privacy means in the digital age. Ms. Jha had little choice but to keep at it. The government has made registration mandatory for hundreds of public services and many private ones, from taking school exams to opening bank accounts. "You almost feel like life is going to stop without an Aadhaar," Ms. Jha said. Technology has given governments around the world new tools to monitor their citizens. In China, the government is rolling out ways to use facial recognition and big data to track people, aiming to inject itself further into everyday life. Many countries, including Britain, deploy closed circuit cameras to monitor their populations. But India's program is in a league of its own, both in the mass collection of biometric data and in the attempt to link it to everything traffic tickets, bank accounts, pensions, even meals for undernourished schoolchildren. "No one has approached that scale and that ambition," said Jacqueline Bhabha, a professor and research director of Harvard's FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, who has studied biometric ID systems around the world. "It has been hailed, and justifiably so, as an extraordinary triumph to get everyone registered." Critics fear that the government will gain unprecedented insight into the lives of all Indians. In response, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other champions of the program say that Aadhaar is India's ticket to the future, a universal, easy to use ID that will reduce this country's endemic corruption and help bring even the most illiterate into the digital age. "It's the equivalent of building interstate highways," said Nandan Nilekani, the technology billionaire who was tapped by the government in 2009 to build the Aadhaar system. "If the government invested in building a digital public utility and that is made available as a platform, then you actually can create major innovations around that." The potential uses from surveillance to managing government benefit programs have drawn interest elsewhere. Sri Lanka is planning a similar system, and Britain, Russia and the Philippines are studying it, according to the Indian government. The poor must scan their fingerprints at the ration shop to get their government allocations of rice. Retirees must do the same to get their pensions. Middle school students cannot enter the water department's annual painting contest until they submit their identification. In some cities, newborns cannot leave the hospital until their parents sign them up. Even leprosy patients, whose illness damages their fingers and eyes, have been told they must pass fingerprint or iris scans to get their benefits. The Modi government has also ordered Indians to link their IDs to their cellphone and bank accounts. States have added their own twists, like using the data to map where people live. Some employers use the ID for background checks on job applicants. "Aadhaar has added great strength to India's development," Mr. Modi said in a January speech to military cadets. Officials estimate that taxpayers have saved at least 9.4 billion from Aadhaar by weeding out "ghosts" and other improper beneficiaries of government services. Opponents have filed at least 30 cases against the program in India's Supreme Court. They argue that Aadhaar violates India's Constitution and, in particular, a unanimous court decision last year that declared for the first time that Indians had a fundamental right to privacy. Rahul Narayan, one of the lawyers challenging the system, said the government was essentially building one giant database on its citizens. "There has been a sort of mission creep to it all along," he said. The court has been holding extensive hearings and is expected to make a ruling in the spring. The government argues that the universal ID is vital in a country where hundreds of millions of people do not have widely accepted identification documents. "The people themselves are the biggest beneficiaries," said Ajay B. Pandey, the Minnesota trained engineer who leads the Unique Identification Authority of India, the government agency that oversees the system. "This identity cannot be refused." Businesses are also using the technology to streamline transactions. Banks once sent employees to the homes of account applicants to verify their addresses. Now, accounts can be opened online and finished with a fingerprint scan at a branch or other authorized outlet. Reliance Jio, a telecom provider, relies on an Aadhaar fingerprint scan to conduct the government mandated ID check for purchases of cellphone SIM cards. That allows clerks to activate service immediately instead of forcing buyers to wait a day or two. But the Aadhar system has also raised practical and legal issues. Although the system's core fingerprint, iris and face database appears to have remained secure, at least 210 government websites have leaked other personal data such as name, birth date, address, parents' names, bank account number and Aadhaar number for millions of Indians. Some of that data is still available with a simple Google search. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
MONTREAL The driving instructor wiped his brow with a handkerchief, and not just because of the heat. His student a grown woman, squinting over the dashboard was ramming the curb in an effort to parallel park. "We reached an agreement, right then and there: He let me pass the test, and I promised never to drive," Brenda Milner said, smiling to herself at the decades old memory. "You see, my spatial skills aren't so good. That's primarily a right brain function." Dr. Milner, a professor of psychology in the department of neurology and neurosurgery at McGill University in Montreal, is best known for discovering the seat of memory in the brain, the foundational finding of cognitive neuroscience. But she also has a knack for picking up on subtle quirks of human behavior and linking them to brain function in the same way she had her own, during the driving test. At 98, Dr. Milner is not letting up in a nearly 70 year career to clarify the function of many brain regions frontal lobes, and temporal; vision centers and tactile; the left hemisphere and the right usually by painstakingly testing people with brain lesions, often from surgery. Her prominence long ago transcended gender, and she is impatient with those who expect her to be a social activist. It's science first with Dr. Milner, say close colleagues, in her lab and her life. Perched recently on a chair in her small office, resplendent in a black satin dress and gold floral pin and banked by moldering towers of old files, she volleyed questions rather than answering them. "People think because I'm 98 years old I must be emerita," she said. "Well, not at all. I'm still nosy, you know, curious." Dr. Milner continues working, because she sees no reason not to. Neither McGill nor the affiliated Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital has asked her to step aside. She has funding: In 2014 she won three prominent achievement awards, which came with money for research. She has a project: a continuing study to investigate how the healthy brain's intellectual left hemisphere coordinates with its more aesthetic right one in thinking and memory. And she has adapted to the life as an undeniably senior senior researcher. "I come into the office about three days a week or so, that is plenty," Dr. Milner said. "And I have some rules," she added. "I will take on postdoctoral students, but not graduate students. Graduate students need to know you'll be around for five years or so, and well" she chuckled, looking up at the ceiling "well, it's very difficult if they have to switch to someone else, you know." Dr. Milner's current project is, appropriately enough, an attempt to weave together two of brain science's richest strands of research, both of which she helped originate a lifetime ago. One is the biology of memory. Dr. Milner changed the course of brain science for good as a newly minted Ph.D. in the 1950s by identifying the specific brain organ that is crucial to memory formation. She did so by observing the behavior of a 29 year old Connecticut man who had recently undergone an operation to relieve severe epileptic seizures. The operation was an experiment: On a hunch, the surgeon suctioned out two trenches of tissue from the man's brain, one from each of his medial temporal lobes, located deep below the skull about level with the ears. The seizures subsided. But the patient, an assembly line worker named Henry Molaison, was forever altered. He could no longer form new memories. Concerned and intrigued, the surgeon contacted Dr. Wilder Penfield and Dr. Milner at the Montreal Neurological Institute, who had previously reported on two cases of amnesia in patients treated there. Thus began a now famous collaboration. She started taking the night train from Montreal to give a battery of tests to Mr. Molaison, who was known in research reports as H. M. to protect his privacy. In a landmark 1957 paper Dr. Milner wrote with Mr. Molaison's surgeon, she concluded that the medial temporal areas including, importantly, an organ called the hippocampus must be critical to memory formation. That finding, though slow to sink in, would upend the accepted teaching at the time, which held that no single area was critical to supporting memory. Dr. Milner continued to work with Mr. Molaison and later showed that his motor memory was intact: He remembered how to perform certain physical drawing tests, even if he had no memory of learning them. The finding, reported in 1962, demonstrated that there are at least two systems in the brain for processing memory: one that is explicit and handles names, faces and experiences; and another that is implicit and incorporates skills, like riding a bike or playing a guitar. "I clearly remember to this day my excitement, sitting there with H. M. and watching this beautiful learning curve develop right there in front of me," Dr. Milner said. "I knew very well I was witnessing something important." The other strand her new research project incorporates is so called hemispheric specialization: how the brain's two halves, the right and the left, divide up its mental labor. In the early 1960s, scientists including Dr. Milner had shown that the brain's left hemisphere specializes in language and reasoning, and that the right makes holistic, more aesthetic judgments it is more sensual than intellectual. Still, in people with brain injuries, particularly to the frontal lobes behind the forehead, the two hemispheres could compensate by working together in subtle ways. In an era before precise imaging technology, standard pencil and paper testing could not easily detect the deficits caused by specific injuries. In a series of studies, and using the same knack for exhaustive observation, Dr. Milner demonstrated that several kinds of tests could help characterize frontal lobe injuries. One of these, for example, is called the verbal fluency test, which assesses a person's ability to generate words in certain categories or beginning with certain letters a test of left hemisphere integrity. "People with early signs of dementia can have trouble with imagery, and by the time the disease is advanced they've lost that ability," said Joelle Crane, a clinical psychologist at the Montreal Neurological Institute. "One area this new work might help us with is in training people to learn in a more visual way." For Dr. Milner, after a lifetime exploring the brain, the motive for the work is personal as well as professional. "I live very close; it's a 10 minute walk up the hill," she said. "So it gives me a good reason to come in regularly." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The prospect of a wall a "big, beautiful wall" or a long, costly monument to fear has entered American political discourse over the past year. But in the world traveled by the Slovakian artist and filmmaker Tomas Rafa, walls have been realities for a long time: some physical, made of reinforced concrete, and others metaphorical, maintained by increasingly virulent nationalist policies. Mr. Rafa's cinema verite video work about life along the fault lines of such boundaries in Central Europe, amid a rising tide of far right opposition to immigration and refugees, arrives this week at MoMA PS1. "Tomas Rafa: New Nationalisms," on view from April 9, presents more than eight years of documentation of the resurgence of xenophobic and neofascist groups, a searing vision like something out of the 2006 film "Children of Men" except it is actually happening. (718 784 2084, momaps1.org.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The World Health Organization extended its declaration of a global health emergency on Friday amid increasing criticism from the Trump Administration about its handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The move comes exactly three months after the organization's original decision to announce a "public health emergency of international concern" on Jan. 30. At the time, only 98 of the nearly 10,000 confirmed cases had occurred outside China's borders. But the pandemic continues to grow. More than 3.2 million people around the world are known to have been infected, and nearly a quarter million have died, according to official counts. There is evidence on six continents of sustained transmission of the virus. All of this has led experts in the W.H.O.'s emergency committee to reconvene to assess the course of the outbreak, and to advise on updated recommendations, said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the organization's director general. "The pandemic remains a public health emergency of international concern," Dr. Tedros said, adding that the crisis "has illustrated that even the most sophisticated health systems are struggling to cope with a pandemic." A rapid rise in new cases in Africa and South America, where many countries have weak health care systems, was alarming, he said. The acceleration is occurring even as the spread of the virus has appeared to slow in many countries in Asia and Europe. Although people are slowly starting to return to work in China after weeks of lockdowns, businesses, schools and cultural institutions are still shuttered in most parts of the world. The virus has badly damaged the global economy. Scientific and public health experts have warned that reopening restaurants, movie theaters and malls may lead to a deadly second wave of infection. Several Republican senators, especially those locked in difficult races, have started shifting the blame for the spread of the virus onto China. Party officials hope that deflecting anger over the human casualties and economic pain in the United States will help salvage a difficult election. President Trump has embraced the strategy, calling out "China's misinformation" and the W.H.O.'s "China centric" response in the early days of the pandemic. He has accused the W.H.O., without evidence, of helping China to obscure the extent of its epidemic in the early days, as well as being slow to release guidelines for precautions against infections. In fact, the W.H.O. began raising alarms in early January, as soon as it was informed by China of a new, mysterious illness in the city of Wuhan. On Friday, Dr. Tedros insisted that the W.H.O. did not waste any time in traveling to Beijing "to discuss with the leadership and to find, to see for ourselves, the situation in China." In mid April, Mr. Trump announced he would halt funding to the W.H.O. The United States is by far the organization's largest benefactor. Dr. Tedros announced Friday that the European Investment Bank would provide grants and financial support to help strengthen global supply chains, and facilitate the distribution of diagnostics, personal protective equipment and other medical supplies. "We look forward to seeing how that type of innovative financing could deliver real results for global health when W.H.O. is advocating health for all," Dr. Tedros said. "W.H.O. is deeply grateful to the European Investment Bank for its support and collaboration." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. But the Trump administration has not been alone in criticizing the W.H.O. Some public health experts and officials of other countries, including Japan's finance minister, have also said the organization was too deferential to China. Others have said the W.H.O. should have realized in early January that there was human to human transmission of the virus, and that the organization should stop blocking participation by Taiwan. Yet the W.H.O. has still managed the coronavirus crisis as well as it could, and better than the Trump administration has, many experts say. The W.H.O. helped arrange testing supplies and personal protective equipment for countries in need and held daily news meetings to warn the world that the virus was spreading and that countries should do everything they could to stop it. At nearly every briefing, Dr. Tedros repeated: "We have a window of opportunity to stop this virus. But that window is rapidly closing." On Friday, Didier Houssin, chair of the W.H.O. emergency committee, said that committee members had made more than 20 recommendations, hoping to reduce disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Elisabeth Andersson, a 23 year old stock exchange analyst, was in a bind. She had a new cat that was eating her aloe plants. No friend or family member wanted the plants, nor could she bring herself to just trash them. "I had been growing the plant for 9 or 10 years, harvesting the little babies and replanting them," she said. "It would make me too sad." So when her apartment building, a TF Cornerstone property in Long Island City, advertised a communal plant swap, she attended. One Saturday this fall, she placed her plants (including a jade) on a table in the courtyard. She spent hours convincing fellow participants to trade their species for hers. She returned home with a new cactus her cat wouldn't touch. It was also fun socially. "These people are like homegrown botanists," she said. "They made me want to learn more." Plant swaps are gaining in popularity across New York City. Some are organized events. Others are individual trades that occur with the help of listservs or social media. It's a solution for people who might want to diversify their collection or who need to get rid of their plants perhaps because of an allergy or a new workplace policy that doesn't allow them. "People are starting to look at their plants differently," said Summer Rayne Oakes, author of "How to Make a Plant Love You." She has organized plant swaps across the country, including the one that Ms. Andersson attended in Long Island City. "There is a trend of people trading clips that they have grown or plants they got from their parents. It's meaningful." Her first plant swap took place in the fall of 2017 at Lululemon's Hub Seventeen, the brand's event space. ("It's hard to find great spaces in the city that are relatively open," she explained. "You need table space. You need horizontal space.") She advertised it through social media and was thrilled when 70 people attended. Since then she has organized eight plant swaps, six of them in New York City. Tickets cost 10 to 15 (donated to charity) and include gift bags, panels and nonalcoholic drinks like kombucha. Earlier this year, she launched a global calendar where people all over the world can advertise their events on Homestead Brooklyn. Since April, the site has listed 84 plant swaps, most of them in the U.S., but also including ones in Sydney, Cape Town and Amsterdam. For Robert Jeffery, a 31 year old clinical lab supervisor in Williamsburg, the timing of plant swaps has never been right. "I just returned from visiting Chatuchak Flower Market in Bangkok, and I was also able to visit the Jianguo Weekend flower market in Taipei," he said over email. "Turns out I had at least two other friends hosting plant swaps back in the city while I was away. FOMO." So he's getting the job done over social media. On an Instagram story, he shared his desire to own a peperomia argyreia, a South American plant whose leaves look like a watermelon. He is now swapping a few stems of that plant for ceropegia woodii, also called rosary vine and native to South Africa, and senecio rowleyanus or string of pearls, which is native to southwest Africa, with a stranger from Sunset Park. Instagram has been so successful, he said, "It is sort of like Plant Currency, PlantCoin." A few years ago, Luca Iorga, who splits her time between the Bronx and Owego, N. Y., where she runs a domestic animal sanctuary, was walking in midtown when she saw a gigantic, healthy plant in a dumpster. Realizing people needed a way to recycle their houseplants if they're moving or if they simply no longer have space for a particular plant, she launched PlantSwap.org, a social network where people can list species they want to give or receive. "We had 44 people sign up the first day," she said. "Now in the New York City area alone, we have about 1,250 users." Larger companies and nonprofit organizations are starting to use the free service. Art Start, a nonprofit organization that works inside Nelson Family Residence, a family shelter in the South Bronx, received 43 plants from a company that was moving offices and couldn't take their plants with them. "Without those plants being donated there is no way we could have afforded them at that size and quality," said Mariam Aryai Rivera, an associate program manager for Art Start. Among the plants donated were dracaena warneckii, a plant native to tropical Africa that is known for its pointy, striped leaves and that can cost more than 100 each. There is also the trouble involved with finding a perfect match. Many people using these services are looking for rare or exotic plants. "The process was much more competitive and cut throat than I expected," said Ms. Andersson. "I had beginner plants, and all these people had exotic ones. I would be like, "Are you willing to trade a cactus for an aloe and they would say, 'Nah.'" But she, like many plant lovers, will tell you that's also part of the fun. "I can't wait to go again," she said. "I will definitely prepare a little more next time. I need selling points and to pick my best plants and bring them all clean and shiny." In late November, Jules Hunt, 28, an Austin native who runs a wellness and mindful lifestyle brand, hosted a plant swap at Athleta, a sports clothing store in the Flatiron district. She wanted the event to be more about community and fun than competition. "I know some people can take plant swaps very seriously," she said. So she dedicated half an hour at the beginning of the evening to strictly socializing before getting down to business. The 30 participants were having so much fun chatting they stayed long after the plant swapping had ended. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The Chinese telecom giant Huawei, which runs this production campus in Dongguan, has long been a point of national pride. On the first anniversary of her arrest in Canada, Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of the Chinese telecom giant Huawei, issued an open letter describing how she experienced fear, pain, disappointment, helplessness, torment and acceptance of the unknown. She wrote at length about the support she received from her colleagues, about friendly people at a courthouse in Vancouver and about "numerous" Chinese online users who expressed their trust. Her letter, posted on Monday, was not well received on the Chinese internet, where Ms. Meng is known in a term meant to be endearing as "princess" because she is a daughter of Huawei's founder, Ren Zhengfei. On the Twitter like social media platform Weibo, many users posted the numbers 985, 996, 251 and 404 in the comment section below her letter. They were slyly referring to a former Huawei employee who graduated from one of the country's top universities in a program code named 985, worked from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week and was jailed for 251 days after he demanded severance pay when his contract wasn't renewed. His story went viral in China, generating angry responses online. That resulted in 404 error messages as articles and comments were deleted, a sign of China's censors at work. The former employee, Li Hongyuan, was eventually released from jail with no charges and received 15,000 in government compensation last week. He shared his story online last week, and that was when the hit to Huawei's reputation began. "One enjoyed a sunny Canadian mansion while the other enjoyed the cold and damp detention cell in Shenzhen," Jiang Feng, a psychologist, commented on the Quora like question and answer site Zhihu. Ms. Meng has been under house arrest in a six bedroom home, awaiting potential extradition to the United States on charges that she conspired to defraud banks about Huawei's relationship with an Iranian company. The anger directed toward Ms. Meng reflected an uneasy moment for both Huawei and China's middle class professionals. In the past year, Huawei had been fending off claims by the United States government that it is secretive and unreliable and that it spies for Beijing, an allegation the company has repeatedly denied. The anger on social media was also indicative of new insecurity among members of China's middle class, who have never experienced an economic downturn and have always thought they had more protections than lower paid migrant workers. People said they could see themselves in Mr. Li. "Many middle class Chinese used to believe that if they went to good schools, worked hard and cared little about the current affairs they would be able to realize their Chinese dreams," a blogger wrote on Weibo. "Now their dreams are in tatters." Huawei declined to comment on the public response. Mr. Li, a Huawei employee for 12 years, negotiated a 48,000 severance package in March 2018, according to interviews he gave to Chinese media outlets. But he didn't get an end of the year bonus that he said had been promised to him. He sued Huawei in November last year. A month later, he was detained in Shenzhen and accused of leaking commercial secrets. He was officially arrested in January on an extortion accusation. But he was released in August with no charges. He did not respond to interview requests. Huawei insisted in a statement that it had done nothing wrong and challenged Mr. Li to prove that he had been treated unfairly. "Huawei has the right, and in fact a duty, to report the facts of any suspected illegal conduct to authorities. We respect the decisions made by the authorities," the statement said. "If Li Hongyuan believes that he has suffered damages or that his rights have been infringed, we support his right to seek satisfaction through legal means, up to and including lawsuit against Huawei." Online commentators called the statement "arrogant" and "cold blooded." "The elephant stepped on you, but you can step back on it," one popular WeChat article said. "What a response of justice!" Jiang Jingjing, a blogger, criticized Huawei for trampling on its employees' rights with its tough performance evaluation system and legal firepower. "Once a company becomes a cold, dehumanized grinding machine, what's the point for it to exist?" he wrote. In some ways, new criticism of Huawei harks back to the early days of the company. Huawei cultivated an aggressive "wolf culture" that encouraged its employees to work extremely hard. New employees would get a mattress when they joined because everyone was expected to work late and often sleep in the office. Over a decade ago, a series of employee deaths drew harsh scrutiny of the company. An investigative report by a news weekly counted six unnatural deaths in two years, including four suicides. Since then, especially after the United States started a global campaign to try to stop its allies from using Huawei's next generation wireless technology, known as 5G, Huawei has become a symbol of China's technology prowess and American attempts to keep China down. One of the Weibo posts of Ms. Meng's letter received 1,400 comments. Many simply said 251, the number of days Mr. Li was detained. Fewer than 10 comments, sympathetic ones, are still visible to the public. "A company that's too big to criticize is even scarier than a company that's too big to fail," Nie Huihua, an economics professor at Renmin University in Beijing, told the news site Jiemian on Tuesday. Jiemian's interview with Mr. Li, published on Monday, was deleted. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The Food and Drug Administration released new guidelines on Tuesday for coronavirus vaccine developers a step that had been held up for two weeks by top White House officials. The guidelines make it highly unlikely that a vaccine could be authorized by Election Day. The move, which was cleared by the White House's Office of Management and Budget, appeared to be an abrupt reversal a day after The New York Times reported that White House officials, including Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, were blocking the guidelines. Top F.D.A. officials were caught by surprise when they learned midafternoon that the new guidelines had been cleared. The new recommendations, which do not carry the force of law, call for gathering comprehensive safety data in the final stage of clinical trials before an emergency authorization can be granted. On Tuesday evening, President Trump showed his displeasure at the action of his own White House, and charged that the new guidelines were a conspiracy against his re election prospects. "New F.D.A. Rules make it more difficult for them to speed up vaccines for approval before Election Day. Just another political hit job!" he tweeted, tagging Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, the F.D.A. commissioner. The guidance was formally published hours after the F.D.A. had quietly released the information at the end of a document prepared for an upcoming meeting of its vaccine advisory committee. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the F.D.A. has said that it has been seeking ways to accelerate the development of vaccines without sacrificing safety. In June, the agency released an initial set of guidelines to give vaccine developers a better idea of how the F.D.A. would decide if a vaccine were acceptable, either for an emergency use authorization or for a full license. Four vaccines have reached the final stage of testing, known as a Phase 3 trial, in the United States. A fifth is expected to start this month. Mr. Trump has repeatedly suggested that a vaccine would be ready by Election Day, if not before. Among the recommendations, the agency advised vaccine makers to follow volunteers for a median of two months after the final dose. The F.D.A. also expected vaccine makers to document five cases of severe infection in people who received the placebo instead of the vaccine. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. The F.D.A. submitted the guidelines to the Office of Management and Budget for approval more than two weeks ago, but they stalled in part because of Mr. Meadows's involvement, according to a senior administration official and others familiar with the situation. The White House objected that the guidelines would add unnecessary burdens on vaccine makers. In a conversation with Dr. Hahn days after the guidelines were submitted, Mr. Meadows said the recommendations amounted to changing the rules on drugmakers in the throes of clinical trials, according to one senior administration official. He also suggested that Dr. Hahn was overly influenced by the career scientists who had drafted the document, the official said. Trump administration officials have the authority to intervene with such nonbinding documents, partly because of a 2019 executive order that tightened restrictions over their issuance. The F.D.A., however, continued to share parts of this guidance with vaccine developers in letters to the companies. "We've made it clear that we want to see a median of about two months of follow up for any of the vaccines that comes in," Dr. Peter Marks, the F.D.A.'s top regulator for vaccines, said in an interview on YouTube on Friday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
BRUSSELS In one of the more cynical lines in the Danish political TV drama, "Borgen," an aide to the prime minister discusses sending one of her rivals into exile as a European commissioner, saying: "In Brussels, no one can hear you scream." But if the European Union has meaning, surely Brussels must. At least that was the hypothesis of Robert Menasse, an Austrian novelist and essayist who moved here in 2010 to try to get under the bureaucratic skin of the place. The result is thought to be the first novel about Brussels as the capital of the European Union, called "Die Hauptstadt," or "The Capital," and much to Mr. Menasse's surprise, it won the 2017 German Book Prize, Germany's most important literary award. The prize is worth 25,000 euros, or about 30,000; and if previous recipients are any guide, Mr. Menasse can expect to see sales of his novel increase considerably. There will be translations in some 20 languages; MacLehose Press will publish an English version in early 2019, just before Britain is due to leave the bloc in March 2019. For Mr. Menasse, a wiry, thoughtful man of 63, the European Union remains a remarkable response to the horrors of the two world wars and the incessant rivalries among Europe's larger powers. It is in his view the best answer to the challenges of globalization, which are too large for any single European nation to handle on its own. In this period of renewed populism and nationalism, he concedes, "it sounds crazy to develop a new transnational European democracy." But "all the big challenges we face today are transnational," he said, citing the financial crisis, migration, employment, productivity, climate change, terrorism, security and trade. With all its flaws, "to that extent the European Union is the world's avant garde, the world's future," while the United States, especially under President Trump, "is retro, even if they don't know it," he said. "Believe me, the nation state will die, but we have to find the institutional system to handle it." MacLehose Press will publish Robert Menasse's novel, "Die Hauptstadt," or "The Capital," in English in early 2019, just before Britain is due to leave the European Union. Brussels may be the capital of Belgium, but matters most because it is the symbolic capital of the European Union, a bloc of (still) 28 states and nearly 510 million people. (The United States, by contrast has about 323 million.) Rather like Washington, Brussels is an administrative, political and lobbying center, chosen not for its political geography or history but because Belgium came first in the alphabet of the founding six nations and so first hosted the new institutions. Except for the Parliament, it evidently was too much trouble to rotate. But for all its importance, Mr. Menasse mused in 2010, he didn't really know much about how the European Union functioned, or for that matter, about the functionaries who ran it. So he rented an apartment in the center, on the Rue du Vieux Marche aux Grains not in the dull European quarter where the Union institutions are. For a writer who loves cities, cigarettes and wine, that would have been a step too far. 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. He set about exploring the place, meeting officials, reading the histories, digging into the archives. "The European Union is man made, and everything done by man contains a story," he said. "What they do all day, what are their biographies, nationalities, coming together with all these different languages and mentalities, and suddenly the institution has a face." The result is a traditional novel, broad shouldered, omniscient, almost Balzac ian, but with terrorism part of a plot centered satirically around an all too plausible Brussels idea. An unhappy Greek Cypriot eurocrat, Fenia Xenopoulou, "promoted" to the underfunded, despised department of culture, is charged with revamping the tarnished image of the European Commission, the bureaucracy that administers the bloc, with a big "Jubilee Project" to mark its 50th anniversary. She is bitter, and thinks: "When the Commissioner for Trade or for Energy, yes, even when the Commissioner for Catching Fish had to leave and go to the bathroom, the discussion was interrupted and people waited until he or she returned. But if the Culture Commissioner had to leave, people kept right on talking, no one even noticed whether she was sitting at the table or on the toilet." Ms. Xenopoulou decides on the perfect project given that the European Union emerged from the atrocities of the Nazis, she proposes to proclaim Auschwitz as the birthplace of the European Commission. Needless to say, the member nations that actually run the European Union are horrified, each for its own reasons. Poland argues that Auschwitz was a solely German crime; Germany says that Muslims, now a part of German and European culture, were innocent; Austria says that a Polish horror must not be used to undermine the foundations of the Austrian state. And so on. But Mr. Menasse wants to capture the other Brussels as well, including the headquarters of NATO, so there is another thread a police detective whose politically sensitive investigation is frustrated and a Polish hit man who kills the wrong person but escapes amid a chaotic protest by pig farmers (and their pigs), demonstrating against an E.U. regulation blocking the export of pigs' ears to China. The novel ends, eerily enough, with a terrorist bombing of the Maalbeek subway station, in the European quarter. Over Austrian white wine and cigarettes in a long interview, partly in English, partly in German, at the Savoy Hotel cigar bar in Berlin, he recalled that day in March 2016, when the station and the airport were hit by suicide bombers, killing 32 people. "When I planned the novel I knew it would end with an attack on the Maalbeek metro station, and then it happened," he said. "I was in Brussels then and in the beginning I really couldn't believe it." Brussels might have been an historical accident as the capital of the bloc, but it was inevitable for Mr. Menasse. "Brussels is the capital of a nation state without a national idea," he said. "It has three official languages and 19 mayors" of individual communes "it's like a lab situation for what's going on in Europe." It has no national "leitkultur," or guiding culture, he said. "Its variety is its richness." But it is the very persistence of nationalism, and the increase in power in the European Union of the Council of nation states, that creates the real democratic deficit felt by Europeans toward the Brussels institutions, Mr. Menasse argues. "The deficit is the result of defending the national democracies within the European system." Mr. Menasse seems an archetypal European. But his history has all the echoes of a terrible past. His father was Jewish, and in 1938, he was one of the 10,000 or so Jewish children brought to Britain in the "Kindertransport." Mr. Menasse's uncle also came to Britain and volunteered for the British Army. He fought the Nazis, helping to liberate Vienna. But when he wanted to remain home, Mr. Menasse recounted, his British commanding officer reminded him that "the British Army was not a club, and he ordered my uncle to go to Burma, where he had to fight the Japanese." Mr. Menasse's father also returned to Vienna, and became something of a national hero as a professional football player. "But anti Semitism was not over in Austria just because the war was over," Mr. Menasse said astringently. "But they liked my father because he was such a great football player." The success of this novel was a complete surprise, he said. He had spent painful years on another novel into which he had poured his soul, "Expulsion From Hell," published in 2001, which did badly, he said. "When I finished that novel I was full of hopes, that I'd get the Nobel Prize, or else I would die unknown." He smiled ruefully, lighting another cigarette. "Unknown was right, and I was depressed for two or three years if you put five, six, seven years of all your emotional and intellectual capacity into one project and no one looks, you can get depressed." He worked hard on "Die Hauptstadt," "but when I gave it to the publisher I had no expectations," he said. "I was numb in my soul." And when nominated for the German Book Prize, "I didn't care. But I went with this attitude and suddenly I had it!" he said. Normally the next day the German press is full of critical, carping articles about the winning book. "But what really touched me," he said, "was that this time, there were no complaints." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Credit...Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times TORONTO "You take such good care of your hands," Daniel Levy marveled as he waited for the director to call "action." It was the last day of spring, and the last week of filming for the sixth and final season of "Schitt's Creek," which premiered January 7 on Pop. During a lull between takes, Levy, one of the show's creators and stars, admired his scene partner's nails. "I'm a little obsessed," said the actress, Genelle Williams, who was playing a chef. His response was swift: "So we all should be!" Levy wears many hats: showrunner, actor, writer, editor, costume designer. Later that day, during a break on set a glass walled cafe ringed by trees in Toronto's East End, which was standing in for a catering business he sat scrolling through his phone, putting together a playlist for the show's wrap party the next night. Levy's music selection was both an annual tradition and a welcome distraction from the end of an era. "It's hectic," he said, "which has actually helped a lot." The Roses, the formerly wealthy, fish out of water family at the heart of "Schitt's Creek," are notoriously allergic to sentiment. But the people who play them Daniel Levy (David), Annie Murphy (Alexis), Catherine O'Hara (Moira, the imperious matriarch) and Eugene Levy (the paterfamilias, Johnny) were less so as the show neared its end. A weepy read through of the final two episodes left O'Hara looking "like Alice Cooper," she said. Others found themselves breaking down more randomly. "Annie and I just text each other out of the blue," Daniel Levy said. "'So I cried today at the grocery store. How are you?'" But even though "Schitt's Creek" is wrapping up just as it has achieved something like mainstream success, the stars and creators remain convinced that it's the right time to say goodbye. "Isn't that the perfect way to go?" Eugene Levy said. "We're on an upward trajectory, and we will be still on an upward trajectory when this series actually wraps." Thanks to a daffy charm a winning combination of its characters' caustic wit and the show's fundamental warmth and enthusiastic word of mouth support, the series rose from humble origins to the pinnacle of TV acclaim. In July 2019, a few months after the creators announced its next season would be its last, "Schitt's Creek" was nominated for four Emmys, including best comedy. O'Hara and Eugene Levy Daniel's father onscreen and off were already familiar faces when "Schitt's Creek" premiered. But the show's success has been a launchpad for the younger Levy, who signed a three year overall deal with ABC Studios in 2019. Murphy, mostly unknown before "Schitt's Creek," said the sitcom also has changed her life. "The show has opened a lot of doors," she said, "and I'm trying to look at the future not as a daunting bleak abyss of hell, but an exciting adventure." The final season is the most ambitious yet, Daniel Levy said. The Roses have finally settled in the town they never thought they'd call home in fact, they're thriving both professionally and in their relationships. But will their achievements propel them beyond Schitt's Creek? Levy began thinking about an ending some time in Season 3. When Pop gave the show a two season extension after Season 4, that struck him as a good opportunity to map out the conclusion he had in mind and go out on a high note. "From start to finish our show will be exactly what it was intended to be," he said. "The biggest mistake you can make in TV is shifting the focus away from characters and the storytelling to servicing audience expectations. The audience is there because you've done something right." Levy says the show's distance from the Hollywood hoopla gives him a certain level of freedom as a storyteller. "We operate very much in an isolated bubble up in Canada," he said. Inspired by a curiosity about the lives of the ultrawealthy and the time Kim Basinger bought a small town in Georgia in the late 1980s he created "Schitt's Creek" with his father and shopped it around to American cable and broadcast networks, which all passed. Eventually they cobbled together funding first they made a deal with the CBC, then Europe's ITV Studios came on as distributor and, finally, Pop rounded out the budget. The arrangement left the Levys with an unusual degree of creative control. Eugene Levy was in the writers' room for the first couple seasons, but by Season 3, he began to step back and cede authority to his son. "Schitt's Creek" has enjoyed a steady if unlikely rise. It's been the rare series to see its audience grow every season between its first and fourth seasons, the show's ratings on Pop more than doubled. Netflix rarely releases viewership numbers for individual shows, but according to Pop, more than four million people watched at least some of the fifth season on its channel. The growth was in part thanks to a Webby Award winning promotional strategy of flooding social media with "Schitt's Creek" references and amplifying fan enthusiasm by having both the stars' Twitter accounts and the show's official one retweet and respond to user generated GIFs and memes. (When the Emmy nominations were announced, the show tweeted a GIF of Moira declaring that her favorite season is "awards.") "Schitt's Creek" also has been a beacon for L.G.B.T.Q. viewers, thanks to its casually progressive depiction of a community devoid of homophobia and to the poignant love story between David and his business partner turned fiance. "I want to feel like I'm putting something out into the world that's of consequence," Levy said. "It is a comedy, but there's a bit of weight to it. In our own little way we're taking a stand." Eugene Levy said that his son's "sensibility has really carried the show into a lovely area of recognition, in terms of critical recognition, in terms of emotional recognition, what he's done for the L.G.B.T.Q. community." "It's all 'Schitt's Creek' related," he said. "So I know the saturation level on the show is getting thicker." "Schitt's Creek" grew stronger as the Roses became more enmeshed in the show's namesake town, which Johnny once bought for David as a joke. The humor comes from the contrast between the flamboyant Roses and the pragmatic townspeople, but that's also where "Schitt's Creek" found its heart. Moira joins the town's singing group and directs a play; Alexis falls in love and goes back to school; David opens a posh general store; and Johnny partners with the motel's sardonic receptionist, Stevie (Emily Hampshire), and takes over the inn. "Over and above, the main thing about this show was how the Roses have developed as a family," Eugene Levy said. As O'Hara put it during a break in filming, "It's like we're aliens learning how to be humans." The production had moved to its second location of the day, a small recording studio where Moira had a gig performing voice overs a job secured by Alexis, who became her mother's publicist in the fifth season. O'Hara and Murphy took their places in the recording booth. "You look so professional, Alexis!" O'Hara exclaimed in her signature Moira accent a mid Atlantic patois in which certain syllables are inexplicably elongated and others abruptly cut off. "My bebe!" A few days earlier, the production had finished shooting on location in the hamlet of Goodwood, Ontario, the site of the Schitt's Creek restaurant, town hall, auto shop and David's general store. On a Sunday afternoon in June, dozens of fans had gathered in Goodwood, about an hour outside Toronto, to bid farewell to "Schitt's Creek" an event billed as "SchittCon." Murphy said she and Daniel Levy were emotionally wrecked after leaving those sets. "As cheesy as it sounds," she said, "they have come to be really familiar, happy places over the years." Back in his trailer, Levy had changed out of his costume drop crotch gray sweats and a black sweatshirt emblazoned with "ICON" in white block lettering and into his own clothes, a gray crew neck and black jeans. His scenes finished for the day, he sat with an iced coffee sweating on the table before him and contemplated the end of "Schitt's Creek." While he's aware that the show is likely to receive more attention than ever before in its final season, he also knows that stunning twists and big narrative swings have never been the "Schitt's Creek" style. Much like his onscreen alter ego, Levy no longer feels the pressure to prove himself. He's learned that sometimes that simplest approach is best. "What I wanted for our series finale was just a great expletive episode of TV," he said. "I think that's all people want. They don't need a huge fireworks display. They just want to know that the characters are going to be O.K." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
BALLINDALLOCH, SCOTLAND George S. Grant markets malt whisky made in the shadow of the snow capped Ben Rinnes, the same spot where, five generations ago, his family bought a distillery in 1865 for PS511. Nowadays the family's Glenfarclas malt is produced in a modern, highly automated plant, and is exported to the United States, Taiwan and other countries. But the profit returns here to the valley of the River Spey in the heart of Scotland's whisky country. And that repatriated money is what makes Glenfarclas such a rarity. "Within a 20 mile radius of where we are now, there are 35 distilleries," said Mr. Grant, the director of sales at Glenfarclas. But only a handful of the operations within that 30 kilometer radius remain in Scottish hands. The rest are owned by big multinationals most notably Diageo, based in London, and the French company Pernod Ricard which book their profits and employ many of their staff members elsewhere. In fact Mr. Grant, 36, says he knows of no other whisky maker apart from Glenfarclas that has its sales and marketing operation based at the distillery in this scenic part of Scotland. Though he says relations with the big non Scottish players are good they buy some of Glenfarclas's output for their blended whiskies, after all Mr. Grant notes that what sets his family's company apart is its place in the community and the fact that "we've been here forever." To be sold as Scotch whisky, the liquor must be produced in Scotland. The rest of the business can be elsewhere, though, and it often is. Non Scottish companies control about four fifths of the PS4.2 billion, or 6.5 billion, global market for Scotch, which is being driven by growth from emerging markets. The United States is still the biggest export market by value, at PS600 million last year. But Scotch whisky exports to Brazil grew 48 percent last year, those to Taiwan 45 percent and to Venezuela 33 percent, according to the Scotch Whisky Association. John Kay, a prominent economist and former economic adviser to the Scottish government, says that too little of the money from those exports ends up in the Scottish economy. He has proposed a PS1 "bottle tax," levied on all Scotch production, which would be paid by the distillers. The precise value of such a tax is hard to predict, but the Scotch Whisky Association says that about 1.3 billion bottles were exported last year, representing about 95 percent of total production. But much of the monetary benefit goes to governments that impose duties on the product wherever it is sold. "A lot of money is being made out of this product by foreign governments and foreign companies," Mr. Kay said. The bottle tax, he said, would be a way to keep some of that money in Scotland. With a referendum looming next year on Scottish independence, the idea has prompted a new debate about the country's economic assets. It has even prompted comparisons between the North Sea natural gas and oil extracted from Scotland's coastal waters and the Scotch distilled on its heather covered moorlands and windswept islands. Whisky supports about 10,000 jobs in Scotland, including those of people working in bottling plants, and in total about 36,000 in Britain across the whole of the economy, including haulers and packaging companies, the Scotch Whisky Association says. But the distilleries themselves are not big job creators. Although the most modern ones operate 24 hours a day, they tend to employ no more than a dozen people. Patrick Harvie, a member of the Scottish Parliament for Glasgow who is responsible for enterprise for the Scottish Green party, said it was "good to see others starting to question the benefits to Scotland of allowing our national assets to be controlled by global corporations." Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. Mr. Harvie drew a parallel with a debate over the tax liability of companies, like Starbucks, that use their multinational status to reduce corporate tax bills. Diageo says that it pays about 18 percent of tax on its profit on average but does not say where those taxes are paid. For all that, though, there is little indication that the Scottish government plans to adopt the bottle tax. For one thing, it is already fighting legal challenges to a plan to place minimum prices on alcohol as a way of discouraging binge drinking. A bottle tax plan would very likely set off a separate, titanic legal and political fight with one of Scotland's biggest industries. The tax idea "only has merit for those who wish to undermine the Scotch whisky industry's competitiveness in the global market and undermine its growth prospects," said Campbell Evans, director of government and consumer affairs at the Scotch Whisky Association. "Apart, perhaps, from the oil and gas sector, nobody else is investing in Scotland" as this industry is, Mr. Evans said. Big companies like Diageo and Chivas Brothers, owned by Pernod Ricard, are happy to show off their investments in Speyside and argue that the economic effects are felt beyond distillery payrolls. Diageo's ultramodern Roseisle plant, which produces each year about 10 million liters, or 2.6 million gallons, of spirit the alcohol from which whisky is made employs only about 10 frontline staff members to keep operations running continuously at its five story complex. But the company points to wider economic benefits: to farmers who provide barley, to local contractors who help equip and service the plant, and to small businesses that benefit from the tens of thousands of tourists who visit distilleries in the region each year. "Diageo sustains over 4,000 direct jobs in the Scottish economy across 50 sites, many of which are in remote and rural areas of Scotland," Peter Lederer, director of Diageo in Scotland, said in a statement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
The first time Jennifer Hindieh saw Alexander Najman, she wished he would go away. Instead, after bumming a Marlboro off her in September 2011 at Long Island University, he stuck around and tried to strike up a conversation. "I was lost in thought," she said. After fishing a cigarette out of the pack and handing it over, she gave him the universal code to get going. "I looked down at my phone. I was thinking, don't talk to me." Ms. Hindieh, then a freshman at the university's Post campus, in Brookville, N.Y., was annoyed that Mr. Najman, a graduate student at Stony Brook University working part time in Post's philosophy department, had trouble taking a hint. She didn't particularly care for his demeanor, either. "He was doing the kind of stuff guys do to impress you, acting all full of himself," she said. After a few drags on his cigarette, though, he made her laugh. By the time he stubbed it out and walked away from the outdoor bench where Ms. Hindieh's smoke plumes had led him, she had forgotten her first impression and given him her phone number. Mr. Najman, 32, is the founder of Get Accepted, an academic and career counseling service. Until 2017, he was also a philosophy professor at LIU Post. Ms. Hindieh, 29, is a teaching assistant and graduate student in molecular biology at Adelphi University. She expects to earn a master's degree next spring before pursuing a Ph.D. in neuroscience. Both are from Long Island. Ms. Hindieh's parents, Rim and Barbara Hindieh, divorced when she was young; they raised her and her older brother, Raymond, and older sister, Danielle, in Roslyn Heights. Mr. Najman grew up in Port Washington with his parents, Lynn and Lee Najman, and an older sister, Liz. At the time of the campus bench encounter, both were in serious relationships that were seriously in trouble. "I was incredibly unhappy," Ms. Hindieh said. "My relationship was kind of similar," Mr. Najman said, adding that he had been with his partner for years but was unsure how to call it quits. "I think everybody goes through a relationship like that, where you stay because it's comfortable," Ms. Hindieh said. "Sometimes it takes meeting someone new and feeling that spark you were missing to realize, I'm not happy, and it's not fair to the person I'm with." "The incredibly short version of an ongoing debate is, neuroscientists think they understand everything about the human brain," Mr. Najman said. "And as philosophers, our job is to convince them that the human brain is different than human consciousness." As their friendship grew, so did their determination to start over romantically, if not necessarily with each other. By the summer of 2012, Mr. Najman was prepared to end his relationship with his girlfriend. Hearing about Ms. Hindieh's struggles with her boyfriend was a catalyst. "One time, we were hanging out and he said, 'You're not happy. Don't do this to yourself. You're a great person, don't let someone treat you this way,'" Ms. Hindieh said. Ms. Hindieh was raised in a household with Middle Eastern tradition, though her mother was born on a United States Army base in Germany. "She cooked Middle Eastern food and loved to use little Arabic phrases, like 'I love you' and 'sweetheart.' She loved the whole culture," she said. Her father spent his childhood in Aleppo, Syria, where his family, who were Maronite Christians, helped to hide a Jewish tailor from persecution in the 1940s. "My father always taught us that we lived in a family where all faiths were respected," said Danielle Hindieh. "That was at the core of how we grew up." When Ms. Hindieh introduced Mr. Najman to her family in 2013, she knew his Jewish background wouldn't be a problem. The Najmans were likewise open minded when they met Ms. Hindieh. Though Lee Najman spent his childhood in Israel, Mr. Najman said his family is shaped more by progressive politics than national origin or religion. "We've always just kind of been open to whatever," he said. "My mom likes to do Passover. She calls it 'the oldest tradition in the book.' But that's about it." By the time Ms. Hindieh was ready to move into an apartment with Mr. Najman in Levittown in 2015, Rim Hindieh was thrilled with how his daughter's love life was progressing. Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. "My dad doesn't usually give more than two word answers to anybody he talks to," she said. "But with Alex he smiles and jokes around. I think he was so relieved to see his daughter with someone who treated me the way I wanted to be treated. He was like, 'Oh, good, we found her someone nice. Now I can go and retire.'" The Najmans, too, were glad the relationship was gaining momentum. Lynn Najman said she was impressed by her son's focus on Ms. Hindieh's wants and needs. And Liz Najman said, "Alex and I have gotten so much closer since he met Jen. She's the one person in his life he doesn't feel he has to be cool in front of." Ms. Hindieh's lack of patience for pretenses, evident from that first day on the bench at Long Island University, has been freeing for Mr. Najman. For example, just after they moved in together, he didn't hide his panic when Bailey, a pit bull puppy they adopted, gobbled a bottle of prescription medication he had left in a bag on the floor. "Alex was screaming," Ms. Hindieh said. "We were like, 'Oh, God, we've only had this dog two weeks and already we've killed her.'" Bailey was fine after a trip to the emergency room. That incident, plus the reputation of her breed, subject to generalizations about viciousness, also knitted them closer as a couple. (In 2016, when they had to find a new apartment because their landlord was moving, Ms. Hindieh put together what she called a storybook about Bailey's life to prove their dog was not threatening. Mr. Najman secured pet insurance.) The couple is also cognizant about other stereotypes particularly that people from Israel and Syria dislike each other. Rumblings of disapproval surfaced from distant relatives after they moved into their new apartment in Huntington Station and announced their engagement. He proposed with an emerald solitaire bought online at Ritani, a site for ethically sourced diamonds, on Oct. 31, 2018. Ultimately, she said, "I threw my middle finger up in the air and said, It's my life. I'm going to love who I'm going to love." She disinvited anyone reluctant to celebrate their union. Their wedding was Sept. 14 in the parklike grounds of the Village Club, in Sands Point, N.Y. Ms. Hindieh, in a Badgley Mischka dress that her father helped to pick out, walked with him down a grassy aisle, littered with rose petals, to Mr. Najman. Her six attendants, wearing mint and sea foam green dresses, awaited her as 75 guests stood for the bride's entrance. Bailey, in a custom wedding dress of her own, ordered by Ms. Hindieh from Etsy, preceded her as Lee Najman held the leash. Under a huppah woven with white and pink hydrangea and roses, Daniel Reitman, a childhood friend of Mr. Najman who was ordained by the Universal Life Church, officiated. Liz Najman, also a Universal Life minister, participated in the ceremony. "I met Alex when he was 4, and I've never seen him as comfortable with another person as he is with Jen," Mr. Reitman said . "I've known him his whole life," Ms. Najman said. "Jen, you make him a better person." After an exchange of rings, Mr. Reitman and Ms. Najman pronounced them married. Mr. Najman stomped on a glass to cheers of "Mazel tov!" The couple plan to privately read handwritten vows on their first wedding anniversary. As guests recessed into the club's reception room, they passed a sign that had instructed them where to sit for the ceremony. "Pick a seat but not a side," it read. "You are loved by the groom and bride." Unleashed Ms. Hindieh's social media posts about her dog Bailey's custom wedding dress were met with a flurry of media attention, though not all positive. "Most people thought it was adorable," she said. "But some people said, 'She'll probably maul the flower girl.' There was stupid stuff like that." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
LOS ANGELES Take a quiz about your open sea survival skills on Buzzfeed. Score maybe 7 of 10, marking you as the type who might make it through a midocean disaster. And up pops an offer of, say, 30 percent off the standard 15 price to buy "Against the Sun," a new feature film about real Navy fliers who spent 34 days adrift on the Pacific during World War II. Brutally direct digital sales techniques are standard stuff for e commerce marketers offering credit cards, resort vacations, shoes or even books that match your presumed tastes or mood of the moment. But movie marketers have been slower to adopt contemporary online equivalents to the classic foot in the door hard sell. Too slow, by the thinking of Joe Ricketts and his colleagues at his American Film Company. Mr. Ricketts is an entrepreneur who learned a few things about salesmanship while building the TD Ameritrade online discount brokerage firm, of which he was chief executive. Now he has pointed the indie movie studio he founded toward an experiment in the use of low cost digital marketing techniques to sell "Against the Sun." The film is directed by Brian Falk, and it includes Tom Felton Draco Malfoy in the "Harry Potter" series among its stars. Made for a little less than 5 million, "Against the Sun" will be shown in a small number of theaters and on a wide range of cable, satellite and digital on demand services like iTunes, starting Jan. 23. And its relatively modest marketing budget, set initially at 2 million, will be overseen by DigitasLBi, a company that has run digital campaigns for companies like American Express but has virtually no film experience. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Just more than a quarter into this unusual 60 game season, this is where the Yankees stand: A 10 6 record, leading the American League East. They possess one of the most talented rosters and best records in Major League Baseball, and were leading the American League in runs and home runs as of Sunday afternoon. Yet as they wrapped up a weekend trip to Florida to play the Tampa Bay Rays, there were a few reasons for concern. On Sunday morning, the Yankees placed slugger Giancarlo Stanton, who was off to a rousing start to the season, on the 10 day injured list with a left hamstring strain. They made the roster move even before a magnetic resonance imaging examination was completed, a telling sign about the severity of Stanton's injury. Then, in the afternoon, the Yankees watched a promising start from pitcher James Paxton evaporate into a 4 3 loss against the Rays, their stiffest division opponent. It capped a closely contested four game series loss to the Rays (8 8), who had been sputtering before facing the Yankees. All three of the Yankees' losses to Tampa Bay were by two runs or fewer, and all of the games were tense: There were pitches thrown up and in, ejections and glaring or jawing at the other dugout. "I know it's a short season, but we'll see them again and we'll be fighting it out with them the rest of the way," Paxton said. Although the Rays have started slowly, in no small part to their shoddy defense and hitting, they showed the Yankees this weekend that they remained a feisty foe a year after they won 96 games, a handful short of the Yankees' 103 victories. "I've been here a long time and they always play us tough," Yankees outfielder Brett Gardner said. While the Boston Red Sox have long been the Yankees' archrivals, of course, the Rays and Yankees have not been amicable opponents over the past few years, either. C.C. Sabathia, the longtime Yankees pitcher who retired after the 2019 season, was at the center of several brush ups with the Rays over the years, including in 2018 when he hit Rays catcher Jesus Sucre in retaliation for Yankees catcher Austin Romine dodging a pitch near his head. Aaron Judge, the Yankees star outfielder, said on Saturday that the past episodes were still on their minds when they watched Rays pitchers, again, challenge his teammates, like D.J. LeMahieu and Gio Urshela, with pitches high and tight. The Yankees voiced their displeasure with the aggressive pitching in the second game of Saturday's doubleheader, which resulted in hitting coach Marcus Thames being tossed by the home plate umpire Vic Carapazza, who also ejected Yankees Manager Aaron Boone for defending Thames. "It's pretty frustrating to have them think that you're not able to chirp and say anything back to them," the Rays' Brandon Lowe told reporters after Sunday's game. "They've been doing it the whole time and for us to not be able to do it back, it's a little childish." None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. For the Yankees, their formula for winning in this shortened season mirrors that of last season: One of the highest scoring lineups in baseball and a stout bullpen covering for an inconsistent starting rotation. Entering Sunday, the Yankees' bullpen had a 3.49 E.R.A., 11th best in baseball. That counted as an accomplishment given the absences of star closer Aroldis Chapman, who is working his way back after testing positive for the coronavirus on July 11, and Tommy Kahnle, a key reliever who had season ending elbow surgery last week. The starting rotation, on the other hand, had produced a 5.13 E.R.A., ranked 23rd in baseball, entering Sunday, despite strong performances from newcomer Gerrit Cole. The struggles of Paxton and J.A. Happ have been particularly problematic for the rotation. Paxton, who had back surgery in early February, showed diminished velocity and off kilter mechanics in his first two starts of the season. But against the Rays, the Yankees' winning formula was sometimes out of whack. Facing a strong Rays' pitching staff, the Yankees managed 14 runs in four games, squandering several fruitful scoring opportunities. Paxton, though, looked much improved on Sunday. Although his velocity still wasn't at his usual level his fastball averaged 95 m.p.h. last season it was up to around 92 m.p.h., a slight tick up from his first two starts. What was markedly better was Paxton's command, and the movement of his fastball. He struck out 11 and allowed just one hit over six innings before it all unraveled in the seventh. "A pretty frustrating day," Britton said. He added later, "To be expected, close games against these guys." When the Yankees take the field again on Tuesday, back in the Bronx against the Atlanta Braves, they will be without one of their most valuable hitters, in Stanton. Their offense had featured some sputtering hitters so far Gary Sanchez and Gleyber Torres and some standouts LeMahieu, Judge, Urshela and Stanton. The Yankees had only used Stanton, who was coming back from a calf injury sustained during spring training in February, as the designated hitter on purpose taking extra care to try to keep him healthy. He also changed his body to try to avoid a repeat of 2019 in which he played in only 18 games. Stanton, who is listed at 6 foot 6 and 245 pounds, said he lost 20 pounds since last season in an effort to mirror the physique of the earlier, healthier years of his career. It was working: He looked like the 2017 N.L. M.V.P. version of himself, for whom the Yankees pulled off a blockbuster trade with the Marlins, hitting .293 with three home runs and nearly as many walks (10) as strikeouts (11). But when the Yankees played Stanton in both games of a doubleheader for the first time this season on Saturday, he felt discomfort running to second base on a wild pitch in the second game. Boone said he hoped the Yankees would be able to continue to help Stanton, both in the short and long term, to stay healthy. "It's going to be a tough loss however long he's out," Judge said. "But our motto, just like last year, is next man up. We've got a stacked team." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
"I'm further behind than I was before I started." REBECCA MASCI , a single mother who enrolled in a Kaplan college. Stanley H. Kaplan started his tutoring business in the basement of his parents' Brooklyn home in 1938. As standardized tests became a bigger fixture of American education, his company became a national operation, preparing millions of students for the SAT, LSAT, MCATs and other tests. Kaplan was still a test prep company when the Washington Post Company bought it in 1984, after Richard D. Simmons, the president, convinced Katharine Graham of its potential for expansion and profits. Over the last decade, Kaplan has moved aggressively into for profit higher education, acquiring 75 small colleges and starting the huge online Kaplan University. Now, Kaplan higher education revenues eclipse not only the test prep operations, but all the rest of the Washington Post Company's operations. And Kaplan's revenue grew 9 percent during the last quarter to 743.3 million with higher education revenues more than four times greater than those from test prep helping its parent company more than triple its profits. But over the last few months, Kaplan and other for profit education companies have come under intense scrutiny from Congress, amid growing concerns that the industry leaves too many students mired in debt, and with credentials that provide little help in finding jobs. Reports of students who leave such schools with heavy debt, only to work in low paying jobs, have prompted the Department of Education to propose regulations that would cut off federal financing to programs whose graduates have high debt to income ratios and low repayment rates. Though Kaplan is not the largest in the industry, the Post Company chairman, Donald Graham, has emerged as the highest profile defender of for profit education. Together, Kaplan and the Post Company spent 350,000 on lobbying in the third quarter of this year, more than any other higher education company. And Mr. Graham has gone to Capitol Hill to argue against the regulations in private visits with lawmakers, the first time he has lobbied directly on a federal issue in a dozen years. His newspaper, too, has editorialized against the regulations. Though it disclosed its conflict of interest, the newspaper said the regulations would limit students' choices. "The aim of the regulations was to punish bad actors, but the effect is to punish institutions that serve poor students," Mr. Graham said in an interview. He said the regulations' emphasis on debt would make it harder for Kaplan to serve older working students who must take out loans to attend school. He added that Kaplan could play an important role in meeting President Obama's goal of a better educated work force. Kaplan Higher Ed, Mr. Graham said, has also broadened the reach of the Post Company beyond the middle income students who typically use its test prep services to include lower income students. "We purchased colleges that served mostly poor students, and we have embraced that role," Mr. Graham said. "For students with risk factors, older working students with children, Kaplan has dramatically better graduation rates than community colleges." The company has acknowledged, however, that the new rules could hurt Kaplan. According to 2009 data released this summer by the Department of Education, only 28 percent of Kaplan's students were repaying their student loans. That figure is well below the 45 percent threshold that most programs will need to remain fully eligible for the federal aid on which they rely. By comparison, 44 percent of students at the largest for profit, the University of Phoenix, were repaying their loans. Kaplan is facing several legal challenges. The Florida attorney general is investigating eight for profit colleges, including Kaplan, for alleged misrepresentation of financial aid and deceptive practices regarding recruitment, enrollment, accreditation, placement and graduation rates. Kaplan is also facing several federal whistle blower lawsuits whose accusations dovetail with the findings of an undercover federal investigation of the for profit industry this summer, including video of high pressure recruiting and unrealistic salary promises. "The claims they make are absurd and simply not reflective of the kind of company that Kaplan is," said Andrew S. Rosen, Kaplan's chairman. "We're confident that when a court rules, we'll have a clear demonstration that this is not who Kaplan is." The growth of the for profit education sector which offers more flexible schedules and online classes than community colleges, at far higher tuition has been nothing short of explosive. The University of Phoenix has more than 450,000 students, for example, and the Education Management Corporation, DeVry, Corinthian Colleges, the Career Education Corporation and Kaplan enroll more than 100,000 each. All these schools get most of their revenue from federal student aid. Kaplan Higher Education, for example, gets 91.5 percent of its revenue from the federal government, through Pell grants, Stafford loans, military and veterans benefits and other aid. On average, for profit colleges spend about 30 percent of their revenue on advertising and marketing. Lawmakers and Department of Education officials have become increasingly concerned that too much of the 26.5 billion in federal student aid that went to for profit colleges last year enriched shareholders and company executives, rather than helping students. Such schools enroll about 11 percent of the nation's college students, and get a quarter of all federal student aid. But their students account for 43 percent of those defaulting on student loans. These statistics have prompted inquiries about the schools' business practices. This summer, Senator Tom Harkin's committee, in oversight hearings on the industry, watched undercover videos about high pressure recruiting tactics that Kaplan and others used to sign up students. The undercover videos showed Kaplan recruiters in Florida and California making false or questionable statements to prospective students suggesting for example, that massage therapists earn 100 an hour, and that student loans need not be paid back. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Graham quickly issued a statement calling the video scenes "sickening," suspended registration at the two campuses, began retraining employees and started their own "mystery shopper" program to check on employee practices. "We've done our best in the aftermath of the Senate hearings and the G.A.O. report to make sure that everyone at Kaplan is working for the benefit of the students," Mr. Graham said. But the bad publicity, and growing scrutiny, have taken their toll. Since its recent high last spring, Washington Post Company stock has dropped by more than a quarter. Other for profit education companies, including Corinthian Colleges, in which the Post owns an 8 percent stake, fell even further. Terry Hartle, senior vice president at the American Council on Education, an umbrella organization for all institutions of higher education, said that most people formerly assumed that Kaplan and other leaders in the field were above reproach. "The G.A.O. investigation changed that," Mr. Hartle said. "It's a very different world for the for profit college than it was even six months ago." Mr. Graham said the two locations included in the G.A.O. investigation were outliers, and not typical of what occurs at other Kaplan locations. But dozens of current and former Kaplan employees said the videos painted a representative picture. "They are not outliers; they are in the middle of the field, the middle of the bell curve," said William Wratten, a former Kaplan admissions adviser in Chicago, who resigned after a year and a half because he disagreed with company practices. "Maybe not the exact same activities, but the mind set was the same: Do whatever it takes to get the sale, to keep your job." Mr. Wratten and other admissions representatives said they were trained to "emphasize that Kaplan is owned by The Washington Post, one of the best newspapers in the country, and that Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates's wife, Melinda Gates, were on our board of directors." Kaplan officials said that was never part of their training. In response to a question about this, they said they scanned two million recruiting calls and found "Buffett" or "Gates" in only 85. Four whistle blower suits against Kaplan under the federal False Claims Act have been made public in the last few years, all making accusations that the company used deceptive practices in its quest for profits, including enrolling unqualified students and paying recruiters for each student enrolled, a practice forbidden by federal law. In addition, the suits allege, Kaplan kept students on the books after they dropped out, inflated students' grades and manipulated placement data to continue receiving financial aid. Three of the suits, from Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and Miami, have been consolidated for trial in Miami. A fourth, from Las Vegas, is pending there. Kaplan has moved to dismiss all four lawsuits, saying they are the work of disgruntled former employees making false accusations. No court has yet heard the whistle blower cases. Although they were filed years ago, the litigation is still in early stages, so Kaplan has not yet had to answer each specific charge. Kaplan, said Mr. Rosen, its chairman, is a model of higher education for the future, helping working adults especially low income and minority students improve their lives. "Kaplan is engaged in making the world a better place," he said. But many current and former Kaplan employees and students including those, like Mr. Wratten, not involved in the lawsuits said in interviews that they believed the company was concerned most with getting students' financial aid, and that Kaplan's fast growing revenues were based on recruiting students whose chances of succeeding were low. They cite, for example, a training manual used by recruiters in Pittsburgh whose "profile" of Kaplan students listed markers like low self esteem, reliance on public assistance, being fired, laid off, incarcerated, or physically or mentally abused. Melissa Mack, a Kaplan spokeswoman, said the manual had not been used since 2006. Admissions advisers, past and present, say the pressure to recruit students leads to aggressive, and sometimes misleading, sales tactics. Carlos Urquilla Diaz, a former Kaplan instructor and administrator who is one of the Miami whistle blowers, recalled a PowerPoint presentation showing African American women who were raising two children by themselves as the company's primary target. Such women, Mr. Urquilla Diaz said, were considered most likely to drop out before completing the program, leaving Kaplan with the aid money and no need to provide more services. "The idea was, we'll take anybody, and I mean anybody," he said. Victoria Gatsiopoulos, a former instructor and director of career services at a Kaplan College in Pittsburgh, said in her complaint that the school made promises to students of "how their lives will magically change" if they attended Kaplan classes. One prospective student with financial difficulties, the complaint said, was promised in writing that "in five years she would have a job in a hospital, a big house in Florida, enough money to go to Disney World with her family and a new Lexus." Ms. Gatsiopoulos said Kaplan representatives routinely misled prospective students about the jobs they could get after graduation. "One of our biggest programs was criminal justice," she said. "Students who were recruited were led to believe that they could get into the C.I.A. or F.B.I. or Border Patrol or crime scene investigation when they graduated, and earn 40 50,000. But those jobs all require advanced training." In reality, Ms. Gatsiopoulos said, graduates would often get the same 8 to 9 an hour security guard jobs they could have had without Kaplan training. Ms. Gatsiopoulos's complaint said that Kaplan also manipulated its reported placement rates so that a graduate employed in sales at Wal Mart, for example, would be reported as working in accounting management, and that a telemarketer was reported as working in "business administration fashion merchandising." She also charges that Kaplan would raise instructors' grades for students so they remained eligible for federal aid. Former Kaplan instructors not involved in the litigation made similar claims. "More than once, when I refused to inflate a student's grade, they went ahead and did it on their own," Ms. Gatsiopoulos said. Kaplan officials said they had seen no evidence of manipulated grades, inflated placement reports or unrealistic job promises. But dozens of former students said they felt misled. Nine years after graduating from high school, Rebecca Masci, a single mother with four young children to support, enrolled in a surgical technology program in 2004 at Kaplan/CCI in Broomall, Pa., to improve her job prospects. She took out student loans, lined up her parents to baby sit, and for three terms, excelled in her classes in anatomy, physiology and pharmacology. But to complete the fourth term and graduate, students need a placement to give her hands on experience in an operating room. She did not get one. "When I signed up, they sounded all positive, about plenty of placements, plenty of jobs," said Ms. Masci, now 32 and with five children. "But after I finished the classes, they told me to go home and wait and they'd call when they found something. I was in limbo for more than a year." Eventually, she said, she was given one short placement, not enough to graduate. Now she has 14,000 of debt, but no surgical technology certification. "I'm further behind than I was before I started," she said. David Goodstein, who was the school's director of education for nine months in 2006, said Ms. Masci's experience was not uncommon. Mr. Goodstein, who has filed a federal whistle blower suit against Kaplan, said that although the school had not had enough placement opportunities for the surgical technology program since 2002, it kept enrolling new students, taking their federal student aid, leaving them stranded without a placement and then dropping them from the program, which was phased out in 2007. Mr. Goodstein's lawsuit, filed four years ago, is under seal. But the Post Company's securities filings disclosed an investigation of the program. In the Las Vegas case, Charles Jajdelski, an admissions adviser at Kaplan's Heritage College, said that while cleaning up after an October 2003, graduation ceremony, he found five boxes of diplomas sitting off to the side. When he asked colleagues about the boxes, his complaint said, they told him they were for phantom students, kept on the books even though they never attended class. The more questions he asked, Mr. Jajdelski said, the more he was told to drop it. "When I called Kaplan's Western regional assistant director, he told me he knew all about it, I shouldn't worry about it, and we didn't ever need to have this conversation again," Mr. Jajdelski said. "I called the human resources guy in Atlanta, and he said, 'Charles, we need you to be a team player here.' That knocked my socks off." Mr. Jajdelski reported the situation to the Education Department hot line in November 2003, his complaint said. He was fired weeks later. Kaplan officials said the company was unaware of Mr. Jajdelski's accusations until his lawsuit was unsealed in 2008. The broadest complaint against Kaplan is the one from Florida, in which the former dean of paralegal studies, Ben Wilcox, is one of three plaintiffs. Kaplan officials say there is reason to distrust all three plaintiffs. Mr. Wilcox is under indictment on charges of hacking into Kaplan's computer system and sending out harassing e mails. "They'll tell you all sorts of terrible things about me," Mr. Wilcox said, adding that Kaplan is intent on discrediting him because of his access to incriminating evidence. "But the bottom line is that Kaplan is a cold hearted scam to make money by taking student loans from the government, and leaving students with debt that they'll never be able to pay off." The other two plaintiffs, Mr. Urquilla Diaz and Jude Gillespie, have both brought unsuccessful discrimination complaints against Kaplan. Mr. Graham and Mr. Rosen emphasize that Kaplan has made important changes, including its new "Kaplan Commitment," which allows students to enroll, risk free, for several weeks thereby eliminating any incentive to recruit unqualified students. During that period, either the student, or Kaplan, could decide that the program was not a good fit, and end the enrollment. "Allowing students four or five weeks of conditional enrollment is quite a bold step," Mr. Graham said. "Plainly, in the short term, it will lead to a shrinkage of enrollment, but we don't know how much." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
In a 1924 editorial headlined "A Familiar Form of Madness," this newspaper expressed its disdain for that vulgar new entertainment, that lowly diversion for idle minds, that pointless display of erudition known as the "cross word": "Scarcely recovered from the form of temporary madness that made so many people pay enormous prices for mahjong sets, about the same persons now are committing the same sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letter of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more or less complex." A year later, this Olympian condescension had gotten a little desperate: "The craze evidently is dying out fast and in a few months it will be forgotten." How and why this "craze" arose and persisted, and how The New York Times came to not only change its institutional opinion but become the epicenter of American crossword culture, is the story told by Adrienne Raphel in her cultural and personal history of crosswords and the "puzzling people who can't live without them," of which she is clearly one. At the end of this diverting, informative and discursive book, her love for crosswords is clear, but her reasons despite a determined effort on her part to explain them remain, in the end, a puzzle of their own. Raphel proves a skilled cultural historian, dipping into newspaper archives and movie reels and private correspondence to describe how the crossword came to conquer the world. The first "Word Cross Puzzle" was invented out of desperation by Arthur Wynne, the British born editor of the Sunday color supplement (titled, simply, "FUN") for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. The deadline for the Christmas 1913 edition was upon him, and he had a blank space and nothing to fill it with. Perhaps that very problem suggested its solution: a puzzle in which readers had to fill in blank spaces with ideas of their own. That first puzzle was in the shape of a diamond, or perhaps as close to a Christmas wreath as the graphics of the time could provide. The clues were straightforward "What we should all be" yielded the answer "MORAL" but the essential idea of a modern crossword, an interlocked array of words in which each solution provides clues to the next, was there. Wynne built his work, as Raphel describes, on centuries of wordplay and word squares, in which words could be read across and down a grid of letters. Wynne wanted to patent his creation, but The New York World refused to pay for the application thus saving themselves almost 100. The paper may have come to regret that, as the crossword instantly became the most popular feature in FUN, if not the entire World. Wynne became overwhelmed with the demand for more and better puzzles, and eventually foisted the whole thing off onto his secretary, Margaret Petherbridge, a refined graduate of Smith College. At first Petherbridge, like The Times, thought it a diversion beneath her talents: a snobbery that ended when she tried to solve one herself. Suddenly she understood why "what had seemed like a major nuisance could be her chance to make her mark. ... Placing her left hand on a dictionary and raising her right, Petherbridge vowed to take up the crossword." It was Petherbridge who established the essential elements of modern crosswords: the rigorous proofreading, the separate lists of Across and Down clues, the avoidance of "unchecked boxes," or squares that were only part of a single word. As such, she became the true parent of the crossword. Wynne may have birthed it, but Petherbridge raised it. Raphel starts her book with the bold thesis "It's hard to imagine modern life without the crossword" and the closest she comes to proving it is during those early decades, when crosswords were the basis for comic strips "Cross Word Cal," by Ernie Bushmiller (who went on to create "Nancy," itself a bit of a puzzle) murder mysteries, even a 1925 Disney short, "Alice Solves the Puzzle." In April 1925 the new magazine The New Yorker profiled a comely 20 year old Wellesley dropout named Ruth von Phul, the winner of the inaugural Herald Tribune National All Comers Cross Word Puzzle Tournament. Raphel describes the delight of the unnamed reporter, disabused of the assumption that "someone who is freakishly good at crosswords will of course be male, be socially awkward and have a face made for radio." I feel seen. In the end, it took the attack on Pearl Harbor to persuade The Times to abandon its sneer. Margaret Petherbridge now Margaret Farrar, after marrying the co founder of the famed publishing house Farrar, Straus Giroux wrote to The Times's publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger: "I don't think I have to sell you on the increased demand for this type of pastime in an increasingly worried world. You can't think of your troubles while solving a crossword." Farrar became the paper's first crossword puzzle editor, the founding dynast of the Hapsburgs of the crossword empire. It is in the modern era that this book loses its lapidary elegance. Raphel profiles some of the pastime's modern titans, including the reigning monarch Will Shortz, current Times puzzle editor (and NPR "puzzlemaster"). We meet many constructors and their artful creations, and we visit the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, founded by Shortz and held each spring in Stamford, Conn. But none of these people seem as vivid as their long dead predecessors. Raphel relates how Ruth von Phul, that first tournament champion, eventually set puzzles aside to become a world renowned scholar, enamored of James Joyce's wordplay. Or consider the romantic, elegiac chapter in which Raphel describes how Vladimir Nabokov maintained his connection to his wife, Vera, then a patient in a sanitarium, by sending her love notes filled with crosswords to solve, revealing his devotion letter by letter. But no one now alive seems quite as, well, alive. Raphel includes a few quotes from the blog of Prof. Michael Sharp, who posts often savage reviews of every daily Times crossword under the pseudonym Rex Parker but she never talks to him about his obsession or his adopted persona as the curmudgeonly scold whom every constructor resents but many secretly want to please. Raphel herself competes in the crossword tournament (she does poorly), but the winners go unnamed and unquoted. Who are these people, who have devoted their efforts to become the greatest crossword solvers in America? If Raphel had talked to the tournament announcer Greg Pliska, she would have discovered he's a talented constructor who wooed his wife with a series of original puzzles, the final one of which was a crossword with the solution: "WILL YOU MARRY ME?" Perhaps not as elegiac as Nabokov but unlike Nabokov, he's still here. Instead of solvers Raphel gives us philosophy, in a chapter on representation and reality in crosswords that begins to feel stretched. Some of her assertions seem disproportionate, as when she claims: "We tell ourselves games in order to live." (Somewhere, Abraham Maslow mutters, "Really?") I am a philistine, socially awkward with a face made for radio, but I would rather associate myself with the less cerebral explanation offered by Thomas Harris, in a very different context, in his novel "The Silence of the Lambs": "Problem solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to it." In my favorite memoir chapter, Raphel visits a writing retreat to construct her own crossword. After much technical discussion of grids and themes and fill, she writes: "I became a mechanical god. I shifted gears; I tuned each letter individually. ... I was a chemist, titrating my micro universe; a lepidopterist, shifting a butterfly's wing onto a pin." She was also, in this and only this, a failure. Her puzzle was rejected, as so many are, by The Times. But her affectionate exegesis of this pastime, this passion, this "temporary madness," succeeds. Like a good crossword, her book challenges us to back away from our assumptions, allows us to think differently and apply ourselves again. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
So here's the story: Donald Trump has abused the powers of his office to threaten a U.S. ally. His threat is probably illegal; his refusal to produce documents about his decision process is definitely illegal. And his claims about the motivation for his actions don't pass the laugh test. You probably think that I'm talking about Trump's attempt to pressure Ukraine into producing political dirt on Joe Biden by withholding aid, and the subsequent cover up you know, the stuff for which he has been impeached (and that half the country believes should lead to his removal from office). But there's another, somewhat similar story: his repeated threats to impose prohibitive tariffs on imports of automobiles from Europe. Granted, the auto tariff story isn't as vile as the Ukraine story, and it poses less of a direct threat to a fair election. But it's recognizably part of the same syndrome: abuse of presidential power, contempt for the rule of law, and dishonesty about motivations. Some background: U.S. tariffs taxes on imports are normally set the same way we set other taxes, through legislation that must pass Congress and then be signed by the president. The law does, however, give the president discretion to impose temporary tariffs under certain circumstances, for example to give U.S. industries a breathing space in the face of sudden import surges, to counter foreign export subsidies or to protect national security (Section 232). And so it was that in 2018 the Trump administration announced that it was beginning a Section 232 investigation of auto imports, especially from Europe and Japan. Every trade expert I know considered the notion that German or Japanese cars constitute a threat to national security absurd. Nonetheless, in 2019 a report from the Commerce Department concluded that auto imports do, indeed, endanger national security. What was the basis for this conclusion? Well, we don't actually know because the Trump administration has refused to release the report. This stonewalling is clearly illegal. The statute requires that all portions of the Commerce report that don't contain classified or proprietary information be published in the Federal Register, and it's hard to believe that any of the report contains such information, let alone the whole thing. Furthermore, Congress inserted a provision in a spending bill last month specifically requiring that the Trump administration turn over the report. Why won't Trump obey the law and hand over the document? My guess is that his people are afraid to let anyone see the Commerce report because it's embarrassingly thin and incompetent. To be honest, I have some doubts about whether the report even exists. Remember, the Commerce Department is run by Wilbur Ross, whom readers of my colleague Gail Collins voted Trump's worst cabinet member, which is quite a distinction given the competition. Beyond all that, why does Trump even want to impose tariffs on European cars? Obviously it has nothing to do with national security. But what's it really about? Part of the answer may be that the self proclaimed Tariff Man still believes that protectionism will revive American manufacturing, even though the evidence says that his trade war had the opposite effect. Beyond that, it appears that Trump tried to use the threat of auto tariffs to bludgeon European nations into backing him up in his confrontation with Iran. This is, by the way, a clear violation both of U.S. law, which does not give the president discretion to impose tariffs for reasons unrelated to economics, and of our international agreements, which prohibit this kind of bullying. And remember, the nations Trump was trying to bully are or were among our most important allies, part of the coalition of democracies we used to call the Free World. These days, our erstwhile allies can no longer consider America a reliable partner, on trade or anything else. Of course, that probably doesn't bother Trump, who prefers autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman. So how should we think about the auto tariff saga? At one level it's part of the broader story of Trump's trade war, which has raised prices for American consumers, hurt U.S. businesses and farmers and deterred business investment by creating uncertainty. But these economic considerations are, I'd argue, much less important than the political aspects. Trump's scofflaw behavior with regard to auto tariffs is part of a broader pattern of abuse of power and contempt for the rule of law. On every front, Trump treats U.S. policy as a tool he can deploy as he chooses, in his own interests, without seeking congressional approval or even informing Congress about what he's doing or why. Basically, the man in the White House operates on the principle that l'etat, c'est Trump. It's a principle nobody who believes in American ideals should accept. 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 |
BERKELEY, CALIF. For many Americans, the basic compact car stands as a matter of sacrifice to financial constraints, to fuel economy demands, to the exigencies of urban crowding. But what if the design of small cars could be reformulated to transcend their size? For an answer, Ford Motor looked to Europe, where small cars, like small apartments and un Gulplike beverage servings, are accepted realities of life. The company found a solution in its C Max, a five seat people mover it has sold in Europe since 2002 but began offering in the United States only last fall. Ford made a bet that American drivers would get used to, and even come to like, the high roof design of the C Max. Its tall proportions create a spacious interior in a small format a layout common on the other side of the Atlantic but one that has struggled for acceptance in this market. Then, one might say, Ford went "all California" and remade the American market C Max into the company's first exclusively hybrid model. There is no gasoline only C Max offered in the United States, only hybrids: a standard gas electric C Max Hybrid and a plug in version, called the C Max Energi, that can recharge from the power grid. Though it shares its basic dimensions with a Ford sibling, the Focus, the C Max is more spacious and comfortable; tall passengers gape in amazement at its generous headroom. That was the experience of Jim Hough, a 6 foot 4, 250 pound Navy veteran who leased a C Max Hybrid in October. Mr. Hough, from San Jose, Calif., considered his 2007 Ford Taurus "too confining" but appreciates the accommodations of his new car. "I can open the door of the C Max and simply get in it like I'm in my living room chair," he said. The C Max is bigger and bulkier than a compact the Energi plug in, with its larger battery, weighs a substantial 3,900 pounds but is smaller than a crossover. The doors feel exceptionally heavy and solid for a car this size, closing with a thud. Visibility is excellent, and the horn is a loud baritone. Though the car's space maximizing proportions may be more functional than typical compacts, they don't stir strong emotions. Still, the C Max is pleasing enough to the eye, even if it is seems slightly large for its frame, like an attractive person who is described as big boned. The dashboard layout, as on many other Ford vehicles, is a mishmash of levels, bevels and angles. The C Max's road manners bear little resemblance to the way typical gas electric models respond. The Hybrid's 188 total horsepower (the combined output of the 2 liter 4 cylinder gas engine and a 118 horsepower electric motor) reveals itself in a guttural roar during highway passing, the only time I could detect the presence of a combustion engine. Ford engineers have perfected the art of hybrid smoothness. The downside of the C Max not driving like a hybrid is that its fuel economy can also be unlike a hybrid. In the week I spent with the C Max Hybrid, followed by a week with the C Max Energi plug in, the gas mileage varied wildly. In my first 175 miles with the C Max Hybrid, I managed only 35.9 miles per gallon. That's shamefully below the E.P.A. rating of 47 m.p.g. for both highway and city driving, something noted by reviewers and owners (and has resulted in a class action suit against Ford in California). But then, on two occasions I used only a single gallon of gasoline to complete a 50 mile highway trip, handily beating the E.P.A.'s estimate. Mr. Hough said his mileage averaged in the low 40s. Consumers who want a more certain leap in mileage should consider the C Max Energi, which went on sale in October. For the Energi Ford's tag for plug in models, also applied to a coming version of the Fusion sedan the 1.4 kilowatt hour lithium ion battery pack used in the Hybrid is swapped for one with a 7.6 kilowatt hour capacity that is recharged from the grid. The larger pack can be replenished in less than two and a half hours through a 240 volt outlet, enough for about 20 miles of all electric range. Total output for the Energi plug in rises to 195 horsepower because of the larger battery pack's greater ability to deliver electricity to the motor. Otherwise, the gas engine and continuously variable transmission are identical to those used in the C Max Hybrid. The E.P.A. combined mileage rating for the C Max Energi is 100 m.p.g.e., or miles per gallon equivalent. It was fascinating to see how long after a full charge I could maintain the maximum 999 m.p.g. reading on the dashboard. That startling number a misleading way of showing that no gas was being consumed usually lasted about 17 miles. Then, with the gas engine starting, the number would drop to 400, 300, 200 and lower. Ford provides three modes to the C Max Energi driver, aptly named EV Now, EV Later and EV Auto. The choices are refreshingly straightforward (unlike the car's maddening Sync interface for infotainment systems), and, I think, would logically become a standard way of offering multiple modes in plug in hybrids. Think of the Energi's 7.6 kilowatt hour battery pack and its 14 gallon gas tank as two separate, interchangeable sources of energy. In the EV Now mode, the car uses only electricity as long as the battery pack has remaining charge and you drive at highway speeds. By choosing EV Later, the driver elects to only use gasoline, reserving the electricity for a different time; with EV Auto, efficiency minded sprites in the car's software make the decisions. One of my days with the C Max Energi required 24 miles of travel, of which 21.6 miles were battery powered, using 6 kilowatt hours of electricity. For a 59 mile journey from Berkeley to the San Francisco airport and back three times what the battery pack can deliver for electric only propulsion I returned home with a reading of 67.7 m.p.g. That number takes into account the initial miles on battery power and the gas used once the Energi's battery was depleted. At that point, the C Max Energi provided the same fuel economy as the C Max Hybrid about 40 m.p.g. around the city and close to 50 m.p.g. on the highway despite being some 260 pounds heavier. But keep in mind that if most driving is within the Energi's 20 mile real world E.V. range, as it was for me, the C Max would effectively serve as an electric vehicle. With the Energi's plug in benefits come compromises, however. First, the copious cargo room that is among the C Max's best features is seriously reduced to make room for a larger, awkwardly placed battery pack that is about the size of a large suitcase. With the rear seats folded flat, the cargo capacity drops to 42.8 cubic feet in the C Max Energi, from 52.6 cubic feet of cargo for the C Max Hybrid. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
A much anticipated annual tradition in Washington is here: The National Cherry Blossom Festival will take place through April 16. The event, celebrating its 90th anniversary, commemorates the 1912 gift of 3,000 cherry trees from Japan to the United States. Today, there are 3,800 cherry blossom trees, and visitors to the city during the festival can see them in bloom. Most of the trees are along the Tidal Basin in West Potomac Park, but they are also in East Potomac Park and on the Washington Monument grounds. . Numerous hotels in Washington have themed packages pegged to the festival. The Embassy Row Hotel is offering the National Cherry Blossom Festival Package, including two nights' accommodations, two one day Metrorail passes and a sake tasting at the hotel's restaurant, Station Kitchen Cocktails. From 179 a night. Available from March 20 to April 16. Washington Hilton has the Capital Coolcation package; it includes two cherry blossom cocktails, unlimited coffee and hot chocolate, and late checkout. From 129 a night. Available throughout the festival. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
"True Detective" Season 1 told us that time is a flat circle. "True Detective" Season 3 proves it. How many ways does the new season of HBO's noir dirge return to familiar ground? The new case, like the first season's, involves brooding Southern police and a horrifying crime against children. It takes place over three time periods, decades apart: an investigation, a re investigation and a re reinvestigation. We meet, again, hardscrabble poor folk and ambitious politicians; we find, again, creepy totems left at the crime scene and intimations of the occult. Even the jokes repeat themselves. In Season 2, Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell) declared: "I support feminism. Mostly by having body issues." Now, Roland West (Stephen Dorff) tries to persuade his partner, Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali), to go to a brothel, saying: "I'm a feminist. They want to sell me a piece of ass, they've got the right." If you score "True Detective" Season 3 on originality, it fails for repeating both its own history and the already dated cable genre of glum loners confronting the evils men do. But if you treat it as a do over if the series, like one of its haunted antiheroes, is retracing its steps to try to get things right then it's fine. Often quite good. Far more consistent. Consistency, though, is an odd achievement for a series in which the creator Nic Pizzolatto has insisted on swinging hard and hitting or missing big. Season 1 suffered from florid dialogue and stereotyped characters, especially the women but when it connected, especially in Matthew McConaughey's performance as the haunted Rust Cohle, it was breathtaking. Season 2 was an admirable effort to change scenery, but it fell apart like a handful of California desert dust. The new story returns to the South, a scrubby, hard luck patch of Arkansas where the partners Hays and West catch a case involving two children who disappeared on a bike ride. They crack the story open like a rotting log, and all manner of sadness scurries out: the local dead enders who come under suspicion, the spiraling marriage of the children's parents, Tom (Scoot McNairy) and Lucy Purcell (Mamie Gummer). The season is nominally a story of partners, as if to keep up the tradition (and honor all those "True Detective 3" internet memes). But the show really belongs to Ali (who just won a Golden Globe for "Green Book"), and he's coolly magnetic. As Hays in 1980, he has a dry, outsider affect; he served in Vietnam as a solo reconnaissance tracker, and as a black man in a largely white community, he stands apart. (The season's exploration of race is intriguing but can feel forced, like the treatment of gender in Season 2.) In 2015, he is shaky and guarded, his memories splintered by dementia, as he tries to recall the case, and what may have gone wrong, for a "Making a Murderer" style documentary. Of course, acting talent has never been the problem with "True Detective," give or take a miscast Vince Vaughn. Overacting, or at least speechifying, is another matter, and both Ali and Pizzolatto (who writes the first five episodes, with an assist from David Milch of "Deadwood" in Episode 4) rein it in. The dialogue is more streamlined but keeps the leavening banter. ("You know how many times rats almost ended civilization?" Hays asks, in a tangent about vermin. "How many?" West answers. Pause. Distant stare. "I don't know. At least two.") The dementia twist complicates a familiar story. We're not so much flashing back and forward in time as joining the elder Hays who hangs on to his memory by recording messages to himself while he wanders about in his past. In the premiere episode, his 1980 self, while combing a house for clues, pauses, stares into the camera and says: "I'm ready to go now. I don't want to be here." They're the words of the elder Hays, speaking to the film crew, overcome by the burden of his history. But as the episodes wear on (the first two, evocatively directed by Jeremy Saulnier, air Sunday), they become more dour, and some of the old pretensions return. Hays is visited by a vision from the past that asks him: "Did you confuse reacting with feeling? Did you mistake compulsion for freedom?" Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil? As compelling as Hays is, the season struggles with its supporting characters. Hays meets Amelia (Carmen Ejogo), a schoolteacher, in 1980; by 1990, they're in a troubled marriage and she has become a writer her book on the missing children case is considered a nonfiction classic by 2015. On paper, she's an intriguing quasi partner, a cerebral foil to the methodical Hays, but the script never develops her beyond an accessory to his story. Her profession does, however, provide an excuse for some literary references, including a quote from a Robert Penn Warren poem that restates the show's favorite theme: "The name of the story will be Time / But you must not pronounce its name." Which returns us to the beginning. Three seasons in, it's clear what "True Detective" is: a platinum cast anthology of moody crime stories in which familiar cops with familiar demons chase familiar devils. How many times do you really need to see it? If your answer is "Once every couple of years," then you're in luck. This new "True Detective" should hold you over perfectly well, until time circles back once again. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
For Malory and Caleb (Lauren Lapkus and Nick Rutherford), becalmed in a four year engagement, the thrill has gone though, honestly, it's hard to imagine one was ever there. Unrelentingly quippy (both actors have backgrounds in sketch comedy and improv), their interactions suggest kooky best pals much more than longtime lovers. Yet, as "The Unicorn" begins, their inability to pull the marriage trigger is presented as a mystery, especially to Malory's sexually outre parents, who remain so mutually besotted they renew their vows every year. And when, at their 25th anniversary party, their secret is revealed as a fondness for threesomes, Malory and Caleb decide that, hey, maybe an extra pair of hands a so called unicorn would be just the thing to invigorate their own close encounters. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
KidGuard is a phone app that markets itself as a tool for keeping tabs on children. But it has also promoted its surveillance for other purposes and run blog posts with headlines like "How to Read Deleted Texts on Your Lover's Phone." A similar app, mSpy, offered advice to a woman on secretly monitoring her husband. Still another, Spyzie, ran ads on Google alongside results for search terms like "catch cheating girlfriend iPhone." As digital tools that gather cellphone data for tracking children, friends or lost phones have multiplied in recent years, so have the options for people who abuse the technology to track others without consent. More than 200 apps and services offer would be stalkers a variety of capabilities, from basic location tracking to harvesting texts and even secretly recording video, according to a new academic study. More than two dozen services were promoted as surveillance tools for spying on romantic partners, according to the researchers and reporting by The New York Times. Most of the spying services required access to victims' phones or knowledge of their passwords both common in domestic relationships. Digital monitoring of a spouse or partner can constitute illegal stalking, wiretapping or hacking. But laws and law enforcement have struggled to keep up with technological changes, even though stalking is a top warning sign for attempted homicide in domestic violence cases. "We misunderstand and minimize this abuse," said Erica Olsen, director of the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence. "People think that if there's not an immediate physical proximity to the victim, there might not be as much danger." Statistics on electronic stalking are hard to find because victims may not know they are being watched, or they may not report it. Even if they believe they are being tracked, hidden software can make confirmation difficult. But data breaches at two surveillance companies last year revealing accounts of more than 100,000 users, according to the technology site Motherboard gave some sense of the scale. The tracking app company mSpy told The New York Times that it sold subscriptions to more than 27,000 users in the United States in the first quarter of this year. According to data published last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 27 percent of women and 11 percent of men in the United States at some point endure stalking or sexual or physical violence by an intimate partner that has significant effects. While comprehensive numbers aren't available on domestic abuse cases involving digital stalking in the United States, a small survey published in Australia in 2016 found that 17 percent of victims were tracked via GPS, including through such apps. This January, Mr. Toledo was sentenced to three consecutive life terms after being convicted of killing his wife, Yessenia Suarez, and her two children. Sergeant Pagliari said Mr. Toledo told him he installed the app several days before her death. "With the use of the app, Toledo was able to confirm his suspicion," the sergeant said. Representatives for SMS Tracker, made by the Dallas based Gizmoquip, did not respond to requests for comment about the app's role in the case. A recent review on the Google Play store for SMS Tracker tells potential users: "I would recommend if you think your partner is cheating." There is no federal law against location tracking, but such monitoring can violate state laws on stalking. Spying on communications can break statutes on wiretapping or computer crime. And knowingly selling illegal wiretapping tools is a federal crime. But it's not illegal to sell or use an app for tracking your children or your own phone. And it can be difficult to tell whether the person being surveilled has given consent, because abusers frequently coerce victims into using such apps. In Everson, Wash., for example, Brooks Owen Laughlin is accused of beating his wife and using an app typically used for benign purposes, Find My iPhone, to control her movements. Luis Toledo was convicted of killing his wife, Yessenia Suarez, and her two children, Michael Otto, 8, left, and Thalia Otto, 9, right. Mr. Toledo had installed an app called SMS Tracker on Ms. Suarez's phone because he suspected she was having an affair. "If she would turn it off, he would instantly call her or text her and say, 'Why did you turn that off? What are you doing?' That was pretty much 24 7," Chief Daniel MacPhee of the Everson Police Department, said in an interview. Mr. Laughlin pleaded not guilty in April to charges of assault, harassment and stalking. Such technical and legal ambiguity has created an environment in which tools are marketed for both legal and illegal uses, without apparent repercussion. "There are definitely app makers that are complicit, seeking out these customers and advertising this use," said Periwinkle Doerfler, a doctoral student at New York University and an author of the study on apps, which will be presented in the coming days. "They're a little bit under the radar about it, but they're still doing it." The researchers, from N.Y.U., Cornell University and Cornell Tech, contacted customer support for nine companies with tracking services. The researchers claimed to be women who wanted to secretly track their husbands, and only one company, TeenSafe, refused to assist. KidGuard, the app largely aimed at parents, also bought ads alongside Google results for searches like "catch cheating spouse app." A spokesman for the business, based in Los Angeles, said in an email that the company worked with third party marketers and customer service reps who had been "testing new strategies." It deleted blog posts about tracking romantic partners and said it did not support that activity. Spyzie, another app that ran such ads, did not respond to requests for comment. On YouTube, dozens of videos provide tutorials on using several of the apps to catch cheating lovers. The videos frequently link back to the app makers' sites using a special code that ensures the promoter will get a cut of the sale a type of deal known as affiliate marketing. Reviews and online discussions about the apps suggest the market for spying on spouses has been important to the businesses. FlexiSPY, an app company, posted survey results on its site showing that 52 percent of potential customers were interested because they thought their partners might be cheating. Asked about the results, the company said the data was five years old and "no longer relevant." The proliferation of such tracking apps raises questions about the role of businesses like Google and Apple in policing their services. The two companies, which run nearly all smartphones in the United States, have long taken different approaches to regulating apps. Apple makes it difficult for iPhone users to download apps from outside the company's App Store, and has many restrictions on what apps in its store can do. After testing several programs available in the stores on both platforms, the researchers found that Apple's strict rules resulted in more limited surveillance capabilities on those apps than those running Google's software. Many App Store apps offered location tracking for phones. But for more intrusive surveillance, spying companies had to work around Apple's restrictions by using the victim's name and password to get data. To combat misuse by predators, an Apple spokesman said, the company urges people to use a tool called two factor authentication to help protect their accounts even if their passwords are stolen. Google prides itself on being more open. Its smartphone software, Android, allows people to install apps from anywhere, and the most invasive ones were found outside the company's app store, Play. The researchers found two apps in the Google Play store that allowed the app icon to be hidden from victims and the camera to run without notifications, as well as a handful of others that tracked users' locations without telling them, all apparent violations of Google's rules. "They're not enforcing their own policies," Ms. Doerfler, the N.Y.U. researcher, said. "If someone reports it then they'll take it down, but it's not something they are checking within their operating system." In response to the researchers' findings, Google tightened several policies "to further restrict the promotion and distribution" of surveillance apps, a company spokesman said. The company provides funding to the N.Y.U. team that helped conduct the study. Victims' advocates said they noticed after the case that makers of surveillance tools changed their tactics, sometimes moving computer servers overseas or scrubbing explicit language about spousal spying from their websites. "As soon as these companies caught wind that they shouldn't be doing it, they just changed their marketing," Ms. Olsen said. One app maker told The Times that he hired a legal team after the StealthGenie case to help him avoid running afoul of the law. "There were a few modifications we had to make," said Patrick Hinchy, the founder of New York based ILF Mobile Apps, which makes Highster Mobile and other services. Several apps, he said, removed call recording and delayed the availability of the data by 10 to 15 minutes. Mr. Hinchy said the company only provided assistance to customers that it believed was legal. When a researcher recently contacted the company and asked, "If I use this app to track my husband, will he know that I am tracking him?" the representative responded: "Our software is undetectable from the home screen." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
A new experimental airplane being built by NASA could help push electric powered aviation from a technical curiosity and pipe dream into something that might become commercially viable for small aircraft. At a conference on Friday of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Washington, Charles F. Bolden Jr., the NASA administrator, announced plans for an all electric airplane designated as X 57, part of the agency's efforts to make aviation more efficient and less of a polluter. "The X 57 will take the first giant step in opening a new era of aviation," Mr. Bolden declared. The steps taken by NASA will not translate into all electric cross country jetliners. But the agency hopes the technology can be incorporated into smaller, general aviation and commuter aircraft some years from now. The X 57 will look more like a Cessna, unlike some of NASA's earlier sleek, futuristic X planes. Its cruising speed might hit 175 miles per hour. Its wings, however, will be unique far skinnier than usual and embedded with 14 motors. "The problem with traditional aircraft design is you have to size the wings so that you have safe takeoff and landing speeds, and so the wing tends to end up bigger than you need for cruise flight," said Sean Clarke, co principal investigator for the project at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif. For the X 57, the NASA researchers are designing narrower wings that are efficient during cruise flight, powered by two 60 kilowatt electric motors at the wingtips that spin five foot wide propellers. For takeoff and landing, 12 smaller 9 kilowatt motors powering two foot wide propellers will kick in to blow extra air over the skinny wings to generate the necessary lift. In flight, the smaller propellers are folded away. NASA has already purchased the Italian designed Tecnam P2006T twin engine four seat aircraft that it will transform into the X 57. In the first step, NASA will replace the gasoline powered motors with electric ones, aiming for takeoff in about a year. Swapping out the wing will take another one to two years, Mr. Clarke estimated. The X plane designations are handed out by the United States Air Force for experimental, cutting edge aircraft starting with the X 1 that broke the sound barrier in 1947. NASA's last X plane effort, more than a decade ago, was the X 43A, a pilotless black dart that accelerated to almost 7,000 m.p.h., which set the record for a jet powered aircraft. The NASA researchers have nicknamed the new plane "Maxwell," after James Clerk Maxwell, a 19th century Scottish physicist who came up with the basic equations underlying electromagnetism. The X 57 is far from the first electric airplane, and a solar powered electric airplane called Solar Impulse is currently making a series of flights that will take it around the world. But Solar Impulse cruises at 30 to 40 m.p.h., of which Mr. Clarke said, "I don't think anyone would classify as high speed." At 175 m.p.h., the X 57 would be as fast as the original P2006T and other similar general aviation planes. "That's a speed that could enable much greater market share for a technology like this," Mr. Clarke said. Operational costs could be cut by as much as 40 percent, and electric motors are much quieter. The design does not overcome the shortcomings of electric propulsion. Its 800 pounds of batteries will replace the rear two passenger seats, and the seat next to the pilot will be replaced with instrumentation, leaving space for only the pilot and no passengers. It can stay aloft for only about one hour. Mr. Clarke said the technology could be scaled upward for commuter or regional airliners, and NASA is investigating using fuel cells rather than batteries to provide the electricity. But limits in the speed of propeller driven aircraft means they are unlikely for cross country airline flights. "I think all electric would be a stretch for jetliners," he said. But NASA has four other X plane projects in the pipeline, part of a 10 year aviation research program proposed by the Obama administration in February. "This will be NASA's moonshot for aviation," Mr. Bolden said. That includes a supersonic airplane that would not generate supersonic booms. "Talking about going around the world in six hours or going from Dubai in New York in an hour," Mr. Bolden said. "That's absolutely incredible." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
"Why are you in there?" a visitor asked the woman behind bars. The woman was the performance artist Ann Liv Young, and she was all dolled up in a free standing jail cell at Jack, a performance space in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. At the invitation of Jack's artistic director, Alec Duffy, Ms. Young was doing time for her transgressions. It's been almost a year since Ms. Young masquerading as her alter ego, the tough love therapist Sherry flagrantly disrupted another artist's show at American Realness, the annual festival of contemporary performance at Abrons Arts Center. That show, Rebecca Patek's "Ineter(a)nal F/ear," dealt subversively with issues of rape and other kinds of trauma, a disquieting blur of sincerity and satire. Sherry (Ms. Young insists she acted in character) didn't like it and objected with a barrage of verbal assaults, some delivered via megaphone. People were angry; Ms. Young was banned from Abrons. "Every curator, institution and artist who aligns themselves with Ms. Young is complicit in her violence," the critic Andy Horwitz wrote. Ms. Patek published an incisive response. So when Mr. Duffy wanted to present Ms. Young, he couldn't ignore "the hubbub," he explained during Thursday's performance. "The idea," he said, addressing Ms. Young, "was to punish you." But "Ann Liv Young in Jail" was hardly punishment. A chance to put on a show and to rehearse and advertise her other new production, "Elektra" it was more like a gift to the artist and her posse of (noncaged) assistants, more party than penance. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
President Trump has often described this pandemic as our "war" with an "invisible enemy" the coronavirus. That war metaphor is wrong and misleading. Wars are fought and won by humans. So, we could out mobilize the Nazis and Japanese to win World War II. We could out spend and out innovate the Soviet Union to win the Cold War. But when you're in a struggle with one of Mother Nature's challenges like a virus or a climate change the goal is not to defeat her. No one can. She's just chemistry, biology and physics. The goal is to adapt. Mother Nature does not reward the strongest or the smartest. She rewards the species that are the most adaptive in evolving the chemistry, biology and physics that she has endowed them with to thrive no matter what she throws at them. And that's why I believe one of the most important questions we need to answer, as these lockdowns end, is this: Are we going to adapt to the coronavirus by design the way Sweden is attempting to do or are we going to go the same direction as Sweden by messy default or are we just going to say "the hell with lockdowns" and go 50 different ways? In case you've missed it, Sweden has taken a radically different approach in dealing with the coronavirus. It has essentially opted for a strategy of "herd immunity" through exposure. This strategy posits that most people under age 65 who get the coronavirus if they do not have major pre existing medical conditions will either experience it as a typical or tough flu, or completely asymptomatically, and the number who will get so sick that they require hospitalization or emergency care will reliably be less than the number of beds needed to care for them. So, if you do your best to shelter and sequester all of those over 65 and those with serious pre existing conditions notably heart and lung disease and diabetes and let much of the rest of the population circulate and get exposed and become naturally immune, once about 60 percent of your population has gone through this you'll have herd immunity and the viral transmission will be blocked. (This assumes that immunity for some period of time results from exposure, as most experts think it will.) After all, herd immunity is our goal either from vaccination or from enough people building natural immunity. Those are the only ways to achieve it. The upside of Sweden's strategy if it works is that your economy does not take such a deep hit from lockdowns. It is unlike the strategy of suppression pursued in cities across America right now as well as around the globe where, when the lockdown is over, your population largely has not developed immunity and so most everyone remains vulnerable to the virus, and to a second wave in the fall. Think of the challenge of New York City. Its hospitals would have been overwhelmed by the sudden crush of patients, so the months of lockdown of millions will surely, and vitally, have saved lives. But it has come at huge cost to jobs and businesses and with little progress to herd immunity and with the prospect that the virus can come roaring back as soon as the lockdown is lifted, unless there is Chinese level testing, tracking, tracing and quarantining those carrying the infection. And even that might not work. Now think of Stockholm. Anders Tegnell, chief epidemiologist at Sweden's Public Health Agency the nation's top infectious disease official and architect of Sweden's coronavirus response, said in an interview published in USA Today on Tuesday: "We think that up to 25 percent people in Stockholm have been exposed to coronavirus and are possibly immune. A recent survey from one of our hospitals in Stockholm found that 27 percent of staff there are immune. We think that most of those are immune from transmission in society, not the workplace. We could reach herd immunity in Stockholm within a matter of weeks." Tegnell explains that Sweden is not just blithely letting all Swedes get the disease to achieve herd immunity, but rather is pursuing a designed strategy for the most sustainable way to navigate through this pandemic. So colleges and high schools are closed, but kindergarten through grade nine are open, as are many restaurants, stores and businesses. But the government has also issued social distancing guidelines, which many people are abiding by, encouraged working from home and discouraged nonessential travel. Most important, it has encouraged everyone over 70 to stay at home and banned gatherings of more than 50 people and visits to nursing homes. The result, so far, Tegnell noted, has been a gradual building of herd immunity among those least vulnerable while the country has avoided mass unemployment and an overwhelming of the hospital system. Tegnell said: "There has always been a problem with running these homes safely in Sweden going back a long time. That's something we are taking advice on now and that we intend to do better on." As for experts who warn that it has not been conclusively proven that individuals who have had Covid 19 are immune, by the presence of antibodies, from getting the virus again, Tegnell told USA Today that such thinking undermines the argument for looking for a vaccine: "If you can't get population immunity, how can we then think a vaccine will protect us?" He concluded: "What's happening now is that many countries are starting to come around to the Swedish way. They are opening schools, trying to find an exit strategy. It comes back to sustainability. We need to have measures in place that we can keep on doing over the longer term, not just for a few months or several weeks." Asked about the American approach, he said that it "seems to me that the Americans let coronavirus go too far before any real strategy came into place." Here's the stone cold truth: There are only different hellish ways to adapt to a pandemic and save both lives and livelihoods. I raise Sweden not because I think it has found the magic balance it is way too soon to tell but because I think we should be debating all the different ways and costs of acquiring immunity. When I look across America, though, and see governors partly lifting lockdowns because they feel their people just can't take it anymore for economic or psychological reasons, even though their populations have little or no immunity I worry we may end up developing more herd immunity but in a painful, deadly, costly, uncoordinated way that still leaves room for the coronavirus to strike hard again and overwhelm hospitals. One of Israel's most renowned computer scientists, Amnon Shashua, the founder of Mobileye, has been advocating a designed Swedish style immunity pathway for Israel for weeks. "The risk based quarantine model is not only beneficial from the point of view of economical sustainability," but also because "when the high risk group is released from isolation they would be facing a largely immune population thus naturally facing a very slow spread of infection with a good chance to whither the storm until a cure or vaccine is available," he wrote in Medium last month. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said in an interview with WCCO radio on Monday that "I think that Sweden is one model we need to look at, but it's not the only model, but we surely need to have these discussions." Because absent a miracle vaccine soon, said Osterholm, "this virus will not stop trying to infect people until we get it to at least the 60 percent or 70 percent level." Herd immunity "has historically been nature's way of ending pandemics," added Dr. David Katz, the public health physician who helped kick off the debate in an essay he wrote in The New York Times on March 20 and in a follow up interview we did together. "We need to bend with her forces even when we as a species are responsible for unleashing them," Katz said. That means a designed strategy, based on risk profiles, of phasing back to work those least vulnerable, so we gradually cultivate the protection of herd immunity "while concentrating our health services and social services on protecting those most vulnerable" until we can sound the all clear. 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 |
Psst, buddy: Can I interest you in a 50,000 or 60,000 Acura? For years, that come on has sent shoppers running from Acura's discount alley to more illustrious brands like Mercedes, BMW, Audi and Lexus. Honda's luxury brand does many things well, but prestige sedans have not necessarily been one of them. Acura's wheelhouse is the 30,000 to 45,000 range, and after a recession era plunge, the brand is smartly ramping up sales. The new RDX crossover may be the best pocketbook friendly alternative to an Audi Q5 or BMW X3. A refashioned MDX, Acura's popular midsize crossover, is busting out of the gate. And the TL is an underrated entry luxury sedan, especially with Super Handling All Wheel Drive, or SH AWD, which despite its supersilly name actually improves handling. But Acura seems to run out of air, and inspiration, above the 50,000 heights. The new RLX shows Acura, Sisyphus like, trying to roll a midsize sedan up the mountain to where the German gods live. We've seen this tragedy before, most recently with the Acura RL. That RL was as D.O.A. as any luxury car can be; a spreadsheet on wheels that, by 2011, became the worst selling mainstream car in America, finding barely 1,000 customers. The RLX fares better, but it doesn't confront Acura's high end sedan issues head on, preferring to dodge them by adding more space and enough gadgets to fill a Best Buy. Acura's flagship still seems designed for an illusory luxury world, one in which low key virtue trumps high design and ego inflating performance. Wedded to Honda's less is more philosophy, Acura has publicly rejected the development of a rear wheel drive sedan (or an optional V 8 engine) despite all the evidence that big money buyers prefer a rear drive platform: the Mercedes E Class, BMW 5 Series, Lexus GS, Infiniti M and Jaguar XF all send power to the rear, with all wheel drive available across the board. The formidable Audi A6 is all wheel drive only. Eight cylinder engines are options in all but the Lexus and Audi. The RLX wades into this shark tank, for now, in exclusively front drive form. Power is amply supplied by a new direct injection 3.5 liter V 6 with 310 horsepower, a gain of 10 over the RL's 3.7 liter V 6. This silky, strengthened version of the Honda Accord's V 6 shuts down half of its cylinders in steady cruising, helping to lift the fuel economy rating to 20/31 m.p.g., up from just 17/24 for the RL. So far, so good, though even my most frugal minded efforts failed to squeeze out more than 27 m.p.g. But as your eye sails over the Acura, it finds no safe perch in a sea of bland. On two occasions, I strolled past the Acura, blending in at the curb, and had to backtrack to find it. There's nothing unpleasant about the RLX, but the go along to get along styling doesn't bode well for what's already an underdog in its class. One distinctive feature, the gleaming Jewel Eye LED headlamps, did a great job of cutting through nighttime murk. Big, airy and relaxing, the RLX's interior benefits from a two inch wheelbase stretch and 1.8 inches more width. Acura says there is more rear knee and shoulder room than in any competitor, and the extra space is apparent. Acura might have pressed that real estate edge with genuine room for three in the rear, but the center perch is typically high and hard. Here's an appreciative nod to the manual rear window shades: Lift the main section, and a smaller shade pivots out to cover the remaining triangle of glass. The new rotary knob control system is blessedly simplified, though screen menus remain cumbersome in the anal retentive Honda fashion. The RLX looks to stare down any competitors' technology: "I'll see your cellular linked assistant, integrated phone apps and adaptive cruise control, and raise you a four wheel steering system." That Precision All Wheel Steer system or PAWS, in one of the more apt industry acronyms can turn the rear wheels in tandem with the fronts for greater high speed stability, or in the opposite direction for low speed agility and a slightly reduced turning circle. It's an often tried technology that's never caught on, probably because the effect, as ever, is largely imperceptible. The same goes for the optional lane keeping assist, which spies lane markers and lightly nudges the steering wheel to keep the car centered. But here, Acura seems too timid, or worried about liability, to go all out: The system stops operating if a driver's hands stray from the wheel. And since its digital hand still lets the car drift wide without human input, it's hard to see the gain over basic lane departure buzzer warnings. The RLX literally doubles down on video displays, stacking a sharp eight inch navigation screen atop a seven inch touchscreen. There's some redundancy between screens, but the Acura can display navigation, audio and climate controls simultaneously with no crowding. (Don't try that in your Mercedes.) The optional Krell audio system is a knockout for spacious sound and tonal clarity on par with some big name Bang Olufsen units especially when I popped in an audiophile level CD. The Honda Acura navigation system and mapping are among the industry's best. But voice functions are a literal waste of breath, requiring more rounds of call and response than a square dance. Acura's latest real time traffic alerts now include conditions on surface streets, though its accuracy will surely be superior in major cities than in obscure small towns. And for a car that aims for easy connectivity, Acura may want a word with its liability lawyers: You can't manually input addresses, access your stored phonebook or even reset the trip computer without pulling over. Over the road, the RLX's watchword is "soft." Laminated acoustic glass hushes the interior. The steering is feather light, creating some high speed trepidation, and the suspension is in comfort's camp as well. The automatic transmission has merely 6 speeds. It is capable in everyday driving, but lazy when prodded with the available paddle shifters, even when Sport mode is selected. Like the basic TL, the RLX is a great cruiser and a good handler for a front drive car. But no amount of steering trickery can hide the cars' nose heavy weight bias. Nor can the RLX fully hide its birthright. From the safe as milk exterior to the Vulcan logic of its cabin, the RLX comes off as the sweetest Honda you've ever imagined. And since there's no need to imagine a 30,000 V 6 Accord or a 40,000 Acura TL, even fans of the Acura brand may ask why they should pay from 49,345 to 61,345 for the RLX. Four wheel steering, anyone? Acura is talking up value, but consider the rear drive Hyundai Genesis luxury sedan. The Genesis' top R Spec model with 429 horsepower from a 5 liter V 8 actually costs less than the base model RLX. As if Audi, BMW and Mercedes weren't scary enough. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
THE BRITISH IN INDIA A Social History of the Raj By David Gilmour Illustrated. 618 pp. Farrar, Straus Giroux. 35. The United Kingdom's still roiling Brexit controversy, with the referendum's most fervent supporters boasting of an unleashed Britain recapturing imperial era glory, has tended to leave the messier, bloodier details of colonialism unexamined. From this distance, and with rose tinted glasses, the British Empire especially as it extended to India can be viewed as an example of a selfless commitment to civilizing the world while standing atop it. And yet, as David Gilmour writes of the British mind set during the imperial heyday, "It was as if the British, at almost every level of society, were proud to have India as their jewel but did not want to spend much time admiring the object: It was just nice to know that it was in the bank and to be able to boast about it." Even a couple of centuries ago, applying a microscope to British rule in India let alone learning about Indians themselves was inevitably a more complex, and fraught, undertaking than most Britons had any wish to engage in. With "The British in India: A Social History of the Raj," Gilmour, metaphorical microscope in hand, has written a broad ranging but precise and intimate examination of the British men and women who served and lived on the subcontinent. A historian of Italy and Britain, a biographer of Kipling and the onetime viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, as well as a prolific essayist, he is ideally suited to the task. But this is not a book about the evils of colonialism; the devil is not in these details. What interests him, in this book at least, are not the larger questions of politics, or economics, or the global position of Britain all of them factors that helped determine the country's imperial stance but instead the often gritty, colorfully distinct stories that constituted the individual British experience. He is also fascinated by the social relations among and within classes, and how mores changed over a vast era that ended with independence, partition and the birth of Pakistan in 1947. It is a finely wrought history of the British in India that does not really examine what the British did to India or to Indians. "The British in India" actually begins in the period before the formation of the British Raj in 1858, which was a direct response to the Indian rebellion of the previous year against the East India Company. That entity, created in 1600, really only came into great prominence in the middle of the 18th century. (The British edition's subtitle, "Three Centuries of Ambition and Experience," is both better and more accurate than "A Social History of the Raj.") Over these years, the "mental journey" of the British, as one writer quoted by Gilmour characterized it, could be charted as "Greed, Scorn, Fear and Indifference," in precisely that order. Gilmour's narrative doesn't really unfold in this chronological fashion, but a consistent theme is how a relatively few Britons ruled a vast territory, and how lonely and isolated their experiences could be. They were a cross section of people, soldiers and civil servants, often the black sheep of their families, sometimes criminals seeking a clean slate and, especially at first, men simply out to make a quick buck. "India's chief allure for Europeans of the 18th century," Gilmour writes, "was its wealth and the chance of getting their hands on some of it." Gilmour is particularly good on the Indian Civil Service a subject he has previously written about which presided over India during the 90 years of formal Raj rule. It did so with a seriousness of purpose and with an increasing number of Indians in its ranks that was lacking in earlier periods. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
WASHINGTON The Food and Drug Administration plans to ban sales of most flavored e cigarettes in retail stores and gas stations around the country, in an effort to reduce the popularity of vaping among young people. The agency also plans to require age verification measures for online sales to try to ensure that minors are not able to buy the flavor pods. F.D.A. officials have been weighing measures to try to curb the use of flavored e cigarettes among teenagers. A senior agency official said details of the plan would be announced next week, and that menthol and mint flavors would be exempt from the restrictions. The F.D.A. stopped short of including menthol flavors in the vaping sales ban, partly out of concern that some users would switch to traditional menthol tobacco cigarettes. In a recent interview that predated this plan, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the agency's commissioner, said he considered youth vaping a pernicious public health problem. "In order to close the on ramp to e cigarettes for kids, we have to put in place some speed bumps for adults," Dr. Gottlieb said. Tobacco companies have fought cutting flavors from e cigarettes, saying they are not aimed at youths but at adults who need them as a way to transition from tobacco cigarettes. But health advocates point to the packaging and youth appeal of a variety of flavors, including chicken and waffles, rocket Popsicle and unicorn milk as well as fruity tastes like mango. Dr. Gottlieb has called the attacks on flavored products an "unfortunate trade off" because they could restrict access to alternatives for adults trying to quit smoking. But, he also said parents should consider their children's use of e cigarettes a serious health threat. "I think that there's a perception that e cigarettes are a safer alternative for kids," he said, "but it can lead to a lifelong addiction, and some percentage will migrate to combustible products." The agency's plans were reported earlier by the Washington Post. The F.D.A.'s crackdown on flavored e cigarettes began earlier this year, as the numbers of teenagers vaping reached epidemic proportions and the popularity of such devices soared. Juul, the blockbuster start up, has been a primary target of agency regulators, lawmakers and concerned parents because of its dominant share of the market. Its device resembles a flash drive, and has had a stunning appeal among youths ever since it was introduced. Dr. Gottlieb focused on Juul and several other major e cigarette makers in September, warning them to stop marketing to teenagers or risk being banned. He set a 60 day deadline for the major companies to prove they could keep their devices away from minors, and that timetable ends this weekend. At the same time, the F.D.A. also warned 1,100 retailers to stop selling the devices to minors, and issues fines to some of them. The latest actions follow months of meetings between the F.D.A. and e cigarette makers over how to prevent teenagers from getting hooked on their products. Juul, which has more than 70 percent of the nation's e cigarette market and has become ubiquitous in many high schools and middle schools, submitted thousands of pages of marketing documents and related materials. But the regulators, not satisfied, then visited the company's San Francisco headquarters in September and seized more. The four other products facing the 60 day deadline were RJR Vapor Co.'s Vuse, Imperial Brands' blu and devices made by Logic. None of the companies responded to immediate requests for comment. RJR, Imperial and Altria are all major tobacco companies, which along with other industry heavyweights have viewed e cigarettes as critical to their survival now that smoking rates have declined to their lowest levels in the United States. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The damsel in distress archetype probably conjures up images of delicate maidens and chivalrous gentlemen. That is precisely what it is designed to do for white people. To people of color, and especially African Americans who have borne the brunt of her power in the United States, the image is very different. The damsel in distress is an illusion of innocence that deflects and denies the racial crimes of white society. That loaded threat issued by Ms. Cooper has no weight unless the person being threatened is as aware of the stakes as the person issuing it. Ms. Cooper's words leaned into the history of lynching black men and boys on the pretext of protecting white women. Yet, in subsequent media interviews, she claimed she was acting out of fear, is "not a racist" and "did not mean to harm that man in any way." She may believe these statements to be true. But even here she betrays her sense of white superiority; even if she didn't intend to physically hurt him, she certainly was letting him know she had the power to do so and was attempting to corner him into submission. Moreover, feeling afraid and being in danger are not necessarily the same thing. Historically speaking, when white people are afraid it is usually people of color who get hurt. Contrary to myths of black rapist hordes preying on innocent white damsels, it was the sexual degradation of enslaved and colonized women that was a defining feature of settler colonialism. European colonizers, and then American slave owners, built their societies not only on lands stolen from Indigenous populations, not only through capitalist exploitation of forced labor, but also on the abused bodies of black, Indigenous and brown women. "Slavery is terrible for men but it is much more terrible for women," declared Harriet Jacobs, formerly enslaved, in her autobiography, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," published in 1861. A Southern plantation mistress, Mary Chesnut, complained in her diary, "Like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives and concubines; and the mulattos one sees in every family partly resemble the white children." In their book "Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America," published in 1988, the historians John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman argue that "the rape of the female slave was the most common form of interracial sex in the slavery era." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Jonathan Hadary, Nikki M. James and Crystal Lucas Perry in the new revival of Tony Kushner's "A Bright Room Called Day." My First Produced Play? Ah, I Remember It Well Tony Kushner was in his 20s when he wrote "A Bright Room Called Day," on the graveyard shift at his job as a hotel switchboard operator. Ronald Reagan had just been re elected, and Kushner, political to the core, channeled his alarm into the play. When his theater company, Heat Light, staged it in 1985, Oskar Eustis now the artistic director of the Public Theater was there. That's how they met. "There's a scene where the characters sing 'The Internationale,'" Kushner said the other day, "and someone in the audience started singing along with them. And that was Oskar." Eustis, who gave Kushner his professional debut two years later when he staged "Bright Room" at the Eureka Theater in San Francisco, is now directing a revival at the Public. And Kushner, whose published script includes an appendix of alternate text that he wrote for the 1991 run at the Public, is taking yet another crack at the play, which is in previews for a Nov. 19 opening. This time, the modern character who's always troubled him is joined by a character from 2019. Kushner and some other well known playwrights mixed insight with affection for their younger selves when they spoke recently about their first professionally produced works, and whether they rewrite old scripts. These are edited and condensed excerpts. Looking back "The modern character was intended to suggest that successful projects of the political right are on a continuum. But the character, in a certain sense, never worked. I felt a degree of ambivalence I still feel it about plays and theater and whether or not it's a good way to address political concerns, because it's indirect. She was there to make sure that I made my point." Critical response "An early front runner for the most infuriating play of 1991." (Frank Rich, reviewing its New York debut in The New York Times) Rewrites? "I rewrite everything. 'Caroline, or Change,' I haven't changed a word. I listen to it, and I feel very happy with it." Afterlife The published text suggests updating Zillah as needed, with Kushner's approval. "I didn't realize I was setting myself up for 30 years of college directors calling me up and saying, 'Would you like to read my Zillah thing?'" Looking back "Even though 'Tina' is my first musical, the reason it didn't scare me to take on such a gargantuan project is because I have an instinct for music, and it started with my first play. As an artist, you want validation, and my first play wasn't a critical darling. But it really taught me that it was O.K. to be me." Critical response A "right minded but ambling opus," a flawed but "creditable early effort." (Anne Midgette, in The Times) Rewrites? "That last draft is the snapshot of who I was as an artist at that time. I'm not ashamed about any mistakes." Afterlife A new production opened this month in Chicago . Plot Two young Chinese Americans spend an evening with an immigrant "fresh off the boat" in a comedy about heritage, assimilation and shame. Looking back "I had gone to the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival. I saw an ad in The L.A. Times that said, 'Study playwriting with Sam Shepard.' At Padua, I studied with Sam and Maria Irene Fornes and Murray Mednick. I started learning to write more from my subconscious. And as I did that, I found that these themes started appearing on the page. I wasn't aware that I had an interest in Asian and Asian American stories and identity issues." Critical response "If West and East don't precisely meet in 'F.O.B.,' they certainly fight each other to a fascinating standoff." (Frank Rich in The Times) Plot In a squalid Texas trailer home, a drug dealer, his virginal sister and their father hire a contract killer to dispatch the siblings' mother. Looking back "'Killer Joe' was written, some of it, in an alcoholic haze. I was reading a lot of pulp fiction: David Goodis and Jim Thompson, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I got sober three weeks after it premiered. It wasn't in any way the impetus for why I got sober, but I was going through a time in my life where I was, let's just say, learning a lot about myself ." Critical response "If you can stomach its ugly nudity, flagrant violence, foul language and blatant sleaze, you're in for one tense, gut twisting thriller ride." (Richard Christiansen, Chicago Tribune) Rewrites? "The whole process was eight years, from the time I first wrote it until we did it in New York. Once it's published, I'm done with it." Afterlife Matthew McConaughey played Killer Joe in the 2012 film. Orlando Bloom played him last year in London. Plot A satire in which an indentured servant from China goes to work for a Chinese American family living a comfortable California life. Looking back "I wrote it as my college thesis without really understanding how to write a play or create a body of work. It was an amalgamation of all these things that I had known and felt over the past however many years. Once I wrote it, then came the much harder task of 'Now it seems like I'm a playwright. How do I keep on writing?' Because I was like, 'Well, it seems like I just used up my one good idea.'" Critical response "Charming, amusing and entirely overcrammed." (Dominic P. Papatola for Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.) Rewrites? "There's almost a time limit on how long you have before the play is set. I really can't go back to it as a writer because I'm a different person with different interests. I'd be rewriting someone else's work." Afterlife "It got done in a lot of different cities, and I think that began my career as a playwright who's worked in a lot of different regions." Known for "The Beard of Avon," "Freedomland" Plot A hallucinatory riff on the tormented lives of the poets Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Ted Hughes and Robert Lowell. Looking back "I spent three years on it. It was like I was going to war to project myself onto the stage. I look back on it now and it's almost painful to see it. And I'm amazed in a good way to see it. I was fighting for my right to be an artist." Critical response An "exultantly mean, painfully affecting comedy." (Lloyd Rose, The Washington Post) Rewrites? "I think they need to happen with every production. The only thing I ever want to be in my whole life is in a rehearsal room with one of my plays, just doing anything that makes it stronger, clearer, better, freer." Known for "Milk Like Sugar," "Luck of the Irish" Professional debut "Sans Culottes in the Promised Land," 2004, Humana Festival, Actors Theater of Louisville. Age: 29. Plot In a white suburb, the daughter of an upwardly mobile black family wants to be Snow White. Looking back "The end of the play, the stage direction is that the forest grows and a new world begins. It's like, 'Let's overthrow the world. We just need a whole new world, and then we'll be O.K.' That says 'early play' to me." Critical response "A surreal fable" showing "colossal" imagination but dissolving "into a welter of confusing language and imagery." (Bruce Weber in The Times) Rewrites? Not for "Sans Culottes." But "my play that's up at Repertory Theater of St. Louis, 'Feeding Beatrice,' was my thesis in graduate school. In the last few months, I reworked it. It has been wild, going back." Afterlife "It had one or two productions. They were small." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
A couple of months ago, I was idly flitting a night away on the internet when it occurred to me that I should open up Twitter and tweet something that in my heart, in that moment was unassailably true: No good story begins with a tweet or, good lord, an abandoned one but bear with me. By that point, Gucci fetishism had become parodic and comical. Alessandro Michele's rebrand had infused the company with flamboyance, joie de vivre, whimsy and sass, but looking at some outfits suggested Ed Hardy's sophisticated older cousin, Edouard. Bally, by contrast, is buttoned up, quiet, peacockish only in its deep inner core. It has been that way for years. Thanks to hip hop, Bally was one of the first brands I coveted in the 1980s. There's a guy I follow on Instagram who sells vintage sneakers and last year posted several gorgeous dead stock pairs but, agonizingly, none in my size. The 2000s have not been kind to the company, but I've sensed a quiet resuscitation in the last two years. Emphasis on quiet: I had to Google the name of its designer. (Beginning in 2014, it was Pablo Coppola, but he left in January; now there are three.) And it is still something of a global luxury footnote: Bally has 146,000 Instagram followers, less than 1 percent of Gucci's 17.4 million. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Class tensions simmer in Mozart's "Don Giovanni." The philandering protagonist may make no distinction in the women he hunts, but with the men who help or hinder his efforts his servant Leporello and the peasant Masetto, whose bride, Zerlina, seems so delectable he wields aristocratic clout like a club. Social mobility? Psh. Only someone as naive as Zerlina could fall for that. For the cast, though, it's a different story. With the exception of the noble but impotent Don Ottavio, a tenor part, the male roles all call for low voices that are potentially interchangeable. That's how, last week at the Metropolitan Opera, the Italian bass baritone Luca Pisaroni came to make his role debut as Don Giovanni in the same drab 2011 production by Michael Grandage, in which he has previously sung Leporello. Years earlier, in Salzburg, Mr. Pisaroni was Masetto. Meanwhile the Met's current Leporello, the Russian bass Ildar Abdrazakov, has starred here before as the Don. That made the serenade scene in Act II, in which master and servant swap clothes, deliciously meta. Or so I told myself on Saturday, straining to find anything of interest in this leathery take on Mozart's dark masterpiece. Vocally, both men fit their roles well. Mr. Pisaroni sounded muscular and suave in the title role, though his Don Giovanni felt more like a frat boy than a shape shifting object of fascination. Mr. Abdrazakov's hearty gruffness suited his part, and his earthy comic acting was effective. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Hollywood bromances, gay skin flicks, obscure art house hits Nick Nicolaou has screened them all at the assorted New York City movie theaters he has owned in the last 38 years. In June, with his four remaining theaters shuttered because of the coronavirus pandemic, he tried his hand at something new virtual cinema, offering the popular documentary "The Booksellers" online. Audiences didn't exactly come in droves. His net proceeds came in a check for a whopping 4.99 that he hasn't bothered to cash. Nicolaou, whose theaters include Cinema Village, the tiny downtown art house, remains in an uneasy limbo along with the people behind indie cinemas like Film Forum, Anthology Film Archives and Nitehawk desperate for audiences to return, yet terrified of cinemas becoming petri dishes. On Friday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo allowed cinemas statewide to reopen, except in a few hot spots, one of them being New York City. Ticket sales over the weekend were strong in places like Long Island and Albany, according to Joe Masher, of the National Association of Theater Owners, showing that New York's moviegoing public was, in some places at least, eager to come back. "Reopening very carefully seven months later is the right thing to do now because New Yorkers are smart, and we get it," said Nicolaou, who is 61. "We listen to Dr. Fauci." On the flip side, he said, "We're on borrowed time." Covid 19 is threatening to give a knockout punch to cinema going, edging the AMC Theaters chain toward bankruptcy and prompting Cineworld, the parent company of Regal Cinemas, to temporarily shutter its theaters in the United States and Britain. (Some reopened last weekend in New York state.) New York and Los Angeles are crucial markets, and cinemas in both cities remain closed. Hollywood is delaying releases because of skimpy audiences, creating a chicken and egg problem. With no tentpole movies to lure them in, audiences have even more reasons to stay away. But the people behind New York's remaining independent theaters hope their small size will help them buck that trend. They cater to niche audiences and aren't wholly reliant, if at all, on the Hollywood machine. Film Forum has a backlog of films to screen, and Anthology Film Archives drew 40,000 online viewers in the first three months of the shutdown as many people as it might see in person in an entire year, according to its director, John Mhiripiri. Absent real life audiences, they have survived on a patchwork of government payroll protection and bank loans, emergency grants, deferred mortgage payments, forgiving landlords, loyal members, donations and the hope that movie theaters will be included in a Covid 19 relief bill. Several theaters had better luck than Nicolaou did at streaming, not that it has brought in anything close to real money. Film Forum on Houston Street has offered 50 or 60 movies on its site since the pandemic began, said its director, Karen Cooper, bringing in a total of 90,000, which was just 10,000 more, she said, than the Aretha Franklin documentary "Amazing Grace" made in a week. Mhiripiri of Anthology Film Archives said that streaming has brought in about 5 percent of normal box office income, but that they had to keep doing it. "We need to stay engaged with our audiences," he said. Even when the city reopens the theaters, they'll likely only be able to operate at a quarter capacity at least until a vaccine comes. "It's just about having that patience to limp along for eight months or so," said Matthew Viragh, the founder of the two Nitehawk eat in movie theaters in Brooklyn. For Nicolaou, abandoning cinemas is unfathomable, because he knows nothing else. After moving with his family from Cyprus to Queens when he was 12, Nicolaou started working at cinemas in Manhattan at age 15, eventually managing a motley mix of pornographic and art house theaters. In his early 20s, he began scooping up theaters from aging owners, and at his peak, in the 1980s, he owned nine, staying in the business as cinema chains muscled in. His biggest joy, he said, was to save theaters treasured by the community. The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation recently honored him for keeping alive Cinema Village, a former firehouse on East 12th Street that is all of 23 feet wide; it was also the rare theater to screen "The Interview," the 2014 film satirizing North Korea that reportedly precipitated a Sony hack. "He's independent, he's his own man, he's the real old American dream," said the director and actor Abel Ferrara, who made a film about Nicolaou, "The Projectionist," that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last year. Along with Cinema Village, Nicolaou owns Cinemart in Forest Hills, Queens; Alpine Cinemas in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn; and a fourth theater deep in Brooklyn that he leased out and plans to sell. He owns his theaters outright, a saving grace, though one of his biggest vexations is his property taxes, which, for the Alpine Cinemas alone, topped 316,000 this year, to his lasting chagrin. He has used the forced fallow time to begin renovating the Alpine, which he says will turn 100 in 2021, pulling down dropped tiling to reveal soaring 24 foot ceilings with elegant century old moldings and installing a powerful air ventilation system. Cinema Village got a new ventilation system, too. He plans to pay for it with a combination of federal relief, cash and bank loans. "I'm a tough guy, I'm going to survive this," Nicolaou said. "No matter what, these theaters are going to come through. Without the theaters, I would be dead." Several of the city's other art houses and smaller cinemas have a surprising safety net large corporate owners that help buffer them from oblivion. The Paris Theater is now operated by Netflix. The Angelika Film Center Cafe on Houston Street is part of a chain of theaters owned by Reading International, a publicly traded multinational company. The IFC Center's parent company is AMC Networks. The Quad is owned by the billionaire real estate developer Charles S. Cohen. Others, like Film Forum and Anthology Film Archives, operate as nonprofits, and have leaned heavily on members and donors for support. "We're only still alive because of the largess of our audience members and our board," said Cooper, of Film Forum. After shuttering the theater in mid March, Cooper sent staffers home with the concessions "ice cream and cake, the whole shebang," she said and stuck a hand printed sign to the front door saying they'd be back in a few weeks. They figured they would be open March 31. And then the end of July. And then August. They taped off theater seats at social distances and installed hand sanitizer and hospital grade air filters. They held a springtime fund raising drive that raised 100,000, and collected another 585,000 from the government's payroll protection program, which for many months helped keep 24 full timers employed. Cooper said the place is still hemorrhaging badly. The Forum's monthly expenses are around a quarter of a million dollars. When it reopens, it probably will not offer concessions, out of safety concerns, which Cooper said usually bring in half a million dollars a year. "So this whole thing is a financial debacle," she said. "But I'm not telling you anything you don't know." On the upside, Cooper said Film Forum has a backlog of movies to screen, and that while she doesn't want to minimize the toll of the coronavirus, reopening is overdue. "We think the audience is out there and that Cuomo, as smart he has been, we think he's gone overboard," she said, adding, "He seems to have forgotten we even exist." A spokesman for Governor Cuomo said that movie theaters will be allowed to reopen when the science, data and health experts deem it safe. "This cautious approach has so far served New Yorkers well," the spokesman, Jack Sterne, said, "and everyone is working to stop a second wave." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
LONDON European officials, increasingly concerned that the Continent's debt crisis will spread, are warning that any new rescue plans may need to cover Portugal as well as Ireland to contain the problem they tried to resolve six months ago. Any such plan would have to be preceded by a formal request for assistance from each country before it would be put in place. And for months now, Ireland has insisted that it has enough funds to keep it going until spring. Portugal says it, too, needs no help and emphasizes that it is in a stronger position than Ireland. While some important details are different, the current situation feels eerily similar to what happened months ago in Greece, where the cost of borrowing rose precipitously. European authorities stepped in with a rescue package, expecting an economic recovery and the creation of new European rescue funds to fend off future panics by bond investors whose money is needed by countries to refinance their debt. But with economic conditions weakening, markets are once again in turmoil. Rescuing Ireland may no longer be enough. Stronger countries and weaker countries using the common currency of the euro are being pulled in different directions. Some economists wonder if unity will hold or if some new system that allows countries to move on one of two parallel financial tracks is needed. Despite the insistence of Irish officials that only its banks need additional help, investors continue to bet on an Irish rescue, driving down the bond yields on that country's debt against a benchmark again on Monday. Portugal's yields increased to 6.7 percent, underscoring the emerging concern in Brussels, the administrative center of the European Union, that it would be irresponsible to adopt a plan to prop up Ireland without addressing the possibility that turmoil could ultimately engulf Portugal, or even Spain. Like Ireland, Portugal has struggled to grow under the fixed currency regime of the euro. Though Portugal has raised enough funds of late from bond markets, its budget deficit is 9 percent of its gross domestic product, much higher than the 3 percent limit for countries in the euro zone. With its weak government and slow growth, investors have grown fearful that Portugal, too, will eventually run out of funds. While Ireland has largely impressed European officials with its commitment to austerity, Portugal has been lagging in this regard, according to European officials. One official in Europe, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said that the budget recently presented by the government in Lisbon did not contain the type of far reaching changes proposed by other countries, like Spain. "If Ireland were to ask for aid, then you'd have to look at what's going on in Portugal as well," the official said, putting forward a view rescuing Ireland alone would not keep speculators from other vulnerable countries. Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, said on Monday that Ireland had not requested aid. "We have all the instruments to address the problems that may come either in the euro area or outside the euro area," he told reporters in Brussels. The Portuguese finance minister, Fernando Teixeira dos Santos, said Monday evening in Brussels that the situation in Ireland was creating dangers for all countries using the euro. "If things are getting worse in Ireland, for instance, that will have a contagion impact on the other euro zone economies and particularly on those that are under closer scrutiny of markets, like Portugal," he said. Asked if Ireland should accept a bailout to stem the contagion, Mr. Teixeira dos Santos said, "It's not up to me to make that assessment." Even so, Mr. Teixeira dos Santos emphasized that his country was not preparing to ask for a rescue package. Mr. Teixeira dos Santos also said his government was preparing a robust budget that would cut wages, freeze pensions and raise taxes. "We are really committed to meet our targets," he said. "I think we deserve that the market gives us the chance to show that." The bureaucratic machinations in Brussels highlight one of the main concerns that grew out of the establishment earlier this year of a rescue fund of 500 billion euros (about 680 billion at today's exchange rate) by the European Union after the Greek budget crisis: What happens if, in the next crisis, multiple countries need aid at the same time? Months later, it remains unclear how, in practice, countries like Ireland and Portugal would tap the rescue money. Of paramount concern to policy makers in Europe is Spain, which is struggling to close its own deficit of 9 percent of G.D.P. at a time when unemployment is more than 20 percent and the economy is failing to grow. Just as the growing inability to get a precise reading on Ireland's banking losses has propelled the Irish crisis, the extent of Spain's own banking vulnerabilities which, like Ireland's, originate from a real estate boom and bust remain unclear. Until now, a series of austerity measures has allowed Spain to escape investor scrutiny. But late last week the spread, or risk premium, between Spanish and German bonds widened to a record high of 2.3 percentage points, underscoring investor fears. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
THE ANARCHY The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire By William Dalrymple Nowadays, almost every M.B.A. program includes classes on business ethics. William Dalrymple's superb account of Britain's East India Company shows why: "The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire" is a case study in what can go wrong very, very wrong when corporate leaders lack a sense of decency. Founded in 1599 to run British trade in Asia, the East India Company evolved from being a profitable corporation with a security force to being a mighty army with a trading division. By 1765, it had even taken the ruler of the once vast Mughal Empire under its protection rather as if Huawei were to invade Europe and hire Boris Johnson. To Edmund Burke, the company was "a state in the guise of a merchant"; to Adam Smith, "a strange absurdity." Dalrymple, the author of nine books on India and the Islamic world, devotes only a few pages to editorializing about contemporary corporations, offering instead a vivid and richly detailed story about how, and why, the company turned into an empire. These questions have recently become historical battlefields, with traditionalists insisting that the indigenous Mughal Empire's decay forced the company to take up arms to restore order, while those on the left respond that the company created the chaos that it exploited. Dalrymple, however, is delightfully evenhanded. Making war, he argues, was rarely the company's only option yet it really did have violent enemies, and the French really were plotting against it. Similarly, the company's men were often wicked and arrogant; they bribed, robbed and killed those who crossed them yet their Indian opponents could commit even more appalling acts of violence. Worst of all, the company sucked 1 million British pounds (equivalent to 120 million today) out of Bengal in 1769 70 even as one in five Bengalis starved yet while native rulers certainly did better, when famine struck their own territories in 1784 86 it also killed one Indian in five. Eighteenth century India was just a tough place to live. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Like the party that serves as its climax, the retro teenage friendship movie "Beats," set in 1994 in Scotland, owes its appeal to mood and vibe. The soundtrack provides a constant, toe tapping thump. The story involves two friends, Johnno (Cristian Ortega) and Spanner (Lorn Macdonald). Johnno will soon move to a better neighborhood. His mother, Alison (Laura Fraser), and her partner, a police officer (Brian Ferguson), are eager for him to get away from Spanner, whose family Alison regards as "scum." Spanner may be a loose cannon, but he has a peculiar sense of ethics. He also lives with a violent, poorly reputed brother and unlike Johnno, he's going nowhere. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The writer and director, Jimmy Maize, tried to weave together three plot lines, each more earnest than the other. One is about Marion (Molly McAdoo), who's researching Annie Moore, the first passenger to be processed at Ellis Island, for a PBS documentary. Another is about Wes (Esau Mora), a neurotic gay man, plagued by dreams about Lewis and Clark, who embarks on a road trip with his boyfriend (Renaldy Smith); his meltdown in the Rockies feels like a Woody Allen movie scene about a city guy's freaking out at the sight of nature. Finally, we follow Cather (Luke Zimmerman), dressed like a pioneer in a Thom Browne catalog, and Antonia (Ayana Workman) nods to Willa Cather and her novel "My Antonia," with a dash of gender bending on the prairie as the writer interacts with his creation. The three strands appear to interconnect, albeit in mysterious ways. At one point, Marion and Antonia engage in a romantic looking pas de deux (the choreography is by Wendy Seyb), but we were so far from the action that I could barely see the dance. By that time the audience, which roams as much as the cast, was sitting on the amphitheater like steps, atop a grand staircase, while the ensemble was all the way down in the atrium. This at least made for some occasionally striking abstract visuals. Most frustrating, however, was the inability to hear the choir, made up of members of the Downtown Voices and the Mama Foundation's Wednesday Sings choirs. With any luck, the sound issues will be fixed in subsequent performances, but on Thursday evening, the singers were barely audible, making it hard to weigh in on Heather Christian's gentle score; you can get a better sense of it from the production's teaser video on YouTube. At times, though, the very faintness of the voices had an oddly beautiful ghostly effect. Perhaps in an unintentional nod to our hardscrabble predecessors, the show works best if you make the most of a tough situation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The executive added that the company would release people from existing nondisclosure agreements related to those matters on a case by case basis. The use of nondisclosure agreements for workers who make complaints of sexual harassment or discrimination has become a point of contention in the wake of the MeToo movement, and The New Yorker has been at the forefront of the discussion. The magazine won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for Ronan Farrow's investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct by the film producer Harvey Weinstein, which involved the use of nondisclosure agreements to silence his accusers. (The Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey were also awarded the Pulitzer that year for their investigation into Mr. Weinstein.) Mr. Weinstein is currently on trial, accused of rape, in Manhattan. During the Democratic presidential primary debate in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Senator Elizabeth Warren criticized Michael R. Bloomberg for the use of nondisclosure agreements at his company, Bloomberg L.P. He had refused to release some female former employees from agreements they signed after accusing him of harassment and discrimination. (Mr. Bloomberg announced on Friday that he would release three women from nondisclosure agreements if they contacted the company.) Conde Nast's decision to limit the use of nondisclosure agreements was reported earlier by The Daily Beast. The union that represents employees at The New Yorker and the Conde Nast publications Pitchfork and Ars Technica had proposed that the company drop nondisclosure agreements at the bargaining table for The New Yorker in November, said Susan DeCarava, the president of the union, the NewsGuild of New York. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
"View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm The Oxbow," 1836. Hills are scarred by clear cutting; the wilderness seethes with life. Cole, in foreground, looks at us, to say: Here are the alternatives; you choose. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's new show, "Thomas Cole's Journey: Atlantic Crossings" is gorgeous, politically right for right now, and a lesson in the mutability of art history. In the 1960s, pioneering scholarship in American art confirmed that Cole (1801 1848) was the nation's first major landscape artist and progenitor of what would be called (though not by him) the Hudson River School. The fact that he was born in England and spent formative time in Europe was noted, without being particularly noticed. The focus was on his identity as a Yankee romantic, the poetic advocate and spiritual protector of a New World Eden beset by industrial encroachments, with forests being mowed down for gain and railroads slicing the land. When the 1990s brought an emphasis on art being viewed as unspiritual, unpoetical, socioeconomic evidence, the perspective on Cole changed. Considered within the framework of the Andrew Jackson presidency, which coincided with the high point of Cole's career in the 1830s, the artist and his work were cast as reactionary, evidence of resistance to the era's push toward democratic populism, urbanism and Westward expansion. Cole was seen as aligning himself with the attitudes and interests of his wealthy patrons. His Eden was a gated rural estate from which the common man was shut out. It's Cole the immigrant and internationalist that the show highlights. He was born in 1801 in northwestern England, where the industrial revolution was grinding away. He grew up in landscapes blackened by pollution from William Blake's "dark Satanic mills." Cole witnessed episodes of class violence, when textiles workers, left jobless by mechanization, attacked factories and were, in turn, brutally punished by a new commercial elite. George Etheredge for The New York Times Cole's father, a luckless small time businessman, moved his family from place to place. In the process, Cole picked up an education, and learned engraving as a print shop apprentice, initially designing patterns for calico fabrics, later making prints of well known paintings. The big move came in 1818, when the family sailed to the United States, settling at first in Philadelphia. The teenage Cole stayed in that city as his family wandered westward. From this point, his largely self taught career as an artist began. As always true, he had little patience with cities and headed out of them when he could. Wherever he went including, briefly, to the Caribbean he sketched what he saw. The earliest piece by him in the show dates to 1823. It's an ink drawing of a single tree, but no ordinary tree: although naturalistically detailed, it looks bizarrely animated, like some half human creature in torment, thrashing its armlike branches and yanking its roots from the earth. It's the product of a distinctive and unplacid sensibility. Hanging out at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he familiarized with new American and European work. Within a few years, he felt ready to head to New York City, where he assiduously networked the still small art world, sold some things and made lasting contacts. And on an 1825 jaunt up the Hudson River, he fixed on the subject that he would make his own, the landscape; and more than that, a particular brand, the American landscape, which he approached the same way he did his treatment of trees: as a mirror of reality and an object of fantasy. Market wise, the approach worked. Early landscapes, like "View of the Round Top in the Catskill Mountains (Sunny Morning in the Hudson)" (1827), were a hit. A self made New York gentry snapped them up. Encouraged, Cole resolved to head for Europe, a move that would not only enhance his pedigree, but let him see firsthand art he had known mostly in reproduction. In terms of sales, London, the first stop, was a bust. Basically, no one noticed him. But he noticed a lot. He saw an England racked by economic tumult, with old social hierarchies seriously shaken. And he saw artists responding to that. What most disturbed him, and seemed symptomatic of a larger malaise, was the government fueled drive toward land grabbing and wilderness taming at any cost. Virtually from his Catskill front porch he could see forests being rapidly and randomly leveled. For Cole, who identified personally, emotionally, with every living element in a landscape, such sights were an assault. Increasingly, he used painting to argue against these developments, to resist them. And art he had seen abroad Constable, Turner, archaeological remains gave him a new language and conceptual perspective to work with. He put both to use in the 1834 36 salon production called "The Course of Empire," which, in five separate paintings, narrates the life cycle of an unnamed civilization: from forest origins, to rural innocence, to prideful florescence, to destruction, to vanishing. For all its moral seriousness and formal ingenuity, "Course of Empire" never really rises above being a didactic machine. (And the otherwise splendid Met installation does it no favors by crowding it into a corner.) Dramatizing a similar message far more effectively is the single large 1836 painting titled "View From Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow)." From a God's eye height we look down at the spot where the Connecticut River, flowing around an island like land mass, creates a question mark shape known as the "Oxbow." The painting divides vertically into two atmospheric halves. To the left is a wild storm soaked tangle of old trees and dense vegetation; to the right, far below, a flat terrain of treeless, square cut fields running back to distant hills scarred by clear cutting. The wilderness looks unkept and threatening, but seethes with life. The flat land, though cultivated and presumably fertile, feels as bare and bland as a tract house town. And in the foreground of the picture is a tiny self portrait of Cole at his easel. He turns away from his canvas and looks right at us, as if to say: Here are the alternatives; you choose. Cole chose wilderness, and in doing so disappeared himself for more than a century. When he died suddenly, at 47, in 1848, he was widely mourned; pictorial tributes from fellow artists piled up, the most famous being Asher Brown Durand's 1849 "Kindred Spirits," which shows Cole and the nature poet William Cullen Bryant sharing thoughts in a paradisal Catskill Mountain glen. (The picture is back in town for the first time since it was sold by the New York Public Library to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas in 2005.) Politically, Cole's art is conservative, but it's also work that challenges and complicates that term. And the Met show organized by Elizabeth Kornhauser, curator of American painting and sculpture at the Met, and Tim Barringer, professor of art history at Yale University, with Chris Riopelle, a curator at the National Gallery, London is precisely about complication. And just as Cole is most realistically and revealingly seen and judged against the background of his time, so is the exhibition, coming as it does in this confounding MAGA moment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Each one is in a battleground state. Votes from people there will matter a lot and offer Joe Biden several paths to victory. The 10 Bellwether Counties That Show How Trump Is in Serious Trouble In an era of stark political polarization, it is difficult to find any one place that is a true microcosm of the country. But it is possible to find places on which the November election pivots. These communities that hold the key to the vote are as varied as the nation and they reflect a notable inversion of its politics. Polls now show Joe Biden with a surprising opportunity to capture Sun Belt suburbs that have voted reliably Republican for decades. He is also performing better than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 but perhaps not as well as Barack Obama did in 2008 and 2012 in heavily white, historically blue Frost Belt small towns and midsize cities where Donald Trump enjoyed a breakthrough in 2016. These 10 bellwether counties five in Sun Belt battlegrounds, five in the Frost Belt (loosely defined to include Iowa) could point us toward each state's winner. They run the gamut from meatpacking hubs to white collar office parks, and from peach orchards to yacht dense retiree havens. But there is something they all have in common: Their votes will matter a lot. The prosperous home of Steelcase office furniture, the DeVos family's Amway empire and President Gerald Ford, Grand Rapids was long a Republican bastion owing to its deeply conservative Dutch Reformed roots. But its white collar work force has soured on Mr. Trump's party, and in 2016 Mr. Trump won Kent County by just three points, down from Mitt Romney's eight point margin. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, carried Kent County by four points in 2018, and Mr. Biden has a strong chance to win it in November. Private polls of the Third Congressional District, which covers much of Kent County, show Mr. Biden with a slight lead. Wood County, just south of Toledo, has multiple personalities. At its northern end are close in Toledo bedroom communities. It has a strong affinity for rural culture: its county seat, Bowling Green, hosts the National Tractor Pulling Championships each August. And its diesel fueled culture might be balanced out by Bowling Green State University (enrollment 19,905), a trove of Democratic votes. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." Wood County is a decent bellwether of the state: Mr. Trump carried it by eight points in 2016, matching his statewide margin. In 2018, Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, carried it by 11 points. The Biden campaign has run ads in the Toledo broadcast market, which conveniently covers part of Michigan, too. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh hog the spotlight, but Pennsylvania's electoral ground zero might be its far northwest corner. The lakefront city of Erie is famous for assembling locomotives and packaging Smith's meats. After decades of layoffs, it's now home to a large population of refugees and the nation's largest medical school by enrollment, Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine. Erie was also the site of a big Trump breakthrough in 2016: He carried the county by nearly two points, defying decades of Democratic dominance owing to a strong union heritage. Mr. Trump likely needs to win it again to keep Pennsylvania in his column. A February Mercyhurst University poll showed Mr. Biden leading Mr. Trump 48 percent to 44 percent in Erie County, and that was before Covid 19 made headlines. Marshalltown, about 50 miles northeast of Des Moines, has been hit hard by the coronavirus: In April, it experienced Covid 19 outbreaks at both the 500 bed Iowa Veterans Home and the giant JBS Swift meatpacking plant. And in August, a derecho tore through town, damaging over 700 buildings. Rebuilding is likely to take years. In 2016, Marshall County voted for Mr. Trump by eight points after voting twice for Mr. Obama by nine points. But the unpopularity of Gov. Kim Reynolds her approval rating in August on her handling of the pandemic, was the lowest among all governors is compounding Republicans' problems this year. Statewide polls show both Mr. Trump and another Republican, Senator Joni Ernst, struggling to carry Iowa. The meatpacking industry has attracted thousands of new Hispanic residents, many of whom could be first time voters. From 2000 to 2019, the Hispanic or Latino share of Marshall County's population surged to 23 percent from 9 percent. With a median age of 48 and hordes of retirees from the Midwest, Pinellas, which includes St. Petersburg, has one of the oldest populations in America. In 2012, it voted for Mr. Obama by six points, but in 2016 Mr. Trump carried it by a single point, matching his statewide margin. So far, Mr. Biden appears to be polling better than Mrs. Clinton among older voters. A late August survey by St. Pete Polls showed Mr. Biden leading Mr. Trump 54 percent to 40 percent in the 13th Congressional District, which covers most of Pinellas. Pinellas could offer an early assessment of Florida on election night. If Mr. Trump loses Pinellas, he'll have to make up for it with gains elsewhere especially among Cuban American voters in Miami Dade County. Wilmington's most famous export might be Michael Jordan, but more recently its bustling movie and TV production industry has earned it the nicknames "Hollywood East" and "Wilmywood." It was North Carolina's largest city until the early 20th century, and today it might be its swingiest: Any entertainment industry leftism might be canceled out by a heavy military and retiree presence. The county hasn't voted for a Democrat for president since 1976, and in 2016, it voted for Mr. Trump by four points, approximating the state's result. But it's home to plenty of the types of voters with whom Mr. Biden is doing well nationally: older people, African Americans and upper income suburbanites (Whole Foods Market arrived in Wilmington in 2012). It could well go blue in 2020. Perhaps the most widely cited bellwether in the country, Vigo, which includes Terre Haute, is the only county in America that has voted for the winner of every presidential race since 1956. But it may lose that status in 2020: In 2016, it broke for Mr. Trump by a whopping 15 points, and it's easy to see him carrying it again this fall, even if he loses the presidency. David Wasserman ( Redistrict) is the House editor at The Cook Political Report. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Eager to speed development of revolutionary treatments, the Food and Drug Administration recently announced that it would expedite approval of experimental gene therapies. But the regulatory process may not be the biggest obstacle here. Biotech companies have exciting plans to introduce treatments that may be transformative, sometimes curing genetic diseases with a single treatment. And the firms are itching to test their products. But they are struggling to obtain a critical component of the therapy: the disabled viruses used to slip good genes into cells that lack them. This delivery system lies at the heart of many forms of gene therapy; without the disabled viruses, there is no treatment. But manufacturing them is costly and onerous. The genes intended to fix a defect in the body are carried into each cell by a modified virus, usually a disabled version of an adenovirus or a lentivirus. These viruses must be custom made in specialized facilities for each treatment. Few gene therapy companies have the factories or expertise to make the viruses for use in clinical trials, where standards are exacting and comprehensive. The firms that can do it are swamped with orders and requests. The result is a logjam. Firms exploring new gene therapies may wait for years in line for bespoke viruses, said Dr. Jim Wilson, director of the gene therapy program at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine. "It's a real issue," said Udit Batra chief executive of MilliporeSigma, which makes viruses under contract for drug companies. MilliporeSigma and other such manufacturers, he added, are "oversubscribed, although companies like ourselves have doubled capacity to keep up with the demand." One of the few big companies producing a gene therapy, Novartis, recently got approval from the F.D.A. to market a treatment for a rare blood cancer. But to get the viruses it needed, Novartis signed up years in advance with Oxford BioMedica, agreeing to three contracts starting in 2013 that, with incentives, add up to as much as 195.2 million and that included a provision to pay Oxford a share of the royalties when the drug was approved. Only a few hundred patients a year might need Novartis's treatment, and the company is charging 475,000 for the one time therapy. Other gene therapy companies are not always able to afford the manufacturing costs or find a manufacturer. Some have taken to buying slots in virus production queues years in advance like buying a nonrefundable airline ticket long before your vacation and hoping you can get away when the time comes. Other firms are hedging their bets. Worried that production at one company will fail as can happen with the finicky viruses they buy places in line at two contract companies. Still other biotechs have simply been shut out, unable to get their viruses made. Then there is BioMarin, one of the larger and more successful biotech companies, which decided to spend several hundred million dollars to build its own virus manufacturing plant. It does not plan to make viruses for anyone but itself. "We don't want to be in a queue, that's for sure," said Robert Baffi, head of technical operations at BioMarin. The new facility also will give the company complete control over manufacturing, he added. The process of developing a gene therapy usually starts with academic researchers who do the preliminary tests. For the viruses they need, they often turn to a few academic medical centers with expertise in the requirements for early clinical research. But there, too, demand far exceeds capacity. At Indiana University, "we are backed up through 2018," said Dr. Kenneth Cornetta, a professor of molecular and medical genetics. After a gene therapy gets through initial tests in an academic setting, researchers may license it to a biotech company or form their own small company. Then they have to find a manufacturer who will make their viruses according to the exacting standards required for treating patients. Delays arise at every step. The contract virus maker has to translate the small scale production used for research purposes into a recipe for commercial production, where standards are extensive and documentation exhaustive. And the maker has to negotiate a contract to do all this. Those two steps can easily take a year, said John Dawson, chief executive of Oxford BioMedica. When the contractor finally is ready to start making the viruses, it can be six months to a year before they are ready assuming there are no glitches along the way. Manufacturing custom made viruses can cost biotech firms a third or more of their development budget, even for diseases so rare that they expect to treat only a dozen or so patients in their final study, Dr. Wilson said. The gene therapy companies often have no drugs on the market and need money. But investors have become wary of companies that do not have a ready source of viruses. "You've got to believe that every time someone gives a pitch to an investor, the investor will say, 'What are you doing about manufacturing?'" Dr. Wilson said. The whole development enterprise has become nerve racking, researchers said. "You don't know until the end that you have a product that is good enough to be used in a treatment," said Dr. David Williams of Harvard. Or, as officials at Bluebird Bio can attest, whether you have any product at all. The company was formed in 2010, hoping to show that gene therapy could work in adrenoleukodystrophy, a rare and fatal neurodegenerative disease that strike boys. That was before the virus production logjam had begun, and all seemed well. Bluebird gave a virus manufacturer its recipe for making needed viruses. Then, said Nick Leschly, the company's chief executive, he got bad news. Using Bluebird's recipe, the manufacturing company said it was going to cost Bluebird a million dollars to create enough viruses to treat one patient. The company scurried to find ways to improve the efficiency of its recipe. Finally, they were ready to start anew. Manufacturing began, but months later there was nothing to show for it. "We got no virus," Mr. Leschly said. "It was an Apollo 13 moment," he added. "We put everyone in a room and said, 'We have to figure this out. Everything at the company is now stopped. Nothing can be done without virus.'" They finally found the source of the problem the acidity of the solution used to grow the viruses was slightly off, killing them. While the recipe for making viruses can affect prices, the cost of a new treatment also depends on how many patients will take the drug and how many cells from each patient must be altered by a virus. If a company wanted to deliver a gene therapy to the lung or liver, where the organ's "surface area is huge," the current price could be as much as 3 million per patient "commercially unviable," said Mr. Dawson of Oxford BioMedica. Oxford is improving its methods, he said, and should soon be able to cut that cost to approximately 300,000 per patient. Methods are improving, Mr. Dawson said, and his expectation is that it might cost a mere 30,000 for the viruses in the future. The costs of testing the drug and marketing it are, of course, out of his hands. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
LeBron James has seen a great deal during his 17 seasons in the N.B.A. He has already won three championships, and now aspires to win his first with the Los Angeles Lakers. At 35, he is one of the oldest players in the league, with patches of gray showing in the beard he grew out during the four months he recently spent in relative seclusion. It is not often, then, that James finds himself in a new environment, coping with unusual circumstances that no one could have seen coming. But there he was on Thursday night, stationed on the foul line in a largely empty arena at Walt Disney World, barking defensive assignments at teammates as a game operations crew piped in artificial crowd noise. James had not played basketball for the (television) viewing public in 135 days, since the N.B.A. suspended its season in March because of the coronavirus pandemic. But if there were questions about how he would look in his much anticipated return, as the Lakers faced the Dallas Mavericks in a scrimmage ahead of the league's official restart later this month, he crammed his 15 minutes of playing time full of answers. In short, LeBron James looked exactly the same. There are so few guarantees as the N.B.A. hopes to finish the season in its so called bubble at the sprawling theme park near Orlando, Fla., but James seems determined to fill his familiar role. Against the Mavericks, he collected 12 points, 5 assists and 3 rebounds while shooting 4 of 6 from the field. He watched the second half from the bench, where he put ice packs on various parts of his body and accessorized his warm up top with a couple of gold chains. The Mavericks' 108 104 victory in a game with 10 minute quarters was an afterthought. "We wanted to try to get better," James said. "We're using this moment as a training camp to implement our identity, and our identity is to defend, share the ball, push the tempo and play together. I think we were able to accomplish that for as close to 40 minutes as possible." Skeptics have suggested that this season interrupted and uncertain, somehow both abridged and extended will come with an asterisk. James does not subscribe to that theory, and why would he? As the window on his career narrows, he wants to seize another crack at a title. History will not remember that he won his fourth ring in a bubble. Giannis Antetokounmpo would love to win his first. Antetokounmpo, the Milwaukee Bucks' do everything forward and the league's reigning most valuable player, described the format as "the toughest championship you could ever win, because the circumstances are really, really tough right now." It is an argument that suits his purposes, but there are merits to it. Players had to stay in shape during the long layoff, and even now, teams are short handed. Like the Lakers, the Bucks made their Disney debut on Thursday. And in a 113 92 win over the San Antonio Spurs, the Bucks were without Eric Bledsoe, their starting point guard, and Pat Connaughton, one of their reserves. Both players recently revealed that they had tested positive for the coronavirus. Connaughton live tweeted the game from his home in Milwaukee. As for Antetokounmpo, the odd atmosphere became apparent to him when he went to shoot free throws in the first quarter. "It was just quiet," he said. "But at the end of the day, you play basketball, try to make the right play. Just listen to your coach. So for me personally, I tried to lock in." Antetokounmpo also said that he felt out of shape, adding that he hoped to spend the next couple of weeks ratcheting up his fitness. All he did against the Spurs was score 22 points in 21 minutes while shooting 9 of 13 from the field. Imagine the havoc once he has his legs under him. The Lakers, too, are dealing with some absences. Avery Bradley, their top perimeter defender, opted out of participating in the restart, citing family reasons. Rajon Rondo is expected to miss several weeks after fracturing his right thumb shortly after the team arrived in Orlando, and Alex Caruso sat out Thursday's scrimmage with a back injury It is worth noting that all three of those players are guards. James often has the ball in his hands regardless of his supporting cast, but it is a safe assumption that he will be his team's primary facilitator throughout its stay at Disney. One scrimmage is a small sample, but he was the driving force on Thursday and it worked out well, per usual. "You've got to create your own energy here," James said. At the same time, James appears determined to continue speaking about issues that are important to him. After Thursday's game, he prefaced his news conference by saying he wanted to "shed light on justice" for Breonna Taylor, a Black medical worker in Louisville, Ky., who was shot and killed by the police on March 13. For more than 10 minutes, James fielded additional questions about social justice causes and challenges facing Black people across the country. At one point, he objected to the idea that Black Lives Matter was a movement with some sort of resolution in the near or distant future. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
BENA, Minn. When temperatures drop and snow falls, students bundle themselves in heavy coats inside Marlene Stately's classroom. Winter comes early and bites hard on this Indian reservation in northern Minnesota, and the pole barn that houses part of the Bug O Nay Ge Shig School offers limited protection from the elements. "I think we need a new school," Ms. Stately said last month after her upper grade students had practiced introducing themselves in the Ojibwe language. "It's cold here in the wintertime. They're not comfortable. And how can you learn when you're freezing?" In the federal Bureau of Indian Education system, the dreadful facilities of Bug O Nay Ge Shig named for a late member of the tribe are far from unique. The network of about 185 congressionally funded schools in 23 states is in the midst of a broad overhaul, but decades of neglect have left reservations with schools where students struggle to meet academic standards, turnover among educators is high and the buildings are often in decay. "If the kids are going into a school with a leaky roof and a bad smell, that's a value thing, that nobody cares," said Crystal Redgrave, the superintendent of Bug O Nay Ge Shig, who said she suspected the condition of the building had contributed to a steep drop in enrollment, which is now about 200 students. "But if they go to a well equipped school, they'd see people really do care." Officials at the United States Department of the Interior, which oversees the bureau, say they are working to improve schools like Bug O Nay Ge Shig. But with limited funding and a huge backlog of repairs the government estimates that it would cost 1.3 billion to restore all buildings to good condition some administrators and students wonder when they will see the fruits of those policies. "I think everyone agrees that our children deserve better, but these are tough budget times and it's difficult," said Charles Roessel, the director of the Indian education bureau. "It's a priority for us." The bureau's challenges extend far beyond bricks and mortar. On a national reading assessment in 2011, fourth graders at the bureau's schools scored 22 points lower on a 500 point scale than their Native American peers in other public schools, a scathing review from the federal Government Accountability Office found. In addition to consistently poor test scores, the report highlighted a subpar graduation rate and confusing layers of bureaucracy that create a disconnect between national policy and classrooms. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell has ordered a restructuring that seeks to shift the federal role from creating curriculum and directly administering far flung schools to providing support and funding to local leaders who would call the shots. The hope, she said, is to shore up facilities and give the schools the means to teach culturally relevant lessons and improve their academics. That tribe first approach is vital to turning around the schools, said William Mendoza, who is leading a White House initiative to improve education of Native Americans. "We've tried just about everything in education except enlist the tribes to affect their own school systems in a more positive way," said Mr. Mendoza, who is Oglala Sicangu Lakota and attended bureau schools as a child in South Dakota, then taught in them. "That's the important component." Like about two thirds of bureau schools, Bug O Nay Ge Shig is operated by a local school board authorized by the tribe, known as the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. Ms. Jewell's order calls for shifting the remaining 60 or so schools to tribal oversight, and providing more efficient funding and support for the entire system. For schools that are already administered locally, the changes could lead to more resources like expanded teacher training or broadband installation. Skepticism of Washington reformers permeates many reservations, where the federal government's fraught history of educating Native American children has left a painful legacy. For decades, national policy sought to strip the children of their culture and language in an effort to "Westernize" them. Those efforts were disavowed long ago, but many federally run Indian schools have continued to struggle. Ms. Jewell, who visited Bug O Nay Ge Shig in August, said that in an effort to build trust, she listens closely but does not offer guarantees when meeting with tribal leaders. Torn carpet at the Bug O Nay Ge Shig School, whose facilities have been neglected for years. Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times "What I told them is 'I'm not going to promise you anything because I don't control the budget,' " said Ms. Jewell, who pledged to use what she saw and heard in Minnesota to prod Congress for more funds. Historically, the reservation schools have not been a top priority for lawmakers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Q. Are there any programs that track phone cellular data usage by individual app? A. Third party apps often use easy to read graphics to break down your phone's cellular data consumption so you can see just which programs are burning through your bytes. Data Usage for Android and iOS as well as My Data Manager (also for Android and iOS) are among the options, and your wireless carrier may have its own data tracking app. However, depending on your device, you may not need extra software. In iOS 11, open the Settings icon on the home screen and tap Cellular. Scroll down to the Cellular Data section to see the total amount of data used in the current period noted above a list of apps. (The "current period" is measured between the times you hit the Reset Statistics button at the bottom of the screen which can be at the beginning of your billing period or whenever you feel like it.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
It looks like the Metropolitan Museum of Art won't be celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2020 with a new wing after all. The Met on Wednesday morning informed its staff that it will push back plans for a 600 million southwest wing dedicated to Modern and contemporary art as it takes new measures to get its financial house in order. The Met had hoped to complete construction of an extension to the Fifth Avenue building while it was still leasing the former Whitney Museum now called the Met Breuer on Madison Avenue. But the Met may not break ground on the new wing for as many as seven years, said Daniel H. Weiss, the Met's president and chief operating officer. Instead, the Met will concentrate on replacing the skylights and roofing system above the European paintings galleries, work that won't start until 2018 and is expected to last about four years. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
A year earlier, too, my grandmother had barely survived a shooting that shattered the feeling of safety in her close knit farming community. She recovered, eventually, but she always needed help after that, and holidays shifted to our house. All the Thanksgiving gatherings of my childhood, the sideboards laid with pies and casseroles and corncakes glistening with butter, with bowls of creamed corn and lady peas; the arrangements of pink camellias and the delicate custard dishes of ambrosia, each with a sprinkling of coconut on top; the rocking on the porch afterward, the catching up talk and the stories about loved ones long since buried in the graveyard just down the road all of it was gone. One year my grandmother was still cooking the feast she had always prepared, and the next year it was just our family at our own ordinary house in the ordinary suburbs. Overnight, it seemed, my mother became the de facto matriarch, and it was not a role she ever came to relish. Mom would have been happy to serve stuffing out of a box and cranberry sauce out of a can, but my father could not surrender the traditions he had acquired by marriage. A child of the Depression, growing up with a single mother forced to travel for work, he spent most of his childhood in what amounted to an orphanage. Having gained an extended family at the age of 32, he would not give up the groaning table so easily and thereafter pitched in as a wholehearted sous chef. Mother Ollie took the recipe for corncakes with her to the grave, but the scaled back Thanksgiving menu at our house included almost all the other favorites plus, it must be said, some horrific innovations, like brandied fruit and cranberry Jell O mold, that my mother must have picked up from a magazine. After I left home, I came to recognize the gift of those gatherings, of being with my family together under one roof, but Thanksgiving never stopped reminding me of that homely old house in the country with pecan trees to climb and cousins to play with and bird dogs sleeping in a patch of sunshine in the yard. Of all the empty seats at the table. Now I am the matriarch, the one who cuts the flowers and puts them in vases, the one who spends days in the kitchen with my husband, chopping and sauteing and stirring and buttering, all for the sake of two hours at the table with everyone we love. I admit that there have been times when I was cross about it all. Times when, like my mother, I didn't want to be the matriarch. Why hadn't I understood, all those years before, what luck it was to be the cherished child returning home, with a whole day set aside for eating and sleeping and reading the intoxicating words of James Agee? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
THE specially equipped Dodge Sprinter pulled into the Morningside College parking lot, transporting my campus guide and his Quickie 646 SE motorized wheelchair. Alex Watters was returning to this small liberal arts college in Sioux City, Iowa, for a wheelchair tour of the campus he had navigated as an undergraduate. Our mission was to understand some of the challenges faced by students with a physical disability for a book I was writing on the first year college experience. I stuck my hand out. Alex could raise his arm but had no mobility in his hands, so I shook his outstretched fist. Freshman year, he had damaged his spinal cord in a diving accident and lost the use of his legs and hands. "Ready to go?" he asked as I grabbed my manually operated wheelchair, on loan from the nursing department. "Ready as ever," I said, not altogether sure how to operate the thing. As I struggled to get over the tiny ribbon of tar between the parking lot and sidewalk, Alex zipped around the lot doing wheelies, as if to say, "You have no idea what you're in for." Motoring backward while talking, like an admissions office tour guide, he was contagiously optimistic. "Sure, I have challenges now," he said, "but I'm not going to let them take over my life." ALEX WATTERS comes from Okoboji, a small town in the northwest corner of Iowa, on the border with Minnesota. He had applied to the University of Iowa and Drake but chose Morningside because he was heavily recruited to play golf. He had been captain of his high school team junior and senior years. When he arrived on campus it was fall 2004 he was full of excitement and expectation. The second week there, Danielle Westphal a classmate with whom he had won a dance contest during orientation invited him to a family get together on Lake Okoboji. He and a friend drove up to the cabin, arriving at about 10 p.m. As the guests toasted marshmallows around a bonfire, Alex and his hostess's younger brother decided to go for a swim. The weather was beginning to get cold. He figured this would be his last swim of the season. The two of them changed into their trunks and walked 150 feet out onto the dock. A gust of wind blew, and Alex's hat flew off, landing near a boat hoist. He took off his shirt and dived in after it. But there was a sandbar. The water was only 18 inches deep. He heard his neck snap. "I remember laying face first underwater," Alex said, a crack in his voice. "At first I tried to start swimming, but of course I couldn't move. I thought, this was it. I'm a pretty religious person, so I was thinking, 'I'm O.K. with this if it happens.' And then I blacked out." At first the young boy thought Alex was playing a joke on him. Then he sensed something was terribly wrong. He ran back to the cabin to get help. They came running, and Danielle jumped into the water feetfirst and knelt beside Alex. He had now been under water more than two minutes. She turned him over and gave him mouth to mouth resuscitation. E.M.S. arrived, and from the local hospital he was quickly airlifted to Mercy Medical Center in Sioux City. "Next thing I remember are Mom and Dad and our pastor standing by my bed and the surgeon telling them about the operation I would soon have," he told me. His spinal cord wasn't severed but pinched. "Your spinal cord is like a banana," Alex said. "If you bend it severely enough it won't necessarily break but it will be permanently damaged." After surgery to stabilize the vertebrae in his neck, Alex underwent therapy for six months at a rehabilitation hospital in Denver. I asked him what he was feeling at this point. He and his parents had become interested in stem cell research, and the possibility he would someday walk again. "But I really didn't want to live my life hoping I would walk again when the chances were I might not," he said. "Even at that point, I was pretty happy with who I was and even then I was thinking about the possibility of returning to college." He took courses at Iowa Lakes Community College that summer, and the next fall returned to Morningside to resume his first year. WE maneuvered our wheelchairs to the path leading to Roadman Hall, where Alex had lived next door to his assistant when he returned to college following the accident. "Since I cannot use my hands," he said, "I needed someone constantly to assist me," including taking notes and typing papers as he dictated. "Wheelchair students like me usually get two principal accommodations: a handicapped accessible residence and classes arranged on the first floor of a classroom building or a classroom building with an elevator," he explained. "Since I was the first wheelchair freshman at the college in recent memory, we had some groundbreaking to do." Alex had wanted to live in the Plex with his first year classmates, but rooms were not reachable by wheelchair. "Freshman year, most of my classmates lived in other buildings, and I couldn't visit them," he said. Roadman had first floor rooms, and they were larger because they had once housed married students. Moreover, Roadman was closer to the student center and academic buildings he would use. Trouble was, the rest of the first floor was occupied by upperclass women. "So I broke two barriers. Not only was I the first freshman in recent memory confined to a wheelchair, but I was also the first male to live in a women's dorm!" We approached the front door. The college had installed automatic openers for Alex, but he wanted me to see how hard it is to get through heavy doors without them. There would be many doors to push through on campus. "Try it without the door opener," he said, "and you'll see what I mean." I tried to push the door open using the footrests on the front of my wheelchair. But the door could be released only by pushing the bar in, and I couldn't quite reach it. So I turned my chair around and tried it backward. After several tries, I finally leveraged the door open and squeezed through. Alex just grinned. As we wheeled down the hall, he pointed to the door of the room where he had lived. The college had to replace the doorknob, which he couldn't grasp, with a lever he could force down using his arm. People who have mobility in their hands and feet simply take these things for granted. In the bathroom down the hall, he demonstrated what he had to do to hoist himself into the shower and onto a small plastic chair he set in the corner. "Since my hall mates were women, you should have seen how I got here. I had to strip naked and then streak down through the hallway in my wheelchair hoping no one entered at that moment." He laughed as he said this, then paused. "Well, that's not quite the story. I did put a towel over my lap." My arms were beginning to ache as we left Roadman and headed toward the nearby Olsen Student Center. As we started to cross Peters Avenue, a car driven by a woman talking on her cellphone sped through the crosswalk without stopping. "Can you believe?" Alex shouted, flipping his wheelchair in reverse. "This happens all the time." At the ramp up the front side of the student center, he cautioned me not to run off the concrete and into the flower beds. "Once, during the winter when it was icy, I slid off into a snowbank," he said. "I could have been buried alive for months!" He pulled his chair to a place about 25 feet beyond the dining hall entrance and faced the wall. "When I came here as a freshman, there was an elevator right here that could take me to the floor below where student meeting rooms are located. During the time I was attending school, they took out the elevator to make the entryway and dining hall more presentable, figuring all they needed to do was provide a handicapped accessible bathroom on this floor. Can you believe they took out the elevator?" He was clearly angry. "I now had to drive around to the back of the building to access the lower floor." We left the student center and headed next door to the Robert M. Lincoln Center, a classroom facility near Roadman where Alex took most of his classes. Scheduling class sessions there for him was one of his most important accommodations. Because cost can be prohibitive, most colleges and universities retrofit only essential buildings and have few academic buildings that can accommodate a wheelchair. Currently, five of Morningside's 1,200 undergraduates have a mobility impairment; one is in a wheelchair. Of the campus's 21 buildings, eight are now accessible, including a new residence hall (though it's down a steep hill); three are partly accessible. We entered a first floor seminar room and settled around a table. I really needed the rest. I ASKED Alex about his mind set when he arrived back on campus in a wheelchair. "I immediately faced two challenges, one physical and the other psychological," he said. "On the physical side, there were no door openers in campus buildings. You just experienced firsthand what it's like to open heavy doors when you are in a wheelchair. You can imagine how impossible it was for me in the beginning." "But perhaps the most significant challenge was psychological," he said. "For example, when I went into the cafeteria for my meals, I refused to use eating equipment designed for quadriplegics. Instead, I insisted my assistant feed me on the ludicrous notion that I would look less disabled if she did. I was terrified that people might stare at me if they saw me using this contraption." He motioned to a strap with an attached spoon that he keeps in the pouch of his wheelchair. "But they stared at me anyway. As you can imagine, it took time for me to get comfortable with my new image." Seats were taken out of Lincoln Center's amphitheater to make space for Alex's wheelchair at lectures. Morningside also created a turnaround space in the seminar room where we were now seated. "So in class here, I had to sit in front of the room and consequently every move I made was in full view of the class." As he said this, he was manipulating his chair to a horizontal position, much as one can in the first class cabin on an international flight. "Especially in long classes, I had to shift my weight as I am doing now so that my blood could recirculate," he explained. "People who are mobile rarely think of it, but no one can stay seated in the same position for one or two hours straight without moving. But if you are in a wheelchair, you are stuck in the same position. So periodically I have to mechanically shift my weight. But now imagine doing this in the front of class. All of a sudden, people are staring at you, not listening to the professor. Believe me, this can be humiliating." I asked Alex what advice he had for disabled high school students contemplating college. He had obviously been asked this question many times before. "Get over your fear of talking to people," he said. "You've got to be O.K. asking strangers for help. Most people want to be of assistance anyway. It makes them feel good. Plan things out. Talk to your professors and ask them not only what you need from them, but what they need from you. Build a support system by joining a fraternity, like I did, or by participating in a club." "My way of meeting women now is the same way as when I could walk confidence," he said. "Women love men who are confident. I can't do little things like holding hands to show affection. So I play to my strong suit. Holding hands just isn't one of them. But having confidence, like being able to carry on an intellectual conversation, is." I believed him. During the tour, young women lots of young women came running over to greet him. Alex was quick with his answer: "Before I die, I want to accomplish eight things in life. Lobby Congress around handicap access. Be an activist for organizations that work for the disabled. Be a nationally known motivational speaker. Write a book about my life. Work with juveniles around conflict resolution. And own a golf course, bar and restaurant." We wheeled out of Lincoln Center to make our way back to his van, but I got stuck in the grass and couldn't move an inch. Alex shook his head. "Watch this," he said as he flipped his wheelchair into high gear and raced across Peters Avenue at about 12 miles an hour. THIS fall, Alex is a paid field organizer for the Sioux City arm of Organizing for America, a community group working on President Obama's re election "my first full time job!" he exclaimed in a phone conversation. Since our tour at Morningside, he has completed his master's degree in conflict resolution at Creighton University in Omaha and served an internship at the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. "My life seems to take these incredible turns," he said. Now 26, he feels he is facing his biggest challenge. "I was able to persevere through college and graduate school," he said, "but the scariest thing has been transitioning into the job market. I have great intentions, but getting a job is so frightening to me. With my disability, I constantly worry about whether I will be able to use my education." He had recently applied for a position as a diversity consultant at a large state university. "One of the requirements of this job is a driver's license," he said. Then he added, "I haven't let that stop me before." A few weeks later, he told me he was turned down. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
"The Last Tree," the visually arresting second feature from Shola Amoo, offers a coming of age narrative guided by fluid definitions of family, strains of cultural tension and the quest for personal freedom. The film, available through virtual cinemas, is a semi autobiographical story told in three acts. It opens in a rural area of the English county of Lincolnshire, with a young Femi (Tai Golding) playing with his friends at the golden hour: They run through the hills, wrestle in the mud and yell triumphantly. But this idyllic moment, marked by yellow, green and brown hues, has an expiration date. Femi's birth mother, Yinka (Gbemisola Ikumelo), has come to collect her son and build a life with him in London. Until then, Femi, the only black child in his area, had been raised by his white foster mother Mary (Denise Black). After an emotional and reluctant farewell, Femi leaves with Yinka for London. London where a majority of the film takes place is gray and subdued. Femi struggles to adjust to his new life at school, where students mock him for being Nigerian, and at home, where he is lonely and doesn't get along with his mother. The film moves ahead five years and Femi, now 16 and played by Sam Adewunmi, is trying to figure out his relationship with himself and the world. Both his mother (with whom his relationship is tempered but distant) and a teacher who has taken interest in him encourage him to focus on school, but there is an alternative lifestyle modeled, in this case, by Mace (Demmy Ladipo), a small time hustler. Perhaps it is the familiarity of these themes, but the choice between the two fates doesn't feel as complicated as the film wants it to be. The third part of the film takes Femi and his mother to Lagos where their relationship takes an unlikely turn. "The Last Tree" which has been compared to "Moonlight" because of its three act structure, distinct visual language and focus on boyhood ambitiously tackles complicated themes in a short period of time, but the most interesting questions raised are about freedom and family. As immigrants living in London, Yinka and Femi are haunted by the effects of how, where and with whom they can be free. Freedom drove Yinka to come to Britain and to desperately fight for a better life, but chasing it also alienates her from her son. And freedom especially to express himself impacts how Femi moves, speaks and relates to those around him. Even Amoo's aesthetic choices are marked by capturing that constrained mobility. However, as a result of this ambition, the film feels at times like it is trying to take on too much plotlines are rushed, relationships feel unearned or not explained. Still, I can't help but be impressed by Amoo's attempts to direct a familiar narrative with such a complicated set of questions. The Last Tree Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
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