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LONDON As Europe slouches toward a monetary union that aims to force euro area governments to cede control over their banks and budgets, a crucial question remains unanswered: how to persuade investors to buy, and hold for the long term, the bonds of at risk economies like Italy and Spain. Both countries have debt and deficit levels that are no worse, and in some cases better, than those of Britain, Japan and the United States. But because they cannot devalue their currencies and must instead impose growth sapping economic measures to regain competitiveness, their bonds have traded as if their economies are near insolvent. Meanwhile, the securities of debt racked Britain, for example, are snapped up with abandon. It is a paradox that lies at the heart of the European debt crisis. On Friday at its most recent summit meeting, Brussels took a halting first step to addressing this issue on a permanent basis. Euro zone leaders proposed that Europe's current and future rescue facilities might buy Italian and Spanish bonds as long as these countries fulfilled Germany's austerity demands and met debt and deficit targets. The market, expecting more waffling, jumped and the yields on 10 year Spanish and Italian bonds dropped sharply as investors celebrated the prospect that Europe might become a buyer of last resort of its beaten down bonds. Still, Friday's euphoria notwithstanding, economists and market participants remain doubtful that the bond market fears can be permanently assuaged until the European Central Bank intervenes with the force and conviction shown by its peers in the United States and Britain. Paul De Grauwe, a Belgian economist at the London School of Economics, says he believes that the latest step will not be enough. Mr. De Grauwe has written extensively on how the cycle of fear and panic in the bond markets is pushing countries that may not need a bailout to ask for one. The euro zone's temporary bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, which has only 248 billion euros at its disposal and must first raise the money on the bond market, does not have the firepower to convince skittish investors that Europe is serious, he said. Italy and Spain alone have a total of nearly 2.5 trillion euros in sovereign bonds outstanding. Mr. De Grauwe proposes instead, that the European Central Bank announce that it will be an aggressive buyer of Spanish or Italian bonds until the spread or the difference between the yields on these bonds and benchmark German bonds reaches a certain level, say 300 basis points, compared with the recent level of 500 basis points and above. "You would then have a floor on bond prices and it would be attractive for investors to buy Spanish bonds again," said Mr. De Grauwe. His most recent paper claims that the Spanish and Italian bond rout has been driven more by the psychology of fear than hard and true economic numbers. "The E.F.S.F. does not have the credibility given its resources," Mr. De Grauwe said. "What you need are the unlimited resources of a central bank." Such a forceful approach has been resisted by Germany, the bank's largest shareholder, on the basis that countries would not proceed with necessary reforms. It is also true that the E.C.B. has intervened in the markets before and is said to own close to 150 billion euros of weak euro zone country bonds. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. The buying has had little effect, though, because the numbers have been relatively small and because the operations have been done mostly in secret, largely mitigating their effect. If the bank were to set an open target, in the same vein that Switzerland's central bank did last year when it shocked markets by declaring that it would limit the increase of the Swiss franc by intervening at a certain level, then perhaps bond investors would take heed. Instead, after the Greek debt restructuring and the Spanish bank bailout, foreign investors have been sellers of Spanish and Italian bonds, fearing that as the yields increase to near 7 percent and above, so does the risk that these countries will run out of money even though the raw numbers would argue the opposite. Italy, for example, had a primary surplus in 2011 of 1.1 percent of gross domestic product, meaning its budget is more than balanced if one takes away interest payments. And Spain's debt last year was 68 percent of its G.D.P. lower than Germany's and France's. Still, problems are severe in both countries: a banking collapse that required a 100 billion euro bailout in Spain and chronic stagnation and higher debt in Italy. Nevertheless, as Mr. De Grauwe would have it, Spain and perhaps even Italy could be forced into a bailout at some point because investors are fixated on the notion that, because they are in the euro zone, they will not have time and flexibility to make the necessary changes. Christopher Marks, the global head of debt capital markets at BNP Paribas, argues that this insolvency fear is being fanned by a new breed of short term investors who have entered the market in the last year or two and have become the dominant voice, arguing loudly that Spain and Italy are destined to fail and making investment bets to that effect by either selling short the bonds or buying credit default swaps. The result is heightened volatility, lack of liquidity and everclimbing yields the bond market equivalent of fear as longer term core investors like pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and insurance companies have stopped buying these securities. "The traditional buyers of these bonds will return but only when there is a decrease in volatility and the yield," said Mr. Marks. As to whether this latest promise by Europe to use the E.F.S.F. and its successor entity to intervene will make a long term difference, Mr. Marks remains cautious. As always, details on how Europe would intervene in the bond markets were scant, outside of a statement in which Brussels said it would "do what is necessary to ensure financial stability in the euro area," by deploying the bailout vehicles. And that there would need to be a memorandum of understanding between the country in question and Europe regarding conditions to be met. In another concession to private sector creditors, Brussels said that loans made to Spain via the European Stability Mechanism, the successor bailout vehicle to the E.F.S.F., would not be considered senior to the claims of bond investors thus easing fears of a debt restructuring and making Spanish bonds more attractive. Mr. Marks considers the summit meeting agreement "a short term palliative." He says he believes that the bailout funds' ability to intervene with maximum effect will be tested sooner rather than later. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
It isn't often that automobile insurance becomes the subject of nationwide outrage. So when it does happen, it's worth a peek inside all our policies to figure out how they actually work and what the insurance companies are up to behind the scenes. This week, a man named Matt Fisher took to his Tumblr site to call out Progressive, which insured his sister, Katie, two years ago when she died in a car accident. The company recently sent its lawyer to court not to assist her estate but to argue that the driver of the other car, who had a suspended license and little insurance, was the innocent party. Or, as Mr. Fisher put it, "My Sister Paid Progressive Insurance to Defend Her Killer in Court." The outrage on social media came swiftly, and it was brutal. Progressive's initial public comments parsing the definition of "defendant" only opened up the company to further vitriol. After several requests, I finally got Progressive to come to the phone and explain in detail, out loud and on the record, why it chose to fight Ms. Fisher's family in court. In the end, the saga of Ms. Fisher and her family isn't just about whether Progressive made a needless mess of its reputation this week. And it's not simply about whether everyone should drop their Progressive policies in protest either, as scores of people have threatened to do. We also need to take a close look at our own coverage and determine whether we have a fundamental misunderstanding of how our various auto insurance policies actually work. Before fishermatt became a social media phenomenon, he was a devastated older brother. His sister was just 24 when she died in Baltimore with two degrees from Johns Hopkins University to her name and nothing but promise in front of her. The insurance machinery began its work relatively quickly. Ms. Fisher had 100,000 in liability coverage per person in this accident, and three people (and the lawyers negotiating for them) wanted a piece of it: a passenger in her car, the driver of the car that hit her and a passenger in that car. Progressive sized up its legal risks. Three individuals thought Ms. Fisher had run a red light the police officer who filed the accident report (but who did not witness it), Ms. Fisher's passenger and the driver of the other vehicle. On the other hand, one eyewitness said that it was the other driver who ran the light. At that point, Progressive chose to pay the liability claims. "If we determine that we shouldn't pay any third parties, our insured can get sued and be responsible for any amount over the limit," said Marcia Marsteller, the business leader in Progressive's legal department for claims. "If we make the wrong call and don't pay them and perhaps we should have, there is an issue for her estate." Here's where things get tricky. Liability insurance pays money to injured people even if the policyholder is at fault. But the dispute in court that so infuriated Ms. Fisher's brother, Matt, also affected a different policy she had underinsured motorist coverage that operates under different rules. That coverage is something you buy if you're worried about somebody hurting you who doesn't have much insurance. The driver who hit Ms. Fisher had only 25,000 in liability coverage, and her parents tried to coordinate claims from his company and their daughter's to collect the 100,000 total that her underinsured motorist insurance covered. The challenge with the coverage, however, is that it pays you money only if the other driver is at fault. Many states, recognizing the subtleties in assigning blame, will pay out partial claims based on the share of responsibility. But Maryland is among a small number of states where insurance policyholders may get nothing under the terms of their underinsured motorist policies if they're even 1 percent at fault. "You're buying insurance that steps into the shoes of the guy who injured you," said Tom Baker, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. "It's kind of a nasty business, because they have to act like they're the bad guy that hurt you." The other driver's insurance company appeared to be siding with the Fishers when it offered them the full 25,000 that his own liability policy covered. But Progressive, having already assessed the evidence and come to a different conclusion when it paid claims on Ms. Fisher's liability policy, decided not to pay the full claim on the underinsured motorist coverage. While the company did engage in settlement negotiations with the Fishers, the two sides could not come to an agreement. "I think they're still hoping that we are what they originally thought we were: stupid people that they could bully," Joan Fisher said. "I think they thought that we would just turn our tails down behind us and walk away." Instead, the Fishers chose to sue the driver of the other vehicle to determine who was truly at fault in the accident. Armed with a favorable judgment, they could then force Progressive to pay their daughter's underinsured motorist claim in full. Progressive didn't want that to happen, so it filed a motion to intervene in the case and sent its lawyer to court alongside the other driver's lawyer to make the case that Ms. Fisher was at fault (giving rise to her brother's accusation that the company defended her killer). The jury sided with the Fishers and determined that she bore no fault at all. The Fishers' lawyer, Allen Cohen, said he felt that Progressive's conduct raised questions about whether the state insurance commissioner would find that the company had acted in bad faith. After all, he explained, two of the witnesses who lined up against Ms. Fisher were not independent, since one had made a liability claim against her insurance policy and another (the other driver) had potential criminal exposure. "I have no issue in general with insurance companies defending themselves," he said. "But in this specific case, I have an issue with how they examined the evidence to come to the decision to abandon their insured." Progressive sure seems to have done absolutely everything wrong here. It paid out three liability claims, doubled down in court on its interpretation of the evidence that was behind those payouts, lost in court, was roundly mocked online, will pay the underinsured motorist claim to the Fishers after all and is now also paying them a separate settlement to avoid a hearing before the state insurance commissioner. But Ms. Marsteller of Progressive said that the company was acting in Ms. Fisher's best interest from the start. "You make a decision and you might get a lawsuit either way," she said. "Our goal is to make the best decision overall for the insured, and I think we did that here." A short personal coda here. I went back and checked my own insurance policy and realized that while I have 1 million of liability coverage, I had the minimum amount of uninsured motorist coverage. My guess is that at the time I made that decision, I figured that my separate health, life and disability coverage would cover me in the event of an accident involving somebody driving around with no insurance. That seems foolish in retrospect, given all the things that I might have to pay for out of pocket if I were hurt badly. Plus, it cost less than 6 a month to take the underinsured coverage up to 1 million. The low price seems to indicate that the odds of making a claim are slim. But the Fishers' experience suggests that having decent coverage is a good idea, and they are now considering increasing their own coverage. Before their daughter died, they had taken out a home equity loan to pay off some of her student loans. The proceeds from the uninsured motorist claim will allow them to retire the debt. But her mother said that the lawsuit was never about the money for them. "This is the last that the world will ever hear of my daughter," she said. "And I didn't want those last words about her to be that she was a reckless driver."Alas, having insurance doesn't guarantee that your insurer won't cross the ring at some point and fight alongside the other person who was involved in your accident. And if companies make enough of the sort of miscalculations that Progressive did here, the costs may well be passed on to all of us in the form of higher premiums. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
The ballet contingent of "Carousel" in Central Park: from left, Amar Ramasar, Brittany Pollack, Justin Peck and Craig Salstein. Since March, three ballet dancers Brittany Pollack, Amar Ramasar and Craig Salstein have been living in a different world, where daily class happens not in a pristine studio with barres and mirrors, but on the carpeted floor of a theater mezzanine. And instead of being thrown onstage in a debut because another dancer is injured, or performing in three ballets in one night (sometimes four), they dance the same thing every night. What happened to them? "Carousel," by way of Justin Peck, the show's 30 year old Tony winning choreographer. They only have a few more weeks to bask under the Broadway spotlight the production closes on Sept. 16 and then it's back to life at Lincoln Center, at least for Ms. Pollack, 29, and Mr. Ramasar, 36, who are members of New York City Ballet. Mr. Salstein, 35 a dance captain of "Carousel" recently left American Ballet Theater, where he danced for 16 years. In the musical, set in Maine at the turn of the 20th century, Julie Jordan, a young millworker, falls in love with the handsome, rugged carousel barker, Billy Bigelow. Ms. Pollack plays Louise, their daughter, and Mr. Ramasar is Jigger Craigin, Billy's friend, who also happens to be a scoundrel. There's a botched robbery; Jigger escapes unscathed, and Billy dies but later comes back to earth to help his troubled daughter who, at times, is very unlike the sunny Ms. Pollack. Dance plays an important part in the show, which features sweeping, intricate ensemble numbers; in the nautically themed "Blow High, Blow Low," the dancers with Mr. Ramasar front and center create the illusion of a ship with their bodies. And there is a 10 minute ballet for the spirited and vulnerable Louise, who, we learn, is snubbed by her peers and left heartbroken after a pas de deux with the Fairground Boy. "I feel like it's a whole experience of different parts of my life," Ms. Pollack said, referring to Louise's trajectory. "It's amazing how I'm able to lose myself so easily in the ballet." The three dancers and Mr. Peck have an easy rapport growing up in ballet can bond people but in "Carousel" they've seen one another grow as artists and discover different sides of themselves. The genial Mr. Ramasar is playing against type; Mr. Salstein, who has left the classical world behind, just feels free to dance. And Mr. Peck? This isn't the last time you'll see him on Broadway if he has anything to say about it. Recently, they met at Mr. Peck's office at Lincoln Center, where he is the resident choreographer for City Ballet and a soloist. He is also a member of the interim leadership team as the company searches for a new director. (Peter Martins, the longtime ballet master in chief, retired after allegations of physical and sexual abuse.) What follows are edited excerpts from that conversation. What has it been like dancing the same steps night after night? BRITTANY POLLACK It's harder than I thought it would be. Just the repetition of doing the same thing on my body you have no recovery time. CRAIG SALSTEIN But there's no coasting. Because the vocabulary requires you to be so present in executing the steps, there's no "I'm on autopilot." Not going to happen. When you prep for a pirouette, it's as if you were onstage doing a classical ballet. The vocabulary requires you to have a certain SALSTEIN You've got to be aware of what's going on. As Jigger, what has this experience been like? RAMASAR I was having a difficulty with my character in the beginning. I'm not a mean guy. But I use Justin's choreography: It has this raw strength to it, and a finesse and grace, so I relate to that. But I have to say that doing it every night is emotional. JUSTIN PECK It's also like Jigger is never the guy who gets caught. It's sort of similar to the dancing. PECK Yes, it's like this natural talent. He always happens to hit his balance at the end of his sixth turn. What have you gotten out of this as a dancer? POLLACK At City Ballet, a lot of what we do is so abstract. I haven't really had the opportunity to have to act so much. I feel that when I go back, I'll dance differently. Studying the other actors has been so amazing. PECK I would always go up to them and be like, "Stop walking like a dancer." POLLACK It's hard to turn that off. RAMASAR I grab my belt to hold my arms down to let the words tell the story. SALSTEIN At A.B.T., you can get very uptight especially in the classics and the Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan work even the Alexei Ratmansky work. It's like being in traffic. You get to the place where you want to go, but you're stopping and starting. Are you on this mark? The priorities are a little different in the classical repertoire, and when you get into Justin, there's no traffic. You just drive on a highway and you just relax SALSTEIN And the other thing is to have the guy in the room. I don't know Ashton. I don't know MacMillan. When you get the guy in the room, you just go, yes. How have you dealt with singing and speaking onstage? RAMASAR I did a lot of studying because I was uncomfortable. It's the most uncomfortable feeling I think I've ever had. The first day I walked in, to have the first read through around the table? POLLACK Oh my God. My lines were not until the end. I sat there for two hours waiting. RAMASAR I was drenched. I've never been that nervous. To Peck Was it your idea to make Jigger a dancer? PECK Yeah, it was never a dance part. He would sing the song, "Blow High, Blow Low" and he would go away and stand off to the side and the ensemble would dance. I was like, let's integrate all this together and turn this into a huge moment in the show. Usually, it's such a throwaway number. So I turned it upside down in that way. PECK I don't know. I enjoy it sometimes. I feel like there's not a lot challenging me or that I have time to take on with everything else happening. I loved doing "The Times Are Racing." I can see the writing on the wall. PECK What do you think? Should I keep dancing? I enjoy watching you dance when you like what you're dancing. PECK I do. I love doing "Opus Jazz." I think that's why I got really into making sneaker dances. I got really good onstage in sneakers. I like Robbins. SALSTEIN Did you ever do "Fancy Free?" PECK I always want to do "Fancy Free." I ask to do it, and they won't let me do it. Who are they? You're on the interim team just cast yourself. Are you applying for Peter Martins's job? PECK No. I'm not. Laughs I wouldn't get to focus on the creative things I want to focus on if I were to do that. But I hope to be involved with who that is or what the setup is. Does it feel like "Carousel" has done more for your career than anything you've accomplished in ballet? PECK I don't know if it feels like more, but I love choreographing for theater, and I want to do more. There's not a lot of dance shows out there. I want there to be more. What will you do about that? PECK One of my dreams is to develop more content for Broadway that drives from a place of dance or movement as storytelling. That, to me, is much more interesting than doing a remake of "Swan Lake" or "Sleeping Beauty." I think there are a enough of those. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
TOKYO The outcry over the demolition last year of the 53 year old Hotel Okura in Tokyo surprised no one more than some Japanese historians and architectural specialists. Monocle, the global lifestyle magazine, had circulated a petition, savetheokura.com, to register the "outrage from admirers of its unique design." Tomas Maier, the creative director of Bottega Veneta, an Italian luxury brand, filmed a video memorial and started a social media campaign, MyMomentAtOkura. The hotel's modernist postwar lobby artfully balanced elements of traditional Japan, like lacquered plum blossom shaped tables and chairs, with visions of what was then futuristic, like a lighted world map displaying global time zones. It was frequented by United States presidents including President Obama, and other heads of state, celebrities, artists and designers. It played a central role in the 1960s James Bond novel "You Only Live Twice." The hotel's main building and its signature lobby were demolished in September. The South Wing, erected in 1973, will remain operational, and the owners plan to replicate the lobby's mezzanine, based on a Japanese painting known as "Bridge of the Dream," and its hexagonal ceiling lights. A newly designed bar will try to recapture the stylish retro chic of the former Orchid Bar, the Okura's elegant, dimly lit cocktail haven loved by diplomats, expatriates and journalists. The new complex will also incorporate upgrades to meet the latest standards in earthquake resistant construction technologies. But those plans have done little to assuage the concerns of preservationists, many of whom contend that Tokyo is destroying its greatest postwar architectural assets to accommodate the 2020 Olympics and a recent surge in tourism. In a twist worthy of Bond, the most outspoken critics are not from Japan. "When the reconstruction was announced, many foreigners, especially well known designers, voiced their regret," said Yoshio Uchida, professor of architecture at Toyo University. "The magnitude of their protest was beyond our imagination." The original Okura opened in 1962, two years before the first Tokyo Olympics, an event that signaled to the world that Japan had recovered from the devastation of World War II. It was erected across the street from the American Embassy, and became so popular with diplomats it was referred to as "the annex." The architect Yoshiro Taniguchi led a design team appointed by Kishichiro Okura, the founder. Unlike many postwar Tokyo buildings, whose primary models of modernism were strictly Western, the Okura was built to evoke Japanese ness, at least as perceived by foreigners. Among other frills, this meant hexagonal hanging lamps shaped like ancient gems and partitions edged with kimono fabrics. But some Japanese question whether the Okura's decor and ambience was, or could ever be, truly Japanese. "In 1962, the very concept of a hotel was not Japanese," Mr. Uchida said. "People wear shoes inside, they wear shirts and neckties. The traditional Japanese concept of lodging is the ryokan, or inn, where no one dresses or behaves that way." Recreating the Okura is the original architect's world famous son, Yoshio Taniguchi, a graduate of Harvard who 11 years ago redesigned the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Mr. Taniguchi is best known for his lean lines and conservative minimalism a far cry, some say, from his father's evocative focus on physical craftsmanship and genius for striking a harmonic balance between East and West. "There were many examples of excellent modern architecture designed in postwar Japan," he said. "But there are also many that have become rundown over the years. For the structures that were especially beautiful and original, we are trying to restore them with sensitivity to their original forms. We're constantly making that effort." The pressure to revive and reinvent Tokyo is not limited to the Okura's next incarnation. Real estate prices in the city plummeted in the 1990s. Modest upturns in the last decade were clouded by competition from shinier neighbors like Singapore, Seoul and Shanghai. But while Japan's population of about 126 million continues to decline with falling birthrates and an aging population, Tokyo's population is growing annually. Last year, an estimated 100,000 joined the capital's hordes of 38 million. Projects undertaken since 2000, like the reconstructed Marunouchi Buildings, tend to be massive, multipurpose skyscrapers. "The multi layeredness of Tokyo is something we may be losing now in our city's major centers," Mr. Matsukuma wrote. "You can only find it in the back streets, the old neighborhoods, and they are disappearing, too." Another challenge for Tokyo is more prosaic: The city has a shortage of hotel rooms. The Japan National Tourism Organization announced late last year that the number of foreign visitors to Japan was expected to near a record breaking 20 million by the end of 2015, an increase of over 40 percent. Occupancy rates for hotels in Tokyo are regularly at 90 percent or higher, and domestic businesses have begun complaining that their traveling salarymen can no longer find affordable rooms. The number of Asian tourists to Japan has exploded in the last year. China alone accounted for 4.7 million visitors, a 109 percent spike in one year. The small number of additional rooms planned for the reconstructed Okura will do little to mitigate a trend that is forcing Tokyo to embrace another 21st century development. Airbnb announced in November that Japan was by far its fastest growing market. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Should celebrities wear all black to the Oscars? Ever since the Golden Globes, when they did exactly that (or most of them did) in support of Time's Up, the movement to combat sexual harassment and gender inequality, this has been a question. Especially after the white rose moment at the Grammys; especially since a similar all black call has gone out to attendees of the British Academy Film Awards (the Baftas) this weekend. Fashion has been largely avoiding the issue, but on Sunday night, Prabal Gurung addressed it head on. Then he name checked the Mosuo, a matriarchal society in China, and the Gulabi Gang fighting for women's rights in India (a.k.a. the Pink Brigade), and then, in front of an audience that included Cardi B., the celebrity of the season, as well as Tarana Burke, the founder of MeToo, he put his palette where his principles were. A year ago during fashion week he ended his show with a parade of models in a variety of message tees that seemed addressed specifically to the policies of the new president ("I am an immigrant"; "The future is female"). He has been making something of a name for himself ever since as a public advocate; a designer willing to Instagram what he thinks. Sometimes his positions seemed better formed than his clothes, but this time, with a finale that saw the models emerge en masse clutching their own white roses, they met in the middle. Still, over all it's been an oddly apolitical fashion week. For a season occurring at a time when clothing has become a vehicle of public messaging in a way it rarely has before, the runways themselves have been strikingly silent. It makes the collections, pretty as they can be, lack a certain currency. At Sies Marjan, the designer Sander Lak, one of the premier colorists in New York, produced a play on life before sunset, all ombre shades of rust fading into black, silver to rose, blood red to indigo, in satin and twill. It was enticing, but had the ephemerality of a dream. At Brandon Maxwell, the big idea was knit knit flares! Knit tees! Knit turtleneck halter swing dresses! which sounds lame but was actually smart, contrasting with the formality of his signature evening wear and giving it a bit of ease. A cashmere hoodie over a giant tulle skirt glinting with Swarovski crystals was an appealing look, albeit a safe one. Mr. Maxwell isn't pushing any boundaries, or big ideas. But that is partly why the Pyer Moss show had such an impact. Also, the clothes were very good. A choir clad entirely in white and brought together for one night only by the singer songwriter Raphael Saadiq stood atop risers and began a soaring, emotive performance that began with "Everything's Got to Get Better" and then ranged through Gil Scott Heron's "Home Is Where the Hatred Is," Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." and Kendrick Lamar's "Alright." It was a fitting backdrop to the designer Kerby Jean Raymond's quietly calibrated ode to the black cowboy, the men he described as being an oft ignored part of the history of the West, including James Beckwourth, an explorer and fur trader, and Bill Pickett, a rodeo star. So there were oversize crisp white shirts and cropped cowboy versions. Short leather jackets with patchwork pockets and trousers billowing with pleats like chaps at the side, to create an hourglass silhouette for both men and women. Loose silk suiting with a medley of seams picked out in white topstitching. And a finale that introduced Mr. Jean Raymond's new collaboration with Reebok and included floor sweeping coats and abstracted flag scarves, sweats palazzo pant wide, and accessories emblazoned with the words "AS USA AS U." It was a rare bit of sloganeering in a season that has not been using its words too much. Less stident than soulful, it pretty much said it all. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The worst thing about being a reporter in the age of Donald Trump is, of course, the president's concerted attacks on the free press. The second worst thing is well meaning readers who say things like, "Thank you for what you do." I mean, I appreciate it. Last week, on assignment in Cape Cod hardship travel, I know I thanked myself for what I do with a dip in the Atlantic and a buttery lobster roll. Some of my more frontline colleagues, from Elmhurst, Queens, to Wuhan, China, take physical and psychological risks to deliver information that deserve true gratitude. But when some of you who are alarmed by the rise of Mr. Trump thank a political journalist or a television pundit, you're feeding our worst instincts toward self importance, toward making ourselves the story and toward telling you exactly what you want to hear. And you're leading us into a dangerous temptation at a time of maximum pressure on the free press. "The many mainstream journalists who have been charting Trump's ceaseless outrages for four long years, myself included, inevitably risk becoming performance artists for appreciative readers who already agree with us," said Frank Rich, the executive producer of the HBO shows "Veep" and "Succession" and a former New York Times columnist. "You have to wonder if any of it has swayed a single Trump voter." Mr. Trump obviously recognizes the media's desire to star in the story, and he's trying to exploit it, conflating the most theatrical political journalism with the broad, dogged and often revelatory work of reporting. He has put the brand name establishment media on the ballot in November. He'd clearly be as happy running against NBC New York Times CNN Atlantic as he is running against Joe Biden. When a CNN reporter asked him last week about violence by his supporters, he replied that "your supporters" shot a man in Portland, Ore., implying that she was responsible for the fatal shooting of a Trump supporter, Aaron Danielson. If you watch Fox News, you see every day how the Republican Party defines itself as a party driven by grievance more than any specific policy, and grievance against the media is its highest form. It even appears in the one page document that stands in for a Republican Party platform. Mr. Trump's great gift is for polarization, and he's driven many of the people who hate him to love journalism, particularly its most dramatic forms, with a new passion. Watch cable news to see the benefits to playing the role of the outraged television journalist. The White House beat was, before Mr. Trump, a dull hostage situation, with reporters shackled to a never ending, often empty, sequence of ritualized events and briefings. Now, it's an ongoing morality play about Truth, in which reporters become famous as they confront Mr. Trump for lying, and the president delights his base by berating them. At its most revealing, it exposes his particular antagonism for blunt questions from women. But it's also another irresistible opportunity for Mr. Trump to posture for the cameras. Lewis Raven Wallace, the author of a provocative new case against detached, "objective," journalism called The View From Somewhere, takes it further, arguing that reporters should get out of the White House briefing room entirely. "If they are serious about safeguarding democracy, they need to be building collective power around not even being in that room anymore" Mr. Wallace said in an interview. But in the for profit world of the media business, the incentives of both subscription sales and personal brand building pull journalists in the opposite direction. Operators in the subscription business which includes cable and a growing share of online and print outlets have found success in telling you what you want to hear, and in signaling that they are, in some sense, on your team. We are, after all, selling something. You can see the tension between exploiting Mr. Trump's attention and being exploited by him in the reaction by CNN and The New York Times. Both hired ad agencies to produce glossy marketing campaigns, seeking to respond to the president's attacks on their journalism but avoid being wholly defined by them. "We've shifted from 'Trump is telling lies, we're going to talk about facts' to 'These are some facts you should know,'" said Mark Figliulo, whose ad agency, Fig, produced CNN's "Facts First" campaign. The debut ads were a direct response to Mr. Trump's denunciations of stories as "fake news." But the network is now "trying to make it a little more centrist, to appeal to everybody," he said. The Times has produced ads promoting its stories on Donald Trump's tax returns and the administration's separation of immigrant families, but has sought to focus more on the journalistic process. "Even if there is a lift that could be gotten from marketing ourselves more oppositionally, we would never do that because it's not what the core product is about," said the Times's chief marketing officer, David Rubin. There are things that journalists can do over the next two months to resist our more self indulgent impulses, do great journalism and stay off the ballot. One is to double down on the best of the coverage of Mr. Trump's attack on democratic institutions. That is not simply to call a tactic racist or undemocratic, but to introduce new reporting into clear patterns of how Mr. Trump, for instance, "uses race for gain" or has become part of "the swamp" he decried. It is better to focus on dangerous actions attacks on the voting infrastructure, for instance, and Justice Department moves against political enemies than the president's unending outrageous comments. 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. Journalists can also be clear about where we're coming from, and where we're not. Most journalists see Mr. Trump's attack on American political norms as a crisis; we understand it clearly because some of the attacks are on us. And we're human beings with identities and beliefs that aren't hard to find on social media. But journalism also has its own weird ideology that doesn't match up with a party or movement. That you, the public, should know, rather than not know. That sunlight is the best disinfectant. That secrets are bad. That power deserves challenge, including the power of figures most of our respective audiences admire. That compelling stories need to be told. But those values are rarely the actual reason anyone likes us, or the direction in which praise pulls us. I felt the lure of praise most intensely in 2017 when I decided to publish a dossier of unverified allegations about President Trump at BuzzFeed News. I was praised at the time for things I hadn't really done, and damned for intentions that I didn't recognize. The unglamorous reality is that I chose to publish the dossier without thinking much about the political consequences. I considered it my job to share with the public a document of public interest that was being circulated among powerful insiders. I can't tell you with confidence today whether publishing it hurt the president or helped him; I didn't think about that question much at the time, and I don't think I should have. And if you read Part Three of some deep investigation of President Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris next year, the author and editor probably won't have thought too much about the political consequences either. (I don't extensively cover BuzzFeed, which I left in February, because I have yet to divest my stock options in the company, as required by The Times.) If you're a reader, you can enjoy journalism, appreciate its role in a free society and resist the search for heroes who will take down evildoers and save our democracy what the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci described to me as "the Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star model of how we get out of here." The alternative to heroes are strong institutions, and a recognition that the people who work in them are human. Reporters, for all the preening from cable news to social media, are normal working people whose strengths are often connected to what would seem in other contexts to be personality flaws: obsessiveness, distrust, appetite for confrontation, sometimes a certain manipulativeness. You don't get revelatory news from strange people with bad motives by giving the impression that you're a saint. One of the journalists who has produced key revelations on President Trump's abuse of power talked to me recently about the job more in terms of the moral grays of John le Carre than the simple contrasts of cable news. This dynamic presents itself with particular clarity on the television interview circuit. It's an enduring global mystery why British and Australian interviewers are so much better than ours at pinning down politicians and forcing clarity out of confrontation, as Kay Burley of Sky News demonstrated in demolishing a cabinet minister last Thursday. The answer, I think, is that American television hosts need to be liked. There are tough American interviewers like Jake Tapper and Chris Wallace, but the most coveted and lucrative gig in the television business is being the host of a morning television show. The ideal host is a soothing presence who greets you as you are waking up, coaxing you into consciousness while you eat your cereal. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. Conan and Andy as Bradley and Gaga Conan O'Brien came to work on Monday in an existential panic. In the success of the Oscars broadcast, which saw a big bump in viewership despite having no host, he saw his own obsolescence. "There was no host last night, and the show did better! Ratings were up 11 percent. So today, people were saying, 'Maybe we don't need a host anymore.' Do you know what that means to me? Do you know how terrifying that concept is? All last night I was, like, tossing and turning. 'End of hosts! No host! Hosts gone!'" CONAN O'BRIEN With Jimmy Fallon celebrating his fifth anniversary as its host on Monday, "The Tonight Show" went meta. Fallon broke the fourth wall, leaving in clips in which he stumbled over his words and said, "We'll edit that out." (They seemed more like put ons than genuine flubs.) His former "Saturday Night Live" castmate and "Weekend Update" co host Tina Fey was seen backstage, watching the show on simulcast and sneering at Fallon's jokes. And the actor Ben Stiller popped out from under a Hashtag the Panda mask, only to diss Fallon and wander offstage in awkward silence. At the end of the show, Fallon doubled down on the story in a story strategy: He rolled tape from earlier in the day, with Fey and Stiller planning how they would pull off their supposedly candid moments. Fallon managed to mostly pull off a regular monologue, in between it all. There were a couple of choice zingers at the expense of North Korea's leader. "There were some interesting winners last night. For example, the Oscar for best animated short went to Kim Jong un." JIMMY FALLON "Speaking of Kim Jong un, later this week he's meeting with President Trump. They have a lot in common: They inherited everything from their dads, and they cut their own hair." JIMMY FALLON Seth Meyers seized on a CNN report that President Trump has been telling aides he wants to cause "chaos" in the Democratic presidential race, according to an adviser. He compared Trump's tack to that of Senator Bernie Sanders, who tends to be a lot less confrontational. Sanders announced his 2020 campaign last week on Vermont public radio (a fact that late night hosts had fun with), and in 2016 he began his presidential bid at a low key news conference outside the United States Capitol, at what barely amounted to a podium. Sanders began it with a gruff, "We don't have an endless amount of time I've got to get back." "It's like we were bothering him just by listening. I'm running for president, now leave me the hell alone! Also, why did he just, like, wander out of a park? 'Sometimes, I like to sleep on a bench to give my suit that nice, socialist rumple!'" SETH MEYERS Amber Ruffin of "Late Night" was pleased with some parts of the Oscars broadcast but not with the best picture win for "Green Book," a film she called "Driving Miss Daisy 2: This Time, the White One Drives!" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
'DIALOGUES DES CARMELITES' at the Metropolitan Opera (May 3 and 8, 7:30 p.m.; through May 11). The Met often sneaks in one of the most interesting prospects of the year right at the end of its season, and these three performances, reprising a 2013 run, certainly qualify as that. Its music director, Yannick Nezet Seguin, leads John Dexter's 1977 production of Poulenc's masterwork with a cast that includes Isabel Leonard as Blanche, Karita Mattila as the Prioress and Adrianne Pieczonka as Madame Lidoine. 212 362 6000, metopera.org ESCHER STRING QUARTET at Alice Tully Hall (May 7, 7:30 p.m.). Appearing under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, this engaging foursome performs the third of Mozart's "Prussian" quartets, Beethoven's titanic Op. 131 quartet, and a rarity: Ives's Quartet No. 2. 212 875 5788, chambermusicsociety.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
If Netflix and chill was once a hackneyed euphemism for hooking up, it's now become a way of life for those staying home to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. And now that cinematic borders on streaming services have all but dissolved, it's easier than ever to experience a different culture by way of a series from around the world, including Latin America. Here are six, in Spanish and Portuguese, from Mexico to Brazil, that you may have missed from a dark Mexican comedy that upends the traditional telenovela to a Brazilian crime thriller that highlights injustices within the criminal justice system. This dramatization of the reggaeton artist Nicky Jam's life provides a dose of early aughts nostalgia. Fans of "Gasolina" era reggaeton probably remember Los Cangris, the Puerto Rican duo made up of Nicky Jam and Daddy Yankee, and their stable of hits, but this show delves deeper to reveal how drugs and violence threatened to derail their rise to stardom. In flashbacks alternating between the early years of Nicky Jam's career and his younger years as a boy whose mother struggled with drug addiction, the series traces how the shadow of his childhood followed him throughout his life. Back then, Nicky (played by Darkiel as the up and coming artist, and by Nicky Jam himself as an adult) was numbing himself with drugs and sex before getting onstage, and tried to balance his passion for music with the pull of street life. In depicting the impossible odds people must sometimes beat to follow their dreams, "Nicky Jam: El Ganador" is honest, devastating and full of heart. With a vibrant flower shop as its backdrop, this dark Mexican comedy is a soapy escape. An upper middle class family's seemingly perfect facade is upended after its patriarch's mistress, Roberta, hangs herself from the ceiling of their flower business, the House of Flowers. That's when the family dysfunction comes to light: their financial struggles, the kids' personal issues and the full extent of the father's parallel life, including a cabaret business called wait for it the House of Flowers. The series was a critical success, praised for its inversion of the traditional Mexican telenovela (the drag scene features prominently, and there is some recreational marijuana use). The show, whose three seasons are now available on Netflix, stars some heavy hitters, like Veronica Castro as Virginia de la Mora, the family's image obsessed matriarch, but the indie film star Cecilia Suarez is the true heartbeat of the series. The memorable staccato speech she developed for her character (Paulina, the family's responsible oldest sibling) is delightfully fitting, and she carries the series after Castro's departure. In flashbacks, a teenage Yeimi is seen dancing and singing through her colorful Medellin neighborhood, which is overrun by violence and poverty. The highlight of these episodes is the focus on the working class characters, like Yeimi's parents, humble bakers who are being extorted by a druglord, or Juancho, a 17 year old left to raise his siblings after his mother runs off with a lover. Music is at the heart of the show, and songs help to narrate the various phases of Yeimi's life: "Reflejo" is heavy with teenage melodrama, and "Fenix" is a redemption narrative about rising from the ashes like a phoenix. Popular Colombian musicians also appear as guest stars, including Karol G and Sebastian Yatra. Celia Cruz, the Cuban salsa singer who died in 2003 at the age of 77, was known for her vivacious energy, multicolored wigs, flamboyant outfits and, of course, her catchphrase: "Azucar!" But this series based on her life introduces us to a quieter Celia (played by the Puerto Rican actress Jeimy Osorio), before she became an international star with an infectious persona. The show, now streaming on Hulu, follows Celia as a young woman living with her parents in 1950s Havana, working as a teacher but harboring dreams of stardom. Her biggest obstacle is her father, a strict but flawed man who strongly opposes her musical ambitions, which he views as unfit for a respectable lady. Though the story can sometimes move a bit slowly, it's satisfying to watch the determined Celia prevail. For a grittier watch, this Brazilian crime thriller delivers a blend of social commentary, family drama and heart pumping action. Set in 1990s Sao Paulo, it delves into moral ambiguity raised by inequities within the criminal justice system through the story of estranged siblings, Cristina and Edson (Naruna Costa and Seu Jorge). Cristina is a successful lawyer, while her brother is a felon serving time in prison. When Cristina compromises her job to help Edson, she becomes embroiled in a mission to take down the Brotherhood, a criminal faction he founded. That's when things start to get murky. As Cristina gets deeper into the organization, the lines between right and wrong are blurred. What's most compelling about the series is the juxtaposition of the extreme abuses in prison with the less severe, but equally life altering injustices facing Brazilians every day. Fans of "Narcos" might enjoy this series, based on a book of the same name, which is set in the drug trafficking world but features a strong cast with complex female characters. When a cartel boss kills Teresa Mendoza's husband, she must flee to avoid the same fate. She escapes to Spain, where she ends up running her own drug operation. This series was Telemundo's most viewed show when it was released in 2011, and last year the network released a second season that picks up eight years after the first. Both seasons are available on Netflix. "La Reina del Sur" ("The Queen of the South") is a refreshing twist on the drug cartel genre because of its razor sharp focus on women's perspectives and its complex portrayal of a bisexual woman as seen through Patricia O'Farrell (Cristina Urgel), a type of character rarely depicted in Spanish language television. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Brian Chesky, chief executive of Airbnb, likes to tell the story of his early struggles to fund his home sharing start up. Many venture capitalists refused to meet with him, he said in an email. Some walked out in the middle of meetings. That changed after venture firms such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund decided to gamble on Airbnb's potential to shake up the vacation rentals business. Three investors at those firms Alfred Lin of Sequoia, Jeff Jordan at Andreessen Horowitz and Brian Singerman of Founders Fund are now among the top players in the venture capital industry, according to an annual ranking compiled for The New York Times by CB Insights, which tracks the start up industry. Airbnb, privately valued at 31 billion, landed more venture investors at the top of the list than any other company. In his email, Mr. Chesky said Mr. Lin, Mr. Jordan and Mr. Singerman "have a founder's mind set" and "share our long term vision." When Uber goes public, Mr. Lin may feel a sting. That's because he made a small personal investment in the ride hailing company when it was very young, but turned down numerous chances to invest on behalf of Sequoia as Uber grew into a behemoth. "We just didn't dream with the entrepreneurs," said Mr. Lin, 46, who joined Sequoia in 2010. "Sometimes we just make the wrong call." He may have other opportunities to celebrate. Mr. Lin and Sequoia invested early in Airbnb; DoorDash, a food delivery start up valued at 7.1 billion; and Houzz, a home design and remodeling start up worth 4 billion. Sequoia wrote Airbnb a 585,000 check in 2009 and invested in each of the company's later funding rounds. Mr. Lin said he was impressed by how the Airbnb founders could "articulate a dream of the world that is very different from what exists today." Yet sometimes those lofty dreams clashed with reality. As Airbnb grew, Mr. Chesky said, he wanted to hire executives from Apple and Disney, companies he admired for their creativity, design and simple product lines. Mr. Lin, a former executive at Amazon owned Zappos, said he had gently suggested that Airbnb emulate businesses that looked more like itself: ones with complex operations in many different places and a wide array of inventory, like Airbnb's millions of home listings. To help make the point, Mr. Lin introduced Mr. Chesky to Jeff Wilke, the head of Amazon's retail business, in 2012. That meeting persuaded Mr. Chesky to shift his focus. Airbnb ended up poaching top Amazon executives to become its chief financial officer and head of its homes business. "Part of our job is to help with the sparring of ideas," Mr. Lin said. With the I.P.O. stampede now on, he said, he is cautioning companies not to rush to go public because their peers are doing so. "These things are milestones, to some degree, that you celebrate," he said. "But soon after you go public, you have to go back to running your business." Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the founders of Andreessen Horowitz, have long been fixtures in the top rankings of venture capital investors, thanks to investments in companies like Lyft. Mr. Jordan, their partner, has recently outdone them. Mr. Jordan, 60, got behind companies such as Pinterest, the digital pin board, which recently filed its prospectus for going public. He also bet on Instacart, the grocery delivery company worth 7.6 billion, and Lime, a scooter start up valued at 2.4 billion. In 2011, Mr. Jordan also led Andreessen Horowitz's 60 million investment in Airbnb. He has said the company's "marketplace" model of matching travelers with home providers reminded him of the early days of eBay, where he was an executive for five years. When Airbnb experienced a hiccup in 2011 a host's home was trashed by a guest Mr. Jordan helped the company with a new insurance program, Airbnb Guarantee, which was modeled after one at eBay. Mr. Jordan, who also led OpenTable before joining Andreessen Horowitz in 2011, said part of his investment success was due to the firm's wide range of services for start ups, including recruiting, public relations and business development. It was once unusual for venture firms to to provide those services, though they have become more common. Apoorva Mehta, founder and chief executive of Instacart, said Mr. Jordan often provided corporate development advice and introductions to potential retail partners. There's one area in which Mr. Singerman is like other venture capitalists: his professed nonchalance toward I.P.O.s. Founders Fund tends to hold stock in its investments "for a very, very long time," so a company's public offering "doesn't impact us," he said. In 2016, Mr. Singerman invested in a company called Long Term Stock Exchange. Founded by Eric Ries, the author of the start up bible "The Lean Startup," the company wants to open a new stock exchange for young companies that are seeking investors who will stick around for the long haul. Mr. Ries said he had gone to Mr. Singerman for funding because he knew his idea was "out on a limb" and would require patience from investors. CB Insights analyzed investors' deals, including companies that sold or went public and the value of current portfolio companies, to rank the top venture capitalists. The analysis spanned 2010 through March 2019 and is weighted toward more recent performance. The Times presents the top 20 here: | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Clockwise from bottom left, Suzanne Cordeiro/Agence France Presse Getty Images; Roger Kisby for The New York Times; Liam Henderson for The New York Times; Eric Liebowitz/NBC, via Associated Press; Krista Schlueter for The New York Times; Jake Michaels for the New York Times Clockwise from bottom left, Suzanne Cordeiro/Agence France Presse Getty Images; Roger Kisby for The New York Times; Liam Henderson for The New York Times; Eric Liebowitz/NBC, via Associated Press; Krista Schlueter for The New York Times; Jake Michaels for the New York Times Credit... Clockwise from bottom left, Suzanne Cordeiro/Agence France Presse Getty Images; Roger Kisby for The New York Times; Liam Henderson for The New York Times; Eric Liebowitz/NBC, via Associated Press; Krista Schlueter for The New York Times; Jake Michaels for the New York Times The interaction of human and machine has been a major theme of Janelle Monae's entire recording career. Her latest concept album, "Dirty Computer," deploys funky riffs (often with Prince echoes), snappy beats and crisp pop song forms to promise that love, polymorphous sensuality and an inclusive American spirit can conquer all, even an impending apocalypse. Meanwhile, Monae's full length accompanying video billed as an "emotion picture" is far more dystopian. On her fifth album, Mitski hasn't figured everything out. Her asymmetrical songs are still trying to make sense of lust, love, life as a performer and countless contradictory impulses. But she has grown ever bolder musically, moving well beyond the confines of indie rock and chamber pop to try synthesizers, disco beats, country and more, while savoring the sweep of her voice. On her larger canvas, her dilemmas just sound more immediate. Intimate confidences grow dizzying and titanic in the songs of Josiah Wise, who records as serpentwithfeet. As he sings about love at its most devotional and all consuming, his androgynous voice arrives as a multitude tenor and falsetto, whisper and proclamation, moan and chant and it appears from all directions. His vocals become dialogues, colloquies, choirs, armies and ghostly wisps, all part of an endless search for connection. The songs on "12 Little Spells" have extensive intellectual superstructures. The lyrics are tied to particular body parts, while the music flaunts its jazzy chord progressions, devious melodies, odd meters and cleverly interlocking patterns. No matter; Spalding sings her complex insights with such breezy charm that the songs come across as lighthearted, even lightheaded. The Spanish singer and songwriter Rosalia Vila Tobella, now 25, immersed herself in the deepest traditions of flamenco before infusing them into thoroughly contemporary pop. With her songs on "El Mal Querer" (which could translate as "Bad Desire" or "Bad Love"), produced by the electronic musician El Guincho and others, she explores passion, jealousy and betrayal while handclaps interweave with minimal trap beats and the arabesques of flamenco singing segue into Auto Tuned quavers: age old sentiments expressed in the present tense. To celebrate romantic and carnal bliss along with career success while trying not to sound too smug, Ariana Grande enlisted pop factory experts Pharrell Williams, Max Martin to clear ample space around her voice. Elaborate yet insistently skeletal tracks let her vocals tease, swoop, push back against pressure, blossom into harmonies and bask in satisfaction. And then, less than three months after the album's release came a postscript, a single announcing that the romance was over: "Thank U, Next." Sophie Allison, the 21 year old songwriter who records as Soccer Mommy, got her start with home recorded songs, and her official debut album, "Clean," still relies on low fi fundamentals: spindly but sinewy guitar parts and a voice that doesn't hide its imperfections. Her songs grapple with desire, insecurity, betrayal and self assertion, learning from every bruised emotion. Jupiter Bokondji Ilola, the son of a Congolese diplomat who grew up in Tanzania and East Germany but returned to the strife torn Democratic Republic of Congo, leads a band, Okwess ("food" in the Kibunda language), that draws on rhythms and languages from all around Congo. It's a statement of unity; it's also a trove of ideas that happens to be magnificently funky, with a different groove in every song. The electronic duo Autechre delivered a magnum opus eight hours of music commissioned by the online London station NTS. It's a fully imagined artificial universe of improbable timbres and rhythms, of repetitions cracked and warped, of long waits and sudden tangents, of propulsion and suspension, of expectations set up and undermined, of menacing implications and funny noises. Brittle, fractured, pointillistic patterns lead, eventually, to weightless, sustained rapture. The final track is nearly an hour long: a reverential, euphoric haze. See the critics' lists of the best songs of 2018. From the indie rock singer songwriter Sophie Allison, who records as Soccer Mommy, comes a ferocious howl of an album that captures the tension just as the fear of internal collapse gives way to newfound strength. These songs are damp with derision, regret and desire, but never uncertainty. The year's most promising pure pop album is from a painstakingly detail oriented, emotionally wrenched, melodically ambitious soul and funk savant who's just now, a couple of years into his run in the limelight, learning how to squeeze the most arresting of sentiments from the rawest of arrangements. The pop punk of 2018 is hip hop, and Juice WRLD is its best brat. On this album, he's a lost soul a victim of others and also himself who's never at a loss for melody. A double album that captures all the essential Drake modes: indignation, flirtation, celebration and more indignation. No one is better at internal narrative continuity than Drake, which is why he has the ability to make an album that's utterly current while effortlessly blending with the Drake of yesterday. The children of Young Thug are alive and thriving beautiful, abstract singer rappers peddling street corner psychedelia. Lil Baby is wiry and rough edged, while the elegant Gunna verges on new age. Lean, sinewy, blues inflected country music from a singer with a voice that's thick but nimble. The still beauty in her singing is impressive, but her easeful storytelling feels practically radical. 7. Kanye West, 'Ye' and Kids See Ghosts, 'Kids See Ghosts' | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Chelcee Johns, an assistant editor at 37 Ink, outside her Brooklyn apartment, where she has been working remotely. "This is our new normal for a lot longer than we thought," she said. During a normal week, Jordan Pavlin, the editorial director at Knopf, seldom ate at her desk. Depending on the day, she might be meeting with literary agents over lunch, catching up with an author over an after work drink, or having a quick bite before a cocktail party for a newly released title. She still doesn't eat at her desk. Since her office closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, lunch is at her kitchen table, with her three teenagers, every day. "I'm driving them crazy," she said. You can read alone, you can write alone, but publishing is a very social business. Heavily concentrated in New York City, a lot of the work was traditionally done face to face before the outbreak forced most offices to close. So while books are a good match for this moment when people are spending so much time at home, book publishing, in many ways, is not. There is a certain intimacy to the book business. For many authors, turning in a manuscript is like handing over a chunk of their soul, and delicate conversations about revisions are generally best when you can look someone in the eye. Editors and agents build relationships over the course of years, learning each other's tastes in writers, themes and ideas. The meandering conversations that lead there just don't work as well on Zoom. "I don't necessarily need to take Eric to lunch for him to think of me for his next great novel," Ms. Pavlin said of Eric Simonoff, a literary agent she's known for almost 30 years whose clients include Jonathan Lethem and Jhumpa Lahiri. "But for the next generation, it would be harder. To create that bond without going for drinks and spending the time and saying the indiscreet things, all the stuff you need to do early on in your career to build lasting relationships. 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. "Of course, these are business relationships," she said. "But it's a business based on the stories you love." Chelcee Johns, an assistant editor at 37 Ink, an imprint at Simon Schuster, is relatively early in her career. Before everyone began working remotely, she had been making an effort to meet agents for lunch at least once a week to build her connections and get more manuscript submissions coming in. As a young editor, she said, it was also easier for her to take advantage of the expertise around the office when she could pop by senior editors' desks and not have to compete with their child care obligations at home. Now she's trying to network from a distance. "The relationships are key, and I have seen agents be open to a Zoom coffee hangout. That's what I've been trying to do," Ms. Johns said. "I think two months in, people started to realize, 'Oh, we're in this,' and everything picked back up, whether it's submissions from agents or 'OK, let's get these meetings back in the books.' This is our new normal for a lot longer than we thought." Jacey Mitziga, an assistant at the New York literary agency DeFiore and Company, was meeting regularly with agents, editors and other publishing employees around her age, hoping that as they climbed to more senior positions, they would grow together. "We're the next face in publishing, and I'm thinking about who I want to know and starting to build those relationships now," she said. "But I would say that's been a challenge. I feel like it's been on pause." Some aspects of publishing are well suited to remote work. Without her commute from Brooklyn to Midtown Manhattan, Ms. Johns said she finds more time to edit during the workweek by sitting down with manuscripts from roughly 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. Indeed, many editors already worked from home one day a week so they could focus on actual editing, a part of the job that is often subsumed by the meetings and interruptions of office life. Alvina Ling, editor in chief of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, previously spent Mondays through Thursdays at the office, punctuated by business lunches two or three times a week at places like Morrell Wine Bar in Rockefeller Center. "A lot of people from outside think editors read and edit all day, and that's not the case," she said. On Fridays, Ms. Ling would set up at her kitchen table for marathon editing sessions. When she started working from home in mid March, that much wasn't new, but she did have to make some adjustments to her workstation. "I've switched sides of the table on videoconferencing because this one side has a little bit more of an attractive backdrop," she said. "In the first couple of meetings people said, 'Oh, I see your bike!'" The Landscape of the Post Pandemic Return to Office None Delta variant delays. A wave of the contagious Delta variant is causing companies to reconsider when they will require employees to return, and what health requirements should be in place when they do. A generation gap. While workers of all ages have become accustomed to dialing in and skipping the wearying commute, younger ones have grown especially attached to the new way of doing business. This is causing some difficult conversations between managers and newer hires. How to keep offices safe. Handwashing is a simple way to reduce the spread of disease, but employers should be thinking about improved ventilation systems, creative scheduling and making sure their building is ready after months of low use. Return to work anxiety. Remote work brought many challenges, particularly for women of color. But going back will also mean a return to microaggressions, pressure to conform to white standards of professionalism, and high rates of stress and burnout. Like many industries, publishing is trying to figure out what from this forced experiment in remote work makes sense to keep. Can companies be more flexible about their staff working from home? Do they have to keep on renting so much office space? And did that meeting really need to be a meeting, or could it have just been an email? "I miss seeing authors and agents," Ms. Pavlin of Knopf said in an email, "and I still believe there are aspects of sitting together over a meal that foster intimacy and trust in ways that are genuinely essential to how we do business in this particular industry, an industry based on personal passions. But in retrospect that schedule seems unnecessarily overstuffed." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Discussions between the tech companies and government agencies have occurred periodically over the past four years. While some of the companies have made a practice of sharing leads about disinformation campaigns and other election threats, the efforts have been haphazard. The effort has broadened as the November election approaches, and the tech companies and agencies have tried to coordinate more frequently. "In preparation for the upcoming election, we regularly meet to discuss trends with U.S. government agencies tasked with protecting the integrity of the election," a spokesman for the group said in a statement. "For the past several years, we have worked closely to counter information operations across our platforms." The group emerged from meetings that began between the tech companies and government agencies last fall. The companies have since taken action to ward off threats in elections around the world. Facebook, for instance, has monitored election behavior in Brazil, Mexico, Germany and France. Last year, the social network said it was strengthening how it verified which groups and people placed political advertising on its site. At Wednesday's meeting, the group and agencies updated one another on the behavior and illicit activities that the companies were seeing on their platforms. "We discussed preparations for the upcoming conventions and scenario planning related to election results," the group's spokesman said. "We will continue to stay vigilant on these issues and meet regularly ahead of the November election." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The Week in Tech: WhatsApp's Spyware Fight Is at Least Good P.R. Each week, we review the week's news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry. Hi, I'm Jamie Condliffe. Greetings from London. Here's a look at the week's tech news: WhatsApp sued the Israeli cybersurveillance firm NSO Group this week over the way spying technology had been used on its messaging service. NSO Group's tools were used to spy on more than 1,400 people, including journalists and human rights activists, from 20 countries, the lawsuit claims. The privacy intrusions used a WhatsApp call to embed spyware on phones that provided access to their contents, my colleague Nicole Perlroth explained. The target didn't even need to answer the call. WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, now seeks to block NSO Group from its service and has called on lawmakers to ban the use of such cyberweapons, which are largely unregulated. NSO Group disputed the claims and said it would "vigorously fight them." Whether the lawsuit, which accuses NSO Group of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as state level violations, works for WhatsApp remains to be seen. Legal experts I spoke with this week said that with WhatsApp as the plaintiff, and not its users, the company's lawyers will have to find interesting ways of arguing that it was the victim. And so far, it hasn't detailed how it might do that convincingly. "It's a little muddled," said Tor Ekeland, a hacker defense attorney. "It's not that strong of a case based on this version of the complaint." But not all court cases are just about getting a jury verdict. "I think it's a sincere attempt to use the C.F.A.A. in a novel way," said Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. "But I think it's partially a P.R. exercise, in that they're calling out NSO and saying they won't let them use vulnerabilities to attack users." WhatsApp has, after all, marketed itself as a secure form of communication, an image it would no doubt like to keep. And a skeptic might go further and point out that this all happens against a backdrop of WhatsApp's owner, Facebook, dealing with huge P.R. challenges of its own. "It's odd to see this suit now," said Susan Landau, a professor in cyber security and policy at Tufts University. "One has to wonder why exactly Facebook found a lawsuit worth its while." If you've found it painful watching Mark Zuckerberg continually defend Facebook's now weeks old policy of letting politicians post any claims they want even false ones in ads, this week was surely torture. At least 250 of his employees this week told Mr. Zuckerberg that they "strongly object to this policy." Then Facebook seemed to muddle its message by saying the rule wouldn't be extended to Adriel Hampton, who on Monday announced a run for governor of California in protest of the policy, with a plan to post fake ads to prove his point. And on Wednesday, Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter, announced that his social network would ban political ads. In one tweet, he managed to needle at Mr. Zuckerberg's seeming hypocrisy without even mentioning his name. "It's not credible for us to say: 'We're working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad ... well ... they can say whatever they want!'" he wrote. Mr. Zuckerberg was on an earnings call with investors shortly after Mr. Dorsey made that announcement. He doubled down on his reasoning for the policy: the importance of free expression. There is no clear answer here. Mr. Dorsey's decision drew mixed reactions: Democrats celebrated it, while those on the right suggested it would silence conservatives. But there's a nagging familiarity to Mr. Zuckerberg's contrarian tone. We've seen this kind of Facebook is right insistence before: over the first reports of 2016 election meddling and in the immediate wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal last year. It'll be interesting to see if the political ad issues have the same, troubled ending. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Julie Bloom, a deputy editor for national coverage for The Times, discussed the tech she's using. As a deputy editor on the national desk, you oversee a lot of breaking news. What tech tools do you use to help? Hurricanes. Shootings. Wildfires. Elections and earthquakes. I didn't think anything could be as crazy as the fall of 2017 in this country, but 2018 came pretty close. I primarily oversee California and parts of the West, but also handle a lot of our coverage of major breaking news. With my colleagues on the desk and our boss, Marc Lacey, the national editor, we've developed a tool kit of sorts to handle these stories that are fast moving and intense. I feel like each day is a little like being caught in a batter's box without knowing when or where the balls are coming from, and that can be both exhilarating and exhausting. Technology certainly helps. My phone is pretty much everything. It's kind of its own command center, and I can do almost everything on it except edit. For stories, I still need my laptop. Most of the reporters know that if they get a call from me at an odd hour, it usually means they're on their way to something awful, but the reason we can do what we do is that they are total pros. Nobody ever just hangs up and goes back to sleep. In these cases, our job is to help them produce the best journalism possible in difficult situations and make sure they stay safe, too. I'm in awe of the reporters on National who are relentless and often put themselves in danger while covering tough stories with compassion. Unfortunately, we've done enough of them now that we kind of know what to do. Recently, we had a ton of breaking news out of California, where the majority of my reporters are based. The combination of the shooting in Thousand Oaks and the wildfires was a good example of having to be really nimble. One of our California reporters, Jenny Medina, called me in what was the middle of her night to say she and a bunch of F.B.I. agents who were in Thousand Oaks after the shooting had been forced to evacuate their hotel because of the fires. You can never predict what's next, so you just have to be ready to switch gears and work with what you have. In breaking news, I rely on Twitter and Dataminr , which monitors Twitter for newsworthy patterns, to keep track of developments. We're also paying attention to police scanners, local television and all forms of social media and trying to break and confirm our own scoops, too. The trick is being careful and fast at the same time. A lot of bad information gets out in the immediate aftermath, and you never want to get it wrong. In the middle of any given story, reporters and I communicate using text messages, Slack, Signal, Gchat and phone calls. We often spin off a Slack channel just for one event and have an email set up for breaking news that teams of reporters feed to. Those are split up into a bunch of different Google docs that we keep building out simultaneously for, say, a profile or a piece just on weapons or victims. Stories are updated dozens of times. We're also watching search trends and adjusting headlines to make sure we're showing up first. On a big, big story we'll also send out multiple alerts with new developments. Many of your reporters are based on the West Coast, while you are stationed in New York. How do you keep in touch with them and work with them on stories? Even though it's a different time zone, we're still covering the news no matter when and where it happens. My reporters are all early risers, or they're becoming ones. We have regular calls where we brainstorm ideas, but most editing is a constant back and forth over email, Gchat and text, and that seems to work well. We're fortunate because The Times has bureaus all over the place, so sometimes we hand off to Hong Kong or London and the editors there can help keep stories going. Your contributors sometimes report stories from odd situations, like natural disasters. What tools do they use, and how do they get stories to you expediently? For stories like wildfires or hurricanes, reporters often take satellite phones with them to make sure they can keep in contact when cell communication is down. But it doesn't always work. During the recent wildfires, one reporter, Julie Turkewitz, was one of the first to enter the fire zone in Paradise, Calif., with a team of forensic experts searching for remains, and we lost contact with her for a few hours right on deadline. Thankfully, she surfaced just in time. Sometimes good old dictation is the best means of getting scenes and reporting in real time. Reporters are also well versed in filing from their cars, Waffle Houses or the side of the road. We've had a few instances in hurricanes when reporters have had to abandon their rental cars because they were flooding and get to safety and they still managed to file. You are a Los Angeles native. In your view, how has tech changed California? I grew up in the Los Angeles area and went to school at Berkeley and keep close ties to both parts of the state, and I go back a lot to see family. California is an endlessly exciting place for The Times to cover: It's the world's fifth largest economy, at the forefront of all sorts of change, extremely complex and a hotbed of contradictions. I like to think of it more as its own country. Technology is obviously a big part of all of that, and we're a long way from when I was a teenager on AOL Messenger. When you're not at work, what tech product do you use a lot? I'm pretty low tech in my nonwork life or I try to be. When you're responsible for news, it's hard to let go. I've tried everything from burying my phone under my kitchen sink to deleting certain apps on the weekend, but at a certain point you just relent and accept. I think social media is a mostly necessary evil and try to avoid it when I'm not working, but I still haven't quit Instagram. Besides friends and family, I follow a lot of dancers and ballet companies remnants from a former life and museums, chefs and fashion designers. It's good to be reminded that there are people out there creating beautiful things, too. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Al Roker, left, Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb on the set of NBC's "Today" show on Wednesday. For NBC News, Matt Lauer's ignominious exit represents another setback in an already difficult period. Even his co hosts did not know until 4 a.m. on Wednesday, just hours before the official announcement, that Matt Lauer had been fired after a serious allegation of sexual misconduct. That was when the NBC News president, Noah Oppenheim, called two of his "Today" show anchors, Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb. They would be broadcasting live to millions of viewers in three hours and Mr. Lauer would not be joining them. Senior executives at NBC News made the decision to fire Mr. Lauer, the face of "Today" for two decades, late Tuesday night. At 6:49 a.m., 11 minutes before airtime, Andrew Lack, the news division's chairman, sent a memo to the staff. In the note, he referred to "a detailed complaint from a colleague about inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace by Matt Lauer." Mr. Lack added that there was "reason to believe this may not have been an isolated incident." During a morning call with NBC News staff members, Mr. Lack said a reason for Mr. Lauer's firing had to do with Mr. Lauer's behavior toward a subordinate. For NBC News, Mr. Lauer's ignominious exit represents another setback in an already difficult period. And it has plunged morning television, a genre that depends on maintaining a mood of homey continuity, deeper into upheaval. The move occurred a week after one of Mr. Lauer's main competitors, Charlie Rose, the co host of "CBS This Morning," was fired after he faced his own spate of sexual harassment allegations. Mr. Lauer, 59, had a greater impact on "Today" than Mr. Rose had on "CBS This Morning," however. Inside 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Mr. Lauer was a one man fief who wielded more behind the scenes influence than any other on air personality. Much of Mr. Lauer's power stemmed from the bond he had forged with viewers as the longest tenured host in the program's 65 years. The first two hours of "Today" Mr. Lauer's showcase generated 508 million in revenue last year, more than the amount brought in by the other network morning shows, according to Kantar Media. That windfall was 100 million more than the earnings at ABC's "Good Morning America," and nearly three times greater than the revenue from "CBS This Morning." In recent months, the dollar figure was only tracking higher: Through the first half of 2017, revenue for "Today" was on the upswing once again, according to Kantar. In effect, Mr. Lauer helped subsidize a good portion of the network's entire news operation. Although "Good Morning America" draws a bigger overall audience than "Today," the NBC show has beaten its ABC rival in the 25 to 54 year old age bracket important to advertisers for 100 consecutive weeks, according to Nielsen. The termination comes toward the end of a year that was supposed to be a kind of victory lap for the host. In January, to acknowledge his 20 years on the program, "Today" aired a celebratory piece that included snippets of Mr. Lauer's 10 interviews with presidents, nine stints as an Olympics host and reports from more than 60 countries. "He's like your breakfast smoothie, you know?" the former "NBC Nightly News" anchor Tom Brokaw said in the segment. "He's kind of a high energy drink. Easy on the palate." Mr. Lauer lasted so long on "Today" because he gave the impression of being equally at ease with celebrities, world leaders and the throng of sign wielding onlookers who crowded the show's windowed studio in Rockefeller Plaza. All that came to an end when he joined the roster of powerful men in the media and entertainment industries a list that includes the late Fox chairman Roger Ailes, the former Fox News Channel prime time host Bill O'Reilly, the film mogul Harvey Weinstein, the political reporter Mark Halperin and many others who lost their positions as a result of accusations made against them by numerous women, the majority of them co workers or job seekers. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. NBC's news division has weathered a series of contentious episodes dating back to last year's presidential race. After a live forum of the presidential candidates in September hosted by Mr. Lauer, he received poor reviews for his handling of Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump, with critics arguing that he questioned Mrs. Clinton aggressively and interrupted her repeatedly while giving Mr. Trump friendlier treatment. In October, the network was scooped by a competitor, The Washington Post, which posted the "Access Hollywood" audio recording from 2005 that captured Mr. Trump boasting to the correspondent Billy Bush about grabbing women by the genitalia and kissing them. NBC's failure to be first with that story in the last days of a heated campaign seemed like a strange misstep to those who watch the media closely. "Access Hollywood," a syndicated program, is an NBC property, and the network reviewed the audio before it was leaked to The Post. At the time when the recording was made public, Mr. Bush was working as a 9 a.m. co host for "Today." Two days later, NBC suspended him for his role in the lewd, off camera conversation. The network fired him 11 days later. (Mr. Trump apologized on video for his remarks the day after they surfaced.) NBC News once more passed on a story it could have reported first when it asked Ronan Farrow to stop reporting his expose of Mr. Weinstein. Mr. Farrow, who was a contributor for MSNBC until the network decided against renewing his contract two months ago, later published his findings in The New Yorker. Along with articles in The New York Times and other publications, Mr. Farrow's series set off a national conversation about powerful figures and sexual misconduct. "Today" has been described as a boys' club in past years. Earlier this month, a booker who worked at "Today," Matt Zimmerman, was fired after the network received allegations of inappropriate behavior with female colleagues. Colleagues of Ann Curry, who served alongside Mr. Lauer as the co anchor on "Today" from 2011 to 2012, said that she was undermined by male colleagues during the time after she had risen to a prominent role on the show. In an interview with People on Wednesday, Ms. Curry said, "We need to move this revolution forward and make our workplaces safe." (She had no comment for this article.) In October, Ms. Curry was among the many women who posted the metoo hashtag on social media to signal solidarity with the anti sexual harassment movement. Mr. Trump, who starred in "The Apprentice," a long running hit for NBC, has in the past singled out the network's news division in his criticism of American media outlets. On Wednesday, he seized on the developments involving Mr. Lauer. "Wow, Matt Lauer was just fired from NBC for 'inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace,' " Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter at 7:16 a.m. "But when will the top executives at NBC Comcast be fired for putting out so much Fake News." Since his years as a New York socialite, tabloid figure and a reality star, Mr. Trump has frequently offered his opinions of television executives and producers obscure to the average viewer. In his Wednesday tweets, Mr. Trump called for the firing of two senior NBC News executives Mr. Lack and Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC. He also referred to an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory involving Joe Scarborough, host of "Morning Joe" on MSNBC. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
It's not often that any tennis player can manage to upstage Serena Williams when it comes to fashion, but at Wimbledon Roger Federer did just that, provoking the kind of social media meltdown that is usually reserved for a cat suit on the court. The reverberations of his decision to trade his Nike swoosh for a Uniqlo red square reached all the way to the gilded rooms of the Paris couture, where I was when it happened. Ever since, as Mr. Federer has progressed through the tournament with his signature efficient grace, and eyes have adjusted to the new look, much has been written about the money involved ( 300 million, reportedly); the length of the contract (10 years, ditto); and the other potential reasons for the change after more than two decades. (Mr. Federer will be the only big star on the Uniqlo roster, whereas at Nike he was one among many, including Ms. Williams and Rafael Nadal; Uniqlo needs him to boost its international expansion efforts.) But as the grass has settled on center court, I have not been able to stop wondering about the real impact of this decision on the sports/fashion nexus a synergistic relationship fast approaching the status and revenues of the Hollywood/fashion nexus. Because in choosing Uniqlo, Mr. Federer is effectively creating a new paradigm for a post technical sports brand adventure. Could he become the Jessica Simpson of men's wear? Don't laugh. Ms. Simpson is the most successful celebrity with an accessible fashion line. It's not a bad model to follow. Certainly, the length of the Uniqlo contract, which will take Mr. Federer well into his mid 40s, would suggest that he is thinking along such after tennis lines. As would the fact that Uniqlo identifies itself in a somewhat different category than the usual brands that sponsor athletes. The news release even laid it out: "Uniqlo enters the partnership inspired by the past accomplishments of Mr. Federer and his previous partners," it read. But then: "While respectful of new standards they set together, Uniqlo is not a sports company. Uniqlo describes itself as a life company that creates LifeWear." Which may sound like a fancy synonym for "clothes" but reflects ambitions that go far beyond the casual and, indeed, the usual branded sports star collaboration. Let us now pause for a brief history of Mr. Federer's off court style: He was voted GQ's Most Stylish Man of 2016, beating out Tom Hiddleston, Jared Leto and Jaden Smith (among others). He attended the 2017 Met Gala in a Gucci tuxedo complete with a giant rhinestone cobra on the back. This is a man who went to the Oscars in 2016 in a Louis Vuitton tux. Who attended the Chanel show the same year in a suit and turtleneck. Who, in fact, has attended a healthy number of shows, including Marc Jacobs and Alexander McQueen, with his famous BFF, Anna Wintour. A man who wore a gray morning suit complete with vest to the 2017 wedding of Pippa Middleton. Who announced, in an Esquire interview: "I grew up enjoying Prada and Dolce Gabbana. I love Dior and Louis Vuitton. I also have a lot of Tom Ford's suits, so that's kind of how I got into it." Who, in other words, has never made any secret of his affinity for the capital F side of fashion. (Though in insisting he will get his RF logo back from Nike, he clearly has not entirely learned the lessons of the industry, which is littered with designers who lost their names to the big groups that owned them, most notably John Galliano, whose name still belongs to LVMH.) Even Mr. Federer's endorsements outside of Nike have always had a whiff of the haute: Mercedes Benz, Rolex, Moet Chandon, Lindt chocolates and NetJets (among others). So while it is easy to believe he may not see his future in fashion as solely sports related, it is more surprising and interesting to learn he sees it as mass. And despite its flirtation with fashion via collaborations with runway names like Christophe Lemaire, formerly of Hermes, now designer of a namesake line and artistic director of Uniqlo U; Tomas Maier, the recently deposed Bottega Veneta designer who just did a limited edition resort collection for Uniqlo; and Jonathan Anderson, the conceptual Briton who is also creative director of Loewe, and who has done two special collections for Uniqlo. Like Jil Sander, the first prominent designer to engage with the brand, all those designers are notably talented but famous largely among fashion insiders and obsessives. Uniqlo, which is owned by the Japanese giant Fast Retailing (a self explanatory name if there ever was one), has not been a brand that brought bells and whistles to its partnerships, or that inflated the ego by creating noisy marketing campaigns. It is a brand whose mission has been perfecting the basics: the things people wear not because they fantasize about being elite athletes, or because they fantasize about having the lifestyles of elite athletes, but because they fantasize about having functional clothes to wear every day that don't cost a huge amount or call attention to themselves, but still look good. Traditionally, however, being associated with such clothes which bridge age, size and sectors has not been the fantasy of elite athletes. So while he won't hoist the Wimbledon trophy on Sunday (after his upset loss to Kevin Anderson in the quarterfinals on Wednesday), Mr. Federer may be about to change the game once again. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Calls and emails come in at all times of day and night. They no longer concern fun or prestige. Instead they focus on fresh water and solar panels. These were not the inquiries they had grown used to. As the coronavirus pandemic has devastated countries around the world, it has upended nearly every aspect of life for everyone, including for those most insulated by money. Even the niche, ultrarich world of island commerce has been turned on its head. "This has been the busiest two months I've had in 22 years of selling islands," Chris Krolow, the chief executive of Private Islands Inc., said in July. The pace has not slowed since then, he said. The only time he has ever had anywhere near this quantity of inquiries was shortly after the disastrous Fyre Festival on Great Exuma, in the Bahamas, in 2017. Mr. Krolow said he was swamped, for some reason, with questions from "kids hoping to start their own country." "You have your yacht, your jet now you want your island," said John Christie, the president of Christie's International Real Estate, a firm based in the Bahamas. The island brokers knew how to cater to these clients. They sought a place to feel like a "boss from sea to sea," Mr. Christie said, a little kingdom with no authority except their own. Deals could be sweetened by allusions to billionaire or celebrity neighbors. But this new wave of island buyers is less driven by ego than a desire to escape the virus, and brokers, like their clients, are newer to pondering survival. So even after a few harried months, brokers are struggling to meet their clients' new requests, like having agriculture to go with the helicopter landing pad. Despite the high interest driven by the coronavirus crisis, Mr. Krolow's firm, based in Canada, has closed only a few sales. Like other brokers, he says that much of his time has been consumed by setting expectations about what it actually takes to set up a self sufficient island the logistics of paradise are complicated and figuring out how to show properties to potential buyers amid travel restrictions. But renting is not enough for some wealthy people. The pandemic has fundamentally changed the way they're thinking long term about being around other humans. "Before, an island was a toy," said Marcus Gondolo Gordon, the chief executive of Incognito Property based in England. Now clients describe dreams of a "a bloody long boat ride" to ensure that no one will cruise up and infringe on their isolation, he said. They also want access to fresh water, solar panels and a house that is ready to sleep in, tomorrow. Quickly setting up an island for self sufficiency is going to be hard, Mr. Gondolo Gordon has to tell them. Construction on private islands takes far more time than on the mainland or even on typical, nonprivate islands. And brokers cannot guarantee that islands will be safe havens from civil unrest. For example, just this week he looked at a lovely island in the eastern Mediterranean a steal at 7.4 million. But there are some tensions in those waters, which are contested by Turkey and Greece. "You're going to have to read the news," he tells clients. And they'll also have to consider that their shoreline will most likely be affected by climate change. When they cannot handle this, he advises them to rent a superyacht. Several buyers declined, through their brokers, to be interviewed about their experiences shopping for islands. Before the pandemic, most agents would sell islands as a boutique fraction of their broader real estate business. Now that many sellers report seeing a surge in island interest, several brokers said it was taking over more of their business. Still, Mr. Krolow is the rare broker who is all islands, all of the time. He helped sell his first island in the late '90s, almost accidentally, after accepting a seller's offer to put an ad for it on the small website about islands that he had created. Two decades later, Mr. Krolow's site features hundreds of islands. Some cost less than 100,000, like the small, rock strewn strips of land in Canadian lakes. Others reach eight and nine digit sums and offer airstrips and prebuilt resorts in turquoise waters in the Caribbean and the South Pacific. But transporting clients to show them islands is trickier than ever. At one point, Mr. Krolow had a dozen potential buyers ready to see islands in Belize, but the airports were closed. Over the past six months, there had been only a few weeks when you could easily fly in and out of the Caribbean, said Edward de Mallet Morgan, a partner at Knight Frank, a real estate firm in London. It's one thing to buy a house without visiting it first, he said, but "buying an island is a different thing, particularly if you can't even send your professional advisers to review it for you ahead of time." The British Virgin Islands have barred tourists until at least December. And even as flights have resumed to the Bahamas, visitors must commit to installing a phone app and quarantining for two weeks. These measures are too much, some clients tell their brokers. Some potential buyers have found workarounds. One of Mr. Christie's American clients had his boat captain sail his yacht to the Bahamas from Florida. The client took a private flight, and then boarded his yacht, where he "quarantined." His captain then took him to his two potential pandemic escapes. One was Bonefish Cay, an 8.2 million, 13 acre island already set up with five buildings and the capacity to generate its own electricity. But that was not quite right, the client told Mr. Christie. The other option was Foot's Cay, an 8.7 million, 20 acre island featuring a four bedroom main house and a weatherproof concrete bunker housing a generator. This was more intriguing but by the time the client stepped onto its shore, it had already gone to another buyer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene production of "Fiddler on the Roof" will move to the Off Broadway Stage 42 in Midtown, where previews will begin Feb. 11, 2019. The opening is set for Feb. 21. The musical, which follows the story of Tevye and his family in imperial Russia's Pale of Settlement in 1905, will end its run at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan on Dec. 30. Written in English by Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick and Joseph Stein, and based on the work of Sholem Aleichem, the show originally opened on Broadway in 1964. The musical was translated into Yiddish by Shraga Friedman and first performed in Israel in 1965. This production, in Yiddish with English and Russian supertitles, has been extended four times since it began performances July 4, and has been lauded as an unexpected success. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
A simmering pain has boiled over. Protesters are in the streets. Looters are on the prowl. Political leadership is on the sidelines. Black people have reached yet another breaking point, tired of America's unresponsiveness to their pain, tired of its flaying of their flesh, tired of it depriving them of equality. Allies, of all races, have come to the black people's side, shocked at the continuation of the cruelty, embarrassed, in many cases, by their own heretofore inaction. This moment is enormous, packed with potential and possibility, but it must be seized. For now, people are continuing to march, to join in solidarity, to make their voices heard and bodies seen. The rage is real. It is urgent. It is fresh. But, as I often say, rage is an expensive emotion. Try as we might, for noble cause and righteous intent, we are physically and psychologically incapable of maintaining it. It eventually recedes. Surely, there are those activists and freedom fighters who commit the whole of their lives to the fight for justice, those who were doing this work before this moment and will continue after, but most of us are not they. Most people reach a point at which they feel the statement has been made, when life otherwise intrudes and attention is redirected. They walk a mile in someone else's shoes but eventually return to their own. And in this era of pandemics and killer hornets and Donald Trumps, there is a constant supply of new tragedies and outrages. So even as we continue to take to the street, we must also think of what we want to come next. What are responsive actions, specifically, that we want, need and demand? In cases like this, the old saying, "strike while the iron is hot," most definitely applies. Otherwise, the powers that be will simply try to wait you out. In 1968, the Fair Housing Act passed the Senate on the day the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Riots broke out in more than a 100 cities across America. President Lyndon B. Johnson leaned on the House to pass the bill, using the assassination and the riots to "at least get something for our nation." Johnson had sent the bill in two years earlier. John F. Kennedy proposed a civil rights act in 1963 after violent riots that spring. The bill languished in a Senate committee for months before finally making it out, and was mercilessly filibustered on the floor. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, and again, Johnson used that event to help push the bill through. These are not those days: Donald Trump is no Johnson, in fact on this question of civil rights he may be the antithesis of Johnson, and there are no bills in the pipeline on civil rights that rise to the scale of those previous acts or that directly go to the effective amelioration of what set off these protests in the first place. Sunday night, Representative Justin Amash announced that he would introduce legislation that would eliminate "qualified immunity," which shields police and other government officials from being sued when a victim's civil rights are violated. That act, good and necessary, is just beginning its legislative journey and will likely come under Senate consideration, should it pass the House, months from now, closer to the election, when politicians are leery of taking touchy votes. That is, if the Senate takes it up at all. There are hundreds of acts already passed by the House that the Senate has refused to take up, and some of them do speak to the issue of equality, broadly speaking. There is one already under consideration that is important and meaningful: The anti lynching bill, which is stalled in the Senate. Rand Paul acknowledged on Wednesday that he is holding up the legislation because of the way it is written, it might "conflate lesser crimes with lynching." Oh, like putting your knee on a man's neck instead of a noose? One could strongly argue that George Floyd was lynched, in broad daylight, for the world to see, his body just going limp horizontally instead of vertically. The anti lynching bill wouldn't end police brutality or white supremacy. It wouldn't establish equality or eliminate oppression. We need many more bills in many different areas to do that. But the passage of this bill would stand as a point of possibility that the government can be responsive, that things can change and that cruelty will be punished. The House already passed a version of the bill, and the Senate another two years ago(!) and the two versions simply need to be reconciled. It took the House a hundred years to pass an anti lynching bill. This moment feels like a perfect one to finish this work. 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 and Twitter ( NYTopinion), and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Funnily enough, the Museum of Modern Art has never named the long running blockbuster show that fills its permanent collection galleries. So I'll name it: "Modern White Guys: The Greatest Art Story Ever Invented." What the museum does name are the occasional temporary exhibitions that offer an alternative to that story. "Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction" is the latest, and a stimulating alternative it is. Abstraction is a foundational subject for MoMA. The institution was basically conceived on the premise that this is the mode to which all advanced art aspires. But the work in "Making Space," dating from the end of World War II to the beginning of second wave feminism, is not really representative of the museum historically. For one thing, of course, it's all by women. And it's by artists of diverse geographic and ethnic backgrounds. Unsurprisingly, much of what's here is late in arriving at MoMA. Several pieces from Latin America, given by the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, came just last year. In its diversity and in other ways, "Making Space" escapes the old MoMA formula, though in certain other ways it adheres to it. We begin on what looks like familiar ground. The show's first section, "Gestural Abstraction," is dominated by two brushy, wall filling paintings one by Lee Krasner, the other by Joan Mitchell of a kind that has been a staple at the museum since the 1940s. Both artists are big names but, you note, they are not quite big enough to rate fixed placement beside Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline in the permanent Abstract Expressionist galleries. So the show starts in what feels like honorable mention mode. But it doesn't stay there. Instead, it goes for difference and sticks with it, introducing us to artists we may not know or have an institutional context for. We meet one right off the bat, the Lebanese born American painter poet Etel Adnan, whom many New Yorkers and possibly MoMA first learned about only through the New Museum's 2014 survey of art from the so called Arab world. Even more interestingly, the Thomas piece complicates the idea of what "gestural" means. It's done in the artist's usual mosaic like blocks of color, but on narrow strips of paper, joined by staples and masking tape. The result is not painting as a gush of I am here ego or emotion. It's a construction, a sort of funky one. And it is personally expressive, though in ways hard to pin down. A lot about the show is hard to pin down, which is its strength. The famous flowchart of Modern art's evolution plotted by MoMA's first director, Alfred Barr, and still reflected in the show's section labels "Geometric Abstraction," "Eccentric Abstraction," etc. simply doesn't apply here. There's too much genius irregularity aesthetic, personal and political on view to fit any prefab template. It's important to know, for example, that the exquisite, centrifugally spinning collages of the New York artist Anne Ryan (1889 1954) were inspired as much by life as by other art. Each of these sparkling visual salads of fabric, paper and thread reflects the artist's work as a seamstress (she made all her clothes) and a cook (she opened a Greenwich Village restaurant) as much as her interest in Pollock and Kurt Schwitters. (Ryan fans will not want to miss a splendid gallery show dedicated to her at Davis and Langdale Company through April 22.) In a section called "Geometric Abstraction" are several 1950s works from Latin America, though whether they embody Modernist order and balance is a question. The opposite seems to be true in a crazily tilting iron sculpture by the German born Venezuelan artist called Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt). And while the interlocking black and white forms in a 1957 painting by the Brazilian Lygia Clark are in perfect alignment, their angled shapes convey a sense of psychological menace like sharp teeth in a closing jaw that MoMA's 2014 Clark retrospective entirely smoothed over. And what view of Modernist rationality lies behind the work of the Czech artist Bela Kolarova? Working in Prague under a repressive political regime in the 1960s, she created photographs of circular forms that look like drains in a giant sink, and made relief paintings that bristle with potentially finger slicing grids of metal paper fasteners. The grid as a form gets an impressive pre Minimalist workout in 1940s room dividers made of cellophane and horsehair by the incomparable weaver, printmaker, art historian, philosopher, teacher, theorist and life student Anni Albers. Eleanore Mikus melts and molds the grid in a 1964 relief. And Lenore Tawney bends, twists and lightens it in her "Little River Wall Hanging." In the 1950s, Ms. Tawney lived in Lower Manhattan, where she counted Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana and Agnes Martin (who is also in the MoMA show) as neighbors. Living in an old shipping loft, she made the most radical work of any of them: towering open warp fiber pieces that stretched from floor to ceiling and across the loft's wide space. Yet, in 1990, when she finally had a retrospective, it took place not at MoMA, but at the American Craft Museum, which was then across the street. Have things changed much for art by women at MoMA? Ms. Tawney's work is now visible there, but in set aside circumstances. This is the way historical work by women is usually shown there, in occasional roundups, like the one assembled by the painter Elizabeth Murray in 1995, or the larger "Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art" in 2010, or now in "Making Space," organized by the MoMA curators Starr Figura and Sarah Meister, with Hillary Reder, a curatorial assistant. These shows are invariably moving, surprising and adventurous. The present one certainly is. But they have too easily become a new normal, an acceptable way to show women but keep them segregated from the permanent collection galleries. In other words, they are a way to keep MoMA's old and false, but coherent and therefore salable, story of Modernism intact. Things may be changing. The old model may slowly be breaking up as the reality of Modernism as an international phenomenon, pan cultural yet locally distinctive, becomes more widely known. And that knowledge can't help confirming the reality that work by women, feminists or not, was the major inventive force propelling and shaping late 20th century art. It's time to integrate that force into the museum fabric, into the permanent collection galleries that remain MoMA's great popular draw. How to create the new mix? Experiment. Put Anne Ryan next to Schwitters and Pollock and 1950s fabric designs by Vera (Vera Neumann), and see how that shakes out, historically and atmospherically. Introduce a body adjusting chair by the great Italian Brazilian artist designer Lina Bo Bardi to the body obsessed sculpture of Constantin Brancusi. Put Ruth Asawa's porous, basket like wire sculptures up against Richard Serra's fortresslike walls. Let Alma Woodsey Thomas and Mondrian meet and talk about masking tape and useful beauty. Naturally, some people will have a problem with all this. A politically minded eroticist like the Italian artist Carol Rama (1918 2015), who has a fantastic piece called "Spurting Out" in the current MoMA show (and a retrospective at the New Museum coming at the end of the month), scares the pants off traditionalists, because what do you do with her? Where does she fit in? How can you make her make White Guy sense? You can't. Anyway, it's time to give the White Guys a rest. They're looking tired. And the moment is auspicious. MoMA is expanding; the only ethical justification for doing so that I can see is to show art it hasn't shown before, to write a broader, realer story, one that might even, in truth, be great. Construction is still in progress, but plans for the new history can start right now. Go see the work by women in "Making Space," then go to MoMA's permanent collection galleries and start mentally moving in their art. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
CHICAGO Jussie Smollett, upset by his salary and seeking publicity, staged a fake assault a week after writing himself a threatening letter, the Chicago police said Thursday after the "Empire" actor surrendered to face a felony charge of filing a false police report. The Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie T. Johnson, visibly angry at a morning news conference, said Mr. Smollett had taken advantage of the pain and anger of racism, draining resources that could have been used to investigate other crimes for which people were actually suffering. Read more: Jussie Smollett returns to work on "Empire" after his arrest. "I just wish that the families of gun violence in this city got this much attention," he said, referring to the news media. At an afternoon bail hearing, a judge set Mr. Smollett's bond at 100,000. He was released late Thursday afternoon after posting bond and returned to the "Empire" set in Chicago where the show is being shot. In Thursday's proceedings, members of Mr. Smollett's family were in the courtroom with him as the judge, John Fitzgerald Lyke Jr., said that he found the investigators' account of the incident disturbing, particularly the assertion that Mr. Smollett had used a rope around his neck to heighten outrage. "We live in a country where you are presumed innocent," the judge said. "However, if these allegations are true, I find them utterly outrageous. Especially the violent, despicable use of a noose, which conjures such evil in our country." Mr. Smollett, wearing a black puffer jacket, did not react, though occasionally he whispered to his legal team during the 25 minute proceeding. One of the lawyers, Jack Prior, agreed that the police account was outrageous, but he said it also was not true. "He wants nothing more than to clear his name," Mr. Prior said of his client. Later on Thursday, Mr. Smollett's legal team released a statement saying the court system had trampled "the presumption of innocence" in a "law enforcement spectacle that has no place in the American legal system." It said that Mr. Smollett "feels betrayed by a system that apparently wants to skip due process and proceed directly to sentencing." The police say Mr. Smollett hired two brothers to carry out the assault and paid them 3,500. They have a copy of the check used to pay them, the police said. Also recovered, they said, were phone records that showed Mr. Smollett speaking to the brothers an hour before the incident took place, and then an hour after. In a document prepared for the bail hearing, prosecutors said they had video of the brothers at the scene, text messages they shared with Mr. Smollett and their testimony as to how Mr. Smollett had recruited them for the plan. He even had them visit the scene of what investigators contend was the fake attack, a spot near his home, on an earlier night to prepare, prosecutors said. But, the prosecutor's document said, a video camera at the spot that Mr. Smollett had hoped would capture a phony attack was pointed in the wrong direction. Superintendent Johnson declined to indicate why investigators now believe that Mr. Smollett had also played the chief role in mailing himself a threatening letter. The letter, which arrived a week before the reported assault, contained a white powder (crushed ibuprofen) and a sketch of what appeared to be a man being hanged and phrases, including "You will die." The return address said "MAGA," a reference to a slogan from the Trump campaign. Mr. Johnson referred further comment about the letter to the F.B.I., which is investigating that part of the case. The agency declined to comment. The actor, who surrendered to the authorities on Thursday morning, has insisted the attack occurred and that he has not done anything wrong. The felony disorderly conduct charge he faces carries a maximum sentence of three years in prison. Mr. Trump said in a post on Twitter, ". JussieSmollett what about MAGA and the tens of millions of people you insulted with your racist and dangerous comments!? MAGA." Fox, the network that airs "Empire," released a statement Thursday saying it was evaluating the situation and the network's options. "We understand the seriousness of this matter and we respect the legal process," the statement said. Network executives later confirmed that among those options was that he return to the set and resume work as Jamal Lyon. Mr. Smollett's official salary has not been made public, but he reportedly earned between 65,000 and 100,000 an episode on "Empire." It was not immediately apparent whether he has had any clashes with executives at Fox, who, as recently as Wednesday, issued a statement highly supportive of the actor, calling him a "consummate professional." At their news conference and the bail hearing, police and prosecutors unveiled much of what they had uncovered about the reported attack. Mr. Smollett, 36, who is black and openly gay, had told the police that at roughly 2 a.m. on Jan. 29, two masked men attacked him on the 300 block of Lower East North Water Street in downtown Chicago. He said his assailants directed homophobic and racial slurs at him, put a rope around his neck and poured a chemical substance on him. Mr. Smollett said the assault occurred after he went to pick up food. A detective commander, Edward Wodnicki, said at the news conference that investigators interviewed Mr. Smollett at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and found he had scratches on his face, some bruising, but no serious injuries. The investigators approached the case as a possible hate crime, but had difficulty finding evidence to match Mr. Smollett's account. The attack itself was not visible on surveillance cameras. Days into their inquiry, investigators released a surveillance image of two men thought to be potential persons of interest, now known to be the two brothers who have said they helped stage a fake attack. Police said they had spotted the brothers on surveillance footage that showed them taking a cab from the area of the reported assault. Investigators tracked the cab, interviewed the driver, and identified the passengers as Olabinjo and Abimbola Osundairo, associates of Mr. Smollett's. Both had worked as extras on "Empire" and Mr. Smollett later acknowledged that he had paid to have one of them train him for a music video. Prosecutors said one of the brothers had sometimes supplied him with designer drugs. The men flew to Nigeria soon after the incident, the police said, and spoke on the phone with Mr. Smollett while they were away. Upon their return to Chicago on Feb. 13, they were met by investigators and detained for two days. Commander Wodnicki said that a lawyer for the brothers, Gloria Schmidt, came to him and said: "You really need to talk to these guys. I'm going to allow them to give you a video interview with us present and we're going to have you hear their story. They are not offenders. They are victims." The men acknowledged being paid to participate in the reported assault, the investigators said. They said Mr. Smollett had been upset that people he worked with had not taken the threatening letter he received seriously. In addition they said, according to the investigators' account, Mr. Smollett had given them 100 to buy supplies for the attack, including the rope and a red hat that would resemble one worn by Trump supporters. While the brothers seemed to have punched Mr. Smollett, Superintendent Johnson said, "As far as we can tell, the scratches and bruising that you saw in his face was most likely self inflicted." After the interview with the brothers, the detectives released them without charges. Asked about that decision, Superintendent Johnson said: "Mr. Smollett is the one who orchestrated this crime. They became cooperating witnesses." Almost from the beginning there was some skepticism about Mr. Smollett's account. It grew as time progressed, though the police for weeks insisted that the actor was being viewed as a victim. Mr. Smollett acknowledged the suspicions in his first public statement about the incident, on Feb. 1, when he said, through his publicist: "I am working with authorities and have been 100 percent factual and consistent on every level. Despite my frustrations and deep concern with certain inaccuracies and misrepresentations that have been spread, I still believe that justice will be served." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The Tokyo 2020 Olympics: What You Need to Know The Tokyo Olympics were postponed until 2021. Find out more about the 2021 Games. From July, the sporting world will descend on Tokyo for the 2020 Summer Olympics and Paralympic Games. An estimated 600,000 overseas visitors are expected to flock to the Japanese capital and surrounding regions, and the Games as they are every four years will be an endurance test of planning and logistics for organizers and attendees alike. But there are ways for international guests to make the most of their stay in Tokyo and help ensure the smooth operation of the Games. Have tickets? Or considering going? The following guide will help answer your burning questions about the 2020 Olympics and provide insider hints and tricks to have a memorable time in Japan. When are the Games? Where are the venues? The 2020 Olympics will officially kick off with the opening ceremony in Tokyo on July 24, with preliminary softball and soccer matches starting on July 22, and run through August 9. Following a two week breather, the Paralympics will begin August 25 and conclude September 6. The Games will be held across nine prefectures, with the majority taking place in two areas of Tokyo: the Heritage Zone, using revamped buildings from the 1964 Olympics, and Tokyo Bay Zone, designed to serve as a "model for innovative urban development." Venues outside of Tokyo include the Sapporo Dome on the northern island of Hokkaido (hosting soccer) and the Fukushima Azuma Baseball Stadium in Fukushima. Five new sports will be added to the Olympic lineup, which now stands at 33: Skateboarding, "sports climbing," surfing and, appropriately for Japan, baseball and softball, and karate. Existing sports, such as canoeing, kayaking, boxing and fencing, will also see a rebalancing with additional events added, primarily with an eye toward increased gender equality. How can I get tickets to the Olympics? Is it too late? The first round of Tokyo Olympics ticketing was limited by lottery system to residents of Japan and closed on May 28. A subsequent "relief measure" lottery was held in August. Paralympic tickets were also awarded on a lottery basis, and closed on September 9. Thirty percent of an estimated 7.8 million have been set aside for overseas visitors, sold by "Authorized Ticket Resellers." For those in the United States, ticket sales will be handled by CoSport and went on sale in July. As of this writing, all available tickets have been sold, although subsequent rounds of ticketing are expected to take place on an ongoing basis before the start of the Games. The next round in 2020 is scheduled for Feb. 6. The Tokyo Olympics organizing committee will also host an online resale site beginning in the spring, with ticket prices capped at the original face value. Available for both foreign visitors and Japanese residents, the official resale service may provide relief for those shut out of the initial rounds of ticketing. What happens if I can't secure any tickets at all? Lack of tickets does not necessarily mean a lack of Olympics fun in and around Tokyo. The organizing committee has approved 30 "Live Site" venues across Japan for non ticketholders, including in areas affected by the Tohoku and Kumamoto earthquakes. These sites will feature live televised sports broadcasts, cultural events and among other programs, attendees will have the chance to try out various Olympic and Paralympic sports. Is it true that I won't be allowed to post photos of events to social media? Shortly after the first round of tickets went on sale in Japan, controversy arose over certain aspects of the terms and conditions attached to the purchase of tickets, namely, the transfer of intellectual property rights of photos taken by attendees at Olympic events to the organizing committee. Would this mean then that the Committee notorious for protecting its I.P. rights would then crack down on social media photos? Organizers have clarified that, while the Committee is in fact claiming copyright over photos taken by ticketholders, it will not prevent those photos from being posted to social media. Only commercial reproduction of photos will be disallowed. Controversially, however, audio and video clips taken by spectators are not permitted to be posted on social media. Organizers are expected to be vigilant in filing takedown notices with social media networks. What is the best way to access the venues each day? Unsurprisingly, Tokyo's extensive public transit system will be key in shuttling attendees to and from venues each day. Even with companies embracing remote work during the Games, to help ease Tokyo's famously packed trains, the influx of tourists is nonetheless expected to tax the system. Regardless, using Tokyo's rail and subway networks is everyone's best bet for reaching the venues. For a cheery twist, JR East and Pasmo (Tokyo Metro) in September began offering special contactless fare cards featuring colorful designs and characters for overseas guests. These cards can also be used for quick, cashless payment at retailers and restaurants in and around rail stations. Tokyo's train and metro schedules look complicated. Help! Fortunately, helpful tools are available to assist navigating the byzantine scheduling and routing of Tokyo's trains. Hyperdia has long been the go to website for expats in Japan for searching out train routes simply enter the originating and destination stations, desired departure or arrival time and Hyperdia will provide up to 10 routes, which can be ranked by trip length, number of transfers required, or price. Above all, it is important to trust the information provided. Hopping on an earlier local train can add significant time to one's commute, while taking a rapid train may mean passing through your desired station without stopping. For those looking to keep things simple, Tokyo's famed Yamanote Line with its famous green livery is a circular commuter line that hits all of the major stations in Tokyo. Whether one has Shibuya dreams or a craving for crepes in Harajuku, the Yamanote Line is an easy though not necessarily the fastest option to travel between major stations in the city. Again, I can't get over the price of the hotels! Good thing I can cram 10 people into a room, right? Yes and no, but mostly no. Unsurprisingly, hotels in and around Tokyo will feature some eye popping prices. Already, "capsule" hotels that normally run around 20 per night are advertising prices exceeding 100. There is certainly temptation to split the cost of a single room across multiple guests, but it may not work. First, Japan's notoriously small (by Western standards) hotel rooms would be extremely cramped quarters for three or four people. The real problem, however, comes with Japanese law and hotel practices. Unlike many destinations, Japanese hotels charge on a per person, per night rate, not simply by the room. If you reserve a double room for one adult, but show up to check in with a travel companion, be prepared to pay up for the additional guest. Further, to comply with safety regulations, hotel rooms are limited by type in the number of guests they may have a room rated as "single" occupancy can only have a single adult, and so on. Hotels particularly those three stars and below, and especially spartan "business" hotels are sticklers for these rules and practice strict access control some chains require guests to leave their key at the front desk when leaving the property, and most have their front desks facing the entrance and elevators to monitor those entering. While high end Western hotel properties are less fastidious about access control, visitors to Japan should be aware of occupancy restrictions at most hotels in the country. What are my other options? After a rocky regulatory start, Airbnb stays in Japan have taken off to help meet the country's current tourism boom. Bookings are going fast, however, and those that remain are priced at a premium. To combat the anticipated hotel room shortfall, cruise ships are also expected to be pressed into service to serve as floating hotels. I wasn't able to get tickets on a few days. What else should I do? Luckily, the Games are occurring during the high season for Japanese festivals and other sporting events, leaving no shortage of alternatives for visitors to the capital. For those looking for an authentic taste of Japan, a summer "matsuri" festival is a great bet. Tokyo's famed Sumida fireworks display at the end of July is normally a crowded affair, but for a roomier experience, head to Takasaki Fireworks Matsuri in nearby Gunma prefecture. Held on the first Saturday in August, the festival features elaborate dashi floats, live music and is capped off with an hour long fireworks display, one of the largest in the region. As an added benefit, the festival has wide open fields from which the fireworks display can be viewed. Simply put down a tarp to reserve a viewing spot, walk back to the city center for the festivities and return later to enjoy the show. For the sports minded, the famed national high school Koushien baseball tournament also runs from early to late August. With a ticket costing 8 to 20 and granting access to three to four games daily, fans can enjoy high quality baseball in a packed stadium with the energy of a professional game. 52 PLACES AND MUCH, MUCH MORE Discover the best places to go in 2020, and find more Travel coverage by following us at nytimestravel on Instagram and Twitter. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: Each week you'll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to photos from all over the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Many thanks to David Masello for sharing his warm reflections on the editor , who died on Tuesday. In this moment when harsh words and even harsher policies are the order of the day, it is important to remember how to read a newspaper (and to read it every day), to thank people for acts of kindness, and, as an editor, to work hard to preserve an author's voice. Keeping a stash of postcards in your desk drawer, encouraging young people: such simple but crucial advice. With this article, Ms. Mayhew has become a mentor to us all. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Bill? Bill Murray? I thought that was you! There he was in the audience at the August Wilson Theater in New York City on Tuesday night, taking in a performance of "Groundhog Day," the Broadway musical based on the 1993 movie that he starred in. It was Mr. Murray's first time seeing the musical Watch out for that first step, it's a doozy! and he was accompanied by his brother, Brian Doyle Murray, who played Buster in the film, as well as Danny Rubin, a co writer of the screenplay for the movie and the writer of the book for the musical. "Groundhog Day" a story about a self absorbed weatherman who keeps repeating the same day over and over again in Punxsutawney, Pa. is one of the most critically acclaimed comedies in history and one of Mr. Murray's best works. When he arrived, he went to the bar to get a glass of water. The bartender, Janet Polanco, offered him a bottle but Mr. Murray wanted a glass and gave a 50 tip. Then he whispered, "This is too much for a glass of water." Mr. Murray walked to his seat mostly unnoticed. One audience member told him he looked "taller and thinner." Murray responded, "Yeah, I've been working out." Minutes later, Mr. Murray got a brief round of applause from the crowd. Once the show started, he immediately started bobbing his head to the music. During a scene in which Ned Ryerson, a pushy insurance salesman, meets Phil Connors, the lead of the show (played by Andy Karl in the musical), Mr. Murray pumped his fist. At intermission, Mr. Murray headed back to the bar to get a beer. On his way, he decided to climb over a woman in a mostly empty row, rather than walk up the aisle. "He said, 'Excuse me, don't move,'" said Toby Arbel, who came in from New Jersey to see the show. "'I'll walk over you,' and then he did and got stuck because my bag was here. And he said, 'You have a suitcase with you.'" During the second act, he could be heard yelling, "Wow!" after a performance of "Playing Nancy," sung by Rebecca Faulkenberry. By the time the cast was bowing on stage, Mr. Murray was in tears. He waited a minute to compose himself before joining the rest of the audience to cheer the cast. Afterward, Mr. Murray took more pictures with fans. When Zoey Jacobs, 11, approached him on crutches, Mr. Murray told her: "Don't sell short on the rehab. Otherwise, you'll limp and gimp for a long time." Then Mr. Murray, Mr. Doyle Murray and Mr. Rubin went backstage to greet the cast and take pictures. Mr. Murray was clearly still moved by the show, telling the conductor, David Holcenberg, "It really killed me." To Sean Montgomery, who played the sheriff, he said: "It was really beautiful. You got me. You really got me." Eventually, he addressed the whole cast. "As actors, I can't respect enough how disciplined you are and how serving you are of the process," Mr. Murray said. "There's nothing worse than seeing someone that's out for themselves. And you are all in it for each other." He did have some suggestions, though. "When you ever feel you don't know what to do, sing to the person next to you," Mr. Murray said. "And that person will sing to the person next to that person, and then you will have this force that's even stronger." In an interview afterward, Mr. Murray said it was the message behind the story brought to life on stage that made him weep. "The idea that ..." Mr. Murray trailed off as he paused to collect his thoughts. "The idea that we just have to try again. We just have to try again. It's such a beautiful, powerful idea." The movie was considered by many critics to be a comic masterpiece. The New York Times critic Janet Maslin wrote that it showed Mr. Murray in "top form," as he smoothly alternated between nihilism and the traditional physical comedy that the script required. It became an oft quoted classic and added another strong showing to the partnership of Mr. Murray and Harold Ramis, the film's director. The men had previously collaborated on "Meatballs" (1979), "Caddyshack" (1980) and "Ghostbusters" (1984). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Martha Graham dancers rehearse Bobbi Jene Smith and Maxine Doyle's new work, "Deo," inspired by the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Female power is something that Martha Graham radiated. This revolutionary modern dance choreographer, who once said that the only sin a person could have was mediocrity, created a repertory that celebrates women in all their grief and triumph. This season, the Martha Graham Dance Company explores female empowerment with the start of its two year EVE Project, commemorating the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment that gave women the power to vote. Included are two new works: Pam Tanowitz's "Untitled (Souvenir)," in which she merges Graham's steps with her own; and "Deo," a collaboration by Maxine Doyle and Bobbi Jene Smith. Inspired by the myth of Demeter and Persephone, "Deo" explores issues surrounding women and mortality with, aptly, an all female cast. Janet Eilber, the company's artistic director, said it was important for the works to be different in approach. She chose her choreographers accordingly: drama on one side (Ms. Doyle and Ms. Smith) and pure movement on the other (Ms. Tanowitz). Ms. Doyle, the associate director and choreographer of the British theater company Punchdrunk brought in Ms. Smith; they met when Ms. Smith performed in the immersive "Sleep No More," one of Punchdrunk's best known productions. Before that, Ms. Smith was a member of Batsheva Dance Company where she trained in Gaga, the sensation based dance language created by the choreographer Ohad Naharin. While Ms. Smith veers toward luscious, deeply felt movement, Ms. Tanowitz loves to invent steps and to mine dance history for inspiration. She's done both for her premiere, in which she regards Graham's steps and set pieces a few will decorate the stage, but subtly so as souvenirs, or mementos, from her body of work. Specifically, she's used movement from "The Legend of Judith" (1967), which she said she related to on a visceral level; and "Dark Meadow" (1946), one of her favorite Graham works. "I wanted the balance of Martha's abstraction and her modernism," Ms. Eilber said. "Pam's into puzzle solving, lines. It was also the fact that she was really interested in the idea of borrowing Graham material and transforming it." Ms. Doyle and Ms. Smith were all about delving into the dancers' inherent theatricality. Ms. Tanowitz had a different mission: "How do we keep the physicality," she said, "but take away the overlay of the drama?" In the end, what the works have in common is how they expose something singular: The dancers as individuals. What follows are edited excerpts from recent interviews with the choreographers about their odysseys into the world of Graham. GRAHAM, PAM, GRAHAM, PAM I spliced together movement. I would take one step from Graham's "The Legend of Judith" and one step from Pam, and sew them together. That became a whole new phrase. In rehearsals, the dancers would be like, "Graham, Pam, Graham, Pam." I also took the male solo from "Dark Meadow" and made it a male trio. Lorenzo Pagano's doing the legs and the torso, Lloyd Mayor is doing the arms and then I have Lloyd Knight reversing it all. A DANCE NERD'S DREAM COME TRUE I watched archival videos and that's where "The Legend of Judith" came in. I'm a dance nerd so it's all really exciting to me. The dancers learned all the movement before I walked in for the first rehearsal. It was like Christmas morning: I had all of these steps to choose from. But it's scary. I have to say that. I try to forget about it and honor it, but I feel the weight of history on me. SHE COULDN'T HELP HERSELF I planned on using existing Graham material that wasn't necessarily well known, but I watched a rehearsal of "Dark Meadow," which is a very famous piece I'm obsessed with. It starts out in silence it's basically step touch, step touch and to me it's about group will and strong women. I couldn't stop thinking about it so I used it. I broke my own rule. NO DRAMA QUEENS What I'm asking them to do to take away the drama is very challenging. They don't need to look out and to be presentational. I tell them to take their focus in. It's strong and what we realized is that it's created a different kind of drama: It's about being present in the physicality and dancing with people onstage. THE OUTCOME This showed me that my movement isn't so different from Graham's. Laughs It has told me that dance is dance and steps are steps. Aside from the obvious of the Graham architecture of the hands or the highly stylized head, the actual steps are steps that we all use. Lloyd Knight: "You come in as you, and that's a great feeling. You are performing, but it's in a very stripped down way. I loved every minute of it. The drama isn't there, but in a weird way it brings up feelings: You're just coming out as yourself." Bobbi Jene Smith Gaga and the Graham movement are very different, but there's something impulsively animal about the connection to pleasure and strength and power and imagination, and that magical combination of content and action and physicality. They both create that. Doyle The myth of Demeter and Persephone really spoke to me as a woman, it spoke to me as a mother and it spoke to me as a daughter. I was thinking about how the work would sit within the rep, and how it could honor, in some way, the themes and concerns and ideas of Graham as a creator. Rather than telling the story or the narrative of Demeter, we decided to look more at the themes of the story, which are separation, rage and grief. Doyle I worked with a process that is about using dramatic tone and physical tensions in the body to tell stories and express emotion. There's an inherent sensuality and connection to their vulnerability and their madness, and the distance between those two things, that I'm really drawn to. Smith I don't think you could ever ask them, "What are you thinking about in this moment?" and they'd say, "Oh nothing, I don't know yet. I'm working on it." They're coming with a whole vessel of memories and stories in their bodies. Xin Ying: "Bobbi talks about how as a woman you're almost like a mountain: You have your leg muscles, and you want to feel the power of them. You don't think, oh my legs are too big. Laughs Suddenly I feel, Oh, I'm beautiful just the way I am." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
At first, Patricia Roman and William Soto expected to buy a home in southern Brooklyn. That's where, for 1,500 a month, they rented a two bedroom apartment across from Coney Island Hospital, where both work. "I was never late," Mr. Soto said. Nor was Ms. Roman. "It was 210 footsteps from my bedroom to my office," she said. Their day to day lives involved much waiting. In the morning, Ms. Roman, who like her husband is in her mid 40s, awakened early to be first in the shower in their one bathroom. Their teenage son was next and, by the time Mr. Soto got there, the water was tepid. They also waited at the laundromat, to which they had to drive. As for parking, the street spots were often taken by hospital personnel. So, to nab a spot in the evening, they shot for either 7:30 p.m. or midnight, when the shifts changed. About a year and a half ago, with interest rates low, the couple became eager to buy. "My peers, people I went to high school with, my friends and family, were already homeowners," said Ms. Roman, who is director of patient relations at the hospital. They wanted a two bedroom two bathroom place, preferably with a washer dryer and a parking spot. Their top price was 450,000. Their inclination was to live near the hospital on Ocean Parkway, where some buildings have water views. They went to see a sunny three bedroom two bath co op on the top floor of 2650 Ocean Parkway. The price was 399,000, with monthly maintenance in the mid 1,400s. But the layout wasn't quite right. The building had a laundry room and parking, although there was a waiting list for that. The swimming pool seemed unnecessary. "I am going to enjoy a pool only on the weekends eight weeks out of the year," Ms. Roman said. They moved on. The apartment later sold for 317,000. The couple decided to look for a house on Staten Island, where they had once lived and where Ms. Roman's sister owned a house. They fell for an adorable three bedroom saltbox with one bath and a beautiful yard on Fingerboard Road, asking price 359,000. Inside, "the house looked like you stepped into 1923," Mr. Soto said. "Every light bulb had a chain where you could click it on and off." They thought about removing walls and adding a bathroom. " The bathroom was in the slopey side of the house and I am 6 2," Mr. Soto said, "so I would have to be tilting to take a shower." Renovations would be costly, and Mr. Soto joked that he was going to need the help of Sabrina Soto, the host of "The High/Low Project" on Home and Garden Television. "We always think about Sabrina Soto coming in and redoing our life," Ms. Roman said. "My husband, in his head, thinks he is related to her." Then they thought about what it takes to maintain a house and a yard. "My sister had that and we knew the hardship," Ms. Roman said. "A house looks really appealing. I grew up in the projects, and it seems really American dreamlike. But I started to think, what am I getting into?" The deal breaker was the shared driveway. "I didn't want to knock on the neighbor's door every time I had to come out or go in," Ms. Roman said. "I didn't want to live like that." Her sister had mentioned the Pointe, a new condominium building on Bay Street, near the ferry terminal. So they stopped by an apartment on the top floor with two bathrooms, a washer dryer, the kind of open kitchen they wanted and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in the distance. The couple's immediate reaction, Mr. Soto said, was "yeah, this is it." He was reminded of the TLC show, "Say Yes to the Dress." "It boggles my mind that these women see 400 dresses and then say yes," he said, explaining that it can be the same way with a house: "You walk in and you just know." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
LOS ANGELES A significant expansion of the "Star Wars" universe. Tom Hanks as Geppetto in a live action "Pinocchio," and Yara Shahidi as Tinker Bell in a live action "Peter Pan Wendy." Footage from new Marvel projects. A star studded prequel to "The Lion King." On Thursday, as part of a four hour investor presentation focused on streaming, the Walt Disney Company will discuss a Death Star size trove of coming content all of the above and more, said three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private planning. Some big budget Disney movies will continue to have exclusive runs in theaters. (The "Lion King" project, directed by Barry Jenkins and focused on Mufasa's back story, is a good bet.) Others will debut online. (That is where "Pinocchio" is headed.) All will ultimately serve one goal, which is strengthening Disney , the company's flagship streaming service. At a time when streaming is becoming cuttingly competitive and some of Disney's traditional businesses are struggling Disney hopes to use the virtual event to dazzle Wall Street: Here is a 97 year old company making a jump to direct to consumer hyperspace. Last month, Bob Chapek, Disney's chief executive, announced that Disney had reached 74 million subscribers worldwide after only 11 months in operation. (Netflix took seven years to reach that threshold, and now has 195 million customers worldwide.) Disney has since rolled out in Latin America and grown rapidly in India, analysts say, leading some to estimate that Disney may reveal that the service is within reach of 100 million subscribers. Disney is also expected to give growth updates on its other streaming platforms, including ESPN , Hulu and a new general entertainment offering, Star, which will debut overseas in the coming months. "The question everyone has now is where to from here?" Michael Nathanson, a founder of the MoffettNathanson media research firm, said in a phone interview. "We expect to see a lot more spending on content to turn Disney into more of an always on service, which will increase pricing power." Subscriptions to Disney cost 7 a month. The least expensive Netflix plan is 9 a month, and HBO Max, a fledgling WarnerMedia service, costs 15. Disney was trading at about 155 on Wednesday, near an all time high, even though several of its theme park resorts (which are enormous cash generators) remain closed because of the pandemic. The company laid off 30,000 workers. Hollywood is keenly interested in the investor presentation because Disney executives have said they will discuss an evolving approach to movie distribution. The coronavirus has forced Disney and other studios to push back the releases of more than a dozen major films and reroute others to streaming services. In September, Disney debuted "Mulan" on Disney as part of a "premium access" experiment, charging subscribers 30 for indefinite access. "Soul," the latest Pixar film, will arrive on Disney on Christmas Day for no additional cost. Some titles on Disney's theatrical slate will move to Disney at no extra cost. Expect "Peter Pan Wendy," like "Soul" and "Pinocchio," to debut in this manner. Other movies will take the "Mulan" route and arrive on Disney as premium offerings. "We've got something here in terms of the premier access strategy," Mr. Chapek told analysts on a recent conference call. "There's going to be a role for it strategically with our portfolio of offerings." And some of Disney's biggest movies will continue to receive exclusive runs in theaters before arriving on the company's streaming services. For instance, contrary to widespread speculation, "Black Widow," a much anticipated Marvel spectacle, will remain on Disney's theatrical release calendar for May 7, the people with knowledge of the presentation said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
OAKLAND, Calif. President Trump aimed his Twitter feed on Tuesday toward a 75 year old man who had been shoved to the sidewalk and badly injured by the police in Buffalo. Mr. Trump speculated that the man, Martin Gugino, could be a provocateur affiliated with an anti fascist movement. The president also wondered if the man had been trying to sabotage police equipment, or fell intentionally to generate outcry over police brutality. The president's tweet, which was not factual, provoked instant outrage. Many users wondered why Twitter, which last month said it had added labels to a handful of Mr. Trump's tweets because they contained election misinformation and glorified violence, did not intervene. The simple answer: The tweet did not violate the company's rules, a spokesman said. What Mr. Trump posted about Mr. Gugino, a peace activist who was still in the hospital recovering from a serious head wound, did not cross into narrow areas of content that the company has staked out for closer scrutiny. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
GUCCI MANE at Avant Gardner (Nov. 16, 8 p.m.). There was a moment when it seemed like this hip hop artist, born Radric Davis, might fade from his central position in Atlanta's music scene; legal troubles and struggles with addiction initially thwarted his mainstream success, even as he was recognized by critics as one of trap music's foremost practitioners. Since his release from prison in 2016, though, Gucci Mane has seen unprecedented success as those artists whom he influenced Migos, Drake and Rae Sremmurd, among others pushed the spotlight his way. Healthy and free, the rapper has never sounded better. 347 987 3146, avant gardner.com PIXIES at Brooklyn Steel (Nov. 18 20, 8 p.m.). This influential alt rock band is celebrating the 30th anniversary of their first full length album, "Surfer Rosa," with a tour and box set that also features their first release, 1987's "Come On Pilgrim." Their willingness to look backward is a boon for nostalgic fans: Pixies will perform both records in their entirety during a three night run in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Sunday's show is sold out, but tickets are available through resellers. 888 929 7849, bowerypresents.com RANDY ROGERS BAND at Gramercy Theater (Nov. 17, 8 p.m.). Rogers, a gruff crooner, and his five piece band (which includes Todd Stewart, billed as a "utility player") are far from hip. They earned their stripes on the road in their native Texas, performing country music based in the genre's rich outlaw tradition. Eighteen years later, consistency, not innovation, remains the band's core value in Rogers's words, "the band that plays on the record is the band that you go see." Collaborations with artists like Willie Nelson, Alison Krauss and Jerry Jeff Walker show how respected the band is within the country world, but the guarantee of good music and a good time is what keeps fans coming back. 212 614 6932, thegramercytheatre.com ST. VINCENT at BAM Harvey Theater (Nov. 20, 8:30 p.m.). Annie Clark, the guitarist, singer, bandleader and contemporary rock visionary also known as St. Vincent, has spent the past decade upping the musical ante with each passing record, adding more synths, drum machines and pop gloss to what was initially a fairly stripped down sound. This show, and the album she's promoting with it, are designed to temper that progression: At BAM's 837 seat theater, she will perform accompanied only by the pianist Thomas Bartlett, following up the just released acoustic version of her 2017 album "Masseduction." The intimate concert is sold out, but tickets are available through the resale market, and there will be a standby line on the night of the show. 718 636 4100, bam.org JACK WHITE at Kings Theater (Nov. 16 17, 8 p.m.). A singular rocker and titan of his own musical empire, Third Man Records, White has been touring almost constantly since the March release of his third solo album, "Boarding House Reach"; with these two nights in Brooklyn, though, White is nearing the end of his marathon year. Despite having new music to promote, the prolific bandleader typically performs songs he first made famous while in the White Stripes, the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather. Unfortunately, you won't be able to record White performing these modern day classics since security will ask you to reliquinish your phone before entering the theater. 718 856 5464, kingstheatre.com YOUNG FATHERS at Elsewhere (Nov. 20 21, 8 p.m.). This Scottish trio takes pride in being tough to pin down, but you could say their sound is a global, unorthodox, experimental vision of pop that places hip hop at the forefront. For those seeking something to dance to, there are plenty of grooves, but they're shrouded in pleasingly messy, rough hewed mixes of synths and heavily distorted vocal lines. Politics figure front and center in the lyrics, but the group takes pains not to be didactic. "I think everybody has a dark side to them," Alloysious Massaquoi, a band member, told the Guardian, adding, "We're all complicit in it. It's me looking at myself too." elsewherebrooklyn.com NATALIE WEINER DIZZY GILLESPIE ALL STARS at the Blue Note (Nov. 20 25, 8 and 10:30 p.m.). This annual engagement celebrates the birthday of Dizzy Gillespie, the co inventor of bebop and a champion of Latin jazz, who died in 1993. The All Stars' ever evolving lineup now stands at nine and boasts some of today's finest straight ahead talent (the trumpeters Terell Stafford and Freddie Hendrix, the drummer Willie Jones III), including a few who played with Gillespie himself (the pianist Cyrus Chestnut and the bassist John Lee). This year's proceedings may have an elegiac air: The trumpeter Roy Hargrove, a longtime member of the group, died earlier this month at 49. 212 475 8592, bluenote.net 'I NEVER LEFT AND NOW I'M BACK': A CONCERT OF THE MUSIC OF ROSWELL RUDD at Murmrr Theater (Nov. 17, 8 p.m.). Rudd, a trombonist, always traced a winding path, and he took on fresh inspiration everywhere he went. He played a role in the jazz avant garde's first generation in the 1960s, then returned from a decades long hibernation in the early 2000s with a broad, globally sourced approach. Rudd died last year at 82, and this concert is a celebration of his life, featuring performances from roughly a dozen ensembles led by his friends. The bands include Sexmob, playing music from Rudd's days with the New York Art Quartet, and the pianist Jamie Saft's trio. murmrr.com ELLIS MARSALIS QUARTET at Dizzy's Club Coca Cola (through Nov. 18, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). Jazz at Lincoln Center is the house that Wynton Marsalis built so, by extension, it is the domain of Ellis Marsalis. This New Orleanian postbop pianist trained a generation of young jazz talent including his son Wynton, the most influential improvising musician of his generation and inspired them to fight for jazz as a proud, coherent tradition. Ellis Marsalis and his four musician sons have been collectively named National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters, and this week he spends four nights at Dizzy's celebrating his 84th birthday with the saxophonist Derek Douget, the trumpeter Ashlin Parker, the bassist Jason Stewart and the drummer Gerald Watkins. 212 258 9595, jazz.org/dizzys MARCUS ROBERTS OCTET at Village Vanguard (through Nov. 18, 8:30 and 10:30 p.m.). It's been 15 years since Roberts an erudite pianist with variegated harmonic texture last played the Vanguard. It's been almost twice as long since he recorded "Deep in the Shed," the breakout album that established him as a Marsalisite Young Lion to be reckoned with. This weekend at the Vanguard, Roberts leads an eight piece band playing the entirety of "Deep in the Shed" for the first set each night, followed by music from across his catalog for the second. 212 255 4037, villagevanguard.com TAREK YAMANI TRIO at City College Center for the Arts (Nov. 16, 7:30 p.m.). Born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, and now based in Harlem, Yamani plays jazz piano with more than a hint of Arab influence. Minor keys and Middle Eastern harmonic modes are everywhere; the rhythms move at a steady clop. But a loose muscle swing softens the metric modes, and the result is sometimes like a new kind of rumba. Anyway, it feels distinctly at home in New York. Yamani calls this music Afro Tarab, acknowledging jazz's African roots and the Arab concept of "tarab," or emotional transcendence through music. At Aaron Davis Hall he will play a mix of originals, jazz standards and century old Arab songs, joined by the bassist Sam Minaie and the drummer John Davis. 212 650 6900, citycollegecenterforthearts.org GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Attention, procrastinators: It's still not too late to book a spring break trip. A combination of lower airfares, a strong dollar and a late Easter holiday means it's still possible to nab a getaway for less. With Easter falling late this year, on Sunday, April 16, versus late March last year, fewer college students and families with school age children are vying for the same weeks, creating less of a booking crunch and better deals spread throughout the season. Below, some of the best bets for last minute bookers. Even though it is peak season, it's not hard to find reasonable hotel rates, with choices ranging from all inclusive mega resorts to stylish boutique hotels. And plenty of nonstop flights from the East Coast make Puerto Rico easy to get to, while a healthy amount of competition keeps fares relatively low. Flights to San Juan are down 11 percent in March and April compared with the same period last year, according to Kayak.com. Every March, the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival (this year, March 10 to 19) draws an affluent crowd of techies, celebrity artists and their fans to this popular city for music, movies and conferences. The time to visit is when they all go home. Hotel rates drop precipitously, while the average daytime temperatures remain in the 60s and 70s. In a recent search on Expedia.com, the lowest rate for a four star hotel the week of SXSW was 834 a night at the Hyatt Regency Austin. A week later the same hotel was available for 299 a night. You can eat well and cheaply at the myriad food trucks found in every nook of the city that serve everything from cupcakes to Korean barbecue. Take in the bluebonnets and other spring wildflowers at Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, kayak Lady Bird Lake in downtown Austin or visit the rodeo (March 11 to 25), where aspiring young cowgirls and cowboys ride sheep in the mutton bustin' competition, among other classic rodeo games. For a thrill at dusk, head to the Congress Avenue Bridge to witness hundreds of thousands of bats emerge from underneath as they set off on their nightly bug hunt. While spring is a prime time to visit this desert town, with daytime temperatures in the mid 80s and a retro pool party scene, hotels and rentals are plentiful. In the last year, roughly a dozen hotels have opened up or undergone face lifts, including the 32 room Arrive Hotel, with a pool, hot tub, bocce court and ice cream parlor/gift shop, and rates from 209 a night (based on a recent search). And on Feb. 15, an ordinance designed to limit the number of vacation rentals was overturned, making way for a surge in listings. Villaway.com, a luxury rental site, will be adding more than 50 homes in the area to its site over the next few weeks. There are "amazing deals in Palm Springs," said Joe Liebke, the chief executive of Villaway, noting that a five bedroom villa with a guesthouse, pool and private disco perched on a bluff is available for 1,200 a night in March, down from 2,000. In March, he said, visitors will beat the "madness of crowds" that arrive for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in mid April. . Families will appreciate the sunshine, beautiful beaches and kid oriented attractions, including the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park, SeaWorld San Diego and Legoland California. Four hotels have opened in or near downtown in the last year, including the Pendry the debut of a new luxury brand from Montage International in the Gaslamp Quarter. It has 317 rooms, a spa and three restaurants and bars, including a poolside rooftop lounge. (Rates from 295 with a 50 breakfast credit for stays through April.) Through March, when low tides tend to coincide with daylight hours, nature lovers can search for sea anemones and starfish in the tide pools of Cabrillo National Monument, a short drive from downtown San Diego at the southern tip of the Point Loma Peninsula. Explore 1,200 acre Balboa Park, home to the zoo and 15 major museums. Or head north to La Jolla to see seals and sea lions just off shore. Sporting events more your style? Teams from 16 nations compete during the second round of the World Baseball Classic, which takes the field at Petco Park in downtown San Diego, March 14 to 19. Looking for a wintry getaway? "Favorable exchange rates and consistent late season snowfall" make Whistler Blackcomb a good bet for procrastinators, said Dan Sherman, the vice president of marketing at Ski.com. Whistler Blackcomb is the largest ski area in North America with more than 200 trails across some 8,100 acres and terrain for beginners, intermediates and experts. Blackcomb Mountain gets snow late into the spring, remaining open until May 22, more than a month later than most resorts in North America. Through April, Ski.com is offering 20 to 40 percent off hotels and condos like Crystal Lodge Suites, in the center of Whistler Village, and Le Chamois, at the base of Blackcomb Mountain in the Upper Village, steps from the chairlifts. Airfares to Europe are down nearly 20 percent on average for travel in March compared with the same period last year, according to StudentUniverse, a booking site for students and recent graduates, which found round trip flights as low as 301 from New York to Stockholm, 332 from Boston to Copenhagen and 352 from New York to Barcelona or Madrid in a recent search. And the strong dollar means more buying power when you land. Low fares can also be found on European budget carriers like Norwegian Air and Wow Air, which have been expanding in the United States. Monograms is offering package tours between 10 and 20 percent off with rates from 1,295 a person for a week of sightseeing in Rome and Venice. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Will Apple's CarPlay dominate the dashboards of future cars? Is Ford planning to kick Microsoft out of its Sync system? Are Audi and General Motors going for Google? Or does QNX, a dark horse whose software is already in tens of millions of vehicles, have the cards to trump other high tech companies? A dashboard donnybrook has erupted among tech companies vying to clean up the clutter of controls infotainment apps, safety systems, social media, maps and the like in the next generation of connected cars. While each company says it should be the one to untangle these connected services, it seems unlikely that any single one is going to dominate the dash, at least in the near future. Apple's recently announced CarPlay software for connecting iPhones to the dashboard will appear in vehicles from Ferrari, Mercedes Benz and Volvo this year, with other automakers signaling that they, too, will support the software. Meanwhile, rumors that Ford may abandon its seven year relationship with Microsoft underscore that carmakers are still wrestling with the multiple layers of software necessary to meld computers, communications and cars. At the surface level, when drivers plug an iPhone 5 with a Lightning cable into a vehicle with CarPlay, for example, what they will see is an Apple icon, and beneath it an iPad style arrangement of familiar square icons for apps like maps, messages, calling and iTunes. (There's no wireless option and the phone's screen will be locked while it's plugged in.) The CarPlay app will effectively take control of the dashboard screen for those tasks, and it will look identical on all vehicles, giving Apple an almost unprecedented say in dictating what apps will appear in cars, and how they will be displayed at least for those with the iPhone 5, 5c and 5s. But while carmakers are willing to acquiesce in giving the creators of the iPad and iPhone control of the in dash screen, that control goes only so far. Under other tabs and menus, the cars will still have apps for Google Android phones as well as popular apps that may not be supported by Apple, like Pandora, and car specific apps, like the manufacturer's remote start function. Referring to what designers call the human machine interface the controls that drivers actually touch Doug Welk, the chief engineer for software and services at Delphi, said, "CarPlay is not changing the H.M.I. that's in the car." Delphi, which supplies in dash systems for customers including General Motors, says carmakers will still decide how drivers operate CarPlay. Volvo, for instance, is "going for a full touch screen integration," said Thomas Muller, the automaker's vice president for electrical and electronic systems engineering. CarPlay will first appear at Volvo in the 2015 XC90 crossover. The company, which has a carefully cultivated image as a safety first automaker, thinks drivers have become more familiar with touch screens, Mr. Muller said, giving them a distinct advantage over knobs and dials. Mr. Muller of Volvo and Mr. Mos of Mercedes point out that Apple will not have access to any critical elements of the car, like the vehicle diagnostics, the safety systems or even the air conditioning. Those tasks falls to a deeper level of software. It is at this level of coordination that operating systems like Linux, QNX's Car Platform and Microsoft's Windows Embedded Automotive step in to coordinate the display, the human machine interface and communications functions. The software market at this level is also in flux, as demonstrated by the rumors that Ford may adopt QNX's infotainment solution over Microsoft's. Neither Ford nor QNX would comment on those reports. But Ford confirmed that its platform for developing new services, called Applink, was not dependent on Microsoft software. Ford and QNX also confirmed that some QNX software was already in some Fords for instance, in the gauge clusters on some hybrids and on some trim levels of pickup trucks. QNX, which is based in Ottawa and owned by BlackBerry, the smartphone maker, already has its software in BMW 6 and 7 Series cars, as well as in systems from suppliers like Delphi. The main problem facing connected cars is the lack of standards, which can be a source of confusion for drivers. In addition to the varieties of operating systems and hardware in dashboards, there are also several competing standards initiatives, including Genivi, MirrorLink (originally started by Nokia) and the Google backed Open Auto Alliance. Each hopes to provide a common interface, primarily for connecting smartphones and their accompanying apps to the dashboard. But no single platform has yet gained much traction. Apple may hope that it will become a de facto standard, while app developers and car makers are approaching CarPlay with a combination of optimism and fear. "We're in over 50 car models, and every one of those implementations is different," says John Donham, the chief executive of TuneIn, an app that lets listeners scan thousands of online radio stations. Mr. Donham acknowledged that it would be simpler to write an app once or twice for Google and Apple and have it work in all vehicles. However, such hopes may be dashed by the fact that Apple plans to limit the apps available in CarPlay, much as it does with Apple TV. So there will not be hundreds of thousands of Apple apps blooming on the dash. "We were hoping there would be more consolidation around an auto driven standard for connecting smartphones to cars," said Niall Berkery, executive director for business development at TeleNav, which provides mapping and navigation services. Indeed, without an open standard and by including free maps, Apple and Google present an additional conundrum for navigation companies and automakers: Even more drivers might be discouraged from buying dedicated map apps or expensive built in navigation systems. Nevertheless, automakers want to work with smartphone technology companies rather than compete against them. "Ford sells cars," not phones, said John Ellis, the automaker's global technologist. "And it would not be in our best interest to limit ourselves." Automakers have to appeal to iPhone and Android owners alike. As for concerns about reliability Apple's initial foray into navigation proved embarrassing automakers seem to think so far that the attraction of the brand is more important than control over every aspect of the dashboard. They also suggest that today's drivers are more sophisticated about technology. "When the phone runs out of battery power," Mr. Muller of Volvo said, "I have yet to see a customer complain to the car maker." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Breast feeding mothers usually struggle to find a private space at the airport to nurse their babies or pump their milk. The Burlington, Vt. based household and baby care company Seventh Generation was aware of that challenge and decided to take action by sponsoring the installation of four pumping and nursing pods in New York area airports: one in the JetBlue terminal at Kennedy Airport, two at Newark Liberty International Airport and one at La Guardia Airport. The pods will officially open on Thursday, May 7, to coincide with Mother's Day. Mamava, a brand dedicated to promoting the culture of breast feeding, created the 4 foot by 8 foot spaces, which are equipped with two benches and an electrical outlet. Their doors fully shut, and the rooms are large enough to fit a family of four plus luggage. Mothers can find the locations by downloading Mamava's app, which is currently available through Apple and planned for Android by July. "Airports can be stressful environments and are busy, and we want to give moms a clean and comfortable area where they can pump or nurse," said Ashley Orgain, Seventh Generation's manager of mission advocacy and outreach. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Clockwise from top left, Jason Decrow/Associated Press; Firstview; Evan Sung for The New York Times; Randy Brooke/Getty Images for Coach; Stefania Curto for The New York Times; Firstview | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The founder of a public charter school in the East Bay that provides a comfort zone for Muslim students is under attack in the wake of a state audit that uncovered questionable financial practices, including lavish payments to her. In 2007, compensation for the founder and director of the FAME school in Fremont, Maram Alaiwat, was more than 240,000. This was roughly the same as the total compensation of the Fremont Unified Schools superintendent, who oversees 38 schools. Ms. Alaiwat's compensation package included a base salary of 153,702, a 32,500 housing allowance and a mileage stipend of 7,000. She was also given 10 percent of federal grant money that the school received for books and other needs, a stipend worth 30,000. She was paid 18,700 in lieu of vacation, and was provided with the money to buy a 74,820 2007 Mercedes GL 450. According to the audit, the five year old charter school, Families of Alameda for Multi Cultural/Multi Lingual Education, had also taken out more than 3 million in loans from private lenders including Ms. Alaiwat's two brothers and two school board members, at an interest rate significantly higher than commercial lenders charge. In most cases, the private lenders also received a 10 percent fee. In addition to the compensation and the loans, Ms. Alaiwat rented her new condominium to an employee, whose salary she subsequently increased. These financial issues and concerns about lagging test scores are expected to be raised Tuesday by officials of the Fremont schools at an Alameda County Board of Education meeting. Last month the board voted, 5 to 2, to give provisional approval for FAME's operations to continue. By March, the school must show it has complied with the auditors' recommendations before it can receive final approval. In her own defense, Ms. Alaiwat said she was "one of the least paid directors in the state" given the number of students and the size of the area FAME draws from. When she started the school, she said, she agreed to work for 88,000, "a lowered salary because it was my baby." "Money was not the motivation," she said. "You make a lot of sacrifices." The school has received favorable attention for the welcome and resources it extends to Muslim families in this multiethnic region. On one of the FAME campuses, a converted J.C. Penney's call center, no one stares when three slender girls slip away at lunch to kneel in a corner and pray. Arabic is taught in all grades, and many girls wear hijabs. FAME is "a second home to many inner city Muslim families," Ms. Alaiwat said in an e mail message. She added, "The wall separating church and state in public schools was barb wired on the Muslim side, making it impossible to have equal access to public services and making it emotionally 'unsafe' for many Muslim children." Niba Jabbar is a 10th grader at FAME, a charter school in Fremont that serves a large population of Muslim students. Brian L. Frank for The New York Times But scores on standardized state tests lag well below the average of the Fremont public school system in almost all subjects a fact Ms. Alaiwat ascribed to the number of students who come from low income families. In recent interviews, Ms. Alaiwat blamed the efforts to shut FAME on Fremont Unified school officials, whom she called "old white men." She said they had not come to terms with changes in Fremont, which is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the region. "I personally believe they are racists," she said. "I hate to pull the race and ethnicity card, but it's so blatantly that. The fact we exist is haunting them." Larry Sweeney, a member of the Fremont Unified School Board, responded, "What a shameful, untruthful thing for an educational leader to say." FAME's students would be better served in the public system, Mr. Sweeney said. Dr. Milt Werner, superintendent of Fremont Unified School District, said his district provided "shining examples" of award winning schools with mostly minority populations that were "closing the achievement gap." The FAME school has grown rapidly, as have the state payments provided in part on the basis of enrollment. The school has 1,490 students, coming from as far away as Richmond. Half are home schooled. Ms. Alaiwat received bonuses for increasing enrollment and maintaining the financial stability of the school. Fast growing charter schools often have financial gaps since their state revenue is based on the previous year's enrollment. In April 2009 the state's "exceptional audit" of FAME Public Charter School made 42 recommendations. Jeff Stark, the Alameda County senior deputy district attorney, said he was "conducting a review of the audit and the underlying issues." Robert Chisholm, the president of FAME's board, defended the payments to Ms. Alaiwat. "They are not excessive for what she's done," Dr. Chisholm said, adding that the board gave her 75,000 for a car because "we thought she deserved it." The board also agreed to pay 958 in reimbursement for a speeding ticket. In its response to the auditors, the board agreed to stop paying such citations with school funds. Jacki Fox Ruby, president of the Alameda County Board of Education, which granted FAME its charter, called Ms. Alaiwat's compensation "outrageous." Maram Alaiwat, the founder and director of the school. Brian L. Frank for The New York Times "What I don't get is," Ms. Ruby added, "if the teachers teach and the principals manage resources, what does the director do?" The "extraordinary audit" issued in April was only the third requested by Superintendent Sheila Jordan in 10 years. A follow up audit last fall indicated that more than half the 42 recommendations in the first audit had been carried out, and that progress was being made on the rest. One recommendation, asking that corrected W 2 forms for Ms. Alaiwat be filed, had not been resolved as of a follow up audit in the fall. It also said that charter school officials were not obligated to abide by state conflict of interest laws cited in the audit. FAME's board now consolidates all of Ms. Alaiwat's compensation into one lump sum. In 2008, she received total compensation of 336,663. This year, her total pay will come to 240,000, Ms. Alaiwat said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
For the first time in years, rates of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis, which had been on track in 2020 to hit record highs in the United States, have taken an abrupt downturn. This should be good news. The coronavirus pandemic has certainly kept more people away from bars, night clubs and large parties, reducing opportunities for unsafe sex, studies show. But the drop is more likely a harbinger of bad news, experts in reproductive and sexual health believe. They say the pandemic has seriously hindered efforts to mitigate sexually transmitted infections that can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, chronic pain, infertility and even blindness and death in newborns. Rather than showing sexually transmitted diseases are on the run, the upbeat numbers likely signal instead that they are now going largely undetected. In communities across the country, contact tracers for gonorrhea and syphilis, which had already been severely understaffed, have been diverted to Covid 19 cases. Eighty percent of sexual health screening clinics reported having to reduce hours or shut down altogether sometime during the pandemic, according to a survey by the National Coalition of STD Directors. In New York City only one of eight facilities was open this spring; now just three are open, which are steadily busy, because they are more of a safety net service than ever, said Dr. Julia A. Schillinger, an assistant commissioner at the New York City health department. Doctors also believe that many patients who might otherwise seek treatment for S.T.D. symptoms have been avoiding the clinics for fear of being exposed to Covid 19. And in some regions, essential supplies to test for S.T.D.s are running low because manufacturers of swabs, tubes and reagents are redirecting their products for use in coronavirus tests. As a result, there is a growing shortage of tests for the diseases. "Our most effective tool for control is timely diagnosis and treatment," said Dr. Gail Bolan, director of the Division of S.T.D. Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 'We're very concerned that we'll have continued, unchecked and sustained increases now if people can't access screening now." In short, desperate efforts to contain one pandemic could well inflame the spread of another. The C.D.C.'s preliminary 2019 figures, the sixth consecutive record year, indicate 1.76 million cases of chlamydia and 602,000 of gonorrhea. Cases of newborn syphilis alone increased 22 percent from 2018. Alarmed, officials at the C.D.C. issued alerts throughout the summer to clinicians nationwide. In its latest letter last month, the agency recommended that priorities for screening and testing should go to patients with symptoms, women who are under 25 or pregnant, and people at high risk for S.T.D.s, including those with H.I.V. In the greater St. Louis area, only about 11 of 128 testing sites remained fully open this spring and summer, and in one health care system, testing dropped by 45 percent. Although many sites have begun to reopen, during one recent week, the St. Louis County Sexual Health Clinic had no urine test kits for gonorrhea and chlamydia, according to Dr. Hilary Reno, its medical director. Area hospitals had been on the hunt as well. One reason that public health officials believe that the drop reflects test shortages and limited clinic access rather than less sexual activity is that the rates of decrease are more pronounced in gonorrhea and chlamydia, for which the test supplies have been affected, rather than in syphilis and H.I.V., which are detected through blood tests. Dr. Bolan is also troubled by the breakdown in reporting of cases. "It's not just data for the purpose of collecting it," she said. "Surveillance is the backbone of public health. It's how we allocate our resources. Without timely and accurate data, we feel like we have blindfolds on, while trying to figure out where our hot spots are." Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Doctors and nurses who work in clinics that serve mostly poor and minority patients say that the burden of the extreme service cutbacks and lack of testing falls most heavily on them. Those who work with teenagers said that many clinics that distribute free condoms have closed. Dr. Joy Friedman directs adolescent medical services at the Einstein Medical Center, in a low income neighborhood in Philadelphia. Teenagers tell her how difficult it is to discuss condom use with partners. Regular testing is the one way they have to protect themselves. And now, she said, "they need to know that testing won't be available." Despite considerable efforts to reduce S.T.D.s, reported cases at the beginning of 2020 were higher than those during the same period in 2019, according to the C.D.C. But by early March, as the nation began complying with stay at home orders, those levels plummeted. In early April, weekly reports of chlamydia were 53 percent below 2019 numbers, with both gonorrhea and syphilis down 33 percent. Gonorrheahad been expected to hit an April monthly total of 54,127. But only 26,771 cases were reported. As of mid June, chlamydia numbers remained depressed but reporting of gonorrhea and syphilis had returned to expected rates. Given the limitations on testing and clinic closures, however, cases may well be higher. "If sexual behavior rebounds while service interruption persists, we project an excess of hundreds of H.I.V. cases and thousands of S.T.I. cases," researchers from Emory, Harvard and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill wrote in a preprint study of the sexual practices Atlanta men who had sex with men during the pandemic. Social scientists are exploring how the coronavirus outbreaks have affected sexual behavior. Justin Lehmiller, a social psychologist at the Kinsey Institute, which has been issuing surveys during the pandemic to about 2,000 people, gay, straight and bisexual, said that even those in continuing relationships reported having less sex in the first months. "Higher levels of stress and anxiety are pushing down desire," he said. "Singles have more challenges to hooking up." But when doctors and nurse practitioners who work with teenagers were asked if the pandemic had slowed down their patients' sexual activity, they replied that, anecdotally speaking, not at all. Dr. Bolan said that one New York pediatrician reported that she'd treated many teenagers for S.T.D.s. Even if sex has declined, researchers question how long it can remain suppressed. Dr. Lehmiller noted that online dating apps report record business. Whether that translates into sexual activity rather than virtual meet ups is unclear, he said. If people are returning to normal levels of encounters, they may not want to admit it. "There is shaming about traveling, social events and gatherings during the pandemic, so sex and dating is seen as part of that," he said. For now, triage at clinics is pervasive. Pre pandemic, the San Francisco City Clinic would typically send more than a hundred specimens to be processed daily at the health department laboratory. Because those supplies have dwindled, the clinic is resorting to a smaller, more expensive backup system, that can only process several dozen gonorrhea and chlamydia tests a day, said Dr. Ina Park, an associate professor of community and family medicine at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. Men who take PrEP to prevent H.I.V. transmission should be screened for S.T.D.s every three months, but many clinics have spaced out those screenings to every six months, she said. A Michigan colleague who had run out of urine testing kits for chlamydia and gonorrhea, she said, was returning to techniques that had been replaced almost 20 years ago: "using older swabs that have to be placed a few centimeters inside the urethra of the penis and twirled around to obtain a specimen. It's highly unpleasant for the patient and doesn't encourage them to return for testing," Dr. Park said. "I'm concerned that this will worsen mistrust in the medical establishment, which is already an issue with some of the patients we serve," added Dr. Park, the author of "Strange Bedfellows," a book out in February on the history and science of sexually transmitted diseases. David C. Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors, said clinics are trying to come up with creative solutions, such as telemedicine visits. In a few districts where the biggest challenge is reduced clinic access, administrators are trying out test kits that allow patients to collect specimens at home, which they then mail to labs. And some clinics are working with pharmacies that can draw blood and have standing orders for some medications. Public health officials see these innovations as a silver lining that may continue after the pandemic abates. But for Dr. Friedman in Philadelphia, the current situation presents a social justice issue as well as a medical one. Her young, predominantly African American and Latino patients, she said, have high rates of STDs because many do not have ready access to health care, and there is pervasive fear and distrust of medical institutions, which the inability to test for S.T.D.s is only exacerbating. "No one says we should curtail testing for Covid 19," Dr. Friedman said. "I don't understand why it has to be one or the other." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
From left, Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), Finn (John Boyega) and Rey (Daisy Ridley) aboard the Millennium Falcon in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker." The question you're facing right now isn't, "Will I go see the new 'Star Wars' movie?" No, if you clicked on this, you're almost definitely going to see the new "Star Wars" movie. So instead you're probably wondering, "When I walk out of the new 'Star Wars' movie, will I feel exuberant, or will I feel as if I've just forked over 12 to have someone besmirch my precious childhood memories, again?" Fans of the franchise that is, fans of pop culture writ large have over the decades experienced both feelings to varying degrees. This week, "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker," the ninth film in a trilogy of trilogies, hits theaters, and fans and critics have begun sharing their reviews. As of Thursday morning, the film had a 58 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on its aggregation of critics' reviews. It had a score of 53 at Metacritic, the other main review site. Ouch. So what went wrong? And what, despite everything, is still right? We've broken down some of the critics' thoughts here and before you whine, there are no spoilers, though we wonder what you're doing here if you're worried about that. It tries too hard to please. Stephanie Zacharek at Time calls it an "overloaded finale" for "everybody and nobody": In its anxiety not to offend, it comes off more like fan fiction than the creation of actual professional filmmakers. A bot would be able to pull off a more surprising movie. The movie "panders wildly," writes Michael O'Sullivan at The Washington Post. On the one hand, that's a good thing. On the other, it may not be the closure this epic, now 42 years in the making, deserves. ... Everybody wants a happy ending. But that doesn't mean that we should always get the one we want. It's fine, if also cliche, to be reminded that good will triumph over evil. But it would make for a deeper and more powerful lesson one that, after nine movies, might leave a lasting dent in the heart if the hero actually had to give up something, or someone, that didn't feel like a tiniest bit of a cop out. David Edelstein at Vulture says the film "hits its marks and bashes ahead, so speedy that no emotion sinks in too deeply." For all its storytelling glitches and cornball dialogue, "The Rise of Skywalker" has the kind of gung ho inspirational spirit that must have elated the Disney Company after the sour response to "The Last Jedi." It's a dream movie for them it's the first "Star Wars" film that feels like it comes from Disney as I'm guessing it's a nightmare for George Lucas. "While lots of things occur, very little actually happens," writes Alissa Wilkinson at Vox. The least possible amount of character development happens (except in one oddly shallow case), mostly because the movie which clocks in at about two hours and 20 minutes is designed as a chain of successfully completed quests. In fact, it's so busy that maybe you won't notice the plot holes, writes Tasha Robinson at Polygon. The gasping pace doesn't leave much time for contemplating plot holes, or noticing that the stakes feel lighter than ever, even though in theory, entire planets are on the line. It also doesn't leave time for further character development, any form of nuance, or even a moment's reflection on the passing of an age. But for Jordan Hoffman at The Guardian, one of few critics to outright rave about the film, the sprawling plots and wandering characters tie up neatly. "All the toys go back where they are supposed to go at the end," he writes. The movie snaps together like a jigsaw puzzle, a series of concluding beats that seem inevitable and perfect, and designed to please all parties, so long as you don't dwell on the logic too much. We're still fighting over the last film. "As one of the greatest sagas in cinema history reaches its climax, it's concerning that 'Star Wars' has lately been generating more drama off screen than on," writes Steve Rose for The Guardian. He is nodding, of course, to the return of J.J. Abrams, who directed the first film in this most recent trilogy, "Episode VII: The Force Awakens," before handing the reins to Rian Johnson for "Episode VIII: The Last Jedi." The two directors had distinct visions for the series, and they didn't always complement each other, writes Tasha Robinson at Polygon. Abrams "embraced fan nostalgia by recreating 'A New Hope' for a new era," she writes, while Johnson "leaned much harder on the 'handover to the new generation' idea, with a kill your idols approach that subverted fan expectations." "The Last Jedi" has proved incredibly contentious, with detractors varying mostly in whether they blame the message, the execution, or both. Seemingly leery of that divisive response, Abrams steers "The Rise of Skywalker" straight back to the nostalgia courting approach that served him so well with "The Force Awakens." Justin Chang at The Los Angeles Times expects at least some fans to be pleased: "The Rise of Skywalker" nakedly offers itself up in the spirit of a "Last Jedi" corrective, a return to storytelling basics, a nearly two and a half hour compendium of everything that made you fall in love with "Star Wars" in the first place. The more accurate way to describe it, I think, is as an epic failure of nerve. This "Rise" feels more like a retreat, a return to a zone of emotional and thematic safety from a filmmaker with a gift for packaging nostalgia as subversion. But this ninth film "might just brush the bad faith squabbling away," writes Owen Gleiberman at Variety: Fans fell hard for "The Force Awakens," until they woke up and realized that they'd been seduced by a kind of painstakingly well traced "Star Wars" simulacrum. "The Last Jedi" was admired by some and disliked by many, with the divide often carrying an ugly subtext: a resentment at the film's diversity casting, while others leapt to its defense for that very reason, turning what was supposed to be a piece of escapism into an ideological turf war as messy and overblown as some of us thought the movie itself was. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
My own farewell to Mr. Stafford occurred the previous afternoon, when he partnered Rebecca Krohn in the same "Emeralds" item. (On this occasion, his sister was dancing the first pas de deux.) You would not have known that the end of his career was in sight. The characteristic courtesy and cleanness of his performance were the same as ever; his musculature displayed no strain, his manners remained quiet. He will not be going far. On the faculty at the School of American Ballet (vitally linked to City Ballet) since 2007, he will continue to teach there. He also now becomes one of City Ballet's ballet masters; he already began this work during his final seasons as a dancer. On Saturday afternoon the virtues of "Jewels" were marvelously clear. Though its three ballets seem to span separate countries, centuries, temperaments, they work better together than apart. Ms. Mearns, currently enjoying the most glorious season of her career to date, was imperially glamorous, rapturously expansive and dramatically compelling in "Diamonds." In "Rubies" Ashley Bouder (though knowingly signaling her roguishness with her face) dazzled in firecracker speed and explosive audacity. Ms. Stafford endearingly communicated her own glee in dancing. Savannah Lowery as the soloist who is mistress of ceremonies in "Rubies" hurled happy thunderbolts. Jared Angle, Anthony Huxley and Mr. Stafford elegantly evoked the "Emeralds" world of medieval chivalric romance. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
On a trip to Austria in 2013, I took a drop in waltz class at the Rueff Dance School in downtown Vienna. I only paid for an hour, so I was limited to the basic steps, but even so, it was thrilling after just 15 minutes to actually be twirling around the floor in the arms of an Austrian for whom this dance was second nature, my instructor, Henry Karesh. Like many Viennese, Mr. Karesh has been waltzing since childhood and knows all the variations that turn a simple three step into something a lot more sophisticated, none of which I did that day. But as he gently steered me around the polished wood floor in the dance studio, I was reminded that more than any other travel activity, dance connects visitor to local in a language that needs no words. "Dancing with people breaks down barriers, and it doesn't happen in another way," said Mickela Mallozzi, a dance tour director who is also the host of the web and television series "Bare Feet." "You make a connection physically. It is intimate, in an appropriate way." One of my very first overseas trips was to Crete with my husband, Jim. Moments after stepping off the ferry, we were invited to a party, and spent our first night in Heraklion with 50 dinner companions with whom we could not converse. At first it was a little uncomfortable, but after the plates were cleared the fun began. We were pulled into a giant spinning circle of locked arms, where we kicked and pivoted and laughed. I never exchanged more than the simplest phrases with any of the Cretans I partied with that night, but it is one of my favorite travel memories. Eager for more encounters like those in Crete and Vienna, in the past year I traveled to three countries with a plan to learn local dances in even the most cursory way so that I might again make the kind of connection Ms. Mallozzi was talking about. Any expectation I had about how easy it would be to shimmy like the Indian actress Freida Pinto in the closing scene of the Oscar winning 2008 film "Slumdog Millionaire" vanished within 10 minutes of the warm up at the Shakti School of Dance in Pushkar, India. Colleena Shakti, 34, an American expat from Ventura, Calif., dabbled in Middle Eastern folk and belly dancing before beginning serious study of Odissi, one of the oldest forms of classical Indian dancing. It was the colorful, joyful Bollywood movies that brought me to Ms. Shakti's school thinking that I would learn those comely shoulder shrugs and graceful hand gestures that were synonymous with contemporary dance in Indian cinema. "Everybody in the world loves Bollywood dance," Ms. Shakti said, because it is beautiful and fun. Some Bollywood movements have their origins in Odissi, she said, but the similarity stops there because classical Indian dances are ancient, subtle and complex. "If people saw Odissi before they saw Bollywood, they would never think, 'I could do that,' " she said, appearing not to judge me for having thought exactly that. Ms. Shakti has been practicing Odissi for 15 years. It cannot be learned in a few days and it does involve serious effort and pain. The shortest class offered here is one month. (The cost for that is 700.) Students from around the world come, some year after year, to study with Ms. Shakti. Elina Kiaili, formerly a ballet dancer in Greece, had already explored belly dancing in Turkey and tango, salsa and ballroom dancing at home in Greece. In 2010, while taking an Indian folk dance class in Pushkar, she saw Ms. Shakti perform for the first time. The performance spoke to her, she said: "I saw Odissi dance, and I said, 'This is it.' My heart was stolen." Music for each three hour session is performed on a drum called the Odissi Mardala by Sudhansu Pohana, another instructor and a classical performer himself. The lesson begins with 90 minutes of the most grueling yoga I have ever tried and that's before the actual heavy leg lifting and feather light arm movements begin. Only the elaborate hand gestures and facial expressions seemed achievable, except for the fact that there are thousands of them so many that a thick encyclopedia explaining the meaning of each is available for reference in a corner of the room. "There's an awareness when you use your hands in the dance, everything right up to fingertips has to be awake and alive," said Katie Getchell, a 50 year old student from Colorado. Ms. Shakti's students are required to learn how to tie a sari, which they must wear on their way to and from class, during their lessons and at Ms. Shakti's evening lectures on the history of the dance and the deities depicted in it. On the roof of the Vishnu temple that houses the studio, I took a break with Sarah Otto Combs, 33, from Seattle. This was her second visit, but the first since Ms. Shakti instituted the sari rule in 2014. Learning to put it on was hard, Ms. Otto Combs told me, though she said it was worth the effort because it helped her relate to local residents. "The women really open up to you and connect with you in a different way because they see that you are coming to respect their culture, not just to look at it," she said. After the break, I made a few more clumsy attempts to join the class, splaying my bare feet in the ballet first position, and stomping as instructed until the pain in my feet and knees got the better of me. The takeaway for me was realizing that even without conquering the steps, I had accomplished one of the goals Ms. Shakti sets for her students: I'd had "an experience in the culture." Before Erin Hummert's wedding last summer, a group of her friends arranged a bachelorette party. They briefly considered taking Ms. Hummert, a 39 year old doctor, bowling. But then the group of American and European expatriates now living in Addis Ababa had another idea: How about a dance class? Earlier in the day, I attended a drop in class the two men offer on Saturday mornings at Galani Coffee Warehouse, a restaurant, art gallery and performance space. When I heard that their next appointment was teaching at the dance party for the bride, I asked to tag along. We arrived at an outdoor pavilion on the grounds of the British Embassy, and I watched while Mr. Sendi and Mr. Demissie patiently demonstrated some of the most popular movements among the many dances performed across the country. Within minutes all the guests were shifting their weight from side to side, making great heaving lunges with their legs while pumping their shoulders up and down to the beat of a drum. "It's not just traditional dance," Dr. Hummert told me. The steps are "part of modern dancing that young people do. Out at bars our friends try to get us to do the different moves." We drove from the party to our next stop, a show by disabled dancers in the Meskel Square neighborhood. On the way, Mr. Demissie told me there are more than 80 varieties of Ethiopian traditional dancing. "All the north people, they dance with the head, the neck or the shoulder, and when you come south they use their hips, their legs. Further down they jump, so they use their feet," he said. Mr. Sendi, 31, and Mr. Demissie, 33, are childhood friends and partners in the Destino Dance Company, which has a goal of increasing Ethiopian appreciation for modern dance by creatively reinterpreting traditional steps. The men offer the Saturday 90 minute morning classes for expats and locals that I attended (about 6 per class) and a separate basic steps session for children. There were about 20 other adults taking lessons with me that morning, and we did floor based moves I associated with contemporary dance and fewer of the jumps and swaying action of tribal dance. Those were reserved for the bachelorette party, where we did it all, including Ethiopia's trademark up and down shoulder shakes and enough neck extensions to make my muscles burn. My class in India showed me that dance could be worship. In Ethiopia, I learned some of the many modern and traditional moves in the dances of that country. Now, I was as ready as I could be for New Zealand's haka, dance that is often intended to intimidate spectators with its fierce movements. "To scare the enemy away you had to portray yourself as an evil person," said Terehira Mokena, a member of New Zealand's native Maoris and a professional dancer at the village of Whakarewarewa in Rotorua, a historic center of Maori culture. On my first visit to New Zealand, in 2012, I attended the Matariki festival, a national competition in which many tribes perform. I watched in fascination as team after team did its best to frighten the audience. So when I went back last summer, I was hoping to at least learn the basics, not just of haka, but also the less well known poi, a way of swinging balls in complex circles on strings of various lengths. While only women use the poi in performances, both Maori men and women learn from childhood how to control the lightweight balls because poi is thought to be good for coordination and flexibility. I could not find a teacher before I left home, but was optimistic about finding one upon arrival. I had arranged to stay with a Maori family, and when I entered the house, I discovered my hostess, Heni Herwini, had a traditional dress with an embroidered top on display in her living room, revealing that she had once been a dancer. I considered that a lucky break, but she confessed it had been years and that she could not teach me. Instead, she directed me to Whakarewarewa, occupied by Maoris for the last 700 years and only a few miles from her home. For an entry fee, tourists are welcome to visit the village. At the small community hall there are dance performances twice a day. When I was there, the men in the audience were invited to the stage for an impromptu haka class. To much good natured screaming and dramatic gesturing, 20 year old Matt Paterson of Australia squatted with the other tourists with his hands on his hips, a broad smile contradicting the intentions of the dance. "Haka was used as an act of defiance," Ms. Mokena, who leads the dance troupe, told me. "You had to be defiant. Your whole body, eyes and tongue are used just to frighten them." By that standard the grinning men signaled the lesson was a complete failure, though they seemed to be having a good time. Unfortunately for me, on the day I visited, women were not called from the audience to give it a try. So I would have left New Zealand having once again seen, but failed to learn, even the first step of either haka or poi if it had not been for the offer of a clerk in the Whakarewarewa Thermal Village souvenir shop. I suspect that Tatiana Te Kowhai, who was working the cash register, determined that she could sell more poi balls if she taught tourists how to use them, because she offered to give me a lesson. It took considerable concentration for me to keep the balls at just the right speed without having them smack into each other or fly off into space. My clumsy attempts looked nothing like the delicate representation of the flight of birds and butterflies that punctuate the stories of nature and tribal life told in the Maori dances. Even so, I bought the balls, though I haven't picked them up since that afternoon. I prefer to believe, as Ms. Mokena had suggested, that Maori dancing is best left for the descendants of New Zealand's first settlers to perform and for visitors like me to observe and enjoy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Should I Flush It? Most Often, the Answer Is No It might seem harmless at first: a thread of dental floss tossed in the toilet, a contact lens swirling down the drain of the bathroom sink. But even the tiniest of items can contaminate waterways. The small fragments of plastic contact lenses are believed to be contributing to the growing problem of microplastic pollution. Pharmaceuticals, which are also frequently flushed down the drain, have been found in our drinking water, and the consequences are not fully known. Larger products like wipes and tampons are also clogging sewer systems, resulting in billions of dollars in maintenance and repair costs. Wondering what's safe to flush or wash down the drain? We spoke with several wastewater management experts who explained why many frequently disposed items belong in a garbage can, not the toilet. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Many wipes claim on their packaging to be "flushable," but almost all of them contain rayon or viscose, said Rob Villee, executive director of the Plainfield Area Regional Sewerage Authority in Middlesex, N.J. "Unfortunately, the natural water bodies these get into do not have the heat or micro organism levels to effectively degrade these," he added. "That is why we see rayon accumulating in the oceans." While toilet paper will break down in anywhere from a minute to four minutes, wipes take at least six hours to disintegrate, Mr. Villee said. Furthermore, the pumps at collection systems that move waste downstream to treatment plants cannot tear them apart. "We see pumps that are designed to pump up to half a million gallons a day clogging," Mr. Villee said. Now that wipes are used around the world, he added, "it's a problem internationally." Dental floss, which is usually made of nylon or Teflon, should also stay out of the toilet. "It seems like, 'Oh, it's just a little string,' but it tends to wrap things up," Mr. Villee said. "It'll collect other things and make kind of a big wad of stuff. It's incredibly strong." When contact lenses are flushed down the toilet or washed down the sink, they do not biodegrade easily. As a result, they may make their way into surface water, causing environmental damage, new research has shown. The science of why contact lenses may have a dark side if they are improperly disposed The lenses are also impervious to the bacteria that break down biological waste at treatment plants. When researchers at Arizona State University submerged contacts in chambers with the bacteria, they found that the lenses appeared intact seven days later. "We discourage any kind of plastics because it can make its way through a treatment plant and end up in the receiving water," said Vincent Sapienza, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. Contact lenses "have densities similar to water, so they don't readily float or sink at wastewater treatment plants," he added, which means they are not captured and removed at the plant. It is often assumed that tampons can be flushed down the toilet, in part because they are so small. But their absorbent materials, including the string, do not break down easily: They cannot be processed by wastewater treatment centers, and can damage septic systems. Kotex, Playtex and Tampax advise women to throw them away instead. "It's best to simply wrap a used tampon in toilet paper and toss it in the garbage or, if you're in a public washroom, place it in the waste receptacle for feminine hygiene products," Playtex says on its website. Wastewater treatment plants are not designed to filter out pharmaceuticals, so drugs that are disposed of in the toilet or the sink drain end up entering streams, rivers and lakes. The first major study to document this, conducted by the United States Geological Survey, found low levels of organic wastewater compounds, including prescription and nonprescription drugs and hormones, in 139 streams across the United States during 1999 and 2000. One or more of these chemicals were found in 80 percent of the streams sampled. A more recent study, which sampled water from 25 drinking water treatment plants in the United States, found that some pharmaceuticals persisted despite water treatment processes. The technology that would be required to remove pharmaceuticals from the water at treatment plants is cost prohibitive, said Ed Gottlieb, the industrial pretreatment coordinator at the Ithaca Area Wastewater Treatment Facility. It is far cheaper to use take back programs that collect unused medications before they enter the water supply, he added, because those cost only 2 to 5 for each pound of medication collected. During its nationwide take back event in April, the Drug Enforcement Administration collected 474.5 tons of pharmaceuticals. The next National Prescription Drug Take Back Day is Oct. 27. "The amount of pounds they collect is phenomenal," Mr. Gottlieb said. "It's huge. And yet there are studies done that show only a very small percentage of what's out there is being collected." Kitty litter will not dissolve in water and can create clogs, even if it is labeled flushable. Gene Weingarten, a syndicated columnist, described what happened when he flushed a small amount of cat litter down his daughter's toilet last year. "Cat litter is a preternaturally absorptive substance, apparently designed to expand to roughly 60,000 times its original volume in some horrible malignant process like cancer, only worse," he wrote. "Molly's toilet resembled one of those baking soda and vinegar volcanoes the dumb kids in middle school made every year for science fairs." Condoms should never be flushed. "I've heard condoms called sewer lilies because they fill with air or gas and float to the top," said Cynthia Finley, the director of regulatory affairs at the National Association of Clean Water Agencies. "As a society, I think we've become more germophobic," she said, adding that there is a tendency to want to flush anything that has bodily fluids. But wastewater treatment plants are not designed to handle anything except for human waste and toilet paper, she said. Facial tissues might seem safe to flush because they look so much like toilet paper. But unlike toilet paper, facial tissues have been treated with a chemical binder that takes time to release and break apart when flushed, Ms. Finley said. Likewise, paper towels and cotton swabs are also formulated to stay intact. When in doubt, throw it out (in a trash can) If you're not sure, follow a simple rule: If it is not human waste or toilet paper, it should not be disposed of in the toilet, Ms. Finley said. The cost of both drinking water and wastewater go into a water bill, said Mr. Sapienza, the New York environmental official. When cities have to send crews to unclog sewers or, in worst case scenarios, replace them, the cost is passed down to everyone who gets a water bill, he added. "If you define flushable as 'Yes, it will go down the toilet,' then everything here is flushable," Tracy Stevens, a pretreatment technician, says in the video. If you define it as whether it will make it to the treatment plant, she added, some of the waste will and some will not. More important, the treatment plants are not equipped to process these products. If hundreds of thousands of people are flushing those items, "they're going to cause trouble," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Two undefeated horses trained by the Hall of Famer Bob Baffert indeed tested positive for a banned substance in Arkansas, a person familiar with the results of the split sample test said Monday. One of the horses, Charlatan, won a division of the Arkansas Derby on May 2. The other, a filly named Gamine, won the Acorn Stakes at Belmont Park in New York on June 20 by nearly 19 lengths in a stakes record time of 1:32.55, a performance that inspired talk of the filly taking on the boys in the Kentucky Derby, which is scheduled for Sept. 5. The horses had two samples test positive for lidocaine, a local numbing agent, according to the person who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case had not been fully adjudicated. The New York Times reported on the positive tests of their first samples in late May. The anesthetic is considered a Class 2 drug by the Association of Racing Commissioners International, and use of it carries a penalty of a 15 to 60 day suspension and a fine of 500 to 1,000 for a first offense. In the absence of mitigating circumstances, the horse would also be disqualified and forfeit its purse. Charlatan earned 300,000 for first place in one of two top races at the Arkansas Derby. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Could It Be Sepsis? C.D.C. Wants More People to Ask The baby seemed fine when Dr. Thomas R. Frieden left for work that July morning in New York more than 20 years ago. But when he returned home several hours later, his son was pale and blazing hot, limp in his wife's arms. "My first thought was that he was dead," said Dr. Frieden, now the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "It was so scary, even for someone trained as a physician, to see how quickly someone who's healthy can become critically ill." Dr. Frieden, an infectious diseases specialist, knew time was of the essence. His hunch, which turned out to be correct, was that his son had developed sepsis, a life threatening condition triggered by an infection that can very quickly spiral out of control. He called the child's pediatrician, and within hours, the infant had received a broad spectrum antibiotic. He recovered within a few days. Many patients are not so fortunate. Between one million and three million Americans are given diagnoses of sepsis each year, and 15 percent to 30 percent of them will die, Dr. Frieden said. Sepsis most commonly affects people over 65, but children are also susceptible. According to one estimate, more than 42,000 children develop sepsis in the United States every year, and 4,400 die. Sepsis develops when the body mounts an overwhelming attack against an infection that can cause inflammation in the entire body. When that happens, the body undergoes a cascade of changes, including blood clots and leaky blood vessels that impede blood flow to organs. Blood pressure drops, multiple organs can fail, the heart is affected, and death can result. "Your body has an army to fight infections," said Dr. Jim O'Brien, the chairman of Sepsis Alliance. "With sepsis, your body starts suffering from friendly fire." Sepsis appears to be rising. The rate of hospitalizations that listed sepsis as the primary illness more than doubled between 2000 and 2008, according to a 2011 C.D.C. study, which attributed the increase to factors like the aging of the population, a rise in antibiotic resistance and, to some extent, better diagnosis. Sepsis is a contributing factor in up to half of all hospital deaths, but it's often not listed as the cause of death because it often develops as a complication of another serious underlying disease like cancer. So although death certificates list sepsis as a cause in 146,000 to 159,000 deaths a year, a recent report estimated that it could play a role in as many as 381,000. Yet advocacy organizations say many Americans have never heard of sepsis and don't know the signs and symptoms. Dr. Thomas Frieden, director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wants sepsis to become a household word to get at risk patients medical treatment sooner. Kevin D. Liles for The New York Times Ciaran and Orlaith Staunton, a Queens couple who lost their son Rory, a sixth grader, to sepsis in 2012, discovered the condition was not even listed on the A to Z index of the C.D.C.'s website at the time. They met with Dr. Frieden and urged him to use his bully pulpit to educate Americans about the disease. Now the C.D.C. is starting a major public awareness campaign to make sepsis a household word. The first step is to teach people to seek treatment quickly when a loved one begins to show symptoms of sepsis, which include chills or fever; extreme pain or discomfort; clammy or sweaty skin; confusion or disorientation; shortness of breath; and a high heart rate. The campaign, which has developed educational fact sheets, encourages lay people to suggest the diagnosis to health care providers who may overlook it. Ask the doctor, "Could it be sepsis?" or say, "I'm worried about sepsis." "We want people to be able to recognize sepsis just like they recognize a heart attack or stroke, and know they shouldn't wait until Thursday when the doctor can see them, but go to the emergency room right away," said Thomas Heymann, executive director of Sepsis Alliance. The group's motto is, "Suspect sepsis, save lives." When blood pressure drops and chokes blood flow to the body's organs, a person can develop septic shock. For every hour without antibiotics, the probability of dying goes up by 8 percent, Dr. O'Brien said. While earlier initiatives have focused on reducing sepsis deaths that developed in hospitals, newer studies suggest most cases start in the community setting, before people are hospitalized. The new campaign was spurred in part by the latest C.D.C. study, which examined the hospital records of 246 adults and 79 children, finding that in nearly 80 percent of cases, sepsis had started when the patient was at home. The study also shed light on who is most susceptible to sepsis. Though it occurs most often in people over 65, infants under the age of 1 are also susceptible, as are people with chronic diseases like diabetes or immune systems weakened from tobacco use, for example. And healthy people can develop sepsis from an infection that's not treated properly as well. The Stauntons' son died after developing an infection that wasn't recognized by emergency room doctors who examined him at NYU Langone Medical Center. A new state law passed after his death requires hospitals in New York to screen all patients for sepsis in order to start treatment early. The new C.D.C. study found sepsis is most often associated with lung, urinary tract, skin and gut or intestinal infections, and that many sepsis patients had visited a doctor or been in a health care setting before developing the infection. The C.D.C. is aiming efforts at health care providers, urging them to consider sepsis and act quickly, and investing in research to study risk factors. It is also emphasizing prevention through better management of chronic diseases, vaccinations and appropriate use of antibiotics. Dr. Frieden said he wanted to share his personal experience with sepsis so people would have a better understanding of the condition. He encourages vaccinating against the infection that caused his son's sepsis, which was pneumococcus. There was no vaccine available at the time, but it has since been developed. "I'm like the thousands of parents and loved ones who experience this every year," Dr. Frieden said. His son "could have died from it. And far too many people do die from sepsis today." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Residential real estate prices have risen so fast that even markets previously considered affordable are now beyond the reach of many. Prices in Denver have risen 90 percent since 2012. Housing Is Already in a Slump. So It (Probably) Can't Cause a Recession. The United States has had 11 recessions since the end of World War II. All but two were preceded by a big decline in the housing market. Inside that bit of trivia lie some fundamental insights into housing's outsize role in the business cycle, along with clues to suggest that the economy is on firmer footing than the increasingly pessimistic forecasts make it seem. The gist is this: The United States may or may not enter a recession this year, but if it does, housing is unlikely to be the cause, because it never really recovered in the first place. "Housing is not in a position to lead this thing down," said Edward Leamer, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. How much it can help prolong the overall recovery is another matter. Home sales and prices have been sluggish in the face of rising interest rates. Still, the pace of construction, combined with pent up demand from young adults, suggests that the sector should at least remain stable in the face of uncertainty elsewhere. Why is housing so often a focus of anxiety as economic expansions run their course? Here are a few reasons. Housing is more volatile than bigger sectors Even though housing does not account for all that much of the economy, its role in recessions is huge, because it is highly cyclical and sensitive to interest rates. Think of expansions and recessions as the cycle of things that go up and down a lot. Housing is a big determinant of where that cycle is headed because, unlike many other sectors, it has wide swings. The housing sector accounts for as little as 3 percent of economic output during recessions and about twice that during booms. Other pieces of the economy are much bigger, but they don't change nearly as much from boom to bust. Government spending, for instance, has hovered between 17 percent and 20 percent of the economy for decades. The three percentage point swing is about the same in each case, but government accounts for much more of the economy. Translation: Housing punches way above its weight. As a result, while housing has never accounted for more than 7 percent of total output, it has on average accounted for about a quarter of the weakness in recessions since World War II, according to a 2007 paper by Mr. Leamer titled "Housing IS the Business Cycle." Sometimes downturns have other causes, but they only underscore housing's role in economic cycles. The 1953 recession followed a decline in government spending after the Korean War, and the 2001 recession was driven by a decline in business spending after the dot com bubble popped. Both were relatively brief and shallow the 2001 recession was the least severe since World War II in part because housing investment remained stable. The most recent recession, from 2007 to 2009, offered one of the more exaggerated examples of housing's guiding role in downturns. A recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that the construction sector accounted for a little over a third of the decline in output in the past recession, and about half of the job losses (a figure that includes laid off construction workers and job losses in connected industries). How does housing look now? Mixed, but mixed in such a way that the things most important to economic growth are the most stable. Prices have gone up so far so fast that even markets previously considered affordable are beyond the reach of many buyers. Home prices have risen by about 50 percent since 2012, according to Zillow, and many of the more affordable markets have shot up even faster. In Phoenix, home values have doubled since 2012, not adjusted for inflation. The Denver market is up 90 percent, Atlanta 84 percent, Nashville 78 percent and Dallas 76 percent. If people can't afford a home in Texas, where can they? The sticker shock of rising prices, combined with rising interest rates that make monthly payments more expensive, scared off many buyers toward the end of last year. Some of that demand seemed to come back at the start of the year, after interest rates fell to roughly where they were a year ago. Nevertheless, homes are sitting on the market longer, price cuts are becoming more common, and a number of homebuilders have had layoffs. Before a recent speech to 1,000 people from the housing industry, John Burns, founder of John Burns Real Estate Consulting, asked the members of the audience to forecast the year ahead. They were evenly split between those seeing sales and price declines and those seeing growth. "Everybody is being really cautious right now," Mr. Burns said in an interview. This all sounds very bad, but for anyone who isn't trying to sell a home or in the business of selling homes, it's not as bad as it seems. Home buying is weak and getting weaker, so that could be a concern. But construction is bordering on moribund. Total housing starts grew at an annual rate of 1.2 million a year in January, more than double the recession era low of less than 500,000, but still well below an average of 1.5 million from 1990 to the start of the housing bust despite an expanding population. Clearly the need for housing is there, so why aren't builders building more? That is a confounding question. During conference calls to announce their earnings, publicly traded builders like D.R. Horton and PulteGroup have said much the same thing as real estate agents, which is that buyers are put off by higher prices and creeping interest rates. Many builders also cite local regulations that make it harder to build homes in denser areas closer to jobs, and higher labor costs in a tight job market. The overall message is that builders cannot build homes at the prices people want in the places people want them, so they aren't building much at all. The largest demand for housing is at the lower end of the market, the hardest to serve profitably, although in conference calls a number of builders said they were shifting some of their building and land buying toward cheaper, smaller homes. This may or may not improve the pace of building. The result is that the housing sector the residential construction components of G.D.P., taken together accounted for only 3.9 percent of the economy in the third quarter, and has helped drag down overall economic output for three quarters. In other words: Housing is in recession already. It might not get better soon , but it probably won't get worse. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Short term rentals are illegal in the Flamingo Park neighborhood of Miami Beach, but lockboxes where tenants can pick up keys are a common sight. Airbnb and Miami Beach Are at War. Travelers Are Caught in the Crossfire . On a recent Friday evening, David Igbokwe and his friends were relaxing in their Miami Beach Airbnb, listening to music and getting ready to go out to dinner. Their plans were interrupted by a knock at the door. "City of Miami Beach," said Jackie Caicedo, a code compliance officer who works for the city. Mr. Igbokwe opened the door and began answering questions: Was he from Miami Beach? Did he find the apartment on Airbnb? Ms. Caicedo had some bad news. "I'm here because, basically, this is an illegal short term rental," she said. "It's in a residential area. It's zoned in a residential area, so it's prohibited for anyone to rent a unit for less than six months and a day." That same night, within a 45 minute period, Ms. Caicedo knocked on the doors of five other apartments in the building at 1300 15th Street, a two story, eight unit white structure. Apt. 101 had two older men who wouldn't reveal their plans. In Apt. 103, two men in their 20s were visiting from New York City for the weekend. Apt. 104 had an Argentine family of four. Apt. 201 had an older Chilean couple on vacation for the week. In Apt. 204, a young man and woman were visiting from the nearby town of Hallandale, Fla. All of the apartments had been illegally rented out. The property manager of an apartment building next door had called in a complaint. Typically, when the city's code compliance officers come across illegal short term rentals, they ask renters to contact their hosts and ask to be relocated. In situations where the hosts won't cooperate, guests still have to leave. On occasion, the city helps them find a new place to stay. But since Mr. Igbokwe and his friends were cooperative and leaving after just two nights, Ms. Caicedo said she would recommend that they be allowed to stay in the apartment. "We have residential areas in our community and we have zoned them so when people purchase a home they know they are in a residential community," said Mayor Dan Gelber of Miami Beach, saying that Airbnb was knowingly flouting the law. Airbnb, for its part, is currently suing the city, saying that its regulations are overly burdensome. "Nobody benefits when cities impose laws written with the sole intent of punishing both residents and consumers," wrote Benjamin Breit, a spokesman for the company, in an email. In the increasingly heated war between the rental companies and communities, renters like Mr. Igbokwe and his friends, who unwittingly book rooms that are being offered illegally, are the collateral damage. They can end up out on the street, out hundreds of dollars and in need of a new place to stay, sometimes in the middle of the night. "We 100 percent would have rented elsewhere if we'd known we couldn't stay there," Mr. Igbokwe said. "The whole thing was out of our hands, which is frustrating." It's easy to understand why tourists want to stay in Flamingo Park. It's close to the beach. It's surrounded by popular restaurants. As one tourist who didn't want to be named because she was staying in an illegal rental said while rolling her bag down the street, Flamingo Park is "postcard perfect." Increasingly, residents have filed noise complaints with the city, which brings out officers like Ms. Caicedo, who night after night knock on doors and tell renters that they're breaking the law. The code compliance department said that noise complaints are one way it finds out about illegal rentals. "Young people often want to continue the party after they've left an actual party," Ms. Caicedo said. "Usually we only find out it's a short term rental after we go to a place for another complaint like noise." The department said it conducted 1,737 short term rental investigations in the 2017 2018 fiscal year, up from 592 in 2013 2014; for the last two years any interactions have been captured on the body cameras code compliance officers wear when they're on duty. Residents say they also have to deal with the trash left behind by renters. "If these were mom and pop operations, with people renting out a room here and there, we wouldn't all notice," said Jeff Donnelly, who has lived in Flamingo Park with his wife since 1992. "We notice because these are inns without innkeeping, and the innkeeping falls on the neighbors." Mr. Donnelly and Ms. Smarsh also said the short term rentals are taking away long term rentals for people who work in Miami's hotels and restaurants. Ms. Smarsh said she and her neighbors were not motivated by renters' color or ethnic origins. "We have neighbors from all over South America, from Europe and around this country, and we want them here," Ms. Smarsh said. "We want to see appreciation, development, growth, diversity, but it's still a neighborhood." Airbnb has said it works with cities around the world to create reasonable regulation. It is currently suing the city of Miami Beach for a rule that went into effect in December that requires platforms only to allow posts from hosts with resort tax registration and business license numbers. The rule also requires home sharing platforms to remove listings in neighborhoods that, like Flamingo Park, don't allow short term rentals. Airbnb chose to follow the second rule, which it refers to as "geofencing." The company is arguing that the city initially said it expected companies to follow either the first requirement or the second , not both. "It came as a shock," Airbnb says in its lawsuit, that the city "expected home sharing platforms to comply both with the registration number display requirements and the geofencing provision." The company added that it does not review the listings that appear on its site and that it "also advises its hosts and guests to be aware of and comply with local laws." The company declined to comment on the situation in Flamingo Park. Jason, the man who rented to Mr. Igbokwe, declined to be interviewed. Emails and messages on booking platforms to 15 other hosts either went unanswered, or they declined to comment. The other apartments in the building Mr. Igbokwe stayed in were not listed for rent online. The guests in those apartments said they had booked at a legal property through Booking.com, but were diverted to the 15th Street building by their host. The host did not respond to a request for an interview. "That property has never been open on Booking.com for customers," said Kimberly Soward, a spokeswoman for the company, who added, "Booking.com always abides by the applicable laws of the market we operate in." Natalie Nichols, a longtime Miami Beach resident, is one of the rare former Airbnb hosts willing to be interviewed. She is currently suing the city over the steep fines Miami Beach imposes on homeowners. Ms. Nichols said she began renting out space in her own home as well as in another building that she has owned since 2006. But it wasn't until the financial crisis in 2008 that she depended on rentals for income. That year, she said, "I was laid off of a pharmaceutical sales job I had for 14 years. Long term tenants of mine quit paying rent and broke leases." Renting out her properties short term allowed her to make money and avoid foreclosure, she said, as well as to pay taxes, mortgage and insurance. But complaints about short term rentals grew and the city increasingly cracked down. Owners caught renting illegally are fined 20,000 the first time they are caught, with the fine going up in 20,000 increments for every subsequent time they are caught. On a second violation there can be an added 25,000 enhanced fine if the home is 5,000 square feet or larger. A 20,000 fine was enough for Ms. Nichols, who said she sold one home and is living in the other without the income to sustain it. "I am depleting my retirement savings, and the city has taken a business from me that should have produced income and carried me through retirement," she said. In December, Merk Aveli, an artist from Boston, traveled to Miami Beach for Art Basel. He reserved a shared room on Airbnb for a weekend but because of car trouble needed to extend his stay, which his host, a woman named Dina, welcomed. While Dina was out one morning, code compliance officers knocked on the door and told Mr. Aveli the rental was illegal and he had to leave. Dina returned to the house and tried to advise Mr. Aveli on what to say if the officers returned to ensure he'd left. "The lady wanted me to tell housing I was her boyfriend," Mr. Aveli said. "I did not. Instead I showed them my receipt and was sent from the spot." Had he known it was illegally listed, Mr. Aveli said, he would not have booked the room. "Why was it even an option?" he asked. "It's not right." Mr. Aveli ended up crashing on a friend's couch for the remainder of his stay. Knowing that the rental had been illegal and upset about the experience, he tried to get a refund for the two nights he had stayed at the apartment. "I contacted Airbnb and they refused to refund me," he said. Mr. Aveli said he didn't bother trying to get a refund from Dina directly because he was frustrated. Mr. Breit would not comment on Mr. Aveli's situation, but said the company wanted to "partner with Miami Beach to develop sensible and enforceable home sharing regulations, which would help protect guests to the City against unfortunate incidents like this." The apartment and the host are no longer listed on Airbnb. Even if that rental is no longer available, walking around Flamingo Park at midday, it's clear that many other homes are: every few blocks there is a van parked on the street with its doors wide open. Inside are towels and bedding that smell freshly cleaned. When asked if the linens are for hotels, a man laughed and said, "You a reporter? I can't talk to you, but lots of Airbnbs around here. Good for business." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
ELEANOR BAUER at Danspace Project (Oct. 11 13, 8 p.m.). An American choreographer based in Europe, Ms. Bauer returns to New York with her solo "A Lot of Moving Parts." In her work, she explores dance and writing to excavate new terrain that looks at the role of the written word in dance practices. This solo, according to her website, "dwells in the untranslatable, sensual, absorbent, expansive, nonlinear, protean and mercurial nature of embodied thought." With music by the WATT quartet, it's a sensorial, intimate piece in which the body is revealed and hidden within a landscape of light and sound. 866 811 4111, danspaceproject.org TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY at BAM Fisher (Oct. 10 11, 7:30 p.m.; through Oct. 13). This revered troupe presents three early dances by Ms. Brown. Along with "Working Title" (1985), a dance that incorporates aerial work, the company offers "Ballet" (1968), an experiment with rope walking that takes place above the stage. Using photographs, slides and a six minute color film, the company reconstructed the piece, which has been performed only once. As for the title? The dancer wears a pink tutu. The program also includes "Pamplona Stones" (1974). A duet created and performed by Ms. Brown and Sylvia Palacios Whitman, it uses props to evoke an improvisational collage of words and movement. All performances have sold out, but standby tickets are available first come first served at the box office before the start of each show. 718 636 4100, bam.org FALL FOR DANCE at New York City Center (through Oct. 13, 8 p.m.). This annual festival attracts a crowd for good reason it has something for everyone. This week, two new programs hit the stage: On Friday and Saturday, the lineup features Tayeh Dance in a new work by Sonya Tayeh; Dance Theater of Harlem in Annabelle Lopez Ochoa's "Balamouk"; Nederlands Dans Theater 2 in Marco Goecke's "Midnight Raga"; and National Ballet of China in Ma Cong and Zhang Zhenxin's "The Crane Calling." If you're after more ballet, Wednesday and Thursday offers Herman Cornejo and Alina Cojocaru executing excerpts from Frederick Ashton's "Rhapsody"; Tiler Peck, Lil Buck and Brooklyn Mack in Jennifer Weber's new "Petrushka"; Lucinda Childs's "Canto Ostinato," performed by Introdans; and Rennie Harris's energizing "Funkedified." All performances have sold out, but tickets may be acquired in person at the box office each night. 212 581 1212, nycitycenter.org LUCY GUERIN INC. at Baryshnikov Arts Center (Oct. 11 13, 7:30 p.m.). In the United States premiere of "Split," this talented Australian choreographer presents an elegant, stark duet for two women one clothed, the other naked as they perform on an ever shrinking stage. How does the choreography change and shift? Ms. Guerin, who spent several years living and dancing in New York, relates this work to her Bessie Award winning "Two Lies." And that was excellent. 866 811 4111, bacnyc.org NY QUADRILLE at the Joyce Theater (through Oct. 13). The brainchild of the choreographer Lar Lubovitch, this series, which features a reconfigured stage that allows the audience to view the pieces from four sides, draws to an end with performances by the wondrous Beth Gill (her "Pitkin Grove" continues through Sunday) and the return of Donna Uchizono Company (Wednesday to Oct. 13). Ms. Uchizono debuts a work featuring a set designed by Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb of New Affiliates. 212 242 0800, joyce.org NEW YORK CITY BALLET at the David H. Koch Theater (through Oct. 14). The fall season continues at City Ballet with new works by Kyle Abraham, Matthew Neenan and Gianna Reisen, as well as the welcome return of Alexei Ratmansky's dazzler "Concerto DSCH." On Wednesday, Joaquin De Luz, who delivers his farewell performance on Oct. 14, takes on George Balanchine's "Prodigal Son" for the final time. 212 496 0600, nycballet.com JENNIFER NUGENT AND PAUL MATTESON at New York Live Arts (Oct. 10 13, 7:30 p.m.). In "Another Piece Apart," these dance artists known for their emphasis on partnering unveil their first evening length work since 2006. In it, as the press material states, they shift "from energetic sensitivity to the absence of tenderness" as they explore "the unraveling of physical and perceptual knots in the body eager for release." 212 924 0077, newyorklivearts.org THE 34TH ANNUAL NEW YORK DANCE AND PERFORMANCE BESSIE AWARDS at N.Y.U. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts (Oct. 8, 7:30 p.m.). This year's Bessies is hosted by the tap dancer and actress Ayodele Casel and the choreographer and dancer Shernita Anderson, and honors those who have excelled in dance and performance. Special awards will go to Marya Warshaw, the founder and director of Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and the choreographer Simone Forti. And what's a dance event without performances? Mariana Valencia, the recipient of this year's Bessie for outstanding breakout choreographer, will appear, as well as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Pooh Kaye, in tribute to Ms. Forti. Presenters include Taylor Mac, Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards, Jennifer Monson and Eduardo Vilaro. bessies.org WORKS AND PROCESS at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (Oct. 7 8, 7:30 p.m.). This presentation highlights selections from American Ballet Theater's upcoming Lincoln Center season. John Meehan moderates a discussion with the choreographer Jessica Lang and the visual artist Sarah Crowner about their new collaboration for the season. This is Ms. Lang's third work for the company; it includes the dancers Sklyar Brandt, Blaine Hoven, Christine Shevchenko and Joo Won Ahn. To liven things up, the ABT Studio Company also presents "Le Jeune," a charming piece by Lauren Lovette, a principal dancer at New York City Ballet. The work is also part of Ballet Theater's fall season. 212 423 3575, worksandprocess.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
What will 1 million buy in New York City? A diamond encrusted Cartier men's watch. A small fleet of 2014 Bentley Continentals. Or maybe your very own parking spot in SoHo. A new development, 42 Crosby Street, is pushing the limits of New York City real estate to new heights with 10 underground parking spots that will cost more per square foot than the apartments being sold upstairs. The million dollar parking spots will be offered on a first come first served basis to buyers at the 10 unit luxury apartment building being developed by Atlas Capital Group at Broome and Crosby Streets, itself the former site of a parking lot. At 250,000 a tire, the parking spaces in the underground garage cost more than four times the national median sales price for a home, which is 217,800, according to Zillow. So instead of a 5,000 square foot house with a wine cellar in Dallas or a 3,500 square foot home with a sauna in Seattle, one could choose 150 square feet in the basement of 42 Crosby, a condominium designed by the architect Annabelle Selldorf. The parking spots, some of which will be a generous 200 square feet, will run 5,000 to 6,666 a square foot, whereas the nine three bedroom units upstairs will cost between 8.70 million, or about 3,170 a square foot, and 10.45 million, around 3,140 a square foot. Monthly common charges for operational expenses and taxes for the three bedrooms will run as high as 8,880 ( 18,360 for the 25 million duplex penthouse). But the parking spots, which also provide a bit of storage space and a charging station, if not views, will not rack up additional monthly charges. In Manhattan, where luxury condominiums and their lavish amenities have been commanding stratospheric prices, the million dollar parking spots are strategically priced. The median sales price of a Manhattan apartment has been tickling the million dollar mark, reaching 920,000 in the second quarter of 2014, while apartments at the ultrahigh end have been selling for more than 90 million. "We're looking at setting the benchmark," said Shaun Osher, the founder and chief executive of the brokerage firm CORE in Manhattan, which is handling the sales and marketing at 42 Crosby. "In real estate, location defines value and parking is no exception to that rule." In SoHo, Mr. Osher said, there are "few to no options" for parking, let alone a private spot in your own building. The construction site, which was once a parking lot. Anthony Lanzilote for The New York Times The number of off street parking spaces in the city was 102,000 in 2010, or about 20 percent less than in 1978, when there were 127,000 spots, according to the Department of City Planning. While scarcity is a factor in the price of parking, 1 million for a parking spot may still be a reach. Last year, a private garage with space for two cars at 66 East 11th Street was listed for 1 million by the Manhattan real estate firm Delos. It is still available in conjunction with the sale of the building's 50 million dollar penthouse. In April 2012, a parking space at 60 Collister Street, a loft condominium building in TriBeCa, sold for 345,459. Over the past year, residential parking spots in Manhattan have been selling for an average of 136,052, according to Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel. Buyers at 42 Crosby Street who pay 1 million for a parking spot will not actually own it. The condo is selling 99 year licenses for each spot. A license, unlike a deeded parking spot, entitles buyers to use the space as long as they are residents of the building and requires that it be sold in the event of a move. To build the 10 spots, the developer had to get a special permit from the city, which typically limits the number of parking spaces in new buildings to no more than 35 percent of the units. Parking spaces in new developments across Manhattan are selling at a brisk pace. At 56 Leonard, a 145 unit TriBeCa tower codeveloped by Alexico Group and Hines, 25 of the 28 parking spots were listed for sale in May at 500,000 apiece; all were sold within months. There is a waiting list for the remaining three spots, which the developer is holding to offer to the buyers of two remaining units. A penthouse in the building went into contract for 47 million in June 2013. "When someone is paying 50 million for an apartment, another 500,000 for the luxury of not walking a block or two and having your own spot, I guess it becomes a rounding error," said Izak Senbahar, the president of the Alexico Group. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The 2016 election campaign may have begun, but an even bigger marketing crusade is on the horizon and the force is strong with this one. Yesterday's release of a trailer for "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," the latest film in the famous franchise, has kicked off what will surely be an endless series of product placement partnerships, one of the first of which is with All Nippon Airways, Japan's largest airline. Fans who delighted at the trailer's old school "Star Wars" charms particularly the appearance of Harrison Ford as Han Solo will be equally thrilled to see a giant R2 D2 flying over their heads this fall, when All Nippon launches its newest 787 9 Dreamliner, painted to resemble everyone's favorite droid sidekick. "We're proud of the innovative R2 D2 design, and we look forward to witnessing the first ever flight of a passenger aircraft featuring a 'Star Wars' character," Kayleen Walters, the vice president of marketing at Lucasfilm, said in a press release. "We're confident that 'Star Wars' fans around the world will absolutely love this design." On a special ANA/Star Wars website, part of ANA's five year partnership with the Walt Disney Company, the airline makes its own case against a backdrop of Storm Troopers: "To the travelers of this planet: To soar the skies is to wander afar, with new encounters awaiting you beyond the blue horizon. It is this desire that drives us to embark on a journey." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Patriots owner Robert K. Kraft's arraignment on charges of soliciting prostitution has been moved a day later, to March 28, court papers said on Thursday, and will no longer overlap with the N.F.L. annual meetings. Despite an all capital warning on the document saying, "The defendant must be present at this hearing," a spokeswoman for the Palm Beach County clerk's office clarified that Mr. Kraft could still be represented at the hearing by his lawyers. Lawyers with experience representing clients in these kinds of cases in Palm Beach County, Fla., said that the "Notice of Hearing" document is considered a form letter and that lawyers represent most defendants at these hearings. Lawyers for Mr. Kraft did not immediately return calls seeking comment, but said in a statement to The Boston Globe that he would not appear at the hearing. The arraignment was originally scheduled for March 27, the final day of the league meetings in Phoenix. The hearing will be at a satellite court in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., not the main courthouse in downtown West Palm Beach. Mr. Kraft faces two first degree misdemeanor charges, which include a penalty of up to one year in jail. He has pleaded not guilty and denies any criminal activity. The police say they have video of Mr. Kraft engaging in sex acts for money in two visits to a strip mall massage parlor in Jupiter, Fla. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. He was one of two dozen men charged with soliciting prostitution at the massage parlor, which is about a 30 minute drive north of Palm Beach, where Mr. Kraft often visits. Their cases are part of a six month investigation into what the police say is a human sex trafficking network operating out of nearly a dozen massage parlors in several counties in Florida. Prosecutors say that Mr. Kraft and the other men had no knowledge that the women working in the massage parlor had any connection to human sex trafficking. Still, the prosecutors increased the severity of the charges, from second degree to first degree misdemeanors, against Mr. Kraft and the other defendants. Prosecutors have said that first time offenders like Mr. Kraft are unlikely to face jail time, but if convicted, they could face fines of up to 5,000 and 100 hours of community service. The court document offers instructions on obtaining a public defender, but Mr. Kraft is hardly likely to be in need of one. Though the case is a minor one by legal standards, Mr. Kraft has spared no expense, bringing in sought after lawyers, including William A. Burck, who worked in the George W. Bush White House, and Jack Goldberger, who defended Jeffrey E. Epstein, the New York financier accused of trafficking underage girls for sex. A vigorous defense is unusual for a case of this kind. Most defendants take a plea deal, pay a fine and complete community service. They can later petition the court to expunge their record. Legals experts say that bringing in high powered lawyers, especially ones from out of state, is unnecessary in misdemeanor cases like the one that Mr. Kraft is fighting. It is often more effective, they say, to hire lawyers who are familiar with state court judges and state attorneys, who are elected in Florida. "The problem with Kraft is the problem with famous people, which is they think if you bring in famous attorneys, they'll do a better job," said Hugh Culverhouse Jr., the son of the former owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and a former prosecutor now in private practice. "In Florida, you don't walk into state court with an out of town attorney. Who are you trying to impress?" Last week, Dave Aronberg, the state attorney overseeing the cases in Palm Beach County, said that all defendants would be treated equally, regardless of their wealth or fame. "Our office treats everyone the same, whether you have a lot of money or are indigent," Mr. Aronberg said last week. "No one gets special treatment in Palm Beach County." Mr. Aronberg, a former assistant attorney general and a Florida state senator, is a Democrat who ran unopposed when he was re elected in 2016. Mr. Kraft has long been associated with Democratic causes. But he is also close friends with President Trump, who has invited Mr. Kraft to fly on Air Force One and dine at his Palm Beach club, Mar a Lago. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
In the department of silver linings, who resigned as editor in chief of Artforum in October amid multiple accusations of sexual harassment against one of the magazine's publishers, Knight Landesman has been appointed the Marlene Hess curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. "This is an exciting turn of events," said Ms. Kuo, adding that the past months "have all been extremely unexpected." In a statement provided last fall to ARTnews, she explained her decision to resign: "I felt that, in light of the troubling allegations surrounding one of our publishers, I could no longer serve as a public representative of Artforum. We need to make the art world a more equitable, just and safe place for women at all levels." She said she has no involvement in the ongoing litigation involving Mr. Landesman, Artforum and Amanda Schmitt, a former employee of the magazine. The timing proved opportune for Ann Temkin, MoMA's chief curator of painting and sculpture, who was looking to fill the position in her department left vacant by the promotion of Leah Dickerman to director of editorial and content strategy at the museum. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The painter Kerry James Marshall was born in Alabama, but he is defined by Chicago: the city he moved to in 1987, and whose private salons and public housing projects have inspired an art of rare ambition. His excellent retrospective "Mastry," which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2016 and traveled to New York and Los Angeles, introduced huge new audiences to his grand tableaus of black American life, steeped in art history and defined by the coal black paint he uses in place of African American skin tones. The show goosed his paintings' prices, too of his new works, some on view now at David Zwirner gallery in London, and of older works in private hands and public ones. This year, his 1997 painting "Past Times," a pastoral scene that was a highlight of "Mastry," sold for 21 million at Sotheby's in New York, more than any work of art by an African American artist. Now another, larger painting by Mr. Marshall is coming up for sale, thanks to Chicago's mayor, Rahm Emanuel. The painting is "Knowledge and Wonder," a dreamlike frieze that the artist completed in 1995 for the Legler branch of the Chicago Public Library on the city's poorer West Side, where African Americans make up about 44 percent of the population. This week, Mr. Emanuel announced that the library would sell the painting at Christie's with the proceeds the estimate is 10 million to 15 million earmarked to expand library services to the same level as other major branches. In a statement, the mayor said that Mr. Marshall would "write the next chapter" in the history of the Chicago Public Library and that his work would "go directly towards supporting the West Side of Chicago." Mr. Marshall was initially reported to be supportive of the city's plans, but at the opening of his London exhibition he told Artnews that "the City of Big Shoulders has wrung every bit of value they could from the fruits of my labor." Rather than pleased by the sale, Mr. Marshall is exasperated. He should be. I begrudge no one a better library, but selling "Knowledge and Wonder" is a dreadful way to go about it. It recalls the thankfully abandoned efforts to auction off the holdings of the Detroit Institute of Arts when that city declared bankruptcy. It malignly reduces the importance of a stellar work of art, by an artist with a lifelong commitment to his adopted city, to its present day exchange value. And it grossly tells black people of west Chicago that they must choose between sufficient civic services and an artwork created expressly for them. "Knowledge and Wonder" was painted in 1995, a critical moment in Mr. Marshall's career, when his ambitions grew to match those of European history painters depicting myths, battles and colonial domination. It depicts nearly a dozen black figures who gaze and point at oversized books that float through an astral sky of lush grape purple. The artist received a fee of 10,000 for the mural, which was funded by Chicago's Percent for Art ordinance during a renovation project. Several West Side aldermen have defended the mural's sale as a down payment on a revived library, after decades of need. They have been dazzled, no doubt, by the record setting sale of "Past Times" to the rapper and producer Sean Combs. The seller, to much consternation, was the McCormick Place convention center in Chicago, which had bought the painting with public funds. That was an even worse offense than the library's planned sale; at least this one has democratic aims, while the earlier sale funded nothing more than facility maintenance. It's fair to entertain the case for moving "Knowledge and Wonder" to another public institution, if not selling it on the open market. Now that Mr. Marshall's art has reached tropospheric prices, insurance and maintenance costs can become onerous to institutions that don't specialize in holding art. This was the case with Thomas Eakins's "The Gross Clinic," a monument of 19th century American painting that belonged to a small Philadelphia medical college. Ill equipped to maintain such an important artwork, the college sold it in 2007 after an outcry and a funding drive to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Nevertheless, Mr. Marshall painted "Knowledge and Wonder" specifically for the West Side library, where a predominantly black public, and in particular black children, he said, could see themselves as proud, curious readers. It's beyond belief that the price of improving this community's library is the loss of its art, but Mr. Emanuel is not the first official to conclude that visual art, with its unique place in an international speculative market, offers an easy budgetary fillip and an escape from more difficult fund raising and political calls. This is the behavior of a country cousin squandering an unforeseen inheritance, not the steward of a city's patrimony. A democratic government is not a mere asset manager. Democratic government is a commonwealth, shared by and accountable to all of us, whose success relies on a commitment from its leaders to perpetual social benefit over short term economic gain. An underserved neighborhood of course deserves a better library, but must it lose one of its few treasures to pay for a public service that ought to be funded by the city collectively? Mr. Marshall waspishly suggested that the sale of a monumental Picasso sculpture on Daley Plaza could pay for the improvements just as well. Unthinkable, of course. This sale should be unthinkable too at a public auction where the highest bidder can spirit away the mural to a home in Aspen or, just as likely, to a free port in Geneva. (Mr. Marshall's current show at Zwirner in London, which I saw this week, includes a suite of acerbic paintings that present contemporary art auction results in the garish vernacular form of a supermarket circular.) The artist has a deep wait list for new works. Mr. Zwirner and Jack Shainman, his dealers, know many generous collectors who sit on the boards of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art and other nonprofit institutions. If Mr. Emanuel and the library were set on selling, they should have at least followed Philadelphia's example with "The Gross Clinic" and brokered a private sale and a long term loan or donation to a museum, ideally in Chicago. I can think of one possible buyer who could keep the mural there, and who could ensure that it remains on public view. The Barack Obama Presidential Library is scheduled to open in 2020 on the South Side and while that will be a special institution, it will also contain a branch of the Chicago Public Library, open to all adults and children. The Obama Foundation's board includes several collectors of contemporary art, including the former commerce secretary Penny Pritzker, as well as the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Thelma Golden, who is one of America's leading voices for African American art. The former president, to whom Mr. Emanuel owes his mayoralty, is no slouch as a fund raiser himself. Before "Knowledge and Wonder" reaches the auction block, or in the saleroom if they have to, Mr. Obama and his team have a chance to do right by the city that adopted the president and the painter both. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Now Lives In a small one bedroom apartment near Lincoln Center, and in a cozy rental in West Hollywood, Calif. Claim to Fame A television actress and indie rock singer, Ms. Kinney starred as the tenacious Beth in four seasons of the zombie TV drama "The Walking Dead." She has also appeared in the TV series "The Knick" and "Masters of Sex." A longtime singer songwriter, she has released two albums of gentle, country inflected pop rock. Big Break In 2007, after attending Nebraska Wesleyan University and New York University, Ms. Kinney auditioned on Broadway, eventually earning a leading role in the in the hip Broadway musical "Spring Awakening." When the play closed the next year, she jumped back into Broadway auditions and joined the cast of "August: Osage County" for over 300 performances before getting her part, which was modest at the time, on the "The Walking Dead." "I was happy and excited to get the job, but I had no idea it would be my life for the next five years," she said. "I thought I was just doing a short recurring role. It's hard for me to watch the show, though, because I don't like that much violence." Latest Project Since Ms. Kinney's character met her grisly end on "The Walking Dead," she has focused on her music career. Her second album, "This Is War," was released in October. "It's an album that's about standing up for myself, rather than being sad that some relationships have ended like before," she said. In January, one song from the album, "Weapons," was used in "Love on the Sidelines," a Hallmark Channel romantic comedy that Ms. Kinney starred in. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
A dimply new star has joined the cast of "Hello, Dolly!" and he's delightful oh wait. Perhaps you weren't asking about Charlie Stemp, the replacement Barnaby Tucker in the hit musical revival that introduced four fresh principals on Thursday evening. O.K., then: A dimply new star has joined the cast of "Hello, Dolly!" and she's delightful. And something more, too. Bernadette Peters, who turns 70 next week, doesn't need to step into anyone's shoes at this point in her 60 year Broadway career. That she would take over the role of Dolly Levi from Bette Midler (and her alternate, Donna Murphy) means she was interested in the challenge, not the provenance. I imagine she understood that there was something she could bring to the part that no one else could. That something is not a stage personality filled with gregarious high spirits. Ms. Peters is neither the hoyden type nor the winking type, at least not since her days as a self parodying chorine. Where Ms. Midler wrung laughs from a line like "I'm tired, Ephraim, tired of living from hand to mouth" sometimes even pretending to collapse in decrepitude Ms. Peters doesn't even go for a giggle. She makes it clear that Dolly is talking about real hardships: the anxiety of work and the loneliness of a widow. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The story, as John Thompson Jr. often shared it, was that he was told by the Georgetown president, upon being hired to coach the university's moribund men's basketball program in the spring of 1972, that it would be great if he could win a few games. Maybe even qualify for a slice of postseason affirmation in the National Invitation Tournament. Thompson, however, was already much less interested in invitations than he was in crashing the bigger tournament party along with the sport's culturally protected borders. But why tip his hand? Why surrender so easily the specter of expectation to his employer and create an immediate narrative for falling short? He said, simply and shrewdly, "Yes, sir, I'll try." By his second season, the 3 23 team Thompson inherited was .500. By his third season, the Hoyas were in the N.C.A.A. tournament for the first time since 1943. A dozen years into Thompson's Hall of Fame career, he became the first Black coach to win the Division I national title, in 1984. Without much time to recruit for his first Georgetown squad, Thompson brought three players from the small Catholic high school team he was coaching in Washington and two others from that basketball rich city. All were Black, immediately raising eyebrows and unearthing a measure of grapevine resentment at the mostly white Jesuit bastion of academia. Thompson didn't blink, or back down. Across that first decade and especially into the early 1980s better known as the "Patrick Ewing Era" he knew the program would run on his terms. Not surprisingly, the news media's response, dubbing Thompson's player protective methodology as "Hoya Paranoia," was derisively swift. Upon his death on Sunday at 78, and in the midst of what has become a long overdue movement to confront America's racial privations, it would seem appropriate to recast those kneejerk characterizations of Thompson's relationship with the at large college basketball community. Sure, the rhyme was catchy. But doesn't the obsession with Thompson's policies and within a sport that once rationalized or celebrated the likes of Bob Knight now sound more paranoid on the part of what then was an overwhelmingly white news media? "A lot of things we did was attributed to paranoia, but it wasn't," Thompson said the last time we spoke, at halftime of a Georgetown game during the 2017 18 season Ewing's first as head coach. "It was the decisions we made as an educational institution. And in Patrick's case, it was because of his talent and the demand being so much higher on him." In other words, the news media strategies were far from the random ravings of a man who, at 6 foot 10 and 300 pounds, was truly a tower of game changing power, willing to do and say things that made people necessarily uncomfortable. He was ahead of his time, speaking to a generation of young players and especially those who had a thought or two of possibly achieving the statistically improbable goal of being Black and coaching on a major college campus. Tommy Amaker, for one. He was a teenage freshman point guard at Duke, out of northern Virginia and thus well acquainted with the Hoyas on the 1984 spring night when Thompson, moments after vanquishing Houston in the N.C.A.A. final, was asked on national television how it felt to be the first Black coach to win it all. "He made a statement that night I never forgot," Amaker, now coaching at Harvard after stops at Seton Hall and Michigan, said in a telephone interview. "He said something like, 'I take offense to that question because I may be the first to do it but I'm not the only one who has the ability or is willing to do the hard work. It's about having the opportunity.' " Amaker, whose 1998 99 Seton Hall team defeated Georgetown in Thompson's final game, said, "For me, what he said after that game had great impact." Thompson wasn't the ogre he too often was made out to be, even if he effectively played one on TV. That night we spoke, he was sitting courtside, near the Georgetown bench. "What do you want," he barked. Then he pointed to the empty seat next to him and said, "If I wasn't mean, you wouldn't know it was me, would you?" Who was John Thompson? Once upon a time, another kid who grew up poor in the nation's capital and who made it out via Providence College and the Boston Celtics with the bounce of a ball. That, in effect, became his mission at Georgetown, unapologetically recruiting African American talent, insisting he was no different from the hockey coach at Providence who exclusively mined Canada for players because that's where the hungriest players were found. In a 1980 Sports Illustrated article filled with allegations and insights about the double standards that existed for white and Black strivers in the college game and especially in the news media vernacular, he admitted, "I'm not a guru, I'm not an altruist, and I'm certainly no saint. What I am is a basketball coach." No evaluation would objectively doubt that he occasionally stretched the ethical boundaries, academic and otherwise, like the rest of the big time sideline foot stompers. Not every cause he championed his boycott of a 1989 game in protest of a standardized testing rule he believed was racially biased, for one was universally applauded. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
It is not Marilyn Monroe who is the woman of the hour, but Stephanie Selfie, so two new books devoted to the scrutiny of famous people both feel like artifacts. But they are interesting ones. Teri Agins, the longtime Wall Street Journal columnist who previously declared "The End of Fashion" (William Morrow, 1999), is now appending a coda: the noisy gate crashing of the industry by celebrities with little or no formal training in clothing design. Mostly these come from showbiz, or the strange showbiz purgatory of the "reality" show, which has produced such would be Ferragamos as the Real Housewives Adrienne Maloof and NeNe Leakes (though not, surprisingly, their colleague Lisa Vanderpump). Some, like the former child stars Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen and the lapsed Spice Girl Victoria Beckham, have ascended to the business's highest echelons. "Hijacking the Runway: How Celebrities Are Stealing the Spotlight from Fashion Designers," by Teri Agins, Gotham Books, 272 pp. 28. But Ms. Agins's index is a fascinating catalog of other, less successful ventures into the manufacture of clothing (what, you don't remember Katherine Heigl's line of scrubs for Peaches Uniforms?), the distribution of perfume (in the case of Jennifer Lopez, 14 perfumes) or both. Toward these ambitious but oft bumbling arrivistes, Ms. Agins assumes a wry detachment, acknowledging the dollars and excitement they sporadically channel into retail while chortling heartily at their missteps. Describing the "pesky" efforts of Kanye West, "carried away on a cloud of chiffon" as he rifles excitedly through the archives of the exacting couturier Ralph Rucci, whom he is wooing as an adviser, she is particularly tart. "First I was insulted, then I realized I was dealing with a very unsophisticated, impressionable guy," Mr. Rucci tells her. "It was just too sad." The incursion of the Kardashian sisters into Sears, meanwhile, is more of an opera buffa (though calling them the K.K.K. Clan seems over freighted). Examining their flimsily constructed jeans, Ms. Agins writes, "I had to laugh." The problem with this kind of subject matter is that it moves faster actually, much faster than a Town Car fleeing a phalanx of paparazzi. Now married, Mr. West and Kim Kardashian tote their baby, North, to fashion shows in Paris as if she were a handbag, provoking ever fresher discomforts; mere weeks ago, Ms. Kardashian appeared to be endorsing nothing more than body oil in photographs for Paper magazine intended to "break the Internet," while Mr. Rucci abruptly left his own label. As best as her deadline permits, Ms. Agins covers the roiling waterfront of celebrity (or as she and many others frequently mis term it, "notoriety"), but her book might have longer shelf life if she had settled into just one skiff; perhaps the gleaming yacht of Michael Kors. Mr. Kors demonstrates perfectly how porous the boundaries between fame and fashion have become; he owes his billionaire status to the persona he developed on "Project Runway." Fashion schools should spend less time training students to sketch, more "on media training and how to package themselves," he tells Ms. Agins. "Styling the Stars" chronicles a time when designers and actors knew their place: the former snipping and pinning, the latter lit up on a big screen, receiving a slack jawed, wide eyed mass gaze from the dark beneath. That's why they were "stars." "Styling the Stars: Lost Treasures from the Twentieth Century Fox Archive," by Angela Cartwright and Tom McLaren, Insight Editions, 304 pp. 75. Its co author, Angela Cartwright, played one of the children, Brigitta, in "The Sound of Music" and appeared in the television series "Lost in Space." (And it turns out even she has a line of clothing, accessories and housewares, including some charming tea cozies.) With Tom McLaren, also an actor, Ms. Cartwright has rescued a large number of "continuity" photographs from a major Hollywood studio, taken to ensure the consistency of hair, makeup and wardrobe from shot to shot and maintain the audience's suspension of disbelief. Even in black and white, these pictures have a warmth and immediacy that seems utterly lost in this era of computer generated imagery, when the common mantra is "fix it in post," meaning postproduction, and the effect is frequently ghostly and hard to locate in time. They are precious, too, because they come from a time before imagery was cheap and celebrities were Instagramming photographs of themselves in their bathrobes. (Are we even "celebrating" such people anymore, or merely having coffee with them over our laptops and smartphones?) There are new angles of Ms. Monroe, brandishing a comb or in a fishnet and feathers ensemble "deemed too risque" for "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend"; there is Ingrid Bergman, regal in a tiger printed maxidress as a big cat lolls at her feet; and Audrey Hepburn looking quizzical. And there is Elizabeth Taylor getting primped on the set of "Cleopatra." Despite her blockbuster success in such projects, Ms. Taylor had cash flow problems, Ms. Agins reports, hence her trailblazing foray into scents like Passion and White Diamonds. "Liz wasn't liquid," as a former Elizabeth Arden executive put it. But here, at least, she is solid gold. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
I am divorced, and I live with my parents. I moved home to Minnesota from Texas and decided to continue pursuing my bachelor's in psychology that I had abandoned after having started school in the fall of 2005. I have been attending classes part time while working full time to keep my health insurance since the summer of 2016. I am on track to graduate next fall. All the while, I have been fighting with chronic pain from a horseback riding accident and managing depression. Some days I have purpose and a drive to succeed, and other days I just want to give up. If you really want something in this life, you have to find that resilience to pursue it and just keep going. As a result of growing up in a broken and traumatic home, I began experiencing severe anxiety and depression in middle school. While it followed me throughout high school and college, I channeled my struggle with mental illness into the founding of a social enterprise, LEAD (Let's Empower, Advocate and Do), that provides mental health training and curriculum to schools, camps and youth serving organizations across the country. I am a senior undergraduate student and was recently named the third best student entrepreneur in the country in the Entrepreneurs' Organization Global Student Entrepreneurship Awards. I read a lot of self help books in high school, but most were written by a 50 year old psychologist who knows what they're talking about in a clinical sense, but not how it actually feels to be 16 and struggling with suicidal thoughts and panic attacks. Because of this, I decided to write a short book with practical advice for improving your outlook on the world and how to incorporate caring for your mental health into your routine through mindfulness, exercise, limited phone time and leaving room for what brings you joy in life. I have conducted a workshop at my high school on improving mental health and also do my best to bring that conversation to Wake Forest. My main philosophy is about learning how to make Tuesday your favorite day of the week, because if you're always waiting for the weekend or Christmas or your graduation, you are deciding that your happiness is circumstantial, and that therefore you don't control it, your environment does. However, if you decide that amid the boring, mundane, stressful and sometimes heartbreaking realities of life, that you are going to focus on what is good and build your life around that instead, you are taking back the control that you deserve over your own happiness. Rachael Cohen Hamilton of the University of Colorado Denver. She is in her second semester of graduate school, studying for a master's in public administration, with a focus in gender based violence. I am in my second semester of graduate school, studying for my master's in public administration, with a focus in gender based violence. Within my first weeks of being here I witnessed a homeless woman being raped outside of my apartment and obviously called 911. This in many ways was triggering to me, and I went into my first semester of grad school suffering from pretty severe post traumatic stress disorder, from both this and a previous incident. This is all happening as the Kavanaugh hearings are happening, and I am taking my first gender based violence class of my program. As I was taking the bus to and from work every day, I was entirely dissociative. I likely could not tell you what happened my entire first month of grad school, that's how detached I was from reality at that time. Luckily, I took the day off for Rosh Hashana and went to the market, and I was able to snap back into reality in a lot of ways. That day I made an appointment with my campus's sexual assault resource center. It was able to get me extensions on assignments, set me up with a therapist and wrote a letter of support for my department allowing me to drop the gender based violence class and receive a full refund. I also saw a psychiatrist and was prescribed beta blockers, which have helped bring down my heightened sense of danger wherever I go. This semester, having had time to help heal, I've been able to restart my concentration in gender based violence, which is more important to me now than ever, and I was still able to complete my other two graduate courses last semester and remain a full time student. It was so important for me to write you, to emphasize the importance of institutional support. I still struggle sometimes, but I think that without them helping me, I likely would have had no choice but to drop out and move back home. Fiona P. Pham of Johns Hopkins University. "Every single time you feel that you are trapped in your head, remember that every little step to make yourself feel better is a step, as long as you don't stop." I always knew that coming to study at another university in a foreign country is tough. You sleep and breathe in English, you learn to embrace flip flops in the classroom. You adapt. And that was part of my plan. I embrace new opportunities, learn as much as I can, make mistakes, make friends, have first drinks, pull all nighters. But depression was never part of my plan. I didn't even know it had a name until everything felt empty. So, here I was, FaceTiming my mother without the video because I could not let her see my face. My voice sounds fine, telling her I was fine, schoolwork is challenging but manageable I am applying to summer internships, competition is rough, but it's fine. And everything was fine. Except me. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
The Australian island of Tasmania might best be known as a former penal colony, but a new biking journey from Gray Co., a travel company based in Toronto, is trying to make its natural beauty famous as well. The four night private trip begins with a walking tour in the city of Hobart. Travelers then start on a series of rides ranging from 20 to 40 miles a day on terrain that varies from gentle rolling hills to more strenuous climbs: Options include a 26 mile ride through the Huon Valley and along the Derwent River; a 31 mile ride from the town of Triabunna to Swansea, which is on the isle's southeast coast and overlooks Freycinet National Park, and a 17 to 45 mile exploration of sights within the park such as Wineglass Bay. When they're not biking, travelers can choose from activities like touring a working oyster farm, kayaking and fishing. Cari Gray, the company founder, said that Tasmania has a unique geography that's best experienced by biking. "There are old growth forests, pristine lakes and endless beaches," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
When AccorHotels, the French based hotel group, planned the first American outpost of its trendy Mama Shelter brand, it chose Los Angeles and a vacant property that was built in 1926 as a hotel. Formerly the Hotel Wilcox, it was popular with the entertainment industry, owing to its prime Hollywood location. At some point in the 1970s, the Church of Scientology used the space. Fast forward to July 2015, and the Mama Shelter Los Angeles opened to a new generation of travelers. Walking into a lobby with a chalkboard ceiling, I was immediately struck by the large foosball table, the rapper DMX's early 2000s hit "Party Up (Up in Here)" playing in the background and Mad magazines scattered on tables. This eccentric boutique hotel really wants you to have fun. The open layout bar, lobby and restaurant fused effortlessly. This 70 room hotel is on Selma Avenue in Hollywood, almost equidistant from Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard. The Walk of Fame, the TCL Chinese Theater (formerly Grauman's Chinese Theater) and the iconic Capitol Records building are only blocks away. The immediate area around Mama Shelter is served by Metro Rail stations. I drove from Los Angeles International Airport and used a nearby self parking lot, which was less expensive than the hotel's valet service. My airy third floor Medium Mama room had a view of the Hollywood sign and a comfortable king bed. Every room has a 27 inch iMac computer, which doubles as a television. To browse the internet, keyboards are available by request. In a hat tip to the film industry, each room comes with a copy of a movie script. (My room had the script to "Swingers," the 1996 film written by Jon Favreau.) A small, empty minifridge, a far cry from the overpriced minibars at most hotels, was tucked under the work table in my room. Instead of a closet, there was a clothing rack with a handful of hangers. I heard live music from a bar down the street well into the morning, but I didn't mind (the bar has since closed). A glass enclosed shower with white tiles and a rectangular wall mounted sink lent a contemporary feeling. The hotel provided organic Absolution brand soap, shampoo and face cream. The rooftop bar features amazing views of the Hollywood landscape, along with much of the city. The space also doubles as a restaurant and yoga studio. The rooftop menu includes entrees like the eight ounce Le Royale wagyu burger ( 18) and grilled salmon ( 26). The bar on the first floor was festive and inviting. Among the many cocktails was the How I Met Your Mother, made with vodka, Aperol, grapes, lemon juice, mint and beer ( 12). Wi Fi is free. As a fan of Monopoly, I was pleased to see a table with an engraved Los Angeles version of the game. The hotel restaurant, with stucco walls and Spanish tile flooring, has a communal feeling with long tables and colorful blankets on the seats. An in house coffee shop opens at 7 a.m., and a happy hour is held at the bar from 3 to 9 p.m. on Sunday and Monday and 3 to 7 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. At Sunday brunch, I had the excellent French toast, with strawberries and bananas ( 12) and a side of maple glazed bacon ( 4). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
LOS ANGELES Three years ago, Trina Turk, a fashion and housewares designer who channels the sunny optimism of California, logged onto the real estate website Curbed.com and felt her blood pressure spike. On that day, the site ran an item about a house designed by the late midcentury architect John Lautner that had mysteriously slipped off the radar for 65 years. The story was brief and the details sketchy: The house was built in 1948, it was in the Echo Park neighborhood and it had been owned by one family for decades. Curbed quoted a listing agent and told readers that the "long lost" Lautner would hit the market within days. Along with her husband, Jonathan Skow, Ms. Turk is passionate about architecture and design. The couple own two historic homes: a Streamline Moderne built in Palm Springs in 1936 and nicknamed Ship of the Desert for its yachtlike scale and swooping lines, and a 1940s post and beam in Silver Lake designed by J. R. Davidson that serves as the couple's main residence. Each house was painstakingly and expensively restored by the couple, and each got the full color shelter mag treatment. For one visiting journalist, Mr. Skow a photographer and the designer of the couple's men's wear line, called Mr. Turk mixed up lime sours while Ms. Turk, dressed in a bright print caftan of her own design, showed off the desert view from the "ship" windows. For house collectors in Southern California, there is no better score no child more golden than a Lautner dwelling. The architect's bold, experimental, sui generis houses are marked by floating concrete roofs and forests of redwood paneling, and suggest a master of the universe in residence. Perhaps that's why Lautner houses are a favorite of Hollywood directors, who have cast the Garcia House as the lair of an international drug dealer in "Lethal Weapon 2," and the Sheats Goldstein Residence as the bachelor pad of the pornographer Jackie Treehorn in "The Big Lebowski." In reality, the Sheats Goldstein Residence is owned by an eccentric developer and fashion peacock named James Goldstein, who announced last year that he was donating it to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The move seemed to confirm that a Lautner house was less an assemblage of brick, wood and insulation than a habitable sculpture. The club of Lautner owners is peopled with the rich and famous, among them the designer Jeremy Scott; the actress Kelly Lynch and her husband, the screenwriter Mitch Glazer; the art book publisher Benedikt Taschen, who restored the architect's most famous design, Chemosphere, a disc shaped U.F.O. floating above a canyon; and the actress Gwyneth Paltrow, who in 2014, with her husband at the time, the Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, paid 14 million for what Curbed described as a "lesser Lautner" in Malibu. Ms. Turk tried to get a sneak peek, but the property was fenced off, so she and Mr. Skow settled for attending the broker's open. "They were very smart and scheduled a sunset open house with wine and cheese," she said. The dusky light and vino helped to obscure the home's modest size and beat up condition. The carport had been enclosed at some point to make a clunky bedroom addition, and decades of exposure to the elements and lack of maintenance had taken a toll. Every architecture buff in town was there, and as they got a look at the three tiny rooms and the faded redwood on the sides of the house, the general reaction was the same, Mr. Skow said, "The whole tone was, 'You would have to be insane to buy this.'" Ms. Turk added: "We've been on enough architecture tours to see what potential a house could be. It sounded like a fun project." The official name for the "lost" Lautner is the Jules Salkin Residence, after the developer who commissioned it. It's part of a group of houses the architect built early in his career with prefabricated roof structures, said Frank Escher, an architect in the Los Angeles firm Escher GuneWardena and an author of a definitive book on Lautner, "Between Earth and Heaven." By 1948, Lautner was a decade or so removed from studying under Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Ariz. He had moved to Los Angeles to assist Wright on residential projects and establish his own practice, where he promoted his mentor's style of organic modernism, blurring the lines between indoor and outdoor spaces. When Lautner submitted the building plans for the Salkin Residence to the city, he didn't yet have his architect's license that came in 1952 and another man had to sign for him, said Louis Wiehle, an architect who worked with Lautner in those days. Part of the reason the house went unnoticed for decades is that the owners never celebrated it. There were no Dwell magazine shoots or tours sponsored by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture the sorts of promotion that savvy owners of architecturally significant houses employ to raise market values and gain personal publicity. Melinda Maxwell Smith grew up in the Salkin Residence. For her, it wasn't so much lost as always there, taken for granted. She said her parents bought the house from the original owner for 12,000 in 1949, when she was 10 months old. Her parents were 1950s bohemians. "My mother ran something called Bobby's Burger Bar," Ms. Maxwell Smith said. "My father had been taken on as a photographer at The L.A. Times. He liked to hobnob with artistic people and forward thinkers. He was friends with Edward Weston. They hosted Democratic club meetings in the home and jazz sessions." "You knew not to touch the fridge or stereo or you'd get a shock," she continued. But Lautner's genius was nevertheless evident at that early stage of his career, when he was working with perhaps a 15,000 budget, modest even in 1940s dollars. Mr. Wiehle singled out the roof, so unusual in its construction that it was called "odd" in the city building plans. Instead of using wood frame or post and beam construction, Lautner created wing shape structural bents at eight foot intervals across the length of the house. At the center, two rows of columns support the structure, meaning the roof can float free from the glass walls like a parasol. "The roof is what individualizes the house," Mr. Wiehle said. "It's a very striking design. It establishes the importance he felt for a sheltering roof that allows for free play beneath it." Ms. Maxwell Smith's parents divorced when she was 10, and her mother, Barbara, remarried and stayed in the house until 1994. By then a widow, Barbara moved in with her boyfriend in Glendale and rented the place to an Australian filmmaker and his family, who stayed 17 years. "Now there's all this stuff about grounding, the importance of being in touch with the earth," Ms. Maxwell Smith said. "Lautner's intent was to keep people close to nature. You're walking on the earth; you're not rising above it. I didn't recognize living there as the privilege that I do now." One September day, in 2015, a little more than a year after the lost Lautner was put up for sale, Mr. Skow stood in the living room, flanked by a contractor, Marshall Knoll, and Ms. Bestor, whom the couple hired to undertake the Salkin Residence restoration. The house was a construction zone. The interior had been stripped down to the distinctive red concrete floor. The glass walls had been removed and a breeze was blowing in. It was the start of a major undertaking. Mr. Skow and Ms. Turk paid 1.2 million for the house, beating out 14 others, including the bassist Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Even a "nightmare" Lautner had started a bidding war. The couple also wrote a letter to Ms. Maxwell Smith's family explaining their intentions. Wisely, the words "tear down" did not appear. "Nothing is getting expanded, the bathrooms aren't twice as big," Ms. Bestor said. "I think we're changing the tub into a shower." The ill conceived bedroom addition was ripped out and the carport restored, the sagging foundation was lifted and the redwood siding was sanded down and restained to a luster. Much of the day to day managing of the project fell to Mr. Skow, while Ms. Turk saw to their fashion and housewares line and weighed in on the material choices and finishes. "Jonathan was horrified that I wanted black kitchen countertops," Ms. Turk said. Last fall, the couple began furnishing the house, mostly with vintage pieces they had bought over time at Los Angeles area flea markets, like a Danish sofa and a Neutra coffee table. They also added colorful rugs they had picked up on a trip to Morocco, in keeping with the low key bohemian vibe. For Mr. Skow, the finished house feels like a groovy 1960s or '70s hippie cabin. "The thing I love about it is there's this weird rustic element mixed with this super space age quality," he said. They envision the Salkin Residence as an office for Mr. Skow and a place where the couple will host out of town guests. "When the glass doors are open, it feels magical in here," Mr. Skow said. "It's a transcendent experience. It's totally cool." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
"How many headbands do I have?" asked , the star of "Booksmart," who was standing in the elevator of a Miu Miu store in New York City recently. She was there for a fitting for the custom gown she would wear to the Oscars as a presenter, and after a pause she answered: "Easily over 50." She pointed out a dainty crystal studded headband with a bow that she wore to a Miu Miu fashion show last year. At the Golden Globes, where she was nominated for her role as Molly in "Booksmart" a comedy about two best friends in their last days of high school she wore a shimmering navy Oscar de la Renta dress with a matching braided headband. "I love bows, color and whimsy," Ms. Feldstein said. Last year, she began working with Erin Walsh, a stylist whose clients include Anne Hathaway and Sarah Jessica Parker. Ms. Walsh was called in at the last minute to pull together looks for Ms. Feldstein for the movie's premiere. "We had never met before, but she walked in saying, 'I was thinking ... headbands,'" Ms. Feldstein said. "We have this Yiddish word for meant to be, 'bashert,' and it was just meant to be." This meeting was unusual for Ms. Feldstein, 26, who did not regularly use stylists, instead preferring to dress herself. Two years ago, she wore a dress to the Oscars that she found at Saks Fifth Avenue. That same year, she wore her high school prom dress to the Screen Actors Guild awards, where the cast of her breakout movie, "Lady Bird," was up for an award. Her decision was both a practical and symbolic one: "It was this sweet moment, because in 'Lady Bird,' my character ends the movie in her prom dress," she said. At the start of the fitting, Ms. Feldstein and Ms. Walsh stared at the dress on the hanger in awe and let out twin squeals of delight. After being zipped into the dress, Ms. Feldstein entered the fitting room, which was decked out in floor to ceiling baby blue, with Baroque inspired wallpaper and carpet to match. "Oh, this is just beyond," Ms. Walsh said. The corseted white gown, made of silk gazar and organza, was hand embroidered with a black rose pattern and covered in sequins that make the dress look liquid when it moves. The full skirt is supported by layers of tulle and other fabrics. The dress took 190 hours to create, with 80 hours devoted to the embroidery alone. Sophia Loren was the inspiration for the look, Ms. Walsh said, pointing out the square halter neck of the dress. "We wanted old Hollywood glamour," she said. "Something incredibly sensual, powerful, feminine and whimsical to create this movie star kind of moment, and the color and fabrics were influenced by that." Ms. Feldstein's voice filled the room when she spoke, clear and excited. "It's not in charge of me, I'm in charge of it," she said, laughing as she walked in a circle around the room after being pinned and prodded for fit adjustments. "It makes her look like a beam of light," Ms. Walsh said. Ms. Feldstein hopped from side to side, angling her face as she tested the weight of the dress. "It's heavy, but my dress in 'Hello, Dolly!' was 20 pounds and we did a whole polka in it," she said, referring to her Broadway debut in 2017. "Trust me, I'll be O.K." Soon came the ultimate test: Could she sit in it? Ms. Feldstein perched on a chair, her skirts billowing around her. "Good luck to my mom sitting next to me," she said of her mother, who is her date at the ceremony. "She'll be using it as a blanket." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
If you've spent any time in sparsely populated, hauntingly sublime far West Texas, you know that this is D.I.Y. country. Unlike at Big Bend, Texas's other (and larger and better known) national park about four hours south, there are no roofs to sleep under here or hot meals to order or waiters to refill your post hike glass of wine. If Guadalupe's first come, first served campsites and RV spots are already taken or you'd like to shower you'll have to drive to Whites City, N.M. (35 miles), or the tiny Texas towns of Dell City (44 miles) or Van Horn (64 miles) for lodging. Same goes if you need food or gas. As one park volunteer put it to me, "This isn't a theme park; it's a wilderness park." He seemed slightly annoyed that you might come all this way and expect it to be anything else. Over millions of years, these marine creatures formed a 400 mile long reef, which ringed the sea's shoreline. The sea eventually dried up, some 90 percent of all life mysteriously went extinct at the end of the Permian era and the horseshoe shaped reef was buried for eons beneath mineral salts and sediments. And then, many more millenniums later, large chunks of it were exhumed as uplift pushed its fossil studded remains skyward and erosion dusted them off. Now, geologists (and the oil and gas companies that employ them) come from around the world to study the well preserved stratotypes in this extensive desert laboratory. The reconfigured landscape, with its tiers of divergent ecosystems, is a bit of a mind bender. The lower elevations look like what most people assume all of Texas looks like: scrubby flatlands light on trees, thick with prickly things. But then you find yourself amid verdant pockets nurtured by springs and seeps, as in McKittrick Canyon, where mule deer and ringtails slink through groves of bigtooth maples and chinquapin oaks and velvet ash that blaze with color each fall. The highest elevations, which are officially classified as "an isolated extension of the Rocky Mountains " and are prone to winter snowstorms and made lush by rain, might as well be in Canada. It's a strange thing to look up and see evergreens raised to the West Texas sky like sweet treats being offered to a desert deity. And at Guadalupe, you do a lot of looking up. In addition to 8,751 foot Guadalupe Peak the Instagram influencer that everyone wants a selfie with the park is also home to the next three highest points in the state (not to mention nine of the highest 10, if unofficially). Collectively advertised as "the top of Texas ," the climbable though strenuous summits are dangled like medals to lure both b ox check ing climbers aiming to reach each state's highest point and Texans whose natal pride leaves them vulnerable to a challenge. Like many road trippers, we had once gone right past Guadalupe's half hidden wonders on our way back from Carlsbad Caverns, its sister national park 40 miles up the road in New Mexico. (The caverns are part of the same ancient reef that the exposed Guads are made of.) It was already late in the day and we hadn't allotted the recommended six to eight hours to reach Guadalupe Peak, though we did stop to snap a few photos of El Capitan, the thousand foot tall limestone prow that catches everyone's attention from the highway. As we drove on, I scrolled through geotagged posts on Instagram and began to brood over the fact that I had never mugged for the camera with an arm slung around the metal pyramid atop the famed zenith. It seemed a shameful omission on my native Texan C.V. And so, I took the bait. A few months later, we headed back so we could say we'd been there, climbed that. With more than 80 miles of trails and a number of way off the grid backcountry campgrounds, Guadalupe has a reputation for being a hard core hiker's paradise. (The ultra hard core can now tackle the hundred mile Guadalupe Ridge Trail, which starts in the park and ends just past Carlsbad Caverns; you'll need to hire an outfitter to drop water caches along the route.) If I were to boil down my own philosophy on ideal outdoor recreation, a la Michael Pollan, it would be, "Long walks. Not too difficult. Mostly shaded." So, a few phrases jumped out as I skimmed a brochure promoting the park's day hikes: "Extremely rocky." "Avoid in midday heat." "No trail the last 1/4 mile." "Avoid during high winds." "Involves some scrambling." There was a chance that I might not be the park's target audience. At least with three full days ahead of us, we had time to ease our way in before tackling Guadalupe Peak. We poked around a few of the park's Old West structures, like the rock ruins of the Pinery Station, once a stopover on the Butterfield Overland Mail Route, and the rugged Frijole Ranch compound. Its 1876 stone house and red schoolhouse are now a cultural museum that traces the stories of the region's early inhabitants, from the Mescalero Apaches, whose mescal cooking pits and petroglyphs have been found nearby, to the hardy (and yes, legume loving) homesteaders who ingeniously rigged all kinds of handmade contraptions to pump water and keep the gas lamps lit. Behind Frijole, we picked up a trail that leads to two of the six springs that keep this part of the park golf course green. The only obstacles along the short, wheelchair accessible paved path to Manzanita Spring, a reed lined pond that used to be the local swimming hole, were copious ringtail droppings, which looked a little too similar to the cherry pie Larabars I had stashed in my pack. The route got a little rockier as we continued past well named Nipple Hill until the desert petered out, overtaken by a woodland of maples and oaks, fiery limbed Texas madrones and maidenhair ferns. "Please protect this fragile moist oasis," read a sign near where Smith Spring bubbles up out of the limestone escarpment, "by remaining in the 'people section.'" That there is a public "people section" is a testament to the vision of a couple of conservation minded landowners who fell for this alluringly inhospitable part of the world. Both J.C. Hunter, a local county judge, and Wallace Pratt, who was the first geologist on the Humble Oil Company payroll, bought up sizable spreads that were eventually donated or sold to the National Park Service, paving the way for Guadalupe Mountains National Park to be established in 1972. In those early days, it was hotly debated whether the new park should build any roads or facilities to accommodate visitors, or if, as per the Wilderness Act of 1964, it should be left "untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." Some boosters worried that without any amenities, only a small segment of the population would be sprightly enough to traverse Guadalupe's undomesticated backcountry. "Go in while you're young," was one wilderness advocate's rejoinder. One morning at the Pine Springs Visitor Center, we overheard a man asking where to start the drive through the park. The ranger broke it to him gently: There aren't any roads through Guadalupe. Its splendor doesn't fully unfold until you get well off the pavement. To get to the remote Dog Canyon campgrounds, an isolationist's Eden near the park's northern edge, you either have to backpack 15 miles or else drive up into New Mexico and then back down into Texas, a nearly three hour excursion. But Guadalupe offers many favorable returns on investment. After about an hour of maneuvering at times, "American Ninja Warrior" style through jumbo boulders in a dry wash along the "moderate" Devil's Hall trail, I got to test out my nerve. We scaled Hiker's Staircase, natural "steps" that should be renamed the Hiker's Slippery Ladder (you'll want to stick to the left). Just a little bit farther came the trail's eponymous payoff: a narrow corridor squeezed between hundred foot limestone walls that turned out to be even more spectacular than all those like bait photos I'd seen online. So too did the rewards seem worth the effort when we decided to go off roading to get to Williams Ranch, a sequestered 1908 house reachable via a rough one lane back road. "We highly suggest you have a high clearance, four wheel drive vehicle, and that's neither," park employee Kristi Haynie told a couple in front of us who wanted to know if they could navigate the rocks and ruts in their station wagon. Luckily, our S.U.V. fit the bill, though "you will lose paint," she assured us. Puncturing a tire was also probable. And the cost for a tow? Two thousand dollars, minimum. One visitor, Ms. Haynie said as she handed us a gate key, broke his axle, and the truck that came to haul him out got two flats and fell into a crevice. Feeling duly warned, we checked our spare, aired down our tires and headed for the mountain's seldom reached western escarpment. As we lumbered along through a sea of spiny ocotillos with red blooms on their fingertips, we had an unadulterated view of the Guads' much studied rock exposures. The drive turned out to be a succession of lesser evil decisions: Do we avoid the small boulder or steer clear of the crater? Gun it up the gravel hill or chance getting stuck in a gully? Sharp tendrils of mesquite scraped the car's flanks like nails on a chalkboard. It took us an hour to go a little more than seven miles. Lord knows how long it took the mule train that hauled the ranch house's lumber all this way, but the teal trimmed structure still stands proud. It's a tribute to the grit of those for whom the solitude and breathtaking panorama outweighed the lonely toil (though one well worn, if unconfirmed, story involves a new bride who high tailed it back to civilization after just one night). After a quick jaunt on foot to get a better look at the oldest rocks in the range, we capped off our brief residency with a picnic on the porch. And then it was back, slow and steady, the way we came. On our last morning, a funny thing happened on the way to the park. Because the Pine Springs campsites had filled quickly for the weekend, we had been happily ensconced at the Hotel El Capitan, in Van Horn. It was an hour's drive away, but the commute gave me time to plot each day's itinerary and to fall awe struck anew each time the Guads rose into view from the highway. (And, since the park is just within the Mountain time zone, we would arrive each morning at the same time as when we'd left the hotel.) We had our sights set on conquering Guadalupe Peak, but as I flipped through my notes, I began to realize something. I'd asked just about everyone we'd met rangers, volunteers, friendly strangers what their favorite parts of Guadalupe were. Not a single person mentioned the hike that everyone comes here to do. Guadalupe Peak may be the hook that draws visitors in, but it's just the tip of the park's sublime iceberg. One route recommended repeatedly was the nearly nine mile loop through the Bowl, the alpine island in the sky, to Hunter Peak (at 8,377 feet, merely the sixth highest in Texas). The vistas, we were assured, were even more stunning, plus we wouldn't have to do any backtracking (though we would have to trudge up one of the steepest grades in the park) and it was far less trafficked. By all accounts, it would be more bang for our buck. I queried the park ranger on duty at the visitor center: Was there any convincing reason we should hike to Guadalupe Peak instead? "Well, you would have that accomplishment," she said. I could collect my "top of Texas" medal another time. We were off to the Bowl. The march up Bear Canyon, basically a two mile StairMaster session in full sun, was as grueling as we'd been warned it would be. When we were nearly to the top (or so I kept telling myself), a sonic boom rippled through the air, momentarily interrupting the birdsong echoing off the canyon's upper reaches. And then, another one. About 35 miles away, Jeff Bezos' suborbital Blue Origin "space vehicle" and its rocket booster had landed on the Amazon billionaire' s West Texas ranch after another successful test launch. We continued our own mission skyward. After roaming through the Bowl's shallow, secluded valley (we'd see only one other hiker all day), we ascended one more rocky staircase to get to the top of Hunter Peak. There were hundred mile views of the park's "greatest hits" in every direction: We could see the gypsum dunes shimmering on the desert floor, the 45,000 acre relict forest just behind us, El Capitan's noble profile and, rising above it all, Guadalupe Peak. As we made the long descent, I found myself fixating on the contradictory meanings of the phrase "it's all downhill from here." Going down proved no easier as we tested fears both known (my husband got to see a rattlesnake's tonsils) and previously unidentified (I started to panic along several no margin for error precipices). And even though we had been told, insistently and many times, to bring at least a gallon of water per person, we had brought two ish gallons and ran out less than halfway through. Such a rookie mistake. That evening, after eight hours and four minutes on the trail, as we limped back into the hotel, we passed the Blue Origin team. They were gathered around the courtyard's fountain, drinking celebratory beers, seemingly as giddy with relief as we were to have made it back down in one piece. In the early '70s, there was talk of installing a tramway that would take visitors to just below Guadalupe Peak, allowing many more people to revel in the beauty of the lesser seen high country. The plan was ultimately scuttled. This would be no theme park. It's a wilderness park. And long may it remain . Jordan Breal is a writer based in Austin, Tex . Her last article for The New York Times was about the Padre Island National Seashore along the Texas coast. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Who knows when a dance partnership will blossom? Alessandra Ferri and Herman Cornejo were members of American Ballet Theater at the same time, but didn't discover their chemistry until they were cast as the leads in "Cheri," Martha Clarke's 2013 production about an older woman and her young lover. Ms. Ferri was 50 and Mr. Cornejo was 32. On Wednesday at the Joyce Theater they expanded their pas de deux with "TRIO ConcertDance," which also was a showcase for the American pianist Bruce Levingston, whose vivid hands floating over keys is like a dance in itself. He performs selections by Philip Glass, Scarlatti, Satie and Chopin, which makes the mostly languid choreography easier to endure. While it isn't a tacky evening Ms. Ferri, who is Italian, and Mr. Cornejo, from Argentina, have too much innate elegance for that the program's unofficial theme, sensuality, grows more prosaic over time. Certainly, both exude heat, but it's not close to what Ms. Ferri had with Julio Bocca, her longtime partner at Ballet Theater. A bigger test comes in June when she and Mr. Cornejo will dance "Romeo and Juliet" there. The two solos stood out most, showing the dancers as individuals unencumbered by the schmaltzy potential of looming romance. (I lost count of how many times Mr. Cornejo held Ms. Ferri from behind or nuzzled her.) But "Senza Tempo," to Bach, by Fang Yi Sheu, captured a sliver of her purity in a simple exploration of port de bras and walking. "Momentum," choreographed by Mr. Cornejo to music by Mr. Glass, is an unpretentious exploration of his clean virtuosity. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Each week, technology reporters and columnists from The New York Times review the week's news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here. Greetings, friends. I'm Brian X. Chen, a tech columnist, meaning my job is to obsess over tech news so you don't have to. So here's the CliffsNotes version of the week in tech. I remember a time when tech companies were desperate to be in the news. Just a decade ago, making headlines usually meant a company's gadget or software product was making a big splash and getting nice publicity. But nowadays, tech companies are more powerful than ever, and journalists are focusing on holding them accountable rather than cheerleading. So I bet Facebook wishes it could be out of the news cycle, even briefly. This week, a British parliamentary committee released confidential Facebook emails and documents as part of its investigation into online misinformation. And they did not make Mark Zuckerberg's social networking empire look good. The documents revealed how Facebook treated user data as a bargaining chip. The social network had a "white list" agreement with companies it favored, including Airbnb, Lyft and Netflix. The arrangement involved sharing user data with those parties that other companies were restricted from obtaining. The revelations paint Facebook as if it were the head of an internet syndicate with the mission of making money and crushing competition. That's a terrible image at a time that Facebook is trying to win back people's trust by saying its true mission is to connect people with people. In a nondenial statement, Facebook said it never sold people's data. None of the bad publicity is lost on Facebook employees, as it appears to be affecting morale. BuzzFeed reported that Facebook had divided into three camps: people on Team Zuckerberg, people who believe the press is creating biased narratives, and a group that believes the scandals show that the company is on the brink of a meltdown. Incidentally, Glassdoor, a site where people can anonymously rank their employers, released a report this week that found Facebook was the No. 7 place to work of 2018, down from No. 1 last year. (Morale dip aside, that's still a great overall ranking; I think people just love having Philz Coffee on campus.) At least Facebook isn't alone in hot water. Last Friday (because companies like to save their bad news for weekends) Marriott International revealed that hackers had breached its Starwood reservation system and had stolen the personal data of up to 500 million guests. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Have you ever daydreamed of ice cubes? The idea sounded absurd until I undertook the Marathon des Sables, a 147 mile adventure through the Sahara's scorching 130 degree temperatures, towering sand dunes and steep mountain passes. When I crossed the finish line on April 14, the race had shown me the joy of suffering and how to appreciate life's simple pleasures. The Marathon des Sables is the brainchild of Patrick Baeur, a garrulous Frenchman in his early 60s who loves rock 'n' roll (each day's running starts with AC/DC's "Highway to Hell"), brims with positive energy, and possesses a keen business sense. He hatched the idea for the race in 1986 after completing his own soul expanding romp around the Sahara. Since then, he has built the Marathon des Sables into one of the world's most iconic races. The Discovery Channel dubbed it the toughest footrace on earth. Why run the Marathon des Sables? There are as many reasons as the 1,167 competitors from 52 nations who started this year's race. Americans Matt and Calvin McKinley thought it would make a great father son bonding experience. Duncan Slater, a former British platoon sergeant and double amputee, ran on his artificial legs to raise awareness for the Walking With the Wounded organization. (Rumors had circulated that Duncan's friend, Prince Harry, who has championed the benefits of healthfully confronting personal struggles, would join him. Maybe next year.) I took on the Marathon des Sables because experiences that challenge my notion of comfort expand my sense of meaning. The opposite is also true: The more I seek comfort, the more unfulfilled I feel. Extreme endurance adventures offer me a tool to self discovery, narrowing the gulf between self imposed limits and actual potential. My goal this year was to complete the two toughest footraces on the planet: the Marathon des Sables in April and the Badwater 135 in July. Unlike many American ultramarathons, the Marathon des Sables takes place as a series of five competitive stages over roughly five days. (There is also a sixth, noncompetitive stage that benefits charity.) The race organizers provide rationed water at checkpoints throughout each stage. The daily stages can take anywhere from two to 12 hours to complete, with one notable exception. The fourth day is the longest, and can take runners from eight hours to 35 hours to finish. (You don't have to qualify for the Sahara run, but organizers will cut you off after 35 hours on the fourth stage.) Another twist is that competitors must carry a backpack filled with their calories for the entire race, a sleeping bag and numerous other pieces of required gear. My favorite was the venom pump I would use in case I spooked a snake or a scorpion. We also lived like nomads. Local Berbers built traditional tents that housed up to eight competitors between stages. There weren't any toilets. We used plastic bags and peed in plain sight of one another. How do runners prepare for the Marathon des Sables? I ran a lot, including the Badwater Cape Fear 51.4 mile race to get comfortable with sand running. I tested and retested my gear. I read race reports. I sweated in the sauna. And I trained my gut to become accustomed to dehydrated food: Every day for three months, I ate instant mashed potatoes after I ran. It took almost no time to realize how ineffectively I had prepared for the Marathon des Sables. I could feel the Sahara laughing at me. The mesh in my shoes let in fine sand, causing me to shake out large amounts every few miles. At the end of the first day, I begged at the medical tent for tape to cover the tops of my shoes. Before turning me away, one French doctor peered into my eyes and said, "I treat people, not shoes." I noticed that people who complained of sore shoulders were receiving lots of tape. And so began my daily ritual of feigning shoulder pain to solve my shoe problem. Nathan DeWall used extra tape on his shoes each day to keep the Sahara desert sand from seeping through the mesh. The first stage acclimated us to the desert and our living conditions. We also learned the race's grave risks. To start the race, you have to show a race doctor an EKG that was taken within 30 days of the start of the race, and jeeps and helicopters were on standby to take people to nearby hospitals if needed. One man experienced cardiac arrest at a water checkpoint. His training partner howled in horror. The doctors revived him with CPR. His race was over, but he left with his life. The next two days involved dozens of miles of climbing and descending sand dunes and mountains. When I reached the top of a rocky climb, I celebrated by giving one of my tent mates a high five. Ian Corless, a British photographer and founder of the Talk Ultra podcast, shot me a grin and said, "Get ready for the fun part." As I peered down a 40 percent gradient, a little voice whispered in my head, "You're going to die on this mountain." I ignored it and followed the herd of other runners, grasping an affixed rope. When the rope ended, I used my feet as skis to plow through hundreds of feet of thick, soft sand. I glissandoed down the mountain, a speck of a person having a larger than life moment, freed from the fear that had paralyzed me a few minutes before. It was magic. The final two competitive stages covered 53 and 26.2 miles, respectively. I buddied up with one of my tent mates, Tim Hunnewell, which made the miles fly by. We learned a lot about each other, including our mutual fondness for the band Dokken, our unending love for our families, and our strategies to avoid sleeping while we ran. When things got rough, I repeated a mantra that Lisa Smith Batchen, an American ultrarunning legend who won the Marathon des Sables in 1999, shared with me repeatedly: "Suck it up, cupcake." The best part of the Marathon des Sables occurred between the stages. We wolfed down as many calories as our bodies could handle. The saltiest foods made up my personal menu every night, such as nuts, beef jerky and dehydrated camping meals. Dried fruit always tasted delicious. We laughed, regaled one another with our adventures and struggles, hobbled around the tent camp, and fantasized about the food and cold drinks we would consume when we returned to civilization. My tent mates and I started the race as strangers; we ended the race as brothers. When I crossed the finish line, I shook the hand of Mr. Bauer (the race founder), received my finisher's medal, and felt a mixture of accomplishment and relief. But as the hours passed, I sensed something lingering beneath the surface, letting me know I could draw strength from my Sahara adventure whenever I felt unsure, unable or unwilling. I was ready to go home. As my homeward flight glided away, the attendant asked if I wanted ice cubes in my soda. I counted as she scooped out each one. One, two, three, four, five. I took a sip, sighed and smiled. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
In the big, light filled studios of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's luxurious Midtown home, many of the company's women have been playing games. A dancer falls, and everyone else has to catch her: a trust building exercise, common in acting classes and corporate retreats. At a rehearsal last week, the raucously laughing dancers were having such a good time that anyone outside the studio might have been surprised to learn that they were preparing "Shelter," a work that frankly addresses the pain and isolation of homelessness. Created in 1988 by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar for her company, Urban Bush Women, "Shelter" was first performed by the Ailey troupe in 1992 and remained a popular work in its repertory for much of the next decade. After a 15 year break, the company is bringing it back on Dec. 12. As Ms. Zollar recalled after coaching the Ailey dancers last week, the original Urban Bush Women production of "Shelter," half of a larger work called "Heat," arose from her shock at the prevalence of homelessness in New York City and more, from her shock at losing that sense of shock. "I realized that as a coping mechanism I had stopped seeing the people who were homeless," she said. "That was more dangerous, because it was a loss of humanity." "Shelter" was a way of directing attention, and not just to the problem and the pain. "I would look at the same people for years, surviving," Ms. Zollar said. "I started to see a resilience." And so "Shelter," set to the sound of drums and poetry, became about that strength, too. It begins with six women in a pile, thrown together and yet isolated, and builds to explosions of power and solidarity. But for the piece to be effective, the extremely successful Ailey company, with its fancy headquarters and glamorous galas, has to create a credible sense of "there but for the grace of God go I." If audiences are to feel that "it could happen to you" as the work's recorded text insists while the dancers point implicating fingers at viewers then the strong Ailey dancers must be believably beaten down. That's where the acting exercises come in. They weren't part of the process for the first Ailey production in 1992, though it was greeted as a brave and welcome departure for the troupe. Along with the difficult subject matter, critics at the time noted the rawness of the aesthetic the unbound hair, the absence of makeup, the emotional exposure. Ailey dancers past and present are also quick to characterize the work as "raw." Danni Gee, a member of the first Ailey cast, remembered how she and her fellow dancers labored to "take the Ailey sheen off" and how they cried after every performance. And these days Ms. Zollar is a revered dance matriarch, honored for lifetime achievement at this year's New York Dance and Performance Awards, also known as the Bessies. But in 1992, her company was young and no other troupe had yet danced any of her works. The invitation from Ailey was a huge break. "I was so intimidated," Ms. Zollar recalled. "I just gave the steps, and I didn't really know how to coach. It prompted me to figure out what the Urban Bush Women methodology is." Now she has a method: "I call it an actor's process through a dancer's physicality with a community organizer's analysis." The actor games are a crucial part of the approach, she said. "That's how we get to an authenticity, a truth, which is the most important thing for me." At the rehearsal last week, it was easy to see what Ms. Zollar meant. Like anyone else, she was impressed by the Ailey dancers' power. When Jacqueline Green marched with her long legs and flexed feet scything instantly to the level of her head, over and over, even the air seemed to rush out of her way. Ms. Zollar greeted the sight with incredulous awe. But she wanted to push the dancers past their comfort and control; firmly and warmly, she did. The fall and catch sequences, which are in the choreography as well as in the preparatory exercises, should not become rote, she said. The dancers must forget that the falls are coming. Even more important, she urged the dancers to use their own exhaustion, rather than hide it or "indicate" it. The work is certainly demanding. Linda Celeste Sims, a member of the current cast and the kind of dancer who seems incapable of fatigue, said, "It seems simple at first, but I'm tired all the way through." She continued, "You get exhausted from being exhausted." For Robert Battle, Ailey's artistic director and the person responsible for choosing the repertory, "Shelter" has taken on new meaning. "It's hard to watch the news lately," he said last week. "I watch and I feel afraid." In this context, Ms. Zollar's dance isn't only about homelessness. "It's about the shelters that are disappearing," he explained. "There used to be an expectation that people could come together after a disaster or a mass shooting, but I feel less of that now." By giving expression to this fear and a resistance to it, Mr. Battle says he hopes "Shelter" can provide audiences with "a shelter in the theater." Over the years, Ms. Zollar has occasionally altered the dance. After Hurricane Katrina, she substituted a text to address that disaster. But the work doesn't really require such updating, she said: homelessness seems as pervasive and intractable to her now as it did in 1988. Yet the current Ailey production finishes with a new poem listing the recent onslaught of hurricanes and raising the alarm about how climate change threatens shelter for everyone. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
SAN FRANCISCO Over the last decade, this has become the tech industry's hometown. But as voters go to the polls Tuesday to choose a mayor in one of San Francisco's most disputed elections in recent memory, the industry that set off a high rise construction boom and has been blamed for a housing crisis in the city is fading into the background. That is quite a contrast to the last open mayoral election, in 2011. Tech leaders were featured in a video for their preferred candidate, Ed Lee, who went on to win and was re elected in 2015. It has been viewed more than 600,000 times on YouTube. This year, several candidates are vying to replace Mr. Lee, who died in December, but none of them has tried to enlist tech in anything so striking. What is happening or rather not happening in San Francisco is part of a broader urge in the tech community to stay behind the scenes in state and national politics. The overwhelmingly Democratic leaning Silicon Valley was shocked by the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump and aghast at his anti immigration ban, which cut to the heart of their existence as a multinational industry whose companies have often been founded by immigrants. But predictions that, for better or worse, tech and politics were henceforth going to be inseparable did not hold up. Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, drew national attention in 2015 when he said he would move his employees out of Indiana if a new state law that would have legalized discrimination was not changed. (It was.) Mr. Benioff, a native of San Francisco and the most prominent tech executive in the city, was a financial backer of Mr. Lee. But he said in an interview Friday that the mayoral election was too important, too closely fought and too contentious for him to support any of the top four candidates: Jane Kim, Mark Leno, Angela Alioto or London Breed. "This is the hottest election San Francisco has ever had for mayor," he said. "I care so deeply, I cannot support one of the candidates. I don't want to disenfranchise my ability to work with whoever is elected." "I've just been super busy," Mr. Altman wrote in an email, adding that he had "no idea" why others had been so quiet. A spokesman for Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co founder who previously showed an intense interest in politics, waved off an inquiry, saying: "Don't really have anything new to report." Mr. Brin has no political thoughts to share at present, a Google spokeswoman said. Even Peter Thiel, who backed Mr. Trump when hardly anyone else in Silicon Valley would, appears not to be making any donations at the moment. Hunter Walk, formerly with Google's YouTube and now a venture capitalist, appeared in the 2011 video supporting Mr. Lee. "That was the beginning and end of my viral video career," he said. Others in the video were Marissa Mayer, then chief executive of Yahoo, and Biz Stone, a co founder of Twitter. Mr. Walk said he was supporting Ms. Breed, the mayoral candidate who seems to have the most backing from tech. Mr. Stone said he was "usually not public about politics" but had been helping Ms. Breed "with social media strategy and expertise," introducing her to knowledgeable people. Ms. Mayer, who could not be reached for comment, gave 500, the legal maximum, to Ms. Breed. If tech is determined to be low key about San Francisco politics, there is an eminently practical reason: fears of a backlash. Ron Conway, a venture capitalist, was widely regarded and sometimes condemned as the power behind the throne for Mr. Lee, whose reign was very good for tech. Attempts to hold Uber and Airbnb responsible for skirting regulations largely failed. Twitter got a major tax break to stay in the city. Mr. Conway championed Ms. Breed, a president of the board of supervisors who became interim mayor after Mr. Lee's death, as the next mayor. At Mr. Lee's funeral, he told Mr. Benioff, "We have to focus on getting London elected." (Mr. Conway disputed that, writing, "At most, I acknowledged the historic significance of an African American woman succeeding the city's first Chinese American mayor.") The venture capitalist moved too aggressively, however. The progressive wing of the board of supervisors removed Ms. Breed from the interim position after a few weeks, saying they did not want her to have an undue advantage in the election. One of the supervisors, Hillary Ronen, said in a direct attack on Mr. Conway that there were "white, rich men billionaires in this city" who "steered the policies" of the two previous mayoral administrations. "They got us into this absolute mess we are in today where poor people and people of color cannot afford to live in this city," she said. Mr. Benioff called Mr. Conway "the Koch brothers of San Francisco," a reference to the siblings who are heavy backers of conservative causes. He added: "That is his prerogative as a citizen of the United States. He feels he's doing the right thing. He's a good person. But he doesn't speak for me or tech." Mr. Conway now says he has more important places to spend his time and resources than the mayor's race. "The future of our country and our progressive values are threatened by this president and this Congress, and candidly stopping them is ultimately far more important to me than who is elected Mayor of San Francisco on June 5th," he wrote in an email. Mr. Conway emphasized that he is still backing Ms. Breed, citing his belief that "she's the only candidate who will truly tackle our city's housing and homeless crises." Gayle Conway, Mr. Conway's wife, gave 200,000 in April to a committee that criticized Ms. Kim, who is on the city's board of supervisors, for her vote to reinstate San Francisco's sheriff, Ross Mirkarimi, six years ago. The sheriff, who was accused of domestic abuse, pleaded guilty to one count of false imprisonment. Mayor Lee suspended him and pressed for his removal, but the supervisors gave him his job back. Domestic abuse, Mr. Conway said, is an issue he and his wife "have long been passionate about." But the battle over the sheriff's reinstatement was really about the mayor's power to fire someone duly elected by the voters. A spokeswoman for Ms. Kim, Julie Edwards, said, "Ron Conway has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars attacking Jane Kim because she believes City Hall belongs to the people, not the billionaires. It's that simple." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here. It was the actor Bruce Myers's voice, above all, that people tended to remember. "His deep lion's voice will resonate no more," was how the French newspaper Le Monde opened its tribute to Mr. Myers, who died of the new coronavirus in Paris on April 15 at 78. A favorite of the great international director Peter Brook, with whom he worked for nearly 50 years, Mr. Myers, with his elegant diction and reverberant tones, inspired comparisons to the famously mellifluous John Gielgud. Writing about Mr. Myers's performance in an evening of short works directed by Mr. Brook in 2011, Charles McNulty of The Los Angeles Times called him "a human Stradivarius," with his "lush caress of vowels and precise choreography of consonants." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
When the author Susan Orlean wrote about Bon Jovi for Rolling Stone in 1987, she gave the hair of the band's frontman, Jon Bon Jovi, a lot of attention: "Its color is somewhere between chestnut and auburn, and the frosty streaks in it give it a sizzling golden sheen. When Jon musses it or boosts it with a squirt of hair spray, it flares around his face like a nimbus, a halo an aura of shiny fuzz. The hair has great body and good texture and a nice, natural wave, and the ends don't look the least bit split." The hair was crucial important enough that a genre took its name from it. At its peak, hair metal style was just as extreme and specific as the ethos of drag queens lip syncing disco hits: Whether you achieved voluminous hair through a wig or through Aqua Net, you presented yourself in an exaggerated fashion that suggested even more passion than the music you were performing. Some hair metal bands opted for full tilt rock fashion and cosmetics, while others didn't, but they all had the hair even the ones who insisted they were playing hard rock or glam rock. Hair metal bands were frequently absurd, mostly interested in women as eye candy and blatantly careerist. Their sound thrived from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, bookended by the success of Van Halen (an inspiration to many hair metal bands) and Nirvana (grunge served as the genre's death knell). Its epicenter was just a few city blocks the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, Calif., which was basically a hair metal petting zoo on 1980s weekends but the ethos spread around the world, propagated by music videos in heavy rotation on MTV. A video that combined a catchy song with over the top visuals could make you famous, and so the genre's high points have endured. These are 15 of the best. "Rock of Ages" took throbbing rhythms, metal guitars, hip hop cadences, biblical references and the nonsense German phrase "gunter gleiben glauchen globen," and blended them into an anthem. The video similarly chewed up Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal," an absurdly phallic glowing broadsword and the shirtless drummer Rick Allen's Union Jack shorts. "Rock of Ages" defined the ambitions of the hair metal genre so well that it later became the title for the hit jukebox musical about '80s rock in Los Angeles, even though the show lacked the actual Def Leppard song. The band, which later reversed course on the show, has repeatedly renounced the term hair metal and pointed out that Def Leppard had nothing to do with Hollywood high jinks: "Literally while everybody else is poncing around Sunset Boulevard doing whatever they did, we were in Holland living next to a windmill recording the 'Hysteria' album," the singer Joe Elliott said last year. Great White had the right look but it didn't have the right song. Bands could call in a song doctor like Desmond Child, who co wrote "Dude (Looks Like a Lady)" with Aerosmith and "I Hate Myself for Loving You" with Joan Jett. Or they could take a shortcut and just cover an old song. So Great White's musical peak turned out to be this version of a 1975 album track on the solo debut of Ian Hunter, formerly of the band Mott the Hoople. Lyrics about a malfunctioning heater on a tour bus and girlfriends who were just as unfaithful as their lead singer hookups turned out to be rock 'n' roll verities. One landmark for the decline of hair metal is the day in 1992 when the members of Warrant visited their record label, expecting to see posters of themselves in the reception area, and discovered that Alice in Chains had taken the band's place. Before then, Warrant scored five Top 40 hits: The best was its first (though its video for "Cherry Pie," starring Bobbi Brown, is also crassly memorable). The "Down Boys" clip compresses the action of Talking Heads' concert film "Stop Making Sense" into four minutes, turning it into a parable of short lived rock stardom: The band plays in an empty warehouse until it is joined by a lighting rig, a stage set and an audience. By the end of the clip, however, the warehouse is empty again. Motley Crue, 'Don't Go Away Mad (Just Go Away)' (1989) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
MELBOURNE, Australia "I've never done this before," Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova said as she climbed on a stationary bike in front of a crowd that didn't feel that much smaller than the one that had watched her 6 7 (3), 6 3, 6 3 upset of fifth seeded Sloane Stephens at the Australian Open. The fourth round match ended six minutes before 2 a.m. on Monday morning, and Pavlyuchenkova was mentally making a list of all the tasks that stood between her and a good morning's sleep: the stationary bike, the reporters with their notebooks and microphones, the ice bath, the shower, the change of clothes, the drive back to the hotel. Pavlyuchenkova asked if she could field questions from reporters while she pedaled so she could kill two tasks with one bike ride. She was so tired, she had struggled to construct her points on the court, and now she was having trouble organizing her thoughts in front of reporters. That's what a starting time of nearly half past 11 will do to a player. "It's honestly terrible," Pavlyuchenkova said, adding, "It's not ideal time to play tennis." Describing the match, she said, "I was like, 'This match is so intense, why am I like still sometimes feeling like I'm going to fall asleep now?'" The late, late, late show, with hosts Pavlyuchenkova and Stephens, started Sunday and ended Monday. Nine matches in the first eight days of the tournament ended after midnight, but Pavlyuchenkova's win over Stephens wasn't close to being the latest finish. It was 12 minutes past 3 a.m. on Friday when Garbine Muguruza clinched her second round match against Johanna Konta. By the time Muguruza met with her coach, showered, changed out of her tennis outfit, received a massage, fulfilled her media obligations and returned to her hotel, it was one hour before sunrise. The prime time television hours in Muguruza's native Spain are from 10:30 p.m. until 1 a.m., so she knows from flawed time systems. And yet, Muguruza, 25, readily acknowledged that playing that late "is not normal." She added, "It was very awkward." The post midnight hours would pose no problem if the players had the body clocks of the mostly nocturnal koala bear, who can sleep up to 22 hours. But the human body's inner clock has a circadian low, a window roughly between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m., when focus, strength, reaction time and physical flexibility ebb, the better to promote sleep. The circadian rhythm can be reset by changing sleep or eating patterns. But how can players adjust their internal clocks for optimal performance when they're playing at 2 a.m. one day and at 2 p.m. another? "There is no way to train that," said Maria Sharapova, who advanced to the third round in a match that ended at 12:36 a.m. or roughly two hours past her preferred bedtime. "If you ask any player that goes into this tournament how many times they have trained after midnight, unless you're jet lagged or just crazy, you don't train for that." So is he crazy enough to have tried practicing after midnight? "No, I have not done that I don't think ever," Djokovic said. He added with a laugh, "I'm not doing push ups at midnight before I go to sleep. You train a bit later, and the whole routine is pushed back a little bit. But you also want to get a good night's sleep so your biological rhythm keeps going in the right way." Djokovic has one strategy, grudgingly adopted, that helps him sleep longer and sounder during tournaments: he leaves his two small children at home. He may be on to something. Norah Simpson, a clinical assistant professor at Stanford who studies the role of sleep on athletic performance, recommends that players get good, quality sleep in the days before matches so they don't go into a late night match already sleep deprived. "It's very challenging to navigate the variable schedule in respect to both your internal clock and the amount of sleep you're able to obtain," Simpson said in a telephone interview. The potential for late night matches is part of tournaments with stadium lights and no curfews. Madison Keys played mostly night matches on her way to the final at the 2017 United States Open, and recalled going to bed after 4 a.m. many mornings, waking up around noon and taking power naps whenever she could. "It's not natural," she said, adding, "If I know I'm playing a night match, I sleep as much as I can the day before." Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova's coach, Simon Goffin, encouraged her to stay up until 1 a.m. the night before playing Stephens to help reset her body clock. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Dr. Catherine Hamlin, an Australian obstetrician and gynecologist who devoted her life to treating Ethiopian women with a devastating childbearing injury and helped develop pioneering techniques to treat it, died on Wednesday at her home in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital. She was 96. Her death was announced by the Catherine Hamlin Fistula Foundation in Sydney, Australia, an independent charity she co founded. Dr. Hamlin, responding to an advertisement, arrived in Ethiopia with her husband, Reginald Hamlin, also a physician, in 1959 to work as a gynecologist at a hospital in Addis Ababa. But what started as a planned three year stint turned into a six decade long mission in which the two doctors worked closely with women who had a childbearing injury known as obstetric fistula. The condition is caused when prolonged labor opens a hole in the birth canal, leaving many women incontinent. For Ethiopian women, the injury often led to their being rejected by their husbands and ostracized by their communities. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Anyone who waited to buy school supplies in a snaking checkout line at Staples last month may not be surprised that on Friday the Commerce Department reported a healthy 0.6 percent increase in retail sales for August. That growth adds a pebble to the optimists' side of the balance scale but does little to change the widespread sense that the nation's economic recovery remains on a relatively modest, if sometimes halting, upward track. "The issue is not a question of whether we're growing or shrinking, but whether we're growing or accelerating," said Steven Blitz, chief economist at ITG Investment Research. "This data says we're growing, but without accelerating." Michael Gapen, Barclays' chief United States economist, agreed that the latest data on sales showed "consumer spending will be modest," adding "it doesn't look like it's downshifting, but it doesn't look like it's upshifting either." Perhaps more significant, however, was the government's revision to the report last month on retail sales for July, raising to 0.3 percent the original estimate of zero. The initial July report spurred worries that "the consumer led growth we were taking for granted might be drying up," said Douglas Handler, chief economist at IHS, a Boston based global information company. "The revision really dispels that a bit." Retail sales which rose to a seasonably adjusted 444.4 billion for August are a prime economic engine, accounting for about 45 percent of total consumption. This month's figures are drawing particular attention in anticipation of next week's meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Federal Reserve's policy making group. The stepped up pace of auto and truck purchases helped lift retail sales the most but there were increases in nearly every category, from electronics and building supplies to groceries and clothing. Not counting the increase in auto sales, spending rose by 0.3 percent. Back to school sales tax holidays in 16 states may have helped nudge consumers into stores. The falloff in gasoline sales was expected given the dip in gas prices, economists said, which meant that consumers had more cash to spend on other things or put into savings. General merchandise chains, particularly department stores, also experienced a small decline. 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. Confidence in the economy also seems to be edging up, according to a monthly survey of consumer sentiment released on Friday by Thomson Reuters and the University of Michigan. Their preliminary September index increased to its highest level in a year, 84.6, up from 82.5 in August. The economy is in its fifth year of recovery from the low point reached in the middle of 2009. Still many Americans are struggling with low wages, reduced hours and difficulty in finding decent jobs. At the Fed meeting in June, Janet L. Yellen, the chairwoman, expressed confidence in the "underlying strength in the economy," but noted that a lack of wage growth would cause her to "worry about downside risk to consumer spending." August's job growth was disappointing, with employers adding only 142,000 workers. More troubling was the drop in the proportion of working age adults in the labor force, which reached a 30 year low last month. Some economists fear that millions of people who lost their jobs during the downturn may never return to the work force. Julie Wilkins shops for school supplies with her grandson Griffin Brady. Retail sales rose 0.6 percent in August. Countering some of the disappointing news on jobs have been increased business investments and improved trade figures that recently prompted the government to revise its estimate of overall growth for the second quarter to an annual rate of 4.2 percent, a sharp turnaround from the 2.1 percent decline in the first quarter. The Commerce Department also reported on Friday that businesses increased their stockpiles in July, a sign that they expected buyers would keep their wallets open. Nearly all economists expect growth to slow to a more modest pace during the third quarter, which will end this month. Mr. Gapen said Barclays expected the advance in gross domestic product to run at 2.5 percent for the summer quarter. Some economists are offering more buoyant projections. After reviewing the monthly report, Goldman Sachs Global Macro Research increased its estimate to 3.3 percent. Paul Dales, senior United States Economist at Capital Economics, cited figures released last week by the Autodata Corporation that showed much stronger car sales in August reaching an annualized rate of 17. 5 million vehicles than those suggested by the Commerce Department figures. "I wouldn't be surprised if it was a bit stronger than 3.5 percent," he said. The flood of economic data leaves experts plenty of evidence to back up a range of viewpoints on the growth outlook. But Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization, also points out how uneven the recovery has been, by way of explaining a wide gap in perceptions of the economy. "Many American families have lost years of income growth already from the Great Recession," he said, "and the progress in getting these lost years back is deeply unequal." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Referring to Saturday's "Fox Friends" segment, she said, "A host on Fox Friends wrongly states that, "al Baghdadi was able to sneak away under the cover of darkness after a New York Times story" and that the U.S. government "would have had al Baghdadi based on the intelligence that we had except someone leaked information to the failing New York Times." On Sunday, The Times also published a fact check of the Fox News article and the president's tweet. On Monday, Ms. Rhoades Ha said in an email that the segment that aired earlier that day "wasn't an apology, nor did it begin to address the larger issues with the Fox Friends Weekend segment, one of which was sheer hypocrisy." She continued, "The host railed against The New York Times for covering a raid stating that the U.S. government 'would have had al Baghdadi based on the intelligence that we had except someone leaked' to The New York Times when Fox News had covered the same raid three weeks earlier in a segment in which their correspondent said, 'The newly recovered intelligence may bring U.S. closer to Baghdadi's kill or capture.'" "According to the curious logic of the Fox Friends host, Fox News itself was unpatriotic," she added. The updated segment on "Fox Friends" on Monday morning consisted of airing General Thomas's comments again, and adding about 15 seconds dedicated to The Times's response. It did not respond directly to the paper's complaints. Fox News did not respond directly Monday morning to questions about whether any further correction or clarification was planned, sending links to the "Fox Friends" segment as well as the relevant portion of the show's transcript. Later in the day, the network sent a statement that said that "neither Fox News' report nor the subsequent on air coverage was inaccurate.'' The statement said the network found it "beyond disappointing'' that The Times "decided to blame Fox News for comments made publicly by General Thomas.'' The Times's full letter to Fox News is below: I am writing on behalf of The New York Times to request an on air apology and tweet from Fox Friends in regards to a malicious and inaccurate segment "NY Times leak allowed ISIS leader to slip away," which aired on Saturday, July 22. Neither the staff at Fox Friends, nor the writers of a related story on Foxnews.com, appeared to make any attempt to confirm relevant facts, nor did they reach out to The New York Times for comment. A host on Fox Friends wrongly states that, "al Baghdadi was able to sneak away under the cover of darkness after a New York Times story" and that the U.S. government "would have had al Baghdadi based on the intelligence that we had except someone leaked information to the failing New York Times." When in fact the raid against Abu Sayyaf occurred on May 16, 2015 and was announced that day in an official statement by Defense Secretary Ash Carter. Below is an excerpt from the May 16 Pentagon news release: "Last night, at the direction of the Commander in Chief, I ordered U.S. Special Operations Forces to conduct an operation in al Amr in eastern Syria to capture an ISIL senior leader known as Abu Sayyaf and his wife Umm Sayyaf. Abu Sayyaf was involved in ISIL's military operations and helped direct the terrorist organization's illicit oil, gas, and financial operations as well. Abu Sayyaf was killed during the course of the operation when he engaged U.S. forces. U.S. forces captured Umm Sayyaf, who we suspect is a member of ISIL, played an important role in ISIL's terrorist activities, and may have been complicit in what appears to have been the enslavement of a young Yezidi woman rescued last night." Baghdadi would have known that Umm Sayyaf, Abu Sayyaf's wife, was being held, if not from his own communications network then from the Pentagon's announcement and news reports about that announcement. If the U.S. government wanted to keep the detention and likely interrogation of the wife secret, the Pentagon would not have publicly announced it. The New York Times story in question was published on June 8, more than three weeks after the raid. Furthermore, The Times described the piece to the Pentagon before publication and they had no objections. No senior American official complained publicly about the story until now, more than two years later. We understand that the segment and story are based on a misleading assertion by Gen. Thomas speaking at a conference in Aspen. However, that does not alleviate Fox News of the obligation to seek information from all the stakeholders in a story. With this segment, Fox Friends demonstrated what little regard it has for reporting facts. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The first thing you notice is the metal fence. At Bungenas, a remote peninsula of mostly untouched wilderness on the northeastern tip of Gotland, a Swedish island, arriving visitors must park their cars and continue on foot or on two wheels past the rusted gate a remnant of the area's past as a restricted military training facility. Peaceful and isolated, the Bergmanesque landscape has now been transformed into a dreamy natural playground for in the know Swedes. "It was 'the last stand in Sweden,' they say, because if there was going to be nuclear war, this was going to be the place to be protected," said Joachim Kuylenstierna, a real estate developer who, envisioning a summertime utopia amid the site's abandoned bunkers and pine trees, bought the nearly 400 acre property in 2007. "No public people have been allowed to visit this area since 1963, so nobody knew that it existed," he said. "I thought that if I opened a coffee shop there, maybe someone would find it." That coffee shop, which would later be called Nystroms, opened quietly in 2008 in a former commissary for workers of Bungenas Kalkbrott, a defunct limestone quarry that predated the military facilities. But finding an architecture firm to perform the renovations proved difficult, so Mr. Kuylenstierna started his own, Skalso Arkitekter. Intentionally relying solely on word of mouth instead of advertising, Bungenas began to attract a trickle of day trippers who had caught wind of an unusual cafe in the middle of nowhere. Still, Mr. Kuylenstierna used other barriers to maintain the area's mysterious aura. "The idea was to keep the fence because I hate people who go and see nature in the car," he said. "If you don't get out of the car, you can't smell the nature and you don't feel the nature." The long term plan was to build a community of unobtrusive well designed summer homes, but Mr. Kuylenstierna first focused on a smaller project with the restaurateur Sonny Gustafsson. "He asked me if I wanted to come see this beautiful place called Bungenas," Mr. Gustafsson said. "And he showed me an old building that was totally worn down and shot to pieces from the military, and he said, 'I want to open a restaurant here, and I want you to do it.' " After a renovation, the World War II era canteen opened as Bungenas Matsal in 2012. "We took away the menus after the first night," said Mr. Gustafsson, who ran the waterfront restaurant that summer with only three staff members. The kitchen instead served a nightly multicourse menu to guests in one seating, creating a festive, familial atmosphere. And word soon got out that Bungenas also had a fine dining restaurant worth traveling for. "We made them walk or borrow the bikes to get down there," said Mr. Gustafsson, referring to a fleet of banged up military bicycles parked inside the main gate that are free to use. (Walking the half mile dirt trail from parking lot to restaurant through woods of pine and spruce is no hardship, either.) Surprised by the first season's success, Mr. Gustafsson recruited Johan Stromberg and his wife, Eva Toivonen (together the couple run the restaurant Bolaget in Visby, the main city on Gotland), to join the team. "It was like nothing else I'd ever experienced, to come through this gate and come out to a place that is entirely untouched," Mr. Stromberg, a Gotland native, said of his first visit to Bungenas. "The cars are gone and there are free range sheep and this total harmony that I'd never found on Gotland before." In 2013, the three opened a five room hotel atop Bungenas Matsal, and turned Kalkladan, the old limestone storage barn, into a cavernous space for art exhibitions, music and other performances with its own bistro and bar. And last summer, Kalkladan hosted a concert series featuring top Swedish artists, which drew crowds of curious visitors to the old quarry site. Increasingly, Bungenas has surfaced on social media: photos of picnickers beneath the towering twin chimneys of the old limestone kilns, of cyclists dwarfed by jagged cliffs in the abandoned quarry, of sunbathers on metal military cots overlooking the Baltic Sea. This season, which will run until mid August, the scene should be more tranquil with fewer concerts but more spontaneous events. A handful of residents will be around, since villas have now been built on 15 of the 152 lots. And a new 30 seat movie theater is set to screen the latest films. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Emon Hassan for The New York Times | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos and anything else that strikes them as intriguing. This week, War on Women bashes out a new track with Kathleen Hanna, Sidi Toure sings about joy, and Rae Sremmurd previews its upcoming triple album. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. Over the past few years, DJ Khaled has grown into several new roles: Snapchat celebrity, occasional motion picture scene stealer, singing competition judge, father of the year. Less heralded, though, is his job as host for Jay Z and Beyonce collaborations, a position that both boosts his profile and also eases pressure on the superstar couple, so they can give away gifts rather than build houses of their own. "Top Off" is the first song from the forthcoming DJ Khaled album, "Father of Asahd," and once you swipe away the numbing hook and pseudo verse from Future, there, plain as day, is an impressive Jay Z/Beyonce duet. Jay Z raps about the injustice of Meek Mill's incarceration, then suggests he'd kill George Zimmerman "with my own hands." Not everything is so weighted though: Jay Z would like to impress you with his watches, and Beyonce will encourage you to have a good time, but "If they trying to party with the queen, they gonna have to sign a nondisclosure." JON CARAMANICA Two songs from the forthcoming Rae Sremmurd triple album, one from each member. But rather than propose new stand alone identities, these songs end up reinforcing leaning on, really the component parts that when combined, have made Rae Sremmurd one of hip hop's most innovative acts. (They also released "Powerglide," a duo song featuring Juicy J.) "Hurt to Look" by Swae Lee is slow burn minimal disco, delivered casually. It's sharp but only simmers lightly without ever cooking the whole way through. What it needs is an anchor. What it needs is Slim Jxmmi, whose brawny "Brxnks Truck" is full of manic energy. J.C. The pianist Keith Jarrett hasn't performed with his longtime trio in many years, but on Friday he released "After the Fall," a collection of 12 jazz classics recorded in concert 20 years ago. This is a straight ahead trio for the ages, fed by a tension between Mr. Jarrett's resolute, lapidary touch and the collective's shape shifting, onward drive. On "Bouncin' With Bud," the tuneful Bud Powell classic, Jack DeJohnette maintains a openhanded clatter on the drums, while Mr. Jarrett revels in the tune's major key buoyancy. Stating the melody, he rounds off some of Powell's punctuation marks and, on his extended solo, verges toward the seraphic. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO There are rappers who write words and then hope to put them to a melody, and then there is Valee, who is melody first, cadence second, imaginative and sometimes odd lyrics third (but never an afterthought). "Miami" is an older song of his, but now that he's signed to G.O.O.D. Music, it's being revived for his major label debut EP, "GOOD Job, You Found Me." On this remix, he even nudges Pusha T, he of the irreducible snarl, toward a stop start flow that sounds like boasts being delivered backward. J.C. Humor faces down desolation in "Nobody's Home" from "Call Me Lucky," an existential ramble from the latest album by the sage, scratchy voiced, blues rooted, 73 year old songwriter Chris Smither: "Everybody wants to text me 'cause they ain't got nothing to say," he notes. He recorded two versions, as he did with half a dozen of the album's songs; one's a ragtimey cackle, while the other is slower and more pensive, revealing a little more darkness. J.P. Anthony Braxton has always seen his reconstituted, spatial music as a part of a wide tradition, lacing free improvisation into new compositional models. The jazz world has never known quite what to do with it all. But Mr. Braxton, an inclusive thinker and far ranging saxophonist, has returned to classic jazz repertoire at various points. His latest release, "Sextet (Parker) 1993," is an 11 CD set collecting live performances of tunes associated with Charlie Parker, the bebop progenitor. On many of these tracks, Mr. Braxton's sextet including the drummer Pheeroan akLaff and the pianist Misha Mengelberg hews to a cinched swing feel, letting its avant garde linguistics slip in through the cracks. But here and there things break wide open. Parker's "Scrapple From the Apple" loses its steady pulse, becoming an immersion in overtones and soupy interplay, especially between Mr. Braxton's contrabass clarinet and the sighing, slippery bass of Joe Fonda. G.R. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Three years to the day after the death of David Bowie, two eminences of American music will come together in Los Angeles to pay tribute. John Adams is set to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the premiere of Philip Glass's Symphony No. 12, "Lodger," at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Thursday. The work is inspired by Bowie's 1979 collaboration with Brian Eno and the producer Tony Visconti, the final album in what's usually called their Berlin trilogy, which also includes "Low" and "Heroes," both from 1977. Mr. Glass's First Symphony, back in 1992, was based on "Low"; his Fourth (1996), on "Heroes." "I put off the third for a long time 20 years before I realized that I owed them something," Mr. Glass said in a recent telephone interview. How did this symphony come about? PHILIP GLASS It's part of a commitment I had made to David Bowie and Brian Eno to take three of their records and turn them into symphonies. In "Lodger," to me the most interesting thing was the lyrics, the poems. In the earlier ones, the musical idea was quite challenging and worthwhile to work on, but when I got to "Lodger," I didn't find that interest in the musical part of it; the interest was in the text. After hedging a little bit, I thought I might as well make a song symphony. Mahler, of course, was the great one at that. I used seven of the texts; I didn't use all 10. That would have pushed me over an hour, and I didn't want to go there. I don't know, John, if you're aware of this, but this was written the words were written when David was living in Berlin. JOHN ADAMS Yeah, you mentioned that to me. GLASS And Brian was there, and Iggy Pop was there; those were his companions. They were there trying to make a movie out of "The Idiot" by Dostoyevsky. None of them spoke Russian, or German, even. But on the other hand, these were three really interesting people in our music world and music life, and made big statements icons, all of them. ADAMS A really great text is just so generative; it produces the best music. If I have a concern about some operas these days, it's that the texts are just not good enough. It doesn't have to be someone with a deep literary background; it can be a David Bowie or Brian Eno. The great thing about American music is the total bleed through of, if you want to call it that, high or low, popular versus art. I think both Philip and I share this. We have very loose filters in terms of classification. When did you first hear each other's music? ADAMS The thing I remember most vividly is a tour of the ensemble doing excerpts from "Einstein on the Beach," which I heard in San Francisco sometime in the 1970s. Then I actually conducted quite a bit of his music a little piece, "Facades," and then I think we did the very first performance of parts of "Akhnaten" in L.A. on a Phil program, 50 minutes' worth. I did the Ninth Symphony, again with L.A., and then this. I came of age during what we now call the bad old days, when the world said you had a choice between European modernism and its American version, or Cagean aesthetics. Hearing Philip's music and Steve Reich's music was this wonderful, new possibility of a language that embraced both tonality and sort of living with a pulse, new, original and fresh. GLASS I was very much taken with hearing John's work of course, "Nixon in China," we talked about a number of times. It's not enough to create a style of music or identity of your own; what you really want to be is in the company of other people. It's more meaningful to be part of a large group of people sharing ideas. He was the first time I met someone who wasn't part of my immediate generation but had the interest and talent. How many operas do you have now? Five or six? ADAMS Laughing Not as many as you do! Depending on how you count, Mr. Glass has composed nearly 30. ADAMS It continues to be a slow absorption of Philip's orchestral music into the regular repertoire; I'm surprised that more conductors haven't taken it on. He has a couple of symphonies, like the Eighth, where there are some real challenges rhythmically. But it's not hard to conduct on a technical level. I think the challenge is creating a sound, and with some orchestras it's simply getting them into the right frame of mind. Something like the Ninth Symphony, which is nearly an hour long, it demands a kind of Zen like concentration by the players, the way some Bruckner symphonies do. It's not like doing "The Rite of Spring," where there's a thrill every 10 seconds. You have a steady build and a long line. What does it pair best with? ADAMS I don't think there's a great challenge there. You could put anything with it. I see programs that have put a piece of Philip's together with a Baroque piece; that makes sense in certain ways. I've put his smaller pieces on programs with my own music, but sometimes with Steve or Terry Riley : obvious harmonious conjunctions. This program we're doing at the L.A. Phil, I'm doing with an old piece of mine, "Grand Pianola Music." GLASS I'm delighted to be able to hear it again. I haven't heard it in a long time. Philip, does it annoy you that these symphonies are still not done more widely? GLASS Quite the opposite: I'm astonished at the size of audiences I'm getting now. I never thought that this music would be accepted in the way it's being accepted. I had my first performance with the New York Philharmonic when I was 80 years old. I mean, come on! I think it's partly that I've been helped by a younger generation that has very broad ideas and taste, and I don't seem nearly as strange as I used to be. I've become not mainstream, that seems a little too far but still I can tell from the Ascap the music licensing agency reports that the music is being used. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The New York Times announced on Friday that it was reviving the title of managing editor and naming Joseph Kahn, an assistant editor for International, to the position. The elevation of Mr. Kahn, 52, to the second highest newsroom position establishes him as a leading candidate to succeed Dean Baquet as executive editor, as The Times continues its shift to the next generation of leaders. As part of the announcement, the company also said that Susan Chira, 58, one of three deputy executive editors, was leaving that role to write about gender issues for The Times. The move comes as The Times's newsroom undergoes significant changes aimed at making it better positioned for its digital future. When Mr. Baquet retired the managing editor title in 2014, he said the changes to the leadership structure were intended to make titles more fluid and the newsroom more nimble and responsive. But in an interview on Friday, he said he came to realize that his job as the top editor "had become really large" because he also had to consider the newsroom's overall strategy. Mr. Baquet said he decided to appoint a managing editor about three weeks ago, and told Mr. Kahn soon after. "It's one thing to have great ideas about how to change a newsroom and create a modern newsroom, it's another thing to actually do it," Mr. Baquet said. "I thought that I really needed a partner in it, if we were really going to pull it off." Succession plans at The Times have been a frequent topic of debate for decades, and Mr. Kahn's promotion will most likely set off a fresh round of guesswork and forecasting. When James Bennet, 50, rejoined The Times this year as editorial page editor, his appointment also spurred speculation inside the newsroom and out that he would eventually succeed Mr. Baquet, who turns 60 next week. "I very much think that Joe should be a candidate to succeed me," Mr. Baquet said. But he added, "He's not the only candidate I'm not setting him up in any way more than anybody else." Mr. Baquet was managing editor before he was named executive editor in May 2014, replacing Jill Abramson. Executive editors at The Times traditionally serve until they are 65, though some leave earlier. Also looming over The Times is the question of who will take over as publisher when Arthur Sulzberger Jr. steps aside. At the company's annual meeting in May, Mr. Sulzberger said succession planning had begun and that by next May the company will have named a deputy publisher, a position that traditionally precedes an appointment to publisher. Mr. Baquet said a decision on the deputy publisher would come "soon." 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. In the newsroom, Mr. Kahn's promotion was less of a surprise than Ms. Chira's decision to leave her role as the main masthead editor overseeing daily news coverage. Ms. Chira said the move was her decision and that this was her next chapter at The Times. "Dean would have loved for me to stay on the masthead, but I decided that this change was an opportunity for me," Ms. Chira said in an interview. She said she had loved working with Mr. Baquet and the other deputy executive editors, "but as the situation changed, I thought, you know I have been basically on the treadmill of breaking news for 13 years" and she wanted to focus more on gender issues and writing. In her new role, Ms. Chira, who was previously the foreign editor for The Times for eight years and has helped oversee coverage that has won multiple Pulitzer Prizes, will cover gender for both the Opinion section and the newsroom. She will also help the editor of a new unit focused on gender issues that The Times plans to create. Ms. Chira has long been a champion of women in the newsroom. The other two deputy executive editors, Matthew Purdy and Janet Elder, will become deputy managing editors. Mr. Purdy, 60, will continue to oversee investigations and enterprise, while taking on additional responsibilities involving daily news coverage. Ms. Elder, 60, will continue her role running newsroom operations and personnel. In a note to the staff on Friday, Mr. Baquet said Mr. Kahn's primary responsibility in the next year would be "to lead our efforts to build The Times of the future, and to grapple with questions of what we cover going forward, and what our desks should look like." In his new role, Mr. Kahn will be in charge of putting into effect changes proposed by a group that is working to prepare and transform the newsroom for a digital future. Mr. Kahn said in an interview that while he will be more focused on strategy in his role, he will also have a hand in the daily newsroom report. He expects to attend news meetings, he said, and will be involved with big stories." I don't think it's going to be 80 percent of my time," Mr. Kahn said about his day to day coverage responsibilities. "But it's going to be a lot bigger than zero." The Times plans to name Michael Slackman, the international managing editor, as its new international editor on Monday, according to a person with direct knowledge of the company's plans who spoke on condition of anonymity. The appointment of Mr. Kahn is a reaffirmation of The Times's commitment to its international expansion, an initiative that Mr. Kahn, a two time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, has helped lead and that has been viewed as a pillar of the company's future growth. In April, The Times said it would invest 50 million over the next three years to expand its international digital audience and increase its revenue outside of the United States. Mr. Kahn joined The Times in 1998 from The Wall Street Journal. He covered Wall Street and international economics and served as The Times's Beijing bureau chief before returning to New York to work as deputy foreign editor and then international editor. In his note to the newsroom, Mr. Baquet praised Mr. Kahn's leadership on "the transformation of our international presence," saying he had helped bring the newsroom together "with our consumer, advertising, technology, product and data teams to help the company think and act globally." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Back in January, the muralists arrived, tiptoeing into the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan at midnight. They erected scaffolding in the grand oval space known as the Rotunda Room, climbed up and stretched out on their backs, daubing at the painted clouds that have long drifted across the sky blue ceiling. Then, in June, they turned their attention to the shiny faux marbling on the stair railing (so dated), applying a subtler matte finish. And earlier this month, under the direction of the architect and decorator Daniel Romualdez, a squad of skilled workers appeared: Electricians installed theatrical lighting to highlight the room's signature feature, its fantastical wall mural; floor contractors polished the parquet; and new furniture was carried in. All these efforts the results of which were unveiled July 12 have resurrected one of New York's most spectacular gathering spaces. Beloved by brides who have taken their vows in the fairy tale setting, remembered wistfully by those who once partook of its formal afternoon tea, and long familiar to members of the city's upper crust who have mingled here during debutante balls and charity events, the Rotunda Room had languished in recent years. But as new boutique hotels turn lobbies and lounges into hip hangouts, the 86 year old Pierre is capitalizing on one of its own extraordinary, but previously underused, common areas. And not just for the benefit of travelers who check into the Pierre's 189 guest rooms and the occupants of its 75 full time residences, but anyone who needs a place to recover from a shopping expedition to Bergdorf Goodman or simply wants to revel in the Rotunda Room's romantic atmosphere. "It's always been the heart of the hotel," said Francois Olivier Luiggi, the general manager of the Pierre, which is run by Mumbai based Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces. "Now we're turning it into more of a public space." In fact, the room has been reinvented repeatedly almost from the moment the hotel opened in 1930. Designed in Georgian style by the architectural firm Schultze Weaver, the Pierre joined a cluster of luxury hotels around Grand Army Plaza, on the southeast corner of Central Park. The Plaza, which opened in 1907, was the first in this select group, followed by the Savoy (now demolished) and the Sherry Netherland. Rising 44 stories on Fifth Avenue and East 61st Street, the Pierre was named for the Corsican born restaurateur Charles Pierre Casalasco, who built it backed by Wall Street financiers. One of several so called apartment hotels that were popular at the time, the Pierre combined lavish leased residences (allowing the affluent to live in splendor without the responsibility and even greater expense of maintaining a private mansion) with hotel rooms (offering guests the thrill of possibly sharing an elevator with Elizabeth Taylor, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Yves Saint Laurent or any of the other luminaries who, over the years, have called the Pierre home). What made the buff colored brick tower stand out in addition to its stately limestone fronted base, topped by gigantic garlanded terra cotta urns, and its copper mansard roof floating above the treetops of Central Park were its social spaces. The main ballroom had marble columns and mirrored walls. The dining room overseen by Auguste Escoffier in the early years was walnut paneled with gold curtains. To reach those spaces one passed through the Rotunda Room, then called the Oval Foyer. With its decorative plaster ceiling, stone walls and marble stairs, it looked like a room from a French castle. But not for long. Within three years of the hotel's opening and with the country plunged into the Depression the extravagant decor was deemed excessive and was simplified. The Rotunda Room acquired a warmer, clubbier, more enveloping feel with Deco style tub chairs and swag drapery. In 1942, the architect and decorator Samuel Marx, in step with the patriotic spirit of the war years, turned back the clock to the Colonial era. He decked out the dining room in red, white and blue and wrapped the Rotunda Room in a mural depicting the landscape of early New York. When Mr. Marx was invited back to update the space in the 1950s, the country's mood had lightened. He painted over the colonial scene and suspended a curved Plexiglas bar from the ceiling. The Birdcage "a Rendez Vous for cocktails," according to the hotel's frothy promotional materials was born. It was 1967 after the Pierre had become a co op, with full time residents purchasing their apartments and hiring the first in a series of hospitality companies to manage the restaurants, ballrooms and transient room operations when the artist Edward Melcarth gave the Rotunda Room its trademark mural: a Renaissance loggia peopled with mythological characters and, seemingly, whomever else he fancied throwing in. Among the mural's figures are prominent members of New York's elite at the time Jacqueline Kennedy climbs a staircase, for instance, and the actor Erik Estrada, posing as Adam, eyes a gamine Eve in slacks and a boho top biting into an apple. Some members of the gentry, including Mrs. Kennedy, weren't happy about being included in the mural and requested that they be removed, according to recently found hotel records. The Pierre responded by painting over telltale facial details, giving the visages a more generic look (though the former First Lady is still instantly recognizable). "It's over the top, even a little bit camp," said Mr. Romualdez, an admirer of the extravaganza, who recalls hanging out in the Rotunda Room in the 1980s when he was a Yale student coming to New York on weekends. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. But by the time Mr. Romualdez returned to the Pierre to renovate the fashion designer Tory Burch's apartment in the hotel in the early 2000s, the Rotunda Room was a less lively place. After a period during which the Pierre was managed by Four Seasons Hotels Resorts, which instituted the afternoon tea towering tiered stands of sandwiches and scones and equally towering flower arrangements the building came under Taj management. It was renovated the designer Alexandra Champalimaud refreshed many of the social spaces and reopened with fanfare in 2010. But the Rotunda Room lay largely dormant. The tea service had been eliminated. The few pieces of furniture sprinkled around looked rather forlorn. Until Mr. Luiggi decided to bring the space back to life. "Every day people come in and say to me, 'I got married here,' or 'My parents got married here,' or 'I came to the prom here,' " he said. "They want to come back." Invited to help, Mr. Romualdez envisioned the space as "a piazza for people in this bubbly corner of Manhattan." Out went the heavy furniture and imitation Aubusson rug. To give the space a more lighthearted look, he specified Louis XVI style side chairs upholstered in a blue and white stripe, and he designed a carpet modeled on the stone paving of Michelangelo's Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome. Green mohair covered banquettes were made to line the walls. LED strips were threaded along the perimeter of the floor, up lighting Mr. Melcarth's creation. The room's candelabra style sconces were fitted with flame tip bulbs to approximate candlelight. "I wanted the mural to glow," Mr. Romualdez said. The carpet is yet to arrive, but the menu is set: Weekday guests help themselves from a center table piled with plated pastries meringues, macarons and slices of lemon blueberry bundt cake baked in a 1930s mold. Champagne and coffee flow. After 7 p.m., light supper fare is on offer, including appetizers ( 18 to 24) and entrees ( 20 to 29), "with the idea that people will choose one or the other," Mr. Luiggi said. In this manner, visitors can sustain themselves while trying to guess the identity of the man in the mural wearing the blue Nehru jacket or the guests seated across the Rotunda Room. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Credit...Julie Bennett for The New York Times AUBURN, Ala. What is it like to live in this small college town during ordinary times? It's nice. Auburn is a pretty town in the eastern part of the state, with gently rolling hills and lots of green. It's a friendly town, too, with neighbors who show up with a chain saw the day after a storm to cut the fallen tree in your backyard into firewood. The South has problems, of course, but that's another essay. I am, and always have been, a great defender of the South, the region of our country that gave us Rosa Parks, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Angela Davis, John Lewis well, the list goes on. If I started to delve into the South's political complexities, the way my county Lee County, after Lee, Robert E. voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, then a year later, overwhelmingly for a Democrat, Doug Jones, for a Senate seat we would be here all day. Well, these are not ordinary times. An issue I naively believed was uncomplicated: mask wearing, to reduce the spread of a virus that continues to spiral out of control. When the pandemic first gained a foothold here, the entire town, myself included, was on the hunt for hand sanitizer. I saw my former neighbors at CVS. Try the Piggly Wiggly, Karen said. They had some yesterday. Now we know that hand sanitizer is only a supporting player in the fight against the coronavirus. Contaminated doorknobs aren't the enormous threat that airborne droplets are. Luckily, we have an easy solution that can reduce your risk of both contracting and spreading the virus: masks. You don't even have to buy them. You can make them! Get yourself some cloth and a needle and thread and go to work. Sewing not your thing? Steal your dog's bandanna, the one the groomer sent her back with, and tie that around your face, which is what I did in the early days, before another neighbor, who happens to be the secretary of the Lee County Democrats, made a mask for me. Mask wearing it's what every leading health organization in the world recommends, including our own beleaguered Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It's what the even more beleaguered W.H.O. recommends. The infectious disease physician at our hospital had been begging people for weeks to wear masks. But because there was no mask ordinance here, all he could do was beg. His pleas mainly fell upon deaf ears. I made the mistake of reading the comments in a local Facebook group. The people who did not want to wear masks had a variety of reasons: infringement upon their civil liberties was a popular one. In what should be a hopeful sign, after a sharp rise in virus cases and I.C.U.s across Alabama nearing capacity, Gov. Kay Ivey on Wednesday issued an order requiring mask wearing in most public spaces. But Governor Ivey's order grants broad exceptions and by her own admission, will be hard to enforce. And given everything that's happened in our usually pleasant town over the past few weeks, I wonder how much will change. Then Governor Ivey gave permission to cities in Alabama to issue their own ordinances. The progressive group I'm in on Facebook, which mobilized the push for masks in Auburn, revved up our engines. We emailed and called and laughingly considered greeting Mayor Anders outside his house, each of us standing six feet away from the next person. We met a wall of resistance. There's one member, Beth Witten, who insists we need only to educate the public, and then everybody will magically start to wear masks. There's another, Brett Smith, who, when asked on his Facebook page if he would vote for a mask ordinance, responded with a GIF of Nick Offerman playing Ron Swanson on "Parks and Recreation," glaring at the camera, an American flag overlaid upon his face. I like "Parks and Recreation" as much as anyone, but people are dying. In response to all this, I've used the mind blown emoji quite frequently. I've made a lot of jokes the most prestigious medical journals in the world have offered study after study citing masks' effectiveness, but none of those are good enough for Jim Buston of Auburn, Ala. but most of all I feel a great, unshakable sense of despair. In about five weeks, roughly 35,000 students will descend upon our small town. The university requires masks on campus, but I wonder how much good that will do when that campus sits in a town where so many people resist the idea of covering their faces, where we are not united by the common goal of protecting one another. It's often said that college football is a religion in the South, and if that's true, we won't be going to church this fall. If we don't get infection rates under control in Auburn, how will we allow thousands of fans into stadiums? Businesses live or die by the money that fans spend each fall. Our enrollment goes up when we win. Auburn without football is like a church without a preacher. I hope people get to return to church both the real kind and the football kind safely and soon. I doubt they will, though. As I said, I've always been a great defender of the South. When friends elsewhere ask how I could live here, I bristle. I tell them there's a lot to love about this place that is my home, that we by no means have a monopoly on racism. After George Floyd was murdered, hundreds of people gathered in Toomer's Corner, where after each victory Auburn fans roll the trees with toilet paper. I was astonished by the turnout. My 5 year old son asked me if we'd won a football game. That's the South I believe in. A South that is trying to do better. The South that is resisting the campaign for a simple means of protection from a terrifying virus well, that is not my South. Anton DiSclafani is a professor of creative writing at Auburn University and author of the novels "The After Party" and "The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls." 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 |
Placing his hand on a Bible, wearing the gold shoulder boards that had been pinned on him moments before, Rear Adm. James A. Helis looked out at several hundred uniformed students last month and took the oath of office as the new leader of the United States Merchant Marine Academy. He was the fourth person to do so in the last four years. Over that period, the school the least well known of the nation's five service academies, despite its location just outside New York City has been in a state of turmoil that includes financial disarray, deteriorating facilities and extreme student dissatisfaction. In January, a carbon monoxide leak sent three dozen people to the hospital. Last year, federal investigators spent time on campus looking into allegations that two administrators had been fraternizing with students after hours. Ray LaHood, the federal transportation secretary whose department oversees the academy, has won a record 85 million annual budget for it and vowed to help it right its course. But given the cost, the state of affairs and an American maritime industry that has shifted away from the academy's traditional curriculum, some loudly question whether the academy is still relevant. "It's an educational institution for an age that the U.S. doesn't participate in any more," said Capt. John Konrad, the editor of gCaptain, a blog widely read in the maritime industry. The Merchant Marine Academy is an anomaly: the only national service academy that is not a part of the military. Over the course of a grueling four year program that includes at least 300 days at sea, it trains about 1,000 undergraduates free of tuition to become officers in the United States' commercial shipping industry. They graduate with a Bachelor of Science degree, a Coast Guard license, an expectation of five years' service in some maritime capacity, and for those who do not pursue active military duty a spot in the Navy Reserve. The academy was founded to support American shipping and to enhance national security. But on gCaptain's numerous discussion groups devoted to the school, contributors routinely call for the federal government to leave the training of merchant mariners to state academies (including the State University of New York Maritime College, in the Bronx, a boat ride of about a mile and a half from the federal academy's campus, near Great Neck) or to the industry itself. Mr. LaHood waved away the suggestion that the academy represents any disproportionate government subsidy. "It's no different from what we would offer to other industries that are involved in transportation," he says, citing taxpayer support of Amtrak, or federal jurisdiction over the airline industry. Speaking in the company of a Transportation Department press officer, one senior, Steven Webb, said life at Kings Point had "far exceeded" his expectations, and called the sea year "a very valuable life experience." But in the most recent Princeton Review survey of American colleges, the academy was No. 4 nationwide in the category of "Least Happy Students." (It came in third for "Professors Get Low Marks," and seventh for "Is It Food?") And in an unchaperoned conversation, a couple dozen of Mr. Webb's peers complained about a dearth of recreational activities, an out of date curriculum, a regimental system that does not reward leadership, and facilities including barracks that have no air conditioning and an empty stretch of dock where the school's training vessel used to be that are in demoralizingly poor condition. The carbon monoxide leak occurred in one of those barracks. In 2009 the Government Accountability Office found "numerous instances of improper and questionable sources and uses of funds" and "numerous breakdowns in its important stewardship responsibilities," including "a lack of awareness or support for strong internal control and accountability across the Academy at all levels and risks." In 2010, a dire report by the Transportation Department warned that failing to upgrade the school's facilities which would require spending hundreds of millions of dollars "will result in the decline of the institution and risks the eventual loss of the school's accreditation." Amid all these challenges, Admiral Helis is in one way an unlikely savior: he has no maritime training. But he is a decorated veteran, a retired colonel whose 30 years of Army service took him from Haiti to Sweden to Afghanistan, as well as an accomplished scholar with a Ph.D. in international relations from Tufts University and two master's degrees. Since 2004 he had taught at the United States Army War College in Pennsylvania, where he led its Department of National Security and Strategy. In an interview, Admiral Helis seemed calm and confident. "I see this as a great opportunity," he said. "We have a Secretary and the Department of Transportation that are passionately committed to this institution and its future. We've seen significant infusion of resources. I see the future as very bright for the academy." He declined to comment on anything that preceded his tenure, including the allegations of improper contact between administrators and students. Some of those who were interviewed by Transportation Department investigators last year, but who asked not to be identified because the department has not authorized them to speak about it, said the investigation centered on allegations that two administrators threw parties in their on campus residences, served alcohol to underage students and kept them out after their curfew. "We take any allegation of misconduct by an academy staff member very seriously," said Sasha Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Department. But she said no evidence was found to substantiate the accusations and "no charges criminal or otherwise were ever brought." The two administrators were later transferred to Transportation Department jobs outside New York, but Ms. Johnson said the moves were unrelated to the investigation. "Several academy employees have left over the past year for other assignments as the academy has realigned staff and priorities," she said. Admiral Helis's first weeks on campus have been eventful. A few days after his installation ceremony, he unveiled a new strategic planning report that was several months in the making and several years overdue. He met with faculty and staff and began trying to address the most egregious aspects of student dissatisfaction. And he got his first glimpse of what his son Ian, a first year "plebe candidate" (who had been accepted to Kings Point before his father had his first interview for the job), looked like with a shaved head. Merely having a leader who will last more than a year or two, several students and staff members said, could do a lot to improve morale. But in addition to the challenges on campus, Admiral Helis must navigate a maritime industry that has changed greatly since the era of the school's founding. Back then, American ships were a major presence in intercontinental shipping routes. Today that "blue water" business is largely the domain of foreign ships, which do the job for less. The American maritime industry has found new opportunities in "brown water" shipping along coast lines, in rivers and in the Great Lakes and in offshore drilling. With a rapidly aging work force, job opportunities abound. But critics say the school has not adapted to those new opportunities. Its curriculum, Captain Konrad said, "is not focused on the new age of technologically advanced offshore rigs, sub sea engineering and development of new ideas for port structures and systems." Sean T. Connaughton, a former head of the Maritime Administration, the Transportation Department agency that oversees the school, views the matter differently. "They're correct that the training curriculum is still geared toward the blue water," he said, "but, at the end of the day, that's because the licensing standards are so strict that they have to do that to end up with the highest class of license that they're eligible for." Admiral Helis says the training that midshipmen receive is under review. "Part of the strategic plan," he said, "was reaching out to stakeholders in the maritime industry: what are the skill sets, what is the knowledge they need, so we can infuse that into the curriculum." The G.A.O. said in a follow up to its 2009 report that the school had addressed many of its concerns, and Admiral Helis said reorganization would address the rest of them. Meanwhile, the shuttered student recreation center is scheduled to reopen in September. The crumbling pier is soon to be replaced. Student barracks are slated to get air conditioning. And the school has recently signed a contract for a new training vessel. Capt. John C. Kennedy, the school's commandant of midshipmen, said the mood was changing, even for the least happy students. "There was a certain amount of cynicism when I arrived," he said. "This is a hard place. But now I think they are cautiously optimistic about the future here." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Pulsing movements in an embryo are crucial to helping intestines grow into the wonder tube that it is, a study finds . These tubes are individual lengths of intestine, taken from a chicken embryo. And what the videos and other measurements demonstrate, according to a paper published Wednesday in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, is that this pulsing movement is crucial to the gut's development. It starts tiny, then elongates to become a wonder tube yards long, with a vast surface area that absorbs nutrients effectively. It's well known among researchers trying to grow model organs in lab dishes, that guts are tricky. Cells that are cultured in a dish to become gut tissue will wad up, rather than forming the tube they make in the body, if nothing is touching or moving them. "Usually the result is a spherical ball of cells," said Nicolas Chevalier, a biophysics researcher at Paris Diderot University. "It does not have the classical, elongated, cylindrical shape." Researchers already knew that, very early in an embryo's growth, the muscle surrounding the gut starts to pulse rhythmically, eventually becoming the peristaltic motion that moves food from the stomach to the colon. Dr. Chevalier and his colleagues were curious to see what encouraging this motion in lab grown gut would do. So they designed a series of experiments using chicken embryos, a common model organism in the study of embryonic development. Early on in developing chickens, as in humans, the gut stages an impressive jailbreak from the rest of the embryo. Through a large hole, it pours out and settles down for a period of growth outside the body, before eventually being drawn back in. The scientists studied these extruded guts, which were no more than about an inch long, from chicken embryos. First, Dr. Chevalier attached small weights to one end of some guts and grew them vertically, alongside others without weights, to see what applying gentle force would do over time. Then, they compared the growth of guts before and after the beginning of strong muscular contractions, which in chickens start sometime after a week of gestation. Guts with less pulsing grew thicker but not much longer, whereas the twitching intestines clearly stretched. T he researchers halted the growth of some older guts by adding a drug that inhibits muscular contractions , and also by slicing the tubes open, which stopped the circular squeezing motion. The study suggests that the gentle pulsing of the developing gut is key to its elongation, much as squeezing on a tube of toothpaste will cause the extruded toothpaste to elongate . Dr. Chevalier and colleagues hope to see if this information will help in developing better dish grown models of the gut, ones that will grow into long tubes. They plan to continue investigating the growth of the embryonic gut, not just in chickens but in mice, to understand how motion plays a role in shaping the organ. "In every square inch of an embryo, there's tons of things happening," Dr. Chevalier said. "You never get bored." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
WASHINGTON The Federal Reserve left its benchmark interest rate unchanged on Wednesday and signaled another rate increase is very likely to come in mid December. But hanging over the meeting was the anticipation of a much bigger change: The nomination of Jerome H. Powell as the next Fed chairman. The Fed's current chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, is expected to remain in that post until her term expires in February. On Wednesday, President Trump called Ms. Yellen "excellent." Nevertheless, he is expected to nominate Mr. Powell, a current board member, for the Fed chairmanship at a Rose Garden event on Thursday, according to people familiar with the decision. Mr. Powell, a Republican who joined the Fed in 2012, has steadily supported Ms. Yellen's approach to monetary policy and is expected to follow a similar trajectory if confirmed to lead the central bank. Mr. Powell has voted for every Fed policy decision since 2012, including its four interest rate increases and the gradual unwinding of the Fed's stimulus campaign. The meeting Wednesday was the first since the Fed began reducing its vast portfolio of Treasury bonds and mortgage backed securities, which it acquired in an effort to stimulate the economy during and after the 2008 financial crisis. The Fed is approaching the process cautiously, and so far investors appear unfazed. The central bank is paring its 4.2 trillion in bond holdings by just 10 billion per month through the end of this year, then gradually increasing the pace until it reaches a monthly rate of 50 billion. At the conclusion of its two day gathering in Washington, the Fed announced that it would leave its benchmark interest rate unchanged in a range between 1 and 1.25 percent, after lifting it twice so far this year. The vote was unanimous, and the central bank did not alter any of the careful wording in its statement about its expected rate of future increases a sign that it is not trying to quell widely held expectations of a rate increase of a quarter point in December. "They're on track to raise rates in December," said Lewis Alexander, chief United States economist at Nomura Securities. In its statement, the Fed said economic activity had been rising "at a solid rate despite hurricane related disruptions." It said that the hurricanes had caused a drop in payrolls in September and a pickup in inflation because of higher gasoline prices, but that it expected both effects to be temporary, and that the storms would be "unlikely to materially alter the course of the national economy over the medium term." The last time the Fed met, in September, large parts of the United States were still reeling from hurricanes that threatened to disrupt economic activity in several major cities. Two weeks later, the government reported that the economy had lost jobs in September for the first time in seven years, a decline most experts attributed to the storms' impact. Since then, however, economic data has indicated that the economy weathered the storms without lasting damage. Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services, rose at a 3 percent annual rate in the third quarter of the year, the second straight quarter of solid growth. Measures of retail sales and consumer confidence have likewise been strong, and most economists expect the next round of employment figures, due Friday, to show a solid rebound from September's dip. "Much of the uncertainty that had existed at the September meetings because of the hurricanes has subsided and signs are that growth has been stronger," said Greg McBride, chief financial analyst for Bankrate.com. The one sticking point remains inflation. The Fed's preferred measure of inflation is well below the central bank's 2 percent target; what's more, inflation has slowed this year even as the unemployment rate has fallen, a trend that would ordinarily be expected to put upward pressure on prices. That disconnect has complicated the Fed's plans to raise interest rates at the steady clip it has signaled, including three more times next year. Ms. Yellen and most of her colleagues have expressed confidence that the slowdown in inflation is temporary and therefore should not force a change in plans. In a September speech, Ms. Yellen said that low unemployment is leading to pay increases, which will ultimately lead to higher prices as well; other Fed officials have made similar comments in recent weeks. Still, at some point "temporary" effects stop looking so temporary. The Fed will get several more reports on inflation before its December meeting, and it remains possible that weak data could give policymakers pause. Financial markets appear all but certain that the Fed plans to raise rates in December. Futures contracts on Wednesday morning suggested investors saw a 96.7 percent probability of a rate increase at the Fed's next meeting, according to CME Group. Matthew Hornbach, global head of interest rate strategy for Morgan Stanley, said the Fed had sent a clear signal that it was prepared to raise rates even if inflation stays low in the coming months. But Ken Matheny, executive director of Macroeconomic Advisers by IHS Markit, was less certain that a December rise was inevitable. He said that the Fed was struggling to reconcile strong growth with weak inflation, and that policymakers would be watching coming inflation data closely in making their interest rate decisions. "A December rate hike is not a foregone conclusion," Mr. Matheny said, adding that the market's overwhelming confidence in an increase was "a puzzle." Policymakers and investors have also been watching closely for any signs that the Fed's long awaited process of drawing down on its 4.2 trillion balance sheet is disrupting financial markets. In 2013, interest rates spiked unexpectedly in response to the Fed's announcement that it would begin slowing its bond purchases, a reaction that came to be known as the "taper tantrum." So far, there is little sign of trouble. Interest rates have edged up since the Fed announced its plans in September, but the stock market has continued to rise and there has been no hint of another tantrum. In a speech last month, Ms. Yellen said the asset reduction process seemed to be going smoothly so far. "I'm sure they're very relieved at the reaction they got," said Joseph Gagnon, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. Investors said the nomination of Mr. Powell would mean that the Fed was likely to continue on its current course. A former Treasury Department official under President George H.W. Bush and a partner at the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm, Mr. Powell emerged as the front runner for the position in recent weeks from a diverse group of finalists. That group included Gary Cohn, a close economic adviser to the president; John B. Taylor, an economist who is a vocal critic of the Fed; and Ms. Yellen herself. Mr. Trump has the opportunity to significantly reshape the Federal Reserve through appointments. Mr. Trump has appointed just one board member so far, the former Treasury official Randal K. Quarles, as the vice chairman for supervision, who voted for the first time on Wednesday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
This article is by Sewell Chan, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and David E. Sanger. SEOUL, South Korea President Obama's hopes of emerging from his Asia trip with the twin victories of a free trade agreement with South Korea and a unified approach to spurring economic growth around the world ran into resistance on all fronts on Thursday, putting Mr. Obama at odds with his key allies and largest trading partners. The most concrete trophy expected to emerge from the trip eluded his grasp: a long delayed free trade agreement with South Korea, first negotiated by the Bush administration and then reopened by Mr. Obama, to have greater protections for American workers. And as officials frenetically tried to paper over differences among the Group of 20 members with a vaguely worded communique to be issued Friday, there was no way to avoid discussion of the fundamental differences of economic strategy. After five largely harmonious meetings in the past two years to deal with the most severe downturn since the Depression, major disputes broke out between Washington and China, Britain, Germany and Brazil. Each rejected core elements of Mr. Obama's strategy of stimulating growth before focusing on deficit reduction. Several major nations continued to accuse the Federal Reserve of deliberately devaluing the dollar last week in an effort to put the costs of America's competitive troubles on trading partners, rather than taking politically tough measures to rein in spending at home. The result was that Mr. Obama repeatedly found himself on the defensive. He and the South Korean president, Lee Myung bak, had vowed to complete the trade pact by the time they met here; while Mr. Obama insisted that it would be resolved "in a matter of weeks," without the pressure of a summit meeting it was unclear how the hurdles on nontariff barriers to American cars and beef would be resolved. Mr. Obama's meeting with China's president, Hu Jintao, appeared to do little to break down Chinese resistance to accepting even nonbinding numerical targets for limiting China's trade surplus. While Lael Brainard, the under secretary of the Treasury for international affairs, said that the United States and China "have gotten to a good place" on rebalancing their trade, Chinese officials later archly reminded the Americans that as the issuers of the dollar, the main global reserve currency, they should consider the interests of the "global economy" as well as their own "national circumstances." The disputes were not limited to America's foreign partners. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner got into a trans Pacific argument with one of his former mentors, Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, after Mr. Greenspan wrote that the United States was "pursuing a policy of currency weakening." Mr. Geithner shot back on CNBC that while he had "enormous respect" for Mr. Greenspan, "that's not an accurate description of either the Fed's policies or our policies." He added, "We will never seek to weaken our currency as a tool to gain competitive advantage or grow the economy." Much of the rest of the world seemed to share Mr. Greenspan's assessment. Moreover, Mr. Obama seemed to be losing the broader debate over austerity. The president has insisted that at a moment of weak private demand, the best way to spur economic growth is to have the government prime the pump with cheap credit and government stimulus programs. He quickly found himself in an argument with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. Mrs. Merkel, reflecting a more traditional German view born of her country's history of hyperinflation before World War II, was equally adamant. "I am not one, and Germany is not one, who says growth and fiscal consolidation are contradictory," she said during a lunchtime address in Seoul. "They can go together, and it is essential to return to a sustainable growth path." She also suggested that it was the job of deficit countries like the United States and Britain, though she diplomatically avoided citing them to increase their competitiveness rather than put limits on countries that had figured out how to get the world to buy their goods. "In the task ahead, the benchmark has to be the countries that have been most competitive, not to reduce to the lowest common denominator," she said. The differences with Mr. Cameron and Mrs. Merkel were particularly striking because during Mr. Obama's first Group of 20 meetings in London, Pittsburgh and Toronto he managed to get all of the major economies to pursue something of a coordinated stimulus strategy. But that consensus began fracturing at the June meeting in Toronto. While the administration had warned that rolling back fiscal stimulus programs too quickly could endanger the fragile recovery, the pressure on European nations to slash their deficits was becoming overwhelming. Ultimately the Group of 20 countries committed to cutting government deficits in half by 2013, a goal the United States insists it will meet. But much has now changed. Mr. Cameron is following his conservative instincts and has made budget cutting a signature issue. Mrs. Merkel is credited with avoiding spending heavily on stimulus programs and emerging with the most successful recovery in Europe. And Mr. Obama faces new political constraints. Jeffry A. Frieden, a political scientist at Harvard, noted Thursday that the administration "feels it does not have the domestic political support for embarking on potentially difficult cooperative measures." The White House decided it was smarter for Mr. Obama to return home with no free trade accord than with one in which it could be accused of making concessions at a time that the consensus on trade has been shattered, particularly within the Democratic Party. Similarly, accusations that China has manipulated its currency for its own advantage and now the countercharge that the Fed is doing the same are part of what Mr. Frieden calls an argument over "who will bear the burden of adjustment." "Will it be the creditor or debtor countries?" he said. "Who's going to take a hit for our debt?" Indeed, the struggle for advantage, which ultimately may be a struggle to set the rules for a new global financial order, was the unspoken subtext of the meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. Hu. Mr. Hu, in the most indirect terms, told Mr. Obama that Beijing was focused on the Fed's role in pushing down interest rates, and its effect on weakening the dollar. The code words were obvious. For days Chinese officials have characterized the Fed's actions as an effort to drive "hot money" to developing nations, pushing up their currencies and their interest rates, and perhaps fueling inflation. Mr. Obama had hoped to make the meeting about a related subject: China's continuing refusal to allow rapid appreciation of its currency, which fuels its huge trade surplus. At a press briefing in Seoul, Zheng Xiaosong, director general of the Chinese Ministry of Finance's international department, indirectly accused the United States of ignoring its international responsibilities. "The major reserve currency issuers, while implementing their monetary policies, should not only take into account their national circumstances but should also bear in mind the possible impacts on the global economy," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
When given the chance, the 11 performers of the L.A. Dance Project, all accomplished, are unusually vivid and individual. In Ohad Naharin's "Yag," the Merce Cunningham MinEvent (a half hour anthology from that choreographer's repertory) and Justin Peck's "Murder Ballades," every dancer is grown up, singular, free. The men are especially assertive none more than David Adrian Freeland Jr., an arresting newcomer. Morgan Lugo and Robbie Moore are marvelous, too. And the women are so immediately different from one another that you applaud the generously eclectic taste of Benjamin Millepied, the founder and artistic director of the company, which is in town presenting two programs at the Joyce Theater, through June 25. There's much else to admire about Mr. Millepied, who was a star dancer at New York City Ballet; he's also made many ballets for that and other companies, as unalike as his Los Angeles dancers. His choice of Cunningham, Mr. Peck and Mr. Naharin shows his brilliantly hybrid taste. Perhaps there's only one important thing wrong with Mr. Millepied. Alas, it's a central thing: he choreographs, a lot, and never memorably. Mr. Millepied made half the repertory brought by his company to the Joyce. And his creations are both bewilderingly versatile and incurably second rate. He also has the regrettable touch of making his female performers look insincere. His best piece here is "Orpheus Highway," which had its world premiere on Wednesday. A two tier work of film and dance, it suggests now vaguely, now obviously the Orpheus Eurydice myth, set beside a modern American highway, to Steve Reich's Triple Quartet. (This and two other items the company presented have live music well played a luxury at the Joyce.) Mr. Freeland, marvelously authoritative, is the Orpheus whose Eurydice dies in his arms; when he leads her back to the world, he kills her again by looking at her. The dancers are also shown on the film projected at the back of the stage, often in similar or identical movements, suggesting the story has happened again and again. But Mr. Reich's music has a rigor and a metric complexity that the choreography lacks. The dancers do brisk footwork (in tennis shoes) now and then, as if toying with it. And the worst Millepied piece at the Joyce? The season's most eagerly anticipated one: "In Silence We Speak" (its world premiere was on Tuesday), a duet for the former ballerinas Janie Taylor and Carla Korbes, set to three compositions by David Lang. Mr. Millepied has set himself a tough assignment here: a study in sustained mutuality, proximity and supportive sensitivity for two women without conflict or contrast. Music gives us many examples, from Bach to Puccini, of the two voiced female idyll; but Mr. Millepied's dance is bland in the extreme. Surrounded by a calf height frame of dim neon light, Ms. Taylor and Ms. Korbes dance in loose trousers, with flowing hair and (why?) tennis shoes. The choreography keeps suggesting lines, but the sneakers keep the lines from extending through the foot. The women's kind, mutual supportiveness is soon tiresome and eventually unconvincing. Mr. Millepied's "Hearts and Arrows," to Philip Glass's String Quartet No. 3, is a nicely made series of ensembles, each ending in a good tableau. Too bad it resembles dozens of other such group dances. I'm sorry to harp on Mr. Millepied's work, but here there's no escaping it. New to me was Mr. Naharin's "Yag," a tragicomic theater game in which each dancer speaks, like a character in a play giving testimony, of family and the family members' love of dance. It's an entirely eccentric piece. And eccentricity is wonderfully the point: These dances (especially the solos) disclose vital human essences in fabulously odd ways, as the body hungrily travels in opposing directions, the leg advancing while the torso arches back or vice versa. Though a couple of sections lose impetus, the six dancers stay astoundingly fine. The company's Cunningham MinEvent began life last spring at the Hammer Museum's edition of the "Leap Before You Look" exhibition about Black Mountain College. The dances, all from Cunningham's 1950s choreography, include the amazing male solo "Changeling" (1957) and the long male female duet from "Springweather and People" (1955), both long lost pieces rediscovered only when a film was found after Cunningham's death. Mr. Freeland takes complete possession of the many moods of "Changeling" (who will forget his crablike crossing of the stage with hands behind his back?). Stephanie Amurao and Robbie Moore make the "Springweather" duet suspenseful (I love the jumps he does for her while she looks up and away). At the heart of Cunningham choreography is change; we never know where these dances are heading. I'm not wild about the way Mr. Millepied places largely black costumes for the Cunningham MinEvent against a black backdrop with dim lighting. The all black effect ought to be true to the spirit of Cunningham's long term visual collaborator Robert Rauschenberg. But Rauschenberg's lighting was more radical, while his and Cunningham's usual preference was for light and clarity. Still, this look is a valid experiment. And the colored, thin geometric lines along the costumes stay in memory. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Kim Ng has long been viewed as the person who would break one of baseball's most stubborn barriers. Thirty years ago, Ms. Ng, 51, started work in the game as an intern for the Chicago White Sox, attempting to carve out a career in a sport dominated by men. She worked her way up, earning senior positions with the Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers and, most recently, serving as Major League Baseball's senior vice president of baseball operations. On Friday, she became the first woman hired to run a major league team's baseball operations when she was named general manager of the Miami Marlins. "This challenge is one I don't take lightly," Ms. Ng said in a statement released by the team. "When I got into this business, it seemed unlikely a woman would lead a major league team, but I am dogged in the pursuit of my goals." The significance of Ms. Ng's hiring extends beyond baseball, as she is the first woman to be a general manager in any of the major men's sports leagues in North America. The move, to many in baseball, was considered long overdue and comes at a time when several other women are moving up the ranks of the sport after years of resistance, and as women begin to populate the benches and boardrooms of professional football and basketball teams. "I felt from 15 years ago that she was always the best candidate for the job, and for whatever reason, people weren't prepared to make that move," said Dan Evans, who in 1990 hired Ms. Ng as an intern for the Chicago White Sox. "So I congratulate the Marlins, because this is not just a baseball move, this is a generational move. Young women throughout the world view Kim differently today, and this gives them hope that that platform could be theirs someday." Ms. Ng (pronounced "ANG") has a formidable resume: After seven years with the White Sox, she spent 13 as an assistant general manager, first with the Yankees before leaving in 2002 to rejoin Mr. Evans, who was running the Dodgers. All of those teams reached the postseason during her tenure, but while Ms. Ng received interviews for at least four general manager openings, she was not chosen for the role until Friday. 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. Derek Jeter, the Marlins' chief executive, was the Yankees' star shortstop during Ms. Ng's time as assistant general manager to Brian Cashman. Mr. Jeter cited her "wealth of knowledge and championship level experience" in naming her as the top decision maker on his baseball operations staff. She will be responsible for, among other things, making trades, negotiating contracts, running the team's draft and managing its moves in free agency. "Kim's appointment makes history in all of professional sports," Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement, "and sets a significant example for the millions of women and girls who love baseball and softball." Women have owned franchises in baseball and other major sports in the past, and still do, but never had one held the position of general manager. Once excluded from baseball, women are entering the industry more than ever. Forty percent of the professional employees at Major League Baseball's central office are women (the highest percentage since 2008), and 21 women had on field coaching or player development roles for organizations entering 2020 (up from only three in 2017), according to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida. Still, that institute's latest report card gave Major League Baseball and its 30 teams a C grade for gender hiring. Of the roughly 500 vice president jobs among the 30 clubs, only 95 were held by women, according to the report, and only 19 were women of color about 4 percent of all vice president level positions. The news of Ms. Ng's hiring was cause for celebration Friday among the dozens of women in full time baseball operations jobs who share a text chain. Many in the group chat, which was created in the summer of 2019, look up to Ms. Ng as a role model. The group's founder, Jen Wolf, 33, a life skills coordinator in the Cleveland Indians' farm system, said she was star struck earlier in her career when she first met Ms. Ng at an annual industrywide conference. She later worked under Ms. Ng in Major League Baseball's central office; it was a powerful experience, Ms. Wolf said, not only because she could learn directly from a role model but because she had another woman as a boss in baseball. Ms. Wolf said her first thought upon hearing the news was happiness for her friend and mentor. "And then my second thought was: it's about time," Ms. Wolf said. "Anyone with her resume should have been hired years ago, so I'm very excited. I feel like males with a similar resume would have been hired ages ago." Before this season, Rachel Balkovec, a Yankees' minor league instructor, was believed to be the first woman hired as a full time hitting coach by a major league organization. Rachel Folden, also a minor league hitting instructor but with the Chicago Cubs, was the first female coach in that organization's history. And in July, Alyssa Nakken of the San Francisco Giants became the first woman in major league history to coach on the field. "The most important thing for me is that this is not a one off in all of these roles," Ms. Wolf said. "Just because Alyssa, Kim and both Rachels are the firsts, they should by no means be the last. They're incredible women, but there are so many more amazing, incredible women that are ready for those roles as well." Ms. Ng was born in Indianapolis but grew up in Queens and graduated from Ridgewood High School in New Jersey. At the University of Chicago, she starred in softball and graduated with a degree in public policy. The White Sox internship soon led to a role as the team's assistant director of baseball operations. "Kim would come in every day and ask me a series of questions, and at lunch ask more questions," Mr. Evans said. "She had a thirst to learn why. She grew into her role so quickly, and the fun thing was to watch the evolution of people getting more and more comfortable with a female in the room. She had pressure that most other people don't have: She had to prove herself all the time." Ms. Ng entered the game when top positions were often filled by former professional players, almost all of them white. Those positions rarely go to former players anymore, as increasingly teams lean on decisions driven more heavily by data than scouting or on field experience. Ms. Ng's hiring resonated throughout an industry that remains heavily male and white. At the beginning of the 2020 season, only four people of color led baseball operations departments: Ken Williams of the Chicago White Sox, Farhan Zaidi of the San Francisco Giants, Al Avila of the Detroit Tigers and the Marlins' Michael Hill, whom Ms. Ng is replacing. This stood in stark contrast to the field, where nearly 40 percent of this season's opening day rosters were made up of players of color, according to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. Latinos, the largest minority group in baseball, made up nearly 30 percent of major league players, followed by Black (about 8 percent) and Asian (roughly 2 percent). Ms. Ng is believed to be the second person of Asian descent to lead a team. Mr. Zaidi, the Dodgers' general manager from 2014 to 2018 and now the Giants' president of baseball operations, was born in Canada to parents from Pakistan. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Decades before the present outward flood of people from Africa and the Middle East, there was another newsworthy exodus, equally catastrophic, the one from postwar Vietnam. Almost two million people fled; by some reckonings almost a third died at sea. The artist Tiffany Chung, born in Danang, Vietnam, in 1969, was among the refugees, and she has made the phenomenon of forced migration her primary subject. Her focus on the refugee crisis in the Middle East seems to have given her a way to approach the emotionally loaded story of her own past, as she now does in "The Vietnam Exodus Project." Visually more varied than her previous work, it includes time stained documents, heart rending videos, and a series of large scale watercolors. These watercolors are based on her own photo collages but painted by young artists in Ho Chi Minh City who work in a program associated with San Art, an alternative space she co founded in that city. Finally, to give the Syria and Vietnam projects context, she has made large world maps, embroidered on canvas, with the global routes of many diasporas stitched in bright colored thread. In Ms. Chung's case, scientific method and painstaking craft serve as both distancing devices and surgical tools. As with tattoos, images that seem to be decoratively superficial are personal, political and ineradicable. Louis Fratino's paintings are hot and not just because they focus primarily on muscly young men who are scantily clad, if at all. Seemingly painted mostly in the same interior, they are also hot with the pleasure of lying around the house domesticity, of shared privacy. And they are hot too with painterly attention and erudition inviting a similar scrutiny from the viewer. Nearly every brush stroke and mark, every detail of furnishings and body hair ,has a life of its own. Mr. Fratino's early promise was apparent in "With Everyone," a solo show of small canvases in this gallery's project room last year. "So, I've Got You" is his second effort here, its title suggesting that the artist now has everything where he wants it: his friends and lovers, his variegated painting style and his audience, mixed together in a new closeness. The show's untitled masterpiece is a life size vertical image of a young man lying naked on a box settle, hands clasped behind his head, his body highlighted by the raking light of a lamp. He is talking, caught midsentence while the painter seems to hover above, as do we, tantalized. Especially arresting is the subject's chest, on which different planes, tints and dots of paint suggest a kind of reassembled Cubism, but also harbor at least two landscapes, with strands of chest and abdominal hair serving as trees. Something similar occurs on the back of the man in "Asleep on Laundry." In the puzzlelike "Dolphin Street," the surprise image is a young man lying with his head in the lap of another. Mr. Fratino's stylized figuration draws from Marsden Hartley, Dana Schutz and Elizabeth Murray. The head bathed in red in "Tristan Dancing, Venus" might belong to a Matisse faun. Mr. Fratino also splits the difference between two British painters of nude men, bringing together Lucian Freud's faceted flesh and David Hockney's languid homoeroticism. Through Oct. 14 at Mathew, 46 Canal Street, Manhattan; 929 229 9156, mathew nyc.com. Through Oct. 15 at MINI/Goethe Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38, 38 Ludlow Street, Manhattan; ludlow38.org. The overlap between contemporary art and fashion has become more of a merger in recent decades, with artists creating garments and clothing lines and designers mounting runway shows in galleries. "The Overworked Body: An Anthology of 2000s Dress" at Mathew and the MINI/Goethe Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38 represent the best of these marriages. Organized by Matthew Linde, the show includes over 50 designers from the 2000s and ranges from graduate student experiments to "fast fashion": early collaborations with multinational corporations (such as Isaac Mizrahi for Target and Alexander McQueen and Viktor Rolf for H M). Many of the garments have back stories, like a black sheath dress at Mathew by Narciso Rodriguez from a show scheduled for Sept. 11, 2001. It became a kind of lost collection, and here it is installed next to a dress with blow torched sequins by the downtown designer Shelley Fox. Some of the more outre objects include postapocalyptic survival wear from the Japanese collective Final Home ; knitted boots and gloves by BLESS; a Martin Margiela vest made with black ski gloves; and Bernhard Willhelm's look books featuring the French porn star Francois Sagat. Artists inclined to present performance art at their openings could take instruction from the designers here. Both galleries have videos of nontraditional runway shows. At Ludlow 38, visitors can watch Tom Ford's Gucci show with strippers lining the catwalk. At Mathew, there are examples of Carol Christian Poell's brilliantly imaginative shows: In one video models lie like corpses on stretchers in a morgue, and in another they float down a river in Milan with spectators standing on bridges, watching them pass below. Beautiful and perverse, the video is like a contemporary updating of John Everett Millais's 1850 51 painting of Shakespeare's Ophelia, a gesture that hovers perfectly between art and fashion, the subversive and sublime. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
After the lunch plates were cleared away and the tape recorder was switched off, Sally Field turned to Misty Copeland, the first female African American principal dancer in the history of American Ballet Theater, and quietly said, "You may think you're fighting for a select group of women for girls and women of color but you're fighting for me, too, and my granddaughters." Ms. Field, 70, a popular and critically acclaimed actress for more than five decades, winner of two Academy Awards and three Emmy Awards, was circling back, at the end of her conversation with Ms. Copeland, to underscore its guiding spirit: the common cause of women in the face of inequality. Now starring on Broadway in "The Glass Menagerie," the classic Tennessee Williams play, Ms. Field has traveled about as far as one can go (and worked tirelessly to get there) from her beginnings in light sitcoms such as "Gidget" and "The Flying Nun." Ms. Copeland, 34, considered a dance prodigy as a child, rose quickly through the ranks of classical ballet, overcoming chaotic family circumstances and injury before taking her place at the top tier of dance in 2015 a black ballerina, and a lingering rarity among premier dance companies. Her performances with the American Ballet Theater, which begins its spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House next month, draw large, diverse crowds, reflecting her pop star appeal. Over lunch at Charlie Bird in SoHo (grilled octopus and burrata for Ms. Copeland; roast chicken with arugula salad for Ms. Field), they discussed the social significance of their success, the complicated childhoods that spurred them, and the political meaning of their work in the early days of the Trump administration. Philip Galanes Do you know why we put you together? PG Because you reinvented the way people see you. That a prima ballerina can have brown skin and curves. That a major dramatic actress can start out in silly sitcoms. When did you first understand you'd have to fight for that? SF Well, it's harder for women in any arena than it is for men. It just is. And even more so in show business, where they shove women into stereotypical little boxes. But I was also battling television itself. If you had any success on TV in the '70s, you could never transition into film. My agents and managers said: "No, no, no. You're not pretty enough; you're not good enough." SF Of course not. I fired them. But I believed them, too. We all have so many pieces inside us. One piece was injured because my feelings were hurt. Another piece, a driving one, was freaking angry at being told I wasn't good enough. But even stronger than those was my desire to find the butterfly inside me, the one I'd first found in the seventh grade, doing my first scene on a school stage. Something happened. I found my own voice. All the other ones that said: Don't do this, and don't do that; they were gone. I felt the sparkle of being alive. Then it was gone. But I've spent the rest of my life trying to find it again and grow it and use it. Misty Copeland When I first came into the ballet world, I didn't feel any limits, which is interesting, because there are so many limits for black women. Growing up the way I did, struggling for day to day survival. Where are we going to stay? What are we going to eat? That made me such an introvert and so nervous about life. But when I came to ballet, at 13, it was the first time I felt calm and protected and beautiful. PG I felt profound kinship with you when I read that you asked your mom to drive you to middle school the week before it began, as a test run. I did that, too. MC I wish I'd known you. We would have been best friends. PG I thought if I could just get everything perfect, you might not hate me. SF We all sound very similar, and insecure. MC My fear was that people would find out what was actually happening in my life. I was so ashamed of everything: the abuse of my stepfather, living in a motel. I was constantly hiding. I thought: If I'm on time and perfect, no one's going to ask me any questions. Ballet was the first time I know this sounds crazy, standing on a big stage, under bright lights but it was the first time I felt safe. No one could touch me; no one could say anything to me. I could express myself. And nothing else mattered. SF Exactly! My family was colorful, too, not as challenging as Misty's, but there was a large degree of abuse. But I was lucky enough to go to school at a time when public school kids were introduced to the arts. And I was voracious about it. I could be me onstage. I could be ugly. I could be mean. I could be all the other colors that little girls weren't allowed to be. MC Oh, yes. None of the other stuff was thrown at me until I became a professional: You're too short; your boobs are too big; you're too muscular. And oh, you're black. There's never been a black woman to reach this level at a ballet company before. That's when I felt defeated. But then this fire appeared inside me. It was like, "No, I am going to make this happen!" Once I realized it wasn't about me, but what I could represent and change in the ballet world for others, that gave me an even bigger push. PG You were both young juggernauts. Sally starred in popular sitcoms as a teenager. Misty flew up the ballet ladder, arriving in the corps de ballet at A.B.T. at 17. Then there was a stalling. Misty stopped moving up so fast; Sally didn't transition to serious roles. How did you deal with that? SF When I got discovered like "wham!" and just stepped into a television series I couldn't see enough to dream. But as I worked, my dreams began to open up. I wanted to be a real actor. I wanted to learn the craft, and all I knew was what I learned in high school. But it wasn't until I got to the Actors Studio and began working with Lee Strasberg that I really knew where I wanted to go. I was "The Flying Nun" during the day and doing weird exercises at the Actors Studio at night. But I couldn't even get on the list to read for serious roles. I said to myself: "That's because I'm not good enough. When I'm good enough, it will change." SF It did, but I don't know if it was because I was good enough. Eventually, I got in the door, but I had to fight like holy hell. I'd hear people say: "Who let her in? We don't want her here." But I'd swallow my anger and use it to focus myself, because I knew the only way I'd be hired was if I was better than everyone else. SF But that's almost worse, isn't it? Because you can feel the intention underneath, but can't use it. MC No, I used that same fuel to prove that black dancers are just as capable, even though I knew I would have to be much better than the others to succeed. For years and years, I watched as white dancers came in when I knew I was more talented or brought more depth to a role but had to sit back and watch it happen. But I didn't stop working. PG Did you reach out for help, like Sally did with Lee Strasberg? MC Oh, yes. Coaches in particular and former ballerinas from the company. I worked with acting coaches to help me tell stories onstage. When you become a principal dancer, it's about carrying the company in telling a story through movement. That's what I'm good at. Not just going out there and dancing technically, but really becoming a character. I fell in love with that, and it came from reaching out for help. SF Coming of age in the '60s, I very much felt the marching feet of my generation. I wasn't in the march, but I could feel the unrest. Vietnam and the women's movement had a huge impact on me, even though it was like a conversation going on down the hall. I was hidden for so long, and so focused on work, then I had my children so early and they were my focus. It wasn't until the end of the '70s, beginning of the '80s, when I began working with the film director Marty Ritt that I really woke up. He taught me that your work should always represent you and what you want to say, personally, about being alive. PG So, by the time you were making "Norma Rae" and "Places in the Heart," were those films representing what you wanted to say? SF No, I was being taught by those characters I was playing. And I learned so much from them because I spent so much time getting into their shoes. PG That willingness to see reminds me of a time after I came out, when I spoke up at work about an issue that was unfair to gay people. My boss said, "Oh, I don't even see you as gay." Do you ever get that? MC I get it all the time. "Oh, I don't see you as black." Like it's a negative thing to be black, but I know you, and you're nice, so I don't see you that way. It's completely insulting. SF It's saying: I refuse to see you. MC Years ago, there was an article in The New York Times titled "Where Are All the Black Swans?" It really hit home. I was stuck in the corps de ballet, and the article called out all the major ballet companies, including A.B.T.: "Where are the black women? We don't see them in your companies." I felt completely defeated, like there was no hope for me. And when I went into work the next day, a co worker who's a good friend said, "Did you see that ridiculous article?" I remember feeling so angry and breaking it down for her, letting her know how the issue affected me personally. It's harder to do that with higher ups without their feeling attacked, but they've come a long way. SF All of this goes down so deep into what's wrong with our society now, whether it's about race or women, gay issues or worker's rights. This failure to see each other. PG It's like Misty's Under Armour ad. Finally, a company says: "This is what a ballerina looks like; this is an athlete!" And the next thing you know, the company's C.E.O. is saying President Trump is an asset to the nation. Was there any way you could let that slide, given the president's comments on communities of color and women? PG Is there such a thing as political dance? How would it express itself? MC Well, dance can tell a political story. But there's only so much I can say when I'm onstage performing. Dancers aren't given a voice. So, it's been an interesting path for me. PG In many ways, you're the first dancer I've known who's had a voice, through your books and speaking engagements and endorsements. SF She didn't wait to be given it, either. Misty said: "This is my voice. Hear it." MC The company has also made stands of not traveling to certain places at certain times, even if it means taking a financial hit. I stepped down from the President's Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition when Trump was elected. I don't want to represent his administration. If A.B.T. were asked to perform at the White House, I doubt we would. PG Well, it's in the air. The women's marches, the immigration protests concerned people are watching and speaking up. Do you see yourselves as part of that movement, or do you have more impact on stage? MC For me, it's a combination of the two. Thanks to the platforms I have and the opportunities to voice what I stand for, when people come to the theater to watch me dance, I think they feel, even more, the power of what I'm doing offstage. SF I also feel a certain responsibility now to stand up and speak up. Because things are happening right now that are wrong. Defunding Planned Parenthood, defunding the arts, public radio. It's disgraceful. And I love this country. PG Let's end by circling back to the beginning. Is the stage still the place you feel freest, like when you were girls? SF It's the place I'm most me. The place I most genuinely exist, even though I'm playing another person. But they're most truly my insides. MC Absolutely! It's evolved a bit, but performing serves the same purpose in my life as it did when I was 13: I feel free. I feel loved. I feel confident. I feel beautiful. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
WASHINGTON Senators pressed top antitrust regulators on Tuesday to aggressively investigate the power of the country's biggest tech companies, with some lawmakers questioning whether the officials had the will or resources to take on Silicon Valley's richest businesses. In the regulators' first hearing since the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department divided up antitrust responsibilities for Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook, lawmakers pushed for assurances that the agencies would provide vigorous oversight of the companies. But the regulators Joe Simons, the chairman of the trade commission, and Makan Delrahim, the top antitrust official at the Justice Department offered few details about their inquiries into the industry. That frustrated some of the lawmakers at the hearing, held by the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust. "The fact that you're coming here without any specifics I think reinforces the impression that federal antitrust enforcement is an empty suit," said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut. "What the public sees is a facade with respect to Big Tech and no immediate prospect of urgency or active enforcement." Read more: 16 ways Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon are in the government's cross hairs. The tech giants are embroiled in investigations around the world over concerns they have abused their market power. In the United States, federal agencies and House lawmakers are looking into the power and influence of Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook. Many state attorneys general have announced investigations into Facebook and Google. The scrutiny has helped upend the companies' usual place in Washington, where they have long been cheered on as pillars of innovation and a major engine of the country's economy. The companies' troubles have escalated in recent years from a range of scandals, including how they handle consumer data and their role in spreading disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. In July, the Federal Trade Commission approved a fine of roughly 5 billion against Facebook for mishandling users' personal information, by far the largest fine against a technology company in the United States. But Senator Josh Hawley, a conservative Republican from Missouri, on Tuesday questioned Mr. Simons of the F.T.C. about whether the settlement was too weak. Mr. Hawley homed in on the fact that the agency never talked to Facebook's top executives during the privacy investigation, using it to suggest that there could be a lack of determination at the agency. Mr. Simons answered no to both questions. Concerns about the tech companies vary. Facebook is accused of shutting out nascent competitors. Google has drawn scrutiny for its smartphone software, ad and search businesses. Critics say Amazon uses its knowledge of independent merchants on its platform to make competing generic products. And software developers chafe at Apple's status as a gatekeeper for iPhone apps. At the federal level, Mr. Simons and Mr. Delrahim have divided up responsibility for handling antitrust complaints about the companies. The Justice Department took Google and Apple, and the F.T.C. got Facebook and Amazon. The regulators and companies have confirmed only two formal investigations. Google disclosed in August that it had received a formal request from the Justice Department for information related to a previous investigation of the company, signaling a new inquiry was underway. Facebook is the subject of an F.T.C. antitrust investigation related to its acquisition of other services. But the accord between the agencies appears tenuous. Lawmakers pressed the regulators on Tuesday on reports that they were at odds over the investigations. When Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, said it sounded like "things have broken down at least in part" between the agencies, Mr. Simons replied: "I would agree with that." Asked later to expand on his comments, Mr. Simons declined. Mr. Delrahim also acknowledged that there was some overlap on the tech investigations. And he said that the state attorneys general investigations could complicate matters, too. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Martha Swope, whose crisp, compelling photographs of dancers and actors at work recorded nearly half a century of stage history, died on Thursday in New York. She was 88. The cause was Parkinson's disease, said Jeanne Fuchs, her longtime friend and executor. From 1957, when Ms. Swope was invited by Jerome Robbins to shoot rehearsals of "West Side Story," to 1994, when she shut down her Times Square studio and sold her archive, Ms. Swope produced hundreds of thousands of images of performers in action, capturing Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov in full flight, the cast of "La Cage Aux Folles" in full drag and John Travolta in full Saturday night fever. Those photographs made their way into newspapers (the arts pages of The New York Times frequently featured her work), magazines and books. They decorated sales brochures, posters and programs. And they eventually garnered her a Tony Honor for Excellence in Theater in 2004 and a lifetime achievement award from the League of Professional Theater Women in 2007. As official photographer first for New York City Ballet and then for an honor roll of other dance troupes, Ms. Swope chronicled the working lives of George Balanchine, Martha Graham, Mr. Robbins and other key figures in 20th century dance. At the same time, she was what Variety called "the go to photog" for New York's theater industry, documenting more than 800 productions. Whether Ms. Swope was posing clients in her studio or capturing their live performances, whether on assignment for a publication, a dance company or a theater producer, her stated aim was to make a straightforward record of the artistry before her lens. "I'm not interested in what's going on on my side of the camera," she told an interviewer. "I'm interested in what's happening on the other side." She took ballet lovers into the studio with Mr. Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky as they worked with the dancers on "Agon." She was backstage as Mr. Baryshnikov and Liza Minnelli prepared their television special. And she brought Irene Worth and Kevin Spacey squabbling in "Lost in Yonkers," Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera vamping in "Chicago" and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton canoodling in "Private Lives" to those who couldn't buy tickets. Martha Joan Swope was, in fact, born on Feb. 22, 1928, in Tyler, Tex. It was Washington's Birthday, and, Ms. Swope told friends, her parents, John Swope and the former Nellie Clark, named her for Martha Washington. Even as a girl, she carried a little camera wherever she went. But her real passion was dance. After a year at Baylor University in Waco, she was accepted at City Ballet's training affiliate, the School of American Ballet. She left Texas to pursue a dance career setting out, she recalled, with 17 hats and "visions of going to cocktail parties and meeting all those West Pointers." Instead she met Mr. Robbins, who had returned to ballet class to get into shape for directing and choreographing "West Side Story." An amateur photographer, he offered his fellow shutterbug the use of his darkroom, and then, when rehearsals began, he invited her to bring her camera. One of her pictures appeared in Life magazine, and her photography career took off. "I didn't even know what an interchangeable lens was, or a Leica," she once recalled. But she was still hoping to become a dancer when Lincoln Kirstein, who ran the school and was general director of City Ballet, pulled her out of class one day to offer her a job recording the company's work in pictures. She shelved her toe shoes. Her routine was to attend rehearsals to become familiar with the choreography. She would then shoot the dress rehearsals for each cast, typically arranging her lanky frame in ballet's fourth position, leaning back on her rear leg and switching between wide angle and close up lenses. Sometimes but only if she had to she loaded a third camera with color film. She also took pictures, as unobtrusively as possible, at performances. Such sessions could yield as many as 300 negatives of a single work. But those that left her darkroom were the ones in which every toe, every fingertip was properly positioned, and dance and dancers looked flawless. Delia Peters, a friend who danced with City Ballet, said in an interview: "Having been a dancer, she understood the timing. She understood what they were going to do, she understood where the pictures were going to be." Ms. Swope's career began as technical advances and evolving tastes changed the way dance and theater performances could be photographed. Previously, slow shutter and film speeds had made it impractical to shoot dancers and actors unless they were prettily posed and carefully lighted in a studio. Ms. Swope was able to catch them animated and sweaty and laboring onstage or in rehearsal. But she also pioneered the now commonplace practice of distilling the essence of a drama or musical by posing the performers tellingly and shooting them in close up. By 1978, she was photographing 60 to 70 percent of the Broadway roster, working out of the apartment below her own on West 72nd Street and using the bathroom as the darkroom. Actors and producers valued not just her canny eye and instinct for flattery but also her ability to work swiftly and calmly. With her gentle temperament and Southern manners, Ms. Swope managed to get cranky, tired actors to do what she wanted without seeming bossy. Back then, publicity photographs were printed from negatives one at a time for hand delivery to newspapers and magazines. Ms. Swope and her assistants regularly worked through the night preparing them for distribution the next morning. "She was an incredible teacher," said Carol Rosegg, one of several dance and theater photographers who learned their craft assisting Ms. Swope and then became her competition. "And she was a master retoucher. In those days you would sit with a single edge razor blade scratching out wrinkles one at a time." In 1980, Ms. Swope moved her studio to a large storefront space in the Midtown complex Manhattan Plaza, taking an apartment there as well. By the time she retired and gave away her cameras, the studio contained more than a million images, which she sold to Time and Life Pictures. But the deal ended in acrimony and litigation, and she regained possession of her archive in an out of court settlement in 2002. In 2010 she donated her life's work contact sheets, negatives, prints, slides and digital files to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. A selection of her photos was exhibited at the library for four months beginning in the fall of 2012. She is survived by two nieces, a nephew and a great niece. Ms. Swope's legacy was important to her, and she was determined not to separate her dance and theater images. She had hoped to compile a volume surveying them together, but she never found a taker. The closest she came to marrying her two worlds in one book was "Baryshnikov on Broadway: Photographs," which documented the dancer's acclaimed 1980 television special. Other books for which she provided photographs include Tanaquil Le Clercq's "Mourka: The Autobiography of a Cat," Kenneth Laws's "Physics and the Art of Dance" and Denny Martin Flinn's "What They Did for Love: The Untold Story Behind the Making of 'A Chorus Line.'" Her friends remember an enthusiastic, card playing traveler who loved animals and jigsaw puzzles. But Ms. Swope's photographs will outlive those memories. They are in dozens of other dance and theater books, and they regularly pop up in web searches for graying Broadway actors or bygone ballet stars. They also reappear as her subjects die or when a reference to show business history needs to be illustrated. Only last month, a dramatic Martha Swope photograph appeared in The Times with an article about the 35th anniversary of "Dreamgirls." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
In the skiing village of Megeve, increased tourism and development have kindled the market, but prices remain mostly static. This five bedroom chalet is built into a hill above the world renowned skiing village of Megeve, in the Haute Savoie region of the French Alps. The 2,153 square foot, Savoyard style home was built in the 1970s. In 2005, it was gutted and fully refurbished by local craftsmen using wood from an old ferme d'alpage, or alpine farmhouse, said Jean Blower, who owns the home with her husband. "We bought an old alpage up in the mountains, and it was taken apart piece by piece," Ms. Blower said. "Every piece was numbered, cleaned and treated, and then it was reconstructed into our new home." "The top floor living area, with its full ceiling height, resembles the barn area of local farms," Mr. Cooke said. "Plus, use of reclaimed timber and stone" including the recycled oak plank flooring "adds to that look." The main entrance, on the second level, opens to a foyer with a powder room. There are three en suite bedrooms on this floor, with rustic wood walls and en suite bathrooms. Two bedrooms open to a long balcony with carved wood railing and shutters. The master suite, with oak floors and carved wood details, includes a study with a fireplace, a dressing area and a stone shower. The living area, on the top floor, has a central wood burning fireplace stretching up to the 12 foot ceiling, along with an open kitchen and dining nook. Doors open to a south facing wraparound terrace with views of the village and mountains, including Rochebrune and Mont Blanc. The kitchen has a breakfast bar, reclaimed timber cabinets and slate floors, along with a traditional Lacanche gas range. The dining area has built in benches and walls clad in a mixture of granite and local stone. The chalet has been furnished with vintage mountain farmhouse pieces, including an end table fashioned from a primitive cheese making table, Ms. Blower said. The furniture is not included in the asking price, but is negotiable. The chalet is about a 10 minute walk from the center of Megeve and the Le Jaillet ski lift, or you can walk 150 yards to ski onto the slopes, she said. The village is also a popular summer destination, with hiking trails, golf courses, a large sports and entertainment complex, as well as dozens of restaurants and upscale stores. The area attracts high altitude runners and cyclists, and holds a jazz festival and an international show jumping competition every year. "Megeve is as spectacular in the winter as it is in the summer," Ms. Blower said. "You really live in nature every month of the year." Megeve, in southeast France, is less than 40 miles from the Swiss and Italian borders. The closest international airport is in Geneva, an hour away by car. High speed rail service to Paris is less than 20 minutes away. Megeve is a traditional alpine farming village of about 3,000 year round residents that sees its population swell by tens of thousands in the winter and summer seasons. It bills itself as the first ski resort to be built in the Alps, conceived in the 1920s as an alternative to St. Moritz, Switzerland, by members of the Rothschild family. Home prices in Megeve have held steady in the past year after a recent slow period, brokers said, adding that the opening of the Four Seasons Hotel Megeve in 2017 and growing tourism investment in the village have kindled the market. According to the 2020 Knight Frank Prime Ski Property Report, the 2018 19 French Alps ski season saw a 5.3 percent increase in tourist visits from the year before. The report tracked the price of a four bedroom chalet in central locations across popular resorts in the French and Swiss Alps, and while favorites like Val d'Isere and Chamonix saw prime prices rise by more than 2.5 percent between June 2018 and June 2019, Megeve's prices stayed flat, said Roddy Aris, an associate partner with Knight Frank. That is likely because Chamonix and the eight resorts in Les 3 Vallees continue to outpace Megeve in investment. "It comes down to investment levels and what is visibly happening in resorts," Mr. Aris said. Megeve's skiing season one of the shortest, at about 18 weeks also plays a role, Mr. Cooke said, as does the recent spate of new development. "Building land is becoming more and more scarce in places like Val d'Isere, due to geographical restrictions," he said. According to Knight Frank's report, a four bedroom chalet in central Megeve is now worth about 13,700 euros a square meter (about 1,400 a square foot). But "there are pockets of Megeve the most obvious being the Mont d'Arbois, which is one of the most exclusive areas where, for the right property, you could pay as high as 20,000 or 25,000 euros per square meter," Mr. Aris said, or 2,050 or 2,600 a square foot. The selection of homes in Megeve is split between chalets and apartments, with old alpine farmhouses among the most coveted for their conversion potential. Newly developed apartments in the village center run about 15,000 euros a square meter ( 1,530 a square foot), while similar apartments on the outskirts might be half that price, Mr. Grepillat said. Proximity to ski slopes or to the center of the village are the driving factors. "If you can ski right up to your front door, you have an asset that will hold its value and increase every year," Mr. Aris said, while a home in the village center appeals to buyers whose "primary reason for being in Megeve is to enjoy the old town, shops and restaurants, and the town life." Back in the booming 2000s, buyers in Megeve were split evenly between French nationals and foreigners, Mr. Cooke said, but today French citizens make up 70 to 80 percent of buyers. Many foreign buyers come from Geneva, just an hour away, brokers said. They also come from other parts of Switzerland, Italy, Britain, Belgium, Holland, Turkey, Australia and Brazil. And the Middle East is "a burgeoning market," Mr. Aris said. "We have huge demand out of Dubai and United Arab Emirates, from Arabs who aren't necessarily skiers, but they see Megeve as a summer destination." There are no restrictions on foreign buyers in France, agents said. A notary working on behalf of the government handles the transaction for both buyer and seller, with the fee paid by the buyer. But it is common for buyers to request their own notaries, which costs the same, with the fee split by the notaries, Mr. Aris said: "If you're a foreign buyer, it's nice to know you've got someone who's got your back and is independent." On a resale home, the notary fee and other taxes typically come to about 7.5 percent of the sale price, Mr. Grepillat said. For a newly developed chalet or apartment, the fee is about 2.5 percent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
My first performance in a Balanchine ballet took place 34 years ago, on April 30, 1983. It was a day that will forever be marked in the history books because it also happened to be the day Balanchine died. I was given the sad news about the legendary choreographer around 11 a.m. as I was prepping to head to the theater for a matinee of the School of American Ballet's annual spring workshop. My roommate had heard it on the radio and came to find me as I was putting on my makeup at the bathroom sink. I went silent with shock. I have never been the type of person to burst into tears or visibly show my emotions, and my immediate thought was that I didn't have the right to feel emotional about this. I had just arrived on the scene and had no real history with the man, or his work for that matter. My teenage thoughts that morning were selfish and swirled around the fact that I'd never get the chance to dance for him. Balanchine had been at the epicenter of American ballet for most of the 20th century, and I had fallen hard for his choreography after spending two previous summers studying at the School of American Ballet. I will never forget crossing paths with Mr. B himself one of those summers as he was entering the school that he co founded. He was tiny and frail, but he strode chest up through the double doorway with an aura of majesty. I stood motionless in the hallway as he passed by. I was frozen, but in my mind I genuflected. I had woken up that April morning filled with hope and excitement for my Lincoln Center debut. I'd imagined that this day could change my life. Eight months earlier, I had left Kentucky and arrived in New York, on my own, to live and study year round at the school. I was 15, the newest and youngest in my class, and was cast to dance a corps part in "Western Symphony," Balanchine's classic American "cowboy ballet." Ballerinas being able to dance as both saloon girls and horses grabbed me by my Kentucky soul. I couldn't wait to wear my purple satin Karinska costume with my feathered headpiece, black beaded velvet choker and densely layered frilly skirt with colorful bows that could be seen only when the dancer flipped her skirt the right way. And after nearly a year of training my legs for Balanchine, I was thrilled with the newly refined shape of their musculature. I had never before felt that degree of glamour, confidence and balletic power generating from within. It was all so intoxicating. Growing up as a kid in Louisville, I searched for ballet programs on PBS. My ideas about Balanchine and his ballets had been colored by a handful of "Great Performances" and "Live From Lincoln Center" evenings that I watched on the family room floor in front of our TV. I had also seen a number of his ballets danced by the Louisville Ballet company, pieces like "Night Shadow," "Square Dance" and "Allegro Brilliante," and I'd seen New York City Ballet dancers like Patricia McBride and Merrill Ashley perform as guest artists. But it wasn't until my first summer in New York when I was 14 that I finally got to see "his" N.Y.C.B. perform as a company. That's when I was genuinely hit with his magic. Until then, I'd never felt any true calling for the type of dancer I wanted to be when I grew up. I knew I wanted to be a ballet dancer, but what kind, I wasn't sure. My two dream companies had been New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater. Most of my early training had been geared toward A.B.T.'s more traditional classicism. But one of my early Kentucky teachers saw something in my high energy, coltish physicality that, in his eyes, made me good Balanchine material. Over that summer, I experienced a huge range of Balanchine's work at N.Y.C.B.'s Tchaikovsky Festival and the Stravinsky Centennial Celebration. I saw for the first time ballets like "Concerto Barocco," "Union Jack" and "Agon" Balanchine ballets that I'd only ever seen in pictures or read about, three ballets that a decade later would come to help define me as a dancer. Balanchine choreography is filled with puzzles and paradoxes. Most of his works are plotless visualizations of the music. His work is free of excess, giving the viewer freedom to find drama through the ingenious design of his dances. That summer, I witnessed ballerinas spinning across the stage so ridiculously fast that I almost felt blinded by them. I was spellbound by a team of Amazonian women in red kilts kicking their legs so high and with such attack that it left me breathless. I remember a flaxen haired woman dancing the second trio in Balanchine's "Agon," as two men elegantly clapped out the beats of her castanet solo behind her, feeling as if I'd been struck by lightning. In that moment, I discovered the dancer I wanted to one day become: a dancer devoted to choreography and choreographers, a dancer who could become a vessel for music, a dancer who would offer her best self in every inch of her work. Sitting in the dark theater, I vowed to explore the mysteries of Balanchine's creativity and of my own notions of beauty. Two years later, my first day performing his work started out with joyful expectation. But what I had envisioned as an entry point into a new world was marked by sorrow. As I headed toward Lincoln Center for my warm up class before the show, I passed a number of company dancers as they headed toward the New York State Theater for their own matinee. Most wore sunglasses with their heads hanging low or walked close with one of their colleagues. No one seemed able to make eye contact. The elders around me were sobbing and hugging one another. I was so new, only beginning to sprout my roots at his school, much less his company, but I wasn't about to crumble. All I wanted to do was to slip my body into Balanchine's choreography that day, to feel his life in his work, to get to know him through his dances. And in time, I'd cultivate my own kind of connection, and tap the essence of the newly discovered dancer living deep within me. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
One hopes that with the publication of his masterly third novel, "Waiting for Eden," will help put to rest the current age of maximalism in American fiction. (I doubt he intended to do so with this brilliant volume, but so it goes.) Rachel Cusk's "Outline" trilogy and Jenny Offill's "Dept. of Speculation" are recent novels with reasonable page counts that have created similarly shimmering portraits of humans at rest and fury. In his short novel, Ackerman accomplishes what a mountain of maximalist books have rarely delivered over tens of thousands of pages and a few decades: He makes pure character based literary art, free of irony, free of authorial self aggrandizement, dedicated only to deeply human storytelling. "Waiting for Eden" is a journey through the traumas, betrayals and ecstasies of contemporary warfare and the multiple lives touched and sometimes shattered by one combat injury or death. Be forewarned, there is more trauma here than ecstasy, yet there is also grace and wonder. Ackerman accomplishes so much in so few pages that the book feels nearly unclassifiable. It is a war novel, certainly, and a wisely observed marriage drama, and a novel of friendship, duty and failure. It's a precise study of the American underclass that mostly fills the ranks of our armed services. There is some Carveresque kitchen sink stuff, pancakes and hidden cigarette butts and all; and some Salterian love and sex and lies; and the writer pulls off a bit of narrative absurdity of the sort perfected most often by Joy Williams. The storytelling also feels so blue flame true that one thinks of the war reporting of C. J. Chivers, Anthony Shadid and Marie Colvin. That's a lot of writers surfing these pages, but "Waiting for Eden" is original and singular not burdened by influence but energized by it. The novel's setup is somewhat mad, and marvelously simple: Three years ago our narrator died in combat in the Hamrin Valley of Iraq: "I was sitting next to Eden and luckier than him when our Humvee hit a pressure plate, killing me and everybody else, him barely surviving." When your dead narrator claims he's luckier than the injured Marine whose story he's about to tell, get ready for a deep dive into pathos, regret and longing. The theme of "only one came back" is not uncommon in the canon of war stories, but here the lone survivor is too severely injured to tell his story, so Ackerman hands the narration to an omniscient member of the dead platoon. This inventive tweak offers Ackerman point of view and narrative time and space options that he engages with brio. 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. By boldly situating his narrative omniscience in a ghost (or corpse, or spirit I'm unsure what to call the narrator), Ackerman immediately achieves uncanny authority. The reader's own "waiting for Eden" becomes an obsession. (Yes, there might be some Beckett here too: Whom or what are we waiting for, all of us?) This omniscience offers privileged views of Eden's medevac back to the United States (those few pages alone constitute an entire tragedy, as a less injured man dies because the two nurses on the plane spend all their energy and resources resuscitating Eden), Eden in the burn unit, Eden and the narrator training for combat, Eden and his wife, Mary, entertaining the narrator with a home cooked meal. (Eden and Mary yes, you might get biblical with it, if that's your style.) The time frame is loose, yet all the moves are determined and distinct, each serving the story in surprising, thrilling ways. When the bachelor narrator leaves his Servicemembers' Group Life Insurance to Mary, it first looks impulsive and desperate, and then insidious, but that act is finally understood as a generous and angelic last rite by a young Marine who more often than not ate Chinese takeout alone in the barracks. In addition to waiting, there is counting: Eden wishes to be counted among the death tolls tallied by both the narrator and Mary, who wonders where on the roster Eden's name will land: "Slowly she changed her mind about what his number might be. But she always knew he'd have a number. ... For in the end it would always be the war that killed him." Early on we are told that Eden, the bedridden, formerly strapping 220 pound combat Marine, now weighs 70 pounds. Ackerman wisely avoids the laundry list of injuries he suffered. We can guess; Eden is housed in a burn center in San Antonio, his physical totality a fraction of what it was: "He's had a lot of infections, and they've cut all of him off up to the torso. ... I don't think anyone really knows what to call him, except for Mary. She calls him her husband." Mary is a good wife, a loving wife. She's not running the base wives' club, but she understands Eden's need to serve his country. She also wants a baby. The couple made an agreement that if she got pregnant, he wouldn't go back to war. But intimacy is difficult while Eden fights his ghosts from an earlier deployment. Or is he just holding out so he can redeploy? Still, a child is conceived, and her hair is red like flames. The birth allows Ackerman to explore conflicted, confused true love in such elegant and humane ways that you will come to question everything you think you know about the meanings of romance and fidelity. Whatever present action exists in the novel happens over a single Christmas holiday, when Mary, after three years, finally leaves Eden's bedside to visit their daughter, who now lives with Mary's mother. Some critics might call "Waiting for Eden" a retelling of Dalton Trumbo's antiwar classic "Johnny Got His Gun." That would be unfair to both writers for a multitude of reasons, Ackerman's apolitical stance first among them. But the younger author does make at least one wry, essential and tragicomic homage to the ringing telephone that begins "Johnny": When Mary travels to see their daughter, she accidentally leaves her cellphone charging in Eden's room, just behind his head. The ringing phone as Mary tries to locate it from her mother's house will rip Eden from the far depths of consciousness into a paranoid phantasmagoria of cockroaches. Eden has always hated bugs, and they are at the center of one of the book's key betrayals. From his hospital bed he clocks a cockroach stalking him from across the room: "Eden didn't know the name for a cockroach anymore, but he knew that its hard backed shell and thorny legs could run a number on him." Is that Kafka's Gregor Samsa haunting this novel? Maybe. The ringing behind Eden's head convinces him that an army of cockroaches is invading his room to annihilate what remains of his body. In an infinite and inhumane technology loop, his panic causes the shift nurse to treat his extreme response as cardiac arrest, which in turn causes her to call Mary's cellphone to tell her Eden is going into cardiac arrest, which causes even more ringing and more physiological anguish for Eden. It's almost a gag out of "I Love Lucy." Except it's not. Even though you shouldn't, you will laugh. There is not a lot of actual death in "Waiting for Eden," except for the poor kid on Eden's medevac who's suffered the most humiliating of injuries: "The kid had been shot in the ass." The message is this: You never know what you're fighting for. You never know what might kill you or when you'll die. The senior nurse, Gabe, is a veteran war medic who takes an interest in helping Eden see out his Morse code plea for the "END." Years removed from his own deployment, Gabe learns "it wasn't too little time that was the enemy but too much. For in the end, it was time that turned all his friends' fractures to breaks. And for his friends, the moments from their saving to their ends became a list of torments caused by him." The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq coincided with and fueled a new era in combat trauma medical technology and techniques: Tens of thousands of men and women who would have died in other conflicts returned home, and continue to do so, with wounds no one should have to cope with. But cope they do, for days, weeks, months, years. No one but the injured and their families keeps track of those days. Ackerman tells us all: Count and look. Ackerman's literary career has had a prolific start; he's written two prior acclaimed novels and a collection of essays and letters, all since 2015. His nominal topics have been modern wars in the Middle East, but the micro level power of his unadorned and direct prose lies in no less than an attempt to contain and dramatize the darkness and light of our souls. He constantly asks: How do we love and why? Why must we so often fail as lovers, friends, citizens? Yet against his wartime backdrops of waste and destruction, he is astonishingly optimistic about his fellow man and the small acts of kindness that just might make us persevere in spite of it all, in life and in novels. To identify this book as a novel seems inadequate: "Waiting for Eden" is a sculpture chiseled from the rarest slab of life experience. The sculptor's tools are extreme psychological interrogation and clear artistic vision. It is a vision from which we might discover some new knowledge about war and being perhaps even regain a moral core. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
A striking moment occurs midway through the opening movement of the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti's 1970 Chamber Concerto. After spinning a dissonant web of melodic strands in the opening minutes, the instruments arrive at that most fundamental of intervals: the perfect octave. Time is momentarily suspended. But a dense tone cluster of brass and Hammond organ interrupts this repose, and the music devolves into a buzzing, asynchronous mass. For audiences accustomed to Tchaikovsky's lyricism and Mozart's familiar harmonies, this music borders on incomprehensibility. Even as some of their works are almost a century old, modernists like Ligeti, Pierre Boulez, and Ruth Crawford Seeger still pose a challenge. What are you supposed to pay attention to? How should you listen to this stuff? To answer these questions, ensembles are rejecting a longstanding premise of both musical modernism and the traditional concert hall: that music is best appreciated through hearing the abstract structural relationships between its various elements. (In other words, valuing "art for art's sake.") So when the ensemble Alarm Will Sound performs Ligeti's music at Carnegie Hall on March 16, the emphasis will be on the history surrounding the works as much as on the sounds themselves. The concert, "This Music Should Not Exist," uses Ligeti's early life experiences to illuminate his later music, using a mixture of storytelling, recorded audio and performance that is being billed as a "live podcast." That is a nod to the indispensable "Meet the Composer" podcast organized by Nadia Sirota, who will serve as a co host for the Carnegie show and developed it alongside Alarm Will Sound's artistic director and conductor, Alan Pierson. (The ensemble had a similar collaboration with the podcast last year for its album "Splitting Adams," a tribute to John Adams.) "To an unusual degree," Mr. Pierson said of Ligeti in an interview, "he's a composer who has these very complex sounding works that are animated by very simple, very understandable ideas. And that always made me feel like this is a composer whose music you could really talk about." That means the audience will hear about how Ligeti's childhood amid the printing presses, typewriters and industrial machinery of Transylvania resurfaced in the mechanical, clocklike layering of various pulses and tempos in the opening movement of his 1988 Piano Concerto, and in the chaotic, ticking energy of his "Poeme Symphonique" for 100 metronomes. For the dense textural music of "Atmospheres" and "Lux Aeterna," which Stanley Kubrick incorporated into "2001: A Space Odyssey," Ligeti drew on a terrifying childhood dream of being trapped in an immense web with buzzing insects. "One of the things that Alarm Will Sound has been interested in from the beginning is creating performances that feel like experiences instead of concerts," Mr. Pierson said. "The starting point isn't the music we want to play as much as the story we want to tell." Symphony orchestras, which operate under the weight of even more tradition than chamber ensembles, have struggled to alter the concert format beyond adding preconcert lectures, program notes and conductor remarks. Some have tried. In the 1970s, Boulez offered a summer series called Rug Concerts with the New York Philharmonic, replacing the orchestra level seats of Avery Fisher (now David Geffen) Hall with carpets and cushions. In recent years, the San Francisco, New World and National symphonies, and other orchestras, have offered their own nontraditional concerts, typically late night ventures in alternative, clublike spaces. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra's series Beyond the Score, which Gerard McBurney organized from 2005 to 2016, fused acting, stage design, film, lighting and music in compelling explorations of works such as Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" and Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire," an early landmark of modernism. (The series is no longer originated by the Chicago Symphony because of costs, but it tours to other ensembles.) "I have no desire to explain any work of art," Mr. McBurney said in a 2014 interview. "I have a desire that we should read the world around us. That means being aware of the texture, the smell, the taste, the culture out of which the work of art came." This kind of audience engagement contrasts with the more idealized form of listening sometimes referred to as structural listening that is as embedded in classical concert culture as formal attire, reverential silence and dimmed lighting. "The most essential condition to the aesthetic enjoyment of music is that of listening to a composition for its own sake," the critic Eduard Hanslick wrote in the mid 1800s. "To me, the most pernicious thing ever written in the history of music is the Hanslick treatise about absolute music," said Michael Lewanski, the conductor of Ensemble Dal Niente. "Removing music from the world in that kind of autonomous sense has provoked almost two centuries of misguided ideology." As a partial remedy, Dal Niente has developed a number of unorthodox concert formats that try to strip away, according to Mr. Lewanski, "the prevailing cultural narratives about what difficult music is, what new music is, what unfamiliar music is, even what old music is." Performance series such as Party and Hard Music, Hard Liquor offer listening contexts without the ritualized trappings of the traditional concert model. Dal Niente's Party series is a nod to American party culture freely mixing food, drink and an atmosphere of social mingling. This June, the group will play a world premiere by Sky Macklay and "Pierrot Lunaire." "Our initial idea is that we're going to stage 'Pierrot' as a sort of cabaret piece," said Mr. Lewanski. "In terms of autonomous artworks that seem impenetrable and are highly composed, 'Pierrot' is near the top of that list for me. Talk about difficult pieces! We want to do something different with it to let the audience feel unafraid of it, but also to not apologize for it, either. Parts of it are weird, so let it be weird." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Oh, no, not a book about the pandemic just a few months into Covid 19. Not another series of snapshots overtaken by tomorrow's events. Fareed Zakaria, a CNN host with a Ph.D. from Harvard, does not fall into this trap. Wisely, he stays away from the daily battles over masks and lockdowns. Nor is doom mongering his business. Instead "Ten Lessons for a Post Pandemic World" employs a wide lens, drawing on governance, economics and culture. Call it "applied history." What insights does it offer during a catastrophe that evokes the Spanish flu after World War I, which claimed 50 million some reckon 100 million lives? That story comes with a word of caution about historical analogies. Zakaria ascribes "seismic effects" to such cataclysms. Ancient Athens, a proud democracy, never recovered from the plague. The late medieval Black Death all but wiped out Europe with a toll between 75 million and 200 million. Yet note that it was estimated to have run for 100 years. The Spanish flu trickled away after two. As mortality soared in the United States, the economy dropped by only 3.5 percent. It took until the 1930s before we could actually see a virus under the electron microscope. Today, SARS CoV 2 was sequenced almost instantaneously. The past, then, is like the Sphinx with her ambiguous advice. Not only has science learned a few things. So have governments, which went for penny pinching and deflation after the Crash of 1929, but now pour out trillions. Having laid out a "gloomy compendium of threats," Zakaria rightly celebrates "our resilient world." States actually "gain strength through chaos and crises." He also dispatches the facile notion that despots like China's Xi Jinping do better than democratic leaders. We owe the coronavirus's leap around the globe to China's suppression of lifesaving data; thereafter, the police state took over. Khamenei's Iran and Erdogan's Turkey performed badly, and so did Brazil, ruled by a would be caudillo. 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. This book was one of our most anticipated titles of October. See the full list. The democracies did not succumb to authoritarianism, but neither is there any clear pattern. At least until recently Germany, Denmark and Austria performed best, Belgium, Sweden and the United Kingdom worst. Taiwan and South Korea quickly contained the virus without totalitarian tactics. The United States is so so, near the bottom of the Top 10 in deaths per million. So, what are the lessons? What matters is not the ideological coloration of government or its size, but its quality, Zakaria says. He argues for "a competent, well functioning, trusted state." Sweden is all that, but also high up on the League Table of Death. The United States has proved neither competent nor cohesive. It is an archipelago of some 2,600 federal, state and local authorities charged with health policy. Yet federal Germany, with its ancient history of decentralization, is also a hodgepodge and still shines forth. The ur model of the strong state is France. In terms of deaths per million, it ranks far above confederate Switzerland, with its 26 cantons jealously holding off Berne. So, what is good governance? An efficient bureaucracy like Prussia's, infused with the spirit of freedom rooted in the American Creed? Beyond your small town D.M.V., the United States seems to enjoy neither. Social Security is superb, Veterans Affairs a disaster. Meanwhile, officialdom has grown exponentially in a supposedly "anti statist" country. America, Zakaria says, must learn "not big or small, but good government." Amen to that though not forgetting Churchill's quip that the United States will eventually do the right thing after exhausting all the alternatives. Zakaria lays out the road from the pandemic to the transcendence of America the Dysfunctional. The to do list is long. Upward mobility is down, inequality is up. The universities of the United States lead the global pack, but a B.A. at one of those top schools comes with a price tag upward of a quarter million dollars. The country boasts the best medical establishment, but health care for the masses might just as well dwell on the moon. We should adopt the best practices of northern Europe, Zakaria counsels. Like Sweden long ago, Denmark is the new Promised Land, even when compared with the rest of Europe. Striking a wondrous balance between efficiency, market economics and equality, those great Danes embody an inspiring model; alas, it is hard to transfer. A small and homogeneous country on the edge of world politics, Denmark is the very opposite of the United States. Maybe its people should occupy America for a couple of generations to reform 330 million uber diverse citizens. The world's troubles are not just Made in U.S.A., Zakaria rightly notes. They are rooted in ultramodernity: globalization, automation, alienation, mass migration, the lure and decay of the world's sprawling metropolises. These are the stuff of misery and the fare of cultural critics since the dawn of the industrial age. With his lively language and to the point examples, Zakaria tells the story well, while resisting boilerplate as served up by the left and the right. Nor does he spare his own liberal class, the "meritocracy" of the best educated and better off, which he fingers ever so gently as deepening the divide between urban and rural, elites and "deplorables." He might have said a bit more about the uses and abuses of cultural hegemony that have driven hoi polloi into the arms of Donald Trump and triggered defections from the democratic left in Europe. The book's central message comes in the last paragraph: "This ugly pandemic has ... opened up a path to a new world." Which one? The gist of Zakaria's program is revealed by a recent editorial in The Financial Times, which he quotes approvingly. That newspaper was once a cheerleader of global capitalism. Now it argues that "many rich societies" do not honor "a social contract that benefits everyone." So, the neoliberalism of decades past must yield to "radical reforms." Governments "will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments. ... Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the ... wealthy in question." Now is the time for "basic income and wealth taxes." Not bad for a supposedly capitalist mouthpiece. Yet this should not come as a surprise. Both The Financial Times and Zakaria's book urge a revolution already upon us, and probably represent today's zeitgeist and reality. Free market economics a la Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher have had a nice run since the 1980s. These days, Covid 19 is merely accelerating the mental turn engendered by the 2008 financial crisis. We are all social democrats now. Government in the West is back with industrial policy and trillions in cash. It is not a radical, but a consensual project. Taxation, a tool of redistribution, will rise along with border walls. For the more perfect welfare state can flourish only in a well fenced world that brakes the influx of competing people and products. If that mends the miserable American health, transportation and public education system without cutting into the country's dynamism, then more power to the spendthrift. Still, "writing checks," Zakaria warns, sometimes "goes badly." Especially if it feeds consumption, not investment. Or favors giga corporations. After half a lifetime of retraction from the economy, big government is back and looks as if it will stay. But beware of what you wish for. Meanwhile, read "Ten Lessons." It is an intelligent, learned and judicious guide for a world already in the making. May we all be as smart as the Danes. They have marvelously combined welfarism and individual responsibility. But they have not invented the PC, MRT, iPhone or Tesla, not to speak of Post its and the microwave popcorn bag. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
You'll find high ceilings, a long marble bar and large glass doors that open onto an inviting patio at OvenBird, the convivial restaurant that the chef Chris Hastings and his wife, Idie, opened in Birmingham's Lakeview neighborhood last October. What you won't find is a gas line. "Are you crazy? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," Mr. Hastings said, summarizing the reactions of his fellow chefs to the news that all the cooking at OvenBird would be done in a wood burning hearth. "That inspired me to crush it. Like, you think I'm crazy? I'll show you crazy." Fortunately, Mr. Hastings had both experience and public good will on his side when he decided his second restaurant would be inspired by the live fire cooking traditions of Spain, Uruguay, Portugal and Argentina: His first, Hot and Hot Fish Club, has been a pillar of Birmingham's dining scene since 1995 and earned Mr. Hastings a James Beard Award. If a recent visit to OvenBird was any indication, lighting a fire has yielded ample rewards. Chief among them was a plate of shishito peppers, silky from their sojourn over the flames. Sprinkled with espelette pepper and benne seeds (the sesame seed's heirloom counterpart), they came piled over a slow cooked egg yolk with the consistency of marmalade. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
"The Fantasy of Medicare for All," by Scott W. Atlas (Op Ed, March 10), did not mention that doctors are exhausted, dissatisfied and cynical dealing with private insurers' regulations. Pre authorizations for medications, CAT and M.R.I. scans, and referrals to specialists, along with recording office visits on computers, have taken their toll on doctors. Patients suffer as well, for office visits are often rushed and impersonal, and patients leave without feeling that they have been listened to. Worse, medical errors are more likely. Patients do better when they feel that they have been treated as people and not as diseases. The chances of this happening would be greater with Medicare for All, which, although it would not be perfect, would have fewer regulations, fewer burned out doctors, fewer unhappy patients and fewer risks of medical error. So I strongly disagree with the statement that Medicare patients would be better served by the 28 private insurers that offer them private plans. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The arrival of Covid 19 has provided a nuclear level stress test to the American health care system and our grade isn't pretty: At least 71,100 dead, 1.2 million infected and 30 million unemployed; nursing homes, prisons and meat packing plants that have become hotbeds of infection. The actual numbers are certainly far higher, since there still hasn't been enough testing to identify all those who have died or have been infected. By all accounts a number of other countries have responded and fared far better. In some ways Covid 19 seemed the biological equivalent of Sept. 11 unthinkable until it happened. Who would have thought individuals would fly jets filled with people into skyscrapers filled with workers? Likewise, who would have predicted the onslaught of a new virus that was stealthy, easily transmissible and also often perilous? Actually, many public health specialists, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, did. And yet, our system failed in its response. Heroic health care providers were left to jury rig last minute solutions to ensure that the toll wasn't even worse. But the saddest part is that most of the failings and vulnerabilities that the pandemic has revealed were predictable a direct outgrowth of the kind of market based system that Americans generally rely on for health care. Our system requires every player from insurers to hospitals to the pharmaceutical industry to doctors be financially self sustaining, to have a profitable business model. As such it excels at expensive specialty care. But there's no return on investment in being primed and positioned for the possibility of a once in a lifetime pandemic. Combine that with an administration unwilling to intervene to force businesses to act en masse to resolve a public health crisis like this, and you get what we got: a messy, uncoordinated under response, defined by shortages and finger pointing. No institutional players not hospitals, not manufacturers of ventilators, masks, tests or drugs saw it as their place to address the Covid 19 train coming down the tracks. Meanwhile, the Trump administration, loath to deploy the Defense Production Act, did so only sparingly and slowly, mostly relying on back channel arm twisting and "incentives" like forgiving liability to get business buy in. That's because in the current iteration of American health care, tens of thousands of people dying is not incentive enough. Let's look at the failures. 1. Ventilators. As images of overwhelmed Italian hospitals flashed across screens, American hospitals projected they might not have enough ventilators for their mounting caseload. They turned to government, which didn't have enough either. President Trump castigated the states and hospitals for not being prepared. But, operated as businesses, hospitals have zero incentive to stockpile. Like hotels, they aim to keep their beds full, or nearly so, with well paying customers, such as those in need of artificial joint or heart procedures. Supply chain management dictates they stock for those needs. A vast storeroom in the basement filled with ventilators that might be needed once in a generation or never? Long ago, before hospitals had lucrative revenue streams from billing and insurance, they relied on philanthropy to meet urgent health needs. The March of Dimes helped finance the treatment of polio victims and the development of improved iron lungs. Today hospitals instead solicit donations for more glamorous projects cancer centers, new wings, genomics research with donors' names affixed. Indeed in a 2017 paper, an official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that the country needed a better strategy for stockpiling ventilators, highlighting a "practical problem": "hospitals must accept responsibility for the costs and resources needed to manage and maintain an excess of ventilators that are likely to be unused in the absence of pandemic related surges in demand." They are unlikely to do so unless government requires them. We've long required ocean liners to have lifeboats and life preservers even though their operators hope to never hit an iceberg. 2. Testing has proved the persistent Achilles' heel in the U.S. response. Even in "hot zones," because of a shortage of tests, they were often rationed to the very ill or essential workers. That makes it difficult to guide treatment and nearly impossible to reopen society. In January, fearing that the virus would hit the United States, researchers at university labs notably the University of Washington jumped in and developed a test. But the commercial and hospital labs that deal with the actual blood work and viral analysis in this country did not. Why would they? There was no market. At that time, it wasn't clear that the coronavirus would produce a pandemic, and there was no billing code for a test and no sense of the price it could garner. With requirements for Food and Drug Administration approval expensive and cumbersome, developing a test was a business non starter. Indeed, months later, after the billing code was created and the Medicare price was set at 51, labs complained that it didn't cover costs and wasn't attractive enough to motivate adequate response. The price was doubled. (Even that most likely seemed somewhat paltry for labs that often charge 200 for basic blood tests.) On March 16, the Trump administration set aside the F.D.A. approval requirement, bringing a host of new players into the fray. But in our market driven, decentralized system it's every provider for himself, and there is no efficient way to connect the new supply with demand. Despite the fact that the administration appointed a national coordinator, by mid April newly able labs were taking to Twitter to plead for business, like this one in Ann Arbor, Mich.: "We have restructured our lab to help with testing. The problem has become finding samples! Can't get in touch with anyone who needs us." In contrast, South Korea, with its national health system, engaged its private test manufacturers with a plan in January, promising them quick approval for a coronavirus test and the widespread use of it in nationally organized and financed testing. With a guaranteed market, 10,000 tests a day were available within weeks, allowing the country to avert a shutdown. The federal government or the C.D.C. might have played that role in the United States, but did not. 3. Testing components and P.P.E. The Trump administration insists that there are plenty of tests that states are not using. Governors say they can't do nearly enough tests and need help. That's partly because conducting tests involves access to a number of components kits, chemical reagents, swabs, personal protective equipment, sometimes custom cartridges for machines. Miss any one of those things and testing becomes impossible. Just as we patients pay item by item the blood test, the X ray, the acetaminophen pill hospitals and doctors' offices also order item by item, with different sources for each component, as they search for the best deals. And medical manufacturers, which make dozens of products some very profitable and some not have no "incentive" to produce low margin items in excess of usual needs. In recent years, this has increasingly led to intermittent shortages during which hospitals find themselves competing to procure IV fluids, cheap old anti nausea meds and some cancer drugs. So it is no surprise that a similar phenomenon is handicapping a coronavirus response that has required a huge increase in simple accessories like masks. "The private sector can directly purchase" personal protective equipment "from manufacturers and distributors, as they normally do," a press officer for the Federal Emergency Management Agency said in late March, explaining why the president chose not to use the Defense Production Act even as states like New York were begging for help, facing over 5,000 new cases and nearly 100 deaths a day. Initially they could not find enough of that equipment, and when they did, it came at a price as market forces would dictate: When demand for the items exceeded supply, prices rose and bidding wars began. In our market, you get companies to ramp up production of low margin items by offering ever higher prices. So 1 masks cost 6. Without a national system for such purchases in a crisis, we are essentially forcing hospitals and states to negotiate the price of water during a drought. (Alternatively, we could require all hospitals to have a 90 day supply of essential response items on hand, as Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York has now done.) 4. Hospital coordination. Early on, New York's elite hospitals staring down a crisis themselves did not jump in to set up outpatient testing centers. That task was left largely to the public hospitals, resulting in crowded lines, which may have risked more infection spread. The elite hospitals also generally did not share precious protective gear with those harder hit. In our market based system, hospitals are primed to compete, not coordinate. They compete for patients who need lucrative procedures and for ratings in magazines like U.S. News World Report. While legally they have to treat anyone who turns up in the emergency room, they are not eager to treat infectious diseases like Covid 19, which disproportionately hits people with poor insurance and carries a stigma. "No. 1 in Covid 19 Treatment!" is bad for the brand. The lack of coordination likewise meant that in California, one hospital had the beds and protective equipment to continue doing elective procedures, while another 75 miles away was overwhelmed by Covid 19. In a national or nationally coordinated health system they would have been obligated to help each other. Hospitals will receive tens of billions of dollars as part of coronavirus relief packages passed since late March. This is partly because they have delivered extraordinary treatment of Covid 19 (which doesn't pay well) but also because they've had to cancel high profit procedures like joint replacements and sophisticated scans to make room for this low profit margin illness. In the past quarter century, we have evolved a reimbursement system that showers cash on elective and specialty care and discourages hospitals from serving the health needs of society. That is true even though two thirds of our hospitals are tax exempt because they in theory perform community benefit. In a functioning health system, pandemic preparedness and response would be part of the expected job. In the 1980s when H.I.V./AIDS was overwhelming hospitals in New York, treating those patients was simply part of each system's obligation though some did so far better than others. All this doesn't necessarily mean that we need a government run health system or should eliminate all market influence in health care. In fact, Medicare for All would not by itself solve the above problems, since it's mostly a payment system that largely relies on providers to come through with services when needed. But the Covid 19 stress test has laid bare a market that is broken, lacking the ability to attend to the public health at a time of desperate need and with a government unwilling in some ways unable to force it to do so. This time around, thousands of stalwart medical professionals have answered the call to treat the ill, doing their best to plug the longstanding holes that the pandemic has revealed. Whether it's regulated or run by the government, or motivated by new incentives, the system we need is one that responds more to illness and less to profits. 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 |
Marni Senofonte, who oversaw the creation of outfits for Beyonce's "Lemonade" visual album, showcased a range of looks from known labels, like the Yeezy two piece that she paired with a Hood by Air fur in "Don't Hurt Yourself," to lesser known ones, like that of the Kuwait designer Yousef al Jasmi, who made the crystal bodysuit in "Sorry." Ms. Senofonte got her start in fashion as Norma Kamali's assistant and started styling 19 years ago for celebrities like Mary J. Blige, Jay Z, Kim Kardashian, Brandy, Monica and Lauryn Hill. She has worked with Beyonce since 2007, first helping out on smaller projects like American Express commercials and looks for the "On the Run" tour. In the last couple years, she has styled the videos "Formation," "Feeling Myself" and "7/11," in which she outfitted Nicki Minaj and Beyonce in bodysuits and matching pink fur coats. The interview has been edited and condensed. Q: This album is full of fashion labels. Walk me through the process of choosing the looks. A: It was a huge mix of high fashion and low fashion. I've done that a lot with Beyonce. Like in the "7/11" video, I mixed Forever 21 leggings with a Givenchy sweatshirt. There was a heavy presence of Gucci in the visual album as well, because the Gucci tapestries all kind of lent themselves to this Victorian, antebellum, reformation vibe we were in. Q: New Orleans played such an integral role in the album. How did it influence the fashion? A: If you look at the visual album, you will see an African influence that touches on her heritage, where she comes from. There is that vibe, and then we were talking about New Orleans and the plantations in Louisiana and whatnot. Beyonce told me that in New Orleans I don't know what the year was black women were not allowed to show their hair. So that's where those head wraps came from. So you make these beautiful creations as kind of like, "O.K., you don't want us to show our hair, watch what we are going to do." Q: Where did the Victorian influence come from? A: We were thinking about being on those plantations at the time of her ancestors and what they would have worn. At the time, there was slavery, so it wasn't about that. It was about looking at these beautiful women that came from Africa and accentuating this beautiful culture and beautiful people. That's why I didn't want to do costume shop stuff, because that doesn't look rich and regal. I was focused on making sure that everybody looked, well, rich. Q: How do you work with Beyonce? A: She's pretty trusting. We always start with inspiration boards, and she comes with so much inspiration. I don't know where she finds the time. She's definitely heavily involved in all of her visuals. Q: What did Beyonce's inspiration boards look like for this album? A: There was a lot of African print and gold. Royal, regal African images. There was a lot of white, antebellum vibes and hats and collars, vintage Gaultier and McQueen. Q: Do you think this album will influence fashion? A: It was funny, because when we were down in New Orleans in November and even December and January, we were, like, this Victorian vibe just feels right. And then in February, when we were starting to see the collections, the Balmain ... everything just started to look like what we were doing. Unbeknown to us, it is already there. So we were kind of on point. Q: That look she wore in the garage the Yeezy outfit and Hood by Air fur was so great. Tell me about that look. A: It was such a boss look. It was so sexy as it is, and the underboob was kind of awesome. It was freezing in New Orleans record low temperatures so when she put that fur harness on, she became that. It was just this look, like she was running it. Very empowering. And that's a part of Beyonce's personality. Don't let the country accent and the sweet smile fool you. She is all about her business. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
This article is by Motoko Rich, Catherine Rampell and David Streitfeld. Last year, as things started looking up, the European debt crisis flustered the fragile recovery. Now, under similar economic circumstances, comes the turmoil in the Middle East. Energy prices have surged in recent days, as a result of the political violence in Libya that has disrupted oil production there. Prices are also climbing because of fears the unrest may continue to spread to other oil producing countries. If the recent rise in oil prices sticks, it will most likely slow a growth rate that is already too sluggish to produce many jobs in this country. Some economists are predicting that oil prices, just above 97 a barrel on Thursday, could be sustained well above 100 a barrel, a benchmark. Even if energy costs don't rise higher, lingering uncertainty over the stability of the Middle East could drag down growth, not just in the United States but around the world. "We've gone beyond responding to the sort of brutal Technicolor of the crisis in Libya," said Daniel H. Yergin, the oil historian and chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates. "There's also a strong element of fear of what's next, and what's next after next." Before the outbreak of violence in Libya, the Federal Reserve had raised its forecast for United States growth in 2011, and a stronger stock market had helped consumers be more confident about the future and more willing to spend. But other sources of economic uncertainty besides oil prices have come into sharper focus in recent days. After a few false starts, housing prices have slid further. New home sales dropped sharply in January, as did sales of big ticket items like appliances, the government reported Thursday. Though the initial panic from last year has faded, Europe's deep debt problems remain, creating another wild card for the global economy. Protests turned violent in Greece this week in response to new austerity measures. Budget and debt problems at all levels of American government also threaten to crimp the domestic recovery. Struggling state and local governments may dismiss more workers this year as many face their deepest shortfalls since the economic downturn began, and a Congressional stalemate over the country's budget could even lead to a federal government shutdown. "The irony is that we just barely got ourselves up and off the ground from the devastating financial crisis," said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group, who had been optimistic about the country's prospects. "The recovery itself is less than two years in, and we haven't yet seen jobs make a decent comeback. Now we're being hit with this new, very ominous event, so the timing couldn't be worse." Most economists are not yet talking about the United States dipping back into recession, and it is too soon to tell how far the pro democracy protests that have roiled Egypt, Bahrain and Libya will spread. For now, most analysts are not predicting that Iran and Saudi Arabia, repressive governments that also happen to be two of the world's biggest oil producers, will catch the revolutionary fever. "But revolutions are notoriously difficult to forecast," said Chris Lafakas, an economist at Moody's Analytics who focuses on energy. Disruptions of oil supplies in Saudi Arabia and Iran in particular, he said, "would be catastrophic for prices. Saudi Arabia alone could cause maybe a 20 to 25 percent increase in oil prices overnight." In the last week, oil prices have risen more than 10 percent and even breached 100 a barrel. A sustained 10 increase in oil prices would shave about two tenths of a percentage point off economic growth, according to Dean Maki, chief United States economist at Barclays Capital. The Federal Reserve had forecast last week that the United States economy would grow by 3.4 to 3.9 percent in 2011, up from 2.9 percent last year. Higher oil prices restrain growth because they translate to higher fuel prices for consumers and businesses. Mr. Lafakas estimates that oil prices are on track to average 90 a barrel in 2011, from 80 in 2010, an increase that would offset nearly a quarter of the 120 billion payroll tax cut that Congress had intended to stimulate the economy this year. In the last month, they have canceled their satellite television subscription and their Internet service. They have also stopped driving from their home in rural Moville to Sioux City on weekends to see Ms. Webb's parents. Along with making their commutes to work more expensive, rising oil prices have driven up the cost of food for animals and people. So the couple have stopped buying feed for their dozen sheep and goats and six chickens and instead asked neighboring farmers to let them use scraps from their corn fields. "It's a struggle," said Ms. Webb, 49. "We have to watch every little penny." A cutback in consumer spending reverberates through the economy by crimping businesses, making it less likely that employers will commit to the additional hiring needed to lower the 9 percent unemployment rate. "Revenue is down, costs are up, and you can't make any money," said R. Jerol Kivett, the owner of Kivett's Inc., a company that manufactures pews and other church furniture in Clinton, N.C. "You're just trying to meet payroll and keep people working, hoping the economy will turn. But it just seems like setback after setback after setback." And the money that consumers and businesses spend on oil often does not stay within the American economy. Nor do the expanded coffers in oil producing countries raise demand for American exports, because they often bank it as reserves. "The countries that are getting this bonus basically get an enormous benefit," said Raghuram G. Rajan, an economics professor at the University of Chicago. "But if they can't spend it quickly, it doesn't add to aggregate demand." There are some signs that the economy could weather this latest round of buffeting. Revenue at many companies is back to prerecession levels, said Scott Bohannon, a general manager at the Corporate Executive Board, a research and advisory firm. That suggests companies may start adding equipment, factories and, eventually, workers. "Of course, if a war breaks out in a significant way or something like that happens," he said, "then I would give you a different answer. Then you're talking about huge shocks to the system." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
At New York City Ballet on Friday night, Ashley Bouder and Andrew Veyette kept bursting back onto the stage in "Donizetti Variations" with a twinkling, ebullient, heart catching virtuosity that had seasoned audience members asking, "When was it last this good?" In the title role of "La Sonnambula," Wendy Whelan paced through the sharply changing paths of her sleep with a bleak urgency that gave an unfamiliar darkness to this always amazing drama. And in "Firebird," the contrasting capacities of Teresa Reichlen's style for superhuman amplitude and quiet intimacy opened up fresh meanings in this ballet. All three works, performed at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, are by George Balanchine. Ms. Bouder, Ms. Whelan and Ms. Reichlen are drastically dissimilar dancers, yet the Balanchine repertory provides important vehicles for each. It's fascinating that Balanchine's ballets so extremely precise, strict and fast in the demands they make don't limit the expressiveness of dancers. Rather, they release it. Kyra Nichols the last "Donizetti Variations" star I saw on a level at least as high as Ms. Bouder was of a wholly different temperament: far less merrily impish, as impersonal as a force of nature. Janie Taylor, the company's last superb interpreter of Balanchine's Sleepwalker (she retired this year), was, quite unlike Ms. Whelan, a lovely and luminous wraith seeming to commune with another world. Although I think Ms. Reichlen is the only great Balanchine Firebird of recent decades, everything about her manner is quite unlike film footage of Maria Tallchief, for whom the role was made. Over 30 years after the master's death, we cannot tell if Balanchine would have approved of any of today's performances. But anyone who watched City Ballet in his lifetime will remember that some of his casting indicated an extraordinarily catholic and sometimes baffling idea of how his roles could be reinterpreted. The severity with which Ms. Whelan plays the Sleepwalker is far from the influential model established by Allegra Kent, but follows instead the precedent of Patricia McBride, who for a number of people remains the most heart stopping of all interpreters of the role. The dance writer Edward Willinger, who saw both, recently wrote to me: "With that phenomenal stage face and those super arched feet, there was nothing sweet or tender about McBride's Sleepwalker. She was truly haunted and nobody laughed when she stepped over the Poet's arms or body. She was implacable." Ms. Whelan, though different in face and feet, brings this version to mind. As Firebird, Ms. Reichlen though I have known her to dance with greater blaze is wonderfully responsive to the different facets of the score; sometimes she anticipates the music by so fine a hair's breadth that it seems to respond to her rather than the other way round. At her best, she's another force of nature dancer. She shows us the superhuman scale of this immortal bird, but then, as the long pas de deux with Prince Ivan develops and she recognizes he is her captor, she suggests a yielding side that transforms the drama. He agrees to give her the liberty that is crucial to her and in return, it seems, she gives him his Bride. The implication is that the Bride is the human, wifely part of herself, and this connects to the suggestion in many Balanchine ballets that every woman contains a core that must elude even the man she loves. But this grows only out of the different textures that Ms. Reichlen finds in the pas de deux: None of the role's other interpreters I have watched since Balanchine's death have made it a suspenseful transaction. The expressive potential of these ballets blooms only when there are remarkable technical control and musical sensitivity. Those things were too seldom apparent at City Ballet from 1989 to 2009. While I congratulate the powers that be at City Ballet led by the ballet master in chief Peter Martins for the company's current excellence, I can't help but wonder all the more how the same Martins led team could have condoned the low standards that characterized that long and shabby era. Ms. Bouder has always been a technical marvel, but there are sequences in some ballets where seasoned observers feel she has matched or surpassed the technical achievements of Merrill Ashley, who took allegro technique at the end of Balanchine's lifetime into new reaches. But, like Ms. Ashley before her, Ms. Bouder has often been an incompletely relaxed stage artist; in her case, the tension principally shows in the way she tucks her chin down and looks straight out front as if addressing the classroom mirror. (That's still how she danced last week as Polyhymnia in "Apollo.") In "Donizetti" on Friday, however, as in Wednesday's "Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux" and in Troy Schumacher's new "Clearing Dawn" last Tuesday, her neck, head and face relaxed with rejuvenating effect. And her timing, always audaciously neat, was often amazing and exhilaratingly hilarious. Other dancers are witty and happy, but Ms. Bouder, like no other dancer today, can produce pyrotechnics of speed while delivering steps like punch lines. When she hops on point diagonally backward, it has a laugh out loud merriment. "Donizetti" is anyway among the wittiest of ballets. The changing sequence of Balanchine's corps and principals constructions does the heart good, as does the ancient and modern combination of steps and the judicious mixture of grace, formality, absurdity and stunning exuberance. Mr. Veyette, despite one semi blip midphrase, hit a new high of entertaining virtuosity, spinning and leaping with fabulous audacity and full textured elan. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
For the last six years, Kate Fowle has divided her time between Moscow, where she was until recently the chief curator at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, and New York City, where she has been director at large at Independent Curators International (ICI). Now Ms. Fowle will be planted here full time as the new director of MoMA PS1, the museum in Long Island City, Queens, known for its inventive contemporary arts programming. The British born Ms. Fowle will be only the third leader in the institution's 43 year history. The museum announced her appointment on Wednesday. "It's an institution that I've known for years and years and years," said Ms. Fowle in a telephone interview. The curator, who was born in Kent, England, added that she first visited the museum's former studio program when she was living in London in the ' 90s. "I love the second skin," she added, saying that she was referring to the museum's lingering aura of past exhibitions, " the legacy artists that have left." Ms. Fowle, who starts Sept. 3, succeeds Klaus Biesenbach, who departed in October to lead the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles . Mr. Biesenbach in 2010 took over from Alanna Heiss, who in 1976 founded the P. S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, which in 2000 merged with the Museum of Modern Art. Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA's director, said Ms. Fowle was a natural choice. "She's an accomplished scholar, a deft curator and an outstanding leader," he said, noting that she will be arriving from outside the organization, where Mr. Biesenbach had been nurtured by Ms. Heiss. "She is the first director that comes at it with fresh eyes," he said. As to Ms. Fowle's mandate at the museum, Mr. Lowry said it would be "to build on the substantial platform we have created together over the last 20 years, but to stay very much true to PS1's artist centric roots." For her part, Ms. Fowle said she had "lots of ideas" but that she would first aim to get to know the staff and the neighborhood. "I don't want to rush into it," she said. "What's most important and the way that I've always worked is through collaboration." "It's an institution that isn't broken, it doesn't need fixing," she continued, adding that given the museum's experimental environment there is "so much that can be pushed and developed." The museum, housed in a 100 year old Romanesque Revival school building, has over the years established an international reputation for mounting adventuresome exhibitions and championing local artists through its every five years roundup, "Greater New York." PS1 has also been acclaimed for shows like its landmark 2013 survey of Mike Kelley at the time the largest exhibition of the artist's work and the recent Bruce Nauman retrospective, which Holland Cotter, The New York Times's co chief critic, called "a transfixing trip." The museum has also had its bumps along the way. Last year, Nikki Columbus, a curator, accused MoMA PS 1 of gender, pregnancy and caregiver discrimination, a claim she brought against the museum saying it had rescinded a job offer upon learning she had recently given birth. The lawsuit was settled in March. Asked whether that case had given her pause, Ms. Fowle said, "I think it was important to listen to what was being said and try to understand things, but it has been settled now." "It's really important to nurture women and especially young women in the workplace and to encourage them to believe they can have it all," she added. "I'm somebody who really stands up for that." Ms. Fowle said she also believes strongly in the current trend among museums to make room on their walls and on their staffs and boards of trustees for people of color. "Understanding the world from that perspective is long overdue," she said. "It's not the West and the rest. Those days are over." Although her responsibilities will mainly be administrative, Ms. Fowle said she is glad they also include curatorial possibilities. "In the job description, it still says that you can curate," she said. "It's something I've done from the very beginning." In an interview with ARTnews in 2015, Rashid Johnson, who was commissioned by Ms. Fowle to create a living, green sculpture for the Garage Museum, said she was "an artist's curator. She's open to dialogue and really wants to participate in the vision, rather than try to mold that vision." Ms. Fowle said she initially wanted to be an artist, but quickly realized she was better at organizing exhibitions, which led to a traineeship in curating and exhibitions through the Arts Council of England. "I decided the world was not going to be that sad if I stopped being an artist," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
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